"Really? A giraffe?" asks Sally incredulously. "We're inside a small bedroom in Ontario, and you want to be a giraffe?"
"Well, you asked!" said Jeff defensively. "You said it needed you to fill in a species, and that's the one that came to mind."
Sally closed her eyes and rubbed her forehead,
"Besides," he reminded her, "it's just until everyone else gets home."
"Which could be several hours from now, or even sometime tomorrow if they run into something unexpected," she reminded him. "Hm, what to do with a five-meter, thousand-kilogram African animal for a night? Ah! Of course! The Chronivac can just automatically teleport you to your species' native habitat as a suitable location for your change."
"Wait, teleporting? Like in a sci-fi novel?! Is it safe? Would it even really be me on the other end if it were?"
"I don't know," admitted Sally with a certain dismissiveness in her voice. "Is turning into a giraffe safe? Am I still me now that I've become a human? What happened to your sense of adventure? This is freaking beta software here, man, but its ours to try whatever we please. Besides, it supposedly has some experimental safety feature where it saves your initial profile and restores you to your original state in the case of death or severe injury. So if you end up as a formless blob of organic molecules, we'll at least get to see if a backup copy of you shows up back here in the bedroom."
Jeff wasn't sure he was entirely pleased with his former pet's newfound human snark and casual disregard for his molecular cohesion and metaphysical identity. He had already been starting to get the impression that she thought she was smarter than him and probably really was. "Okay, let's do it," he said, not wanting to be less adventurous than Sally in addition to being less intelligent.
"Great," she said, typing away on the machine. "I'm setting the species for giraffe, setting the duration for indefinite so we can change back manually whenever your parents come home, setting the destination for northeastern DRC--"
"The DRC?!" exclaimed Jeff, surprisingly remembering a few modern history tidbits from his Geography classes. "Haven't they had a lot of political violence there?"
Sally snorted, "Yeah, you're going to make the perfect prisoner of war on all fours. Come on! Giraffes are endangered there; at least for tonight there will be one more."
"ENDANGERED?!"
"Sense of adventure, remember? Ah, here we are, done!"
Jeff blinked, or at least he felt like he did, and all at once he discovered he was...