The Next Chapter: 2

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The Next Chapter
Chapter 2: How Did We Get Here? (Remix)

"I'm not saying we should go through with it..."
"But you want to go back to talk to her again anyway," Ed finished.
"Yeah! Let's take that tour. Maybe ask to meet those two 'prospective members' she was talking about. I mean—maybe that'll actually give us a really good reason to say no!"

"Hmm..." Jay's best friend and roommate would get this expression, with his finger under his chin, whenever he was seriously thinking about something. It was a good sign; it meant he was taking the suggestion seriously. "Yeeaah, you're right. Like, that building was built probably over the summer or something. Maybe it was a rush job. She could totally be lying about those 'top-notch facilities'," he said, making air quotes. "We don't even know if those other two people exist, anyway. Maybe we were talking to an actual crazy person all along!"
"Yeah, yeah—or maybe they're both total jerks. The whole point is to get in a house with people we can actually get along with, right?"
"Right..."

The night after meeting Nancy, Jay had thought about it—really thought about it. Magic was real, and yet had largely been quite distant from him and Ed for most of their lives until now. So the concept of himself being turned into a girl was kind of a shock, a surprise—something that had never entered his mind before. His first thought was that it would be very, very weird and uncomfortable, and that was probably what Ed thought too—and most likely where his thoughts on the matter ended. But not Jay's.

Wouldn't it be kind of interesting, to try out a different body? That was where his mind went next. Even if it really didn't work out, a little bit of experience being a girl might make him a little more of a hit with the ladies afterward—having more empathy for how their bodies worked and felt, and all. But also...every publicly-known instance of a person transforming had resulted in...

All Jay had to do was bring up some pictures. Whether it was a man turning into a woman, or a woman turning into a man, the end result was usually at least a little bit more attractive. And typically they would end up physically fit—not necessarily having any new muscle tone, but certainly a lack of excess body fat appeared to be a constant. For a guy as unused to exercise as Jay, and with as severe of a sweet tooth as he had, the idea of magicking himself into some much more favorable metabolism was very appealing. That change might even persist through the process of some additional magic turning 'her' back into 'him'!

Besides that: He'd learned to sing very well with the voice he had now, so wouldn't it be interesting and exciting to try out singing in a completely different range? Maybe even a good experience for his education, for his future as a composer, to know from firsthand experience how a girl's voice felt and worked. Also...there were some rumors that Ursa Major was doing something similar, with the male vocals on some of her tracks rumored to be herself, transformed. If she was connected to an organization that was willing to casually enchant an entire building in the way Nancy had claimed, then that went straight from 'strange rumor' to 'extremely likely' in Jay's book. It's totally what he would do, given access to such an option, anyway.

The tricky part would be convincing Ed to come along, then. He certainly didn't want to leave his best friend behind to have to room with someone else. Anyway, Edward was the kind of person who liked life to be on a straightforward, simple path...maybe too much so, to the point of it being overly predictable and boring. Jay could easily think of many times he'd pulled Ed out of his comfort zone before and into something he wound up enjoying...and, sure, a few times he hadn't enjoyed so much too. So this could...just be another of those adventures, right? But he also knew that Ed wouldn't be convinced to go along with it if Jay put it that way. So, as usual, he would need...other methods.

After a brief phone call, they had successfully scheduled a tour. Late in the afternoon, once both of their classes were over, they walked up to the house's front door, and Jay knocked on it. A voice that, notably, wasn't Nancy's called from inside: "Coming!" A moment later, with the clip-clop of some hard shoes on hardwood floor, the front door opened.

A girl with purple skin was on the other side.

Purple skin, darker-purple shoulder-length hair, yellow eyes, pointy ears, batlike wings, a slim black tail ending in a heart-shaped tip, and horns coming out of the upper-side-corners of her head. She was wearing pretty normal clothes, however: A skirt, camisole, and some thigh-high stockings. "Hey there~," she said, smiling and completely ignoring the fact that they were both staring at her. "You must be Ed and Jay, right? I'm Lu-hox-if-el." Jay found out later that this name was spelled L'hoxifel; in the moment, it just sounded like a jumbled barf of random syllables.

