Billy stood hesitantly in the locker room as the other girls changed around her. They were going out for P.E., that had surprised her a bit because she couldn't remember if kids her age had to do that. But at this school, it seemed that was what they did. Sighing, she pulled her sweater-vest off, then the blouse.
Jenny, meanwhile, had finished undressing and was poking curiously at her chest. The squirrel-girl eyed her curiously. "What're you doin'?" she asked.
The white-haired girl turned towards her friend. "Oh," she said, "my n...um...nipples, yeah. They kinda felt funny the other day, an' my Mom said that's 'cause they're startin' to grow. So I was just lookin'...but she said it takes a long time."
Lilly looked her friend over curiously, then gasped. "Y-you got four, too?" she said. She bit her lip immediately afterward, she hadn't intended to reveal that, but there it was.
Jenny nodded. "Uh-huh. D'you?"
Lilly nodded sheepishly. "Yeah...I just noticed yest'rday...they're not gonna...gonna...are they?"
Jenny smiled. "My mommy thinks so," she said. "But she said it prob'bly doesn't really start 'til I'm twelve...an' it probably takes 'til sixteen to be done. So it's gonna be a long time..."
She felt a little relieved at that...not for a few years yet...but still, the thought of growing up...into a lady... "I kinda hoped they weren't gonna," she said.
Jenny frowned. "That's silly!" she said. "You gotta grow up. I think you'll be a nice pretty squirrel-lady some day..."
Lilly blushed a little under her fur. "B-but I don't wanna be all girly!" she said.
"You don't hafta, 'member?" Jenny said. "My Mom's not so girly, an' she gets t' do stuff like be a police lady. Maybe you can do somethin' like that, or play sports, or somethin'."
That made her feel a little bit better, if not a whole lot. Still...she wanted to change the subject. "S-so," she said, as she pulled off her skirt and underwear, "'f we're gonna go look for Miss Violet's niece, where do we look?"
Jenny frowned thoughtfully as she pulled on the leotard that served as her gym clothes. "I dunno," she said. "I asked my Mom where she was when she got lost, an' she said it was out by the woods, but she said she's been missin' since the sun changed, so they dunno where she might be now."
Lilly sighed as she threaded her tails through a hole in the back of her outfit and pulled it up over herself, a little weirded out by the way her fur rustled against it. Her mom had had to take some of her new clothes back to the store 'cause there was so much poly...plester? in them that they made a lot of static electricity...she winced as she remembered touching the doorknob to her closet after changing. "Um," she said, "d'you think we should look there anyway? Maybe she was hidin' or something..."
Jenny thought for a minute. "Huh, maybe..."
"Girls," the gym teacher said, "come on out, you can talk later."
Erica sighed as she stared up at the forest canopy, watching the sunlight shift as it filtered through the leaves. It was quite pretty...but it also reminded her uncomfortably of her own time, and of something she'd been trying to avoid thinking about...
She snuggled in close to Samuel, who was lying beside her. It still felt so strange to think of everything that had happened, everything she'd done, over the past couple days. It felt strange, even after more than a month, to think that she was a woman. It felt strange to think that she was going to conceive, going to be a mother, and most definitely strange to think that the daughter she had yet to bear was at this very moment off hunting. But...what didn't feel strange was to have this man here, next to her.
They had been enjoying each other when they could, when Nikki wasn't around; after all, Erica was still in heat, they wanted to make sure Nikki was conceived, and there was much time and little else to do here in the forest. By now it was firmly cemented in the skunk-girl's mind that Sam was her mate. But even before, before they'd made love for the first time, back when he was just the young deputy who was interested in her...even then, she'd been drawn to him, though she only really understood that now. And now she was afraid that...that she might lose him...
"Sam...?" she said, feeling nervous, like even bringing the subject up might invite cruel disaster upon them. "Y-you know what I told you...about the future?"
He nodded. "You mean 'bout the sun?"
She sighed. "Yeah. Sam, I want you to be with me...but...if you do, you're gonna have to...be exposed to the sun."
"Yeah, I suppose you're right," he mused. "Not much way around it, is there?"
