Catgirl Flu Flash Fiction

I got inspired by a light novel idea someone mentioned in the Zandraverse discord and couldn't stop myself. Whoops.

(Text content of image pasted below.)

The pile shifted with a groan. Slowly but surely the students that comprised it woke up and crawled to their feet, stumbling off into various directions. Nearby, the TV turned on; over in the kitchen, a fresh pot of coffee started bubbling away.

“Hey, we got a straggler,” someone said.

A hand gently came to rest on top of her head, scratching affectionately. She gave a confused yowl as her eyes peered open, the haze of sleep slowly peeled away by both the attention and the morning light. That hand knew what it was doing, however, and the gentle touches made it hard to do anything other than purr blissfully.

“Do you know who this is?” the owner of the hand asked.

“Beats me,” a familiar voice replied, “you know how hard it is to tell. Must be a late arrival.”

“Weird, I thought everyone had come in before the weekend. Hope they don’t have Monday classes, I guess.”

She sat bolt upright. Monday. Monday! It was Monday morning! Oh no! “Work!” she managed, scrambling to the nearby coffee table to sift through the discarded phones. “I’m gonna be late for work!”

“No one’s going to work,” the familiar voice said, walking into the living room with coffee in hand and picking one of the phones up at random. “We’ll figure out which one you are and sort it out with the school. Hopefully you didn’t have a paper due or something.”

“Work!” she repeated, struggling to make sense of what she was being told. “I can’t miss another day, the deadline… there’s a deadline, and…” She rubbed her temples, making her ears twitch. Ears?

“Dang you’re loopy,” the familiar figure said, sitting down in front of the table, sorting through more of the phones. “Listen, just calm down. You gotta let this thing work its way out of your system. You’re a student… ostensibly. Only one who works around here is my roommate, and he’s always off at the crack of dawn.” They picked one of the phones up. “Forgets his phone a lot, too.”

“Phone!” she gasped, wide-eyed, as she snatched it from their hand. Her tail thumping nervously against the table leg, she quickly fumbled through the password screen. She went to check her mail, but the claw on her index finger caught on the side of the case and she opened the selfie app instead.

“…Wait,” the familiar student said, putting their coffee down on the table. “No, that ain’t right… You caught it last week. It absolutely should’ve worn off by now.”

She stared at the phone, transfixed on the face looking back at her. That wasn’t her face, was it? Wait.

Her face?