"Uh...sure..." Ed said. "I guess you're...one of the 'other prospective members' Nancy mentioned the other day?"
"Oh, 'prospective' nothing, we're totally doing this!" she said. "I mean, Camilla and I already moved in and everything. I'm totally committed to making it work." Then she tilted her head slightly, perhaps pretending to only now notice their expressions. "What..? You two never met a demon before?"

"Uh...nope, I guess not," Jay said.
"Well—no need to worry," she said, "I don't bite. I'm a Thumos—rage demon. That means I feed off of the anger of others, so I'm pretty good at controlling myself."

"Uh-huh..." Ed nodded slowly. "Well, I guess this means you're leading the tour, then?"
"Right! C'mon in, then, I'll show you around," she said with a light wave toward the inside of the house. "Introduce you to Cammy while we're at it."

The two of them had toured several frat houses in the past week or so—even more since they'd met with Nancy. Leaving aside the other people in them, all of those buildings had seemed like excellent places to live—paradises, compared to the dorm the two roommates were in now. But this newly-built house belonging to a sorority chapter which might wind up not even existing was about as far above those as they were above the dorms. The bedrooms were spacious, each with its own bathroom, and there were dozens of facilities for members and guests to use: A gym, a game room equipped with consoles and big TVs and a couple of arcade machines, a lounge full of comfy seating, another place that was practically a private theater. By about halfway through the tour, Jay was having some difficulty believing that all of this fit in the house they'd seen from the outside. There was also a fully-equipped kitchen and a dining area, several laundry machines, a painting studio with giant windows to let in tons of natural light, a room specially designed to have great acoustics for recording, a room for people to play board games or card games together in, a small computer lab with two 3D printers...Ed looked dizzy by the time they'd seen the majority of it.

Along the way, they ran briefly into Nancy, who was busy sewing something (in a room designated for the purpose, of course), and also met Camilla, but she was busy gaming and spared them not much more than a grunt and a wave and a quick "Hey." That perhaps left L'hoxifel as the weird one..but out of the three of them, she acted the most like a normal person, which only further enhanced the surreality of her being visibly, obviously, a literal demon.

They took a break in the lounge at one point and got to talk with her for a few minutes. L'hoxifel was a junior taking a creative writing major, and she wanted to 'get famous writing romance novels'. Her interests all seemed perfectly mundane. She seemed friendly and cheerful and (looking past the demon horns) even cute. At any rate, she was extremely easy to get along with, and told a couple of jokes that even had Ed laughing. It was hard to say much for sure about the other two residents of the building, but it certainly seemed like they could get along with this one pretty easily.

At the end of the tour, the sun had set, and L'hoxifel insisted on treating them to a supper, to "show off what the kitchen can do!". She corralled the other two residents of the building to come eat with them; Camilla stayed quiet most of the time, while Nancy seemed eager to be the star of the show. And whether it was the kitchen or just the demon-girl's own talents showing, the meal was amazingly delicious. The three of them saw Ed and Jay off with some friendly farewells afterward.

They spent the first few minutes of the walk back to their dorm room in complete silence, both just trying to mentally process all of the things they'd seen in that house. It was Jay who spoke up first, with just: "So, uh..."
"Auuuuggghhhh...!" Ed's immediate response was somewhere between a very loud groan and some kind of guttural sigh. "That place, is amazing! I hate having to go back to our dorm, after seeing that!"
"Yeah...it is pretty good," Jay said, in a deliberate understatement. "L'hoxifel is nice. Nancy seemed pretty friendly. I guess Camilla's a gamer, at least?"

"Uuhh huuuh."

"And I mean...if we're worried about the other people who'll join...being some of the first would mean we decide what the culture's like, right?"

Edward sighed loudly. "We'd just. Have to let the magic house. Turn us into girls."
"Yeah. I guess we would," Jay said, using a tone of voice that suggested that he considered this part to be a negative.

"We don't fit in at any of the frats. We've been to all of them."

