I know I said that my next post would be something else, but I had forgotten about this long-overdue chinchilla collaboration between myself and the talented  jellatrix. She has decided to withdraw from posting art for the time being, so this will have to serve as her swan song for now in that regard.

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"Oh, how sweet," said the barista. "Are you supposed to be a cute lil' Halloweeny thing? Somebody from Halloween Town?"

"No," Cici said in as much of a monotone as she could muster. "I'm a goth."

"Are you sure about that, cutie?" The espresso machine chugged like a nuclear reactor as it processed Cici's order ("coffee, black like my soul"). "Your hair and that corset look too bright for a goth. Not a whole lot of pale going on."

"My hair is naturally black," Cici said, coiffing her purple-dyed strands, her voice cracking a bit as she struggled to maintain her monotone in the face of such ridicule. "And orange is the color of flames and dark magic and it happens to go well with my eyes."

"I dunno," the barista said, handing the coffee over, nothing but mud and ice. "You still look like cute little slice of Halloween Town pumpkin pie to me."

"I'M A GOTH, DAMMIT!" Cici cried, snatching the elixir-of-the-morning from the barista's hand. The emotion had broken through her monotone, though, and brought a decidedly un-goth-like level of caring-about-stuff to the surface.

"Whatever you say, dearie," said the barista in a condescending tone of voice. "Enjoy your spoooooky coffee!"

Cici's calf-length black boots, complete with heels tall enough to menace commercial aviation, clicked angrily as she made her way out of the Three Pines Mall Beanatorium. Her latest failure to be taken seriously as a goth was yet another stinging rebuke to her chosen way of life.

"What more do I need to do?" Cici said sadly. She held up her πPhone, in a black-and-orange case studded with studs, its lock screen a screen capture from a vampire romance showing a playlist of black metal, death metal, metal metal, and My Tiny Equine sing-alongs.

She combed strands of purple hair over her face afresh. "Don't they know how much I spend on hair relaxer so I can do this?" she said, the naturally curly and springy texture of her locks evident even after they'd had more chemicals sprayed on them than a World War I battlefield. "And who is that barista to say that I'm not pale enough?" she added, looking glumly over her merrily chocolate skin that hadn't seen the light of the full sun without an impressive glop of sunblock in months. "The media sets up an unrealistic standard of paleness for goths that is not very inclusive."

Feeling glum did at least give her the proper posture and return her monotone. She went to the food court to meet the rest of the Three Pines Mall Societia Gothica that was often hanging out there, hoping for refuge among her own kind.

"Hey, it's Cici Washington," said Randall Featherstone, the only member that seemed to be around at the time. "How's it going, Ceece?"

"I told you, it's Cici Heindahll now," Cici said, her monotone once again shading over into annoyance. "Washington is just not a goth enough name, and I already have enough trouble..." She paused in mid sentence. "Uh, Randy?" she added after a moment.

"Yeah?"

"Why are you a jackal?"

"Oh, this old thing," Randy said. Normally a pale kid with the usual long strandy hair and stooped gait, he now had pointed ears, a muzzle bristling with fangs, and of course fur that swirled in a dark and very metal pattern especially when coupled with his usual black trenchcoat and ruffled dress shirt.

"Uh, yeah, that old thing," Cici said. "Again, how are you a jackal?"

"I'll tell you, Ceece," said Randy. His tongue lolled out instinctively, leading him to grab a water cup and lap it up noisily even as he offered Cici a seat with an outstretched paw. "I'm sure that you've noticed how hard it is to differentiate oneself as a goth these days. The look can only be done so many ways."

"And if you're born with certain features outside the goth mainstream, it can be very hard to find goth acceptance," Cici added, taking a seat, torn between her glumness and goggling over the fact that Randy was a freakin' jackal.

"Right. Being pale and depressed and monotone and dressing the part isn't enough anymore," Randy continued in between noisy laps and the sound of his wagging tail beating against the side of the mall food court chair. "You've got to do something fresh to be darker, more goth, and more metal. Something to set yourself apart."

"And so that's why you're a jackal now?" Cici said with a sidelong glance.

"I was sick of people telling me I wasn't goth enough, that I was cute even as I was trying to be dark and brooding," Randy said. "But not many things could be more goth than a jackal, a scavenger of bones and the dead."

"I absolutely agree, Randy," Cici said. "And I too know the sting of not beiing considered goth enough. But let's back up a second, okay? Slow down a sec and treat some issues at length."

"Sure, Ceece."

"HOW EXACTLY ARE YOU A FREAKIN' JACKAL?" Cici cried anew, the exertion making her corset strain.

