Awakening from her drowsy bask in the sun, the rattler slithers from the rocks to the stream. Quickly, her flicking tongue directed her to the badly-needed water.
After drinking her fill, the snake felt dizzy and slithered off to hide and wait it out. An itching was increasing like she was about to shed her skin again.
Suddenly spasming, she rolled from hiding, knotting about herself in fear and pain. Her body swelled and stretched as two then four nubs appeared, then stretched out from her body, splitting her current skin. The stumps grew longer, segmenting in two places- giving her feet and hands at the ends of long, wiry limbs.
suddenly, her chest swelled in a pair of lumps, forming scaily bags tipped with knobs coated with even finer scales. "Nipples?" supplied her expanding mind. Her new pelvis widened to frame her dividing cloaca, placing the new vent under her tail.
The human programming of the virus energized vestigeal bones in her skull, forming ear holes on the sides of her head. a triangular flap grew to shroud each ear. The vibrations she felt through the ground suddenly filled her head, leaving her stunned and oblivious to the end of the change. Scales stretched thin in a mohawk crest on her head as rudimentary eyelids formed.
When she awoke amid tatters of her old skin, she looked over her strange new body with these odd, taloned.. fingers? Her body was long and slender with a tail 5 feet long, tipped with her rattle. New thoughts and concepts buzzed in her head, implanted by the virus.
*snap*
She rolled to her.. feet and looked to the bushes, tongue flicking to sense what was there.
Out of the bushes came...