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This is officially the start of Act II of Mary's Story- her cover's blown, the world's going to know about her, and she's going to have to find some way to deal with that that keeps her and katie safe while avoiding devouring all life on earth in the process.
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Katie was waiting on the other side of the wall, hands clasped together under her bosom.
"What happened? What'd you do?" She asked, backing away from Mary's hulking form.
"I spooked the cops away," Mary said, the growling timbre in her voice softening as she turned back into her human form. "Managed to convince the Body they'd be better off knowing they couldn't win."
"I heard guns," Katie said, still looking distressed.
"Oh yeah," Mary nodded.
"Did... did it hurt?" She asked.
Mary cocked her head to the side as she headed for Katie's bedroom, looking at her with a wry grin. "You remember the head thing, right? Of course it didn't hurt. Like little lead tic-tacs."
Katie followed Mary into her bedroom, where Mary was pulling the topsheet off of Katie's bed.
"Mind if I borrow this?" Mary said as she wrapped herself in the sheet like a toga. "I'm really starting to get irritated with how many clothes I'm going through..."
"Sure, sure," Katie sad, sitting on the bed as Mary finished cinching her toga. "So, uh, what now?"
Mary shruged. "I don't know. Hopefully they got my message- I carved 'CDC' into the hood of one of their cars," Mary explained at Katie's puzzled loook elicited by he word 'message', "And they'll send somone along soon."
"And if they can't help?"
Mary shook her head. "I've got no idea. I think we're past the point of no return here."
"Well, is there anything you can think of?" Katie asked, "Any way to stop it?"
"There... might be," Mary said, "but given that it hears everything I say I'm not sure it's safe to talk about it."
"Oh yeah..." Katie nodded, scooting back against the headboard of her bed. The two thought in silence for a moment, until Mary's stomach growled.
"Oh, crap," Mary said, putting a hand to her stomach.
"What?" Katie asked, sitting upright.
"I'm hungry. The body's hungry," Mary said.
"Well, I could maybe sneak out and get some snacks from the store real quick..." Katie offered.
Mary shook her head. "No. I'm hungry. Like, all of me. All of *it*," She said, waving an arm at the green mat creeping along the walls and ceiling.
"...All of it?" Katie asked.
Mary nodded. "Gonna need a lot of... something to feed all this, and I don't really know where I'll get it. Especially once it gets a hankering for new 'seeds'..."
"'Seeds'?" Katie repeated, brow arched.
"New DNA strands, new species of stuff," Mary clarified. "I've been satiating it on bugs and forest rodents and crap, but I don't know how long that'll hold out." Mary looked around, seeming to see things that Katie couldn't as she tried to follow her friend's gaze.

"I think I need to go out," Mary said. "I need to get something new to satiate it. I can eat dirt for all the body cares if it just needs food, but it wants new seeds and it's better that I get them before the Body decides to do what it wants with who it wants." She looked at the walls again, her eyes unfocusing, appearing to see through them. "Okay," Mary said, walking into what would have been their kitchen. "All the police are gone from the back of the apartment, I'm gonna go grab something to eat and get back. You stay here and hold down the fort."
"What if someone comes?" Katie asked.
"They're not making it through here," Mary said as she took the toga off over her shoulders and balled it up, handing it to Katie.
"Well, how do I keep this stuff from eating my desk?" Katie continued, tucking the toga under her arm and putting her hands on her hips.
Mary paused at that one, one hand resting on the wall and her head bowed slightly.
"Okay!" She yelled, turning and looking up at the ceiling. "You do what Katie says while I'm gone, got it?!"
Katie looked around a if expecting some sort of answer, but apparently the Body's answer could only be heard by Mary, though it seemed to satisfy her.
"Right," she said, turning back to the wall, "If they get too close to your stuff just yell and they'll back off."
Katie relaxed her arms and nodded.
"Okay, I'll be back as soon as possible," Mary said, pushing into and through the wall.
"...Be safe," Katie said after her friend.