"Yeeeaah. That last one wasn't bad, but..."

He sighed a second time, less loudly. "Let's...sleep on it. I'm still trying to get over meeting an extremely cute wrath demon."

"Pfft, yeah. All right."

And so they slept on it. By the end of the next day, the decision was made. It wasn't hard; Jay just had to wait for Edward to ask him so that he was the one "reluctantly agreeing to it", and then they were locked in. By the end of the day that Friday, the three girls had helped Ed and Jay move their stuff into a room on the first floor of the OZK house, they had gotten their beds made and everything settled into place, and after another supper in the house's dining room (cooked by the demon girl again), they relaxed for the evening and, eventually, went to bed. Somewhere in between, there had been talking with their parents about the decision, signing some legal paperwork, and Nancy promising to buy them everything they'd need for their new appearances on Saturday morning.

Jay wasn't a naturally restless person; he usually fell asleep as soon as his head hit the bed. But tonight, he was too excited to sleep at first. He wondered what he'd wind up looking like: Tall, short, fit, curvy? For that matter, how would Ed look as a girl? What would the process of transforming feel like? Or would they just go to bed male and then wake up female, without experiencing the change at all? How would their voices sound? But anyway, excitement could only keep him from sleeping so long, and after a little while, he drifted off...

Jay found himself standing in his bedroom back at home. Funny; the last thing he remembered, he'd been lying in a bed many miles from there. Yet he was still wearing the exact same set of pajamas. He looked around briefly before spotting something odd in the mirror above his dresser. "Hmm..?" His hair looked a little longer than usual, and its color a slightly brighter shade of red. "Ah..!" As if prompted by his noticing these differences, both of them intensified: His hair burst out several inches longer, enough to fall across his shoulders, and its color became an even brighter shade of red at the same time. This came with a burst of tingling all over his scalp, and he could feel the slight weight of the locks all across his shoulders, too.

"Oh, wow.." He reached up and put a hand through the hair, finding it pleasantly soft to the touch. He'd started to suspect that he was dreaming, but somehow..he could still feel these things. And he was starting to feel something else too; the tingling across his scalp hadn't gone away entirely after that burst of growth, and now it seemed to be slowly flowing downward across his face and beyond. Jay leaned forward a bit toward the mirror. "Huh..." Those tresses continued to slowly brighten and grow out, but he was presently more interested in the sight of what that tingling on his face was doing, his bits of unshaven facial hair almost seeming to 'un-grow' themselves away until there wasn't a trace of it left. He put a hand to his cheek and found the skin there pleasantly smooth.

"W-whoa!" This was followed by a sudden rush as the tingling—which had only now reached the bottom of his neck—suddenly raced down the entire rest of his body. He shuddered, then felt the heat of a blush on his cheeks when the tingling reached the thing between his legs and grew especially strong right there. "A-aah..!" Even as it faded off everywhere else, it grew even stronger, and he could feel it starting to get smaller, even as this sensation seemed to..stimulate it. "O-oh..m-ma~an..!" His voice cracked slightly mid-word, and he shuddered again. His hair's color had shifted by now to a brilliantly blazing, fiery red, and it was still slowly growing longer despite now spreading out to maybe halfway down his back behind him. From the spots where his hair had first touched his pajama tops, a shift in color began to spread out, the deep blue being replaced by a bright pink. "W-wow...mm~mh..!" His voice came out slightly higher in pitch, and squeaked slightly again when he softly cried out in response to a slight..tug, from down there.

"I-it's re~eally happening. wa~ah..w-woo~oow...!" He listened to the tone of his voice changing step-by-step, now already leaving its familiar range for a high, boyish tenor. The tugging was getting sharper and stronger; the pink coloration reached the hem of his top and began to spread its way down his pants, too. The pajamas also began to pull tighter against his body, which—surprisingly—seemed to yield to this pressure, shrinking smaller rather than insisting on retaining its original shape. Before his eyes, his shoulders narrowed, his belly began to pull inward, and his arms and legs slimmed down. "O-o~oh..coo~ool..!" Jay was having some difficulty concentrating on these changes compared to the more intense sensation of his manhood getting smaller and smaller still, tugging its way into him...making his heart race and his face redden with an ever brighter blush...!

