The creature he was looking at may have once been the snake, but now it seemed to be in the middle of some kind of transformation. He knew caterpillars changed into butterflies, and tadpoles into frogs, but he didn’t think snakes went through the same types of change into anything else. A darker shade of the sickly orange it had previously been, the small needle-like teeth were growing into larger versions as he watched, a grinning maw filled with incisors and fangs, an impossible number of perfect ivory blades dripping with thick, viscous saliva. A head was slowly forming, an elongated skull rising up from expanding shoulders, and stubby, malformed arms slowly stretching out from the distended torso bristling with rapidly expanding ribs. Its tail was covered with ridges and tipped with a fine blade-like protrusion made from cartilage, uncoiled from around its girth and lazily flicked out across the deck. Upon seeing him, or at least sensing him, for there were no visible eyes, ears or nostrils on the beast, the cavernous maw opened with an almost silent hiss, clearly a warning to Naki, and a warning he was more than willing to take heed of. Dropping the aerosol and lighter with a clatter, he spun on his heels and lurched out the showers, rushing back into the main locker room and losing his balance as he slipped on a pool of blood. ...