Mary's senses seemed to twirl and flow around her, her body dissolving into a mass of tentacles as she emerged from the wall of her apartment and surged through the underbrush like a gaggle of entwined snakes all moving the same direction. Though she couldn't see or hear in the classic sense, Mary could feel things, sense them. She felt drawn to a cold source, sliding along the forest floor and snatching up any small flora or fauna she wormed over. She could feel the coldness getting closer, and what's more could sense living things inside it. In the back of her mind she could also feel Katie moving around inside of her lair, though it was a minor concern at that point because Mary had just plunged into the river water, the sudden buoyancy throwing her disoriented senses even further into disarray. Mary gasped, water flowing into the mouth that she had subconsiously formed, the submersion instinctually causing her to revert to a more familiar form. Mary shook her head and looked around where she was treading water, panting for air. Her tongue lolled out between her teeth, slapping against her forehead-

Wait, what?

Mary tilted her head back and looked up, seeing the dark green tongue resting on her forehead, sliding up and down as she panted. Mary brought her hands up to her head, and felt a large, bulbous sack hanging off the back of her head, like an over-stuffed nightcap hanging down nearly to the small of her back. At the front of the protrusion was her mouth, though the giant jaws went from nearly where where her ears would be up and over her head to the other ear. She felt the large, triangular, serrated teeth with her tongue and realized she had turned into something predatory. She looked down and saw that she was not treading water by scissoring her legs, but by a large tail-fin, connected to her torso by an odd spiral of tentacles that retracted close to her body and then pushed away, water flowing through the hollow slits in the tentacle-cage and keeping her above the water line. Her arms were no less aquatic, fins running along the insides of her forearms and the outside of her biceps. Her fingers ended in hooked claws, and a thin membrane of webbing stretched between them like the swim gloves she used to have when she was a teenager.
"Well, better get moving," Mary thought as she lowered herself down to the waterline, "before somebody thinks I'm the Loch Ness monster on vacation..."

Mary crawled her way through the water, an odd locomotive conglomerate of paddling with her arms, swinging her tail back and forth, and the octopus-like forward-and-back propulsion through her tentacle-cage that conneted her tail to her torso. She held her breath under the water, surfacing every so often for air, until she realied she was never actually feeling any tightness in her chest before she surfaced. Mary stopped, still under the water, and felt her face. Her mouth was closed, and she didn't have a nose, so what was she breathng through? Mary felt around on her body, finally feeling a trio of gill slits on the lower curve of her neck, near ech of her collarbones.
"...Cool," Mary thought as she sat underwater, breathing air through the lazy river current. A fish passed by Mary's head, and without even really thinking about it she darted forward, catching the fish in her jaws and swallowing it in two bloody chunks.
"Ahh," The body said inside Mary's head. "This is indeed a new and interesting seed."
"Yeah, well, we're only stopping for a couple, so don't get too- whoa!" Mary said, looking down at herself for the first time since her change and being surprised by the increased size of her bosom and stomach, rivaling Shandra's measurements.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa!" Mary yellled in her head, remembering when she'd gotten caught in the rain. "Stop drinking! Stop it!"
"Why?" The Body asked, puzzled. "We have already found many small seeds-"
"Stop blowing me up or I will get out and go home right this instant!" Mary yelled.
Mary felt herself stop drinking in the river water, though now she more resembled a manatee or other such bloated sea mammal than any kind of predatory fish, her buoyant breasts bobbing in the water and her stomach gently undulating from side to side with every swish of her tail.
"Let's get on with this..." Mary grumbled inwardly as she set off down the river in search of food.

