Content Warning:

Body Horror (given)

Traumatic Transformation

Transformation

Specieism

Lot of self-image issues (eventual recovery)

The beat of the club was pounding, loud enough to shake the drink in her cup with its bass beat reverberating through her lungs. It wasn't really her scene, but then that was the point. To try new things, experience life from another perspective. And when her roommate had told her about a new club opening up well.

Ashley Graham had been right there, first in line.

A nice white blouse, matching hair band, some shorts that were just the right kind of bold, and more sensible shoes since she planned to actually try and dance tonight instead of hanging back at the edges of the crowd. Her friend was already out there, swaying to the beat of the music, the lights flashing and laser light effects coming out from the DJ's stage. She hadn't been bold enough yet to take up an offer to join her, though the fact that there'd been more than one had set her stomach aflutter and left Ashley sorely tempted.

Instead she made her way to the bar, deciding that maybe she could be even a little bolder. Not stupid bold, god, imagine if she got caught taking something. But she was twenty-one as of a week ago, so why not try some liquid courage? As long as it was fruity, light, and she kept her hand on the drink the whole time (again, when you had Presidential security detail giving you safety lectures you tended to listen) what was the harm?

Though she'd only felt the first swallow of a pineapple daiquiri flow down her throat before she almost doubled over. Her stomach twisted, rebelling against the invading liquid as her mouth felt numb and too full of saliva. She swallowed over and over, hoping it was just an onset of nervousness but the nausea only grew stronger. Till it drove her from the dance floor and the lights, seeking out the women's restroom with all the speed she could muster.

The nicer club gave way to linoleum floors and harsh, white fluorescent. She stumbled at the sink, her left ankle snapping as she tripped. The cry of pain silenced as she coughed and hacked into the sink. First the daiquiri came up. Then her lunch. Then more fluids of indeterminate nature.

When it stopped she started to look up from the sink, only to pause in sheer stupefied horror. The porcelain was smoking, etched and scarred from her body's… fluids. She felt another pulse in her throat, but this time it wasn't down below, not her stomach. Merely the drooling liquid from her mouth, falling onto white surface of the sink and burning as it reacted with the surface and anything else.

Ashley's mind went numb, memories flowing back. Memories of fear and terror and being carried into noxious tunnels where she'd seen creatures out of her worst nightmares.

"No no n-no," she cried out, repeating the word as she shook her head, so horrified she didn't even notice the feeling of her twisted ankle popping back into place. And starting to stretch longer, her boot deforming around her foot as it did. She felt weak, yet her legs seemed stiff and unwilling to move, providing an unnatural form of support that kept her fixed before the sink. Still looking down. Running her tongue over her teeth.

She… she had teeth still?

Something felt wrong in her mouth. Like there were both things missing and too much of others. She couldn't tell if her gums had devoured her teeth or the acid had melted them, but in either case it felt like a row of razors now… splitting in the middle. The center of her mouth open to cold air as she gasped. Her tongue fell out.

Long and green.

She looked up.

And screamed.

Those weren't her eyes.

She had pretty brown eyes and soft gold hair and a cute face with a nose like a button and-and-and…

She gagged, wanting to cry, but those blue-tinged things in her skull wouldn't. Her face was deforming, changing into something alien. Something wrong and not her . She wanted to cry and couldn't.

Small mercies she could still close her eyes.

The darkness was comforting, but it didn't stop the feelings. Her skin is stretching, becoming numb and hard in some places and too sensitive in others. She heard the club drone away into the distance, her ears merging into her new skull as something else poked out of her head and made her whole body shudder as she felt the flow of the air through the ventilation system upon this new organ. Her human mind wasn't meant to feel these things.

No one's was.

"It's not fair. I did everything right. I didn't deserve this." Ashley's thoughts expressed the despair her body no longer seemed capable of. Though as the initial horror of the change faded other aspects started to appear that were no less disturbing.

She opened her eyes, hissing, god, like some damn insect, as she saw from too many angles and realized that she had more eyes than before. She didn't dare look up, keeping her gaze down, on the sink. The way her face seemed a mottled gray, her nose gone or turned into some bizarre mix of insectoid mandible and mammalian snout pushed out as one was bad enough. No, what had her attention now was her hands.