The tugging and tightening and shrinking all seemed to sharpen at once. Jay found himself squirming around and crying out: "Aah, aa~aah, aa~aa~aAA~AAAaah...!" The masculinity vanished from his voice as its range pulled straight past tenor to a high, cute soprano, and his body's fat vanished away, his waist trimming inward while his arms and legs grew slim. Before his eyes, his face shrank to a smaller, rounder, cuter shape, and his adam's apple disappeared, and then, with one last tug...! "OOOOO~OOOHH...!" Jay's pajama pants, and the underwear beneath them, suddenly pulled tight and flat between the legs—revealing a complete lack of a bump that would be there if Jay were still male. Instead, she had fully become a girl! "MMH—mmmm~mmhh..!" Her squirming around continued as she felt a fuzzy feeling coming on down there, and at the same time a slight sensation of her body 'bouncing back' from the recent shrinking: Her hips and bottom and thighs pushed out wider, plumper, and thicker, beginning to fill out some girlish curves. Then her chest tingled sharply and perked up, starting to grow out into a small pair of breasts.

"Aa~aah...h-heheh..! Wo~wh..!" She watched as those small breasts steadily grew bigger and bigger, proving sensitive to the feeling of the pajama top's material rubbing across them in response. "Mm~nnh...!" This drew still more of that fuzzy feeling between her legs...which she was really starting to like quite a bit! "Oo~oh...heheh..!" The new girl watched happily as the topmost button of her pajama top came undone, then another, then another, giving the increasingly large globes plenty of room to keep expanding out bigger and bigger...!

Finally, Jay's new breasts gave one last push, bouncing out into place as an enormous bosom and completing her shift into a fairly tall, very curvy young woman. Her brilliant, fiery red hair now trailed out all the way down to her hips in the back, and an adorable, soft, girlish face grinned back at her from the mirror. "Hffh..a-amazing..I-I...mmfh..?!" She was a little confused—since the change seemed to be done now—when another wave of tingling hit. "A-a~aah..!" She shivered slightly; it was very faint and brief everywhere except for her ears, and a spot on her back right near the base of her spine. In those spots, it seemed to rapidly grow stronger.

"O-ooh...mrr...rrfh..!" A strange, canine-like bark came from Jay's lips at a sudden, strong push from her right ear, and in the mirror she got to see what this feeling meant right away. That ear grew huge, poking its way out past her hair as it rapidly covered itself in fluffy fur: White on the inside, bright red like her hair on the outside, but fading to pitch black near the tip. "Aa~hhrrfh..!" A similar sound and sensation accompanied an identical growth of her left ear. "Mngh...heheh...are those...f-fox ears?!" She'd started to reach up to feel one of them, when the sensation from the base of her spine intensified and gave way to a quite similar pushing, growing feeling back there. "W-whoa! Aa~aah...mmh, mnngh, mmrrr~rr~RRRRRRrrrh...!" A tail to match those ears rapidly pushed its way out between the hem of her top and the top of her pants. It started out as a slim line of bright red fur with a white tip, but it very swiftly became bigger, longer, and fluffier, and within a matter of seconds she now had a huge, plush fox-like tail wagging back and forth behind her.

"O-oh..heheh...w-wow...!" She found it effortless to pull the tail up in front of her, running her hands across it, and then hugging it...! Jay had never even considered what it might feel like to have fur like this, but she already loved it! She rubbed her face against the tail's tip a bit, closing her eyes, and felt...briefly like she was falling backwards. The landing was gentle, the back of a bed seeming to appear behind her to catch her, followed quickly by sheets and covers falling down around her.

"Mrrr~rrh..." Jay very quietly churred, coming slowly up out of her sleep to the warmth and brightness of the sun. Her ears twitched as she slowly released her tail from the hug, hearing the sounds of a girl's voice crying out softly, and then barking, yipping...

