Wendy had never been a big fan of the cold.
Now, that didn't mean she disliked the cold – cold meant snow, snow meant epic Corduroy snowball fights and could mean snow days, and snow days were an excuse to slack off that wouldn't get her yelled at by her boss. (Not that he ever yelled at her after the first few times – she'd gotten way too good at sneaking in her breaks.)
Of course, snow days also meant a high likelihood of needing to shovel snow and chip ice off driveways and cars, so she didn't exactly like it either.
So she wasn't quite sure what to think about turning into a giant bipedal fox made of ice. On one hand, if it hadn't happened to her, she might've thought it was cool. Making snowstorms and leaving behind ice footprints? It was something right out of those nerdy fantasy TV shows her oldest brother secretly liked.
On the other hand, it'd happened to her, and she'd been turned into a giant fox.
So, much like normal winter things, it kinda evened itself out.
Wendy tapped her new ice claws – another thing she was conflicted about, because those things were seriously useful, even if they were made of ice and left frost behind on anything they touched – against a tree trunk, watching icy ferns grow up and into the crevices of the bark.
Her family had taken the transformation surprisingly well. Well, maybe not too surprisingly, considering who her dad was – she'd helped save the entire town, after all, and as far as Manly Dan was concerned, it was the most manly thing any of his family had ever done. He'd more or less screamed his pride for her actions loud enough for the entire town to hear. But still, all things considered, the worst reaction her turning-into-an-ice-fox thing had gotten was worry and the occasional yelp when her cold snaps took someone by surprise.
And yelling at her to get out of the house because it was too cold.
That was one thing about this that definitely sucked, right there. She just didn't fit in the house anymore. Well, she could crouch going through the door, and go onto all fours to keep her head from knocking into the ceiling, but it wasn't the same, and her tails couldn't fit into the house. They were too wide and spiky, and though they looked "ridiculously awesome," according to Mabel, it was impossible to get them through the front door without breaking the frame.
It made her feel so alien, like she didn't belong there.
So she'd started hanging out in the woods instead. There, her snowstorms couldn't inconvenience anybody except the animals and maybe Dipper, who she visited every now and then. (Little guy had it worse than her, that was for sure. She couldn't even imagine being stuck in one place like that.)
A rustling caught her attention, and the by-now familiar pfft of a sapling bursting from the ground.
"Hey Wendy!"
She blinked her three blue eyes (three eyes was yet another thing she was unsure of – on the one hand, it made her vision that much sharper, but on the other, it just made her even more alien than before) at the little tree, which looked less like the normal saplings and more like a mini-version of Dipper. It even had his face in the trunk, with dark sockets, a little nose, and a mouth. No birthmark, though.
"Hey Dip," she said. "That's a new trick."
"Huh? Oh, yeah, the uh, sapling. Figured out how to do it last week!" The little tree held out it's spindly branch-limbs, as if going tah-dah. "So, uh, what'ya think?"
Wendy gave the little tree a cursory once-over, and a sniff (her sense of smell had gotten a lot better when the icy snout had grown out of her nose, though it probably wasn't as good as Soos's.) The weird, earthy, not-quite-a-tree scent that Dipper had had since his change was rather faint, with a new scent, something newer, added to the mix.
"Are you, like, in two places at once?"
"Yep!" The sapling leaned a little away from her nose – right, she must've looked huge to him like this – and grinned almost bashfully. "It gives me a headache when I do it, but I'm doing better at it than when I first found out about it! I can be four trees at once now!"
He looked so freaking proud of himself, the little goober. She couldn't blame him – it sounded hard, having one mind in more than one body. She couldn't even imagine it.
"Well, good on you, dude. Glad to see you're not moping anymore!"
He pouted. "I wasn't moping."
"You were."
"Wasn't!"
Wendy cracked a grin at his stubbornness – this was the Dipper she knew, alright. It was good to see him back to his old self.
Well, kind of his old self. The whole being-a-tree-thing threw that through a loop.
And if Dipper, one of the most self-conscious guys on the planet, could feel better about this whole situation, then so could she.