Christine found herself lying face-first on the floor. She couldn't tell how long she had been out, but figured she must have fainted. It always got so hot inside that costume, after all, regardless of the weather outside - the heat must have finally gotten to her. Nobody had come to her aid, though, so she reasoned it couldn't have been long. She moved to push herself off the ground but her arms felt strangely weak, as if her muscles just couldn't tense up right. Figuring she probably needed to go easy on herself after fainting like that, Christine remembered a bit of her perfunctory first aid training and didn't try to get to her feet right away. Scooching into a sitting position, she couldn't help but notice that she was still wearing the costume. Of course she was - who would have taken it off of her?
She went to take off the costume head, but when she brought her hands up to the sides of her head, she felt nothing but her bare skin pressing against skin. It was then that she realized, still shaking off the disorientation, that she could see her surroundings clearly and not through the dimly-lit mesh of the mascot's eyes. So she'd already removed the head, apparently, but it didn't seem to be lying next to her. Turning to look behind herself, there was nothing in the room beside her.
Christine had barely begun to puzzle over this when an even stranger realization crossed her mind. She caught a glimpse of her hands, still covered by the costume's gloves, but that couldn't be right. She had just been touching her own temples, and there was no barrier of thick cushy fabric separating the two parts of her body then...
Experimentally, she pressed her palms together. She could feel the skin-to-skin contact, even as she watched the fake fur of one glove rub against the other. Okay, Christine thought, trying to calm herself, I must be losing it. That wasn't a calming thought, admittedly, but at least it had a solution - go to the medical tent and get the on-duty nurse to observe her until whatever heat stroke or manic episode she was having was past. But before she could do that, she still had to take the costume off, no matter how delusional she felt. Her boss was not going to be happy if the kids saw the mascot getting first aid - or freaking out and having a mental breakdown.
Shakily, Christine rose to her feet, her legs wobbling underneath her like they were filled with cotton. She tried not to dwell on that thought. If she couldn't make sense of what she was seeing and feeling, she could at least go to the employee restroom and splash some water in her face. That might be all she needed to snap out of it.
In the narrow hallways of the zoo's back rooms, nobody batted an eyelash at Christine. A person in a leopard costume was an entirely normal sight here, after all, though Christine couldn't help thinking that there seemed to be a lot more people milling around than usual on a late afternoon like this. She glanced at a clock on the wall of one room, whose hands were sitting at a few minutes past 8:00. The thought that several hours had passed since she went into the changing room, and the fact that she couldn't even tell whether that was A.M. or P.M., barely registered with Christine right now. She was more focused on every twinge of unfamiliar sensation that she felt, trying to assess her mental state and possibly her physical state at every moment. Why did she feel like she was walking barefoot when she could see the big cartoony paws right there beneath her? Why was the costume's tail swinging behind her, rather than hanging limply as dead weight on her butt like usual? It didn't make any sense - or, if there was an explanation, it was one so bizarre and impossible that she wasn't even going to consider it.
In the restroom, she went straight to the nearest sink. But before she could do anything, she saw her own reflection in the mirror that hung above it. There was the costume in full - the head securely attached, and everything else looking exactly as it was supposed to, except maybe a little dirtier than when she had put it on this morning. Or yesterday morning? She had to admit she rarely saw the costume like this, with somebody inside it - either it was in pieces in her locker, or she was the one wearing it and could hardly see anything. Even the view she was getting now should have been logically impossible.
Now with the benefit of being able to see what she was doing, Christine reached to take off the costume's head again. She figured that at the very least, this would prove that she was delusional - that somehow the movements she saw in the mirror would fail to line up with the reality outside the reflection, and then she would know for sure she had gone insane, or someone had slipped her drugs or something. But what she saw was exactly what she expected to see - the leopard mascot putting its paws to its head, trying and failing to get a grip with its clumsy excuse for fingers.
Then it occurred to Christine that she had other options here. She had always been told that the head was the last part of the costume to go on and the first to come off, but that was only because it blocked her vision of everything else she would need to put on or remove. She didn't have that problem right now, even if that was itself a much bigger problem. She went for the zipper that ran across a subtle seam along her back, figuring that she could at least snag it on an undexterous paw and pull it open by brute force. But as she ran a hand along the back of her neck, she couldn't feel a seam there at all. She patted down the length of her back until she could no longer reach any further down and felt nothing but her own body. Well, that and the sensation of fibers bending at their roots as she rubbed against the fake fur. It was like she was covered in a layer of coarse hair, the feeling she would normally get from pressing against her scalp extended across the rest of her body.
Sliding her arm around her body to reach even lower, it was more of the same at her lower back. That is, until her hand bumped against something sticking out just above her buttocks that, once again, very much felt like a part of her. Grabbing her tail was a completely alien feeling, and even weirder was realizing that she could move it and control it like any other part of her body. Even when she wasn't trying to, it flicked and swished like it was trying to escape from her grasp, and it required as much thought to stop it from doing that as it did to make it swing around from side to side.
Christine was beginning to realize that this was not a hallucination, or a disorientation, or a dream, for that matter. Everything she felt was pointing her to one perfectly logical conclusion, but she still didn't want to admit it to herself, as though refusing to accept the reality could make it go away. She wanted one more test. Reaching for the costume head once again, this time she didn't contemplate the sensation - she just pulled it away from her neck. Not only did that hurt, but she got nowhere - the head was stuck on as firmly as her real head. Unless this, somehow, was her real head all of a sudden. Pulling harder and harder, with the desperation of a woman at the end of her rope, Christine could feel her hands pressing inward further and further with every tug, pushing down to a depth that should have fractured her skull. But she didn't seem to have one. Her head simply deformed under the pressure, putting up about as much resistance as a pillow.
Finally, she gave up. She let go of her head, which instantly sprung back to its previous shape, and let her arms fly forward to crash against the ledge of the sink, where they practically bounced off with a soft thump. Christine could no longer deny what she was experiencing. She was not trapped inside the suit. She was not even wearing the suit. She was the suit now, and there was nothing else inside her except some sort of stuffing. She gazed back into the mirror, studying a cartoon animal's face she had seen many times before, that was now just her face. What could she possibly do now?