When she awoke, the remnants of the strange precipitation still was in large, silvery drops upon her thick wintry coat and the air was thick with humidity. Nimueh blinked a few times, her lids heavy with sleep, and as she slowly pulled herself from the fog of her unconsciousness, she felt an itch upon her left front limb… no… her right… no… it was really all four. Exasperated, Nimueh inwardly groaned – had she fallen asleep in a patch of poison ivy? She had not seen any of the shiny, three leafed plant, but who knows how long the rain had been affecting her. If it had the power to put her to sleep, perhaps it had also altered her perception or even caused her to see illusions, making it difficult to tell exactly what was and wasn’t there. Lazily, the she-wolf stayed on her side and brought one of her hind limbs forward to scratch at what she was sure to be contact dermatitis on her forelimbs. She knew she shouldn’t itch, but more than that knew that she could make a poultice to coat her limbs to take away the itch and prevent it from spreading further. Now, where was the last patch of jewelweed that she had seen? It certainly did not grow in Uyaraut…

Nimueh froze as soon as the claws on her hind limb made their first full connection with her limb, for instead of her claws contacting flesh, instead of hair fluffing in between her toes, there was nothing but scale. She did not look for a few moments, trying to think of any plant or condition that would suddenly make all of her hair fall out and cause her skin to harden into scale, but she could not think of anything that would do that. Hesitantly, her milky white pools shifted as she arched her neck up to peer down at her legs, and was shocked to find vibrantly bright scales curving up her limbs, as if each of them were a snake itself. A bright strip of cyan blue ran up both the dorsal and palmar aspect of her front limbs and the dorsal and plantar aspect of her hind limbs. And then, on either side of each of the cyan dorsal stripe, navy blue started to dip backward, making a zipper pattern with the rose that started on either side of the back cyan stripe. Nimueh stared at it for a few minutes, and then began to chuckle. Before long, the chuckling turned into great guffaws and she was on her side again, tears rolling out of both of her eyes, staining the hairs on her face. It wasn’t funny, not really, it sucked, it really did. Already, life had dealt her the shittiest cards that it could have – it had cursed her with her genetic disease that altered the way her sinews were stitched together making it easier to be injured and making it more difficult to heal. Then it had dealt her the card of abandonment with her parents abandoning her just after her eyes had opened and her ears had become auditory. And then there had been the murder of her adoptive parents, the betrayal by the first varg she had ever loved, and the exile. Skip a few years and lots of other painful memories, and more recently her pack had been stolen away by a tyrant… and now this? It was so cruel, so terrible as to send her into this fit. Once her sides stopped heaving, her laughter subsided, she caught her breath and just laid on her side for a few moments. “Well… fuck. Why not I guess.”

Mutation: Vipera Tier 1
Species: Red Sided Garter Snake
Word Count: 613