"Fucking Tinkers."

The voice was muffled, feminine, and extremely miffed.

"Hold still, please." The other voice was also feminine, but somewhat exasperated, not to mention worried.

"Fucking PHO fanfiction."

"Stop wiggling around, will you, Vicky?" The worry had gotten stronger as had the exasperation.

"Fucking Leet!"

There was a sigh of irritation. The second voice was silent for a few seconds, then sighed again, with more worry than annoyance.

"I can't do anything about it, my power just... won't grab hold of the changes," she mumbled.

A long silence followed.

"You can't fix this?" the first voice said, shaking a little. The anger had been replaced with fear.

"No."

Another silence. Eventually, the first voice said, "Shit," in a flat tone.

"You probably shouldn't have hit Über so hard last week," the second voice sighed. "You nearly killed him. And you know Leet is his friend. He was bound to eventually try something to get you back. The guy's a bit vindictive sometimes."

"He's a scrawny little Tinker, not a fighter." This was said in a somewhat dismissive tone.

"The main word there is 'Tinker', Vicky. You know how dangerous they can be if they're given a chance to come up with something. Not to mention when they're both seriously angry and drunk. You're probably lucky that this is all he did."

"Lucky!" The squawk of rage was loud enough to echo off the walls of the room. "How is this lucky?"

"He could have done something a lot worse with whatever he made," her companion commented, "or possibly killed you. You're incredibly tough but he found a way around that. No one ever said he wasn't smart, just sort of... odd."

"Little freak," Vicky, or Victoria Dallon, better know as Glory Girl, mumbled viciously, rolling over from her face down position on her bed, then wincing a little before ending up on her side, looking at her sister. The dark-haired girl was kneeling beside the bed looking at her with worried eyes.

"What the hell am I going to do?" she asked quietly, pushing her blonde hair out of her eyes. "When Mom gets home..." She fell silent. Eventually she finished, "She's going to kill me. Then Leet. Then probably Über , just on general principles."

Amy rocked back on her heels and stood, moving to sit on the bed next to her sister. "I wish you hadn't smashed up that machine he made, maybe another Tinker could have worked out what it did and how to undo it," she sighed. Reaching out she experimentally poked her sister again, then shook her head. "It's the weirdest thing I've ever seen. I have absolutely no idea how he locked it down like this but I can't do anything. I can heal you fine, but not change this back."

Vicky looked down the length of her body, before shaking her head and allowing it to flop down onto the pillow. "They're both going to be long gone by now, aren't they?" she asked rhetorically. "They'll know they've gone too far and we'll be looking for them."

"I expect so," her sister admitted. "Like I said. Not stupid, just... odd. And a little amoral."

"Fuck it," Vicky grumbled. "If I ever find out who wrote that stupid story I'm going to strangle them for giving the idiot ideas."

They sat or lay in silence for a couple of minutes. "What am I going to do, Ames?" Vicky finally asked plaintively. "I can't live like this. Everyone's going to be looking at me and laughing."

"Everyone already looks at you, you should be used to it by now," her sister replied with a small smile.

"But they don't laugh," the blonde returned.

"True, I guess."

After a moment, Amy Dallon, the superhero Panacea, shrugged a little. "We're going to have to figure something out. At least you can fly, if you couldn't you'd be stuck in a wheelchair."

They both looked at what had been Vicky's legs until the run in with a drunk and angry Leet an hour ago. Now it was a golden-scaled fish tail, the vertical fin at the end darker gold, almost bronze. The dorsal fin that ran up the back of it from about half-way down to about her mid-back area was the same color, as were the pair of pectoral fins that sprouted from just above the hips. Vicky was wearing only a bra at the moment, allowing all the changes to be seen clearly.

"And you don't need to be wet, the skin and scales are more like something from a snake," Amy added. "It's an interesting design, biologically."

"Trust you to think about that," the other girl snorted. Amy smiled apologetically.

"Sorry. But it is."

"I hate fanfiction," Vicky muttered to herself, making Amy smile a little again. "Especially weird stories that have me in them."

"It was very popular on PHO a while ago," her sister said. "Kind of over the top but it was mostly funny."

Vicky sighed, then rolled onto her back, wincing again as her dorsal fin was pressed flat. "This feels really weird," she complained. With no real effort she floated off the bed, rotating into an upright position with her tail-fin a couple of inches from the floor. Her head was over six and a half feet up like this, considerably taller than she'd been before, since her tail was longer than her legs had been. Amy looked up at her.

"You actually look pretty impressive in a strange way," she commented. The blonde didn't look too happy about that but said nothing. Moving over to her dresser she peered into the mirror unhappily.

"Half my clothes are useless now," she complained. Amy rolled her eyes a little.

"Like that's important," the brunette said wryly. "Your costume sort of fits still, though."

"It's uncomfortable, with all these bits sticking out," Vicky replied, turning in mid air and wiggling one of her pectoral fins, something she was a little surprised to find was easy.

The sound of the front door opening and closing made both girls freeze. They exchanged a glance.

"I guess it's time to face the music," the flying mermaid known as Glory Girl sighed tremulously, atypically looking both worried and uncertain of herself. Amy nodded, her face blank. Standing, the brunette moved to her sister, both of them exchanging a quick hug, before they went to her bedroom door, opening it and going into the hallway.

"Mom?" Vicky called down the stairs. "I've got a sort of a... problem. Don't freak out, OK?" She floated down the stairs with her sister following glumly.

A few seconds after they entered the living room the shouting began.