Actually, we were done with the alterations by the end of the day. She downplayed her skill, but Tammy's work was neat and fast, and we didn't have that much to do: another half-dozen shirts and three camisoles for me, a couple skirts for her. The only noteworthy interruption was a text from Gil asking where I was and how I was doing - which seemed odd, but then it probably was strange for him to return to our room and not find me holed up in it.

I told him I'd gone out with some other students, which wasn't untrue; he replied with a thumbs-up. No doubt he thought I was getting out and socializing, instead of having my entire life turned upside-down and hiding out in the women's dorm, sewing. Well, it's easier than explaining the truth, I thought. Though I'd have to break the news sooner or later...

Tammy and Emma had dinner delivered, and Emma went down to pick it up. She came back giggling madly. "You shoulda seen the look on the guy's face when he saw me!" she said. "I almost lost it right there, but it was even better when I kept a straight face and he was trying to pull himself back together..." She set the food down and wiped tears from her eyes. "Oh, man," she chuckled. "I gave him like a $10 tip. Worth it."

"We're trying not to cause a commotion here," Tammy groused as she took her tray. "I'd like to at least have two days to get our shit together before we have to deal with the faculty on Monday."

Emma shrugged. "C'mon, they're not even in the office over the weekend, mostly. Monday'll come when it comes, no matter what we do. Heck, it might be good for an icebreaker."

"I'm talking about what'll happen when anyone else finds out," she replied. "We already have to deal with the Little Divas. If we lay low, tomorrow could be nice and quiet while we think about what we're going to do on Monday. If we don't, and word gets around, it'll be Katey-bar-the-door while every bored student whose tailgate party got rained out tries to barge in. Capisce?"

"Yes, Mom," Emma sighed, digging into her pasta. She turned a critical eye toward Tammy, who was munching calamari with gusto. "Isn't that basically cannibalism now?"

Our resident mermaid shot her a Look. "I'm not a friggin' fish, Em. Hell, neither are squid, for that matter."

Emma frowned. "Aren't you?" She turned to me with a sly grin. "Hey, Professor?"

I hesitated, wondering where to begin, or whether to get involved at all, but Tammy fixed me with a stare that said two things simultaneously: please, shut her up with this nonsense, and, don't you dare tell her if it is true.

"Um, no...?" I said. "I mean, muscle tissue is basically the same, at least in vertebrates. It mostly differs in configuration and what's packed in with the muscle fibers. Beyond that...there are similarities, but it's just the way they're engineered. It's what you'd call convergent evolution, if merfolk had evolved instead of coming into existence by happenstance."

Emma cocked an eyebrow, tilting her head to one side in a show of curiosity as she swallowed a mouthful of linguini. "Oh? Do tell."

"Well, think about it," I said. "Merfolk and fish both live - normally - in an environment where fluid density does most of the work in supporting their weight, and they move by repeatedly flicking a single body segment from side to side. They don't need sustained strength nearly as much as short, strong bursts of motion, so they both have a lot more fast-twitch muscle than slow-twitch. Similar problems, similar solutions."

"Is that why this dumb thing's always flopping around?" Tammy said, motioning toward her caudal fin, which twitched from one side to the other as if to illustrate. "I swear it has a mind of its own..." She seemed annoyed with me talking similarities, but she was clearly a little curious herself.

"Probably...? Seems like it'd make sense," I said. "From what I've read, most of the similarities can be explained that way - the scales reduce drag, the pectoral fins are a lightweight and flexible control surface, the gills let them breathe without surfacing, et cetera. But they're mammals through and through, adaptations notwithstanding.^* Not fish, and definitely not cephalopods. In terms of dietary ethics, a human and a cow are closer than a squid and a mermaid."

^* (Which wasn't to say that other species didn't blur the lines a bit more. Several kinds of demi-humans, for example, were oviparous, including an otherwise normal-looking human variant.)

