MermaidsTail
patreon
Egyptian Problem
🕑 Added 2021-10-26 12:29:05 +0000 UTCWoman: MJ Ranum
Beetle: Creative Commons
Jillian, after a lot of thought (and she now had plenty of time for that), decided that her current predicament started nearly six months earlier. That was long before the current messes with power blackouts and long lineups at the grocery store when shipments finally made it through. She was sure it had started that day when her husband came home running a fever and feeling dizzy. He was the local bug expert at the city zoo and had just received a new shipment of beetles or something like that from a colleague in the middle east somewhere. He'd stayed to unpack the shipment and get them into proper enclosures rather than leaving them for his assistant. Through his sneezes and groaning about joint pains (he never had been one to suffer in silence), he managed to convey his excitement at the delivery.
Needless to say, Jillian caught the cold, too. She was off work for nearly three days but that was only the beginnings of things. About two months later, she began to notice a strange rash on her tummy. Assuming it to be related to the cold and winter, she applied lotion and tried to ignore it. Of course, she didn't relate it to the hundreds of reports of people becoming half-dog or half-pig throughout the Arab world. That was over there and the government had already instituted quarantine so there was no way it could spread. After all, with all airlines and ships no longer calling at ports in the area and a military cordon to keep fugitives in the contained area, surely they were trapped there. The disease would be trapped, too, until a cure were found.
The rash, though, refused her treatments. Soon her back, tummy and legs were all itching madly. She decided that a doctor's visit was in order. About halfway through, the doctor excused herself and, about five minutes later, Jillian was startled when three men in hazmat suits burst in on her. They quickly bundled her into her own suit and began spraying down the doctor's office. Jillian was efficiently carted off home with an injunction to stay there. This was the first she'd heard of the fact that the virus had, somehow, disobeyed the military cordon and managed to spread regardless.
Her husband, bless his dark heart, decided to avoid contact, too. He quickly
arranged for a separate apartment and left her to her own devices. Of course the government made sure the people in quarantine had the basic necessities of life. Every week, a white truck would park outside her house, open the plastic curtain they'd hung around her front door, drop off a parcel, wait until she retrieved it, and then the driver would carefully wash down the plastic with a foul smelling liquid. Jillian hated that last part. The smell inevitably got into the house and she was stuck with it for nearly a day afterwards.
Jillian had never been a terribly thin woman. When her waist began to thin like she was wearing one of those extreme corsets, she became worried. She phoned the number she'd been given and was informed that the only way they could find out whether this was just part of the disease or not was to do a genetic assay. Since there was no way she could afford the cost of such a test, she decided that she'd have to live with the uncertainty. The shrinkage, though, stopped when her waist had shrunk to 30 centimetres.
The Change of Life virus (that's what the news reports were calling it now) hadn't stopped though. Soon Jillian noticed six swellings in pairs below her breasts. Over the weeks that followed, the bumps grew longer and began to separate into segments. At first, Jillian tried to hide them or ignore them but they were soon half her own length and too large to be hidden. They were also shiny and black like some kind of strange plastic or metal. Jillian, who knew that her husband worked with all kinds of bugs, decided to check his computer files to find out what she'd been mixed with. Backtracking through his image database for nearly a week, she finally found one that had the same colouring and shape as her new appendages. It seemed that the virus had mixed her with some kind of Scarab beetle!
After her six legs stopped growing, she began to notice swellings on her forehead. These elongated and divided until she was left with antennae, the antennae of a scarab beetle. About this time, she noticed that the weekly drop-off had begun to use a different disinfectant. It didn't smell quite as foul as the original one. Jillian was truly thankful for that small mercy.
Although she trie to ignore these extra pieces, it seemed they had other ideas. Jillian began to get feeling in her new legs and occasionally she'd discover that they'd twitch or move slightly. She hated that, of course. They were becoming harder and harder to ignore. Jillian found herself able to move them herself, slightly at first and later with increasing control. This at least allowed her to drop them more conveniently by her sides instead of sticking out at odd angles.
