Andy stared in the mirror as she tried to work the post-shower tangles out of her hair. It was so strange to be looking at this view from a first-person perspective. The wild snarls aside, there was just something about it...her long black hair, still damp, the little trickles of water down her still-naked breasts, the way her body had just enough muscle to give it definition but still looked soft and inviting...she blushed a bit, but where she would've been aroused by the sight before, now she...she felt good about herself.
It felt crazy to think that, when she still wasn't even comfortable going out in public like this, but it was true. Standing here before herself, in the nude, she could hardly hide from or deny the reality of her transformation; and if it wasn't something that could be hidden or ignored, for the moment, she couldn't feel too uncomfortable about it...or perhaps it was just that her subconscious was less hung-up on these things than her conscious mind.
(And, well, maybe she was a little turned on; after all, she knew what this body did to Sue, and what it got Sue to do to her...)
She was distracted from her overview by a particularily stubborn clump; even with a couple strokes of Susan's hairbrush it didn't want to come out. She clamped down on the offending lock, dug the hairbrush in, and yanked.
"Gah!" She winced. "How do you do this?"
"Not like that," her husband said, holding back a smirk. "The key is to do it gradually; separate out little bits until the rest of it comes undone. Here." He took the brush and gently began brushing strands out of the snarl. Andy sighed; it felt nice even to have him giving her hair attention. His hands were so gentle...
She did still smarted a bit from her attempt to force the clump out, though. "I don't know how you manage it," she said. "Really, I ought to just cut it short..."
The naga-man shrugged. "You just get used to dealing with it," he said. "If you're willing to spend the time on it and remember to leave yourself enough time to do it right, it's not bad at all. You just have to plan around it. And you can't cut it off."
The rabbit-woman cocked an eyebrow. "Oh? It's my hair, isn't it?"
Susan frowned. "Well, yes, but I'll get custody of it, if I have to. You have lovely hair, honey; it would be a crime to cut it off."
Andy laughed. "Hey, I'm not talking Annie Lennox short, here. Just something that's less trouble. It's just hair."
The snake-man shook his head. "No, really...I guess I might be over-reacting a bit, but trust me on this. You look much nicer like this than you would without."
She blushed slightly. "Well, we don't have time to do it right now, anyway," she said. The interview was at 11:00...she still couldn't quite believe she was going in for an interview, much less that the employer sounded enthused. She finished brushing out her hair, stepped out into the master bedroom, and put on the dress-casual clothes they'd bought yesterday; she supposed they'd have to bring Alex and Sally in to get new clothes today, or perhaps tomorrow.
She looked herself over, and frowned. "Gah," she muttered, "now I have to re-brush it. I guess it's dry, dress, then hair?"
Sue shrugged. "Depends on whether you prefer re-brushing your hair, or living with a damp top for an hour," he said. "I stick with the former...well, I stuck with the former, but it's pretty much a matter of taste." He gazed at his wife for a long moment. "God, you look good," he said.
Andy looked herself over in the full-length mirror. Wow. He was...he was right, she did. The slacks didn't exactly hug her legs, but they weren't especially baggy, either, and her buttocks were well-defined underneath, her perky little tail providing a perfect accent to them, her petite frame sitting gracefully atop the legs. She could see how her smallish, perky breasts tented out the blouse slightly, softened into a more general (and larger-seeming) curve by the sweater on top. Her face, small and soft but not childish, framed by long, wavy black hair...he was right about it, it did look nice...and her rabbit ears sticking out the top...she didn't even mean to do this, and yet she looked nice. "Whew," she whispered.
Her huband nodded, grinning impishly. "If you didn't have an interview in two hours...mmm."
She smirked. "You know, I was naked just now..."
Susan nodded. "I know, but...that's part of the fun, you know. It's like unwrapping presents on Christmas morning..."
Andy smiled slyly. "Only you don't have to wait a year to enjoy it again," she said. "But yeah, interview."
"Right. How are you feeling?"
