Melissa let Kevin and John come up with a plan to temporarily block the domed chamber. They decided to cover their entrance portal with a large square of sheet metal, and then to park the Rover on top of it. Before they executed their plan, Melissa dropped a note down the shaft to Hannah and Rogers, in the hope they were still alive, and informing them that they would bring them back up in the morning. She also dropped down a loaf of the local bread.
While the men executed their plan, Melissa moved off by herself to gather her thoughts. Why was she so willing to believe Kevin? She had never seen anyone so scared, and as over-the-top as Kevin could be about his faith, she never would have characterized him as excitable or irrational. It pained her to potentially seal her mentor and fellow student underground for the night. If Kevin was wrong, it would be her ass that got chewed out by Rogers tomorrow. Would the professor accept “better safe than sorry?”
That thought led to another. She remembered the gun that Rogers kept on site, in case looters decided to pay a call on the excavation. The situation seemed to demand preparation for a worst case scenario, so she recovered the gun from among Rogers’ personal belongings. That was two things that Rogers would chew her out for if they were wrong.
Returning to the chamber entrance, the men had finished blocking the hole they had made earlier. John was standing over Kevin, who had curled up on the hot, coarse floor of the Harappan-era excavation.
“Is he all right?” Melissa asked.
“Look at his head,” John answered.
“Are those…cat ears?”
John nodded. “Something seriously strange is going on here. I don’t think Kevin was lying about what he saw.”
Melissa crouched down next to the first-year. “Kevin? How do you feel? What’s happening to you?”
“I don’t know,” Kevin said. His voice was anxious, but he did not appear to be in pain. All of a sudden, he arched his back and tugged down the back of his trousers to allow a furry orange tail to escape. “She must have done something to me. She called me her ‘pet’.”
John took a step back, as if he was worried that Kevin might be contagious. His own voice trembled with panic. “Shit like this doesn’t happen, Mel. This is beyond Indiana Jones stuff. Kevin is cursed.”
“Well what do you want me to do?” Melissa snapped. “Throw him down the hole?”
“No!” wailed Kevin. “She’s down there. We have to get away from here.” He clawed at his clothes, as if their touch was burning his skin. In seconds he was naked, exposed to the still-hot rays of the setting sun.
“Kev, you seem to be losing weight,” John remarked.
“Oh, no! No! No! No!” Kevin wailed. Before their eyes, his frame shrank, slimmed, and grew more feminine. His penis, which he was doing his best to cover with hands that now resembled furry paws, dwindled away into nothing, revealing a clearly feminine slit to replace it. “I’m becoming a monster!”
Melissa scowled as Kevin seemed more upset by becoming a woman than by gaining catlike features. John was positively leering. “A hot monster, you mean! Will your tits ever stop growing?”
Kevin gave a “yipe!” as he tried to cover both his expanding bosom as well as his nether regions, but as his breasts expanded past the G-cup side, it became impossible to do both. Kevin got up and sprinted towards the Rover.
“We have to get out of here now!” he cried. “I can feel her entering my brain. She wants me to blaspheme, to declare her to be the one true god. Please, let’s drive away from here and get as far as possible.”
John still had the keys to the Rover. He looked at Melissa for approval. She nodded.
“Let’s go,” she said. “We can come back in the morning. Maybe what happened to Kevin will wear off.”
Kevin’s heart sank. He knew in the pit of his soul that She would not return him to normal.