Oceanside State University campus, Lyell Hall Classroom 227, 9:20AM

Brenda idly doodled in her PALE 202 notebook while her professor, Dr. Ellen Theresa, paced back and forth in front of the class like a caged animal, lecturing in a frenzy with only occasional pauses to jab at the whiteboard with a blood-red Sharpie.

"So we can see here from the excavations at Springfield the complete variety of Pleistocene megafauna, from elasmotherium to megatherium, in addition to your garden-variety mammoths, mastodons, and Coelodonta antiquitatis," Dr. Theresa was saying, aggressively sketching out a family tree of the extinct ice age landships on the board.

For her part, Brenda was having trouble concentrating. She'd felt out of sorts all night, had trouble sleeping, and strange dreams about disemboweling and devouring prey had left her bleary. It didn't help that Dr. Theresa was off topic again; the syllabus said that the class was supposed to be learning about trilobites, but she was banging on about the Ice Age again.

"I really need to drop this course," Brenda mumbled. "I got into paleontology for the dinosaurs, not hairy rhinos." Putting down her pencil, she quietly opened a copy of Captain Explosion that was tucked into Basic Palaeontology. She grinned at the panel where Captain Explosion's close ally, Paleo the Prehistoric Person, used her "one thousand Chicxulub impacts" punch to send Larva Lad flying into the sun.

"Ah, Ms. Vogel," said Dr. Theresa. "I see you're following along in the text, so can you please enlighten us as to the best strata to find Mammuthus primigenius subfossil remains?"

Brenda slowly looked up with a hangdog half-smile. "Um," she said. "Glaciers?"

Dr. Theresa walked over to Brenda's seat, her stiletto heels clacking loudly. Ellen Theresa was very much a valkyrie, leggy and strong-chinned with a shock of platinum hair pulled back into a permanent ponytail behind her steely eyeglasses. Trixie was fond of saying that Dr. Theresa was "model gorgeous," but then again Trixie was fond of saying that about a lot of people and Brenda had learned to tune it out.

"You can find Mammuthus primigenius subfossil remains in a glacier, I suppose, but it's not a geologic strata, Ms. Vogel," Dr. Theresa said in an appropriately icy tone. "Perhaps you'd care to put the comic books away and follow along?"

Feeling her cheeks burn, to say nothing of an unsettled feeling that had been building up all morning, Brenda decided that the best defense was a good offense. "Of course, Dr. Theresa, but weren't we supposed to be studying trilobites?"

"Oh, I'm sorry, are we boring you?" Having clacked her way to Brenda's seat, Dr. Theresa bent over to put herself face to face with her student, leaning against the table with both hands. "Do you find talking about an important time in our planet's history, and creatures that have reams to teach us about the dangers we face today, to be somehow off-topic for a paleontology class?" Her lab coat parted--why did she always wear a lab coat? PALE 202 was a theory class, after all--and Brenda had to crane her neck so as not to inadvertently address her reply to her professor's cleavage.

"Well, I joined this class--this program--for the dinosaurs," said Brenda.

She saw a look of white-hot fury pass over her teacher's face for a moment. Ellen Theresa remembered being 10 years old and playing with ice age mammal toys alone while plastic dinosaurs got all the glory, and the stinging taunts of the schoolyard when she had said she wanted to be a woolly rhinoceros when she grew up. Brenda had no way of knowing about Dr. Theresa's Fanfiction.net account, which had a script treatment for an ice age adventure film that was surprisingly heartfelt, but she was about to catch hell for it.

"Pleistocene megafauna are the unsung heroes of paleontology, far more interesting--and with far more reliable data!--than any dinosaur, trilobite, or dodo bird you care to name, Ms. Vogel!" Dr. Theresa snapped. "They have a story to tell about climate change and human shortsightedness, if we'd only put our ears to the permafrost and listen! Are you listening, Ms. Vogel?"

Brenda bit her lip. She was feeling really roiled, more than a little ill, and vaguely queasy from irritation and anger. But she had never backed away from a good fight. "Put my ear to the permafrost and listen? Does it get a lot colder in Oceanside City over the winter than I think it does?"

The rest of the class tittered, and Dr. Theresa walked angrily back to the whiteboard. She began stabbing at it, furiously, with her red sharpie. "Popular cultural depictions of extinct animals are sensationalistic, biased, and inaccurate!" she cried, furiously drawing a taxonomy of dinosaur movies starting with King Kong and moving down through Jurassic Park and Carnosaur 2. "Paleontology is about finding real answers, not fantasy with dragons that just happened to be real."

"And...what do the real answers tell us?" Brenda was having trouble concentrating now; she was really steamed, seeing red, and she hadn't felt so out of sorts since catching a bad strain on H1Nerd1 at the Oceanside City Comic Expo a year ago. She wanted to stick it to Dr. Theresa with a real crusher, but in her rage was having trouble finding the words.

"They tell us that if they'd had the wherewithal to resist human bloodlust and expansive imperialism, Pleistocene megafauna would still be with us today, Ms. Vogel, and the world would be a better place for it!" Dr. Theresa was really worked up now, and her whiteboard drawings had degenerated into a series of Lascaux-style cave drawings.

Brenda laid her book down. "I...I don't feel good," she said. "Can I go?"

"Yes, you should feel bad!" Dr. Theresa snapped after her. "Get out of here and think about what you've done!"

Sweeping her books and other detritus into her bag, Brenda rushed out of the classroom and headed for the Lyell Hall third-floor bathrooms. Luckily, thanks to the early hour and the fact that Lyell Hall hadn't been renovated since it had been built in 1968, there was nobody around. Anyone who didn't have an emergency preferred to go use the actually good bathrooms across the quad in the business school, which had been renovated six times since 1990 and now featured friendly robot fixtures.