A handful of fish, a few different types of lichen, some crawfish, and an unlucky otter later, and Mary had had her fill. Or rather, Mary was convinced the Body had had its fill and it was safe for her to go out again. She swam for the shore, poking her head out and looking around to make sure there weren't any campsites or anthing tucked between the trees. Mary crawled up to the shore, needing to get rid of her tail but not relishing the walk back, especially naked as she was. She felt herself beginning to unravel, to "relax" into the pile of writhing tentacles, but she caught herself, keeping her current form. The feeling of darting around with no eyes, no ears, only the vaguest of senses was somewhat disconcerting. It'd been different when she was doing it in her lair; with so much of herself everywhere it was like touching your fingertips with your eyes closed, the environment was so familiar and the extent so well known it was hardly a challenge.
"What about those legs I used the other day, when it was raining?" Mary thouht to herself, Rembering how she sailed through the forest when she was getting rained on. Now that the sky was clear, she could take her time while still moving pretty quickly.
"Now how did that go...?" Mary thought to herself as her tail split into two legs once more, the long, scythe-like talons splitting away and hardening. "Good grief, is that what those were?" Mary asked herself as she watched her legs thin and harden, feeling the enormous tensile strength in them that had allowed her to bound through the forest with such amazing speed. The fleshy cables of tense, barely-contained strength wound their way up into her torso, and Mary realized as she stood that instead of just the legs, like last time, she was transforming fully into whatever creature her subconsious plea of "go faster!" had made. The claws on her fingers seemed to draw the webbing into them, becoming longer and just as scythe-like as her toes, while her arms seemed to shrivel and wither into spindly, almost sickly-looking appendages. Mary felt as though she hadn't an ounce of fat from her shoulders to her fingertips. She felt a prickle on her back, and looked over her shoulder to see a trio of long, feather-like fins protrude from her back, one each from her shoulderblades and one from the middle of her neck. Mary would have liked to feel them, but as long and sharp as her claws were at the moment, she didn't think she was in much of a position for careful tactile exploration.

Besides which, she had a more pressing irritation, an itch of sorts in her legs, the kinds of pins-and-needles feeling like she'd get when she sat with her legs crossed the wrong way. She picked one of her feet up and kicked it, the tingle being relieved slightly, if only briefly. Mary shook her head, realizing she needed to get back to the apartment and make use of what time the Body was satiated while she could.

Mary was a little more prepared for the sudden lurch this time, but the super-human speed with which she lept through the air was still enough to give her a thrill of fear as she narrowly dodged tree branches and other foliage as she soared through the air. It took a few strides for her to accomodate the heaving stomach and bosom buldging out of her otherwise smooth and taut body, like trying to run with a loose-fitting backpack slung over one's shoulders the wrong way. She pumped her arms, the long, clawed appendages slicing the air in front of her. She felt the long feather-fins traiing behind her, the air passing over them and cooling them; Mary supposed, in a bit of distraction, that were there still blood pumping through those fins that it would be a great way to cool a body down, especially one that could run as fast as this one.

Mary's attention snapped back to the present just as she launched herself right at the trunk of an aldar tree. Reacting purely on instinct, Mary grabbed one of the branches and twisted herself, her feet wrapping around the thin trunk as she landed on it. As the tree bent away from her, Mary used the thin tree as a springboard, launching herself through the air high enough that she could see her apartment complex over the tree line.
"Not exactly discrete..." Mary had time to think before plummeting to earth, her four limbs absorbing the shock and springing off just as quickly, the transition from bipedal to quadrapedal effortless and natural. Well, natural save for the huge, jiggling masses of squishy fat hanging from her abdomen and ribcage. Mary's arms and legs churned the soft ground like a tiller, claws sinking in deep and throwing clods of dirt and pine needles into the air behind her as she lunged forward, pulling the earth underneath and behind her as though she was trying to leapfrog the entire globe. The twists and turns caused great furrows to be torn into the ground, dirt spraying up like the wake from a waterskier as she barreled around thick pines and between small firs.

Mary saw the apartment complex come into view, her feather-fins whipping behind her angular head as she dashedtowards her back wall. She knew she didn't have to go around the front- the walls were pretty much a stucco shell held together by her lair. With a single mighty bound, Mary lurched back into a bipedal stance, aiming for right where she'd exited earlier. Right as she approached, a flash passed into her senses- a police uniform, the start of a surprised "Freeze!" and then she slammed into the wall, all but splattering as she was absorbed into the writhing mass of her lair.

