Jennifer sat in the library with an encyclopedia, reading the article on women. Animal-girls, it seemed, had a fair bit in common with the animal whose traits they shared. Cat-girls, for instance, had great night vision and reflexes, and all animal-girls had good hearing and a great sense of smell. Fox-girls, she read, apparently were fast (which made sense; Jennifer recalled hearing that a fox's top speed is about 35 mph, though she was entirely fox-girls weren't THAT fast,) but also, like foxes, had generally poor eyesight. Jennifer noticed as she read this that she was wearing glasses, and wondered why she hadn't noticed before. Now that she thought about it, Karyn had been wearing them too. She shrugged and moved on.
She glanced over the "reproduction" section, trying not to pick up any major details. The species of the mother, she read, didn't control the species of the child; that explained why she was a fox-girl even though her mother and Zoe were cat-girls. Passing on, she suddenly spied something out of the corner of her eye that made her gape in horror: animal-girls had an estrus cycle, better known as "heat!"
Upon closer investigation, it wasn't nearly as bad as she'd thought; in animal-girls going through estrus just made them a little bit more amorous than usual, rather than giving them an instinctive need to mate like real animals. It also made them more "emotionally responsive," whatever that meant. Jennifer sighed in relief. That was going to be a lot easier to deal with. And, on the bright side, it meant she wouldn't have to deal with menstruation. She would have to go through it, though, as it came about every 28 days, the same as girls' periods used to. Still, she was pretty sure she could handle it.
