(Woman to Alien Monster)


Nicole went over her script for the hundredth time.  Not that such a feat was impressive, she had two lines today and then it was just page after page of ‘[Hive Queen//Hesperax screeching]’, or some variant thereof.  She didn’t join this film for its script, she joined it for the chance to work with Josh Hawken.  The guy was a nobody until he burst onto the movie scene three weeks ago, a ‘monster maker’.
Since then she had heard nothing but good things, how his work transcended CGI and makeup alike.  Nicole had been to one or two of the movies he’d worked for, and she had to admit, his skills were good.  Werewolves looked wonderful, he had an amazing scene with a woman cursed to become a raven...  But so far he’d kept his effects to fantasy.  This move, ‘The Hesperax’, was supposed to be his first foray into sci-fi and the young starlet counted herself blessed she’d landed the titular role.
The door to the makeup room opened behind her, and she turned to find one of the interns waiting for her.  “We’re ready for you on set.”  She’d heard that the producer gave the interns a list of lines, and if they said anything else, they’d be fired.
She smiled naughtily, deciding to test him.  “So... Marty, right?  What’s your favorite color?”
He furrowed his brow, thinking of a response.  “We’re all out of... oranges.”  The intern emphasized the last word and nodded, smiling to himself.
Nicole applauded and got to her feet.  Absently, she dusted off the patient gown wardrobe had put her in.  “Tell you what.  Give me your phone number in the next three seconds and I’ll sleep with you tonight.”  He started opening and closing his mouth like a goldfish and she laughed, walking past him to the set.  Looks like the rumors about Max Walters were true.  Her producer had some sharp fangs.
Though if he had fangs, he kept them well-hidden beneath a flabby exterior.  Max had used the many years of his life to finely tone his beer gut into a work of art, especially since it drew away from his thinning hair and unibrow.  His dad had an old saying: “Make enough cash and nobody will care what you look like”, and Max made a lot of money.
And yet even that wasn’t as much as the man beside him stood to make.  Apparently Josh was a little past his thirtieth birthday, but Nicole could swear he was fresh out of college.  He turned to her and flashed her a winning smile.
“Wow.  You look like a thousand bucks, Nicole!”  Josh gave her both thumbs up, and even Max nodded approvingly, his customary unlit cigar clenched tight between his jaws.  She turned for her audience, showing off the dressing gown they’d put her in.
Then, she looked over her shoulder to them.  “So, how’re we shooting this?”
Max chewed his cigar for a moment, then he grinned around it, his bushy moustache moving up with the corners of his mouth.  “One shot, one take, baby.”
Nicole gasped, turning to face them.  Since she’d woken up that morning, she’d been mentally preparing herself for hour upon hour in the makeup chair as they worked on her bit by bit to shape her into the aliens’ hive queen.  “Are you serious?”  The words were out of her mouth before she knew it, and she covered her lips anxiously.  She didn’t want to offend the biggest rising star in Hollywood.
To her surprise, Josh laughed.  “Hey, it’s just how I work.  Before we get to this, though: you signed that nondisclosure agreement, right?”
Nicole nodded eagerly.  “What was that about?  I mean, I get if you don’t tell me, but I did sign that, so you know I’m not telling anyone.”
A grin spread across Josh’s face, as though he’d been waiting to tell her something from the moment he met her.  “Brace yourself for this, Nicole.  I’m going to literally transform you into the Hesperax.”
She laughed, and he sighed patiently, like a teacher would at a problem child.
“I’m serious.  You’ve seen some of my work, right?  Of course you have.  Ever wonder how it looks so real?  It’s a little more than Hollywood magic.”  As he spoke, Josh reached into his coat to reveal a small pillbox.  He opened it, showing her an olive pill.  “This little bad boy’s going to make you into the Hive Queen herself.  Don’t worry about the effects, it’s crafted to last eight hours.  After that, you go back to normal, sleep in your bed, then we do this all over again the next day!”  He pulled out the pill and tossed it to her.  “It’s chewable.”
Nicole fumbled for a moment, then grabbed it in a steady grip.  She looked down at it, then up at Max.  “You can’t be serious.”
He scratched his balding spot, then waved her onto the set.  “Listen, kid’s got some skills.  And anyways, it’s in your contract that you take the pill.  Don’t worry, he gave out a demo earlier, and boy—”  The man laughed.  “Just take the pill, say your line, and improvise.  We’ve got something like twenty cameras covering you from every angle for this.”
