Chris blinked blearily at the werewolf doctor. Her ears twitched slightly. "Sorry, a what?"
She flipped the sheet on her clipboard and nodded at him, "That's what it says, Strain Gir-tab-lee-lu. Sorry, I don't know anything about Babylon. This is a very uncommon one!" She continued to read from the sheet as I slumped against the paper covered examination table that dominated the wall of the room. "Girtablilu, or aqrabuamela, have the head torso and arms of men and the body of a scorpion. In the Epic of Gilgamesh they are described as having heads that touch the sky, awesome terror and a "glance of death". "
She looks up at Chris and took in his figure. Chris blushed slightly aware how he stacked up. At Thirty he was not especially tall and had put on a little extra weight. A slightly receding hairline gave him a sharp widow's peak, and he hadn't been to the gym in long enough to forget which one he had a membership at.
"There have been three known Girtablilu cases. Two cases were killed by military forces-" The doctor glanced up, "This will have been before we had early detection and preserves." She turned back to the sheet, "The third, equipped with special protective eye wear has lived a secluded life in the greater Bhutan province. Due to their classification as A1-B5-C3-D0, they merit special observation but other than the aforementioned eye wear, few precautions." She paused, wrinkling her black tipped nose. "Sorry, are you familiar with the Forester classification system? We use it a lot here. Each letter and number is a measured quality, lower typically means more problematic for living. A 1 means the form is extremely abnormal, but not a zero. Zeros typically break physics in some way other than just size. B 5 means there are no expected behavioral changes and C 3 means only a moderate amount of cautionary accomdations are needed to keep your new form health. D0 means extremely dangerous. Sometimes folks drop the letters, so you could be a 15-30."
Chris nodded slowly, "That's... a lot. What are you, if you don't mind me asking?"
The doctor smiled "A4-B2-C4-D3, 42-43."
Chris nodded, working his way through it. "Okay. So I guess that's what I'm going to be. Some giant scorpion man?" He laughs, "That almost sounds goofy."
"It might help to think of it that way. We've all had to develop a pretty robust sense of humor here."
Chris grinned, "I can see how that might be the case. You said I can wait two weeks and have it happen "naturally" or force it sooner, right?"
"Correct. Well, technically we can trigger an accelerated change at any point between now and then, but it's a big hassle to chase you around for two weeks and make sure there are no complications."
Chris sighed, "I'd really hoped to like, enjoy being human for a while longer and find a place to stay."
"Sure, but there's a cost. Sorry, just the way the world is."
Chris glumly nodded, "Well, I guess I'll say goodbye to all this. I'll take the accelerator now, if you please."
The doctor made a quick note on her sheet and walked Chris through the process. Moving to an appropriate facility, really a re-purposed high school football field, a quick examination and then a shot, followed by two days of extreme discomfort. Chris could feel his anxiety spiking at the discussion but managed to tamp it down. He and the doctor loaded into a van with a case of equipment, a team of nurses waiting for him there. On the way he asked her, "So do you like it here?"
"Frankly? Yes." She was a rather aggressive driver, and Chris found himself holding tight to the handle above the door to the van as she swerved around a tractor. "We're kind of...well, contained here, which is nice enough since not everyone handles the transition well and for D0s especially we have to have some controls. But lots of people here end up freeing themselves from old habits. I mean, racism and sexism are alive and well but more and more people are independent here. Elves barely need to eat and a single Hutaur provides enough milk for a hundred people. We do pretty well, and no one wants any of our contaminated crops. It's rather nice. Most everyone lives in a couple hundred small communities with decent amenities, with only one or two big cities."
Pulling up at the football field Chris was feeling much better, allowing himself to be led to the center and stripped, anxiously covering himself before he was given a paper gown by the nurse, a man with a shell like a tortoise. The shot was a tiny thing, hardly portentous, and he wasn't strapped down, just isolated with a few wireless sensors stuck to his body. But the feeling after the shot was intense. A full body ache, like a terrible flu, wracking him. He curled up slightly as the doctors and nurses stepped away, seeming to recede from his vision.
He felt his skin aching, stretching as he grew and grew, trying to keep from thrashing with discomfort. He could feel the turf underneath his shoulders splitting as they dragged over it and he hazily watched as his eyes crept towards a ten yard line even as his head seemed to hover off the ground, growing larger. His hands wrapped tight around his body's tubby belly were growing with him and he held one out, marveling as it seemed to grow to dwarf the world around. But by far the most intense feeling was from his waist down. He could not see it but could feel the skin growing thick and dull, feel numerous appendages twitching as they grew, feel his genitalia receding behind armored plates and disappearing. He panted, eyes swimming with dancing stars as he continued over the course of aching hours to grow and change. At last he could not hold himself together and fell to sleep as the last changes passed over him.
When he awoke he saw the world through blue tinted lenses, the protective eye wear the doctor had mentioned. He shakily tried to stand and then shuddered in pain as his new body refused to bend the way he expected. "Woah there!" The doctor's voice.
Chris turned his head towards her and blinked, she was so very tiny. "Woah there Chris. You can't sit up like that. Look down."
Looking down his prostrate body Chris saw where his pale tubby torso seemed to blend into the black carapace of an immense scorpion, on its back. He experimentally moved his legs and the wriggled, tried his pincers and had no problem controlling those. Even the immense tail obeyed his will. To stand up he carefully rolled over and lifted himself off the ground, bending up the opposite way he would have as a human. His scorpion body was relatively low to the ground, maybe eight or nine feet, but his head was a good thirty feet above that. He shivered slightly a spoke, voice now a resonant boom.
"Wow. Do you have any shirts in thirty-xl?"
The doctors voice, small and distant, made Chris crane his head to hear. "A few! You're not the only giant around. How do you feel?"
"Sore. Like I need to use the restroom but-"
"Sorry, should have mentioned. You're lower body is a bug. You don't uh, have the kind of plumbing your used to."
"What? That sucks."
"Tell me about it when you have to get spayed so you don't go into heat."
"Oh. Sorry."
"No worries. So, what do you want to do now?"
"I think I'll..."