The Rendering Pit - Chapter 21 (Patreon)

Once Rigel decided that his condition as a perma-berry was a challenge to be overcome, it was only a matter of time before he figured out how to do it! Of course, like so much that happens at TRP, the outcome was not quite what he expected!

Thanks to the results of this poll ( https://www.patreon.com/posts/rigels-fate-v2-17468777 ) Rigel has began to grow in a substantially different way, and quite substantially! ;3 

This story was written by RabidBadger and illustrated by me! We thank you for your continued support, you've helped make this series what it is <3 

This episode includes: Blueberry, expansion/growth, massive weight gain, living with being a permaberry, drunken effects, morbid obesity and juicing! 

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Rigel yawned wide, feeling that dull fuzziness in the back of his skull as he read the same few lines of information over for the third time now, hoping that they’d actually sink in this time. At his side, both Genevieve and Nathan were sleeping. He glanced at the time, fully aware he ought to be doing the same. He ought to have been at it hours ago, but he wanted this to work a little too much. 

That ought to be a warning sign in itself, Rigel wagered. That and the willingness to keep at it when he knew he wasn’t a hundred percent. All that psyching up he’d done about things being problems to fix, not life sentences, had gotten into him good. Rigel looked over the dimmed screen he was arranging his gene sequencing on, it all looked right – he was fairly sure he’d targeted the proper parts of himself and directed the augmented cell replication and fluid mass storage appropriately. It just had to work now, which was both a matter of it needed to do its job properly and it needed to compile before that could happen. That latter bit, as Rigel set his table down on the edge of the bed and lay onto his side, was fine by him.

It gave him an excuse to finally pass out. Rigel didn’t even realize he’d closed his eyes when sleep came.

Some hours later, the alarm in the tablet jarred him back to consciousness mercilessly. Rigel snapped awake but remained drenched under a thick sheet of fatigue that refused to leave his head no matter how furiously he blinked and rubbed his face. He managed to at least sort out that no, he wasn’t yet late – not if he got his ass moving right now anyway. Not the easiest of tasks, of course. His ass was a mutable obstacle and today was something of a ‘heavy flow’ day he suspected. 

All it took was sliding off the bed to be sure of that one. He hit the floor and his whole body wobbled, especially his ass. By the time he had slid off and reached for his tablet, it still hadn’t stopped moving. It meant he’d definitely need to stop by the nurse’s office before he went to class, but that might make him late – he seriously hoped Professor Tenebrae would understand, but this had come up a lot of late.

Rigel snatched up his tablet and made as good time as he could out the door, into the halls. It wasn’t an impressive showing, he had a serious suspicion that beyond a certain point any effort to move faster just made his sloshing middle and bouncing bottom more energetic without actually saving time. It was something he had half a mind to do a study on, if it wouldn’t involve quite so much exercise.

That hallway he always had to stop and make his decision at loomed, with the nurse’s office dead ahead and the botany levels were a turn and some winding hallways away. Rigel stopped, hesitated really, at that junction. Quite a bit of him kept moving after but that wasn’t the point. He had two options, always the same two options. Until he thought of the break room halfway to class, and its programmable fabricator.

“…No, I have three.”

Biting his lip, Rigel hesitated a moment longer before making the turn and digging his design up on his tablet. He’d had enough foresight to set up some modules for delivery systems, and he could get a couple of transdermal patches printed up in a minute or two. A tiny bit late but with his problem solved was a lot better than an hour late with another temporary fix.

The blue-stained reptile thought about it, realizing he ought to afford himself a bit more time for editing – possibly also sleep – but time was in short supply. Something had to give. Applying what pitiful amounts of hustle he could, Rigel detoured into the break room and found an unoccupied fabricator. 

A few minutes later he was en route to class, holding a small stack of adhesive patches. 

“Oof… huff. If – if I go fast, I can make it before roll call!”

*** 

Rigel barreled into the corner of the arboretum, flattening his bloated side out against an incredibly solid barrier of actual wood. The walls of the place seemed to be nothing but tree trunks and ivy, though there were bulkheads if you looked really closely behind some of them. All told, Rigel preferred crashing into the tree. Even if it got him some looks from the handful of other students gathered in the lush, humid room’s small clearing – and a raised eyebrow from the dark furred cat teaching the class.

“Not quite late this time I see, but a bit swollen for it. Might I suggest setting your alarm a little earlier from now on, Rigel? Or you could put down roots closer to class.”

The scaled student suppressed a shudder over that choice of words, which he had no doubt was deliberate. 

“N-no thanks, Professor. Did I miss anything?”

Rigel was panting by then, overheated and agitated. His whole form felt infuriatingly fluid as he moved, like he was walking inside a swimming pool full of smoothies that was literally under his skin. Which wasn’t far from the truth. It made the simple act of finding a seat, most of which were worn into the top of gigantic fallen logs, an arduous and lengthy task.

“Not as such, we were just beginning a discussion about mycological infestations of living bodies. How some are outright hostile – see those that alter the behavior of animals to encourage suicidal behavior – to the less common, potentially symbiotic sorts. Now, open your data files to page three hundred and ninety-four.”

