"There are plenty of homeless people in this city, right?" asked Mary Lou as she rubbed the large gator she had just defeated.
"Well, yes, you're not thinking of having these guys eat them, are you?" asked Evelyn with some dread.
"Why would I want to do that when it would be so much more productive to them like us?" asked Mary Lou.
"What?" asked Adam and Evelyn.
"Think of it; we three are currently the only ones of our species. If we were found, it would easy for the humans to capture us and take us to a lab. But if we had a whole congregation of gator people, we'd be a lot harder to capture," said Mary Lou.
"I thought you didn't like being part human," said Evelyn.
"I'm not as large and strong as I once was, but I'm seeing several advantages to this new form," said Mary Lou, "For one thing, I'm far smarter now than I was before and I can express it a lot more understandably now. Walking on two legs is a bit irksome for balance, but I'm able to do so much more with hands." Said hands reached up and squeezed her sizable breasts, causing Mary Lou to give a little moan. "And I'm starting to understand the appeal of these things."
Adam couldn't help but stare at Mary Lou fondling herself until Evelyn elbowed him. Adam blinked and said, "And you think your new congregation will appreciate this? Or those homeless people?"
"These sewers may give this gators a lot more freedom than the zoo, but they can do far better with a little brainpower," said Mary Lou, "And those homeless people have nowhere else to go. They could continued to live on the fringes of society or they could become part of a stronger species that will be far more closely-knit."
Adam and Evelyn exchanged glances. Mary Lou was a lot smarter than they thought. The idea of building up a race of anthro alligators was intriguing, though there was a bit of moral ambiguity to it. True, the homeless wouldn't be missed and they'd be getting better bodies, but did they have the right to change them like that?
"Shouldn't we ask them if they want to be changed first?" asked Evelyn.
"And we probably should start with a small group, just to see if this idea will work out," said Adam.
Mary Lou looked annoyed before thinking the idea and said, "A test group would be a good start and not so hard to find either."
***
Finding a small group of homeless people was actually very easy. It took only a half hour's searching to find an ideal test group: two men, two women, each looking the worse for wear. Adam and Evelyn noticed a slight vagueness in their eyes that suggested they didn't have the sharpest minds, but that suited Mary Lou just fine.
Of course, they got scared at the sight of the large alligators and the humanoid alligators. However, Mary Lou turned out to be a surprisingly eloquent speaker. She spoke with such fluidity and rhetoric that Adam and Evelyn started to wonder if Mary Lou had been smarter than the average alligator before or the shampoo has boosted her brainpower dramatically.
The fancier words seemed to go over the homeless people's heads, but her soothing tone calmed them and they did get the gist of what she was saying: a change for a better life and body and all they had to do was scrub down a gator. While most people would have hesitated to get near such a large carnivore, these people seemed willing to try it if it would improve their livelihood. Or perhaps they were intimidated and didn't want to refuse the muscular gator woman's offer.
Mary Lou hissed to the gators and had a bull and cow crawl over to the hobos. She instructed the men to start scrubbing shampoo on the cow and the women to start rubbing down the bull. The gators seemed to be pleased with this grooming, though it was hard to read the expressions of reptiles. After a few minutes, the results started to become apparent. The humans' skin started to harden and become scaly, their hands developing webbing and claws. Their faces started pushing out into snouts as the hair on their heads receded. Meanwhile, the gators they were washing were changing as well. They were getting a lot smaller as their mass passed into their bathers. The front legs extended into arms while their back legs grew longer and capable of supporting them.
As the humans' mass increased, their old worn clothing started to rip away, particularly when the tails started growing in. Adam and Evelyn noticed with interest that the bodies revealed beneath were in much better shape than their condition hinted at before. The men had lost what unwanted body fat they had and their muscles easier to see while the women's bodies were firming up and looking healthier. The gators' bodies were also looking to be in condition as they became more humanoid, though their muscles were a lot larger than what the humans were becoming.
Pretty soon, the line between the species had blurred and where four homeless people and two alligators had been were six humanoid gators. The hisses that the alligators were giving turned into lustful moans as the former humans kept rubbing their bodies. The cow gator was enjoying having her new breasts and ass rubbed while the bull gator was reveling in two females feeling out the details of his new torso muscles.
Mary Lou turned to the former zookeepers and said, "I'd call this a rousing success. How about we add some more to our congregation?"