Mike spent a long minute looking back and forth over the options she'd presented them with, for all the good it did him. He wasn't exactly enthused about this in the first place, and he had no earthly idea how he was supposed to work out a preference for which bizarre body type his financial circumstances were driving him to adopt for the next year. He glanced back at Joe, who looked less uncomfortable, but no more decisive. Finally, he set the sheaf of papers down with a sigh. "Honestly," he said, "we're doing this for the money, so...whatever, I guess."
Joe cocked an eyebrow, thought about it for a moment, then set his own stack down. "Heck, I'm pretty easy myself. However we end up, it's gonna be an adjustment."
The doctor gave them a brief, curious look, then nodded thoughtfully. "Well, I can respect your frankness," she said, "although I certainly hope you find the experience enriching in more than just that sense." She smiled to herself. "And we can definitely assign the treatments for you, if you'd really prefer; I do enjoy a good surprise."
Mike had a little flare of second-thoughts at that, but it was true that he really couldn't decide. She handed them each a stack of forms to sign, waive, disclaim, etc.; it took him a bit to make up his mind, while Joe powered on through without a second thought, but he eventually made himself go through with it; think of the payout, he told himself...
Dr. Kelly, meanwhile, had filled out a scrip for each of them; Mike glanced at it, but her handwriting was proof positive that she had a doctorate, and he had no idea what it said, if it was even English and not some in-house product code. She directed them to a pair of exam rooms at the far end of the hall, where a nurse was waiting for each of them. He spent the whole trek battling his own urge to bolt, run screaming for the hills, and find a nice hole somewhere to curl up in a ball and think of safe, sane, normal things, and not the lunacy they'd just signed themselves up for.
But he did succeed in keeping a handle on himself long enough to make it to his destination, where he was distracted from his discomfort by the discovery that his nurse was not entirely human. Mike looked him over a little warily as he handed over the scrip; he was a short, slender young man, not much older than him or Joe, with slightly shaggy golden-brown hair, out of which sprang a pair of rabbit ears covered in milk-chocolate fur. He was dressed in scrubs, and his pants had a snap in the back to let a perky little tail poke out without making the waistband ride down.
The nurse gave him a cheery grin as he looked the paper over; his incisors were a little more pronounced than usual, Mike noticed, but not cartoonishly so. "It's great to meet you," he said, giving him a warm but surprisingly gentle handshake. "We're all very excited for the second-order trials, here; it's been a real pleasant surprise how well the first round went."
"Are...are you one of the, uh...?" Mike ventured, before realizing that it was a question with a stupidly obvious answer.
To his surprise, the nurse blushed slightly as he nodded. "Uh-huh. Truth be told, I signed up 'cause some of my coworkers were doing it, but, well..." He glanced down at himself and shifted his hips from side to side a little antsily. "...I guess you could say it grew on me. Never imagined myself wanting to be this, but..." He sighed happily. "I wouldn't dream of going back."
Mike regarded him curiously as he set about fetching a box of syringes from the cabinet above the little sink; it was on the second shelf up, and he had to stand tip-toe to reach it. He was oddly round-hipped for a guy; come think, his features had a soft, subtly feminine cast, too. His voice wasn't conspicuously girly, though; after considering it for a moment, Mike decided not to think too much about it. Some people were just...built different, after all...
"Now, I'll have you sit on the table there," the nurse said, picking a syringe from the box and double-checking it against the scrip. "And you're going to need to strip from the waist down," he continued, as he administered the injection. "You can leave your shirt on, if you like."
"Are you, uh, sure...?" Mike said uncomfortably. He didn't even like undressing around his roommate; Joe, at least, was willing to respect his privacy, but it didn't make him feel any less awkward about it.
The bunny-boy nodded knowingly. "Trust me," he said. "You're going to experience a substantial revision of your whole body plan; you'd destroy those jeans in any case, and you might hurt yourself in the process." He patted Mike on the should in what was meant as a comforting gesture. "If it makes you feel any better, you've got nothing I, uh, haven't seen before."
