Naomi saw the large breasts adorning the new Charlotte's chest, thought about "pairs," and "hormonal balances," put her hands on her own flat, but hairless, chest, and screamed.
Instinctively, Charlotte undulated her new tail and sped across the tank to her lover's side. She wasn't going to tell Naomi everything would work out--there just wasn't much of a base for optimism now. "There, there" she whispered. "Go ahead and cry."
Naomi felt reassurance in the depths of her despair from Charlotte's touch. But she also felt something else, something she hoped she would never, ever feel again.
A penis. Of her own.
He screamed again.
++++++++++++++
"Where's Zack?" Goldie wondered. "Where's Harry?" She was disturbed that the huskies she had come to look to as the leaders of the pack weren't here. Instead Dunstan, one of the new huskies, stood in the place of the pack leader. Beside him stood a human.
"Harry has retired" the human began. "Dunstan here is your new leader. Dunstan?"
The husky, who nobody really knew very well, approached the podium. But the human management didn't really understand husky loyalty. They thought it was bureaucratic, given to anyone the management designated as leader of the pack. But husky loyalty was more primal than that. It had to be earned, as Naomi and Harry had in their different ways earned it. The pack wasn't a democracy, but power still flowed from the collective consent of the rank-and-file huskies. Even the new huskies were accustomed to give experienced huskies like Harry and Zack their loyalty rather than one of their peers who had suddenly been elevated by the decision of an outsider. "Where's Harry?" Goldie barked. Sam joined her. "Where's Harry?" Soon the entire park was barking "Where's Harry? Where's Harry?"
+++++++++++++++
"So, they gave a serial killer claws and teeth and then turned him loose in an unstructured environment where he kidnapped and tortured you for days." the lawyer began "It would be in the highest degree improper for me to suggest an outcome is guaranteed, but I will say I feel very, very good about this case."
Susan beamed.
++++++++++++++
"Just tell the judge everything you told me." Agent Sherman the skunk-man was grinning for the first time since his transformation as he brought up a connection to the judge the agents used on his laptop and introduced Zack and Katie. Just get the subpoena, he thought, then go in there and grab the papers, the computers, everything, find out what the hell this freak show is really about.
The other reason Agent Sherman was happy was that Agent Johnson had gone back to being human. Growing up in a strictly religious family, Agent Sherman was a repressed lesbian, and as such she had become a repressed gay skunk-man. The creepiest part of the entire transformation had been finding Johnson attractive. He just really, really hoped he wasn't going to run into any more skunk-men until he got changed back.
++++++++++++++
Naomi definitely wasn't taking the gender change well. He thrashed in the water, almost trying to escape his new body. Charlotte was trying to calm him, a task not made easier by the fact that she herself was terrified by the total control their captors seemed to have over them. She ran through the mental exercises she had learned in the military for cases of capture.
"I'm a man! A man!" Naomi screamed.
"No! No, you're not!" Charlotte responded. "You're the woman I love! You're the woman who made me a woman! You have a problem, but we can fix it! But I need Naomi! I need you to calm down and help me think about this! We can get out of this, we can get our real bodies" whatever those are, she thought "back, but we need to think!"
Slowly, Naomi began to quiet herself.
++++++++++++++
"What's this?" demanded Vinny. He lowered his head to charge Brian, his rival for Cherry, as he saw it.