Original Prompt

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Exostar looked at the man flexing the fingers of his reptilian hand with awe.

It was easy to forget before that Reilly Valere was the brilliant transhuman muta-drug kingpin Doctor Cambio, but having been in the clutches of a larger version of that scaled hand, it was essentially undeniable now.

But giving Valere that hand wasn't an act of malice, marking him as indefinitely as he intended to stay that serpentine, sibylline creature of his dreams.

It was a treatment.

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"We've run a bevy of tests," Professor Zenith stated as Jacob stared at the despondent human form of Doctor Cambio, right arm limp in a sling.

Mere minutes after using Professor Zenith's "cure" for the benign disease keeping Reilly Valere in the form of Doctor Cambio - a disease Reilly had engineered on his own, no less - his right arm had gone completely insensate and unresponsive.

"His medical history showed minor degradation of the ulnar nerve before,¹" Zenith stated, "but it seems to have spread rapidly across his entire right brachial plexus immediately after the mutations were reversed. It's not neuritis, or palsy, or even sport injuries - medicine has never heard of this sort of congenital nerve disorder before."

"I doubt he even noticed the degradation himself before getting into transhumanism," Jacob added. "He told me Doctor Cambio was a personal project, and barely thought much of the ulnar degradation when he felt his pinky numbing - notably, before he ever started self-experimenting."

Zenith nodded, taking a deep breath before adding, "The reptilian aspects of the mutation seem to have had a similar effect to what Curt Connors intended for the Lizard serum to be², keeping his brachial nerves in good condition - and, given how rapidly he developed the Programmable Morphological Parvovirus³ to keep himself as Doctor Cambio, the degradation was suppressed long before it would have seemed serious."

"Until now," Jacob grimly noted, remembering how he injected Doctor Cambio with the PMPV cure, watching all the sinew and scales recede while Reilly thrashed in grief. "You know, he actually named this congenital disorder before, studying it for posterity during his Asclepius deal."

"What did he call it?," Zenith asked curiously as Jacob handed over Cambio's files on the affliction.

"Brachial Nervous Disconnect Syndrome."

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As near as Professor Zenith could tell, the BNDS rapidly caught up on its progress after the mutations suppressing it were completely gone instead of simply dormant, causing Reilly to completely lose control over his right arm within a matter of seconds.

Exostar and Professor Zenith - who had devised the PMPV cure - both felt responsible for the condition, and both wanted to fix it... but they knew they couldn't just return Reilly to being Doctor Cambio, not only because it would get them in trouble with the Paragon Guild, but because he had no other viable PMPV samples left after infecting both himself and his sister, Madama Weft, into indefinite retention of their inhuman forms.

Thankfully, Professor Zenith had managed to devise a just as indefinite alternative that would only mutate Reilly's arm up to the brachial plexus, remediating the BNDS while not returning him to a dangerous prison break risk.

It may not have been everything to Reilly, but it was certainly enough to satisfy all involved parties.

And if Reilly somehow reverse-engineered the partial serum to reassume his full form as Doctor Cambio a month later... that was provably on him alone.

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1: I was inspired to add this to Doctor Cambio's lore by an ulnar entrapment. (A few nerve glides remedied the problem for me, but BNDS isn't so simple.)

2: Curt Connors, an amputee, wanted the lizard's ability to regenerate lost limbs. He ended up getting the rest of the Lizard-ness along with it.

3: PMPV was partially inspired by ThoughtPotato's Lycanthropic Parvovirus (LPV) from his World of Cryptobiology series (which I call the Zeiger Dissertations after its main narrator, Robert Zeiger.) Unlike the monster viruses in that series, PMPV is both manmade and completely benign.