Three months after the first changes, Jillian noticed a swelling in her tailbone. It was apparent that the next set of changes was about to take place. The bump, all shiny and black like her legs, grew slowly until it dragged on the floor when she stood up. This was inconvenient, to say the least, and Jillian soon found herself hunching over when she went about her daily chores to keep the thing off the ground. It was a major annoyance. Despite her best efforts, Jillian was always bumping things with it. Plant stands came crashing down when she turned, chairs were pushed over, her furniture rearranged. Jillian hated the damned thing. Even more so when it too began to develop some feeling, becoming part of her.
As if to add insult to all the injury of before, Jillian began to lose feeling in her own legs. They'd tingle a bit and go numb at the most awful times. They were becoming strangely weaker, too. It was painful to get up in the morning and the crawl up the stairs at night was becoming increasingly difficult and slow. She felt as if she were eighty and didn't like the feeling. The changes were so gradual that she didn't notice they were thinning for several weeks. But thin they did until her legs looked like those of someone after a famine. Soon, despite all her efforts to the contrary in her home gym, they were too weak to support her.
The insect legs were now her only means of getting about. But learning to walk about on them proved a real challenge. Two weeks passed while she learned coordination for six instead of two legs. By the end of that time, her own legs (she never really thought of the six as hers) had become rubbery and shrunk to withered blobs hanging below her stomach. Changes were occurring in her tail, too. One morning, startled by a noise, she discovered that she'd raised her wing covers and a pair of folded and filmy wings had sprung out at her sides. Tentatively, she tried moving them and discovered that, like everything else, they were part of her, too.
Five and a half months later, Jillian stopped changing. She'd developed an armoured torso that covered everything save her arms and breasts. Now a new and unwanted changes began to show up in her thinking.
The thoughts were insidious at first. Although she and her husband had often talked of family, they'd agreed that children would have to wait a few years until both their careers were better established. Now Jillian began to feel the need to have a family and not the one or two they'd talked about. She wanted a large family, a huge family.
She put the thoughts down to her incarceration. Obviously, she was becoming affected by cabin fever. She wanted to get outside. Six months inside a house with no one save a bored delivery man once a week was too much! Despite the injunction to stay indoors, Jillian could take it no longer. She opened the back door (half expecting a policeman or soldier back there) but found no one. The door had been taped shut but it proved little more than an annoyance. It seemed her new legs had sharp cutting claws on their tips that made short work of even the sealing tape they'd used to quarantine her.
For a while, Jillian walked about the backyard, soaking up the sunshine. Then a compulsion hit, once so strong she couldn't ignore it. Jillian, who had never been a tall woman, was now shorter still. Considerably lighter than she'd ever been in her adult life, she launched herself into the air. Her wings snapped out and Jillian discovered the joy of flight.
But this flight had a purpose. She knew where her husband was at this time of the day. She pounced on him without warning sending him sprawling. Quickly, before he could recover, she stripped him. Mating was all that mattered now. Her genitals were now at the tip of her abdomen and she quickly brought it into play. He was quickly brought to his peak, implanted his sperm in her new body, and discarded.
Jillian now needed to find food for the next generation. Dung! That's what she needed. She needed to roll dung! Flying from the city, she tracked by its delicious aroma, a cattle farm. Dung was there in plenty. She quickly began rolling it until she had a sphere nearly a meter across. Into its centre, she deposited a single small egg. Now to hide the ball! Reversing herself, she began to roll the tonne sized dung ball towards a nearby sand spit. Once there, she dug a hole for it and careful hid it. Five more times she repeated the process until there were six new sand covered mounds in the sand. Then, her mission completed, Jillian flew off home.
The rancher was somewhat startled the next day when checking his herds. Someone had cleaned up all the dung in the fields and managed to flatten a good deal of the forage in the process. He never did find the dung balls quietly decomposing in the abandoned sand quarry in his neighbour’s land. He reported the incident and then wished he hadn't. For nearly ten months afterwards, he had to suffer the foolish questions of the local UFO nuts. They were certain that only flying saucers could have done it.
As for the eggs, they never did hatch. It wouldn't be until many years later that it was found out that only relatively close genetic matches would result in fertile transformations. A beetle was just too distant on the tree of life to let Jillian have a family in her altered form. But every spring, Jillian yielded to her compulsion to mate, roll dung balls and lay eggs. Her husband, after the first attack, moved away but the compulsion couldn't be denied. Any man would do and every year one more would be added to the list of men raped by a huge flying beetle.
