Tiffany left the counselor's office feeling a bit baffled. This was so confusing...her feelings were always shifting! She'd keep feeling echoes of the things she'd felt in her first change rising within her when she tried to maintain the point that she'd suffered a loss in this second change, only to have them collapse and deflate and die again while she was still in the middle of her argument, and leave her feeling like she'd had the rug pulled out from under her...and when she thought about it at any other time, it was like they just refused to come back at all. Like now. Even though she knew what the point she'd been trying to make to the counselor was, she couldn't feel it. In fact, she felt faintly ashamed to even be trying. It was like...it was like she was the only creature in the entire universe that understood what it was like to have that power, and then have it taken away...it was like the Universe itself was in active disagreement with her.
And...and right now, she just couldn't argue with it. Why not? Hadn't she been wronged, here? Hadn't she had something of value ripped from her against her will? But although she knew these points well, knew the way she'd rehearsed them leading up to her visit to the counselor, it all rang so hollow. She didn't really believe it, not right now, and she didn't understand why she did when she did. But there must be some reason, right? ...right?
Tiffany had dealt before with the uncomfortable suspicion that her teacher and her father might have been right all along, that maybe her first change wasn't as great as she remembered - in fact, when she wasn't clinging to her points in order to marshal an argument against them, she was pretty sure of it. (Certainly the memories of her feelings fell flat often enough.) And she'd wondered at times if they weren't also right about its being somehow harmful to her, malicious even...
But she didn't remember anything like that. Sure, she'd withdrawn from society and holed up in the house, but it was because she was tired of dealing with people, not because something had made her. And if she'd intimated them and driven them away, it was for the same reason! She was in control, not some nebulous "something else" like her father and teacher were afraid of! She was making the decisions; she couldn't have been controlled! She couldn't have...she just couldn't...it wasn't...wasn't possible...
Without warning, Tiffany was wrapped in gentle arms, and for some reason her nostrils were filled with the scent of something baking - something soft and flaky with apples in it, she thought. Something homey, something that reminded her of...it didn't make any sense for it to remind her of her mother, her mother had never been much for baking, but it did. For a moment she just sat in the embrace of whoever was embracing her, a warm tranquility seeping into her, and then she looked up. It took her a moment to recognize the face - it was Nadine. She'd been an annoyance before her change, now she was just kind of freaky - for example, the multiple arms which held her now. Tiffany pried herself out of the hug a bit abruptly, but not without regret. "What was that for?" she asked, more confused than upset.
Nadine smiled gently. "You seemed like you needed it," she said. "Are you going to be alright?"
Tiffany blinked in confusion, trying to follow the other girl's reasoning, and only then realizing that she'd been tearing up a little. "Uh...uh, yeah," she said. "Yeah. I'm fine."
"That's good," Nadine said. "God bless you, Tiffany." With that, she turned and strode down the hall, leaving Tiffany to stare in confusion after her. When she'd watched her go, Tiffany turned back to her own thoughts, which seemed further away than a mere fifteen seconds ago, wondering where she'd left off.
Anyway, even if it hadn't been all it was cracked up to be, how could this make her better off? Even if the counselor was right and she didn't look like any more of a freak than anybody else here, what good was it? If it was just cosmetic, the horn got in the way of things and the patterns on her body itched when she wore most anything other than those robes...and all the counselor could suggest for helping her get back into the social game the way she used to be was to suggest that she start working for other people...how did that even make sense? If it was herself she was trying to benefit, wouldn't it make more sense to try and figure out how to help herself? If she was just supposed to put aside her own issues and-
Tiffany was interrupted in her thoughts when she strolled around a corner and walked smack into something - really into it, she could feel it deform around her. The texture reminded her in an unsettling way of those "sticky hands" you could get from grocery-store vending machines. She scrambled backwards, feeling the surface in question peel off her as she did, and opened her eyes to see a wall of translucent orange in front of her. The shape quickly resolved itself into a human figure, and she recognized Zoe Madison, an eight-grader whom she knew primarily for being A. one of the school's various Goth types, and B. the younger sister of Jon, whom she really just wanted to avoid if at all possible - having some freak slug-thing crawling all over her would be the last thing she needed. She just hoped Zoe didn't go running off to complain to big sis...
