The Process Forum - New TF Story

Here's where things really start to turn ugly. Katie was okay with a little transformation between friends, but out-and-out kidnapping? Someone's going to notice the nurse's disappearance, and who's looking into the handyman's disappearance...?
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"Fabulous," Mary fumed as she looked around for some other way to get down. "Just fabulous." There was no fire escape, no ladder, nothing short of walking off the roof to get down- which, Mary conceded, probably wouldn't hurt her any but she knew there were cameras around ground level; a video of her dropping into a twisted pile and straightening out like a slinky would be all the wrong kinds of attention.
Mary went back to the locked door, hands on her hips as she cocked her head and examined the door. She couldn't squeeze under the door and keep her clothes, and breaking the door down with some sort of spike or claw was out of the question. Mary scratched her lip, trying to figure some way to bypass the lock without breaking it...
Mary paused, pulling her finger back from her face and looking at it, then at the lock.
"If I can make a needle..." Mary said to herself as she walked back to the door, "what about a bobby pin...?"
Mary reached for the doorknob, the "bone" of her index finger already extending out past her fingernail, a long, flat shape that slimmed to fit indie the lock as she pressed it into the door. Mary shut her eyes, relying on her sense of touch alone to feel the tumblers as she moulded the sliver of bone into a key. One, two, three, four, each tumbler clicked into place as she jiggled her finger deeper and deeper into the lock. As mary bit her tongue in concentration, she idly thought back to her criminal law class and wondered if this would still constitute breaking and entering- after all, if you can push a door open with one finger, it's obviously not secured enough to be considered "breaking", right?
"Yes!" Mary exclaimed as her finger finally turned in the lock. She pulled the door open with her other hand, the bony "key" being reassimilated into her finger nearly instantly.

Mary's feet slapped against the steps as she hurried downstairs as fast as her feet allowed in their unaltered state. She all but burst out of the stairwell, quickly scanning down both hallways. Most of the university buildings were built like a figure 8 from a digital alarm clock, the hallways on the outside surrounding the classrooms in the middle and a layer of offices surrounding the entire facade. the stairwell mary just came out of seemed to be in the corner of the "8", and Mary didn't see anything unusual in either direction. She went down the halllway that was the long side of the 8, a light jog striking the balance between her urgency for speed while trying not to draw too much attention to herself. At the middle part of the 8 she turned and went down the shorter hallway, stopping at the T-juncture and looking both ways. When she saw a small knot of students huddled outside a door, she knew she'd found Katie.