She used to have more fingers. More than three, pretty human things. That weren't sharp claws digging into the sink and leaving deep scratches as her grip tightened. Not even in pain now, the horrid sort of warmth and even relief was starting to flow through her. How awful was that, how much more awful was it that this… betrayal of her own flesh had the audacity to feel good in places?

The shift of flesh to armored exoskeleton flowing up her arms, the solidifying and thickening of her thighs and lower body… it felt like an itch being scratched, tension being released. The pain from before an initial explosion that left her wallowing in an almost calming haze as her humanity vanished piece by piece. As the last few strands of human hair fell from her head she dared look up again.

Ashley Graham was gone.

No one would recognize this multi-eyed insect as her, let alone as a person in general. The fact that the tatters of her outfit remained upon her humanoid form, providing modesty only further mocked her. What was the point? The nice hair band hung from one antenna and flopped onto the floor as they twitched and pulled down against her head. Her blouse was starting to tear off and reveal a strangely soft and still white, if more like chalk than human skin, underbelly of her body. The irritation in her shoulders peaked and with a rough ripping sound, of skin or cloth her still muffled hearing couldn't tell, her wings tore free and began to grow.

She hissed again, a strange pressure in her rear pushing out and then beginning to rapidly grow. She turned her head from the mirror, looking at her back side. It wasn't a tail of course, though it served about the same purpose. The tail of a scorpion by way of a centipede. The nightmarish chimera of insect and woman she was becoming had so very many ways to kill and maim. Claws in place of hands, an acidic kiss where once her lips had been, and now this. She was in every way a monster now.

No wonder her friend screamed when they opened the door and saw her standing there. Ashley heard it, barely, still not accustomed to whatever had happened to her senses but she felt the door open on her antenna first and turned to see. The pairs of glowing eyes met two human which looked at her with not a trace of recollection. Even with the tatters of her outfit still worn all she could do was scream and run. The music cut off moments later followed by more sounds. More screaming.

Of course they should scream. They had no way of knowing she wasn't contagious. Hell, she couldn't even be sure she was safe to be around. For all they knew her bite or sting would do the same to them as had been done to her. Skin hardening into this mottled gray plates over the softer and vulnerable parts of her limbs. Angry spikes erupting from parts of their legs and arms to better ward off their enemies and make them more efficient at capturing prey for the hive.

It was smart to run, to run from her. She was a living and breathing abomination now, one of those things that had crawled out of the ruins of Raccoon City and blighted the world for almost a decade now. One of the creatures that they heard about in the nighttime news, a living weapon used by terrorists and mad dictators that didn't care how many innocents their weapons devoured alive as long as they got job down. Soulless manufactured killing machines which would never feel the slightest compunction about what they were about to do, that would never regret or hesitate, that would never look at themselves and say "No more."

Ashley turned towards the mirror herself then, a newfound confusion rising at what she saw. The last traces of her clothing fell from her body, the abdomen like protrusion behind and her wings too damaging what remained after her growth. Showing the perverse mockery of herself that was left. Why still have those? Or that?

She wasn't human now, just a horrid insect.

Her three fingered fist slammed into the mirror, destroying the reflection as she cried out in anguish. And ran from the harsh lights into the now silent darkness of the club.

She had no destination, no plan. There was nowhere to go and nowhere for her now. If any were still in the club they hid, under table or behind the bar. Silent as could be. Her antenna twitched, the movement in the air telling of something. Person or rat, her new instincts couldn't tell which. But even in the near pitch dark of the club she could find them easily.

She could kill them easily.

She no longer needed to vomit but part of her wanted to as she thought about what a wonderful weapon she'd been turned into.

"Stop right there!"

"Leon?"

Of all the people to find, of all the people that could possibly have found her. She would have cried in joy… if she could. But then she saw him. Outfitted in a BSAA armored uniform, a half dozen figures behind him. A gun leveled at her. Those that had been hiding took off towards the light and the safety of the armed response squad. Her eyes caught their faces as they passed behind the flashlights. Frightened, horrified.

Disgusted by what they saw.

In her mind she felt a maddening laughter of what had been her voice while what it had become hissed out loud. She couldn't argue with them. She was disgusting wasn't she? A failure as a human. It's probably why the Plagas cure didn't work for her but had for the man in front of her. She'd been weak and cowardly and afraid and now this was her punishment.

