Ugh, was Pam's first thought upon pulling into the driveway. Tree trimmers.

"Excuse me," she called out after rolling her window down. "Is there something I can help you with?"

There were two men standing outside her house, one assessing the tree that bridged the property line, the other retrieving something from their truck.

The second man closed the passenger door with a wide smile on his face. "No, Ma'am. Just doing some limbing."

"Why?" Was Pam's next question.

"We were hired by the owners of the house to clean this bad boy up," he informed her.

Unfortunately for him, she'd had it up to here with grinning men today. "Well that's odd…seeing as I'm the owner of the house.

"Which one? This one?" he asked, pointing to the neighbor's.

Without first answering, she turned off the car and got out, walking with purpose back over to him, her heels clicking on the pavement. "That tree bridges our property line. They don't have the authority to—"

Harleen, who had been playing in the front yard with Jo, bounded up beside her, planting a kiss on her cheek. "Welcome home, Honey."

Pamela knew that translated to 'pretend like you're human, please,' so she gritted her teeth. "Do you have a permit?"

"Yes they do," Harley interjected before the man could answer. "And they're not chopping it down, they're just trimming it—to make it healthier."

Pam scowled at the man. "And you have a license? You know what you're doing?"

"Geez, lady," he chuckled. "It's just a tree."

"Just a—just a tree?!" Pamela was horrified. "Sir, if you only knew!"

"Alrighty then…" Harley looped her arm around Pam's and turned her around, dragging her towards the house.

"It's absolutely, totally, completely unnecessary, Harleen!" Pam complained, nearly tripping as she was led onto the front porch. "What do they know? The stupid Joneses with their stupid dog and stupid sweaters, and stupid, ridiculous lawn care OCD."

Harley laughed, "I don't think I've ever heard you use the word 'stupid' so many times in a sentence," running her thumb over her wife's bottom lip, she leaning forward into a kiss. "How about we plant another one in our yard, huh?"

"Yeah, Mom," Jolene skipped up next to them with a grin. "And then we could go to the store and buy better sweaters and wear them around just to make the stupid Joneses mad."

"Oh, my vindictive little angel," Harley cooed, with only a hint of sarcasm, running a loving hand through the girl's hair.

Pam sighed, shaking her head and entering the house. Anthony was playing the piano—Bach, clearly, though Pamela couldn't identify the specific piece at the moment. Jolene was following so close behind her she stepped on her heel, and Harley was asking what the kids wanted for dinner. Separately? None of this would have been a problem, but together—Pamela felt overwhelmed, claustrophobic, like she was still wearing that space helmet.

"Hey, Mom, check it out," Anthony grinned, not looking up from the piano keys. "I think I finally got the bridge down."

"Whaddya bring us back from space, Mom?" Jolene asked as Anthony's playing grew louder.

"You're dragging," Pam observed, speaking to Anthony but looking at Jolene.

"Huh?" the girl's face pulled into a question mark.

"No, not—get the metronome," Pam sputtered. "You're—"

Anthony yelped in surprise, springing up from the bench as a vine shot out from the flowerpot by the door, sprouting finger-like extensions to occupy the keys Anthony had just abandoned, resuming the song where the boy had left off.

Pamela stared in bewilderment along with her family. She hadn't moved. Her hand had barely twitched, let alone directed the actions of that vine. She was used to being able to exercise that degree of control when dressed in her suit, but she was in civilian clothes now. Just a simple dress and blazer, no special fabric.

"I…" she cleared her throat and waved her hand to retract the vine back to its pot, stopping the music as she did. "I need to go to the greenhouse for a moment. And, umm," she smoothed down the non-existent wrinkles in her dress. "I think you should order pizza, Harleen. With broccoli. Pizza with broccoli."

"OK…" Harleen was looking at her oddly. "Are you alright?"

"What?" Pam had heard her, but the meaning of the words didn't exactly sink in. The sentence was scrambled in her mind, like Pam's brain couldn't interpret the language she'd used.

"Are you alright?" Harley repeated, slower this time.

"Oh, yes," Pam smiled, though it was slightly pained. "Perfectly—perfect." And with that, she continued through the foyer and the living room, down the hallway and out the back door towards the greenhouse.

"Umm…I think maybe space broke Mom?" Jo theorized, just loud enough for Pam to hear as she shut the back door behind her.

She moved quickly across the yard, but her fingers fumbled clumsily at the latch on the greenhouse and her breathing quickened, another wave of panic overtaking her. Finally, she did get it open, and closed herself inside, pressing her hand against her chest to feel her heartbeat as it raced.

Slowly, her breathing returned to normal, just as it had during the mission she'd participated in earlier that day, and her heartrate followed suit. Pam blinked, her skin adjusting to the sweltering heat of the greenhouse, and sunk down to the floor, sitting with her back up against the closed door.

