Jill made her wish.
They sat expectantly, anticipating.
Jill felt a numbness sweep across her flesh. Her skin looked mottled, darker. She heard one of her friends gasp.
Her skin darkened, like it had been bruised all over. Then it started becoming shiny. bumps and ridges started appearing on her body in odd places. Her epidermas hardened, taking on an armor-like quality. She felt a strange hot flash running through her veins... her blood changing. She closed her eyes, the changes within her unnerving. Internal organs shifted; it didn't hurt, exactly, but it definately wasn't pleasant either. Her body felt cold and numb at the extremities and on the outside, but the inside became hot with fire. Acid. Coursing through her new viens.
She tried to open her eyes, but couldn't. She could see, but she no longer had eyes... not like a human has eyes, anyway. The sight was different, unnerving. Her sensory input was changing - all 5 senses - until it became a confusing mailstrom of sensation.
She "heard" her body cracking as the shifting intensified. Limbs lengthened, changed, skin turned into exoskeleton, her jaw jerked down, jutting out - it felt like it was disjointed. Then there was teh sensation of a second jaw developing where the first one had been.
She was both freezing and boiling at the same time.
Then something tugged at the edges of her mind. It was beyond description, beyond anything she had any reference of understanding... and alien sensation. If it could be put into words, the closest one could come to describing it was that it was like a cold slimey salamandar crawling up your spine and sliding into your brain, then shutting you down switch by switch, synapse by synapse... and throwing new switches, creating new synapses that were completely different from the ones that had just been shut down, no frame of reference to reconcile the two.
Her jaw jutted forward, her head jutted back. Her spine jutted out into a long tail, what were fingers and toes sliding out into long curved talons.
The emotions where there still... but more primal, they were more instinct than emotion. And the thoughts... so clear, so orderly. There was no confusion, there were only the directives mandated by instinct. SURVIVAL. And all of the subdirectives that came with that. To survive, one must reproduce. One must make a home. One must... eat.
Her body snapped into its full new glory, a queen Xenomorph. Her new mind made order from the chaos, processing her new sensory input from new sensory organs... the world taking on shape around her once again.
Across from her sat... sustinance. She would feed, then she would retreat somewhere dark, somewhere safe. And she would reproduce.
The game was never finished as the Xenomorph Queen's talons shot out with cold, calculated precision. She manipulated her razor sharp digits with the precision of a surgeon, making her first killing.
She ate.
One stray impulse in her new mind sent her strange information. Something called horror, guilt, and regret... but her new mind filtered the concepts out as irrelevant, they did not serve her primary directive, therefore they were of no value.
Her children were waiting to be born, her hive awaited conception so that they might serve her, serve life, serve the primary directive.