The next morning, I dropped down once more into my own backyard, the street at the front still bearing the scars of the previous day's incident. It had been a busy couple of days, between the queen, the poison, the military, the police and the newspaper. Going from thinking I only had a few days to live to having around a year, or more if I could get the production facility back online. I was rather hoping that today would be less... full. Heck, it had been a busy few weeks. Wasn't it less than a month ago that I'd been a perfectly normal human schoolgirl?

I opened the back door to find Ben sitting at the table in the kitchen, eating breakfast in his school uniform, because of course a mere military strike on the neighbourhood and poisoned water supply was no excuse to cancel the school day.

"Lily!" he shouted as I walked in.

"Hi," I responded. "How's my favourite little brother? Are you feeling better?"

Mum came running in, looking at me with a mix of fear and reverence. Oh damn; I recognised that look. Terror over what had happened yesterday, and reverence from the water supply. Guess boiling it hadn't helped. And now that I looked at Ben, he had the same look of admiration about him. He wasn't looking at me like a little brother who was proud of his big sister. He was looking at his queen.

Dad walked in, and unlike the others, he was under no delusion. "What I'm feeling towards you right now isn't natural, is it? What are you doing?"

"Nothing," I sighed, noting with relief that his head seemed fine, other than a small bump. "At least not deliberately. The water contained harpy mutagen, and I'm the harpy queen. Even if I neutralised it, it seems there's still some lingering effects."

This was... uncomfortable. My family were my anchor, the thing that tied Lily to this world. I didn't want them as subjects. If they didn't maintain free will, the ability to tell me when they thought I was wrong, I was likely to end up flying off the deep end and going full Leona, and that would not end well for anyone, particularly now that I probably couldn't be stopped by anything short of a nuke. "Right," I tried, completely uncertain if this would work, "as your queen, I command you to think of me as family, and not royalty. You do not take your orders from me, and you are not inferior to me."

Everyone blinked a few times before Ben said, "huh? You're being weird."

"That... helped, I think," said dad.

"Good, now will someone please go out and buy a paper?"

"I thought you just told us not to take orders from you?" quipped dad.

"That's why I said please," I answered, giving him a full-fat harpy grin.

Mum was not in such a jovial mood, and after yesterday I didn't blame her. Heck, dad was the weird one for being okay with it, while Ben just didn't understand, and had been knocked out by the poison anyway. She kept her silence for now, waiting for dad to take Ben to school.

"I'm... not sure who you are anymore," she finally admitted. "Lily wouldn't... Lily couldn't... But you just killed them all."

"They were about to start throwing grenades inside our house. What should I have done?"

"I... don't know. This world is shit. Why did you have to..."

"It's over now, I hope. I don't think anyone will be stupid enough to attack me again. I'm more worried about people taking you guys hostage, but right now half the city is under my control. I can... make this city safe. Very safe. And I don't even need to use violence anymore to do it."

"But isn't that just as bad? You're only replacing Grant with yourself."

"I'm not intending to kidnap children," I snapped, before considering my food supply. Even if they weren't children, I fully intended to lock people into tubes, nutrients forcibly pumped in one end, waste pumped out the other, left imprisoned just so that I could eat. Maybe I could pay them and organise some sort of rotation system? Make a respectable job out of it? But the truth was that I didn't care even if I couldn't. Just like the way I didn't care back in the ancient history of two days ago, when I ate people directly.

"Okay, maybe I would be almost as bad. I want to keep you safe and don't care about anyone else. The Leona side of me simply doesn't see people as important, and things could go badly if the Lily side of me doesn't keep up. So it needs to be up to you to make sure Lily stays strong. Is taking advantage of the poisoned water to purge the police force of corruption a bad thing? Tell me if you think it is, because I can easily stop."

Mum looked at me in confusion, not giving an answer. Frankly, I would be likely to get better answers from dad. Or would I just consider them 'better' because I thought they would be the answers I wanted? Dad would answer from a place of logic, whereas mum would be more swayed by emotion. Mum would be less likely to accept the ends justifying the means as an excuse.

"It's going to take some getting used to, having a monster for a daughter," she finally sighed, "but I'll do my best to keep you human."

"Oh, hell no," I said with a shudder. "Not human. Say 'good' or 'on the straight and narrow' or something, but not 'human'. I've met enough humans to know that you can be far more monstrous than any monster."

"Hah. However did I raise such a cynic? Fine, you can debate morality all you like with your dad instead, and I'll just make sure you know you're loved."

"That's... not bad, actually. That's something I need."

Dad returned home sometime later, with a newspaper. It was rather spectacular, laying out a list of over a thousand names of people who had lost their lives to the experiments. How they'd come by that information, I had no idea, but it showed what they could do when they put their mind to it, and were properly incentivised. Or when they were being manipulated by alien DNA. I hadn't actually checked if anyone in that office had been under my influence, but it was safe to assume that at least some of them were.

There was also one story told the tale of me as a lone heroine, seeking justice at great personal risk despite the whole corrupt city moving against me. It was of debatable accuracy and strongly implied that the writer was high on mutagen, or possibly whatever Maximilian had been smoking. In any case, it was portrayed in such a way as to not paint me as dangerous, which was nice. Maybe I'd be able to walking into stores and buy things again?

Maybe things would flare up again in a few days, once the military realised that I wasn't going to die on schedule and they had something that was a threat to the whole country flying around, but for today I could relax with my family. Oh, drat... The military probably didn't know I'd said that, given that the one guy I told had exploded himself... I just want to relax for a few hours, dammit! I suppose that means they'll be less upset when I don't die, at least. Hopefully, they'll be too scared to come near me, or will believe the papers...

It was a pity the army guy had exploded himself; with a thousand names, I wanted to question him on how they had they never noticed the faces of their kills matched those of missing people... The man himself had seemed excessively patriotic, but it wouldn't surprise me if there were conspirators embedded in his unit somewhere. Or maybe the monsters scattered around the country were those without human faces, and anyone that might be recognised was kept in the forest.

Ben interrupted my musings by returning home and diving straight into a big, heart-warming hug. "See!" he said, slightly muffled by all the fur in his mouth. "I told you my sister was super fluffy."

Wait, what? I looked up to find another boy of Ben's age staring from the doorway. He brought a friend home? I recognised him as one of Ben's school friends, Tommy, who lives across the street and does visit us regularly. I suppose I hadn't told him not to, and he is only eight... So, now what? He was still staring at me. Would he scream and run? Follow Ben's lead and go for snuggles? Was he infected by mutagen and about to start gushing about how beautiful my eyes were? Really, none of the options I could think of particularly appealed...

"Why are you naked?" he asked. "Aren't you cold?"

Ah. Somehow, he managed to come up with something worse than any of my suggestions. I know I have no private bits, but for the sake of the kiddies, perhaps I should wear a dress or something?