Nicole sighed, but walked onto the faux moonscape nonetheless.  She glanced at the pill; then shrugged and plopped it in her mouth.  If she got fired from this gig, she’d be jobless anyways.  And hey, the pill somehow tasted like tres leches cake, her favorite dessert.  She’d need to get some more off of Josh after shooting.
She nodded, waving an all-clear to the crew.
“Quiet on the set!”  An assistant ran up with a clapper, slapping it shut.
Nicole closed her eyes, sighing.  Then, she swallowed the pill.  She jogged forward to the center of the stage, turning to look behind her.  “I think I lost them!”   She placed her hands on her knees, gasping for air.  “But...  But what did that doctor mean by I’d never truly get away?”  According to her script, that was where her changes would begin.
She blinked, waiting for something to happen.  Then, she blinked again.  Did the world seem... redder?  Her eyes began to burn, and she rubbed at them uncomfortably.  When she opened her eyes again, everything seemed to have a deep crimson film over it.  Even her neon green gown seemed to be a bright pink.
“W-what’s going on?”  She closed her eyes for a third time.  When she opened them, she could see everything as though she was looking at them through a thermal camera, except that her body was blue, outlined in green.  “This is really weird...”  Nicole muttered, holding one of her hands before her face.  Her eyes widened as the two fingers at either end of her hand started to fuse while her thumbs sank lengthened and thinned.
“I don’t like—uhn!”  She grunted with discomfort as her chest started to ache, and she pressed at it gingerly.  The girl screamed as she realized she could feel it squirming beneath her palm.  Looking under her coat didn’t make it any better.  The flesh of her front had been overwhelmed by a wave of chitin, a layer of segmented plates concealing her chest.  She grunted as two of her ribs burst from her chest, a curiously painless sensation that was no less horrifying for the fact.  The grunt turned into a scream as her arms split down the middle, forming four flailing limbs that waved wildly in the air, more plates of insectoid carapace crunching softly as they inched from her chest to her arms.
Nicole brought her right pair under control and whimpered as dark black calcite overwhelmed her digits, forming sharp claws.  Her thumbs snapped multiple times as they became multisegmented, her digits splitting at the tip to create limbs not unlike those of a spider.
Nicole took a deep breath to scream again.  What left her mouth was an alien screech that echoed through the studio.  She continued her cry, even as her lips drew back, her teeth grew out, and her face grew numb.  Her carapace had reached past her neck, and as it drew up to her forehead, the girl couldn’t help but begin choking and whimpering as her cranial plate drew higher, flattening out to a broad shield-like plate.  Her hair hardened, receding into her scalp until a row of spines surrounded her new forehead.
She scraped her talons along the plate on her forehead, gagging as her cheekbones forced out into sharp mandibles, two lower pairs forcing themselves from her jawbone.  She didn’t have a chance to reflect upon this before her ass burst away from her, forming an alien gaster.  It took half of her legs with it, the limbs tearing painfully lengthwise.  Her hips snapped, forcing even her new legs into a split.  Her feet weren’t safe from the changes either, growing a set of plating along her four sets of two talons.  She clicked her jaws anxiously, seeing that she’d lost either her big or pinky toes to the change.
Nicole raised her gaze, finding her knees had grown to spikes.  Her new rear had a pair of stingers from it, too.  She waggled it experimentally, noticing how the plates covering her sensitive backside shifted with her every motion.  Then she looked down to notice her hips had done more than simply snap.  They had slid their way out of her body, becoming another set of lower talons, longer than her first, but just as sharp.
A wave of retches and gagging overtook her, and she coughed as her neck drew away from her chest, the chitin layering on the back of his neck, her skin pulling away from the front to reveal thick ropes of tough sinew, the muscle thick and covered with a thin plating of scales.  She hissed and spat, feeling the muscles up and down her neck shuddering as she worked up another layer of drool to cover her bare gums and razor-like fangs.
Nicole gasped for air, trying to make stock of how to control her new alien limbs.  She skittered backwards, then forward, her forelimbs flailing widely.  One of her talons slashed a deep gouge in the set, and she spun to find that she’d just carved through solid steel.  She swayed dangerously as she contemplated her new stance, but managed to remain upright.  Though she wasn’t used to walking yet, having six limbs did make it rather difficult to trip.  She wobbled into a new turn, feeling her rear stingers carving through the plating like butter.
Her thermal vision made out a fat man giving her a thumbs-up, and she screeched loudly, waving all four of her arms in exasperation.  Her lower six talons mimicked her motion, and she fell back a six-legged posture, starting to get a hang of how those worked.
She blinked all six of her eyes, and spread her jaws wide as she smiled, thinking of a brilliant way to end the scene.  Nicole reared back onto her hind legs once more, raising all ten of her upper body’s claws skyward.  She let out a deafening screech, shaking her head, flinging drool left and right.
