The vixen had been minding her own business, getting a drink from the river, though she didn't much care for the strange taste the water had acquired. Suddenly, a human had swum up to the bank and bumped right into her as he clambered out of the water. Surprised, she yelped and leapt back, but for some reason she couldn't bring herself to run away.
Mike managed to haul himself out of the water and right smack into the muzzle of a fox who'd merely been getting a drink. To his surprise, she didn't claw or bite him, not that he was complaining. He was focused more on trying to get the foul taste of the river water out of his mouth. Funny, he reflected; he'd accidentally ingested water from this river before, and it didn't taste that bad. Some grit and a bit of a fishy flavor, sure, but this was downright bitter. Finally, he managed to cleanse his palate sufficiently, and looked around.
The vixen was still there, but something was different about her. She was...larger? Mike stared, and sure enough, she was getting larger before his eyes, her body proportions changing. It almost looked like she was becoming human...
His thoughts quickly shifted focus when he realized that he was shrinking slightly, becoming shorter. Not nearly as fast as the vixen was getting larger, but he was getting shorter. On top of that, his arms seemed to be getting slenderer...there was an expanding sensation in his chest, and he sudenly realized exactly what was happening.
The vixen was too preoccupied with the strange changes happening to her body to pay much attention to the human. It was bizarre; her whole body was growing, but her legs were growing faster than the rest of her. There a twisting, cracking pain in her hindlegs, and she realized that her knees had suddenly switched the wrong way round, bending forward instead of backward! There was also a feeling of growing in her front two nipples, as the others disappeared into her belly. What on earth could the purpose of that be!? Suddenly, she became aware of the human, who was suffering some similar changes, especially with the growing nipples. He was making all kinds of strange noises, and a light suddenly broke in upon the vixen's brain; she could understand them! The noises were supplications to his god to end the changes!
"Oh god oh god NO NO NO!" Mike screamed. His voice had cracked a moment ago, and had just changed into a soft soprano as his new breasts finished growing, stopping at a moderate size. Mike watched, horrified and screaming, as his body took on a feminine shape, his formerly straight and angular figure becoming soft and curvy, hips expanding and waist contracting. Before he knew it, there was a sickening scrambling sensation in Mike's privates and she realized that she was fully a woman.
But that wasn't all; she could feel a change in her ears as they relocated to the top of her head, and a painful, kinking pressure in the seat of her pants ended with a three-foot tail bursting from the back of her jeans. She could only stare as her fingernails became claws, and a bone-crunching sensation in her feet led her to pull her shoes and socks off to find that her feet had become paws. To top it off, parts of her suddenly began to sprout fur; her ears and tail became covered in red fur, with her ears tipped black and the insides lined with white, and her tail tipped white. Her hands and feet became covered in black fur up to mid-forearm and mid-shin, respectively, and as her fur was growing, so was her hair; it had been a litle shaggy before, but now it had become long red tresses dropping down just past her shoulders.
The vixen, meanwhile, felt her body continue to rearrange. Her hindlegs and forelegs had finally stopped growing when they reached about the same proportions as the human's, and her forepaws had changed, the toes becoming long and slender, with the dewclaw moving around to the side and becoming a full-fledged toe that folded inward onto the bottom of her foot. Her muzzle had changed too, becoming more blunt and rounded like the human's, though not too much. Her body itself changed shape, becoming curved around the base of her hindlegs, and for some reason the fur on top of her head began to grow, spilling down her back until it nearly reached the base of her tail.
And then it was over. Sensing the end of the changes, Mike stopped her shrieking and just stared - at herself, at the vixen, at the sky.
The vixen stared as well. Her legs had changed so much that she couldn't walk on all fours, so there wasn't much else she could do. She thought back to the noises the human made, and how she could suddenly understand them. Maybe, she thought, she could duplicate them. If the human could use those noises to create meaning, maybe she could too. And as she thought of this, two noises stuck in her mind, the first words she would ever utter.
"What happened?" she asked.