She shook her head. "No...you can hide inside during the day, but...seems like it always gets you, eventually..." At least the one small mercy of being changed right off was that she'd never had reason to fear the sun, to hide indoors as the unchanged did. But she'd seen so many people around her change, one by one...
He sighed. "Well, I s'pose that's all there is to it," he said. "But I expect you're worryin' about what'll happen..."
She nodded, feeling tears begin to form. She tried to shake them off. "There's no way to know what's going to happen to you," she said. "You might become a...a sk-skunk like me, or a giant, or a tree-spirit, or something...you might become a woman, Sam."
He nodded. "I know. But...even that can't be too awful..." He grinned devilishly. "You sure seemed t' like it."
Erica blushed under her fur, but by now she really couldn't deny it; though the assorted hassles that came with the female form definitely mitigated her appreciation of everything it offered. But that wasn't the point, she...she... "But," she said, "Well, yeah, but I'm...I'm not attracted to...I like men, Sam!" She winced a little at saying it; it was the antithesis of everything she'd been trying to tell herself before, but...it was true. It was the truth, and she couldn't argue otherwise.
He nodded and pulled her close. "Don't you worry," he said. "I'll be fine. We'll still be together. No matter what happens, okay?"
The teenage skunk-girl smiled in spite of herself. "Uh-huh," she said. "No matter what."
David sat at a cafeteria table with Mark, trying to think of a good way to phrase this. It was odd, considering how they hadn't really gotten along before, that Mark was the angel-girl she found herself around the most...Zach, or "Zara" as she was now going by, was usually hanging around her bandmates, and the other three had their own groups they were a part of...maybe it was just that she, like Mark, didn't really have any people to hang around.
Well, Rachel excepted. The devil-girl was seated next to her, trying to be on good behavior while David tried to ask something. After all, this was important.
"So, um," David said, "I don't know if you've heard, but...there's this group of fanatics, they've decided that we're servants of God."
Mark smirked. "Unless they're going to be handing out more bread and wine, I'm not particularily interested."
David frowned. "I thought you weren't going to do that anymore..."
She shook her head. "I'm not, but that doesn't mean I have to retroactively not have enjoyed it."
Rachel laughed. "So you're the scoundrel who led this innocent astray...I tell you, we were all so shocked to hear it..." She found it interesting listening to the two; though the timbre of their voice was identical, everything else was different...the tone, the inflection, all the little vocal mannerisms she hadn't even considered before now. She wondered if identical twins sounded similar and different like this...
Mark chuckled. "Yeah, sure you were. So, why were you bringing this up, David?"
"Well," she said, "they've decided that the devil-changed are evil, and they're going to be protesting this one church that has a devil-woman for a pastor..."
Mark frowned. "And...you want me to do what about it? I don't have the power to stop people from being assholes. 'S long as they leave me alone..."
David sighed. "Look," she said, a little exasperated, "if they go for this, people are gonna start to think that not only are the devil-changed evil, but us angel-changed are 'good' in some kind of holy-cleansing-smiting sense, that's what these people are acting like. If you go back to that club you were at the other night, do you want them assuming you're just there to tell everybody to repent?"
"Oh, huh," the other angel mused. "Guess not. Still, what can we even do about it? It's not like it's illegal to have a protest, and I could only take a few people in a fight, even if I wasn't on unofficial probation."
"Well," David said, "the devil-changed...they're going to have a kind of a barbecue or something, something where they can show people they're really pretty alright. And they wanted to know if we could do the same, have a dinner thing for people to see we're friendly, and that we don't mind the devil-changed. So I was thinking we could ask the people at our place-"
Mark frowned. "'Our place?'" she said. "Could you be any less specific?"
David eyed her curiously. "The place we can find?" she said. "With the kitchen and the food...you haven't been there?"
Mark shook her head. "I don't even know what you're talking about."
She sighed. "Okay. There's a place all the devil-changed can find called Hell's Kitchen, it's kind of a bar and grill thing. Rachel took me there a few days ago. After that we figured there might be a placed for the angel-changed, and we found that, too. It's...I don't know if it has a name, I never heard it if it does. But it's kind of a church-potluck kind of place, or something like that. We were thinking we could ask the people there to help with the dinner. Besides, if you've never been there you've gotta come see it! We can go after school..."
Mark shrugged. "Okay, I guess..."
