Sorority Girls
By Darker

"Are the Potions of Change duly planted, Brother Manticore?" the heavily robed figure pronounced over the makeshift pulpit in the centre of the forest clearing, the only thing showing through the hood was a sharp pale yellow beak.

"Aye, Master Phoenix," the shorter set of robes croaked, though the robes looked like a pair of bat wings.

"And are the Eternal Watchdogs duly sated, Brother Quedaan?" Master Phoenix boomed into the night sky.

"Aye, Master Phoenix, I did it this morning," another thickly dressed figure answered, abet slightly peeved at the ceremony.

"And are the Wheels of Torment duly oiled with the blood of the Non Believers, Brother Salamander?" Master Phoenix commanded, hesitating only slightly by the glare from Brother Quedaan's glowing eyes.

"Oh, monkeyballs, there's always something," Brother Salamander said, shyly swishing his red tail.

Master Phoenix slumped over his pulpit. "You know, it would be nice, just once, to get the Timeless Rituals of the Cult of Blood right," he said exasperatedly.

"I was duly Chastising the Bloodless. I didn't have time," Brother Salamander complained.

"You always make excuses," hissed a pair of robes, connected to each other by a thick scaly appendage that wound from under one of the robes and up the other.

"And what were you two doing?" Master Phoenix said at Brothers Amphisbaena.

"We were duly Making Sure Nobody Was Eavesdropping On Us." Brothers Amphisbaena's robes moved; giving the impression that one of them had folded his arms and the other had put his on his hips. "Must you do that?" the folded arms hissed to the other.

"I can't help it! I got our feminine side when we were blooded!"

"Silence!" Master Phoenix shouted before Brothers Amphisbaena got into a fight with himself. Again. "At least the Potions of Change are duly planted. That is all that matters, for our High Priest-Warrior Gorgon commands we have blooded wives."

"What if they don't like us?" Brother Quedaan grumbled.

"That doesn't matter!" Master Phoenix squawked, flailing his arms angrily.

They all started arguing and stopped when something rustled in the bushes.

"Who's there?" Master Phoenix whispered, quite a trick when all you have for a mouth is two hard bits of beak.

"I'm sending up a flare," Brother Salamander said, raising his arm to the moonlight sky. "When our Brethren in the Cult of Blood see my signal, they shall come for aid!"

A ball of fire shot from Brother Salamander's splayed hand, flying into the air and exploding, briefly lighting up the clearing and its occupants.

After a short pause, Brother Quedaan was the first to speak.

"You daft bugger. I can't see a thing."

The five young women, all around the ages of seventeen or so, sat in a circle. The tallest and, it must be said, most well endowed, spoke first in an impressive faux voice.

"We are duly gathered in our coven of five," was as far as she got before bursting out laughing. "Sorry, but it sounds so funny."

"This is serious, Jenny," said the youngest, a brown-eyed, brown-haired girl by the name of Mary.

Sitting next to her was her sister Joyce. You could have easily confused the two, except Mary was more impulsive and Joyce more logical.

Mary secretly harboured an interest in mutants even her sister didn't know about, a certain feeling that said that part of her actually wanted to be one. Mary knew nobody would approve, so she kept quiet about it. Joyce kept quiet about just about everything, because she was dumb from birth.

"C'mon, this is our sorority initiation," said the girl with the blond hair. Jade. Like most in the group, she had a fear of monsters and being blooded so much it bordered on a phobia. Jade kept twisting and glaring into the darker corners of the room not lit by candles, even though she was fully aware that they were traditionally left alone in the sorority dorm while they did the initiation. The only one who had already been initiated was Jenny.

"I don't wanna get it wrong, so let's hurry it up!" squealed Phoebe excitedly. Her umber skin cut a sudden contrast in the paleness of the five girls, and possibly her only failing was her extreme prejudice for the blood mutated.

"Fine, fine, fine," Jenny said, standing up and walking over to the corner table, where five (fake) gold chalices lay.

"Now these have the blood of a monster in them," she said, handing each of the girls a chalice of red wine, and keeping one for herself.

Jade visibly recoiled from the cup in her hand.

"It's all right, Jade, it's not real," Phoebe reassured her.

"What you have to do is to drink all of it, and if you don't become a monster, you're into the sorority," Jenny said. "In your own time, girls," she finished, gulping down the wine in one slow chug.

Mary shrugged. "Down the hatch," she said, and sipped all of it in no time, Joyce following suit.

"Do we get more wine later?" Phoebe asked before drinking hers.