Mary hurried over to the bathroom, seeing about six or seven other students huddled around the door to the women's restroom.
"Is katie in there?" Mary asked.
"Yeah, but she's sick or something," An asian student said.
"It's like, really gross or something," One of Mary's classmates echoed, a girl she recognized from her Mediation class. "Any time someone so much as opens the door she yells at them not to come in, something about it's too gross or whatever."
Mary grimmaced.
"Don't you carpool with Katie?" A third student asked. "I see you two together a lot."
"We're neighbors," Mary answered. "I, uh, I brought some medicine for her, it should help her-"
"Medicine?" Came a stern voice from behind her. Mary turned to see the school nurse, an olive-skinned woman in her 30's with her hands on her hips. "What kind of medicine? Let me see it."
Mary instinctively jammed a hand in her pants, knowing she had to fake like there was *something* in the empty pockets.
"It's, uh, organic," Mary said, backing towards the bathroom door.
"Don't give me that homeopathic crap. What've you got there?" The nurse asked, holding her hand out.
"Uh... Ah... It's kind of embarrassing..." Mary stammered, noticing all eyes were on her. Feeling the handle of the door against her back, Mary quickly pinched the skin of her back together where hopefully no one could see, doing a quick turn that pulled the door open just enough to let her spin inside, grabbing the inside handle and slamming the door shut.
"No!" Katie yelled even as the slam echoed through the restroom. "Please, don't come in!"
"Katie, it's me!" Mary yelled as she turned the deadbolt in the door, barely catching the lock before the nurse tried to pull it back open.
"Mary?!" Katie croaked. "Oh, Mary, thank God..."
Mary could tell by Katie's hoarse voice that she'd been crying. "Katie, where are you?" Mary asked, bending down to look under the stall dividers. She couldn't see Katie's feet anywhere.
"In the last stall," Katie sniffed. Mary went to the end of the restroom and opened the last stall.
Katie was sitting on the lid of the toilet seat, her pants bunched up under her knees and her legs drawn up against her chest. Katie's breasts flowed up and over her knees, completely filling the space between the narrow walls of the toilet stall, totally obscuring her arms save for where her hands covered her nipples, large wads of sopping toilet paper clenched in each.
"Oh my God, Katie..." Mary breathed as she approached. "Hold still, I'll fix you right up."
Katie simply craned her neck as Mary reached a hand out, the fang-like needle already protruding out of her fingertip.
"I'm sorry, Katie," Mary said as she injected her friend. "I tried my best."
Almost immediately Katie's skin began to return to its normal dark color, her enormous measurements shrinking down to a more manageable size. Katie sniffed again and put her feet down, standing up as soon as her bosom wasn't wide enough to jam in the doorway. Mary took a step back as Katie hiked her pants back up, pausing until her hips shrunk down to a size that allowed her to close them up. Katie wiped her eyes with a sleeve, fastening up her shirt again, though Mary couldn't help but notice there were a couple buttons missing.
"Three days..." Katie sighed. "Three days away from you the rest of my stinking life."
"I'm so sorry," Mary said again, picking up the wads of milk-soaked toilt paper and throwing them away.
"And what're we gonna do about them?" Katie asked with a half-hearted gesture to the door as she made her way to the sink. Mary could hear the irritation in Katie's voice, but more than that it was obvious she was just too emotionally drained to work up any genuine anger. "What're we gonna tell them? What're we gonna do?"
"Well, you said you were sick," Mary started. "did you, well... do anything in there that could be evidence of it?"
"Aside from leaking milk all over my hands, no," Katie said, turning the faucet on and running her hands under the water.
"Is there any way to fake it?"
"I'm not sticking my finger down my throat, if that's what you mean," Katie said, as sternly as she could muster.
"Well, no, I just meant, well..." Mary thought for a second, rembering what the Body had said about beign able to make things like the slime that had paralyzed the repairman.
"Hang on a sec, let me try something," Mary said, increasingly aware of the incessant pounding on the door. Sooner or later they'd get a janitor or someone with a key, they needed to get out of there fast. Mary focused on her thumb, watching it change shape, thinning and hollowing out until it looked like a leaf off a pitcher plant. She tried to picture in her mind the most foul--smelling thing she could think of, a miasma of the worst of the worst, hoping the Body would be able to interpret the request correctly. She felt a fluid begin to fill in her thumb, and she held it out at arm's length, the scent already beginning to irritate her nostrils. Mary pointer her thumb towards the toilet katie was using, grabbed her thumb in her other hand, and squeezed, a poof of liquid squirting out her transformed digit in a fine mist.

The result was instanteous. Mary flinched away as she turned her thumb back to normal, coughing as she waved a hand in front of her face.
"Pleh! Pwah! There's your evidence," Mary said as she waked over to Katie.
"What do you- or lordy, that's nasty!" Katie said, her face similarly scrunching up.
"Come on, let's get out of here," Mary said. "Fold your arms over your stomach and I'll put your suit coat over you so you can hide the button holes."
Katie nodded and shrugged out of her suitcoat, handing it to Mary as she wrapped her arms around herself. "It was so terrible, Mary..."
"Turning into something like that in the middle of class?" Mary asked as she placed the coat over her friend's shoulders. "I'll bet."
"Not just that," Katie said.
"Where're your car keys?" Mary interrupted, looking around. "Not still in class, are they?"
"In my purse," Katie said, pointing with one hand towards the corner of the restroom. "Dropped my purse soon as I got in here."
Mary found Katie's purse and slung it over her shoulder. "All right, let's go," she said as she went to the door, one arm around her friend. "Look sick."

