Steven was panicking. Here she was, in a situation that would have been unthinkable a day ago, staring right at a Man in Black. That would have been shocking enough if she were still human, but in a technical sense, she wasn't. She was an alien now, and she was a few feet away from a man whose job it was to deal with aliens. What did they do, really? All kinds of movie images of sinister government dissections and neuralizers were flashing through her head, and although she knew, in the back of her mind, that the truth was probably much more mundane, it was still awfully hard to think. She wanted to run, she wanted to fight, she wanted to scream...
"I'mnotanalien!" she squeaked, in about the most ridiculous high-pitched shriek she'd ever heard. The man smiled, shaking slightly like he was trying to suppress a laugh.
"You're not the alien we're looking for," he said. "The residual radiation from the ship we're tracking indicates an engine type used by creatures that look nothing like you. However, you're clearly not quite human, either."
"So!" Steven's mother interrupted from the hallway. "It wasn't an 'experimental aircraft' after all, was it?"
Fields shrugged. "Well, ma'am, you haven't exactly been completely honest with us, either. 'Family troubles,' you said? 'Sensitive personal items?'"
She sighed. "Alright. Let's stop pretending things are more normal than they are, shall we? This is my son, Steven. Last night, she was abducted, I presume by the ship you're looking for, and had this done to her. What can you tell us about the situation?"
Fields shrugged. "Not as much as you probably think. Unfortunately, our reputation has inflated quite a bit over the years. We don't have much advanced technology, nor do we actually have any regular contact with extraterrestrials. In fact, we really don't know that much about most of them. Here's what I can tell you: once in a while, we'll track down a craft with an engine signature like this, it'll be gone after a night or two, and some poor schmuck will have been left in its wake, altered in some way. Your child being one of them."
"But why?" Steven moaned.
Fields shrugged. "We really have no idea. Our best guess is that they just enjoy dicking with people who can't defend themselves. I'm really sorry we don't have more to tell you."
Steven's mother sighed. "What do we do now?"
"That's the difficult question," Fields said. "Usually, in these cases, the changes are something simple to explain, like a sex change. But your child here has had more than that done to her, and naturally green hair and horns are a little more difficult to explain away. Still, we can have you act like the hair is dyed, and the horns could be explained as papillomae. A little more complicated, but all plausible to the alien-ignorant layperson, assuming that she keeps out of public view long enough to plausibly have completed gender reassignment."
"Wait," Steven's mother said, "you're seriously suggesting that Steven just stays like this and pretends that it was planned? Can't she undergo gender reassignment to become a boy again?"
"Yeah!" Steven interrupted. "There's no way I'm staying like this!"
"Well," Fields said, "you can try if you want, but...well, I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but victims who've been sex-switched have found that they tend to...revert after trying to switch back."
Steven's lower lip began to tremble. "R-revert?" she asked.
Agent Thomson nodded. "Not all at once, but even if they stay on hormone therapy, they slowly shift back into the form they were left with. We're still not sure how it happens, but it's happened with every victim who's tried it."
Fields shrugged. "And with the costs and time involved in gender reassignment...I can only advise you to not bother. Again, I'm sorry I don't have better news for you, but whoever these creatures are, they do a pretty thorough job of messing with their victims."
Steven and her mother were speechless. Was she really facing the prospect of being female for the rest of her life?