"Are you okay Dan?!" Kyle asked, leaning down beside his friend.
The internal pains wore off a bit, and Dan relaxed for a moment on his hands and knees beside the car, panting in only the very slightest relief. His organs still felt wrong, like they had rearranged inside him.
"What did Monica do to him?" Kyle demanded, looking up at his girlfriend with a not particularly pleasant tone in his voice.
"Losing your humanity is going to be rough," she answered blankly, "no pun intended. Your bodies, your lives, who you are now. It's all so deeply entrenched down to your very souls. But Monica thinks your bond is deeper. She thinks you'll both survive this. I hope she's right. You and Dan are closer than you and I are, Kyle. This needs to happen. I won't accept losing either of you. And I won't let you lose each other."
Now it was Kyle's turn to lose his cool. "Monica's magical doggie thing? You're still on that? Our friend could be dying here, Katie!" He went off into a tirade and Katie shouted back some things but Dan was not really focused on their argument. He was focused on the feelings from inside him. Once he'd calmed down and they had settled into a vague lingering discomfort, he was about to get up and try to get into his car. But instead he stayed with his knees on the ground and grabbed his ears. They were swelling. Painfully. And the argument, like everything around him, was suddenly getting louder.
"Kyle, look!" Katie pointed to Dan all at once, cutting off whatever Kyle was going to say about Monica. At first, he only saw Dan holding his ears. And then he saw the ears. They'd stretched beyond his grip, widening and lengthening to broad points. Dan was rubbing the thin flaps of skin as though they ached, and Kyle could see a fine layer of black fuzz sprouting across them. Dan gasped and let go of them. The large ears flopped a bit and Kyle saw them perking up and down.
"Guys, what happened?" Dan blurted out frantically. "I can't see my ears! Or my guts! What's happened to them?"
Neither Kyle nor Katie knew exactly how to tell Dan that he had dog ears now, but whatever they might have said was interrupted when Kyle grabbed his groin.
"Kyle! Are you okay!" Katie shrieked and wrapped her arms around her grimacing man's shoulders. Dan flattened his twitching ears at the noise. Kyle wanted to say it felt like he was getting repeatedly kicked in the nuts, but all his could do was moan.