It started happening so fast, no one really knew what was happening until it was far too late.
The first reports where passed off as someone making it up.
Then the first videos came out and people assumed it was for a movie or streaming service.
Then it became yet another breaking news on the 24-hour news channels, but something overlooked by most people.
Then it happened to them or someone they knew, and it was no longer relegated to the news or something they read about online.
It had many names at first, but the one generally agreed upon by the time it got well known was the mermaid virus.
Researchers where already hard at work trying to figure it out but so far no luck.
The virus, if it was a virus, they weren’t even sure about that. Didn’t act like a normal virus. They couldn’t even figure out how it spread or who it was triggered but once it started the outcome was predictable.
The person transforming would start by feeling thirsty and have a dry throat. Then after the span of a few hours or days the next phase would begin.
A person’s body would begin to change.
Here the change differed from person to person.
Some people experienced little to no change, smoother skin, more refined features where almost always there but for some that is where it would end.
For others drastic changes would happen.
There was one case where a bed ridden obese man weighing almost 500 pounds dropped over the course of a week to 92 pounds all the while his body shifted and became a woman.
That was another part of the virus
While an equal number of men and women would transform, around half the man would transform into women. There where some cases of women transforming into men but that was 1 in every 10,000 cases or so.
There had also been proven cases of de aging, in one well documented case a 91-year-old women regressed into a 22 year old but kept all her memories. There so far hasn’t been any age progression but given the other changes minor changes could have gone unnoticed.
Once those changes where done, sometimes it took months while other times it happened over the course of a couple of hours. The final phase would begin.
Here, was where the mermaid virus got its name as people began to change into mermaids and merman. Being fully able to breath and speak underwater, take pressures that would kill a normal human where all the normal. Some even lost their ability to breath air at all and had to go full time under water.
The number of tails and scale combination was without count, some looked like your classical mermaid straight out of a cartoon while others looked like stuff out of someone’s nightmare. Almost every physical feature would change.
The government tried to contain it, to figure out how to stop the spread but it almost seamed random and there seamed to be no logic. A person who had lived alone in the mountains for almost a decade transformed while a person could have their whole family transform and they remain human…for now.
Soon tens of thousands were transformed and then hundreds of thousands. Whole communities began to grow up near the coast line as science raced to find answers if there were any. Some feared that this would be the end of entire human race and soon everyone would be a mermaid or merman.