Tammy gave Emma a smug grin, but she was lost in thought, cradling her head in her lap as she finished the last of her pasta. "Come think," she said, "I wonder what we're supposed to be feeding Lucky now?"

"Huh?" I had to pause and search my memory - my brain clicking and chattering away inside my head - to remember who or what she was talking about. "Oh, right, the rat. Wait, what even happened to him?"

"Oh, you never did get a look, did you?" Tammy said. "We were so out of it last night, we didn't even think of it until today - while you were out getting your stuff. Cage's on the other side of the desk."

I went around the double desk that divided the room to the side by Tammy's bed. The cage sat atop the desk, which also held a pile of miscellany; she used the other desk, on the more easily-accessible side of the room. Standing in the cage, peering out through the wire mesh, was a small humanoid figure.

This wasn't a huge shock. Experiments on animals sometimes produced "homunculi," non-sentient life-forms with a vaguely humanoid appearance; as usual, this was the subject of much debate between the Strong and Weak camps, with predictable arguments from each. But there was no dispute over whether the likeness went any deeper; mere animals changed into mere animals, and people into people. For better or worse, no test subjects had ever changed from beast to person - or, thankfully, vice-versa.

Homunculi tended to end up in the higher-functioning range for non-sentient life, though, whatever they'd started out as. They weren't always terribly clever - more often like a dog or cat than, say, an octopus - but they were generally curious and (usually) sociable creatures. Some kinds, when chance had produced enough similar specimens to allow breeding, had even caught on as pets.^*

^* (There was a kind of primate - a small Old World monkey, but with a face halfway between a chimpanzee and a Muppet and a head of human-like hair - that had been a full-fledged craze a decade ago; I found them deeply unsettling, myself. Some parties had also gone to great lengths trying to make "ur-gerbils" - an inapt name for jerboas the size of a pony - into A Thing, but space and fodder costs were prohibitive, and it'd just ended up as a variant on the old emu-farm scam.)

But what stared back at me wasn't something I'd heard of before. The new Lucky was a sort of mushroom-creature about five inches tall, with stubby little arms and legs, stumpy feet, and mitten-hands (thumbs, but no fingers.) Its skin was light beige and rubbery like a mushroom stalk, and the "face" was a round surface with no features besides two beady black eyes. But it was surprisingly expressive, and I could tell the little critter was in a friendly and curious mood.

The top of the head and the lower torso were mushroom caps - red with patches of white material, the iconic spotted-toadstool look. The head-cap was broad and shallow, like those conical Asian hats; the one at the waist was longer and, with the legs peeking out from inside, resembled a skirt. Fringes of loose "skin" hung down around the upper torso and forearms for a ruffled-shirt-and-flared-cuffs look, as did the fringes around the upper legs, under the "skirt;" the veil of white spongy stuff around the back and sides of the head looked a bit like hair.

"Cute, isn't she?" Emma said.

"I, uh, don't know if it's a 'she,'" I said, thinking back to high-school biology. "I think they reproduce asexually."

"Oh, c'mon, she's got petticoats and everything," she replied. "She's obviously a 'she.'"

There was an awkward silence as something inside me got hung up over her weird insistence on assigning a gender to a sexless, non-sentient life-form; I could feel some mechanism in my chest clicking like it was trying to move past a certain position and getting stuck. It was probably no weirder than people who insist on referring to yappy little dogs as their "kids," but it just bugged me, for reasons I couldn't articulate.

Finally, Emma shrugged. "Alright, alright," she said with a smirk. "If she wants to correct me on her pronouns, I'll respect her wishes."

I rolled my eyes, but we both knew it wasn't worth arguing over. "Anyway," I said, "don't they - uh, 'eat...?' - rotting leaves and wood and stuff? Or...I guess rotting anything, if you count mold."

"Right, right," she said, nodding her head thoughtfully. "And we're in a college dorm, so it's not like decomposing organic matter is gonna be hard to come by."

"You're not making a compost heap in my dorm room," Tammy interjected.

