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Leo had measured himself (and gawked at the results.) With the measurements, he ordered a new wardrobe from Amazon. He idly thought about how much trouble he'd be in if the advent of modern shopping hadn't occurred when it did.

Oliver was right about one thing - becoming a demi-human wasn't just for fetishists, it was dangerous. Loopholes in the law were used to exploit them and their families every day, and with them being few in number the government felt little reason to adjust and adapt. There were two demi-humans in the house of commons, both of them belonging to the Labour party. But even they were often stepped over.

The Tories hadn't been so nice, their one demi-human member being expelled immediately. Due to a wafer-thin majority in the house though, they were hesitant to set a precedent of them being barred from politics. Every member they expelled the looser their grip on the house became.

A demi-human could be killed, robbed and assaulted with little consequence. He'd seen it first-hand. Leo heard another knocking on the door, bless one day delivery. He had to squeeze into a pair of tracksuit bottoms to prevent himself from flashing the delivery person. He pulled open the door and looked down on the man who was already preparing his PDA for the process of signing over the package.

"Just sign here..." he stopped. Leo didn't wait to hear it and pulled the PDA into his claws, he scribbled down his signature and handed it back. The man dropped it to the ground and turned to run. Leo, having paid for the package already, wasn't about to let this fellow run away with his new clothes. He placed a firm hand on his shoulder and pulled him back. "Don't kill me!"

His other hand slipped under his arm and pulled away the box. "Give me the fucking box you twat." The man didn't stop running. He shot away like a cartoon as Leo let go and dashed down the emergency stairs. Leo didn't care much if he ran to the police or the news, things couldn't get much more fucked than they were already.

Leo slammed the door shut and tore open the package, he didn't even need a pair of scissors anymore; he could just cut it open with his new claws. Leo had ordered a few shirts, some pants, in the biggest size they had just to be safe. Leo pulled out a white dress shirt and tried it on. It was tight around the chest - having clearly been stitched for a fat person rather than an overly muscular one. It didn't matter, as long as he was covered.

The trousers were fine, black denim. Leo couldn't help but notice how much is made his cock stand out. He sighed; he looked like a cheap stripper, the king of the cheap club scene. Leo didn't like trance music or raves; he dreaded the thought of being invited to one. The lion patted himself down and tensed, his body blowing outwards like a hot air balloon. The clothes held firm, so they were good enough to go outside in.

Leo desperately wanted fresh air and no amount of anxiety about how people would react was going to stop him. With all the confidence of a nerd put into an overly built body he stormed out of his apartment, locked the door, and rid the lift down to the ground floor. None of his neighbours were there to see him thankfully.

On the other hand, the street outside his building was packed. It was the runup to the Christmas sales and that meant that the middle of town would be mobbed with shoppers for the entire month. Not ideal when taking your new body out for its first spin. He could already see a couple of people glancing at his imposing silhouette through the frosted glass of the front door. Leo didn't want to cause any trouble; he was in enough as he was. He instead headed towards the back door that led into the car park. It spewed the residents out onto a much quieter street where there were no shops to attract people.

Leo didn't know why it was so busy. The high-street in town had been in dire straits for years. There was nothing new to see, and what was there didn't offer anything you could find online. The council had spent millions of pounds trying to fix the place up, but what Leo had learnt was that you couldn't take the people out of the town too. They'd messed the place up so bad that they were back to where they started.

There were very few cars in the parking spaces reserved for the residents. If they were renting like Leo was, they probably couldn't afford a car anyway. Across from the back door was the backside of another large building, an ugly mass of red brick and mortar. A man walked along the side road, carrying a pair of white shopping bags. His head tilted towards Leo, but he quickly looked dead ahead and refuse to meet Leo's gaze. The man's shock cut straight into Leo's chest.

That was the first person who saw him - and he reacted like he'd seen a dead body in the street. It didn't bode well for his chances. Leo swallowed his nerves and walked over to the corner where the man came from. The red sea parted as several people stopped and stared. The interruption to the flow of traffic only attracting further attention. One young woman pulled out her phone and took a picture.

He heard murmurings, concerning ones about him going feral and clawing eyes and genitals. Leo's body was covered with pins and needles, the armour of his new body doing nothing to protect him from the anxiety inducing scrutiny. The people scrambled to avoid him as he powdered his way away from the middle of town and towards the park.

The park was usually an empty place that connected the multi-story parking garage to a walkway under the nearby roundabout - a piece of brutalist urban engineering designed to give space to both walkers and vehicles. Leo had avoided it; he didn't own a car of his own, but even so he avoided it. It was a place where you were more likely to be stabbed than pass through unmolested. A blind spot for the purpose of drug deals and sheltering the homeless.

