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By Jonathan S. Coolidge
Version 70.1 was finished on April 13, 2002, less than a month away from the fifteenth anniversary of the storyline. It had been long overdue. Version 70.3.5, the final draft, was finished on October 4, 2003. A year and a half is a long time to write a book in and of itself, but the time from concept to final draft was over sixteen years.
Version one began as a daydream on May 5th, 1987, almost immediately after seeing the movie Teen Wolf. Being a fourteen-year-old's daydream inspired by a comedy, the story arc was never originally intended to become more than a passing thought. I had many daydreams before and after, each usually involving myself either having or attaining some strange power or undergoing some sort of transformation. It only seemed natural that I would explore lycanthropy. So, I took on my own mental simulation of what might happen should I be stricken a week from the daydream, perhaps interrupting my watching The Equalizer with my family, by a bizarre metamorphosis.
Prior to that fateful night, I had passing familiarity with lycanthropy. My sister, interested in metaphysics at a young age, had told me about some of her research into the subject. I remember the first time I overheard my father trying out the movie The Company of Wolves, recognizing what Angela Landsbury's character was warning her granddaughter about when she said "...and never trust a man who's eyebrows meet in the middle." I also remember being horrified by the transformation scene in which one of the werewolves in that film tore his human skin off to reveal his lupine form. The scene was nearly as disturbing to me as Baby Elizabeth's forked tongue in "V", and it would only be a few years later before I could watch that movie from beginning to end and appreciate its beauty.
About two months before May 5th, I read a short story in my eighth grade "Humanities" class under Ms. Brophy, a precursor to numerous high school literature courses I would later endure. I do not remember the name of it, but it did involve a child from an eccentric family, asking to go with the lead character, another kid, walking in the woods at night. It was absolutely imperative that he get home before seven pm, and he had a strange aversion to silver. At the time I was reading it, my friend Thomas Weigel and I were playing simulated arena fight games, pitting imaginary genetically engineered creatures against each other--the Genetic Wars had just started. After reading the story, I briefly entertained the question of what I would look like as a wolf. Unlike Scott Gardener's wolf form in the current version, my fur back then was dark brown, like the color of my hair. I would only later decide that black fur would be more appropriate, given the color of my body hair rather than that of my scalp. The image came and went, lasting about an hour, but it is of interest in that it is the one case to my memory of my contemplating what lycanthropy would be like prior to May 4th, 1987. Around the same time, however, I wrote a brief story about a person who shapeshifted into a centaur.
The werewolf daydream lasted about a week, starting with an improved basketball game borrowed directly from the inspiring movie, but then leading into the realm of government conspiracies. After escaping from research taking place in SFA's Psychiatry building, I would end up rescuing my friend Thomas from aliens, on the moon. I enjoyed running the story thread so much that I made a decision to re-imagine the whole thing over again several times, creating about eight or nine versions over the summer of 1987.
In the early versions, silver and the full moon both affected lycanthropes. I was myself the lead character; the name change to reflect that this was a story rather than a daydream did not happen until four years later. Thomas Weigel and his brother Matthew were both included as lycanthropes as well. My lycanthropy in the first version was explained in a manner completely different from the later versions; the alien virus was adrift in the atmosphere for years until it happened upon a four year old with pneumonia and a weakened immune system. Following infection, it remained dormant until the day of the change.
However, a number of elements survived the transition from version to version. The SFA Psychology building did get a brief spot as the setting in which Scott meets Elodea. Government conspiracies and coverups in one form or another appeared in nearly all versions. The virus concept survived all seventy versions more or less the same; it worked well with the once obscure, vampire-like legend popularized by Hollywood, of getting lycanthropy from a bite.
The stories began becoming more layered when I came to the realization that this was more than just another daydream. I began giving in to pressure from friends to write some things down. Regrettably, I did not write down nearly as much as I should have, and much of my older work has been lost. Granted, a lot of it is more of personal historic interest, and the remaining early works very quickly remind me how much better my writing has gotten over the years.
