Mark Halberd still remembered the last time he had been in Moon Lake. He had just reached adulthood back then.
For some odd reason, his family was the oldest family of normals in Moon Lake. While not all of them stayed normal all their life, each generation seemed to always have at least one member that didn't become a were, something that always stuck him as odd.
For his part, he thought of becoming a werefox and joining the skulk for a long time, to be with the girl he liked. But while weres of all kinds are immune to most known diseases, (including AIDS) there is still the possibility of them being sick. So he waited for the day she would get better, a day that never came.
After her death, he needed to clear his head, pass some time outside of Moon Lake, the only place he had ever known. At the time he imagined he would come back and finally become a wolf, with or without his Alice. Instead he found love again during his travels, another normal that, unlike him, probably never knew of the weres existence.
Things could have ended here, but they obviously didn't.
One day they, their travel landed them into a coastal village who was eerily silent. A silence accompanied by the stench of purified fish.
As they entered the center of the strangely Mediterranean-looking town, they saw what looked like weres bodies, all of them sea creatures of some sort. All were dead, some being half-eaten. Or so they thought, until they heard what sounded like a kid trying not to cry, and failing. Searching among the pile of body, they finally found a 4 years old cecaelia girl. (Think Ursula from Disney's Little mermaid, but in far younger and cuter.)
Mark knew that, normally, a were won't transform before puberty. But he also knew that it could happen under some circumstances, and supposed seeing everyone she ever knew dead was more than enough to qualify.
While Stephanie, his wife, tried to calm down the poor girl, visibly unphased by the presence of octopi arms where should be human legs, he started to plan a trip to Moon Lake, wanting to bring the girl somewhere safe for her, while noticing the bloody footmark of a werecat of some sort going toward the nearby beach.
— – - – —
“What I hadn't anticipated” admitted Mark, “was that the ordeal made her so scared of cats it made her change anytime she was near one, forcing us to go into hiding far more often that we would have liked.”
“Well… That explain why she started hiding behind her mother as soon as I approached,” admitted the town chancellor, Samantha Twist “but not why she changed from a white-skinned little girl to a black-skinned one, like her mother.”
“You know octopi can change colors depending of their environment or mood, a bit like chameleons, right? So I suppose Lena is just doing that.”