Demy's stream was a little slow the other night, so I gave her commission money and told her to surprise me. This delightfully cute red panda girl was the result, and I simply had to commission her human form as well to make it a mini-sequence. There aren't nearly enough red panda metamorphoses out there and even fewer stories; we're doing our part. Please comment and fave the original: human, fuzzy.

---

The Tale of Jennifer Habre

Cal K. Chervena was a man on a mission, and that mission was drugs. These days, he was supplying half of Oceanside State with happy pills, happy syringes, happy smokables, and happy snortables. If that sounds a bit shocking, Cal would be the first to walk it back a little, privately.

His happy pills were mostly melanin and seratonin mixed in with some trace amounts of inert materials designed to help the compound pass muster in any impromptu tests. The syringes were mostly caffeine and glucose--in effect, Red Bull in a needle. Snortables were mostly the same, mixed with minute amounts of cayenne pepper to give the slight burning sensation people expected. And Cal's smokes? Mostly harmless herbs rolled in paper chemically treated with over-the-counter downers for the mellow feel that people craved. The placebo effect tended to do the rest.

Another valid question might be what Cal stood to gain from such an elaborate deception. For him, the "drugs" were simply a means to an end, a way to continue his research and acquire materials and hardware now that his funding from the Oceanside Department of Science had run out. Sort of a reverse Breaking Bad, save for the fact that Cal still had most of his hair, even if he did keep it close-cropped to avoid the inevitable 'fro that would develop otherwise. Real drugs might have been easier to make, but a strong spirit of morality and justice--at least after a fashion--inhabited Cal's portly frame.

The mission may have been drugs, but that was only to get the money needed to save mankind and by extension the world.

"What's that?" The voice of Jennifer Habre, a nursing student and Cal's roommate, almost made him jump out of his chair. Well, frankly, all he could have managed was lurching out of his chair; Cal would be the first to admit it would take an aircraft carrier steam catapult to make him jump at all.

"Shit, Jen," Cal said, swiveling his chair away from his lab equipment. "You trying to give me a heart attack? I know I'm fat, but I was at least hoping to stave off my first angioplasty for a few more years."

"We're almost to that point in my coursework. I can angioplast you myself with steel wool, chewing gum, and your pizza cutter." Jen glitzed that confident smile of hers, and Cal was struck by her beauty. It tended to strike at regular hours like some kind of frustrated romantic cuckoo clock, honestly. Jen was wearing a babydoll wifebeater in puce over red and black plaid boxers, giving Cal a full view of her most excellent beach-volleyball legs, strong and well-defined Real Attractive Person Boobs (as opposed to the quadruple-D beach balls prevalent in Cal's favorite anime), to say nothing of her duckfluff of unkempt hair that most people would've put in ten hours at a salon to achieve and healthy bronze tan.

"You'll forgive me if that doesn't fill me with confidence, Jen," Cal said. "If I recall, you incorrectly identified the spleen as a third kidney on your last exam."

"That was an honest mistake that could have happened to anybody, and honestly the direction I think evolution is taking us," Jen replied, her voice brimming with mock offense. "When your sixteen-times great grandkids are boozing well into their hundreds thanks to kidney three, I'll be celebrated as the prophet I rightfully am."

"Touche." When she'd first moved in, Cal had entertained thoughts of bringing Jen under his wing and eventually under his sheets as a protege and partner in both the romantic and scientific sense. But he had quickly realized that, despite his obvious intelligence and charm and suitability as a mate for any female (well, obvious to Cal at any rate), he was firmly in Jen's Friend Zone. It was like a broad Romulan Neutral Zone between them, to borrow a turn of phrase from Cal's favorite show, the exception being that even people in the Romulan Zone occasionally saw some action (if only in the form of plasma torpedo attacks).