"Okay, okay, easy," Randy said, holding up his paws. "Don't break your monotone, I'll tell you. Know The Body Shop on the other side of the mall?"

"The piercing and tattoo place?" Cici said.

"Yeah?" Cici said. She'd been in there a few times, wondering if a little more metal in her face would make her a little more metal in the eyes of others. Unfortunately, she had come to the realization that it would make her more gangsta instead, something she was keen to avoid at any cost. Her brother was already gangsta, and she would not follow him down that path.

"Well, they've started getting into some really crazy body modification stuff," Randy said, his voice dropping to a growly, conspiratorial whisper. "Out the back. Straight from Eastern Europe. Old Soviet formula."

Cici's eyes widened. "Is jackal their only option?"

"Hell no," said Randy. "They've got all of Linnaeus back there. I had every animal I could think of to choose from. Jackal, wolf, raven, vampire bat..."

"Wait a second," said Cici. "You're telling me that you had the opportunity to mix yourself up with the most metal and least cute critter in the world, a FREAKIN' VAMPIRE BAT, and you chose a jackal instead?"

"Well," said Randy, "I mean, well, jackals are...they're still pretty goth, right?"

Cici didn't hear him. She was already up and off, her Frank Lloyd Wright heels clicking her in the direction of The Body Shop and the solution to all her goth-related problems.

"Just make sure you talk to Mr. Body!" Rany howled after her. "Not Mr. Body Junior!"

His jackally words hung unheard in the recirculated mall air.

The Body Shop was well-known among the Three Pines Mall Societia Gothica as they catered to a wide variety of bod-mod tastes from tattoos to piercings to henna to targeted wasp stings. There was a hand-drawn banner outside today, though, which advertised their newest service:

NEW GENE SPLICE SERUMS IN STOCK! UPDATE YOUR GENOME AND YOUR LOOK WITH THE DNA OF YOUR FAVORITE CRITTERS!

"Aw, yes," Cici said, walking confidently in. This was definitely the solution she'd been looking for. Hair too curly to fall over her eyes, skin that was too healthily dark even at its palest...a little bit of vampire bat would be just the thing to make it so no one ever called her cute or questioned her goth credentials ever again.

"Welcome to the Body Shop," said the beard behind the counter, the only hair on his knobby body being that drooping from his face. "How can we workshop your body today?"

"Give me a gene splice serum," Cici said, not wasting any time.

"Are you sure? We've got a wide variety of cheaper..." said the employee who, judging by their name tag, was one Mr. Body.

Cici laid her wallet, orange with black lace and the burned-in emblem of a crying skull with a pretty bow, on the table. "Shut up and take my money."

"Just so you know, we require a legal waiver before..."

Snatching the paper that Mr. Body was in the process of handing her, Cici scrawled a signature that absolved The Body Shop of liability in case of death, dismemberment, or mutation. "There. Now can I have a serum?"

"My, we're anxious, aren't we?" Mr. Body said. "Ordinarily, I tell people to go home and sleep on gene splice serums so they can be sure and consider the grave-"

"I have been sleeping on it for 20 years," said Cici, gesturing at herself while struggling to maintain her detached monotone. "Let me sleep on something else for a change."

"Very well," said Mr. Body. "Come in back with me."

Cici obligingly followed, practically on the tiptoes of her long and strappy boots with excitement. A moment later, a much older and much beardier man entered the shop laden with fresh sterile ink and precious metal bits for jamming into fleshy holes.

"Junior, I'm back!" he cried. "I'll be up front restocking if you need me!"

Led back past racks of piercing-needles and tattoo guns, Cic was brought to a small place labeled "changing room" which was full of brightly-colored pills. "Now," said her host. "What sort of gene splice serum can I get for you? Perhaps you'd be interested in Lavender Lapine, which would go great with your eyes."

"No. Give me the vampire bat."

"Surely a cute little thing like yourself would prefer Hamster Harvest," Mr. Body said. "Or maybe Gerbil Grenadine."

Cici stomped a strap-ridden boot. "Vampire bat," she repeated. "I'm here to stop all these insults about cuteness once and for all and to go full goth."

"But vampire bats kind of...suck," Mr. Body said. "Are you sure that Violet Vole or Sugar Glider Sorghum wouldn't be more your speed?"

"I want the most goth animal you have, and that's the vampire bat," Cici insisted. "I want it now. Remember what I said about shutting up and taking my money?"

"Concentrated Chilean Chiroptera it is," sighed Mr. Body, producing a crimson capsule the size and shape of a horse tranquilizer. "Specially formulated to allow splicers the ability to subsist on either blood plasma or human foods as they prefer. Can we interest you in one of our 6-month blood bank feeding programs?"