Mike hesitated, but ultimately shucked off his pants, underwear, socks, and shoes. He wondered, uneasily, how he'd be expected to dress for the next year - cripes, if he became, say, a centaur, would he just have his junk hanging out all the time? Or would they make him wear one of those...medieval horse dropcloth things, whatever you called them? He didn't know how to feel about that.
It took a little while before the treatment began to take effect, and he spent the time sitting there feeling awkward and self-conscious and trying not to think about things. The nurse gave him a supportive smile; he had a habit of twitching his nose which came across as very "rabbit," despite his facial structure being entirely human. Mike wondered idly what weird instincts he'd get saddled with...
When it finally started, it was subtle; he shifted awkwardly in his seat as he felt a funny sensation in his tailbone, and didn't really think about it for another minute or so, 'til he realized that his spine was extending out from between his buttcheeks. It took him a bit to process that, and he spent a minute or so trying to figure out how he was supposed to sit like that; he ultimately settled on leaning back and letting it pass between his legs, which felt weird, but there was probably no non-weird outcome here.
As it gradually extended, Mike realized that his ribcage was growing with it: a pair of ribs forming along with each new vertebra, and slowly expanding outward as the next one began to form. This was merely weird at first, but it wasn't long before he found his thighs being forced outward by the arches of bone between them; his legs felt funny, too. "What...what's happening to me!?" he asked nervously.
The nurse eyed him curiously, nose twitching. "You don't know?" he asked, then gave Mike a knowing smile when he shook his head in response. "Ah - you let her decide, didn't you." He blushed slightly, as if he could relate. "Well, you're becoming a lamia - a snake hybrid," he clarified. "This is...it's hard to say normal, but expected, anyway."
"A snake hybrid...?" Mike cringed a little; he didn't really hate snakes, he didn't think, but like most people, he had them subconsciously filed under "danger noodle" and rarely thought about them in any other context - and the idea of becoming one made him feel all awkward and self-conscious. So much for fitting in back at the college; he really would be a monster...
"Yup!" the nurse said brightly. "Assuming the treatment goes according to plan, you'll have a...mostly normal human torso attached to a serpent body; we figure half-and-half hybrids like centaurs and merfolk are the next logical step after, well, folks like me." He chuckled. "For generous definitions of 'half,' that is - we don't know exactly yet, but we'd estimate that your lower body will be...somewhere around twenty-five to forty feet long, I think?"
Mike gaped. "Jesus." Would he even fit in their dorm room!? And that feeling in his legs...glancing down, he realized that they were starting to atrophy. Admittedly, it shouldn't have come as a shock given what he'd just been told, but it was still unsettling as hell to watch parts of his body wither in real time. "Oh shit," he murmured, "oh shit..."
"It's alright," the nurse reassured him, "this is part of the process. Just...think of it as recycling, maybe." He gestured down at Mike's ever-growing tail. "You're not losing anything, it's just being repurposed."
He felt a prickling sensation in his skin, around the waist, sort of like goosebumps; on inspection, he found that he was developing scales. The point of differentiation between "human" and "snek" was around the hips (or whatever was left of them,) but he had a handful scattered across his skin all the way up to the navel (which was disappearing) and the small of his back, making it less of a sharp borderline and more of a gradient. The smallest were the size of his pinky fingernail, but by mid-thigh they were about half the size of his palm - and he could see the beginnings of broad, thick ventral scales banding across the top of his pubic area.
His tail-section was already almost three feet long, and the topmost part had grown in diameter 'til it was fully as broad as his waist - a little wider, even. With his dwindling legs forced out to the sides at what would've been an incredibly uncomfortable angle if his femurs were still connected to his hip sockets, he had to lean back and support himself on his arms. Even these felt strange right now, and he almost thought his shoulders were a little narrower. For a minute he was terrified that they were going to just go away like his legs were, but thankfully that didn't seem to be the case.