With her free hand, Mary undid the lock and opened the door, leading Katie through first with a soft push on her back. As Mary had hoped, any indignant anger over being locked out evaporated when they sak Katie, worn and tear-stained as her face was.
"...what happened in there?" The nurse finally demanded.
"I don't wanna talk about it," Katie said simply.
"Are you okay?" the girl from Mediation class asked.
"I wanna go home," Katie answered. "Katie, let's go home."
"Sure thing, Katie," Mary said, Leading her down the hall towards the elevators. They made it a few steps before the scent finally reached the door, a cacophany of "Eww"s and "Ugh"s leaving Mary with little doubt that their cover story would be accepted ipso facto, especially considering the actual cause of the stench would be left up the imaginations of the onlooker where it would certainly be more terrible than any explanation Mary could come up with.
"All right, all right, get out of here," Mary heard the nurse saying as she hit the elevator button. "This room's closed down until the janitor can go through it with enough bleach to kill a lake."
As Mary and Katie went into the elevator, they both breathed a sigh of relief.
"I'm so sorry, Katie," Mary said, leaning against the side wall.
"No, I was stupid," Katie said, shaking her head. "Just trusting- hoping- it'd work forever. 'Always do your research first', right?"
"Heh," Mary chuckled, smiling somewhat.
"Like I was saying before," Katie said, lowering her voice to a whisper as the doors opened and shuffling out with Mary beside her, "The actual change wasn't the worst part."
"What was?" Mary asked as she pushed open one side of the front double-doors.
"The worst part," Katie said as they got outside, "Was that it felt good."
"What?" Mary asked.
"I didn't *enjoy* it," Katie quickly clarified, "But it still felt good. Like, it tickled me in a way that those parts aren't ticklish in. It was really wierd."

Mary's repy died halfway up he throat as she heard the Nurse's pumps clicking on the asphalt behind her.
"I still want to know what you gave her and why you had to lock the rest of us out of the bathroom to administer it," She said as soon as she was within certain earshot.
"She said she didn't want to talk about it," Mary said as they closed in on Katie's car.
"I don't care," the nurse said, "not when you're administering who-knows-what on school grounds, on my watch. It's my ass if she gets some bad side-effect or whatever from whatever hippie crap you gave her."
Mary's blood went cold as she felt the first twinges of the Body deep within her. "So the pheremones you released to disperse the predators didn't work...?"
"No. NO.", Mary yelled in her head. "You can NOT eat her. Not here." She realized her fingers were digging in to Katie's arm. "Uh, katie, go ahead and get in," she said, handing Katie her purse and guiding her around to the passenger side.
The nurse went and stoop behind the bumper of Katie's car, hands on her hips. "Look, I'm not leaving until you at least give me a name," She said. "Something I can look up on the PDR and know whether or not you poisoned that poor girl."
"Is she a predator?" The Body asked as Mary went around to the driver's side door. "One like you warned us about?"
"No!" Mary said, "And she's not prey either!"
"A 'friend' meat?"
"No! She's, uh, a healer," Mary said, fidgeting from side to side as she waited for Katie to reach over and unlock her door.
"Hey, are you listening to me?" the nurse said as she came around to the driver's side.
"What is a healer?" The Body asked.
"It's, uh, nothing you've ever heard of, believe me," Mary said to the nurse. "They, uh, tend to the sick, help deliver babies- er, reproduce, I guess. Not a predator." She continued inwardly to the Body.
"Bullshit," The nurse said as Katie finally, mercifully got the lock on the car open. "I didn't go to school for six years to- hey!" She yelled, clamping a hand on Mary's shoulder as she opened the door to get in.
Maddi felt the needle pierce through her sleeve and into the nurse's hand before she'd even been able to react to the nurse's grip. As the nurse yelled "Ow!" and pulled her had away, Mary spun to face her, wide-eyed and mouth agape.
"What was..." Was as far as the nurse's protest got before her eyes rolled back in her head.
"Shit!" Mary yelled as she lunged for the nurse, grabbing her as she went limp. "Shit, shit, shit!" she continued, throwing her head forward like she was stamping her foot.
"Mary!?" Katie asked, leaning across the center armrest. "Mary, what did you do?"
"The Body shot her full of the same stuff it did you!" Mary said as she pulled the nurse's body towards the backseat. "Katie, Drive! I'll take care of her!"
"But Mary-"
"Drive!" Mary yelled as she grew another arm right out of her side to open the door and started to wrestle the unconsious woman into the backseat.
Katie scooted across to the driver's seat, shutting the door and putting the key into the ignition. Mary, meanwhile, was rapidly reverting to her tentacled form, arms and legs splitting as she pulled, pushed, and dragged the woman into the car, using all of her tentacles to situate the woman on her back, knees bent and feet wedged against the rear driver's side door.
"Go!" Mary yelled, Katie's tires squealing as she tore out of the parking lot and headed for the freeway.