"Pregnant?" Sunny thinks first of course, children had always been the last thing on her
mind, mostly due to poor forethought on what being the trophy mate to a very powerful
male lupman would mean.
"Don't worry beautiful." Kira thought to the two fellow giant entry way statues. "If you do
get pregnant, there's a very easy way to tell I think."
"Which is?" Luna asked first.
"Simple. You won't be able to transform back from being immortal art for as long as the
pregnancy would last naturally, and you'll form will slowly change with the perception filter
still full intact of your belly slowly growing and all that jazz. Then a statue giving birth, and
finally a new new batch of statues of new born pups would appear around you."
Sunny stiffened while Luna thought this over.
"Hey, look, we can stop right now if it scares ya that much. Ya can leave right now and
sleep in yer own beds, I don't mind. I won't bring up the whole mating thing ever again."
Luna asked, "How do you even know that? How do you know the pregnancy wouldn't just
be frozen during our time with you?"
"... Call it an educated guess. I do have more experience being part of the still world than
you two lovelies. Like I said, we can stop right now if you want."
"No." Sunny finally thought at last, "Let's keep going."
So the three room sized statues remained in their pose of passionate love making all
through the night.
++++++++++++
1689 June
The half-aging leoman Rosa Daleson and the half-aging human Monica were the only
non-members of the witches entourage to fully have their senses, or at least to see what
was happening around them. On the one hand, Monica was happy that people were
suddenly no longer treating her quite like the teenage girl she appeared to be but with
respect... Except of course when she mentioned her old students and how they had gone
funny in the head in her opinion.
The heir to the throne Rosa Daleson likewise founds the other leoman no longer treating
her quite so passive or off handedly, but at the same time, nobody so much questioned
how the human's clothes were looking just a little bit looser, and the adult leoman and
lupmans were all looking a little bit shorter.
"Marie Cruz rejected much of what Linus said. 'Sure, I've killed people in the name of the
church... but never without purpose or reason. It makes no sense that those following the
christian creed 'Love your enemy' would slaughter innocent people. I'd like to see who
wrote that history.'
And from the version Marie had heard, the Crusades had served the purpose of off loading
excess royalty.
However, Marie Cruz for all her bias was no fool, and had no intention of saying no word of
this to Linus because she had no intention of sparking a squabble with one of her own
allies when the stakes were this high. So the Puritan and the Catholic silently agreed to
disagree least they destroy each other before the witches got the chance to."
'Much like a Shinto, and two different sects of Christianity would three hundred years later
in the battle against Kurse.' Marie-Eliza thought while her mother herself stood behind her
almost totally in silence. Marie-Eliza wanted to ask her mother to simply go home now
but... her presence was very comforting to say the least.
"Hello Mal'Akh!" Waved Joella happily at the female leoman cub as she entered the witches'
grounds via the bright flowery thorn maze that separated it's way for her easily, Joella
having accepted her as a playmate apparently making the maze see her as a non-threat
and as 'one of them.'
"So you're Male-Arc!" Said a naked human child with her hair in a dark pony tail, "I'm Lark!
Our names rhyme, isn't that gay?"
Marie-Eliza beat everyone to the punch, "This was three hundred years ago! The word 'gay'
meant joyous or happy! And not even a hundred years ago that use of the word was still
the most prevalent! Moving on!"
Mal'akh of course going around in just the fur herself didn't react that much to a naked
human child being right next to her, let alone her being named after a bird (though it did
leave Mal'akh wondering if the some the witches' children had been animals that had
transformed into people).
But it was odd to find a human without that invisible wall that all humans seemed to have
that kept them from being near each other. And Mal'akh finally got out, "Actually it's Mal'
Akh... no 'R' at the end there... "
"Oh! Okay Male-Akh!" Lark answered in a slightly better pronouncing of the jewish name.
Mal'akh tried to side step her but she seemed interested in her for some reason. "Yes?"
"You don't act like all the other cubs here... there's, something, different about you." Lark
said as she went into a classic thinking pose. That Lark herself couldn't remember anything
about herself from two years ago was also odd, but she didn't dwell on it, she felt
something push her mind along whenever she tried to, and she got bad headache when
she tried to resist.
