Luckily for everyone the backdoor had been left open in the chaos that had ocurred earlier, but for some reason Laura seemed happy enough to stay outside.
"Laura, aren't you happy to *ook* be back?"
Laura just snorted in response.
"Laura, are you *croak* okay?"
The pig oinked to itself again and eventually trotted away to from the house to rest contentedly in a patch of mud in the garden. So Laura now had the mind of a pig as well as the body of one? Sophie sighed to herself and entered the house with one more problem to fix.
But none of her friends followed her inside. Annie hopped excitedly towards the pond and was soon splashing around delightedly and croaking at the real frogs who were somehow now her friends. Lucy had again been distracted by the cat, but her chasing of him seemed to be playful and they were both clearly enjoying themselves. Even Portia seemed to be having fun scurrying around in the grass without a care in the world.
Sophie felt sad. She had never seen her friends this happy. But she knew things couldn't stay this way. It wasn't that she minded being a monkey, in fact she had started to find the life of an animal strangely liberating and stress free - when the creepy shop owner wasn't chasing her and her friends.
But living like this wasn't practical. All but Laura were stuck between two species and wouldn't be accepted by either. And to some degree they were still naked young women, hardly safe or able to fend for themselves in the streets or the wild and unable to keep a roof over their heads without working. She seemed to be the only one left with any real idea of her true identity. Though she hated the responsibility she had to make a decision for herself and her friends