Taking a slow breath, Rigel let some of his tension fade. Some. He was still enormous, but he’d gone and taken the initiative there. He had a fix to it in progress, in his hand. Several of them in fact. They weren’t doing much good there, though.

Thinking it over a little, Rigel let his fatigue addled mind pick at what threads it could find. This was his solution, his way to prove he had what it took to make it here. Rigel shook himself a bit, found the page his professor said to, and casually stuck one of the patches against his side, right under his arm.

*** 

If nothing else, Rigel thought three hours’ worth of discussion about the nuances of how similar or even identical genetic sequences in different types of flora and fauna reacted in vastly different ways in practice was interesting, in an arcane ‘cautionary tale’ kind of way. Then there was fungus, which just blurred the lines even further, and – well, everything felt blurry. Not to mention slow, and full, and other words he was growing increasingly frustrated with. He’d managed to get by without juicing so far today, but he knew he was at the absolute end of that tolerance – though it was fairly obvious the mixture was doing its job. He wasn’t nearly as big as he would’ve ordinarily been by now. 

“One last time then. It’s not so bad – one last little embarrassing squeeze and poke with the creepy time-share nurse body.”

Rigel started down the halls, the infuriatingly uphill stretch of halls between him and the nurse’s office loomed, and he had never felt quite so unprepared to make it. His limbs felt stiff, even a bit sticky inside. His thighs scraped roughly past each other with every labored step. Every rounded inch of him wobbled ominously when he put his foot down. 

It was halfway there before he started worrying. Not about the weight of it, or whether he could make it the entire trip or not – Rigel was certain he could. He’d hate every minute of it, but he could. Or at least, he had been – and then some things he ought to hate hadn’t happened, and some new wrinkles had worked into the tapestry instead.

There ought to be pain, for starters. By now his lower back ought to be flinching on him with each step, and he should be sweating a thin sheen of blue that would ruin his clothing – or at least it had done that a couple of times until he started buying nothing but blacks, grays, and blues. Neither of those things was happening. His limbs were still stiff, walking was still spectacularly hard as he struggled to force his belly up and out of the way when his thighs inevitably ran into it, and he once again felt like he was pushing against a thick body of water just to get his own limbs to shift – it just didn’t hurt, and he was quite dry and cool on the outside. That part he’d briefly tried to write off as due to his clothes tearing, but no such luck.

It’s not like he didn’t suspect why that was the case, either. The patch on his arm was still stuck there good and tight, and he dare not peel it loose. The adhesive would release from his body once it had finished, and it had to finish. There was no telling what kind of horrible, cancerous damage he could do to his genetic code to go through with half of a treatment. Something was amiss, and the lack of pain didn’t make it a good thing. Beyond that, he’d started losing track of himself a bit – his belly stuck out so far he was having difficulty judging where it actually ended past its own curvature – and figuring out the dimensions of his ass at the moment was an utterly lost cause.

By the time he arrived at the nurse station making his gut give way enough for his bloated thighs to take a proper step had become borderline impossible, Rigel simply couldn’t produce the force necessary for it. The sluggish waddle he’d been forced to put up with for the last leg of the journey was agonizingly slow, but it was all he had left. It did, eventually, get him back to the nurse’s doorway – and that left him hammering on the door with an arm newly thickened and swaddled with the fruits of whatever the blazes was going on inside him.

“N-nurse! Help!”

That last bit drew some attention. Rigel had gotten by much of the journey without that, the lower levels down to the arboretum weren’t terribly well frequented by most students, and the nurse’s office was just at the peak of where the lower level met the campus proper. Sure, he’d seen a few people and caught a couple of looks, but the cry for aid had stepped it up considerably. An entire room full of students all turning to stare at an indigo blue heap of flesh, standing naked and clutching a small bag of transdermal patches and a tablet.

“Nur- oop…!”

The door slid open at that moment, leaving Rigel’s laboriously cultivated swing of his arm hitting nothing at all as the nurse and her scarred visage deftly sidestepped his slow-motion wave. Not smacking the nurse was good, though. It spared him a little indignity. Teetering slowly sideways like a tree falling, but with a much softer landing. Rigel eased onto his thighs, belly sliding down to touch the floor, arms waving about in a paradoxically lazy panic until his center of gravity took over. The comparatively small upper half of him rolled right to the floor, while the sheer volume of his ass propped his legs up and left them and his tail feebly kicking about. 

Not quite as many students began laughing as he had feared. The nurse didn’t laugh at all. She snatched the patches and tablet from him though, and quietly maneuvered herself over to Rigel’s side, leaving him confused in her silence. Right until he felt two hands firmly plant themselves against one of the meatiest parts of his bottom and give it a push. 

Rigel felt just a little vertigo as he began to roll. Not in a straight line, he watched the whole world tilt and spin and knew he’d veered to the right a fair bit, but the nurse needed naught but a little shouldering and a grunt to compensate for that on her next shove. 

“My dear boy, I have – ngh – no idea what you’ve done! But I can’t wait to find out.”