'Maybe because I'm not funny in the head?' Mal'akh thought. And a chilling piece of logic
far beyond her age hit her, 'If everyone here is funny in the head, then they're acting
normal, am I the one then acting funny in the head then?'
Lawrence said, "There's actually a bit of discussion on weather if everyone in the world was
mad, that the one sane man would therefore be the actual mad one since many forms of
insanity are culturally defined..."
"But Mal'akh had no clue about that." Marie-Eliza said, "She was just confronted with the
warped harmony of a horde of mad children all acting in a way that somehow balanced
each other out."
"Lark." Joella said calmly putting a hand on Lark's bare shoulder, after all, she was friends
with every single child, cub, and pup here. "Mal'akh wants to speak to me I think."
Mal'akh cringed at that idea, who she actually wanted to talk to was being led by the hand
by Joella, Mal'akh's sister Aimiliona. Who was looking at Mal'akh as if trying to figure out
what she was all about.
"Oh okay." Lark politely backed off, but got into a squatting position and simply looked
intensely at the three as they interacted never taking her eyes off them. Jimmy eventually
squatted down next to her mostly just because she was doing it.
On the other side of the witches grounds, Afua dragged herself along. Her Master she
hoped had finally given up looking for her, along with the friends he had asked to help
track her down. A piece of cloth covered the chain manacle around her left wrist she hadn't
been able to get off. She was tired, she was hungry, and she had even hallucinated that
the trees had waved and motioned at her as she had fled nearly aimlessly with a vague
direction of what she hoped was north from the farm where she had abandoned her fellow
slaves in an attempt to gain freedom and person-hood for herself.
She saw the large house, saw the many children, along a couple lupman pups, and...
leoman? Yes Leoman! The lion men! She remembered the stories (that brought a beating to
anyone who said them) how they would buy slaves and then release them once in northern
lands. She knew she'd be safe with them, right?
"I just have to make it a bit further..." She whispered to herself, her throat dry.
She got some ways closer to the house when she fell to her knees, and knew she was
delusional again. A naked girl with pink hair in a bowl cut looked at her on her left. A girl
with curly hair as red as rouge in a black and pink dress on her right, in front of her a boy
with green hair in curl in overalls and shirt, and another naked girl with long blue hair
behind her.
She blacked out.
"Is she okay?" Becky asked from behind looking at the dark skinned woman, never having
seen one before.
"I don't think so." Said Rouge on the left.
"We oughta take her inside to mamas, I mean the witches..." Said Oliver.
"Help me move her." Said Rosalie.
++++++++++
The old woman looked up at her own ceiling as she went to sleep.
'It's interesting when you stop and think about it. Even the almighty laws of cause and
effect can not transform you, let alone magic or surgery. And yet, by that logic, you should
have been frozen in time. But you have changed and aged and grown like any human
being. And you'll continue to get older, until you die and are put in the ground like any
other human being.' Madam Serenity thought to herself. And she realized, 'If I exist as a
human being always, therefore, all my ancestors had to be human too right? So there
would be at least one line of humans left in the world... or when the lion-curse is through
with everything will I be a unique mutant born to the world or changed by the Transform
or Dare that zapped me in the first place? Oh well... at least the game will be dead and
gone at last, and three hundred years of sick games and petty misery will be finally over.'
She dreamed she was in a crowd cheering for Trevor as he wrested with his sister
surrounded by different cuts of meat.
++++++++++
With Judas keeping watch as well as the black cat was able to, Father Michael took the shift
of sleeping while his brother continued his task of making more of the cure they aimed to
have enough to cure the city in one sweep in roughly five days.
Father Michael just hoped he and his brother were DONE with whatever insane or sick
games reality seemed fixated with them for no apparent reason what so ever.
Looking into the mirror before going to bed, it was disorienting and disturbing to see the
ape man staring back. 'I know this is just the cure and the curse twisting around
themselves or some other trick of sorcery. But I can imagine the militant atheist who
cursed me and my brother would approve laugh her head off somewhere.' On the other
hand, he thanked God that his brother had been given at least half of his humanity back,
even if the price had been half of Father Michael's, but all the same, it was a price the
priest was more than willing to pay.