The winner of my "help me choose my next story topic" mini-poll, here we have a modern-day twist on the fable of Actaeon, starring impeccable artwork from MistressSparkles, who I hope to commission again very soon. Fav her artwork here. Due to the fact that there's a cell phone in the art, I was unable to honor the request for a medieval setting per se.

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The Tale of Louise Simco Donohue

In the right hands, the πPhone 6 by 3.14 Computer was a tool of good. Hooked to a nationwide, blisteringly fast 5G network, it combined the functions of a digital camera, cell phone, MP3 player, GameBoy, calculator, flashlight, and erotic masseuse.

Louise Simco Donohue did not have the right hands. In her grasp, the πPhone became a tool of annoyance, devastation, and despair. Mostly the former.

Louise's parents, Dr. Simco and Dr. Donohue respectively, were annoyed by their younger daughter's slipping college grades and constant, soaring telephone bill on their family plan. They couldn't take her off of it for fear of emergencies, and Louise had resisted all attempts to find gainful employment to pay her own damn bill. So, against her will, they had signed her up to be a fall counselor at Camp Artemis in the hope that some sun and a rather remote location would help break the πPhone's grip on her life.

They had sadly underestimated the strength of 3.14 Computer's nationwide 5G network.

"Yes! Full bars!" Louise said as she disembarked from the Camp Artemis bus.

Her fellow counselors looked at her askance.

"You know, I don't think that you packed the right stuff for this job," said Aura Simco, Louise's cousin and the "in" Drs. Simco and Donohue had used to get their daughter signed up. "There aren't any campers during the fall, so we're just cleaning up and locking the place down for winter."

Louise was furiously texting a friend at Western State about the state of Camp Artemis ("OMG 2 much dirtttt!!1!") and didn't look up. "What's wrong with what I packed?"

"Well, we're going to be getting down and dirty. Did you pack anything but skinny jeans?"

"Nothing wrong with showing off a little," Louise said, still not making eye contact, fingers still flying across her πPhone's touchscreen.

Aura sighed. "Did you pack anything but sandals?"

Still touchscreening ("OMG, WTF gttng hssld bi lme cuz!!"). "I didn't pay for Ms. Nguyen's famous 'Midnight Black' pedicure to hide it."

"All right," Aura said rolling her eyes. "Looks like you're in good shape." She would have sworn that Louise had been adopted if they hadn't shared the exact same delicate features, fine figures, and mocha complexions as their mothers.

Leon, the leader of the counselors sent to the Diana campsite, put the group to work mucking out a cabin. Aura, wearing gloves and old baggy jeans, got down on her knees and began to scrub away at the accumulated filth of a summer's worth of middle schoolers. Leon cleared away brush and began stacking up the boards and locks needed to batten it down for the season.

And Louise?

"Aaaand…there!" The shutter on her πPhone popped merrily at Aura, who was rolling her eyes while shoveling a dead raccoon out of the cabin attic. A few more rapid touches and it was uploaded to SpaceBook, complete with caption ("OMG soooo grosssss!!1!").

"Louise…" Aura said.

"No, now's a perfect time to talk, Angie!" Louise bubbled into her phone, sitting on the back porch of the cabin while Aura and Leon scrubbed the floor.

"Louise…" Leon said.

"Definitely going viral," Louise said, after uploading a video of the wheelbarrow she was supposed to be pushing roll backwards down a hill and pitch into Lake Artemis.

"Louise…" Aura said.

"Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick," said Louise's πPhone, stringing together a message ("OMG so bored and so dirty LOL!!1!"). "Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick."

"LOUISE!" Leon cried.

"What, what?" Louise said, still not taking her eyes off the phone.

"If you don't put that damn thing away and start doing some actual work, you're not getting paid!" Leon fumed.

Louise's parents had sworn up and down that what she earned from the job would be her only pocket money for the semester…and the only way to pay for her πPhone's data plan. Without it. she'd be stuck with just the basic phone functions Drs. Simco and Donohue sprang for.

"Okay, okay!"

"Now go clear out some brush by the swimming hole!" Leon cried. "I want the boat landing clear before we pull the floating dock in!"

"Fine, fine!" Louise darted out of the cabin and wandered to the swimming hole. Relatively deep in the woods that embraced Camp Artemis, it was serviced by a dirt path and surrounded by thick trees, with a rock overhang, waterfall, and a diving dock for kids learning how to swim. Rather than begin clearing the brush, though, Louise waved her πPhone about to get a signal and began a series of recriminating Spacebook posts against those who were making her stress her skinny jeans and risk chipping a pedicured nail.

And then, when she looked up briefly to keep from tripping over a fallen branch, Louise saw that someone was at the water's edge.

Tall guy, flowing blonde hair, piercing blue eyes…and yet for all that probably a day laborer, Louise thought, because his clothes looked old and ratty enough to be in a renaissance fair.