They watched Jade.

"Go on then!" Mary encouraged.

Jade nervously drank her cup in one slow sip.

"Now, what do we do now?" Mary said, scratching one of her ears.

"I don't feel well," Jade moaned.

Phoebe sighed dramatically. "Jeeze, Jade, it's only your imagination!"

"That wine tasted funny," Jade mumbled. "I gotta go…" Jade stood up and almost ran out of the room. Phoebe rolled her eyes at the rest of the girls and followed her.

Jade stumbled into her dorm room and shut the door behind her. She started as something fell to the floor outside, but was too concerned by her growing sense of unease and queasiness.

She caught a glance of her right hand as she sat on her bed. Staring at it, she saw tiny green spikes poke through her flesh and lie flat along her skin. Then her fingernails lengthened and sharpened to points.

The same happened to her other hand. Holding them up so she could see both of them turning green as the scales covered them, she realised the truth.

"Monster blood!" she shrieked, leaping to her feet. "Nononononono!"

Jade doubled over as a sharp pain shot through her stomach and her organs shifted about inside her. Two massive bulged appeared on her back, and suddenly her red top ripped away from her body as her two green wings flexed and writhed. Jade screamed again, this time in shock and pain.

Now she could see the scales from her hands had grown up her arms to her shoulders.

"No, don't! Please!" she begged when her legs buckled and changed shape.

Green scales, complete with a strip of yellow underbelly scales covered her stomach and chest up to her neck, and Jade tried to pull her head away from them.

Jade screamed once more, but this time it was hoarse and half-hearted, fuelled only by her panicked confusion. Her wings flapped of their own accord as her legs split out of the trousers she wore, and her tail ripped away the rest.

"No, please, no, too much…" Jade moaned as the three new limbs tried to find a place in her mind so she could control them. It was too strange, too unfamiliar.

Jade hoped it had stopped, but then she felt the scales slowly travel up her neck and invade her stunning features.

"Not my face… please…" she gasped pathetically, the transformation tiring her out. The mouth filled with sharp teeth and pulled forwards with her nose into a dragon snout. Jade fought back the urge to vomit as her tongue grew alarmingly to fill the gap. Jade then resorted to crying uncontrollably as the scale growth traveled further up her face to completely cover her. A pair of sharp pangs erupted from her forehead, and she felt up with a clawed hand to feel a pair of curled horns frame her head.

As this happened, Jade managed one last plead before her vocal chords changed. "Make it stoaaaaAAARRWWWK!"

With the tears running down the scales of her face and making calls of the dragon, Jade slumped to the floor, curling up and sobbing. She couldn't even talk, couldn't call for help, only make snorts and whines.

I don't want to be a freak, she thought before she finally tired out and fell asleep.

Phoebe saw Jade close the door to her dorm room as she made it halfway down the landing at a quick walk when her legs gave way and she fell to her hands and knees, searing pain running up an down the length of her spine.

She looked at her left hand when the muscles in it started to spasm sporadically.

"What the-?" she managed as she watched her hand morph into a large cat paw covered in black fur. Phoebe leaned back on her knees to a sitting position as the same happened to her right hand.

Her thumbs gone, she could only flex her now stubby, claw tipped fingers.

Looking up, she saw her reflection in the large mirror that ended the landing. There were whiskers growing around her nose, which was pulling forwards into a cat-like snout. Jade screamed in the room she had run into, but Phoebe ignored her, trying to make her legs stand again.

"What's going on?" Phoebe moaned, the pain travelling to her paralysed legs.

The pain grew more intense, and just as Phoebe thought she would faint from it, her legs kicked out and split into two. The front pair travelled forwards slightly, grinding her pelvis into a new shape. Phoebe screamed in agony, the pain completely blocking out everything else.

Suddenly it stopped. She felt something rip away her shirt and two pairs of things wave around weakly, and she realised they were attached to her.

She was jolted out of her doze by a reptilian screech from behind the wall next to her, which dissolved into a heartfelt sobbing. A crash from the floor below made her start.

Phoebe levered herself onto her elbows, looking at the mirror. Her ears had moved to the top of her head and become sharp, like a panther's.

Phoebe finally realised what had happened.

"Displacer Beast…" she choked, wobbling to her four feet, her tentacles and black fur covered tail wagging oddly. She had become what she hated.

Jenny was in the back room of the dorm house when she heard the screams above. She almost dismissed them as messing about, but they seemed too urgent, too panicked. She went to investigate until a searing pain, more painful than anything she'd ever felt before struck her in the neck.

