Sylvia Tisdale had a bit of a cold coming in to work this morning. Nothing to worry about, she told herself, she just had to make sure she covered her nose and kept hand sanitizer on standby and maintained her social distancing rules. That way she wouldn’t spread whatever bug she’d come down with around the office.
That said, where she worked was kind of a big hazard for someone feeling under the weather like she was. Sylvia worked for a major research laboratory that specialized in developing products that can cause human beings to biologically transmogrify into any number of different things. They made drugs that could turn you into an anthropomorphic dog, turn you into a giant blueberry like in that one movie, turn you into a muscular super soldier, and anything else you can think of under the sun. Sure she worked in the accounting department far away from the actual R&D labs, but given that the lab boys liked to commission other employees to act as volunteer test subjects, she was still at quite a bit of risk of inadvertently causing a major catastrophe just because she had a little cold.
Unfortunately for her, anything that can go wrong will inevitably go wrong, because as she got ready to sit down and work on her quarterly earnings report, a memo found its way to her cubicle. Just as she feared, she was randomly selected to test out a new product the lab boys had just cooked up. Dread weighed on her shoulders as she shuffled over to R&D, weighing her opponent about whether or not she could make a break for the exit.
“It’s just a little test, Sylvia,” she told herself, “It’s not like whatever transformation you get is gonna suddenly be contagious just because you have a cold.”
Unfortunately for her, as you’re about to discover, that’s exactly what’s about to happen, and the world will never be the same after this moment. Through no fault of her own, she was about to accidentally become patient zero for a contagious transformation.