After a while of poring over his lab notes, desperately trying to theorize a way to undo the effects of the virus, Darrell felt his clothes begin to grow tighter. At first he thought it was just the fabric shrinking up as it dried, but then he noticed that they were in fact tighter, and he was slightly bigger, and in fact his skin under the lamp light looked faintly greenish.
Darrell was a scientist. Having the virus reorder his DNA was one thing, but one thing it could not do was get mass from nowhere.
He stood up--and up!--and then realized he couldn't move his feet. His bare feet, where he'd taken his soaking shoes off, were rooted to the floorboards. Literally.
Darrell was not much of a botanist, but he still could recognize the planks of the old cabin as what they were: California redwood. The giant sequoia to be exact. The world's tallest tree. The virus was turning him into an ent!
He found himself leaning towards the light--photosynthesis--then decided quickly what to do. If he could get himself off the boards, and the dirt underneath them that his rootlets were feeding into, he could go stand on something where he wouldn't feet from anything but possibly sunlight, stunting the growth, at least for the moment. Trees never stopped growing. They just grew each year, more or less, depending on the available nutrients.
He pulled against the boards, straining, then his legs started to relax and he felt a feeling not unlike uncurling his toes as the rootlets coming from the soles his feet drew up and curled until it looked like his feet had nothing worse wrong with them than hard, barky, somewhat greenish calluses. He gathered up his notes into his backpack, paused a moment to loosen his belt, then ducked out the door of the cabin.
Ducked? This was getting serious.
But then he felt it--the sun! As a science geek, he'd always been one for the indoors and fluorescent light, but the sun.... Oh, it was marvelous. He quickly unbuttoned his shirt so he could feel it full on his chest then pulled it off, dropping his pants as well. They'd soon get too constricting, he knew, one small part of rational thought as he was drawn down towards the lake and paused in the middle of a beautiful lush green meadow, which was slightly muddy under his bare feet, no doubt fed by a nearby spring. He stretched, glorying in the sun and the warmth of it all, raising his hands high above his head and basked.
At last the sun cooled and faded, and Darrell open his eyes. That had been stupid. He'd better get some cover before it came back from behind a cloud and he got drunk on it again, but then he realized that there weren't any clouds, the sky was black, and the sun had just set over the trees and the far edge of the lake.
Over the trees? Darrell realized he was looking down at the trees, and the cabin behind him was.... It was....
Darrell sighed, a deep woody sigh, that sounded somewhere between the wind through the trees and a pipe organ. The cabin behind him was just the right height to make a low stool for him to sit on while he went over his notes. He uprooted himself, lumbering a couple steps over and sitting down on the roof, which was scratchy on his bare butt, and he noted that his Jeep would now make a good rollerskate for him. Until he compared his foot to it and realized it would be a bad rollerskate, as his foot was now a bit bigger. He'd wear a Cadilac now or something.
And he had a woody. His dick, easily the most spongy and expansible tissue of the human body, pointed up straight, a thick and sizable log the same way a tree might have a branch sticking out lower down.
Darrell was somewhat fascinated, inspecting the rest of himself. Redwoods, being a conifer, had needles, and these were what his body hair had grown into, though he had considerably more green chest hair than he'd had before, and his arms were extremely hairy-needly. And a lot longer, even in proportion.
He hadn't expected the virus to combine with plant DNA as well, but the hours of having the pooled virus touching his feet to bare wood had evidently done it.
He took the notes out of his tiny backpack, the straps still hooked around his thumb, but the writing was too small to read, especially by the light of the pale moon.
Darrell tried to figure out what to do.