Five years later:
"Well, sage, looks like we're ready." Transformation Park Canada was set to open, and the years in which Jasmine and Mike had eaten, slept and breathed Transformation Park along with the mixed crew of humans and anthros that had put it together were nearing their end. Keeping the park running for the two years left on their contract would be a challenge, but a more manageable one.
"So right, vixen, so right." Mike answered. He had been afraid that their relationship would be sorely tried by the isolation of the new park, but it had deepened as the two of them moved out of their "teenage" years into their second young adulthoods. Jasmine was no longer a girl, but a proud, strong, confident woman. And Mike's consort.
At first, Mike and Jasmine had thought like Jackie and many other predators that a wedding was really not necessary. But after a long phone conversation with Laurie, Jasmine had changed her mind, and brought Mike along with her. The wedding, attended by the park staff and Laurie, along with some of Mike's friends, had been the happiest moment of either of Mike's lives, and Jasmine rid herself of the last vestiges of self-doubt about her femininity.
There was only one more step. "Mike, I'd like to stop eating the berries."
Mike seized his wife in his arms. "Jasmine, that's the best idea ever."
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"You think they're going to come?" the tall black woman asked her Asian-American friend.
"Hannah said she would come, and so did Jenny. Who knows about Leticia, she's still in the park and I don't think she gets out very often."
"I liked your book, you know."
"Thanks. I made enough money after Oprah picked it that I could retire from teaching. I hear things are going well for you?"
"Anthro-friendly beauty shops turned out to be an idea whose time had come." Lateisha smiled. "A lot of interesting challenges. We had a she-wolf today that wanted dreads."
A deermorph had appeared in the doorway of the cocktail lounge where the two women were waiting. "Hannah!" they cried together.
The deermorph made her way to the table, maneuvering carefully through the humans and the tricky, not-made-for-deermorphs obstacle course of chairs and tables.
The three exchanged greetings, then turned to discover that Jenny, still a deermorph, was coming over to join them. "The first reunion of the saltlick symposium can come to order!" Lateisha giggled.
The women, two human and two deermorphs, quickly began to catch up on the intervening five years. Hannah was working full-time at the park, doing transgender counseling. Jenny and Spike had followed Hannah out of the park, but Spike, now the equivalent of a human adolescent, was having trouble adjusting to the human world. He was talking about either changing back to a human or moving back to the park or one of the morph-only villages growing up on its boundaries. Jenny was worried, but she fundamentally had confidence in her child.
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"Daddy, look!" shouted little Cathy. Keith tried to love all his children equally, but Cathy was the apple of his eye.
Right now the apple of his eye was holding the bloodied corpse of a squirrel. "I killed it all by myself!" her human-feline face beamed with pride.
"That's wonderful sweetheart! Now let daddy show you how to eat it." Keith expertly opened and gutted the animal, revealing the sweet meat inside. Cathy started to expertly rip the flesh away from the bones.
In the kitchen of their small house in one of the combined human/anthromorph communities that had begun to spring up, Jackie was listening to her eldest child, Jack, talk about a family trip they had taken. "Grandma showed me a picture of you when you were little! She said you used to be a human just like her! Is that true?"
"Well, I guess if grandma said it, it must be true. I used to be a human till I went to the park for the first time."
"She said you used to be a boy too!"
"That's true, I turned myself into a girl the same time I turned myself into a panthermorph."
"So can I turn myself into a human?"
"When you're older you can, if that's what you want."
"I don't think I want to be a girl, though."
Jackie laughed and gave her son a hug. "Well, you don't have to. You don't have to be anything you don't want to be."