And he was stripping to skinny dip.

After tittering to herself for a moment, Louise held up her πPhone and set it to record a video (and also to split the video into still images so she could select the juiciest ones to upload).

Having continued to walk along the shore, and mot making any effort in the slightest to hide her presence, Louise was naturally spotted by the skinny dipper when he surfaced.

"Who's there?" he said in a commanding voice that seemed to echo to the heavens. "Who dares to mock me, Phoebus Apollo?"

"Mock you? You're mocking yourself, mister," Louise said, still viewing the scene through the tiny, low-res lens of her πPhone. "Who skinny dips any more anyway? It's just asking to show up in a Fail Dot Com video."

"I…look, I'm not like my sister, always cursing mortals for annoying her," the man said. "Just delete that video and go back the way you came, and we'll forget the whole thing ever happened."

Louise didn't say anything, riveted to her πPhone as she was.

"I sometimes forget that you mortals…what? Are you still taking video of me?"

"Taking, editing, and posting," Louise said. "It's already got seventeen likes on Fail Dot Com."

"Argh, that is it! You have incurred the wrath of Phoebus Apollo, mortal! I know I promised Dad that I wouldn't curse mortals like big sis, but, I have had it!" The fact that his father had a habit of turning girls into cows on their second date did little for his moral authority, after all. So Phoebus Apollo cast his first curse since the medieval Dancing Plague of 1518.

Louise continued to peck away at her πPhone, ignoring the skinny-dipper's whining. At least she did until her fingers began to fuse together.

"Aah!" she cried. Her long and delicate fingers were pressing into each other, with the nails rapidly gaining a thickness and luster that not even Ms. Nguyen's famous manicures could match it. Every finger but her thumbs, so necessary for texting--those began to travel up her wrists, shriveling away as they climbed. Louise'd grip faltered, and her precious πPhone clattered to the ground.

Simultaneously, fine brown hair began to appear on Louise's arms, and--she could tell by the intense tickling sensation--just about everywhere else on her body. Her feet began to elongate as the hair grew, and Ms. Nguyen's Midnight Black pedicure grew and took over, merging her toes into large and unwieldy hooves; the change in mass and shape was violent enough that her designer sandals each burst under the pressure. There was a sharp snap as a small tail tore loose from her skinny jeans, which could barely contain her slim figure as it was.

Well, her figure had been slim, but now it was suddenly bulging out in unexpected places. Her midriff expanded, shooting upward and thick with hair and muscle Louise didn't gain much height because her feet, now grotesquely long and hooved, were taking up more and more of her height. Pushed down by her new girth and up by her Ms. Nguyen's pedicure gone mad, her skinny jeans strained audibly. Louise's arms were now longer and bonier too, to match her legs, and she realized with a start that even as her body was growing her pert "girls" were shrinking away to A-cups and oblivion.

But more so than any of that, the stretching and distortion of her pretty face--the background on her πPhone and subject of 1,299 self-tagged snaps on Spacebook--filled Louise with panic. "What's happening to me?"

"To borrow a phrase from a competitor of mine, you're reaping what you've sown," said Phoebus Apollo, laughing heartily.

Louise's face--now completely hair-covered--twisted itself into a muzzle even as her ears flared out to either side and grew long, pointy, and sensitive. Her hair--elegantly coiffed by Ms. Ngyuen's sister-in-law Ms. Yuan--vanished in the blink of an eye, sucked up into a vestigial fringe and then nothing by a metamorphosing body desperate for fuel.

The balance of her limbs had grown too much to allow for standing upright anymore. Louise fell to all fours, and the gyrations involved popped her shirt and skinny jeans like week-old zits. The remains of her clothes sloughed off as Louise looked back with horror from her increasingly long and mobile neck, tail--now nearly a foot long--waggling frantically.

A final convulsive jerk forward into a natural standing position, and it was over--a mule deer doe stood where Louise had been, alert but panicked, her human mind locked deep beneath a raft of instinct, scent, and sound.

"Go on on now, get!" Phoebus Apollo said, clapping his hands with the sound of a thousand thunderbolts. The Louise-deer bolted noisily into the forest.

"Yeah, yeah, I know," the skinny-dipper said as he emerged from the pool, speaking to the sky directly. "I'm sorry, but she was clearly in the wrong there. No, nothing like that…yeah, she'll wake up as a human in about a week, maybe two. I promise, she'll have learned something having to rough it without any human technology."

He approached Louisa's πPhone and picked it up. It had captured its owner's entire transformation, and was still recording. A few button presses, and it had been cropped, edited, and uploaded to feebusapollo (some snot-nosed brat in Sacramento had grabbed phoebusapollo before it could be registered, and Dad had forbidden punishing them with two months as a water flea).

"There," he said. "Let's see how many likes that old trick gets!"