Jen leaned over, arms clasped behind her back. "I won't let my roommate casting aspersions on my future as a nurse distract me from the fact he's evading my questions, though," she said. "What…is…that?" She pointed at a small package on Cal's desk, which looked like it had been shipped to Oceanside via Venus, beat-up and covered in stickers depicting flags and languages that were a good half-hour on Wikipedia away from being understood. The flags of China, Australia, and (bizarrely) Vatican City were most immediately recognizable.

"Oh this?" Cal picked up the box and pulled its easy-open tab, disgorging a flood of packing peanuts large enough to sustain a herd of packing elephants for six months, and a bubble-wrapped cylinder. Shaking it loose from the wrap revealed an unmarked syringe with no needle filled with clear fluid and a small scrap of paper. "This is the latest item in my fake-drug-funded quest to save the world."

"Ailurus fulgens, common name red or lesser panda, semi-contaminated gene admixture from Xuanlong Firefox Research Center, Sichuan," Jen read. "Have fun. Sincerely yours, unreadable moon-runes."

"It's from a contact of mine, Mao Sun-Lee," Cal said proudly. He set the syringe down on his lab table.

"You do know that I'm studying to be a human nurse, right?" said Jen, an eyebrow arching. "And that your talk of saving the world tends to turn to un-rememberable mush in my cerebrum? You might as well have told me that it's a tube of spoogy-juice wrung from the hanging spooge plant native to Spoogeria and sacred to its native peoples as the source of unprovoked leopard attacks."

Cal sighed. If he ever needed to reinforce his position in the Romulan Friend Zone, Jen's inability to remember the details of work was right there. "It's a sample of DNA from the red panda--you know, the kung-fu master voiced by Tootsie from that cartoon the other year?--encoded into a self-replicating RNA virus for storage and stability. Mao Sun-Lee wasn't able to obtain a pure sample, so I have to work on the genome and play with it myself until I can get a better one to compare it against for genome, enzyme, and extract analysis."

"Spoogey spoogey spooge spooge spooge. Spoogerific." Jen flapped one hand, her red nails giving the resulting handpuppet an almost arachnid look.

"It's a DNA sample from a red panda that's slightly contaminated, probably from animals that live or are kept nearby," Cal said, rolling his eyes. "I'm going to try and cut out the contamination so I can sequence the genome and see what makes red pandas tick."

"As Grumpy Bear said to Trueheart Bear: why do you care?" replied Jen. "Isn't this like the hundredth or billionth or googolth DNA sample that's come strolling though our door by illegal back door black market channels?"

Well, at least she remembered the 277 other samples that had arrived in the last six months. And anyone--especially an anyone with boobs--using the word "googol" in conversation that didn't mean a ubiquitous search engine was incredibly hot. "It's all part of my master plan, Jen. I'm sequencing the DNA so the red panda will be cloneable when--not if, but when--it's driven to extinction in a hydrocarbon-spewing Hummer. And I'm looking at the DNA--the enzymes and secretions in particular--to see if there's anything I could synthesize to form the basis for a beneficial drug. People have done it before, like the quaggasol in Stripe-brand shampoo before they yanked it off the market, but I'm the first to try it for good and awesome rather than crass commercialism. Combining endangered species preservation with cutting-edge drug synthesis…that's what all the drug money goes towards, if you'll recall, and that's how I'll save the world."

Cal noted with considerable disappointment that Jen's eyes had glazed over a bit. "Science talk is sciency," she said. "And sleepybored Jen is sleepybored. Give me something to take the edge off and I'll debit it from your share of the rent this month."

If there was one thing the portly drug-meister-slash-savior-of-the-Earth didn't like about Jen, it was her openness to various vices. Granted, she'd come from a very strict upbringing, which more often than not backfired in spectacular fashion once the parental reins were loosened in college, and had spent the last five years making up for lost time. But it was a crying shame, Cal thought with more than a whiff of judgement, that someone of her intelligence and vivaciousness should be as open to trying the next big mood-altering thing Congress was rushing back into session to ban. He'd told her a hundred times that even his strongest concoctions weren't really that sort of thing, but Jen was all-too-often willing to exchange rent vouchers for a temporary non-addictive high.