She didn't have to worry about disappointing anyone ever again. They wouldn't expect anything from a monster like her anyway.

Her left eye twitched as the laser caught it. Only for a moment and so bright she flinched. And then it exploded a moment later from the 9mm round. Her body twisted and fell, the carapace covering her knees hitting the floor of the club. Only for the next shot to strike as true.

And releasing her into oblivion.

The floor embraced her.

Ashley hit it, a mess of limbs and blankets, struggling to disentangle herself from it all. She hissed in anger as she heard the fabric rip, then rip some more. Tatters about her body as she came to crouch next to her bed. The pincer-like claws at the very tip of her rear came loose from the cloth as she stood, stretching up and wings flexing outward.

That had been a nasty one.

She looked at the door to her room, thankfully unlocked from the outside. No one had come running so she must not have made that much noise. That or after five years the BSAA had finally decided that it was a waste of resources to follow all the procedures they were supposed to when it came to Ms. Graham's 'condition.'

Clicking her tongue Ashley made her way to the connected bathroom. Her eyes glowing blue in the darkness before she turned the light on. The colors popped back as her organic night vision faded away. The gray-green of her facial carapace gazing back at her as she flexed the mandibles back and forth, running that awful too long green tongue over and around the contours of her mouth. As much as the nightmare had provided certain details she really didn't know what had happened to her original human teeth.

Had her body used them as part of what she'd become or had the horrid acid she'd used to have been the cause of their disappearance?

In either case the acid was also gone now, months of calming, non-threatening environments having the desired effect on the stress related triggers to her transformation. A bit of elective surgery, over and over to cut back on the organs growth and eventually those glands had turned vestigial.

Her antenna twitched up, pointed at a high angle and wavered back and forth. That and a certain way her mandibles moved were what she, and perhaps that first therapist her father had found, had come to realize was a smile. The day she'd stopped salivating a ph of 3.0 had been probably the happiest moment of her life since… this. Food had started to taste like things again, and she'd asked one of the guards to get her the biggest, greasiest hamburger they could find.

She'd made a mess of herself, but even licking her hands clean of ketchup and mustard afterwards had been exhilarating. Of course it would have been nicer to have been allowed out to get it herself… but that wasn't happening.

Not with how she looked.

Though she definitely looked better. Her whiter and softer belly had gotten the fat back that her transformation had stolen away. If it weren't for the complexion she'd almost pass for attractive there. More so in some places, if her bra size getting bigger of all things was anything to go by.

"Guess I still have those ballistics," Ashley said after a moment. She'd been so mad at Luis for that dumb joke. And even now she didn't even get it. Was that some weird local sexual euphemism? And later, when his cure had… failed she'd been even angrier. Angry at him for dying before he could see what she'd become, angry for managing to save Leon and not her.

Now she felt bad about that.

He was the last person to say something nice about how she looked and mean it.

Oh, plenty of doctors had said her new, greener complexion on those wings and her last molting (which seemed to happen only when needed, another bizarre aspect of her body) were a sign of her fantastic diet. As if there was some kind of BOW Care and Grooming book that told them whatever the hell she was was supposed to look like.

For instance, what was up with her eyes… the blue was on when in darkness, but off when in light? And the amber color wasn't exactly like her old brown, but certainly different from any of the creatures that had been in the village after they swept through and terminated the remainder.

None had survived, too stupid to run or fly away and thankfully for everyone involved they didn't seem to be able to breed in the wild.

Her antenna sunk down at that thought, a sign of anger or irritation. Ashley didn't like to think about those issues as the answers in her case were indeterminate beyond the initial safety concerns. Which pretty much stopped at making sure she wasn't capable of parthogenesis and wasn't about to lay a hundred awful eggs with equally awful bug creatures in them that would try and eat everyone.

The slight twitch up and down was probably as close to rolling her eyes as she could now, but it showed her annoyance just as well to those few that could recognize it.

None of that mattered. She was 'safe', or at least as safe as she could be. Most of her worst aspects seemed to have been controlled or gone into remission. She could talk, she had some tools to sand her talons down to a safer level and while she probably could hurt a normal human if she wanted to she'd thankfully never done so or thought about it.

… the bastards that had done this to her didn't count as normal people as far as Ashley was concerned and frankly her therapist didn't have to know about those dreams when they did the quarterly psych evaluations now.