Lycanthrope saw many revisions in 1988, and that year was perhaps one of the most prolific ones in terms of the story's version history. I also made the decision that year to merge Lycanthrope and The Genetic Wars, a story shared by myself and longtime friend Thomas Weigel, into a single timeline, the first step towards creating a unified timeline linking most of my creative projects. At the time it seemed like a lot of rewriting, but now the process of seperating the two would involve an even more monumental revision of each story. Up until 1991, the two stories took center seat in the bulk of my story-writing energy, pushing to the sidelines my previous work on an ongoing Transformers fanfic. My sister transferred over some of her story concepts from the former to the latter, and she also became involved with the development of Genetic Wars. However, barring some suggestions, she and Thomas mostly left Lycanthrope in my own hands. Another good friend of mine, also named Thomas, and our mutual friend Todd Stallings, developed a spin-off story set in the then future 1990s, involving werewolf and vampire rock musicians. However, I could not get them to participate directly in developing the main story itself. It is probably just as well that Lycanthrope remain a personal journey.
By 1991, however, times had changed. I had gotten older, and life after high school graduation was sending Thomas to another state. We decided to end the Genetic Wars timeline and move on, while we developed new ideas. I had met another friend, Tim Leonard, and began playing in an AD&D: Ravenloft campaign that he had put together. I began diverting creative energy into my character Spiritwalker Dreamsail, as well as into an Elfquest fanfic. Wolves play important part of the Elfquest storyline, but I would find ways of inserting lycanthropic and lycanthropomorphic references to my other works. When Thomas organized his Ell'Jaret gaming campaign, my character was a wolf anthropomorph. When he ran a play-by-mail game about interstellar civilizations, mine consisted of starfaring wolf anthropomorphs who would go on to discover that they have genetically repressed alternate human and wolf forms. And, the two lead characters of Lycanthrope and the Genetic Wars would be brought back in my own Moonstone gaming campaign as ultra-powerful, highly evolved beings. Though both Lycanthrope and Genetic Wars had themselves ended, in their wake developed numerous spin-offs and influences during what may have been one of my most creative periods in my personal history.
However, even though the original run of Genetic Wars had ended, by 1993 I was already at work revising, and Lycanthrope accordingly was undergoing numerous revisions. I had made the decision to change the lead character's name from my own name to Scott Fenris, feeling that I needed to seperate the character's life from my own, rather than having to rewrite Lycanthrope every time my own future changed appearant course. It also promoted the idea of eventually publishing the thing as a story rather than treating it indefinitely as a complex fanfic of my own psychoanalysis. Further promoting the publishing idea, I renamed the character to Scott Gardener in an effort to make the name more plausible and less contrived.
1993 was also an important year for several other reasons. I began undergoing a personal and a shared creative revolution as my mother, my sister, and I began reading through Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, a self-help workbook on improving creativity. I had around the same time gotten my first taste of the Internet, a full two years before the 1-800-BE-A-GEEK commercial introduced the flat rate unlimited Internet access and heralded the Internet revolution. The World Wide Web was still a novelty, but a lot of people exchanged ideas through email discussion list memberships and Usenet newsgroups. I witnessed the creation in 1992 of a new group specifically devoted to werewolves, entitled "alt.horror.werewolves." It had virtually no traffic for several months, but gradually it took off, and by late 1993 the concept of "spiritual therianthropy" was emerging; the therian movement had begun, and I had the opportunity to witness it and even participate. At the end of 1993, I had a falling out with Christianity, even though I had already described myself as agnostic for several years. I declared myself Wiccan on Christmas of 1993, and throughout 1994 and onward I would undergo a period of redefining my belief structure.
Mid-way into 1995, I would move to Fort Worth to go to medical school. From that point up until mid-2001, very little progress was made on Lycanthrope; it stayed on the back-burner while I focused my efforts on education and studying Wicca. Though I did not generate much of anything in the way of stories throughout the medical school years, they were very important in terms of my real life. My own evolution would reflect on the 70th version of Lycanthrope. In 1999, I would direct a lot of my energy into series of short stories entitled New Moonstone, until a mix of events would bring Lycanthrope back to the forefront. I was nearing the fifteenth anniversary of May 4th, 1987, though it was still a number of months away. I began browsing Werewolf.com, seeing how therianthropy had progressed over eight years. My own interest was rekindled, and I decided it was time to produce a definitive draft of the novel.
At that point, I sat down in front of my laptop and made myself write something--anything to fill the gaps, no matter how badly written. I wrote placeholder text to fill the gaps between previously written portions, and I purposefully saved for last the beginning of the story, since that was the part I had already written over and over again. By April, less than a month before my fifteenth anniversary deadline, I had revised that collection of text into the first viable complete draft of Lycanthrope.
