"...it smells nice."
She spoke without really having considered the words. It was just something that Jennifer blurted out idly, and as soon as she'd spoken, her hands raced to cover her mouth. Madeline's look of worry only grew, as she stared at the mutated woman with mouth slightly ajar. "I'm... I'm sorry, Doctor?"
Oh no. Oh god no. "I... I don't..." She blinked rapidly, forced to sit down as a sensation of veritgo hit her - not from another change, but from the realization of what was happening. "It's... there uh... there must be some... metal, o-or at least instinctual changes occurring..."
The honey, the antennae, those had scared her. But this? This terrified her a thousand times more than any physical alteration. Even putting aside that Jennifer's mind was her greatest asset, it was, currently, the thing that allowed her to retain some degree of humanity through this nightmare. If she lost that, if her brain began to change, or reduce to some insect-like level... all while she was aware... her hand covered her mouth again, as she tried not to cry in panic at the idea.
Madeline seemed to pick up on her worry, as she paced back and forth for several moments, a trembling hand running through her hair. Her abrupt halt caused the doctor to look up, where she watched as the girl took a deep breath before marching straight to the lab's fridge. "We need to stop this, or slow it down... and I have an idea."
Silently she thanked any god that might be listening for the student helping her. She had a knack for staying resolute in the face of a problem - exactly the kind of thing Jennifer desperately needed right now. "What... what are you thinking?" She asked, open to just about anything right now.
"We still have the samples of our blood, right?" She asked in reply as she rummanged through the fridge's contents. "From those experiments last... month... AHA!" She quickly spun around, holding up a vial in one hand a sack of red fluid in the other. The former, was easily recognizable as one of their retrovirus samples - the other a small container of Jennifer's own blood, from several experiments they'd been performing a few weeks ago.
It didn't take her but a moment to connect the dots. "...you want to make a new strain, with... my own DNA." She reached up to rub her forehead, but quickly pulled her hand back in shock as she felt the bony protrusion. "I suppose... it's possible, but... it'd take days to develop, and how would we even test it?"
Madeline swallowed audibly. "Ma'am, at the rate this is progressing... we don't have hours, never mind days." She hurried over to another table with a variety of equipment used for DNA extraction. "I-if we can get the cells broken via lysing, then it'll release the DNA, and then-"
"-we can introduce it to the retrovirus." They'd spent a solid year trying to increase effiency by making the retrovirus able to accept new genes - normally, such genes were slotted in carefully, but if they had to rush this... "It... it could work." Maybe. The results... well, there wasn't really any way to predict it. But compared to the thought of becoming some half-insect monster, she'd take the unpredictability. "...alright. Let's... let's hurry."
The smell of the sweet sugar down the hall continued to batter her senses, but with some sort of goal in mind, she was better able to weather it. While Madeline attended to the lysing process, Jennifer rushed to prepare the retrovirus, getting it warm and introducing several chemical agents that would accelerate the process of assimilating the supplied genetic information. It was something she normally could take an hour to do, just by itself, carefully attending to every individual step with great care and a delicate touch; in her current state, she rushed and rushed hard, deciding that careful, measured, well-documented science would have to take a back seat to salvaging her own humanity.
Her assistant, bless her, was ready as soon as Jennifer was. Ordinarily, they'd be introducing a few specific genes stored in a special solution - this scenario saw the next step take the form of, essentially, mixing the bloody sample and the solution with the retrovirus together. She had dumped an extra dose of the binding agent in, hoping it would serve to further increase the speed at which the retrovirus absorbed her pre-mutation genes.
Finding it difficult to not look longingly towards the source of that sugary smell, she had to leave Madeline to preparing their frankensteined solution for injection. She shut her eyes, trying to focus on something, anything other than her craving for for those sweet little crystals, even as the blonde was rolling up her sleeve. There was no small amount of hesitation in her voice once she'd found a blood vessel and held the syringe close to Jennifer's arm.
"I uh... I know hope isn't very scientific, but... I hope this works." The blonde took a deep breath. "Are you ready?"
She nodded silently, wincing as the need sunk into her arm. The warm solution flooded into her veins, and now... now all she could do was pray that they hadn't made things even worse.