Chapter #3Strange Symptoms by: BeeJay   It was at the Arrival Day celebration when we got our first clue what had happened.
I was having fun with all my friends at the festivities; even with Sarah Douglas, who had had to sneak in: her mother didn't seem to like the Metaturians for some reason. It was a hot day, so we were all drinking big cups of soda. We were sitting down. And I was bothered by this persistent itch, right in the middle of my chest.
As I started my second cup of soda, I started having trouble focusing my eyes. It was like, whatever I was looking at, there were suddenly two of them. I shook my head, hoping to clear my vision, but no such luck.
"Are you okay, Rennie?" asked Missi Pyle, another of my friends.
"Ever'thing looksh funny," I replied. Now, I was having trouble talking, too.
"C'mon," said Susan Oliver, another friend, "let's go find your folks."
We got up to go, and my legs suddenly didn't want to do what I wanted. If we weren't already going to look for my parents, I would have said we should go get them. With Missi on one side, and Susan on the other, they half-carried me along.
It wasn't hard to find my parents, since Mom was about a month away from having her fourth baby. "What's going on, girls?" Dad asked.
"Rennie's not feeling well, Mr. Weaver," Missi replied.
"It seemed to come on all of a sudden," Susan added.
Since I couldn't walk or talk the way I could when we first got there, my folks agreed that something was wrong with me, and they took me to the hospital, with my friends in tow.
******************************
At the hospital, they ran some tests. Then, they ran some other tests, since the first tests didn't seem to help. The whole family was taking turns hugging me. What could possibly be the matter with me?
Finally, the doctor came back, along with a Metaturian doctor. "This is Dr. Olkaela," the human doctor said.
Dr. Olkaela came right to me. "Did you do anything recently, Rennie, that you don't normally do?"
"We - we played on the ship," I said. "Lasht week."
"What did you do there?"
"We wen' through the tel'porter."
Dr. Olkaela nodded. "That must be the cause," she said.
"What are you talking about?" Mom asked. "What's wrong with my daughter?"
"To begin with her present condition, Mrs. Weaver," Dr. Olkaela said, "Rennie is intoxicated."
"But all we had was some soda," Missi said.
"But you girls didn't go through the teleporter, did you? Only Rennie and her Metaturian friends."
"What do you mean?"
"I'm afraid the teleporter was never programmed to recognize human DNA. When Rennie went through, it didn't understand why she was different, so it... 'corrected' the problem."
"What are you saying?"
"The teleporter made Rennie genetically Metaturian. And, now, her body is changing to reflect this."  indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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