Science Fiction by definition stretches plausibility somewhat, though some does it more than others. Sagan's Contact and Clarke's 2001 (ignoring dates, of course) represent hard-core sci-fi, which endevours to stay true to physics. At the other end of the spectrum would be shows like Star Wars and Star Trek, in which aliens from countless worlds look almost human and starships woosh through space in THX surround sound. In the latter, nit-picking the science, of course, is missing the point. They're about story-telling, about depicting the human condition with a slight twist. One does not complain to Tolkein about the accuracy of his depiction of elves, wizards, dragons, and magic. My intentions have been to put Lycanthrope (and its sequel storyline the Genetic Wars) somewhere in between. I've tried to make it plausible, but I will admit that it is no where near perfect.
The ability of detectives and historians is quite phenomenal. Recently, investigators have brought up evidence that Thomas Jefferson slept with some of his African slaves--evidence of an affair that occurred over 200 years ago. In Lycanthrope, werewolves had been among humanity for thousands of years. I would find it hard to believe them to be real and among us with only our legends as they stand today, without something a bit more conclusive turning up somewhere.
In the story, I justify this in part by the Blue Sentinel coverup. Since I started the story back in 1987, however, I've become a bit more skeptical of claims of government conspiracies regarding extraterrestrials. I still think they know more than they're letting on. Routinely, documents discussing UFOs have been blacked out or destroyed. However, I feel that claims of alien bodies in storage are almost certainly exaggerations. I suspect that certain factions or individuals know a little more than the rest of us about UFOs, but exactly of what they know, I am hesitant even to guess.
However, I'm firmly convinced that there is a very real conspiracy to cover and conceal our own human technology and inventions. Many of Nikoli Tesla's invention patents were bought up by the United States government and then shelved in a vault. The oil industry and the automobile industry have actively supressed efforts to introduce public transportation or until recently to develop electric cars. The music industry fought the release of audio cassettes and was recently and even now remains in the trenches against the mp3 format. The movie industry likewise fought against the VHS tape, even though today it is one of their chief sources of revenue. This demonstrates that large organizations often will resist change, even if it can be to their advantage. Consider how many environmentalists actively fight against use of nuclear fission reactor plants, which in conjunction with electric cars could virtually eliminate reliance upon fossil fuels, one of our chief sources of pollution. It is not unthinkable, therefore, that organizations exist to hide other forms of knowledge regardless of the logic of doing so.
How believable are the Cozaliens? More now than in the previous versions, certainly. In older versions, they were more similar to space opera aliens. The first thing I had to do in the new version was explain the name, which, cheesy as it is, is grandfathered into my personal subconscious. It's a corruption of "CZ-aliens," a code name for a particular unknown group of entities. In earlier versions, they were purely silicon based. Thomas Weigel never acknowledged that technical aspect, because he knew the chemistry involved would not work in the manner in which I depicted them; they would not be able to tolerate temperatures above Antarctica's worst blizzards, for instance. So, I've since given them the benefit of being silicon hybridized with more familiar carbon-based biology. I also made it a point to try as much as possible not to borrow from Earth life in designing the crystalline aliens collectively known as Four One. But, it seems that how life began on Earth 3.6 billion years ago very likely has occurred billions of times elsewhere in the cosmos.
In experiments done recently, the process that is believed to have brought about the first life on Earth has been reproduced with alarmingly quick results. Amino acids can be formed within hours of mixing a primordial soup, and familiar DNA and RNA seems to be the first choice of stable molecules for building a basic instruction set for a living organism. Therefore, many within the scientific community took notice when a rock from Mars was suggested to contain fossils of bacteria-like organisms born on that world. To this day, it remains up in the air whether or not the fossils were Earthly contaminants, but the simple bacterial form is none-the-less quite possibly common in the universe, given its simplicity and ease of recreation from scratch. What it does from there I would imagine can vary greatly from one planet to the next. Here on Earth, many changed very little, while some learned photosynthesis, while others learned how to make chromosomes, group together, and create much larger organisms, including us. The ancestors to the Cozaliens, I have postulated, would go on to do things with silicon and electromagnetics, in essense building living crystalline machines, incorperating both biomolecular and silicon-based computer-like components to form consciousness.
Yes, Elodea is an extraterrestrial who looks human. But, she looks human for a very obvious reason. She was put together using the human genome as a reference point. She is nothing like her Cozalien crystalline creators, but is instead the product of their genetic engineering. As a side note, between starting the storyline in 1987 and finishing version 70, our scientists here on Earth would start and finish the Human Genome Project, mapping out all 46 of our chromosomes. The fate of the Genetic Wars sequels remain up in the air, right now, however, as at the moment, the simple processes of human cloning and modifying human stem cells for the most basic of medical purposes are sparking enormous political controversy.