He breathed a sigh of relief; bad enough to get stuck as a monster, but having to finish out senior year without hands would've been just too goddamn much. But speaking of bridges too far, he noticed the top couple of ventral scales closing up around his junk. "H-hey, what...!?" he sputtered, his voice sounding a little funny - but there was nothing much he could do besides watch it happen...
"Don't worry," the nurse said, fishing around for something in one of the cabinets. "You'll still be, er, 'functionally complete' - your bits are just gonna be out of the way, most of the time." He produced a box full of squeeze pouches and handed one over. "Here, you're gonna want this."
Mike was about to ask why when he felt his stomach rumble. A glance at the label indicated that it was some kind of generic nutrient jelly, and he realized that, with his tail now approaching five feet and his legs reduced to stubs of skin and bone, he was running out of body-mass that could be "repurposed." More than a little concerned about what'd happen if the needle hit "empty," he popped the cap on the pouch and sucked the contents down post-haste, then reached for another, which the nurse was already handing him. It didn't taste like much, but at the moment he couldn't bring himself to care.
He went through four of them before his system relaxed and cancelled the "OMG FOOD REQUIRED" alarm, but he noted that the nurse kept the rest of the box at the ready. He felt an odd sensation in his lower abdomen (or, well, what would've been his lower abdomen, if you didn't count the tail,) as if something was rearranging inside of him, but this whole experience was too weird for it to draw any special attention. At least now his tail weighed enough that he could "sit" approximately upright without having to prop himself up...
He felt a little strange, though; his shoulders were narrower, he was sure of it. In fact, his whole torso felt smaller than he thought he remembered, though it was hard to be sure when the proportions of his entire body were so different. His face felt funny, too; he thought he'd felt it shift somehow while he was sucking on the jelly, and prodded at it curiously with hands that seemed a bit daintier than usual.
But as he did, to his surprise he found his tongue reflexively darting out from between his lips; it tickled at his palm, flickering briefly in his field of vision before slipping back inside and brushing against something at the roof of his mouth, unleashing a burst of sensory information that blurred the lines between smell and taste. "WHASS JHE-!?" he yelped, having trouble with his T and TH sounds on account of his newly-forked tongue.
"Ah, yeah, that might take some getting used to," the nurse chuckled. "On the bright side, I'm sure you've noticed that your sense of smell is much stronger than it used to be."
It was true, though he was struggling to process it all; this was like stepping out of the farmhouse and into Oz. Odors he'd never experienced before whirled around him, and even familiar smells seemed richer, more detailed, vibrant. He frowned, subconsciously taking another sample of the air in the exam room; he was picking up pheromones that his brain increasingly classified as womanscent, but it was just the two of them in here, wasn't it? Was this left over from some prior patient...?
His legs were practically gone, now; he felt a pang of hunger and reached for another pouch of jelly, which the nurse was ready to hand him. The bunny-boy gave him a curious look as he nursed it, but said nothing. His tail was well over eight feet long, and showed no signs of stopping; he wondered how long it'd be, by the time all was said and done.
He shifted his weight a little, trying to figure out how he'd have to "sit" like this. His tail wasn't long or sturdy enough to coil up underneath him, yet, but it probably would be. He wondered if he'd even be able to use a chair normally, or if he'd just have to resign himself to being his own furniture for a year. He squirmed; something felt off about the way his shirt brushed across his chest when he moved. Annoyed, he tugged at the collar and hem, trying to get it to sit more comfortably...
...and froze, stunned by what he'd just felt. Mike's eyes went wide, and without a word he pulled his shirt up. The nurse gave him a look of mild concern, at first; then he got a better view, and it changed to pure surprise. "Oh wow," he said, nose twitching. "That, uh...that is not according to plan."