She took a deep breath. "Nervous."
The naga-man put an arm around her shoulder. "That's understandable, but honey, you'll do fine. Trust me."
She sighed. "Thanks."
Jon was still feeling a little shook-up when she got into school that morning. It was encouraging to hear that not all the sun's effects were negative; on the other hand, it still didn't make the situation okay. And that thing about changing the dating system was just ridiculous. Even if they didn't know, as she did, that the sun's change was going to be a finite thing, it wasn't like the previous system was inadequate! Besides, it was tricky enough to keep track of one zero-point far back enough in history that you rarely had to think about it; who needed another?
She consoled herself a bit by figuring that people would probably just ignore it. She remembered her dad talking once about the attempted introduction of the metric system in the '80s, but people here (and, as she recalled, in the UK) still used the...uh, the other system. "Imperial system," was it? She hardly even remembered it had a name, that's how accustomed she was. People weren't going to just forget that it was 2011, or that Star Wars was released in 1977. She had still been born in 1994, no matter what they were calling it now! Feh.
Aaaand now she felt like an old codger. Oh well.
The slug-girl made her way over to the lockers and dropped off her bookbag. Another day to get through, another day closer to the alignment that would make it possible for her to change things back, and then everything could get back to some semblance of normal. She knew that wouldn't change the fact that these things had happened, but it might at least help, for the people who were really unhappy with their changes. She herself...she could go back to her own, original body...
"Hey, Jon!" A bit startled, she looked up to see Tim. The dark-elf boy smiled. "How's it going?"
She smiled. "Oh, okay, pretty much. You?"
"Pretty good. Did you hear the news about the moon?"
Jon frowned. "Huh? What about it?"
"They're saying its magnetic field's picked up. They think the core's become more active somehow."
"Really?" That was...odd. A sudden change in a planetary body...that couldn't be a coincidence, it had to have something to do with the sun. But it had never affected anything other than people, before...what was going on here? Were the rules changing, or was there some other factor involved? "Huh," she said. "That's surprising."
He nodded. "No kidding. Makes you wonder what else might happen out there..."
"Y-yeah. Well, I guess it's going to do what it's going to do..." Her voice shook just a little bit. Actually, she felt a bit helpless all of a sudden; it was one thing for these changes to happen, and then be over and done with, but with things happening on a larger scale - first Hedgeton, now this - and her unable to use the stone even to find out what was going on for fear of throwing away her chance of fixing things....it was a little frightening.
"Hey, you okay there?" Tim said. She looked tense; he thought of that weird spell in the mall on Saturday. But here she just looked a little scared, not as drained as she had then.
"Uh, yeah," she said, snapping back to reality. "Yeah, I'm fine, thanks." She smiled; nice of him to be concerned, but she couldn't just blurt out everything to him. "Um, I guess I better get to class..."
"Oh, yeah, I suppose so," he said. "Um...see you at lunch?"
She nodded. "See you then." She watched him go, then smiled to herself and went to class.
It was a while before Hiro found a quiet moment that morning. At first it was all a rush to get he and Hitomi off to school, then he was settling back into the routine of classes. Now that he had a few moments to himself, he knew exactly what he wanted to do. He went to the guys' bathroom - it was one of the worst spots in the school for reception, so he was isolated from the school network. Better safe than sorry, especially after what happened yesterday.
He holed up in one of the stalls, took a deep breath, and pulled up the file for the daemon. He hadn't had the space to store a copy, so...this was it. Whether he'd been successful in the repair attempt or not, the daemon's fate was sealed. He really hoped this Shi character knew what she was doing...
In any case, it looked like things had gone well. He wasn't much of a programmer, but the code seemed cleaner and saner than it had before. Insofar as he could trace it without running it, it looked like it at least wasn't going to crash horribly on startup. Well, this was it, then. Time to check in on his patient...time to see what, if anything, remained in the entity he'd been given care of. He set up his MMU to protect the important sections of his memory as best as he could...
He initiated the daemon.