It was at that moment that the tree trimmers decided to start up their chainsaw. Pam groaned, sticking her fingers in her ears in an attempt to shut out the sound of one of her children being maimed. But when she heard the metal saw make contact with the tree, she screamed in pain, feeling like someone was slicing her up the middle with a hot blade.

The pain didn't stop until the trimmers had presumably sawed the branch off, and even when that stopped, Pamela was left with a lingering ache that reverberated through her body. She moaned in anguish and rolled forward onto her knees, crawling over the grass to her work bench.

She didn't understand what was happening to her, but she was frustrated and confused…and the angrier she got the more her wrist began to throb. Pulling herself up and then leaning against the bench, she tore off her blazer and looked down at her wrist to see identical ridges to the ones she'd found on her stomach…but these ones were pulsing beneath her skin, like engorged veins being pumped with blood.

Pam yanked her top drawer open, grabbing for the scalpel and attempting to steady herself as she lined up the blade. Stuffing the blazer in her mouth to muffle any cries she might emit, Pam pressed the tip of the scalpel into her skin and drug it down one of the ridges, splitting it at the top. Her eyes grew wide, blazer dropping from her mouth and stomach turning as a thin, green vine slithered out of the slit she'd just created, writhing in the air, but remaining rooted beneath her skin.

Ivy stumbled back from the table, disoriented, almost like she was attempting to put space between she and her wrist. But being that it was attached to her body, it inevitably followed her, as did the tendril wriggling slowly in and out of her skin.

"Hey, Pam?" Came Harley's voice after a few knocks on the door. "Are you sure you're OK?"

"Yes! Yes, I'm fine!" The redhead attempted to sound nonchalant, but her voice came out unnaturally high. She prayed Harley wouldn't detect the underlying panic.

"OK—sure, uhh…you want me to come get you when the pizza gets here so you can sit with us?" Harleen suggested. "Or, I don't know—maybe you worked up an actual appetite?"

"You know, it's entirely possible," was Pam's "casual" response. "I just need to catalogue a sample and I'll be right in."

"Great…" Harley was obviously unconvinced about something. "Love you."

"And I love you too, Harleen." Pam assured her, rather awkwardly, as she eyed the tendril twisting in the air. "So much."

She could feel Harley linger by the door for another moment before turning away and heading back across the yard. As soon as she felt sufficiently alone, Pam grabbed the vine and held it there, pulling slightly to see if it was removable.

It wasn't.

As she tugged, she could feel it pulling from the pit of her stomach somehow.

"OK, Dr. Isley…" she attempted to calm herself. "How about we…efficiently…assess this latest development."

Clearing her throat, Pam made her way back to the bench and took a pair of scissors out of the drawer she'd left open. Gritting her teeth, she quickly let go of the vine just long enough to snip off the end. That hurt. Not nearly as much as whatever she'd experienced with the tree had, but certainly painful still.

She then snatched a clean petri dish from atop the desk and placed the portion she'd snipped off into it, watching as if moved like a worm would without soil.

Dr. Isley just stood there, starring at it, unsure—for maybe the first time in her life—how to move forward with some semblance of scientific procedure. But then she thought back to the vine and the piano in the house, and to how it had moved according to her thought process and not her direction…like it was a part of her. And then how it had felt like she, herself, was losing a limb when they'd sawed into the tree…and this vine actually had come from her, and…she glanced down at her wrist once more, seeing the identical spirals now protruding from her forearms as well. Slowly, sheepishly, she lifted her dress back over her hips to examine her stomach, and found those same markings running through her thighs.

Suddenly, her eyes snapped back to the vine in the petri dish. Grow. She thought…and that's exactly what it did. Longer, thicker…it soon slithered, snakelike, off of the table and onto the ground. Like one of her genetically engineered seeds would, but this…this had come from her. This was an extension of her anatomy.

"Mutation." Ivy breathed. "It's a mutation."

But why? And more importantly, how? She'd maintained the same physiology for 55 years, and now she was suddenly drastically different? What had been the trigger? Why would—the smell.

The smell of the pheromones she was exposed to today, it was familiar not because it was similar to the ones she employed on Earth, but because she'd been exposed to a substance from the same organism before! The enzyme that dissolved her suit all those years ago, it was the alien pitcher plant's stomach acid. You idiot, Pamela.

So this change wasn't subtle at all, that attack had laid the ground work, this was just the final stage of the mutation. Why had she stopped performing blood tests on herself?! These changes should have been on her radar! She got complacent, that's why. Got busy and distracted. She'd taken shortcuts. There had been other things to focus on besides herself, like Harley and the kids, and…this was unsafe.

She snatched her cellphone out of the pocket of her blazer and dialed Bruce. He answered quickly.

"Pamela?"

"Bruce, I need to be removed from my home on the grounds of possibly dangerous levels of toxicity."

"What, do you have a gas leak or something? Lead in the water pipes?"

"No, it's me." She told him, watching the vein-like vines pulse beneath her thin skin. "I seem to have undergone some…physical alterations, the extent of which is impossible to determine using the equipment I have here. I need an evac and a quarantine."