"Fine, fine." Cal reached into the pile of syringes littering his lab area and handed Jen one. "Here's a serotonin-melanin-sugar-Croatian Prozac cocktail. Fresh off the drawing board. You'll feel great and alert and then crash like a 747 fueled with biodiesel."

Jen snatched it up, and picked a sterile needle from the table. "Thanks, Cal."

"Right, whatever. Going in between the toes again?"

Looking down, Jen wriggled her crimson-painted metatarsals. "Nah, the marks on my arm have faded enough to go in the easy way for a little while."

Cal picked up his syringe and loaded it into the gene sequencer his ersatz narcotics were helping to fund. "Fun times. Just remember to drop it in the biohazard disposal in my lab when you're done. If I step on another one the next time I'm giving you caffeinated LSD. You'll wake up on top of the Oceanside Cellular tower dressed like a dragon."

Jen didn't hear him; she was merrily skipping to her room. Leaving the door open a crack, she laid out her laptop on her "desk"--really an old mirror bureau with all the drawers removed, and prepped the syringe. A tap, a squirt--just like on ER--and she was ready to go. She'd seen Cal's reproachful look--you'd have had to be blind not to--but wasn't about to let it affect her. People had to make their own mistakes, and there were a lot worse mistakes to make than rocking out to Cal's custom-made non-addictive "drugs." Even if Jen thought that his talk about saving the world was ridiculous, and she did, he was definitely a bonafide genius with a chemistry set. That's why she stuck around after all--well, maybe that and the fact that Cal made a better verbal sparring partner than most.

The needle stung a bit as it slid in and delivered its payload, but Jen wasn't afraid of a little pinch (unlike Cal, who could be downright aichophobic sometimes). She slapped a Hello Kitty band-aid on it and flicked the power switch on her laptop. Seconds later, she started to feel something--not like the usual feeling Cal's concoctions induced, either. A sort of very warm, very fuzzy feeling welling up from the deepest recesses of her being. It was like drinking, or being injected with, or even being one with, a really great aged brandy

"Hey Cal!" Jen cried. "This new stuff feels great!"

"That's nice," Cal called from the other side of the floor, sounding distracted.

The warm bourbon-feeling now seemed to be producing actual symptoms of drunkenness in Jen. She swayed unsteady on her feet, and let out a loud hiccup. At the same instant she did, her ears twitched visibly--she could see it in the mirror. They moved themselves so visibly, in fact, that they twitched right into elflike points. Jen approached the mirror and felt at them, trying to see if they were real or some kind of a hallucination from a bad batch of Cal's concoctions (something that had never happened before).

Her pointed ears were firm, real…and growing. Unable to quite process that, Jen fell back on her natural instinct which was often indistinguishable from snark. "Umm…Cal? There's a pretty big…point…here."

"Yeah, syringes have a way of needing those to work," Cal called back. "Thanks for the incisive observation."

Holding her hands up to feel her ears, Jen gasped as red and black hairs began forcing their way through the follicles on her arms, making rapid headway against the natural tan of her skin. The warm and fuzzy feeling she'd experienced was rapidly translating into an actual warm and fuzzy reality; she could see patches of the stuff appearing on her legs, on her chest, even--though the mirror--on her cheeks.

"C-Cal, things are getting kind of hairy in here!" Jen cried, not quite sure how to put her sudden and unexpected changes into words.

"You're the one who wanted one of my patented low-key nonaddictive highs," came the riposte. "If it's a little more intense than you're used to, well, caveat emptor. The new formula hasn't gone through the standard 'desperate hobo' trials yet."

Jen's ears were by now grown out of all proportion to her face, and rapidly gaining their own fur. They assumed a pointed, almost foxlike, appearance and had migrated steadily through the ginger jungle of Jen's hair to sit erect and twitching close to the crown of her head.