Jenny fell to her knees, trying to call for help and managing only pained gasps. Several bumps had formed on her neck, bumps that were growing larger with each passing second.

The bumps grew out on thick stalks she could move somehow. The feeling of how to do it just came to her, but it felt abnormal, those eight stubby tentacles waving through the air.

Jenny gasped when the stumps on the ends of the tentacles burst open into mouths which stretched into reptilian snouts. A pair of eyes appeared behind each mouth.

Some of the snake heads had orange scales covering them, others had human skin. Some of their eyes were blue, like hers, others were baleful yellow, reptile slits. The head and its neck that as on the back of her neck grew until it was arm length and hung over her head. The pair on either side of it weren't as long and thick, and the pattern continued with the heads getting smaller, until they progressed to a small worm-like neck with a tiny head poking out of the front of her neck just under her Adam's Apple.

"Oh no, these look like hydras. I've been blooded," she whispered hoarsely as all eight heads moved to look at her, and she closed her eyes, readying herself for the heads' attack on her.

She was confused when she realised her eyes were still open. The reptiles' eyes. With the eyes on her 'main'" head closed, she was seeing from the hydra heads, and was watching her human head from all angles.

Jenny opened her oldest pair of eyes and the image of her panicked, crying face disappeared. She threw up just the same.

She got to her feet, the hydra heads writhing. She grabbed control of each one individually, the vision of it adding to her own as she did so, and once she had control of all nine of her heads she used them to give herself a look over.

Her teeth were pointed. Mercifully that was the only change to her face. The ruff of hydra heads was the most drastic addition to her form, but the stump of a tail surprised her. She was concentrating on her heads she hadn't noticed it growing at all. That, and her feet and lower legs had changed. They were now digitigrades legs, twice the size and tipped with sharp claws.

That appeared to be it. When something howled back in the front room, all her heads turned towards it automatically, some hissing.

"What… what d-do I I do now? now?" she mumbled, some of the heads talking with her, others whining in tune to the words, and some muttering words before or after she spoke them, making a discordant mockery of speech.

Mary backed away from Joyce. Her sister was thrashing and knocking over furniture, as if she was having some kind of seizure.

Mary was too scared to call for help, and ran behind the couch when one of Joyce's arms flaked away and was replaced by several sucker encrusted tentacles. It hadn't been the tentacles that had scared her; it was the look of terrified pleading on her sister's silent face.

"Oh God, oh God, oh God, what's happening?!" she panicked, curling up as her legs started burning.

She tried running for the kitchen when Joyce, or what she was becoming, slammed into the couch, pushing it into her a few inches. A tentacle whirled over her head, and Joyce silently mouthed Mary's name for help.

Mary couldn't run; her legs were shrinking away into a ball of grey fur. She fell onto her face and pushed herself up on her arms, arms that were becoming more and more flexible in all the wrong places.

She looked down at the large ball of fur that used to be her legs. Gritting her teeth against the pain, she watched it transform outwards, until a shape started to appear. It looked like a wolf cub growing to adulthood incredibly quickly.

Mary passed out when the pain in her legs/wolf was matched by the grinding in her arms. She caught one last look at them before she fainted; they had green scales with a pattern of black diamonds on the back. One twisted to look at her with her hand, except it wasn't a hand anymore; it was a snake's head.

The wolf opened its eyes and howled, before it too fell asleep with Mary.

"Mary?"

The girl stirred, mumbling something.

"Mary? Wake up, please,'" the voice persisted.

Mary opened her eyes. "Jenny? I had a nightmare… something bad had happeeeeEEEEEK!" she squealed as a wolf started licking her face.

She found she could feel the wolf's tongue one her cheek from the wolf's point of view as well as her own. Looking down she saw she was attached to the creature; her waist bonded to an area of its make between its shoulders.

She brushed the join with the fingers of her right hand, where the fur ended and her skin began. She squealed again she noticed how odd her arms were.

Her left arm was simply a snake that she could move around, its head hissing and flicking its tongue out by itself. Her right was weirder. It was a snake, but on the upper lip of the snake's mouth were the four fingers she had stroked her wolf with. Under the fingers was a gaping mouth she learned to manipulate as easily as her thumb, but she could only open and close it and flick its tongue out. The eyes of the right snake head just stared blankly ahead, as if blind.

"What's happened to me?"