She realized after a moment that that voice had to be Ed's! Which meant he—or probably she by now—was mid-change, probably most of the way through! So the fox-girl tossed off her covers and sat up, making her way to the side of the bed to look. It was hard to see much through the covers, but Ed's face was already adorable (with that blush, too!), and she, too, had some big fuzzy ears—a little smaller than Jay's, but no less cute! A short moment later, Ed threw the covers off of herself, giving the fox-girl a full view of the body her friend had wound up with. She heard Ed murmuring confusedly as she fully came to, in a fairly deep, mature sort of feminine voice.

At this sight, Jay just couldn't help herself: "Oh wow, you turned out super cuuuute!!!"

"Wh-wha..?" Ed turned her head the fox-girls way very briefly, then adorably squeaked, her face flushing bright red, as she sat up and yanked her shirt as closed as she could for such a swift motion. "H-hey, don't just stare like that! I'm barely wearing anything!"

"Pfft, like we haven't seen each other shirtless before," Jay said, shrugging. "You're not gonna catch me complaining about it!"
"W-well you should be!" Ed's blush persisted when her eyes properly focused on her roommate, her gaze very clearly hitting Jay's considerable bosom for a second before she snapped it upward towards her face. "At least t-try to button up or something!" she said while hurriedly trying to match some buttons over her own chest, which wound up putting a couple in the wrong holes and leaving a gap large enough to see most of it anyway.
"What's the big deal?"
"I don't know if you've noticed but we both have boobs now!?"

"Well, yeah, but—so what?" Jay shrugged. "Since we're both girls, neither of us has anything the other doesn't, riiight?"

Ed just gave up on this, hopping down onto her feet. "Ugh, whatever..."

Jay decided to stand up herself, and found that..while she had shrunk a bit in the process of becoming a curvy fox-girl, her friend had shrunk decidedly more, which really accentuated the height difference between them. Ed's eye level was probably around her chin with both of them standing up like this. The little wolf-girl clearly noticed this too, frowning and blushing briefly before tilting her head upward and away from the bigger girl's chest again.

"Wh-why'd you end up practically fully clothed while I'm like...this?!" she said, waving at herself.
"Dude, you sleep in boxers and a shirt. What'd you expect, for those to turn into a complete dress?"

Ed raised her hand with the index finger up, then slowly lowered it, sighing—knowing that Jay was right. So instead of responding to that, she changed the subject: "A-and why do we both have fur now!? I don't remember that being part of the deal!" She reached the other hand up to lightly pull at one of her own ears, like they weren't obvious enough already.
"The contract said something about 'possible side-effects' of the transformation. So I guess magic's just gonna magic sometimes," Jay said with a shrug. "Anyway, I think I like it! Like, I get a big warm pillow that I can hug anytime I want!" She pulled her tail up in front of herself and wrapped her arms around it briefly to unnecessarily illustrate this point. "Besides, you look really cute as a wolf-girl!"
Ed's blush brightened again. "Y-yeah, we've established you think I'm 'cute' now...whatever.." She quickly turned around, heading for her dresser to try to find something that fit her considerably diminished new form. "Good luck washing and brushing all that fur..and hair..."

"Is it weird that that kinda sounds like fun, actually?" Jay said, releasing her tail to start over toward the bedroom door.
"Yes, that's weird. Are you going out in that?"
"Sure, I guess? I'm pretty much fully clothed, and nothing else I own really fits now, so I'm sure I can at least get breakfast in this," Jay said.

"Good, I can change shirts in peace...but button up first, seriously!"
"Okay, okay..." The fox-girl made a point of just fastening a couple of buttons near the top together, leaving plenty of room for some cleavage to show, and then headed out the door. She was actually..really hungry, now that the idea of getting food had entered her head!

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Demons in this setting are supposed to very commonly have "inhuman" skin colors like purple, blue, green, cherry red, etc. It's so nice to be able to actually get images of that if I want them, honestly.
Anyway, if every transformation worked exactly the same as the one in part 1, it'd get stale pretty quickly. I had various ideas of ways to mix things up instead.