Biff padded through the house on pawed feet. It felt very strange - perhaps it was just that she was seeing it from a different perspective, but it felt colder and emptier than it had before. Her father hadn't been a particularly positive influence on her life, but now she was entirely alone - nobody would live in this house but her...
The living room was about how it had been this morning, other than the computer having been taken, but when Biff made her way upstairs, she found it all in a mess. It was obvious that her father had torn through the closets and grabbed anything he thought he'd need, then taken off without bothering to tidy anything up. Fine, then, she thought. I'm some kind of animal monster thing now, what do I need with a clean house? Probably she should be living in a cave somewhere or something...
As she thought this, she noticed the full-length mirror in the master bedroom. She didn't really want to look into it, not after her experience with the bathroom mirror this morning, but some part of her just had to know. Stepping gingerly over strewn clothes and miscellaneous personal effects, she made her way over to the mirror and peered into it.
And softly gasped.
The creature in the mirror was a strange yet familiar amalgamation of parts of other things - lion, bird, human. It was, from a certain point of view, the wrong face on the wrong body for the wrong wings.
But what it wasn't was a monster. Not a crude jumble of body parts Frankensteined together. Not a grotesque chimera. A single, unified creature, all of the seemingly disparate pieces fitting together into a natural whole, carrying itself with a certain wild grace despite its awkward unfamiliarity with itself, animated by a distinctive mind and spirit that made it recognizably a person. A lovely young woman...of a new and alien species.
The only problem was that it was her.
Biff stared into the mirror at the young she-sphinx reflected there, struggling to comprehend it all. She wanted to feel disgust when she looked at that. She wanted to know that it was wrong, that that thing was a monster that had stolen his very life from him, that it was just some awful creature and not really him...
...but...
...she couldn't.
No matter how much it confused and angered her, no matter how elaborate the mental gymnastics, she simply couldn't make herself believe that. She saw the sphinx-girl making the same faces that she was making, expressing the same feelings she was feeling. She saw the same ears and paws and wings and tail and hair and breasts that she felt as part of herself. Her own brain denied her the possibility of dissociating herself from the creature in the mirror, and left her frustrations without a target.
She stood there on her four legs, staring into the mirror and feeling hot, angry tears welling up in her eyes and spilling down her cheeks as her emotions were in turmoil. The panic and pain and sadness of the encounter with her father clashing with the frustration and anger of having her body stolen from her again, plus the nagging uncertainty of how she was supposed to get through life like this, left her in a complete jumble. She probably would have stood there for an hour, if her ears hadn't picked up a sudden knock on the front door.
As it was, all of that was temporarily washed away in a sudden straight shot of pure panic. I can't be seen like this! she thought, disregarding for the moment the fact that multiple people already had seen her like this and she would have to leave the house sometime. This was just not what she needed right now. But maybe if she just ignored it, they'd-
Knock knock knock.
Damn it.
As Biff stood there pondering what to do, trying to remember if she'd locked the door behind her, she heard it open. "This is Ms. Collins from across the street," a woman's voice called. "Are you home? I'm coming in."
She didn't know what to do. She briefly considered trying to hide in a closet or something, but none of the closets in the house were big enough for her to fit in, and she'd look even stupider if the neighbor lady came up to find her lion's ass sticking out of it while the front half of her cowered ineffectually inside. And there was no way she'd ever fit under the bed. With little else as an alternative, she turned to face the door, sat her haunches down on the floor and propped her shoulders up as far as her forelegs would take them, and awaited the inevitable.
It didn't take long for a set of footsteps to make its way across the living room and come up the stairs. Biff tried to remember who Ms. Collins was as she waited, but couldn't quite put a face to the name. Then the footsteps rounded the corner in the upstairs hallway and a woman poked her head into the master bedroom.
Ms. Collins, as it turned out, wasn't someone Biff recalled ever running into before - but his free time had usually been spent either in his room or out somewhere else, with his friends or at practice, rather than outside in his own neighborhood, so it wasn't that much of a surprise. She was on the taller side, with a modest but noticeable figure, dressed unassumingly in faded jeans and a white T-shirt, and looked to be in her mid-to-late thirties. She also had triangular, orange-furred ears sticking out of her thatchy golden hair and a bushy fox's tail swishing around behind her. To Biff's newly sensitive nose, she smelled like wet dog and shampoo.
"I saw the cab pulling away as I was getting out of the shower," she said, apparently not at all surprised to find a sphinx sitting in a half-trashed house by herself. "I figured it was probably you, and I just wanted to make sure you were okay after what they put you through this morning."
Biff stared at her. "Do...do I know you?" she asked.
The fox-woman laughed. "I suppose not," she said. "But I've seen you around, and I saw everything that happened this morning. When I saw your father packing things into the car and taking off, it wasn't hard to figure out what was happening, and I imagined you were in for a bit of a shock when you got back."
The sphinx-girl sighed. "Not that much of a shock."
Ms. Collins nodded. "No, I suppose not. Still, I know this must be a lot for you to handle right now..."
Biff felt herself starting to get irritable. "I'm fine," she said, practically biting down on the end of the word. She could look after herself, and the last thing she needed right now was somebody butting into her business.
The fox-woman was unimpressed. "You know your eyes are still red, right?"
Biff glanced aside, trying to avoid eye contact and trying to keep her cheeks from flushing. "I...look, just...I don't need this, okay? I'll...I'll be fine." She felt her tail thrashing behind her, betraying her agitation.
"Uh-huh." Ms. Collins crossed her arms under her breasts. "We both know you have a lot to get used to, whether you want to admit it or not. I wanted to offer you a place to stay. I work from home, so I can be available to help when you need it."
"I don't need a place to stay!" Biff protested. "Hell, I have this all to myself, now!"
"Until he sells it out from under you." The thought of that sent a shudder up the sphinx-girl's spine, but she persisted. "I'll...it'll be fine, I'm getting a settlement from the cops anyway..." If there was one small mercy in this whole situation, it was that she'd already turned eighteen, so her dad wasn't going to have a way to weasel his way into getting a slice of that pie.
"Which will cover, what, a couple years of rent in a cheap efficiency apartment, plus food? While you handle all the housekeeping and cooking in addition to your schooling?"
Biff balked. "School? I'm...I'm not going back to school like this!"
"So then your job prospects will be bad after the money runs out?" Ms. Collins was regarded her with what appeared to be bemused compassion, which was getting her a little agitated. "Seriously, now. I know this is a lot for you to take in, but you must know that that isn't a viable plan. Look, I can't force you to do anything, but I just want you to know that the offer stands. And whatever happens, if you ever need anything, all you have to do is ask."