"Not a heap," Emma said, stuffing the plastic utensils and empty takeout boxes into the bag they'd come in. "Just, you know, get some old banana peels and whatnot and make a little layer of, um, stuff. We'd need a proper terrarium, though."

"No, Emma."

"Um," I said, "I think there's home cultivation kits you can buy, so there's gotta be some way to feed them that doesn't involve composting. We could look into that."

"We'll have to," Emma said, setting her head on the end-table next to the couch. Her body stood up and took the bag over to Tammy's trash can. "I mean, we can't let the poor thing starve."

"Okay," Tammy said, "when did we decide that we're keeping her in my room? You've got a room of your own, you know."

"Oh, I'm moving in with you," Emma said nonchalantly. The "smoke" between her shoulders curled lazily up towards the ceiling, dissipating into thin air partway up. She returned to the sofa and picked herself up.

Tammy stared at her. "Come again?"

"It's only logical," she replied, holding herself just below her bust to look Tammy in the eye. "Your roommates are moving out, which frees up the other room. We're all in the same boat, so we can all look out for each other - and it's easier for us to be on hand for Stu when she needs winding."

I did a double-take as the machinery in my brain skipped a beat. "I-wait, what? Huh!?"

Tammy thought for a moment. "I...damn, I hate to admit it, but that kinda makes sense."

"W-wait, wait," I stammered, things getting off-kilter inside me again, "that's...I can't..."

"You can't go back to the men's dorm like that, right?" Emma said. "You said so yourself. This way, you'll have a place here, with two people you can trust, who are in the exact same position. Plus, you know more than either of us about the practical implications for transformees. We'd all benefit from having each other around."

"But...they're not just going to let a guy move in here," I said, before stopping to consider that. "I mean, whatever you think about...this, they know perfectly well what it says on my student record."

Emma scoffed. "C'mon, this isn't Old Kentucky Confederate Baptist University here. We can talk 'em into it, if we tell them you're tra-ow!" She winced as Tammy gave her another whack across the shins with her tail. "Geez, you need a trigger lock on that thing."

"Speak for yourself," Tammy said acerbically. "Look, Stu...I think she's right. And I'm sure we can get housing to make accomodations for you, given the circumstances. Even if your roommate's an okay guy...you really don't need to deal with some of the cretins they have over there."

"Seriously, I can't just...!" I trailed off, losing steam for my own protest. I knew the pattern: this was the part where I flailed around mentally for a bit, trying to work up the willpower to say no to something, while group consensus steadily encroached upon me, until I was finally bound to the will of others. The sensations were different - a spring near the base of my neck coiling tight, gears somewhere under my shoulder blades whirring frantically - but I knew the feeling intimately.

And yet I couldn't disagree. They were right - I had said so myself, and thinking about some of the troglodytes I'd encountered in the dorms, I felt the bloodless equivalent of a shudder. Being crawled all over by a drunken sophomore was gross enough when I wasn't a petite...girl-thing...who might just freeze in place at any moment. Like it or not, I would need people to support me while I was like this, and maybe I could be helpful to them, and here I went again pre-justifying a course of action that other people were pushing me into just like always and this always happened and...and...

"U-um, I guess," I murmured, sealing my fate. My shoulders slumped; the tension inside me relaxed, but it still felt draining.

Tammy nodded silently, giving me a look of mild concern. Emma grinned. "Excellent. We'll hit up Housing after we talk to the faculty on Monday. We can move your stuff tomorrow - you don't have much, do you?"

I shook my head slowly; Emma took it as agreement, and rattled off plans for the remainder of the weekend, but I just stared down at Lucky in the cage - the other member of our group to become a sexless nonentity that people were insistently trying to feminize and align to their plans. You're "lucky" you don't have the capacity to angst out over this, I thought to the little mushroom-critter.

After brooding about it for a while longer, I called it an early evening and went to bed, where I willed myself into dreamless "sleep."