Christine tried to think of what to do, but she quickly ran out of time. The door to the breakroom burst open, and before she could even react she felt something strike her in the neck. Looking up, she saw the zoo's animal control officer standing over her in full uniform, his tranquilizer gun in his hands. In all the time Christine had spent working at the zoo, she'd passed by him many times, but she'd never seen him needing to fire a dart before. She couldn't have imagined that he would end up using it on her...
Christine's next thought was to try to communicate with the man somehow. If she could just show him that she was really a human, then maybe... But by then, her head was swimming. As her four legs lost their strength and her unfamiliar body crumpled beneath her, it took every ounce of fight she had just to keep her eyes open. But it was a fight she was losing... and in a moment... everything faded to black...
The next thing Christine knew, she could feel the hard ground beneath her. Her eyes shot open as she remembered what she was trying to do. But it was immediately clear to her that it was too late. She was lying on a rock in the middle of the leopard enclosure - a place she knew very well and easily recognized, although she had never seen it from this angle. And in all the time she had spent trying to attract people to this part of the zoo with her costume, she had never seen it this full. Turning her head, she could see that the crowd was several people deep and surrounded the enclosure 360 degrees around. And many of them were staring directly at her. They must have heard that something happened, Christine thought to herself. She wondered what the news reports were saying about all of this - surely they had no idea what the real story was.
This crowd of people looking down on Christine from probably 20 feet above, making her feel like she was on the field of a stadium more than anything else, wasn't the only thing she could see around her. The zoo's three leopards were sitting around on the other end of the enclosure, not right up next to her but already much closer than Christine ever thought she would get to them. She scowled when the thought crossed her mind that the zoo had four leopards now. She thought about what she had overheard when she was still stuck in the breakroom. What would happen to her, she wondered, when whatever investigation they were going to conduct came up empty-handed and they couldn't find a "previous owner"? Would they just shrug their shoulders and keep her in captivity? She didn't want to think about the possibility that this was her new life. She had to find some sort of way out of here, either by letting the zookeepers know that she was intelligent or - maybe if that failed - by escaping.
As Christine's mind reeled, she could see one of the other leopards approaching her, a look of curiosity in its eyes. She flinched - there was more than enough humanity left in her to make an approaching predator instinctively terrifying, although she rationally knew that getting eaten was not what she had to fear from it right now.
"So," the other leopard said, "where did you come from?" Okay, the leopard didn't "say" anything in English to her - it produced a low noise somewhere between a suspicious growl and an amorous purr, but between that and the body language signals it was giving off, Christine had no trouble at all understanding the message. For a moment, she just stared back in response, confused as to how she had understood the animal's "words" as clearly as if he - and she could tell by now that it was a he - had spoken plain old English.
Christine wasn't sure how to respond - literally, she had no idea how to "speak" to the other leopard in the same way it had just "spoken" to her - but to her surprise, that came just as naturally to her. "I'm not supposed to be here," she responded - or said something like it, she was pretty sure. "I'm actually a human who got trapped in here by mistake!"
"A human? You mean one of those two-legged things that are always up there staring at us? You don't look like one of those to me. You look like a fine young female who will be perfect when mating season comes around." Admittedly, that was a pretty loose translation, but it was the message Christine received, more or less, as she started to pick up on the pheromones he was giving off alongside everything else. She really, really didn't want to think about the meaning of those pheromones, and she especially didn't want to think about how good they smelled to her right now.
The male leopard waited a minute for Christine's response, but she was too distracted, trying to push any thought of mating with him out of her mind. Eventually he just walked off. Christine glanced at the two other leopards, who were both lazing around on the rocks. She had always thought that living in this zoo looked boring as hell, and was glad to think that the animals probably weren't intelligent enough to see it that way. Well, now she was living here and she hadn't lost any of her intelligence. And she was already getting the sense that this was going to be a very boring life - punctuated, of course, from time to time by moments of existential horror where she contemplated the absurdity of her fate.
She couldn't resign herself to that so quickly, though. There had to be something she could do. For all she knew, maybe this would just wear off, and she definitely didn't want to be lying around in the middle of the leopard enclosure when she suddenly became human again. But beyond that, she had a life to get back to - friends, family members, even coworkers who were definitely going to notice that she was missing. Not that she could exactly go back to her normal life looking like this, even if she could get somebody to understand her. But even if she couldn't figure out how to reverse her sudden and inexplicable transformation, she felt she had to at least let them know what had happened to her. She had to try something.