Time for a change – Part 2
#3 of Time for a Change
I'm going to try and stick with this quick turnaround for now. Please enjoy the continuing adventures of Jenny!
The next morning Jenny woke with a bit of a headache, concentrated at the front of her skull. Barely conscious, she slapped her beeping alarm to turn it off and fiddled for one of the aspirin she'd left by the side of the bed in case the ache from last night showed up again. She plonked the tablet into the remains of her glass of water and staggered to the bathroom to let it dissolve. Yawning, she looked in the bathroom mirror and paused.
In her tired state it almost looked like she had a pair of horns.
Jenny reached up, blinking to clear her eyes a little. Her fingers encountered a pair of short, straight horns that had erupted from her forehead and poked about three or four inches in length upwards. They had a slight backwards curve to them, and felt smooth under her fingers. The flesh where they emerged was the source of her headache; instead of originating within her head, the pain was a reaction to the skin having bloodlessly split to allow the two goat-like horns to poke out of her skull.
This was when she began freaking out.
The next few minutes were a blur. Jenny tried tugging at the horns, which only hurt. She tried slapping herself to wake herself up. She even tried dunking her head under the shower to try and escape from this strange dream. As she began to reach that calm plateaux of panic where she began ot think straight she decided this had to be an Event-related incident. She'd never heard of someone growing horns overnight...but since the Event nothing was completely as it had been before.
Dredging up the courage to face the mirror once more, Jenny padded through to the bathroom. She had left the shower on from her dunking, and had to wipe condensation off the glass to see herself again. She looked closely at herself, seeing the horns up close. Her head felt...unbalanced by them, although that could have been from yanking on the freshly-healed spurs. She shook her head, her ears giving a flick as she tried to work out what to...
Wait...
Jenny's hands shot up to the sides of her head. Where her ears had been there was now smooth flesh. Slight higher up, almost inside her hair, were a new pair or ears. They were furred on the outside, curved and tapered, and even as she touched them the muscles at their based twitched to pull them close to her head in shock and fear.
Understandably, she spent several more minutes freaking out.
Horns, she could deal with. Dog ears, she could deal with. Both at once saw her running around her flat, from her TV to the phone to her computer and back. She checked every news source she could, seeing if this was something the government had set up a helpline about. However, aside from a rain of giant spiders in York and the Golden Gate Bridge beginning to sing soprano, there were no major Events in the news.
Clutching her phone, Jenny tried to work out what to do.