Katherine's key jammed against the lock to her apartment door as she fumbled with it in her shaking hands. The brown paper bag of groceries balanced with one arm against her hip threatened to topple, and Kate's twisted posture barely kept it upright. A million terrified, adrenalin fueled thoughts fought for dominance under the buzzing neon light as she desperately tried to act casual in the face of having completely lost her mind. Growing more and more desperate, she fought with the lock, trying to get the key to fit at all let alone turn, until gravity finally won out in its onslaught on her precarious tower of consumables. They all fell to the floor with an anticlimactic thud and clatter. Kate swore as one of the apples skittered just under the railing and over the ledge, hitting the dark pavement below with a wet smack.
Defeated, Kate turned from the rubble of her groceries, and focused on getting the key into the lock. After a couple more tries, it slipped in easily, as if nothing had ever been amiss. Kate swung open the door, and was about to begin gathering her groceries, when something stopped her dead. A siren, from a police car, or maybe an ambulance sounded far off in the distance. It echoed over the rooftops of low rent apartment complexes and office buildings, a call in the night that she must have ignored a thousand times before. But not this night.
She looked down to the bulge in her pants pocket. Her dangerous cargo felt heavy and conspicuous, like eyes were watching her suspiciously.
Kate quickly gathered up the rest of her groceries and went inside, locking the door behind her.
--
The clip stood upright, resting on its base, on the far end of Katherine's kitchen table. The light above bathed everything in the small space in slight yellowish hues. Everything but the clip, which cast an eerie green light around it. Kate simply sat and stared at it, admiring its technical aesthetics as much as considering the madness she had gotten herself into. She wanted to tell herself that she had gone temporarily insane, that she couldn't say what came over her and didn't understand how she had gotten to this point, but she was having a hard time lying to herself. The truth was, she had known exactly what she was doing. The gunshot rang out from the rooftop above her head, and a glowing object, like a fallen star, fell neatly into the garbage can beside her. Kate had recognized it immediately, understood the danger and realized fully that she should have called the cops and run. She pushed these thoughts aside, consciously, intentionally, and reached out to grab the long, square container without hesitation. Then she ran, and preyed no one had seen her.
Kate honestly couldn't recall when the sirens had started. Her rush back to the apartment was a blur of adrenalin and paranoia, and the first thing she could honestly remember between now and then had been the siren just now in the distance. They could have been going off constantly, and she wouldn't have noticed. She should have called the cops. She should have turned it in, but she just stared into the acrylic window in the side of the long, thin clip, watching the mesmerizing glow of the liquid inside, and she couldn't force herself to do it. The thought of it made her heart race. A full clip.
--
Ramay Chemical was almost literally a drug company gone mad. At the turn of the century, they produced a miracle drug called VΔnara, with nearly inconceivable implications. It could do to human flesh what nothing in the history of mankind could even hope to achieve, but it was horribly unstable. Every attempt at utilizing it caused uncontrollable and bizarre mutations in the subject. Still, the company pushed forward, realizing their creation could potentially yield a technology that could cure no end of suffering and ailments, possibly including death. They spent more than a fortune on the project, went bankrupt several times, getting bailed out by the government and even other companies interested in the result. They were bought and sold almost constantly, but continued their research relentlessly. But as years grew long, the company turned out nothing but controversy and outrage against amoral testing on animals. Ramay Chem was finally blacklisted for good when it came to light that they had been doing human testing for several years as well. They started with cadavers, but quickly moved up to live subjects, criminals sentenced to death. Pictures were revealed with reams of paper documenting human atrocities, created by their unstable drug. Ramay Chem should have died then and there...
...but it didn't.
They moved underground, out of the country, stating at one point that the search for an end to human suffering, in total, was worth any price. Their drugs began circulating on the black market. The smallest hit cost a fortune, and they were unstable and often had terrifying results, but the effects were just as notorious. The rumor was that it changed you, mentally and physically, but not the same way each time. It depended on the kind of person you were, on the deepest recesses of your soul. The PSAs, however, said it would almost certainly kill you, and at best deformed you for life. Both were right, and Kate had a full clip sitting on her table.
Without warning, and with much the same push of willpower she had used when grabbing the thing in the first place, Kate stood up from the table. She took the clip, and tucked it away in a cabinet behind the flour. Then she closed the cabinet and began fixing herself something to eat, pushing all thoughts of the thing from her mind. She had to do something else for a while. Something normal. Something sane.
--
Katherine was by no means a criminal. She held a dull and normal office job at a technical firm, converting vague and contradictory instructions into code for her pointy haired bosses, and generally muddling through until the weekend. Nor was she a particularly outgoing girl. She made a point of maintaining a polite and regular exterior, even in the company of her wilder friends, while cultivating a more than exotic collection of fetishes in private. That was how she heard of VΔnara.
VΔnara had sparked more than a few fetish stories. Standard fare; people growing large breasts, changing gender, growing fifty fee tall, with a few more creative ones thrown in the mix. It was the supposedly true accounts of what VΔnara actually did that had really caught Kate's attention, but that was where it ended. Kate wasn't a criminal. She wasn't stupid enough to get into hard drugs, and she certainly didn't have several thousand dollars to blow on it, so she stuck with fantasy.
At least until tonight, she reminded herself.
The thought sent shivers through her.
She fixed herself some instant ramen, absentmindedly petting her cat Augustus until it was done. She decided she needed to cool down for a bit, get herself thinking clearly before she decided what to do with the package waiting patiently in her kitchen. The adrenaline was sure as hell not letting her get to sleep any time soon, so she decided to blow some steam before taking a long, hot, bath. She had work in the morning, but wasn't so concerned with staying up late right now.
Kate put her groceries away, then peeled her coat off and tossed it carelessly on the couch. Underneath the coat, she wore a white polo, crumpled and worn from a long day at the office. She loosed her straight black hair from it's bun, letting it fall to brush against her shoulders, and kicked off her shoes. Heading down the hall to her room, she pulled off the crumpled shirt, revealing her curving waist and small breasts beneath a lavender bra. She was a little short at 5' 2", but had strong hips and long legs for her frame.
Sitting down at her computer, she plugged in her external drive, quickly navigating to her fetish folder, specifically avoiding anything related to VΔnara, or mutations of any kind. She eventually settled in with a video of a girl being wrapped up in living latex goo, one she normally avoided thanks to the cheesy dialogue, which she muted, but at this point Kate felt so hot she could get off to pictures of elongated vegetables. She was finally getting into a good flow, rubbing her clit with one hand, while using the other to reach inside with a marker to stroke her g-spot, when a sudden and sharp rapping on the door startled her so much that she yelped and jumped out of her chair, landing hard on the floor.
Startled, Augustus screeched and mauled her hand from under the futon, causing Kate to cry out again, when she heard the rapping again, as well as muffled shouting.
"Are you ok in there?"
"I..." Kate started, confused and suddenly extremely nauseous, "I'm fine just... Just hold on."
