She sat awkwardly squeezed into the diner's corner booth, wings spread wide and tail trailing out from under the table.
The waitress brought a second order of buffalo wings and smiled as she topped up the draconic creature's water.
Of course the waitress didn't see a rubber skinned dragon, she saw an exceptionally tall woman, college aged with long blonde hair.
For a roadside diner in the middle of nowhere, they did have excellent food the alien creation mused. She had decided to take the name Eve, in acknowledgement of her future as the mother of her new species.
The diner was mostly empty, making it relatively easy to use her psionic abilities to prevent anyone from truly seeing what she was. To Eve's amusement, the waitress clearly did see her true form on some level with the care taken to step over the dragoness's tail each time she passed.
Eve felt the pleasant fullness in her neck, the network of glands inside brimming with the metamorphic venom which would create the second of her kind. She had been staking out this diner and a few other locations for days waiting to find a worthy candidate to uplift. Using her mental abilities she dug into the minds of each traveller who entered. It took days to build up enough venom to convert a human, making it important to select the most promising raw material.
A new set of travellers entered, a man and woman around 30. The man was of African ancestry, dark skinned and quite fit. His hair was kept buzzed to a shirt fuzz, and was well (though casually) dressed with Oakley sunglasses hiding how his eyes rapidly scanned the room.
His companion was a woman of mixed background; skin the color of coffee with cream, but with generally caucasian facial features. Looking closer, there was a hint of an asian ancestor with her eyes. Her hair was black and straight, pulled into a ponytail.
She would have been quite pretty if not for the bags under her eyes and lines prematurely aging her. The air of sad weariness about her spoke of a King Kong sized monkey on her back. She was dressed very casually in a well worn UVA sweatshirt and jeans, though they seemed slightly too large for her.
Digging into their minds, it was clear the husband and wife duo were both drug addicts and dealers. Tyson and Tamara were high school sweethearts, they attended UVA together and studied organic chemistry. After college they got jobs together in pharmaceutical research for GSK. They lived the American dream, and were jokingly called T&T by their friends.
Unfortunately a layoff claimed both their jobs and threatened to put them on the street. In desperation, they took inspiration from Breaking Bad, and applied their chemistry abilities to manufacturing crystal meth - and quickly became addicts themselves.
Tyson had become hardened by the experience, becoming a ruthless independent player in the drug trade. He cared for nothing beyond money, power, and his next high. He also proved to be exceptionally good at it, raking in tens of millions without leaving any leads for the authorities.
Eve debated Tyson as a candidate as the couple say down at a booth, oblivious to the alien intellect exploring their minds.
Tamara had been conquered by her addiction, and was a burnout. She lived from high to high, unable to focus on anything but satisfying her need. Eve dug deeper, looking for who the woman had been before her downfall.
Eve found a brilliant, creative soul. Tamara's secret pleasure had been to open a bottle of wine and improvise on the piano, to play from the heart and express the music within her. A shy girl, she had never played in front of anyone else, not even her husband. Eve dug deeper and relived one of Tamara's sessions. The glossy dragoness found her new body could indeed cry, the girl's soulful music was original and exquisitely beautiful.
She weighed what she had found. One was
A ruthless and creative leader, well on his way to creating his own drug empire. The other was a broken shell, who had once created pretty music. She needed to select an ideal specimen, one with the innate abilities to begin their mission of replacing humanity.