"You're seriously telling us you could work out how to turn us into crazy hybrid creatures, but not this!?" Joe said, gesturing down at herself with her wings. Per the doctor's choice, he'd ended up as a harpy, but as with Mike, the changes hadn't stopped there. Her auburn hair had grown out more than a little, and her plumage was that of a robin, black speckled with white around the edges, and a bright red patch down the front of her pelvic area. For someone built like a bird, her figure was surprisingly full.
Dr. Kelly chewed on her pen, frowning thoughtfully. "These are the kind of unknowns we conduct trials in order to catch," she said. "We'll need to do some digging to figure out the how and why. Offhand, I'd guess it has to do with birds and snakes both being heterogamete-female, but this didn't happen with our lizard-folk among the first-order subjects; they may have been too comparatively human for it to have the same effect."
"Buss...buT THere has To be someTHing you can Do!" Mike stammered; she was still getting the hang of enunciating with her new tongue, and kept over-compensating. Her voice was now a middling alto, but had a bit of a husky edge to it that you normally heard more on women in the lower end of the range.
She felt acutely embarrassed thinking back on what'd happened. She'd panicked a bit, briefly, but there was nothing she or the nurse could do about it; the changes didn't stop, and it was almost another hour before she was finally done. In the meantime, all she'd been able to do was sit there sucking down nutrient jelly, watching her tail grow, and flicking her tongue out to catch samples of her increasingly feminine scent, while the nurse reassured her that there was nothing wrong with being female. Maybe not in the abstract, she'd thought, but she-he was supposed to be a guy, wasn't he!? It was what he was, all he knew how to be...
"Of course we'll let you know as soon as we have an answer on that," the doctor replied. "Sex-change therapy is another avenue of research we've made some very impressive strides in, and I imagine we'll be able to offer you the choice to become male or remain female, once we've had a chance to reassess here."
"It...it is?" Joe said, looking a bit surprised. "I mean, couldn't you do that now, then?"
"No," she replied, with a slight but firm shake of the head. "We design our treatments to be compatible where possible, and we have successfully tested some of the sex-change options in combination with first-order demi-human changes - but only mammalian ones; in your case, it may be subject to the same unforeseen reaction that caused this in the first place. We appreciate a boldly experimental spirit here, believe me, but that's a different thing from mere recklessness."
Mike crossed his arms under his breasts, which he was still getting used to even having, and gave the doctor a frown that was slightly undercut by the way his tongue kept darting out. "Wha're we suppose' sho jo in jhe meanshime, jhen?" he groused; dammit, now he was under-compensating...
"Well, that's up to you," Dr. Kelly said. "As we discussed, you could go back to school under your own name, in which case we'll back you up in explaining to the administration that you really are who you claim to be, or if you prefer to complete your degrees through 'distance learning,' we can provide living quarters for you here at the lab. Alternatively, if you're not comfortable having your current forms associated with your original identities, we can arrange for cover identities. It's entirely your choice."
She uncapped her pen and began to jot down some notes on a piece of scratch paper. "If you'd like some time to think it over, you're welcome to borrow one of the conference rooms down the hall. I'll be here when you're ready; I've got a lot to discuss with the biochem department, in the meantime."
Mike and Joe shared a glance. "Uh, thanks," Joe said, "we'll take you up on that. Back in a bit, I guess...?"
Mike slithered over to the door. He - or she, or whatever you'd call a thing like this - was still getting the hang of serpentine locomotion; it wasn't even slightly like walking on two legs, or even one "leg." Legs were completely out of the picture, as far as the brain's own map of the body was concerned; the tail was more like an extra thirty-nine feet of unusually flexible abdomen, and the basic process of moving it more closely resembled twisting at the waist - in multiple directions at once, spread out across a vastly longer tract of spine - than swinging a couple of lanky levers of meat and bone around.
It also more closely resembled shaking his ass from side to side, which had him feeling all awkward and self-conscious about herself. Girl-Mike wasn't really any kind of bombshell, and in fact she didn't even have an ass to shake, in the conventional sense; buttocks were gone along with the legs that defined them, and she had no idea as yet what'd become of her pelvis. But her snake body was somewhat bigger around than her human torso, so the place where they joined up still resembled the old waist enough to draw attention to what would've been her butt.
She tried to open the door, only to realize that she was standing (sitting...?) right in front of it, and it opened inward. She was used to the standard human action - stand in front of door, grab handle, step back and pull open - but she didn't know how to "step" back like this, if she even could. "Shith," she muttered; the nurse had let her in at first, and she hadn't had to think about this.
She pulled back, arcing the foremost part of her serpent half upwards; that got her clear of the door, but it put her head near the ceiling, and her arms weren't long enough to keep a hold on the door handle from that high up. She wasn't sure what to make of that; he'd always felt a bit gangly, and it was weird to have his remaining limbs be comparatively dainty, now.
But this did at least create an opening for Joe, who darted over with her steppy little bird-gait and hopped over several swaths of Mike that were laid across the carpet to arrive in front of the door. She also needed a minute to think about it, but reached up to work the handle with one of her talons, planted the other behind her, and hauled back with her whole body, spreading her wings a bit to balance herself; she looked as surprised by how high she could reach with her new legs as Mike was. "Ladies first," she teased, with a sly grin.
Mike felt a little weird at that, but she knew Joe well enough to know she didn't mean anything by it. She slid through the doorway; it took more than a few seconds for all of her to leave the office and get clear into the hallway. Joe tried to hop around to the other side while still holding it open, but ultimately let go of the handle and kicked off the edge of the door as it closed, landing in the hallway with a quick flutter. "Wild," she said, with a melodic chuckle. "That's gonna take some practice."