Her nose abruptly went black, as if someone had switched off a light. Not satisfied with that, Jen's nose rapidly declared independence from the rest of her face as well as humanity. It flattened into a rough triangle shape before moving outward, accompanied with the crack and rumble of reforming bone, into a long and vaguely vulpine configuration. The tan of Jen's cheeks was lost in a land-rush of black, white, and orange as unfamiliar markings painted themselves upon her emerging fur.

"Wh…at's…happen…ing…to…me?" As her face moved in a decidedly inhuman direction, Jen could barely squeak out the words through teeth that had decided they were fed up with being square white Chiclets and were busily metamorphosing into the pointed dentition of a bamboo-eater.

Cal's irritated grunt was audible even over the sound of Jen's body rearranging itself as heard from the inside, largely thanks to her new and sensitive ears. "You're getting high, remember? Or do the kids have a new word for it these days?"

A jerking and stretching feeling in her lower legs was enough to tear Jen away from the mirror (her face seemed to be approaching some kind of new equilibrium of form). Her toes were dancing about, seemingly of their own accord; a moment later, with a sudden jerk, her left foot gained a few inches in length and girth while the light dusting of fur upon it dashed to catch up with what had emerged almost everywhere else. Her toenails grew, one by one, to sharp points, the change wearing away all but a few dabs of the crimson polish she was wearing. In a series of spasms, each toe became thicker and took on an increasing percentage of the weight Jen was placing on her leg. Her shin seemed to crunch in on itself to compensate, meaning no height was lost overall. With a final snap, Jen was looking at what was definitely a paw. Her other foot dawdled in human form for a moment, its neatness incongruous with the unkempt claw beside it, before grudgingly reshaping itself to match. It proceeded at a much slower pace, though, lingering through the transformation in a series of tremblors and snaps.

"OW!" Jen cried. It hadn't really hurt much, but what else was she supposed to yell?" M-my feet…"

"So you decided to inject between the toes after all, huh?" said Cal. "I warned you. More nerve endings down there." A similar feeling had spread to Jen's hands: she held them up and watched as her slender piano-player fingers sprouted claws and thick black pads. They became thick and strong but--thankfully--still dextrous.

Something was going on at the base of her spine, too; Jen twisted herself around to try and look but had to rely on the mirror to watch something small and wormlike struggle its way out of the back of her pajama boxer bottoms. Emerging small and almost ratlike, and the same color as the remaining bits of Jen's normal human skin, it quickly exploded in size and fuzziness, rocketing downward to gain nearly four feet in length in just a few moments. A series of red and black stripes, almost raccoon-like, were visible in the first twinge of fur before rapidly puffing out until the finished, writhing appendage was almost a fifth as wide as it was long.

"T-T-T-TAIL!" Jen shrieked, flailing about in an attempt to dislodge it.

"Yeah, yeah, I know. I was wrong about those boxers not looking good on you, okay?" Cal groused. "Don't rub it in."

The remaining changes in Jen's unexpected metamorphosis were subtle--a little more muscle here, a last patch of tanned human skin to eradicate there. She whimpered softly, unable to take her eyes off the new and unfamiliar creature in the mirror that just happened to be wearing her pajamas. "W…why me?"

In the other room, Cal rolled his eyes. The girl was complaining about everything these last few minutes. His computer pinged as it finished its sequencing of the contaminated red panda sample. "Wait a second…" Cal said, examining the screen. "This isn't genetic material! It's the chemical structure of my serotonin-melanin-sugar-Croatian Prozac cocktail!"

He looked through the pile of syringes for a moment before his eyes widened. "Umm…Jen? Did anything…weird…happen when you took that syringe?" His mind raced, trying to figure out the long and laborious process he'd have to undertake to retrieve his sample from Jen's bloodstream.

Jen appeared at her door, stumbling over unfamiliar paws, a perfect--and, quite honestly, adorable--melding of human and red panda. "You tell me," she said.