"Gah, sorry!" the slime-girl said. "My bad. I should've looked...aw damn..." She knelt down - if "knelt" was the word, for someone who didn't appear to have knees at the moment - and began to try to pick up an armful of supplies that had scattered when she'd run (?) into Tiffany. She tried to pick up the small stuff first, but made little headway; her fingers were somewhat less defined and dextrous than those of a human, and items that she tried to grasp between her fingers tended to squish into them and spring out back onto the floor, sort of like a trampoline.
"Here," Tiffany said, kneeling down. "Get the larger stuff, I'll get the small stuff." It wasn't until she'd already started to pick things up that she wondered why she'd said this - plainly, because Zoe was doing it wrong, and she'd seen a better way, but...why was she helping her, of all people? She didn't really know.
But she kept doing it.
Steven and Mrs. Daguerre had walked out towards the outer suburbs, where there were nicer houses on larger lots, interspersed with some small parks and even full-fledged woods. They hadn't exactly made a plan on which route to take, they'd more just walked where they liked. It was nice to be simply taking a day off, but the further out they got, the more Steven began to feel a bit self-conscious; the plants out here tended to be less shy than the ones in the city, and kept "greeting" her in their own way. This was such a strange experience for her; it wasn't like they had conscious thought processes, even on an animal level, but somehow they knew her, and somehow - by chemical signals, maybe? - they made her feel welcomed.
Of course, they were equally (if not more) fixated on her mom, who managed to look slightly regal even when she was out on a casual walk. Steven had the odd feeling of her mother being sort of a "queen of the flowers;" which, she supposed, would make her...no, that was too weird a notion. But at times she'd felt like that was exactly how they thought of her...
As they were passing a nice-looking house built into a little hill, with the garage door coming out of it at street level, Steven was distracted from her line of thought in an unwelcome way. They were strolling along when she was suddenly confronted by a swarm of bees that dropped down not four feet in front of her - huge ones, too! She gave an embarassingly girly shriek and ducked behind her mother, hiding behind the broad leaf-robes that laid on top of her mother's rich purple inner petals.
"Oh, did I startle you? I'm so sorry!" The voice seemed to come from nowhere definite; Steven felt a sort of hazy quality to it, like the same sound emanated from multiple distinct points in front of her - or rather, in front of her mother. Curiously, she peeked out to see. There was nobody there but - oh God, the bees? They were...they were tiny human figures...
"It's all right," her mother said, placing a hand on Steven's shoulder. "She's just been getting a bit of unwanted attention from various parties looking for nectar."
"Oh, I suppose so," the bees - bee? It seemed to be one voice, saying one thing, did that mean that they were all one person? - replied. "She does have a lovely scent, I'm not surprised they're interested - though I'm sure it gets old." The voice was warm and harmonically rich, like a string section if violas knew how to talk. Steven could hear an audible hum backing it, but she wasn't sure if that was something to do with the number of voices in not-quite-perfect unison, or whether that was just their wings.
Still a bit nervous, she came out from behind her mother for a closer look. The bees were all women, all human in general form, but with various apian attributes - torsos banded in yellow and black fuzz, black chitin coverings for the legs and forearms that curiously reminded her of leggings and opera gloves, antennae and of course wings. She couldn't make out any form of stinger on them, which was a comfort. And...actually, they almost looked like the same woman, or dozens of not-quite-identical twins. "Are...are you all one person?" she asked. She wasn't sure if it was a polite thing to ask, but she was curious.