Letting out a long sigh she turned and left the bathroom. Back into the darkness of her room, where the digital clock showed the time to be a little past 3:00 AM.

"Better get back to sleep," Ashley thought as she tried to salvage her blanket and find that comfortable position for her wings again.

She'd need plenty of rest for another day of doing absolutely nothing.

CONFIDENTIAL DOCUMENT

Bioterrorism Security Assessment Alliance

TOPIC: Concerning the case of the SBOW.

Following the Raccoon City incident and the need to prevent disasters of a similar scale the standard operating policy of the BSAA and affiliate organizations worldwide has been the immediate termination of any non-research allocated samples of BOW or BOW potential vectors. While human rights and bioethics groups have been debating policies regarding individuals afflicted by these bio-weapons (the aggressive vectors commonly referred to as "zombies" most often a topic of these discussions) little interest was shown for the more refined products of these technologies which were eventually classified as Bio-Organic Weapons.

In part because the line between irrecoverable patients and aggressive vectors under study and treatment and these BOWs was ultimately arbitrary, as by their nature all refined examples of these technologies, from the viral pathogens that produced them up to the surgical and cybernetically augmented TYRANT variations were by their nature biological weapons. Additionally BOWs often proved too difficult to contain and study once activated outside of the controlled laboratory conditions that produced them. Those that came about as secondary stages of more widespread outbreaks were even harder to capture alive, ultimately making any discussion of their "human rights" (for those that had once been human) irrelevant.

In those cases where the BSAA was able to directly analyze a living or intact BOW sample that had been produced through the directed or undirected mutation of the Homo Sapiens genome the conclusion was always the same. The trauma of the transformation, obviously physiological but additionally severe neurological and psychological damage as well effectively terminated the prior individual. This was shown in recordings recovered from Umbrella facilities and direct observation of some patients who had progressed beyond the state that vaccines and treatments could provide treatment at that time. Memory damage/loss, extreme alteration of personality, loss of higher logic, and the total annulment of empathy and mirror neuron activation was common.

The conclusion at the time was that BOWs could not be classified as "human" and were too dangerous to attempt treatment or live study without conditional exceptions provided on a case by case basis.

The general termination order remained in effect without conditions until late 2004 when the first classified case of the SBOW ( Sentient Bio-Organic Weapon) was discovered.

SBOWs v BOWs

It should be noted before we continue that the term SBOW is something of a misnomer. Some lab created BOWs, including TYRANT strains have been observed to possess higher-order thinking and problem solving skills, tool use, and even a capacity to communicate with handlers and to receive vocal orders from persons in authority over them. This is NOT sufficient to classify as an SBOW under the current classification system. These "higher intelligence" BOWs are created from cloned organisms, treated cadavers, or the use of repeated viral, chemical, and cybernetic augmentation of the sample organism.

The SBOW by contrast MUST have originated from a mutation of the Homo Sapiens genome at its origin. The infection must have been administered to living person who survived the resulting physiological changes without the accompanying neurological and psychological damage that most BOWs undergo. Furthermore, so as to not include vat grown and cloned individuals administered to viral vectors in bulk, an SBOW must have been alive and a normative example of the Homo Sapiens genome within the BSAA Control Variance (2005 Genetic Testing Safety Agreement).

Should all of these categories be achieved the BOW will be reclassified as an SBOW. Policy states live capture is preferred from this point on, as it is possible that once removed from a stressful environment and triggering stimulus the increased Fight and Flight reactions that predicate much of the aggressive behavior of out of control BOWs will decline, allowing for attempted communication and therapeutic treatment. The first initial cases of successful treatment and psychological recovery of mutated individuals occurred in the months prior to the creation of the SBOW classification and provided the identifying criteria outlined here and elsewhere in the documentation.

However, SBOWs are not currently classified as human going by the BSAA Control Variance, and while their safety is guaranteed to ensure cooperation and a means of studying forms of Irregular Mutations in a controlled laboratory without the problematic conditions normally present with these cases, their release from BSAA secured facilities is not open to discussion. Currently no means of reversing BOW or SBOW mutations has been discovered and as the weaponized functions remain active irregardless of the state of the mind inhabiting said body it has been determined by unanimous agreement of the BSAA and regulating commissions that no SBOW be allowed outside of a secured facility for the foreseeable future.