After Marcy left, Lady started pacing back and forth. What was she going to do? She'd made an impulsive
decision, once that she really hadn't given any thought to. Now, she was trapped.
It took only a short while before she decided she needed to get out of here, out of the house. She needed to
go out and talk a walk.
Given that she still had her human mind, she was easily able to figure out how to open the back gate (it had a
bad latch, a couple jumps were all that were needed to open it) and took off into the night. Maybe she'd find
the answer out there.
**
Two hours later, she was already regretting yet another impulsive decision.
She was tired and thirsty, and had somehow managed to get so far from home that she wasn't sure exactly how to
get back. And for that matter, with all her frustration with perhaps being stuck as a dog, she didn't really
think about what running away meant. The best case was getting found by someone and returned home and being
stuck where she started. Worse would be getting adopted by a family that didn't know she was once human.
Worse would be getting stuck in the pound and put down as an unadoptable stray.
She dearly wanted to return home, but felt like she was too tired to move.
"Oh, you poor thing," she heard a woman say from not far away.
Lady stood, panting and tired while the woman approached quietly and gently. She sniffed instinctually at the
offered hand, finally giving it a friendly, tired lick.
The woman took her home and gave her a bowl of water, which she drank greedily. It turned out to be the home
of three small children who fawned over the poor, lost dog.
"Can we keep her?" one of them asked.
"She's missing her collar, but she's owned by someone. We need to figure out who she belongs to."
I'm missing my collar? thought Lady. That doesn't make sense. I didn't remove it.
It was getting late, so the father of the house laid a few blankets along the wall of the living room, where
she slept.
**
She fully expected to see Marcy in the morning, but she didn't. The family put signs up in the neighborhood
looking for her owners, but no one called. In the meantime, she played with the children, feeling for the
first time since right after the transformation happy with the dog body she now wore. After a few weeks, the
family stopped looking.
She was given a new name by the youngest child, "Goldie", and a new collar and tag. She was taken to the
groomer, given shots at the vet, and all the while spent each afternoon and often all day on the weekends
playing with the children. The few hours of solitude she was left with between the family leaving in the
morning and coming back after school were spent resting, getting ready for play. It had only been a few
months, but she had long given up waiting for her old owner.
The puppies weren't really planned by anyone. No one was home when she discovered a stray neighbors dog in
the yard. The German Shepard had dug under the fence and was sniffing around. She had gone out to
investigate, and hadn't realized the strange feelings she'd been having were being in heat. She forced the
thought out of her mind almost until the moment she let the strange male take her.
It would be weeks before her family realized what happened, but they rolled well with it. As she grew, Goldie
couldn't move as fast, but she could still play with the children. Finally, she knew her time had come and
with the family watching she gave birth to five large puppies.
She allowed her instincts to kick in, grooming them and pushing them toward her teats for food. The children
were delighted. Goldie could feel them nibbling at her teats, feeling a bond with them that she knew would
only last a few weeks. After all, these were puppies, not children. Someone would adopt them after a time.
She wondered if Marcy had planned this. She wondered it several times until the day had arrived for the
family to start adopting out the puppies and a familiar teenage girl showed up with her parents to adopt.
Goldie looked at Marcy and a knowing look passed between them. They chose a female pup and left. Goldie
never saw Marcy again.
Marcy, for her part, had been angry when Lady hadn't returned and had planned on leaving the dog at the
strange house for a couple days as a punishment. As time passed, though, and she realized that Lady was
actually happy where she was, she was actually getting to feel loved as a dog, not just as a companion for a
superbeing, she decided to leave her there.
She felt just fine with that choice.