They - she? - bobbed and made a little noise of affirmation. "Mm-hm. Or close enough. We're certainly not separate people, at any rate. But it doesn't quite work to think of us as no more than one person, either."
Steven's mom laughed. "Sounds complicated."
"Oh, it's really not," the swarm replied. "Not in practice, anyway. It did take a bit for the rest of the family to get used to it, though. But it's probably for the best, it means I can leave some of me with my husband while the rest of me works on other things."
"Oh, that must be nice," Mrs. Daguerre said. "Is your husband changed as well?"
The swarm bobbed again, which Steven took for a nod. "Actually, Paul's a flower...person as well. Not quite like the two of you, though. Would you like to come around back and say hello?"
Steven wasn't sure she wanted to go off somewhere with a swarm of bees, even if they appeared to be wholly civilized and respectful bees, but her mother spoke first. "You know," she said, "I think I would. Actually, the two of us are a little new to this - we haven't yet met any other people with changes like ours."
"Well, as I said, my husband isn't quite like you," the bees said, "but why don't you come have a look. I'm Susan, by the way. Susan MacMillan." The swarm drifted towards the house.
"Very nice to meet you," Mrs. Daguerre said. She and Steven followed them - her? - around back. It was a nice yard, though the grass had run a bit wild (yardwork had become less of a priority since the Sun changed, Steven knew, especially for the unchanged; she wondered how recently these people had been exposed.) It was even bordered by some shrubs forming a low hedge, except at the back, where it met open woods. However, it was what was in the center of the yard that caught her eye, and she stared open-mouthed until her mother noticed and gave her a gentle jab in the side.
In the center of the yard was an enormous flower, far bigger than even the creepy rotting-meat flowers she'd seen in an old National Geographic. Those were something like three feet across - this had to be closer to twelve or fifteen, with the petals all spread out on the lawn in the afternoon sunlight. But where those flowers - Rafflesia, was it? - had struck her as creepy because they were huge and thick-petaled and looked like some kind of monstrous Plasticine parody of a real flower, this one, despite its even greater size, had an elegance and beauty to it that the other lacked. It was huge, and being huge it was by necessity sturdy, but it wasn't indelicate.
It also had a woman at the center of it.
Steven blinked in surprise, having been so caught up in the hugeness of the flower that she'd completely forgotten they were going to meet the bees'...husband, but this was...clearly a woman...oh. Frankly, while she knew academically that plenty of other transformees suffered sex changes, and she even knew who some of the girls at school that used to be guys were, she'd never quite considered them as being in the same boat as herself. This person, though, had been a man - had been the husband of the woman who was now a swarm of bees - and was now a flower-woman, like herself...
She looked again at the woman. Green skin, lighter and a bit yellower than her mother's, green hair of a slightly darker shade, a definitely womanly figure...or what she could see of one. The petals angled up from the ground to surround her at about waist level before plunging down to meet at the base of the flower, but Steven could see fairly broad hips just peeking out. She was naked, oblivious to them and soaking in the sunlight, angled so that her whole front was exposed to it; Steven could see that, like her, the woman had little flowers in place of her nipples. She was surrounded, in the center of the flower, by several pollen-coated stamens, and Steven realized with a start that, in what seemed like some kind of cosmic joke, the woman was actually in place of the flower's pistil - the female part of it. That hardly compared, however, to what she felt when she glanced down at the ground and back up at the woman's waist, judging the distance, and realized that there was no possible way that there could be any legs hidden behind those petals.
This, then was one of those people who had not only become plants, but actually been rooted to one spot. Steven gave a little shudder, remembering how afraid she was of that happening to her, when her change had moved into its second stage. She tried not to be conspicuous as she crossed her legs over each other, feeling them touch and knowing that they were still there. What must it be like?
Steven stuck close to her mother as a group of bees broke off from the swarm and flitted over to the flower-woman. "Paul, honey," Mrs. MacMillan said, "I met some people who'd like to meet you."
