"Are you sure you're ready for this? We can keep rescheduling you both if you're not 100% confident..."
Chrissy Moore looked down at the assistant manager, a ferret Animalian, as she prepared to clock in.
"I'm ready," she replied. "I got it all out of my system at the Coliseum last weekend, and I'm pretty sure she did too. Before that... yeah, I would've wanted to start throwing punches the moment I laid eyes on her again. But not anymore."
As she started her evening shift at the Meat Market, Chrissy could see that the other employees were watching her nervously. It was the first time that she and Marcella Walker had been scheduled to work the same night. Everyone expected - or at least hoped - that the two elephant Animalians would keep their heads down and ignore each other completely. But her coworkers winced every time her thundering footsteps, which rattled the floor slightly even when she did her best to move softly, came close to the other, equally loud thuds that could be heard moving around the club. They were polite enough not to mention it around Chrissy, of course, but they all must have seen the viral video by now. And no one wanted to see that happen again.
Chrissy had other things to hold her attention, though. She had a job to do, for one thing. And even when that was relatively slow, the club atmosphere offered plenty of distractions. She wasn't aroused at all by the girls who were the main attraction here, and she tried not to spend too much time looking at the males. But the things that those strippers could do with their tails, or wings, or prehensile feet, were always fascinating to watch. And while she'd had a few months now to get used to the incredible diversity of her customers, Chrissy still sometimes had to stop herself from staring at random Animalians passing by. This was a whole world that she was only dimly aware of before her unwanted change. And here she was in the thick of it.
Still, it was inevitable that the two of them would cross paths in such a small space, even as the managers kept trying to assign them to tables on opposite ends of the room. Before the first hour of the shift had passed, Chrissy pushed open the swinging door of the kitchen to find Marcella, also waiting for her next order to fill. She snorted a little at the sight of her, but that was as much aggression as she was going to show.
"Hey, Chrissy...", Marcella said hesitantly.
The tension between them was undeniably thick. A bear chef standing nearby jokingly made a little cutting motion in the air with his knife. Neither elephant laughed.
"So...", Chrissy said, making the most awkward small talk of her life, "... we've both still got a few more months of this, huh?"
"Yeah," Marcella replied. "But now that school's out, and I can work more than just every other evening, it should pass more quickly. Definitely done before the end of the year."
Silence settled in again. In the past, Chrissy might have fidgeted with her hands or kicked the ground nervously, but not anymore. She had learned, particularly through the guidance of Dean and Nzinga, not to move too much unless it was careful and deliberate. At her size, it was all too easy to break something absent-mindedly. Even her tail stopped flicking as she stood perfectly still. She was an imposing figure to just about anyone, although it wouldn't work quite as well on someone who matched her height. But for now, she only wanted to be just intimidating enough to make sure Marcy wouldn't try anything.
"Well," Marcella said, "I guess now, both of us are sort of..."
"Chrissy!" The bear reached up to put a tray of drinks and small-bites in her hands. "These are going to the ducks at Table 19."
As she carried the tray out to the customers, she was left wondering how that sentence was supposed to end. But when she got back to the kitchen, Marcella had just been sent out herself. And when the two elephant girls eventually did bump into each other again, Marcella seemed to want to drop the subject. More small talk instead.
And that was pretty much how it was going to go for the next few hours. They would get no more than 30 seconds, maybe a minute at most, of downtime where they could speak to each other before there was more business to attend to. Which was probably for the best - it gave them enough time to chat lightly, and not enough to get into the more serious issues that laid beneath the surface. And they had plenty to chat about.
"Ugh, I hate when those humans reach up and try to grab my ass," Marcella grumbled. Then she caught herself referring to "humans" in the third person, which made both of them feel weird.
"I know", Chrissy said. "The end of this job can't come soon enough. But I usually just give them a stern look, like this-" She demonstrated a good angry elephant face, and as many times as Marcy had seen more or less the same expression in the mirror, it still frightened her a little bit. "-and they back off right away. As tempting as it is to swat them away with your tail, you could really hurt 'em that way."
Another brief meeting:
"It's so awkward always looking down at everybody," Chrissy complained. "Some of them barely even make it past my waist."
Marcella smiled a little behind her trunk. "I was just thinking, it's nice to finally have someone I can look in the eye around here. Other than the occasional megafauna that pops in, it's like there's a sea of hair and fur and feathers down there."
And another time:
"When this is all over," Marcella said, already sounding exhausted, "we're both still gonna have to live in Animalia, aren't we?"
"Yeah," Chrissy sighed, "I guess we probably will. They keep talking about how Animalians can go live anywhere and do anything - I guess the city is getting overcrowded and they want to encourage people to spread out. And I'm sure that's great for most species... but not if you're nine feet tall and eight hundred pounds. Hell, even a lot of things here aren't quite built with us in mind."
"Maybe we'd be better off going to Dino City or something," Marcella suggested jokingly.
It might seem strange to commiserate about the struggles of being turned into an elephant-person with the one who turned you into an elephant-person. Even if you put aside the obvious species-based joke, Chrissy could certainly never forget what Marcella had done to her. It was always there, when she looked down at her thick gray body, when her trunk swished at the edge of her vision, and every time a chair or a plate or a room was too small for her. But then again, all of that applied to both of them. Chrissy had already gotten her revenge without even meaning to, the moment she sneezed on her former friend. Both Chrissy and Marcy still felt that their lives had been ruined, but it was getting harder and harder for either of them to hold that against the other, knowing that they both felt the same way. "It's like... we're even now," Chrissy said tentatively, not sure how the other girl would react.
"Wait," Marcella interrupted. "That's what I was gonna say earlier! I guess we always did finish each other's sentences when we were little, huh?"
The dam was starting to break. All those shared experiences and inside jokes from years of friendship had been walled off a long time ago - permanently, both girls would have thought. But now that they were finally given the opportunity to talk it out, one on one, those memories came flooding back. When they both clocked out, their coworkers - as well as Manfred and Nzinga, who came by to pick them up - were amazed to see the two of them smiling bigger than they had since they were converted.
"You know, I can't believe I'm saying this," Marcella said to Chrissy just before she left, "but I really have to thank you."
"What, for not beating the snot out of you? No pun intended."
"No," Marcy replied. "Well, yes, thank you for that also. But for infecting me with the virus in the first place. I-I mean, I never wanted to be an Animalian, and I still wish I could take it back. Undo it for both of us. And when I was lying in that jail cell, I thought it was a fate worse than death, honestly. But now I just keep thinking of how much worse off I'd be now if I was still human. They only do those punishments for Animalians, after all. If you hadn't exposed me, they probably would've gotten away with that terrorism charge, and I'd be sitting in prison for the rest of my life. I still don't exactly know what to do with this second chance I've been given... but you're the one that let me have it."
Of course, a few brief snippets of conversation like that were only the start. If they were ever going to be friends again, let alone starting a new herd together, there would have to be some hard discussions between the two of them. Those years of bullying and betrayal weren't going to just disappear. There would be many more arguments, and hopefully many more apologies, to come. Maybe they never would completely reconcile, after everything that had happened. But the Meat Market wasn't the place for any of that. And Chrissy thought it was nice, even if it only lasted for a few hours, to remember why she'd ever been friends with Marcella in the first place.