Vanessa's Interlude
CW: Graphic body horror, involuntary medical experimentation, extreme physical pain, grotesque transformation, attempted execution, psychological distress.
Vanessa woke up on a cold, steel table, sharp metal restraints around her limbs. Larger restraints, big enough to hold down a bear, arched over her body. She couldn't imagine what they were there for.
"Now, lie still, Wolf." The man in the surgical mask approached Vanessa, a syringe in his hand. She'd been sentenced to death for helping Sohelia and Matt escape, and now, she was getting what she assumed would be a lethal injection.
Vanessa looked away, eyes squinting shut. There goes my plans for my eighteenth birthday. Great. I'm gonna die young.
The needle stabbed into her veins, plunging some unknown chemical into her body. Vanessa took a breath. She could feel her heart pounding in her chest, each beat getting closer to the last one.
But her heart didn't stop. In fact, it began to pound ever faster, and with that, came a sharp, burning sensation in her arm, like that of a thousand ants biting her at once. Vanessa lifted her head, watching as the veins in the arm that whatever that chemical was had been injected into all turned black.
With morbid fascination, she observed the dark veins crawl up her arm and up toward her heart. The moment the veins reached her chest, they exploded out, the burning sensation reaching every spot in her body.
Ignoring the unpleasant sensation, Vanessa continued to watch what was happening to her. A sudden shock of excruciating pain shot through her, but Vanessa bit back the scream, forcing herself to keep watching. Her skin seemed to be boiling as bits of plum-colored armor stabbed out of her arm, covering her natural complexion until she could barely see it anymore.
Vanessa bucked against her restraints, feeling them loosen around her quickly-altering limbs. With one final jerk, she was able to break free. The upper restraints seemed much closer, and it was clear that Vanessa's body was significantly larger than she'd believed.
Suddenly, an alarm went off, the room suddenly flooding with some kind of gas. Vanessa slammed her body weight into the door, the metal significantly denting from her assault. But what was more important was that the deadbolt snapped in two, leaving Vanessa able to escape.
She stumbled through the halls, the changes having settled down for now. Her forearms, up to the elbow, were covered with some kind of dark purple, almost-black exoskeleton, as were her legs up to her knees. Some kind of webbing in the same tone had formed between her fingers, changing her grip drastically.
Then, suddenly, the pain started up again. She could hear footsteps behind her, so quickly, she clawed at the doorknob of a storage closet, forcing her body through even with her failing strength. She collapsed against a stack of paper towel packs, holding her right arm in front of her face.
It seemed to stretch, dark armor replacing skin at every point, until her elbow and knee joints snapped back to an inhuman angle, forcing Vanessa onto all fours. Her legs tore through the fabric of her jeans, the shape more resembling that of a cricket now, rather than that of a human seventeen-year-old.
Her fingers fused together, forming some kind of two-fingered claw, covered with the same armor as the rest of her arm. Vanessa lifted her head to scream from the pain, only to have her neck snap up longer than expected. She threw her head back in agony, her mouth opening far further back than any human's should, as an unnatural, demonic-sounding screech emanated from her throat, rather than the high-pitched scream she was expecting.
Her spine snapped into angles, back stretching as something pushed out from its armor, shredding her shirt and bra into pieces. Plating stabbed through her chest, taking what was left of her shirt with it. Her teeth stabbed upwards, forcing her jaw into a perpetual sneer as the tips of them stabbed into her lips.
Her field of vision stretched back, and she was suddenly aware of layers of color and light she'd never been able to sense before. It was as if her sensory input was collected into six points, three on either side of her face. Her sense of smell increased, too. She was suddenly able to smell and identify every single cleaning product on the shelves around her, and it made her feel sick.
Her body was no longer her own. Everything was stretching, snapping, twisting and contorting, taking away everything that Vanessa ever knew and replacing it with something foreign. Something monstrous.
She reared up onto two legs, forcing herself through the wall. She was bigger now- bigger than most of the young trees she could see outside. Vanessa bolted, her body taking a clumsy gait as dizziness swarmed her head, and her body wasn't used to its new quadrupedal form.
Vanessa tore through the fence around the facility and made it into the woods, away from the people who wanted to hurt her. The strength in her new legs gave out, forcing her body to collapse to the ground, shaking the trees for meters around.
The last thing Vanessa thought before she lost consciousness was that she wished that the injection had killed her instead.