In the first version, I decided that a werewolf had 80 chromosomes--the usual 46 human, plus 34 additional sets to describe both the wolf form and the transformation process. I would later change this number, since a wolf's 78 chromosomes seemed an aweful lot to pack along-side extensive information on metamorphosis onto 34 chromasomes. Eventually, I would come back around, however. The human genome project would reveal that we are described by only some 10,000 or so genes, and that more than 90% of our DNA was unused. (Nature tends to do this; most of the human brain is similarly unused. I recently jokingly postulated that this unused DNA consisted of biomolecular email joke lists, porn sites, and pyramid schemes.) 78 chromosomes could conceivably be compressed to 8. Furthermore, since wolves are fellow mammals, more than 90% of their functional genome is already scattered in ours. The missing portions could fit onto a single chromosome pair. This ignores a lot, however, even using a handful of chromosomes worth of DNA to describe how to shapeshift. First one assumes that the unused DNA is really unused, and doesn't serve some yet undiscovered purpose. Next, with each cell division, the tips of chromosomes get cropped off; cloning is an analog process, and a copy is never as good as the original. The ends of chromosomes consist of a large amount of unused material, possibly serving, among other functions, as a buffer to this data loss. "Immortalized" cells that repair the damaged ends still need a reasonable amount of blank space at the end of the tape, so to speak. And, for a creature able to regenerate, like a lycanthrope, frequent cell divisions can become an issue.
Shapeshifting itself also introduces several problems. Surprisingly, bones are not as much one of them as many would expect. Mammalian bones are only rigid because of calcium carbonate deposits, and even with these deposits, live bone is not as inert and inflexible as the dead bone with which most people are familiar. Osteopathic theory describes a fluid wave phenomenon throughout the body in which the bones move and respond, flexing and extending in alternating cycles about three or four seconds apart. One can feel this mechanism by placing one's hands on the head of a partner in a quiet room free of distractions, though one must be certain to factor out motions from breathing and heartbeat first. I do grant that this subtle fluid motion is at most a millimeter or two, which is a sharp contrast to changing into a wolf. However, temporarily selectively releasing and reabsorbing calcium in the right place, in combination with highly specialized contractile connective tissue, could make such a thing work in theory.
Fitting a human brain into a wolf's skull presents a bigger challenge. While the human brain is 90% water, simply dehydrating the brain would not work, as doing so would produce severe headaches followed by seizures, coma, and death long before it was reduced in size enough to fit. But, the brain does give somewhat in the before-mentioned fluid wave phenomenon. In fact, the flow of cerebrospinal fluid has been implicated by many osteopathic theorists as the point of origination of the phenomenon. The size difference between wolf and human brains is largely one of connective tissue, though it is almost a cubic liter's difference, and dumping excess axon length only to pick it up again later is tricky at best. I will leave my advanced civilization to engineer the specifics, but giving that same arbitrary contractile property to existing glial structural cells holds some promise.
Another problem to overcome is fur and hair. Each species' representative follicles must be either shed or reabsorbed; I favor the latter to prevent a significant loss of mass with frequent shapeshifting, though it requires inventing new metabolic pathways for cells not normally designed for it. Some shedding is still going to happen, however.
Elodea did not exist in the early versions. In fact, early on, I swore I'd never include a relationship story in the thing. As a young adulescent, I was a late bloomer, turned off from the subject of intimate relationships by overuse of sexuality in movies and disinterested from sex because of the excessive talk of it in slang terms by fellow adulescents in school. My original designs for Lycanthrope was to create an action story with very little in the way of plot development.
By about version 25 plus or minus two or three, however, the climate had changed, and I started taking the story more seriously. Elodea was introduced initally only as a relatively minor character around that time, though I did have Elodea appear in another form before her role in Lycanthrope. In this form I first thought of her not as a werewolf at all, but as a serpentine form that would become her second incarnation in the Genetifc Wars. (You can see drawings of her in this form in my DeviantArt and VCL sites in the links section.) I envisioned the serpetine form of Elodea as a sexual fantasy. The name was an attempt to generate a variant of the phrase "the image," and is an alteration of the word "eidolon." I would later discover that an aquatic plant genus has her name. As the story evolved and became more realistic, I gave her a more human name. "Yolanda Taylor" was first used as her identity in the Moonstone: Haven role-playing gaming campaign around 1991, but I soon afterwards used the same name in Lycanthrope as well. As for "Elodea," the name "Zebrina,"a genus of flowers, is also the name of at least one African-American woman out there, so it works.
