If anything drove home with finality for Jackie that she was a lady now, it was her looking at the stags down below. While she still couldn’t bring herself to see herself with one even if she hadn’t effective bound herself with Keith, proving the species barrier was very real, she found herself honestly more interested in them than she had in a ‘figure to kill for’ doe like Hannah.
All those muscles, true, Jackie knew that the DNA splicing had likely made all those, just like hers, but they still looked nice.
Sam’s six points made him the second biggest rack there, his figure didn’t hold anything that suggested he had been female, he moved a bit more limber than others, but nothing compared to how clumsy he moved when Hannah found him.
The second contestant was shorter than Sam but more muscular, and looked rather pleased with himself. Jackie could smell an upper management snake a mile away when she was human, and she hadn’t lost this talent having changed gender and species. She had to deal with them breathing down her neck often enough. The way he moved, he was he turned his head when he spoke to others, he natural saw himself as better than everyone else even before his change in species.
The third one moved with confidence too, but Jackie could somehow tell that his confidence was laced with determination, someone who wouldn’t let anyone treat him like he was an inferior person. The stag seemed younger than the others, but at the same time calmer, more focused. A larger stag followed behind him like a shadow. There was no hatred in the shadowing buck’s eyes, more like… confusion and surrender.
Then there was the only buck with more pointers in the finals than Sam, eight points total. He had bigger muscles than any of the others, and had a nasty look on his face, like he was a stag standing on two legs instead of a human given half a stag’s DNA.
His body was covered in scars, which was very odd, since the gene-splicing removed scars.
It was actually a minor vexing among the half-humans that Jackie didn’t know about yet that many felt that having their scars erased was a two faced blessing. While some ex-suicidal people were happy to have the mistake of the past erased, other people –wanted- to keep their reminders.
But what struck Jackie was that she couldn’t tell if these scars were results from fights, or part of some weird fung-fu pain tolerance training she had read about in comic books.
Break time was over, and the bucks began to pair up.