Not As Far As Lois Lane Is Concerned

The mutagenic black goo continued on its course, reshaping Lois Lane's body, rewriting her DNA on the fly—and the steady stream of nutrition supplied by Lex Luthor to his new captive xenomorph queen rapidly fueled her transformation. Within hours, Lois had more than tripled her weight, standing now more than ten feet tall with a skinny, skeletal tail whipping back and forth behind her. Most of the weight had gone to her widening hips and thickening legs, her gate shifting to something closer to a tyrannosaurus rex than a human being, her long, skeletal arms undersized by comparison.

The frill of her head-crest had expanded into a broad, fluted black shield, and her dorsal spikes and carapace were continuing to swell and harden...the only soft parts of her were the distended, glowing green vagina and swollen abdomen, her black breasts now pendulous jiggling masses bigger than the old Lois Lane's head. In the normal lifecycle of a xenomorph queen, once she hit a certain mass her body would shift entirely into egg production, the ovipositor growing into a distended egg-factory, rendering her largely immobile, to be served by her drones...

Except Lois Lane had no drones. The titanium-allow collar about her neck chafed. New, subtle senses began to intrude on the transformed reporter's consciousness. She could sense warm bodies...potential hosts...beyond those walls. A great mass of them up above. Dim memories trickled through Lois Lane's consciousness. Even with the strange, terrible transformation that had changed and impacted her consciousness, a part of her was still Lois Lane.

She could still think. Reason.

She still knew how to pick a lock.

A long, steel-hard claw picked carefully at the catch of the collar...the great crested head looked around the room. She needed a tool. Something narrow...

Lowering her head back to the trough, the nascent queen opened her jaw wide and let the inner jaw burst forth. The smaller mouth bashed painfully against the edge of the food trough, specially built to resist xenomorph attack...and a tiny, sharp-pointed tooth broke off. The bleeding inner-jaw returned as the Lois-Queen picked the fang up off the floor. As she dipped her mouth back into the trough, she began to rub it frantically but methodically against the hard edge...narrowing and winnowing it down into a suitable lockpick.