"Thanks," Mike said, finally feeling like she'd settled in on how to speak like this. It was strange to think about needing to practice adapting to life in this form, but they would be like this for a year, even after things got sorted out with...that. She glanced down at herself as she glid down the hall...or, well, glanced back? She could "stand" upright without difficulty, but when she was in motion she found herself angling lower to the ground (though not low enough to risk dragging her bust on the floor.) It just felt more natural to move in line with herself; was this one of the weird little instincts she'd have to get used to?
She glanced back over herself. It was bizarre to see her tail stretching into the distance behind her, covered in dark green scales and pale yellow "racing stripes;" with the curves her body was describing across the floor, it wasn't as far as if she were to lay herself out straight, but the tip was still nearly thirty feet from her head, and her brain kept perfect track of that, as if all of this was completely normal and nothing to feel weird about. How strange; the human part of her was smaller than before, her point of view "shorter" even when "standing," and yet she felt...
Mike cringed slightly, feeling weird at even having thoughts like this. Some part of her mind, the subconscious part that at a mere 5'11" used to feel all gangly and awkward, now at forty-two feet from head to "toe" felt...large, but not in a bad way. Quite the opposite; she felt big, unassailable, the sense of her own mass a bulwark against anything that life might throw her way. (She must weigh north of seven hundred pounds, for the love of God...)
But it was hard to reconcile this instinctual sense of presence with the turmoil of complex people-thoughts going through her brain right now. Did it really matter how physically imposing you were if you were still, up in your mostly-human head, essentially the same kind of creature as you were before? A social animal stuck with social instincts no matter how not-particularly-social you felt around (most) other people, left to wonder what everyone else would make of your bizarre new form, even apart from being suddenly on the other side of the most fundamental social divide in human history?
God, it was so weird to think about that. She wondered if it were really true, but thinking back to his experience with the nurse was enough to illustrate the point; Mike's own subconscious assessment had been man (with bunny ears,) not rabbit-hybrid (male.) Would everyone around her really look at this and think girl (with a snake for a butt) instead of snake-monster (with boobs)? She had no clue, and no idea how to feel about the idea, either.
She slid smoothly back into a "standing" position as she reached the conference-room door, and glanced back to find Joe making a slightly clumsy landing from a wing-assisted vault down the hallway after her. "Cripes, you move like greased lightning!" the novice harpy said; O.G. Joe would've been panting after exertion like that, but she was only kinda softly hyperventilating, and Mike wondered how much of her system had been remodeled to suit the demands of flight. "Maybe I should just ride on your back or something; I feel like I only weigh, like, five stone right now. Hollow bones, I guess...?"
Mike rolled her eyes and chuckled dryly. "Sure, first I drive us everywhere, now you want me to chauffer you around personally. I'm not the one with wings, y'know." In spite of everything, it was reassuring to banter with her roommate, almost as if nothing had happened...almost.
"You drive us everywhere 'cause you're the only one who can wrangle that rustbucket of yours!" Joe tittered, then frowned and glanced down at her wingtips, and Mike's tail. "Geez, guess we're gonna have to park it for a while, tho."
Mike raised an eyebrow, and glanced down at herself. "Damn, I hadn't even thought about that. Are we gonna be stuck taking the bus everywhere, like this?" That...was a bit more public exposure than she liked to think about.
"That or walking...well, 'walking,'" Joe said, putting a feathered wrist to her lip with a thoughtful expression, the way he'd used to do with his thumb. "I guess I'm probably supposed to be capable of flight; wonder if I can just fly home for Thanksgiving? It's not that far to Fremont..."
Mike felt her stomach knot at the thought of going home like this, and shoved it aside for now. She turned to the door, staying back a bit this time, planting her tail on the ground and arcing herself forward so she could grab the handle but leave herself room to open it - but she paused for a long moment before doing so. There was a window in the door, and in the glass...
The creature staring back at her had a human face, framed by straight black hair; like Joe's, it'd grown out a bit, but being shaggier to begin with, it now hung a bit past the jawline. Its vibrant green eyes had slit pupils. A thin, forked tongue (red at the base and black at the tips) flicked sporadically out from between its lips, and as its jaw slowly dropped, a set of fangs could be seen within its mouth. Even with the enormous serpent body out of view, it was visibly non-human - and yet the girl reflected here was...was almost...
She shook her head, hauled the door open, and lunged into the safety of the conference room; she could feel her scales brushing hard up against the edge of the door as it tried to swing shut on her, but she didn't care. Joe hopped through while she was still getting the rest of her inside, and gave her a funny look. "You okay there?" the harpy queried.
"Y-yeah," Mike said, drawing herself up under her to "sit" atop a pyramid of her own coils. She wondered if there was a way she could huddle under them like a blanket without crushing herself under her own weight; failing that, maybe she could just hole up under the conference-room table? (So much for feeling unassailable...!) "But, ah, we should talk about how we're gonna handle school, I guess."
Joe shrugged, hopping up onto the table and perching on the edge. "Seems straightforward enough," she said. "I mean, I guess we could take them up on staying at the lab, but...not gonna lie, that kinda freaks me out. Weird enough to be test subjects for something this crazy, without living under a microscope for a year."
Mike had to concur, when she put it like that; while the people here had seemed...comparatively sane and professional (considering what they apparently thought of as "normal" lines of research,) she wasn't eager to be in a place like this 24/7. But if they weren't going to do that, then one way or the other, they'd have to face the prospect of actually attending college like this...
"Ssso, then," she sighed, surprised to find it coming out with a bit of serpentine hiss to it, "we either go as ourselves and have everyone asking us awkward questions, or we, uh...pretend to be, um, girls...and have people ask us...less awkward questions...?"