...except, to his fevered brain's horror, Billy could not help but notice a growing - and hideously recognizable - pattern to the 'arcane' way his skeletal, muscular, and epidermal changes were occurring. The painful expansion of his hips, the itchy-crawly sensation on the top of his head, the shift and shudder of muscle and fat just beneath the surface of his skin - it all added up to something Billy's whirling mind desperately tried not to accept.

Hard as he tried to deny it, however, what had been 'merely' horrifying, the knowledge that his body was somehow, impossibly, changing... was made even more terrible by the growing certainty of what it was changing into.

Gasping, Billy continued tearing at his clothes, not content to just open them - he had to be rid of them, and in a desperate attempt to cool his burning body, shed them behind him in a ragged trail as he stumbled through the marginally cooler, and considerably more humid depths of the woods. Brambles and branches grabbed at him, and stones and roots clawed as his feet, but the minor pain of these encounters was nothing compared to the one that wracked him from the soles of his feet to the now-stubbled crown of his head.

The serum that ran through Billy's body was burning him up, from the inside out. As it forced cells to change, muscles and tissue and sinew to grow with a new template, it did so at a literally feverish pace, rapidly increasing his body temperature. Trapped within the confines of it's painfully re-shaping skull, his brain was coming dangerously close to a temperature that would lead to delirium, followed by death.

His whirling, horrified mind under assault by pain and his rising fever, the shambling, changing figure of what had once been a man named William John Hunter could well have died. What saved Billy was nothing more than shear, blind luck.

He stumbled upon the glade by pure chance - he had not known it was there, and even if he had, his fevered mind was in no shape to have guided his traitorous body to it. Nevertheless, he stumbled into the little clearing, whimpering and sobbing, his mind overwhelmed with pain and horror...

...and his changing eyes fell upon the small, spring-fed pond in the center of the glade.

He was pretty far gone - but given his tortured brain's desperate desire for relief, he - or that what had once been a 'he' - recognized salvation. The shambling figure, now naked, stumbled towards the small pool of clear, cool water.

Steadily lengthening hair brushed across the back of a neck that was slimmer, softer and smoother than it had been before. Growing mounds of fatty tissue and other forms of flesh jiggled on a still-broad chest that was nevertheless steadily drawing inwards upon itself. With each step, and conspicuous lack of movement came from the nether regions that had not to long ago shifted and bounced with every unrestrained step, but was now smooth and flat - and part of the tortured brain recorded these sensations, and even understood the horrifying implications of the new sensations. All of it paled, however, in the desire for the relief that calm pool of water represented, and with single-minded purpose the changing figure forced itself forward until it could literally collapse in the cooling embrace of the clear, still water....