Leo didn't know why, but he felt like going. Through the fish market (which stunk.) Across the car park and under the bridge, a long, graffiti filled tunnel burying into the Earth. All along the way he was sneered at and avoided like he was some kind of plague victim. Leo shook his head, that was silly, the infection could only be spread through a large quantity of body fluid; casual interaction had no vector of attack.

At the end of the tunnel was the "park," but in reality, it was more like a plaza. A single green mound in the middle, topped with a withered and miserable looking tree. Wooden benches, which used to have anti-homeless bars in the middle that had been cannibalized to make room, surrounded it on all sides.

It was funny to Leo. This was meant to be a place intended to let people escape from the urban sprawl of his rapidly developing hometown, but it was more oppressive than anything else. An urban fight box with a single round window to the circle of cars that rode around and around up above. Leo stared at the overcast sky for half an hour without interruption. Why did he come here? Was he looking for trouble? For that fucked up thing that Oliver had asked him to find, dared him to find.

He heard the shuffling of feet; somebody had approached him. "What the hell are you?" A brash voice asked. Leo tensed his neck and looked to the man. He didn't seem hostile. He was wearing a tracksuit and flat cap. His face was angular, rat-like. With a small, elevated nose and wide eyes.

"You didn't hear? This demi-human thing is big news."

"I don't watch the news."

"And you've never heard anybody talk about it?"

"My Mum and Dad don't talk about it."

"There's not much to say. I'm an animal man now."

The bloke frowned, his few brain cells undoubtably working on solving this enigma in front of him. "An... animal man. How's that happen?"

"Uh, you intake body fluids from the infected, or it happens randomly."

"Am I gonna' infected?"

"Not unless I fucking spit in your mouth, no."

"Cool."

Leo wasn't sure what was so cool about it. Leo was annoyed. He didn't know it was possible to be so ignorant about the most significant world event in the past three years.

"What's your name?"

"Danny."

"Well Dan, I don't know what else to say. This only happened the other night, I don't know what it means either."

"You gonna'... eat someone?"

"No."

"They gonna' put you in a zoo?"

"No."

Danny's intense line of inane questioning had already been exhausted. Perhaps it was a mercy that another group of people came up behind him, dressed in similar clothing. But Leo could tell that they weren't friends. The swaggering way that the leader put his arm around Danny's shoulder told him that much.

"Talking with the animal fuckers now Danny?"

Danny shook his head, "Ryan?"

"Ryan" had a gang of three people with him. If Leo was to place them on a scale, they were even duller looking than Danny was. Leo knew a gang of dropouts when he saw them, a group of bright young men destined to be employed by the town's flourishing drug industry. If they even got that far. Leo felt a violent compulsion to correct him.

"This virus is the result of spontaneous generation, a rapidly evolving series of viruses closely related to the common cold or flu. Nobody fucked any animals to make it happen."

Ryan sneered, "What's that mean?"

Leo stood, disinterested in continuing this comedy routine any longer. "It means I'm going."

Two of the gang stepped in front of Leo's escape route. He had a bad feeling.

"I heard from a mate that I can rob you and get off scot free. That's well good innit."

"I don't have my wallet."

"Check his pockets."

The two men seemed hesitant to touch Leo. "You go into my pockets and you'll be breathing through a fucking tube on new year." They backed away. The bravado stripped away by Leo's sheer size. He was several heads above them. Ryan's face reddened like a tomato. He sputtered and blustered, but Leo wasn't afraid of them.

"I don't have any money. You going to leave it, or are you going to try and fight me?" Ryan reached into his jacket's pocket and pulled out a short kitchen knife, the kind you could buy from a supermarket or local store. Of course he had a knife, knife fighting was one of the most popular pass-times for people with a death wish.

Ryan smiled cockily and Leo wanted to do nothing more than knock out what few teeth he had left. His friends left him to it. Ryan stepped into Leo's range and thrusted the knife towards his midsection. Leo acted on instinct and held up an arm. Leo gasped as the metal entered his forearm. It was almost like his muscle density protected him from most of the damage, but he still felt it. It was every bit as painful as he expected.

Ryan attempted to yank the knife away, but it had gotten caught in Leo's arm. Leo reached forwards and gripped the front of Ryan's head. With a roar he swept the man off his feet and slammed his head into the concrete ground. The crack even making him wince. Leo stood and pulled the knife, keeping hold of it in case the others tried to attack him too.

"Holy shit, you fucking banged him!" Danny shouted, jumping up and down.

"You should probably take him to a hospital or something." Leo didn't stick around to hear anything else. He ran past Danny and through the tunnel he came through before the police came asking for him.

