"Maiju?"


She opened her eyes: "Yes?"


"Do ... do you mind if I say Liel to you?"


The girl was surprised, but she smiled: "No."


He smiled back. Wordless eye contact. Their fingertips touched.


The door to the adjoining room opened, and the two doctors vigorously entered the room. The children started, Jeice flinched back in shock, their eye contact was broken.


Just as energetically as he had come in, the senior doctor approached the couch, startled when he saw that Maiju was awake.


"You woke up? How are you?"


"Good, apart from the fact that everything hurts me!" she muttered, half unconscious again.


With a contemptuous "Hmpf!" the doctor first turned to his subordinate: "Bring the little one to the observation room!" and then, as he pushed the couch away, to Jeice: "Did she say something?"


Yes, of course!thought the boy. But if he said that, the doc would want to know what, and that would be trouble!


"No!"


"Really not?"


Jeice shook his head emphatically.


The senior doctor left it at that.


"So did you find out what she got?" Jeice asked now, outwardly bored and just on the side, but inwardly he was afraid of the answer.


"You guessed well, boy! It really is the mutation! I never would have thought after three years!"


Jeice's stomach tightened. He's happy about it, he thought angrily, sure, he doesn't care about Maiju, he doesn't care if she dies! "And you think she'll survive if it starts like this?"


"Your condition will get better!" the doctor prophesied confidently "And if not, we still have the Medi-Tank!"


Will he help what? Jeice was skeptical. He would have liked to ask more questions, but the senior doctor just disappeared into the next room and left him standing.

Resigned, he turned around and left.




Her condition did not improve. He got worse.


Maiju lay in a vegetative state for days in which she reacted to external stimuli and from which she woke up at times, only for a few minutes at a time. But on the fourth day she sank into a deep coma in which she could no longer perceive anything. The fever also rose and her pulse quickened. The only thing that made the doctors confident was that the mutation in her hand was progressing slowly but surely.


On the sixth day it was locked: Maiju only had four fingers on each hand, but they didn't look deformed, but as if it belonged that way.


The doctors' relieved mood was clouded when their general condition did not improve at all.


They agreed to put the girl in the medi-tank and feed her artificially.


She stayed in the tank for almost a month - that's how long it took until her mutation was finally completed.

First of all, her legs changed until they looked like the back legs and the feet like the paws of the Liel cat, overgrown with light gray fur. At the same time it grew a tail that was narrow at first, but wider again towards the tip, ideal to strike with, and with purple fur.


Then their ears tapered, they got tufts like squirrel kittens, and their canines too became longer and pointed.


At the end, some minor changes took place: lilac streaks appeared on the side of her thighs, back, upper arms, and above her eyes, but they looked black on her dark skin. The wide strip above the eyes looked like the mask of a ninja and gave it a sneaky look, the fringe on the forehead and the foremost strand of hair also turned purple.


Maiju's transformation was complete, but her body temperature and pulse did not quite return to their normal values. That's why she stayed in the Medi-Tank.

In the meantime she began to move more and more violently, which the senior doctor saw as a good sign: "In this way she learns to control her new body, she subconsciously develops a feeling for her strengths and weaknesses!"


Freezer was extremely pleased.