Christine was groggy as she woke up, feeling like she'd been asleep for a whole day. As she came to, she realized she was lying on the floor of the breakroom. She tried to push herself up off the floor and immediately realized that something was off. Her arms seemed to be locked in place beneath her, and she couldn't lift herself up more than a few inches off the ground. No matter how hard she pushed, she was stuck on all fours.
That was when Christine started to notice the other things that had changed around her. At a glance, she could see that she was still wearing the mascot suit, the tawny fur dotted with black spots still covering her arms and chest. But upon closer inspection, that wasn't right either. Her arms were far more slender now, and they ended in sleek paws rather than the stubby-fingered fuzzy gloves that were supposed to be there. Trying to inspect the rest of her body with her suddenly limited range of motion, she quickly spotted something moving right behind her. It looked much more lively than the costume's tail, which normally would hang limply from just above Christine's butt. Stranger than that, though, she could feel it involuntarily flicking back and forth as though it were actually a part of her. Right before her eyes, the tail started to move just as she directed it to.
Christine tried to let out a shout of surprise, but it came out as an inarticulate growl. That left no more doubt in her mind. She had become an actual leopard! She had to admit, throughout all those days of wearing the costume and directing visitors to the leopard enclosure, she had fantasized from time to time about what it would be like to be one of them for real. Had she somehow, unknowingly, wished for this to happen and it somehow came true? She couldn't recall running into any genies or spotting any shooting stars lately...
But before she could try to test out any of the other capabilities of her powerful new body, her acute hearing picked up a faint noise - the muffled sound of a voice saying "Oh, shit!" Christine whipped her head around to the door of the breakroom and saw one of her coworkers staring at her through the glass, his mouth agape. Without thinking, she tried to approach him, but he just flinched and grabbed a nearby chair to bar the door shut. Then he reached for the walkie-talkie on his waistband. "We have, um, an escaped leopard here! Currently confined to the breakroom!" That was followed by a long series of inaudible, but frantic-sounding, squawks from the other end of the line.
Christine mentally cursed to herself. How was she going to explain this to anybody? She didn't even know what happened to her or how she ended up like this. And that meant, she realized, she had no idea how to turn back into a human, either. Was it just going to wear off? Or maybe it was something she could control at will? She shut her eyes tight and tried to think human thoughts, focus on the shape of her normal body, will herself back onto two legs, but none of it seemed to be working.
Quickly, a bevy of security guards and curious staff members formed a crowd around the doorway and started to watch as Christine paced around the room like any other cat. She was still focused on how to get out of her predicament, but she couldn't help but overhear their conversations with her sensitive ears. "The keepers say all the leopards are accounted for. This isn't one of ours." "Then how on earth did it get in here?" "You think maybe someone was trying to drop off an exotic pet without getting caught?" "A donation? Well, stranger things have happened." "I guess we can put her in the enclosure with the other leopards until we can track down her rightful owner - if she has one. It'll be perfect - right now, we only have two males and one female, so we can balance things out." "Who's got the tranq gun? We're gonna have to clear a path for them whenever they get here."
Christine tried to focus on getting out of this, but she couldn't drown out those voices and what they were planning to do with her. They were going to tranquilize her and stick her behind the glass with the "other" leopards! It took everything she could do to keep from panicking. What was she possibly going to do now?