Leo wasn't surprised to see himself on the local news. Not him, but a story about him the following day. Ryan had gone blubbering to the police with his broken face. While Leo had hoped that it'd teach him a lesson about picking a fight you can't win, it seems that the soft blanket of the failing justice system would ensure that no karma would be served.

"There was outrage today from the families of those involved, as the police said that no prosecution could occur under current rules. Meanwhile one witness to the fight alleged that the demi-human was assaulted with a knife and fled the scene afterwards."

The report moved into an interview segment. "Doctor Mugabe is a leading expert in demi-human law." An older man dressed in an expensive looking suit began to speak. "The existence of the demi-humans is a double-edged sword, so to say. They receive no protection under the law, and conversely they cannot be prosecuted in this country due to the government's recent action."

"Labour activists claim that the government is avoiding changes to the law in order to prevent the official recognition of demi-humans and their rights, and that until they receive that protection - contested crimes like this will go un-investigated. The shadow justice secretary had strong words when we spoke to him."

The report moved to a new interview. "We are currently in a lose-lose situation. Crimes involving demi-humans are ignored by the police, while demi-humans are victimized and subject to discrimination and violence. Something has to change, and that change is official recognition of the problem under the government and the law."

Leo's phone rang. He picked it up and noticed that it was from an unknown number. Leo sighed and swiped to answer. "Hello?"

Oliver's voice busted through the speaker, "Oi, I tell you to go cause trouble and the first thing you do is bust up some kid's face?"

Leo frowned and looked around the apartment as if he'd broken in again, "How the fuck did you get my number?"

"I looked you up and found one of your papers." Leo silently regretted not scrubbing his contact details from his old work. "You're a fuckin' smart arse, why were you working in a place like that?"

"Because everybody in that lab is as good as I am. They were paying good money to nab people like me."

"Don't be modest, I know somebody exceptional when I see them. You're smarter than them. I feel it."

"Is this your pitch to join your fucking terrorist thing then? Flattery and a street fight."

"I didn't plan the street fight..."

"Well the flattery isn't going to work either."

"The point is that I knew that as soon as you'd leave the house you'd get into trouble. That's what's so fucked about it. And you can't go tell the police, can you? No legal protection."

"And why's that? We can just break the law and get away with it?"

"The horror of recognizing us as people outweighs the occasional murder or robbery, you know. Watch out, if they catch you, they'll still haul you off to the police station or batter you. But if you're already gone..."

"They won't prosecute us."

"One of the people who works with me smashed a window in front of a copper, got knicked, and was out two days later because they couldn't prosecute him!" Oliver laughed boisterously. "Stupid fuckers!"

"What does this have to do with me?"

"Fine, I'll get down to brass tacks for once. We want to increase the number of people infected."

Leo shook his head, "You want to infect people on purpose?" He wasn't surprised, the man carried a flask of his own cum with him for that exact purpose.

"Sounds horrible doesn't it? The natural rate of infection isn't high enough to cause changes, they'll keep dragging their feet until it becomes a big problem. So we're going to make it a big problem. Now, I can't exactly go around nutting on people, even with our legal invisibility, somebody'll take exception eventually."

"Oh, and making enough cum to do it isn't an issue at all."

Oliver laughed again, "You've got no idea son, no idea!" Leo frowned - the messy orgasm that heralded his transformation in the first place was pretty violent... "Listen, there are two things that I want. I want an easier way of infecting people, one that doesn't need me to run up to them and force feed 'em. The second thing is a big target, infecting Bob from down the road won't do a thing - infecting somebody with influence will."

"Good luck finding anybody important in this town."

"Didn't the PM stop by after the last election?"

Indeed he did. But that was just an electioneering stunt. "He's not going to make a fucking habit of it, is he?"

"I guess not."

"And do you even have a lab to do this bio-engineering in?"

Oliver shook his head, his wild mane flowing to-and-fro. "No."

"Fucks sake. So you put your cummy fingers down my gob but didn't get a place for me to do anything." Leo threw up his hands in frustration, short of being a tactical evil genius, Oliver instead seemed to have no idea what he was doing.

"Listen mate, it's a work in progress."

"I don't see much fucking work going on. How about you go buy some lab gear before scouting people to use it."

Oliver was done with this argument, "Are you in, or not?"

Leo averted his eyes and stamped his pawed foot in frustration. There wasn't much he could do now; he'd be out of a job in a week and his first time outside was punctuated by a violent assault. Oliver was right, things were messed up. But the principle of the matter was that it was his fault in the first place.

"If I'm doing this, then we're doing it properly. No more cum flasks, no more bullshitting me around."

Oliver grinned. "Alright, no problem."

"You got anybody else?"

"A couple people. I'll have to introduce you. I think this is the start of a beautiful partnership!"