Gabby the Guppy (anthro branches)

Hi! My name is Gabby, and I'm a lifeguard at Venice Beach. At least I was before a strange fish bit me and I started... changing. At first I thought it was just a rash, but a week after I'd been bitten it was impossible to deny that my skin was growing scales. And it only got weirder from there. Gills, webbed fingers, an appetite for raw seafood... but I'm getting ahead of myself. If I'm going to tell my story right, I need to rewind to when I was an ordinary girl.

SETTING

This is my take on an idea pistachio messaged me. While hers is compatible with the main story's setting (with the addition of male pets, but they're very rare), this one is not. I'm introducing physical transformations so pets can grow fur or scales and so on.

I've come up with three possibilities how this could work:

1. Gabby is a unique mutation in the same world as John and Tibby.
2. Gabby lives in a world separate from the main story, with its own mechanism: pets are just as common, but instead of being caused by a shift in hormones it's a fusion of human and animal DNA. Every time a human interacts with a living vertebrate animal, some DNA is picked up. Bigger interactions (like being bitten or scratched) increase the odds of triggering a fusion and the severity of the resulting mutations. The animal's DNA merges with yours and you start mutating into an anthro version of that animal. You can still transform if you're never bitten, your body will simply pick at random from the DNA you've already picked up.
3. Gabby lives in a world without human pets (i.e. our world) and is the first of her kind.

We don't know if we'll ever come back to these prompts, but anyone is free to pick them up as well as add to the main story. This prompt will also serve as a catch-all for any plot that revolves around anthros, I thought "Gabby the Guppy" was a fun way to introduce it but you don't have to write about her. If you have an idea that involves anthros but is different enough that you think it warrants its own section you can post it outside this prompt too.