As I got out of adulescence, I had decided it was time to do more with Elodea than the stock action story one token female there only for sex interest. Around the time I turned Wiccan, I also began working with the idea of archetypes. The book Women Who Run With the Wolves came out around the same time; though I still have yet to read the thing, it's wake and lycanthropically suggestive title certainly got my attention. It drew brief public attention to the idea of the "wild woman." In my medical school years, I discovered the Goth scene, including the Dallas club "The Church." Elodea in black vinyl and her characteristic vertical halo hair style would have blended in smoothly.
In version 70, I strived to make Elodea more of a complete character. Her roots as a sexual fantasy are there; I would not want immature readers reading certain scenes in the first part of the story. However, there is considerably more to her than that. She has a human side, struggling between her animal instincts and the need to live in the world. Early on, she is driven by instincts, and not too different from how I originally pictured her. She is aggressive and uninhibited by the self-doubt that so many women in my culture battle every day. But, as time progresses, she becomes increasingly human, starting to question her own motivations and intentions. However, she eventually comes full circle, becoming bolder and more assertive again towards society as she learns to channel her energy towards a goal.
Lycanthrope spans a twenty year stretch from May 1993 to the beginning of 2013. Part of that time has not yet happened. One of the reasons there are so many versions of the story is that I've made revisions to take into account changes in the real world.
In the first 49 versions, the lead character was me. It started as a daydream about myself, and I kept it that way for a long time. On the 50th version, I gave in and changed the name of the lead character to "Scott Fenris," admitting the fact that it was indeed fiction, and that I had changed so much since I first came up with the story idea. Scott Gardener is not quite me anymore; he is in some ways me, after having taken the long way around. In other respects, however, I've had my own share of things that have made us distinct. The name Gardener, by the way, is a reference to Gerald Gardener, a major figure in defining twentieth century Wicca. I managed to pay tribute to the previous names by having Scott Gardener use both the Fenris name and my own name Coolidge as pseudonyms at various points.
The first 50 versions changed one right after the other very quickly as my own life plans changed. When I thought I would go to University of Texas, the story was set in Austin. When I thought I could get into the Texas Academy of Math and Science, I set the story there in Denton. When I considered moving to an apartment, that, too, made its way into the story. By version 60, however, I had settled into a fairly certain future timeline, with the exception of which medical school I'd be attending. In October of 1991, my father and I had a rather bad falling out, lasting three days. We managed to work a truce and eventually settle our differences peacefully. I decided, however, that that would be the turning point for Scott Gardener to follow a different path. He at that point left home and moved into an apartment complex.
Version 70 has an additional element none of the previous ones had--September 11th. Like nearly everyone else in America, I was quite shaken by the events. It was significant enough to get a scene.
The emotional impact of the terrorist attacks and the fall of the World Trade Center are paralleled in another story of mine, Genetic Wars: New World Order. It is set in 2076, twelve years after the Cozaliens attack Earth. The Cozalien invasion itself may some day be detailed in the as-of-yet unwritten story concept for Lycanthrope II. I had imagined for a number of years humanity being shaken as bolts rained down from the sky, devistating city skylines, a way in my mind of venting my frustration at human arrogance towards other animal life. I felt very uneasy in the spring of 2000, when my wife Cathey described experiencing personally a spectacle not unlike that, when she was across the street from a tornado that critically damaged the Bank One Tower in Fort Worth's skyline. Then, when the World Trade Center collapsed, I saw footage from the streets of New York virtually identical to what I had imagined in that part of the story. It changed very dramatically my perspective about the subject matter.
Unfortunately, September 11th did more than change New York's skyline. It set in motion a beefing of security and establishment of new government powers. George Lucas' new Star Wars movie depicts Chancellor Palpatine asking the Galactic Senate for additional powers to deal with the threat of a fringe seperatist movement; longtime Star Wars fans know Palpatine to be the evil Emperor in Return of the Jedi, to whom even the legendary arch-villain Darth Vader refers as master. Within my own story Lycanthrope, the beefed up security allows Blue Sentinel to become more aggressive, forcing Scott Gardener and Elodea to flee from their human lives, living in the woods as animal suvivalists.
