To Jennifer's relief, Madeline seemed to calm down after the pep talk. "Y-yes, Dr. Xiao. T-thank you..." They both took a deep breath -- Jennifer's sounding rather strange if she was honest with the faint whistle her new mandibles were making as the air passed over them, they weren't really meant to be for inhaling and exhaling after all -- before the doctor started up on a plan: "Right, now that we aren't...in a rush, I think...I think it's safe to take more tests for data. I..." She looked around the lab, trying to spot the audio recorder. "I think now...is also a good time to make observations about my...situation."
"Yes, Doctor. I'll..." Madeleine sniffed for a moment. "I'll prepare the saliva tests before I start looking at the retrovirus."
"That sounds good. I'll make some recordings first in the back room..." Jennifer began to make her way to said room, getting about three steps before her antennae picked up the smell of honey coming from Madeleine. Or to be specific, from Madeline's shirt: "Madeline, perhaps...you should change clothes. I think my hug has, uh...left some residue." There was no telling yet if Jennifer's honey could also hold the retrovirus, and they'd already had one close call. "I think there should be a...spare one in the back room."
Madeline checked her own shirt to see what the Doctor was talking about. "Ah, right, yes, um...I'll do that first."
"Good." With Madeline heading off, Jennifer then got to work making her newest audio log. Finding the recorder was easy enough, though manipulating it proved to be a more difficult task now that she no longer had her human hands. "Doctor...Doctor Jennifer Xiao, recording twelve thirty-three AM, May 20th. T-there has been...significant developments regarding my...exposure to Strain 3185 of the retrovirus since my last recording. At approximately eleven forty-five a...pair of apid antennae grew out of my forehead, approximately...twenty-five centimeters in length. The event was preceded by pain and heat in my forehead, similar to...what happened to my...mammaries before they began to secrete honey. The event coincided with...a sudden increase in ability for me to detect the scent of sugar, much farther than a normal human. At this point, my student Madeline Leavitt and I agreed that continuing to let this retrovirus proceed would have posed an unacceptably high chance of...me becoming unable to return to being a normal human, in a matter of hours. We used a new batch of the retrovirus combined with an unaffected blood sample with my DNA to produce a treatment...meant to counter the effects of the venom. In...retrospect, perhaps our haste meant we overlooked an important safety measure somewhere. When the...cure was administered, rather than counteracting the effects of the venom...it accelerated them instead. Within a few minutes, much of...my body was transformed...See the photographs for details, but in summary, I have...taken on many characteristics of a bee. I have grown a second pair of arms. My limbs have become thin and segemnted, similar to an insect's. I now only have three digits at the end of each limb...manipulating objects has become difficult. I appear to have grown a bee's abdomen, about...sixty to eighty centimeters in length. A pair of wings have grown on my back -- they are quite large, but I have not yet attempted flight, assisted or otherwise, with them. My mouth has...grown a pair of insect-like mandibles. My eyes have grown in size and have become compound...there are also three smaller eyes lining down the bridge of what remains of my nose. And...I have grown a second pair of mammaries underneath my natural set; they too have secreted honey."
"The changes were accompanied by...a lot of pain. But it is possible that by administering this cure that accelerated my change into this...creature, Madeleine might have saved my life. Without the injection of the retrovirus encased with my own DNA, it is possible that the venom from the bee sting several hours ago would have...eventually changed me completely into a feral insect. As I have not experienced any further changes, our hypothesis is that the cure Madeline made...mixed with the existing 3185-affected venom circulating within me for hours now...accelerated the creation, for want of a term, of the hybrid I am now. More importantly, my brain, my intelligence, my memories, my...my human being appears to have been left mostly untouched. As...frightening and strange my...current body is to me, the fact that I still have my mind is something I consider a blessing. I do not appear to be changing any further physically...I still have a chance to return to normal. We are now monitoring my reactions and working on a way to reverse this process. "
At this point, an involuntary shudder coming from Jennifer interrupted the recording. When she felt a small amount of dribbling liquid one of her breasts, she looked down to see that they, almost impossibly, looked even larger than ever. The skin appeared to be stretched to their limit. The culprit appeared to be her lower right arm just brushing up against the breast while she had been talking. "Side note: while making this recording one of...my arms brushed up against one of my...mammaries, which has exuded a small amount of honey. All four have grown to a very large size and I have...felt a growing pain. I...I have tried to resist doing so for several hours now as I did not know whether it would cause further changes to my body, but...I believe I must extract the honey from my mammaries to relieve the pain. It seems they have continued to do their new function after all this time."
With that, Jennifer found several empty beakers and carefully lined up one of her breasts over the first one before gently massaging it. She could barely contain the gasps of relief and...pleasure...as the touch upon her alien-yet-still-somewhat-human organ seemed to reverberate through her entire body, the honey squirting out into the beaker and filling it up rapidly. Then the next one, and the next one. She needed six beakers in total to get her breasts' size down from "borderline absurd" to merely "large".
It seems that even though the changes stopped, her new body would be doing this constantly. Jennifer suspected she would need a way to deal with this going forward.