"We can talk about that when I'm goth as all getout," Cici snapped. She grabbed the pill from Mr. Body's hand and downed it in a single gulp, waving away the glass of water offered her.

Cici stood stock-still, feeling the gigantic capsule squirm down her throat and splash into her belly. Nothing happened for a few moments, but then with an enormous gasp Cici straightened her posture, mouth agape. A violently squirmy sensation had invaded her now-roiling innards, flooding her with queasiness and then a violent series of tremulous tremblors.

"I...urgh...I think it's starting to work," she moaned.

Cici felt a sudden concentration of her feelings of not-rightness in her ears; it started as twitching and poking before they abruptly kaboomed out and up. Her ears extruded a grey meadow of fur as they moved from sylvan points to enormous round satellite dishes on either side of Cici's head. The great ears that bats were known for, surely, and if they seemed to round and rodentlike it must have been just a transitional phase in the metamorphosis.

"Yes!" she crowed. "Look at it go!"

Cici felt more grey fur beginning to blossom all over her as well. She felt nose prance about her face as it swelled in form and function and fur, so large and prominent that she had to giggle for a moment, the gleeful sound ringing out as more hair sprouted up her face, up to her chemically relaxed and dyed hair.

"Yes!"

Mr. Body looked on with a note of concern in his face. "Does that look like vampire bat's nose to you?" he said.

Cici looked into the provided mirror and gasped. Granted, she wasn't the world's foremost expert on vampire bats, but she was nevertheless able to see that form of her face and ears in flagrante metamorpho definitely had an unmistakably rodentlike lapine shape. As if to drive this point home, Cici's front teeth chose that moment to reform themselves before her eyes, and what made themselves known in her maw certainly weren't the flesh-shredding fangs of a vampire bat but rather the buck teeth of a rodent. Whiskers emerged on first the left and then the right to accentuate just how unlike a vampire bat her metamorphosis was turning out to be.

"No!" she shouted, horrified at the growing fluffy cuteness that was making itself known in the impossibly soft hairs prickling rapidly out of every follicle on her body. "What did you do? What's happening to me?"

Beneath her elbow-length gloves, Cici felt her hands metamorphosing, her nails warping into claws while growing thick pads--light years away from the great finger-wings she should have been sprouting. But with the screaming of leather in her strappy high boots and the whine of polyester about her fishnet stockings, Cici could both see and feel her body developing a rodent's musculature and body plan--one built for scurrying and scavenging.

And cuteness, too. There was no denying that even as Cici's eyes widened in horror and the grey fur covered her ebony skin, that she was rapidly leveling up in adorableness.

Her orange and black goth raiments, chosen by their owner specifically to address her perceived lack of angst and strapped tight, were no match for Cici's continuing metamorphosis and the powerful leg muscles the gene splicing was hellbent on adding to her form. Straps snapped and popped merrily on her boots, helpless against the tide of fur and cuteness, while runs and splits quickly shredded Cici's fishnets.

She stumbled as her legs and feet, now sporting the same fur and pads, peeled themselves free of her boots, shedding the black leather and straps like a spent lizard skin. Faster and fuzzier, Cici's legs were now bristling with hair and muscles, and ending not in toenails carefully painted with skulls but two sets of subtle dark claws. A bump bulged at the bottom of her back, filling what little space remained in her black lacy underwear before exploding in a fireball of poofiness through the stubborn seat of her unmentionables to emerge as a long and fluffy tail of quasi-squirrel appearance.

A few more changes followed, mostly rearrangements of muscle and fluff which burst the most constraining seams on Cici's orange corset. But her change was mostly complete, mere minutes after she had begun, leaving her to look in horror at the adorable fusion of girl and rodent in the mirror, one whose shredded gothic raiments served only to accentuate how utterly soft and unthreatening it was. Cici's dream of forever proving her goth credentials as a vampire bat had been abruptly hijacked with the reality that she was now, unmistakably, a chinchillady.

"WHAT DID YOU DO TO ME?" she cried, turning to face Mr. Body.

"Umm...oh," the purveyor said after a moment's scrambling. "My mistake. I gave you Concentrate of Chilean Chinchillessence instead. But chinchillas are still pretty metal or whatever, right?"

The next day, Randy the jackaladdie met Cici the chinchillady in the food court. "Don't say a word," she growled at him, her voice coming out a squeak between her teeth and fuzzy cheeks."

"Oh, I wouldn't dream of it," said Randy. "My only question is, how can we tell if you are generating the properly goth level of angst when everybody you see wants to smile and pet you?

In fact, the question on everybody's lips that week was quite different: how could two different people wind up in the hospital for chinchilla-related injuries in the same week?