I am fearful for what can happen to us, here in America in this world. George W. Bush and his administration, as well as politicians like John Ashcroft and Dick Chaney, are already engaging in inquisition-like activities, for the sake of a "war on terrorism" with no definitive exit strategy. Since the first draft of this article was written, that campaign has expanded to include the invasion and occupation of Iraq in spite of the fact that they were not directly involved in the September 11th terrorist attacks.
The current climate here in the U.S. is one in which anyone who challenges the actions of the present presidential administration is accused of being "un-American." A similar purging happened fifty years ago to hunt out suspected Communists, many of whom were harassed, fired from their jobs, and even expelled from the country. Before then, the churches of early Renaissance Europe held a similar hunt for werewolves, leading to horrific events, such as the executions of Gilles Garnier and Peter Stump.
Version 70 is the officially sanctioned version as of the year 2002, and I have no plans for any further revisions. But, I have said that before, about 69 times. With Version 70, however, I accomplished something done with no previous version--I finished it. Many versions were never written down at all, and are lost forever. Of version 8, I can say safely that you're not missing much.
I define a new version of Lycanthrope as a version that is different enough in plot elements to qualify as a different interpretation. In the change from version 69, I added most of the scenes taking place in Wyoming and Yellowstone. In version 69, they were brief and set non-specifically in the northwest. In version 69, Scott and Elodea moved to Alaska at the end; this aspect was discarded, as it did not square with their being actively involved in the L.G.F.F. in the Genetic Wars. Also, in version 70, I have greatly expanded the story elements involving Scott's and Elodea's captivity under Blue Sentinel. Up until then, they were simply tortured, experimented on for awhile, and then they escaped.
"Version 70 beta" was the title of the initial draft, thrown together with placeholder text and incomplete scenes. When a first complete draft was finished, I referred to it as "Version 70.1." Between that version and 70.2, I fleshed out and rewrote several portions, as well as patched some spelling errors and the like, but I did not substantially change the story itself. By version 70.3 I had introduced a few new elements. Scott Gardener's sister and parents were given a few more scenes, but the most significant change was the addition of a sequence in which Scott and Elodea are abducted by the Cozaliens, checking on Elodea's progress towards infecting humanity with lycanthropy. I felt this scene important in establishing more about the Cozaliens and their nature as ground work for future story concepts.
One contribution from my sister, sadly enough, never could be tied into the current version, though it has been in previous ones. She had a very dramatic dream a few years ago, in which werewolves stormed the house where we and our parents lived. I appeared to her afterwards, and from my mannerisms she deduced to her horror that I was one of them. I had entertained the idea of using this as a dream sequence, but I already had several dream sequences, and I did not want them dominating the novel.
The later stories created after the early versions of Lycanthrope were useful references not only for continuity's sake, but also as a springboard for expanding the story. In the Yellowstone scenes, Scott and Elodea struggle to maintain a sense of human identity as their prolonged life away from humans causes their lycanthropy to pull them towards a feral state. This portion of the novel was based on aspects of lycanthrope physiology explored in the mostly unwritten Galactic Empire Lykosa. In a play-by-mail game run by Genetic Wars co-author Thomas Weigel, I portrayed the Lykosans, a race of wolf anthropomorphs. As they encountered races Thomas created, it became clear that they were in an alternate timeline of the Genetic Wars story, so I decided that the Lykosans would discover that they were in fact werewolves, who simply lost their human form and forgot about it through tens of thousands of years. One quirk of the Lykosans is that when under prolonged stress or isolation, a Lykosan would revert to a feral state. I realized that if that were the case, then Scott and Elodea would probably both have that same problem, and that it would come up when they had to live in the wild.
I've made several references already to the Genetic Wars. Lycanthrope was only the beginning of a long story arc. The storyline goes on to chronicle the expansion of humanity into space following an alien invasion. Details of these stories and other ongoing additions to the timeline can be found in the Links portion of this site.
The novel Lycanthrope to this day still goes by a working title. So far, I've yet to come up with anything better, even after seventeen years. Not surprisingly, I've discovered another story online by the same title, and a movie Lycanthrope unrelated to either is out there somewhere on VHS, though I have yet to see it. "Genetic Wars" also a working title. I know it sounds a bit cheesy, but if George Lucas can get away with titles like Attack of the Clones--though I do grant that I have yet to get anywhere near that good. Bear with me; I'm working on it.