In a situation like Jennifer's, the minutes going by one by one waiting to see if they would be her last as a human, to see if this Hail Mary of an attempt would work out would almost been as agonizing as the pain the retrovirus was putting her through. "Would have", because the answer to the question of whether it worked came all too quickly.
Barely a few minutes after the hastily thrown-together cure was injected, the heat and pain Jennifer had come to dread returned in force all over her body, causing her to double over onto the counter again and letting out a pained cry. No. No no no this couldn't be happening! Had they done something wrong? Was a step or two missed somewhere in their haste?
...Had she signed her own worse-than-death warrant?
"Doctor Xiao!" Madeleine's voice shared in the shock, horror, and rising despair at seeing her mentor paying the price for their haste. Through the pain, Jennifer managed to get out one last "Run!" to her student before it overwhelmed her, unable to focus on anything else but what might have been her last lucid moments as Dr. Jennifer Xiao, geneticist.
It started with her arms, which seemed to burn like someone was running blowtorches along their lengths. Jennifer dared to peek her eyes open for a moment to look at them -- the horror at seeing her arms darken, thin, and gain a bony-like surface entirely too similar to those of her antennae would soon be surpassed by seeing her hands, forced open by the pain, changing in structure as the index and middle fingers lengthened to twice their normal length while her ring and pinky ones shrunk away. A similar pain coming from her legs and a feeling of her shoes being more and more cramped until they suddenly weren't would be all she needed to know about the fate of those limbs.
The shirt she was wearing would soon feel too tight, the pressure coming from her sides pooling into pain and causing Jennifer to clutch them with her suddenly alien arms in a vain attempt to hold them back, a futile gesture of trying to stop what seemed like bony growths on either side of her, growths that pushed out and lengthened, bending and forming into a second pair of arms (if they could be called that, seeing how similarly insect-like they were to the ones she had trying to hold them back). Her original arms remained cross across her chest paraluzed with shock and pain, meaning that her forearms' feeling of soft tissue pooling and growing on her chest verified that underneath the straining shirt and underneath her honey-producing breasts a second set was forming, also growing to match the originals' new size. There would also be pressure coming out of her back, building more and more like something was trying to break out. It would be too much for the shirt, which would finally give out and tear into pieces, exposing all four honey-producing organs to the air.
The pain and heat then arose in her head, and Jennifer had to shut her eyes just trying to stop it from overwhelming her senses. Not that that would stop her disorientation from her suddenly seeing the lab again despite trying to shut her eyes, which now seemed to look...different. Was that UV box's light always that vivid? And the pain in and around her mouth...whatever part of Jennifer that was still human didn't even want to venture to guess. Down below, the dull pressure that had been building in her buttocks and the rest of her lower region seemed to explode all at once, the pang of pain accompanied by the sounds of tearing cloth.
Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, the almost-crippling pain and searing heat began to subside, enough for Jennifer to regain her orientation and spatial awareness. There was evidence that her thrashing about from the pain made something of a mess of the lab now -- overturned lab chairs, damaged beakers, a large dent on the lab bench -- though whether any of the blood samples or retroviruses were caught in the crossfire, she saw no evidence.
What Jennifer did see was the mirror, still usable. Her altered eyes would finally get to see the other physical changes that she only felt before. Her eyes were now much larger than before, becoming compound like a bee's -- an astute look would also reveal three smaller eyes lined up above what remained of her nose. Her mouth now had a pair of apid mandibles. A turn to the side would reveal a pair of large wings coming out of her back, though it wasn't certain yet whether she could physically fly off the ground with them yet or if they needed more time. An elogated bee's abdomen was coming out of the seat of her now-ruined pants, reaching nearly to the floor and tipped at the end with what looked like a stinger; the size of it forcing her posture to bend slightly forward. Her torso was covered in what would best be described as yellow and black fuzz, though it would do nothing to hide the fact that she now had four arms with three long fingers at the end looking more like claws, and four large breasts that continued to produce and store honey from whatever her body could metabolize having gone so long now without sugar.
With the situation having gone so wrong now, one could only wonder what had happened to the last bastion of humanity Dr. Xiao had to place her fading hope in, or what Madeline was doing as she tried to process what she had seen happen to her mentor...