"We were blooded. You got a scylla. Somebody switched our fake blood with real monster blood," Phoebe said grimly. Mary took in her appearance.

"You…"

"A damn displacer beast. Be glad you still have a human face," Phoebe snapped gruffly, poking at her feline nose. Jade, crouched next to her, gave a small sob, covering her dragon snout with her hands. "Jade can just about talk. You got lucky."

"Where's my sister?"

"B- Behind-d the the couch-ch. Shee picked-ed you you up and put y-you on it and then she hid shehid behind it," Jenny answered. Mary gasped when she finally saw Jenny, hiding in the shadows of the doorway.

"Who did this to us?"

"How should we know?" Phoebe snarled. Jade curled in on herself more, but keeping her tail and wings as far away as she could from her body.

"Joyce?" Mary said quietly, getting to stand up, but couldn't. She looked at the wolf, which looked up at her. It got the message and climbed down from the couch, Mary wobbling atop it. It was slightly larger than a normal wolf, and she seemed able to direct it with subtle thoughts, but not before she drove it into a wall.

Mary held out a hand to Joyce. She received a sucker-less tentacle. Mary could just about see the girl's transformation.

Both her arms had become tentacles, and extra ones had sprouted from the shoulder of her left arm. Her nose had virtually disappeared, leaving a flat, white patch of skin in its place. Everything just below her ribcage had split into long tentacles the thickness of her none existent legs.

"Joyce? Are you okay?"

Joyce shook her head. She only had a few strands of hair left; the rest was rubbery white kraken skin.

"Are you going to come out soon?" Joyce shook her head again.

"The rest of the sorority will be back soon, we have to get out of here," Phoebe reasoned. Jade looked up, her eyes filled with fear, and tried to speak.

"Whuuuurrrr weeeee gowwwww?"

"I don't know, Jade," Phoebe said kindly, sitting next to the blood mutant and hugging her. Jade pushed her away with a wing.

"Waanaaa beee alllloooonnnne, pleeeze."

"Jade, come on! If they find us like this… if they find us they'll get some men to kill us!" Mary pleaded.

"Don' caaaare. Waanaa dyyye."

Jade then just slumped completely on the floor, not moving at all except for breathing.

"You know you don't mean that!" Mary yelled. "I've… I've heard of a place we can… go…" Mary trailed off, her optimism melting in the glare of the other girls.

"Where? That rumour about a freak show city? Not bloody likely," Phoebe growled, folding her arms and looking at the ceiling.

Joyce slithered out from behind the couch. She managed to sign with her tentacles. [I'm going.] she said.

Mary made the wolf walk for the back door with Joyce sliding along behind her. Mary realised how short she now was as she travelled past Jenny, who looked down at her. Not unkindly, just confused.

Mary opened the door, letting the night air in. The wolf under her struggled to bound away, but Mary kept it in check. Joyce shivered.

"Is anyone coming with us?" Mary asked, and was very surprised so see Jade moping along on all fours after her, head held low.

"Ch'nged m' m'nd," she mumbled. Jenny stood behind her, some of her heads looking back at Phoebe in to other room. She had a roll of tape in her hand and was busily taping shut the mouths of all her extra heads.

"Can't stand these damn things talking with me. Stop that!" she yelled when the largest started nuzzling her hair parting in an attempt to make her take the tape off. "If I wasn't scared of bleeding to death I'd cut you all off!"

"Phoebe?"

After a minute Phoebe followed, not looking at any of them.

"Do you know where this place is?" she asked Mary.

"I've heard its somewhere North…"

"Well, lead on, Red Riding Hood," Phoebe said as they stepped outside, all of them watching for any of the usual voyeurs from the fraternity across town.

"Don't call me that!" Mary yelped, making her wolf jump. "We're all as worse off as each other!"

"Whatever."

Jade growled as they made for the cover of the forest near the little town they had grown up in.

"Are you defending her?" Phoebe snapped at Jade.

"Duunnooo, buut no b'tteeer ideeeeas, huh?" Jade grunted.

"What do they call, umph, this mutant place?" Jenny asked, batting away a stray head.

"Haven, I think…"

"Shit," Brother Quedaan swore.

"Couldn't've put it better ourselves," Brothers Amphisbaena said.

"Where are our brides?" Master Phoenix sighed.

"They've scarpered," Brother Salamander slurred. "You want I should send up another flare?" he said, raising his hand again.

As one, the other Brothers jumped on him, wrestling his hand to the ground.

"No more bloody flares!" Brother Manticore shouted in his ear.