"It's okay, Brenda. You're just pissed because she's an awful teacher." She leaned over the sink, trembling a bit, and overcome with a very strange sensation--not quite sick, not quite feverish, but some bizarre omelette of ill-at-ease and hot-and-bothered. "Man, I hope it's not that nerd flu again," Brenda added through gritted teeth. Still feeling incredibly angry, she also felt a bit achy, a bit tremulous, and--remembering some long-ago advice from her mother--pulled her mouth open to look for white spots back in her throat.

She didn't see any white spots, but she did notice her teeth starting to get unusually pointy, and the fingers holding her mouth open beginning to sprout dark claws.

"H-huh?" Brenda took a step back and held out her hand. The skin was dry-elbow-rough, and the natural chocolate of her skin was giving way to a more mottled greenish-brown. Also the roughness wasn't from lack of moisturizer, but rather from Brenda's human skin mutating into scales. Her nails, too, were changing from a French manicure to wicked claws with audible popping noises.

"Whoa!" Suddenly unsteady, Brenda winmilled her arms and wobbled, as her changing body let fly with a cacophony of snappling, crackling, and popping bones. The imbalance was from her spine, which was growing furiously against the seat of her shorts, the sudden adjustment forcing her awkwardly forward onto the balls of her feet. Something was going on down there, too, and the fabric Brenda's shoes visibly bulged, with the material audibly complaining.

With fresh gymnastics from her spine, the seat of Brenda's pants popped open and out slithered a long and thickening tail, speckled with orange at its tip. At the same time, her mane of curly hair was undergoing some strange contortions of its own, shrinking and thickening and...unfolding...into bright orange feathers, the same sort of quills poking out from her newly grown tail.

"W-wow…!" Brenda had trouble saying anything else, with her rapidly shifting face growing scales, sharp teeth, and most importantly a vast muzzle. With a distracted blink, her greenish-brown eyes became slit-pupiled. Her face ballooned into a snout filled with razor-sharp fangs so fast that all she could do was sneeze.

To add a final insult, the two most expensive pieces of clothing she was wearing gave way, one after the other. Brenda's shoes disintegrated, new claws wriggling their way through the wreckage instead, with each of her big toes swelling into a particularly long and vicious blade. Finally, the increase in mass and change in body shape was too much for her designer top to handle, and it shredded apart so violently that confused janitors were still finding bits of it weeks later. Her large, well-rounded 'girls' remained, she noted with a bit of relief, becoming even more buxom in comparison to her newly enlarged and dinosaurine body.

For whatever reason, getting unusually steamed at Dr. Theresa's lecture had mutated Brenda into a perfect hybrid of a human girl and a velociraptor, human in all the right places and awesome in all the others.

She took a minute, examining herself in the mirror warily, before jumping gleefully into the air and pumping a fist. "YES!" she crowed. "This is incredible! Just like in the comics! I can be a superhero now...get a costume...maybe a catch phrase…" She paused. "Can I change back?" Then a moment later, dismissively: "WHO CARES? I'M A SUPERHERO NOW!"

Visions of spandex, code names, and catch phrases--as well as artfully explosive covers--were dancing in Brenda's head. So much so, in fact, that she barely noticed another student entering the women's room behind her.

"What the hell are you supposed to be?"

Brenda whirled around, coming face to face with another of Dr. Theresa's students. What was her name? She was always slouching in the back of the class, dressing like a greaser from a decades-old musical that only boomers found edgy. Ida Stellazzio--that was it.

When Brenda turned around she held up her hands and flinched. "Wow. Okay. Those are totally scaly boobs. Just what I was hoping to see."

Brenda, sensing that Ida didn't recognize her, despite the rags of her clothing still hanging about, tried to adopt a more heroic posture and tone. "I'm sorry, citizen," she said. "I'm on my way to fight crime, and you've stumbled into my phone booth."

"Uh-huh. Are you supposed to be some kinda raptor?" Ida narrowed her eyes. "You got it wrong."

The pretense of heroic diction fell away immediately as Brenda, indignant, snapped back. "What do you mean I got it wrong?"

"Raptors are tiny. Like chicken size. And they're feathered."

Brenda gestured to her fresh-grown feather crest ant--after taking a moment to figure out which muscles to flex--held her tail forward.

"No, like a chicken level of featherage," Ida said. "Way more chicken all around. And less boob. What are boobs even doing there when you lay eggs. Doing it wrong."

"I am not doing it wrong!" Brenda snapped. "I'm a combination, okay! I think! Part raptor and part girl!"

"You look like a combination of someone who sort-of saw Jurassic Park and someone way too proud of their tit size."

"It's my first time, okay?" Brenda roared. "I don't know what the rules are!"

"Clearly." Ida shrugged. "I was gonna take a dump, but I think I'm gonna use the ladies' downstairs. Less weird. Less tits."

She left, and Brenda stood there for a moment, trying to figure out how to use her new legs. The sting of being dissed soon gave way to more fantasies about superhero names, costumes, and merchandising tie-ins.

"I've gotta show the girls," she said. Thinking quickly, she rummaged through the trash cans and pulled out their black plastic bags, fashioning them into a flimsy sort of poncho disguise before slinking out.

Brenda didn't notice Dr. Theresa approaching from the opposite direction, and had no idea that her flimsy disguise hadn't fooled her professor for an instant. Clacking her stilettos eagerly into the restroom at a speed normally reserved for hookers and runway models, she quickly turned up a curly hair that human Brenda had shed just before her metamorphosis, as well as a freshly shed and bright orange feather.

"Fascinating," Dr. Theresa said. "Most fascinating indeed."