Shaula responds to Christa.
“Yeah, Ms. Rowfield, I honestly don’t know what’s going on either. All I can tell is that both we’re–”
“Ah, what’s–” Ajax interrupts Shaula’s explanation as he starts to feel a pain in the fingers of both of his hands and moving up his arms.
“Ajax?” Christa asks him with concern on her face when she notices Shaula looking at her own hands.
Shaula looks from her hands to her feet. Her face starts to get more and more frantic as she stares at her extremities. Her breathing accelerates, her eyes tremble, and her face twists into pain and fear. Soon, she panics. She pushes away the desk in front of her, sits back down in her chair and quickly takes off her shoes.
“Ah, m-my hands and f-feet are–” Shaula says quickly, but then notices Ajax looking at his hands down to his chest.
His face is pale. He can feel the pain in his entire body now become more and more intense. Then, it peaks in a flash of intense pain as if the entire surface and inside of his body were dipped into scalding hot acid.
“AAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!”
He screams for a few seconds at the unbelievably excruciating pain. It is pain comparable to if he were an absolutely heinous criminal, and Lucifer himself was handling his torture in hell along with Judas Iscariot. Then, the pain stops completely.
“Ugh… Ah…”
Ajax goes into shock as he dumbfoundedly looks at himself, his eyes clouded over as if he has already died. Shaula feels that same pain as well. As if molten iron made contact with every nerve ending in her body all at once. She screams so loud that she tears her vocal cords.
She looks back at Ajax in pure terror as tears stream down her cheeks. She prays to herself that he isn’t dead. But, the pain stops for her as well, in fact all sensation stops.
While she looks at Ajax, she moves her trembling gaze to her arms and legs once again. Something is happening to them. Ajax can see the bones of his hands moving around and shattering like cheap glass.
Christa can hear the sound of flesh and bone moving and reacting in unnatural, inhuman ways. She immediately turns her eyes away, while the remaining students in the classroom immediately leave, one or two of them heading to a nearby trashcan to vomit.
Shaula herself vomits blood from the sight of her arms and legs undergoing a grotesque transformation. The muscles in her hands and forearms tear apart without tearing her skin; she can see the outline of torn muscles and tendons moving like worms.
The reason that neither Ajax and Shaula are feeling any of this pain is that their nerves have already disintegrated in preparation for their transcendance. They aren’t feeling anything that is happening to their bodies; unfortunately, they are still seeing all of it.
The skin on the back of Ajax’s left hand tears and starts bleeding profusely. The skin on Shaula’s right forearm starts to fall away revealing her muscles moving under her skin, both disintegrating and reforming in a disgusting looking process.
At that point she decides to close her eyes. However, Christa, for whatever reason, has turned back to continue watching what is happening to them. She has no answer to this sight in front of her and no way to help the two of them. She is the only one left to witness. She has to at least tell their parents what happened to them… how they died.
Would they even want to hear it… Yet, she cannot look away. She has the decency to do this much for the two of her students.
She is certain that neither of them will survive this pestilence, whatever it may be. Shaula’s clothes start to become dyed red as various parts of her torso and legs start to rupture. For a brief moment, the skin, muscle and arteries on Ajax’s right bicep melts away revealing the white bone of his upper arm.
Not every single bit of their skin falls apart however. Their heads, their sternum, the spot in front of their hearts and their backs are virtually devoid of blood splatter falling on their clothing. The transformation of those areas is being handled carefully. But it isn’t like nothing at all happens to those areas.
Ajax’s head blanks out as his skull and brain starts to transform. With any luck, he and Shaula will only dimly remember the pain of their transcendence.
“A-Ah.”
Ajax and Shaula fall unconscious. They both fall forward out of their chairs on the ground as their bodies seize and squirm. Christa watches this occur as more of their blood falls to the floor in large puddles surrounding their bodies.
However, they aren’t dead.
In fact, the parts of their skin that melted away have already been replaced by fresh skin. The muscles that fell away were recreated and their blood vessels returned to their right places under their skin. The last of their flesh and bone stitches itself back together and for half a second, Christa thinks that they’re going to be ok.
Of course, she considers the deep emotional scars that form through this horrifying event that happened to them.
They’re not going to be ok at all.
Christa walks slowly towards their bodies. Before she can get close enough to see if their hearts are still beating, she notices one more movement of their bodies. For a brief moment, their blood vessels constrict. Ajax and Shaula wake up immediately. Electric blood flows through their veins bringing them back to a state of composure.
It looks unsettling to Christa, as if their minds have been taken over by an alien parasite.