The Hive Queen thudded back onto her bottom forelimbs, and she hissed at a camera menacingly.
“Aaand cut!”  Max applauded earnestly.  “I freaking love it!  Hey, Paulie, can we get a mirror up in here so our star can see how she looks?”
One of the cameramen ran off-set, then returned wheeling out a large mirror.  Josh followed his progress, scratching his chin contemplatively.  “Not sure if that’s a good idea.”
“Don’t worry about it.”  Maxed waved his objections off and Josh shrugged, taking an uneasy step back.
Nicole lowered her head to the mirror.  To her eyes, it looked like a wall.  She clacked her mandibles, then turned to face the director, doing her best to make her new body shrug.
Josh got the point and grinned, despite the fact that she couldn’t make out the expression.  “You’ve got a few different modes of vision.  Try sneezing.”
Nicole blinked her compound eyes twice in confusion; then she turned to the mirror once more.  Her throat gurgled as she tried to flex her nonexistent nose, and she hissed as a blue filter settled over her gaze.  She could make out everyone’s skeletal structures, but her reflection was much the same as before.  She made another attempt, and her mind whirled as she was able to view the world normally once more—or at least close enough to normal.  Everything looked red now, like she was viewing the world through a colored lens.
Still, she could make out the mirror, though all it showed was her lower limbs, a tangled mess of skittering limbs.  She pointed upwards with her right arms, and the crewman hastily addressed the issue by tilting the mirror slightly.
Nicole blinked at the monster that was looking back at her.  She’d expected something bad from the concept art, but she hadn’t been able to brace herself for this.  The fangs hidden behind lipless gums, twisting cords of sinew behind plates of chitin, the multitude of spines...  She reflexively hissed at her reflection; then she jumped back, afraid.  Numb fear overwhelmed rational thought.  Instinct took over, and she speared out both claws, snapping her head forward for a lethal bite.
Her talons punched through the mirror, scything through open air.  Her jaws, on the other hand, easily snapped around the cowering cameraman who’d poorly chosen to hide behind her reflection. Hot blood gushed into her maw, and she clamped down further, tearing his head from his shoulders in a spray of gore.  She chewed twice, tilting her head up to let the meat run down her gullet.

Josh leapt backwards, smoothly unholstering the revolver he’d kept for such a situation.  Tranquilizer rounds, of course; he wasn’t one to lose an investment.
“Holy shit!”  Max breathed behind him.
The special effects artist took a step in front of his boss, bracing his gun in a two-handed grip.  “You want me to take the shot?  We can pick up tomorrow from here.”
Josh’s question was dutifully ignored, Max pushing him aside to spread his arms wide.  “That was fucking incredible!  Paulie, Paulie!!  We get all that?”
A man in the rafters flashed him a thumbs-up.
Max punched his fist towards the ground, his smile almost threatening to drop his cigar.  “Movie magic; Joshie-boy, this is why I fucking love you, kid!  Brilliant start to this shooting!”
Josh frowned at the fat man, slowly holstering his gun.  “Except for the fact that she ate a cameraman.”
Nicole crooned, holding her foremost upper talons apologetically while her lower sets of claws tapped against each other nervously.  She twitched the lower set of appendages on her chest, sliding the man’s body behind the bottom of the mirror.
Max shrugged.  “We’ll add some civvies to the film, make it look like he was one of them.”  He took a step back, framing the scene with his hands.
Josh arched an eyebrow as he rephrased himself.  “No, I mean, someone died right here.”  He gestured to the bloody smear on the ground.
Nicole scratched her thorax absently, trying to give them an innocent smile.  It might have worked, had she not been an eight-foot tall creature with chunks of spine in her teeth.
“Eh.  Don’t worry about that; happens all the time in show biz.”  Max twirled his cigar in one hand, snapping the fingers of his other.
On cue, a new cameraman ran out, dressed identically to the old one.  Max waved him over to the body to salvage equipment.  Then he turned back to Josh, twirling his cigar between his fingers.  “Tricks of the trade, my boy.  We’ll tell the papers it as a stray lamp that fell on him.”
Josh looked Nicole up and down.  She blinked, then looked up, using one of her talons to cut through the lamp closest to her.  It fell on the body with a wet crunch, and the young starlet chirped with satisfaction.
“Atta girl!  She’s got Hollywood in her veins, I’m telling you.”  Max clapped as Nicole burped.
“And in her stomach.”  Josh quipped, crewmen hurriedly working to repair the set.