"Whoa!" Katie said as Mary stumbled through the wall, green but otherwise reverted to her human form as her excess curves sloughed off her as tentacles.
"Phew..." Mary panted as she reached for her toga off the table. "Wait a second..." She said, pausing as her toga unfurled in front of her.
"Like what I did with the place?" Katie asked, grinning. Mary looked around, seeing her apartment trasformed into some sort of cubist designer's mistake. There was a square "table" where her small kitchen used to be, little more than a compact green cube of tentacles rising out of he floor, flanked on two sides by small, flat square pilliars meant to serve as chairs. Instead of the pale, suffusing glow that had dimly lit the room when she'd left, there were four evenly-spaced "bulbs" of the bioluminescent tentcles, providing bright if sttill green-tinted light to the apartment. But perhaps the most shocking re-arrangement was seeing Shandra standing in the corner trying to look inconspicuous.
"You!" Mary snarled, her features turning feral as she advanced on Shandra's gravid, cowering form.
"Mary, don't-!" Katie started, before Mary spun at her.
"Not one word, Katie," Mary warned, waving a clawed finger at her. "Not ONE."
Katie frowned and turned her head away, letting Mary turn back and stalk towards Shandra. Mary got to within two paces of her before halting in her tracks, pausing momentarily and then spinning back towards Katie.
"I didn't make you not say anything right now, did I?" She asked, her rage momentarily forgotten. "Like, force you?"
"Uh, no?" Katie replied, briefly confused by the question. "No, I don't think so."
"Okay, good," Mary said, nodding and turning back to Shandra, still angry but at least no longer feral in feature.

"They're dead because of you," Mary said, glaring. "Those two officers died in a way that's too horrible for me to even consider, because of *you*."
"I-if you hadn't-" Shandra started.
"Shut UP." Mary said, her teeth growing slightly into fangs. "It *was* your fault. If you had just kept still and not tried to- to- to be whatever you think you were being, they would have left and none of this would have happened. But no, now they're dead, our cover is blown, and you've endangered all of us, maybe even the entire world, because you're too damned pushy to take orders. I swear to God, if it wasn't for Katie I'd have half a mind to just turn you into a vegetable until this is all over."
Shandra was now backed against the corner, whimpering as Mary's barely contained transformations pushed and pulled at her features, her rage threatening to transmogrify her into a giant of claw and muscle.
"So here's how things are going to work from now on," Mary continued. When I tell you to do something, you wil do *exactly* that, *immediately*. When I tell you not to do something, you will conspicuously avoid doing anything that even resembles the thing I told you not to do, as though your life depended on it. Because believe me, it does."
Shandra slid down the wall a bit as Mary leaned towards her, still scowling. "I- I just-"
"Want to leave?" Mary interrupted. "Fine, go." She waved her hand at the secion of wall where her door used to be, and the tentacles shuffled around a bit, aligning themselves vertically against the wall. "You want to leave, be my guest. Just pull those apart like drapes, and they'll let you through."
Shandra looked from the door to Mary and then back, confued disbelief playing at her features.
"Just remember," Mary said as she turned from Shandra and headed back to the kitchen, "You made me a cop-killer. And remember what cops *do* to cop-killers." She paused, one hand on the table, looking over her shoulder to shandra. "You really think after today they'll stop and consider which green-skinned monster you are before opening fire?"
Shandra looked at the door again, then back to Mary.
"Sure, I can take a bullet to the head and be fine, but as far as I'm aware, you still have a brain in there, despite all evidence to the contrary. You still have a heart that pumps blood. Maybe not, though- it's not like any of us have been to a doctor." Mary sat down and crossed her legs, her recent changes receeding back into her human form as she bent down and picked up her toga from where she'd dropped it on her march over to Shandra. "So, basically... Are you willing to risk it?"
Shandra looked from the door to Mary to Katie and back to the door, mouth quivering for a moment before she slid the rest of the way to the ground, pulling her knees as close to her chest as her stomach allowed and burying her head in her arms before quietly sobbing to herself.