After a few wishes that failed, and a few more for information, the results were not encouraging.
It seemed that within the bounds of the first wish, the means by which I had been changed into a female leopard and Karyn had been made to experience what I was feeling, were I had been given a subconscious desire, masochistic as it may have been, to deep down want to be a mother leopard, and then that Karyn had first been put into the same state as me; namely she had been given the power to be whatever she wanted to be, but not anything I didn't want her to be, and given a similar subconscious desire. And this was permanent. We were going to be female leopards for the rest of our lives. The second part had found a way in, under the constraints of the first part, the shapeshifting power to be whatever the both of us wanted to be, but the second part subverted that by permanently making us to want to be stuck as female leopards, and to be pregnant, and there was nothing we could do about that. The stone had run out of wiggle room to let us be human again without contradicting an earlier wish, which was prohibited.
After promising not to abuse this ability, however, she at least gave us back our voices. We at least could talk. At first she said we were not to speak except to her or others she cleared as good to be down with the secret, unless absolutely necessary. Then I talked her into abandoning that plan, in favor of something a bit more ambitious than merely being zoo animals who secretly were able to talk. Rather than just being caged animals, we were now employees of the zoo with freedom to go about as we wished. The backstory was that we had been kidnapped by a mad scientist as children and turned into leopards and in my case my sex had been changed as well, but we retained our human mental abilities, human lifespan, and of course could speak. Anne was amazed to see that no one found this implausible. Once the wish was made, it all just seemed perfectly reasonable to them that two of their employees who would help with the veterinary needs of all the animals, just happened to be leopards, and were going to be materially participating in the leopard breeding program, were going to be having sex with their male leopards on loan from other zoos, getting knocked up, and bearing and giving birth to leopard cubs for their breeding program. That too was not negotiable within the constraints of the previous wishes. But that wasn't so bad. After all, at some level, both Karyn and I wanted to be leopard moms, and had really enjoyed the sex with males of our kind, as weird and perverse as that may seem.
After contacting our families, it seemed they were still our families, and they completely were on board with this. It was a perfect career choice for their two children who had been kidnapped and changed years earlier by that mad scientist. On the one paw, I hadn't wanted to become a doctor of human medicine or a lawyer as my parents had been trying to cast me into, and hadn't really been looking for a career in veterinary medicine either, but on the other paw, now I kind of loved the idea. Maybe an interest in caring for animals came with my new maternal instincts, and the fact that I actually wanted to give birth to and nurse litters of leopard cubs. My and Karyn's families also thought it would be nice to have some grandchildren, and some more cats in their family. It remained to be seen whether they would have enhanced intelligence, speech, or aged at the human rate like we do though. Perhaps they would just be regular leopards. Then again, if we want, we could change that with the stone as well.
And so now Karyn and I were interns working with the zoo. As leopards. And we were going to literally be breeding leopards for them. We had lost our humanity, but had each secured a very strange career at least, so yay? But we weren't unhappy with the arrangement. After all, we couldn't help but actually want to be what we wanted to be, even if we knew we only wanted it because the stone had made us want it.
But what adventures were in store for us from here on out? I still have the stone after all. We may be permanently female leopards with some questionable motivations and sexual interests, but the stone still provides for nearly unlimited potential. What should we do now?