Trying to speak seemed unwise, Rigel decided. There was a syrupy substance starting to coat the back of his throat anyway. Busying himself keeping that in check and shutting his eyes to the spinning of the world while feeling his body gradually flow and flatten and reform was more than enough for him to occupy himself with. He was still busy with it right up to the moment he felt a gas mask being slid over his muzzle and realized the world had stayed dark when he tried to open his eyes.

*** 

The first thought to crawl lazily across Rigel’s mind when it lazily got back around to the business of thinking at all was that he had truly, desperately needed that nap. It was a nice thought, one that lingered for a while and let him savor it. His head felt a bit light and fuzzy after a fashion, kind of like having a pleasant little buzz. Even better, someone had clearly remembered to dim the lights for him. All told, he felt perfectly content to just linger in that warmth and comfort for a while.

It took about ten minutes of that, and the sudden onset of a queer internal ‘sucking’ sensation that gently tugged on his entire body from the inside out, before Rigel opened his eyes and saw the nurse leaning over him. Leaning over a lot of him. Fiddling with something set square in the middle of his bellybutton that seemed to be the source of the odd feeling he was suffering through at the moment. The little squeak of protest he made as the interruption of his nice, sluggish waking seemed to get her attention.

“Rigel! My dear boy, it is a relief to see you awake. How do you feel? Can you still think properly?”

Could he think properly? That question alone spooked him enough to make it harder to, which seemed like an unfair bit of irony to subject him to all things considered. In a rush of dulled panic, Rigel flailed about as if to slip out from whatever heavy covers he was under. This led to the discovery that he wasn’t under anything, all that warmth and weight wasn’t on him, it was him. Wobbling precariously, he nearly began slipping off the side of the examination bed from that little outburst. It was only the nurse putting her hands to his belly and giving it a firm push, one that he saw her hand sink into his gut wrist-deep in the process of, that kept him balanced for now. 

“W-what? What kind of question is that to wake up to?!”

Just the act of speaking left Rigel keenly aware of how thick he still was, he even felt the gentle shifting of fluid in his cheeks. Though it wasn’t quite the same as usual, it felt considerably thicker than it ought to. Slow to move, slow to settle. It left him with questions. Some honest, some with answers he was rabidly denying himself. The one he’d just asked was honest, the second one Rigel wasn’t so sure about.

“W-why haven’t I shrunk down?”

The nurse didn’t answer straight away, but rather took out a small wad of cloth and dabbed it just below Rigel’s navel. She also fiddled once more with something about it, something he still couldn’t see. That part troubled him most, perhaps a touch irrationally even, but then maybe he just had Samuel’s fate burned into his mind. Logically, he knew that Samuel’s case had been special – that it was the infection, not the weight, that ended his days as a student. Anxiety rarely had any patience for logic. Anxiety just wanted Rigel to stare at his pillow-thick arms and to dwell on how he clearly felt both sides of his ass hanging over the edge of either end of the examination bed, his belly pressing his legs apart and dipping over his thighs to touch the bed’s cool surface. He didn’t look swollen and taut like he usually did, he looked fat. 

The nurse looked over at him and smiled, then flinched briefly, and took a sharp turn into a glare.

“Well, for one thing, you seem to be sporting a completely different internal architecture than last time we saw you. Your floral-faunal integration has interacted in an interesting way with some sort of fungal trace that was in your system – and of course with the gene therapy you dosed yourself with without consulting me.” 

Rigel swallowed hard there, fidgeting a little. He felt so unnaturally heavy, and slow. Not to mention that split-second delay between thought and action the buzz was giving him. That alone prompted another question.

“W-was I drinking or something?”

The nurse – or the doctor, if that shift in mood was anything to go by, rolled her eyes about as hard as a person could. She also snorted, then lifted a shot glass of something he didn’t have time to get a good look at and downed it before answering.

“No, that at least would’ve explained your judgment.”

That thought managed to cause a small pileup in Rigel’s mind as it tried to get in one ear and then file itself into his brain.

“But, but I feel…”

Again, the doe snorted. 

“Drunk? That’s because y…”

Rigel watched the woman shudder again, before taking a breath and looking back at him directly with her earlier soft, tolerant smile on. The doe set the shot glass aside and gave his belly a gentle rubbing at.

“You’re fermenting, dear. I had a look at your gene therapy patches and they’re well made, they might have worked if they were only accounting for two variables like you planned, as opposed to three.”

Giving his head a shake in confusion, Rigel tried desperately to ignore how his cheeks shook and wobbled, and his neck rubbed against what could only be a second chin.

“Three?”

The nurse extended a single finger, pushing with it. It didn’t hurt, and that alone left Rigel remembering a little. The walk back from class, all that fatigue without any of the yelling nerves. Her finger sunk in until he felt her fist touching his plump middle as well, and then that began to sink a little too.

“There is some kind of fungal colony in you, I’m honestly shocked it escaped my notice beforehand. It shouldn’t have – but I suspect the only reason I’ve found it now is the alterations that went on as a result of your transdermal patches. You wanted to redirect your fluid buildup to specific areas of your body with them, yes? Channel them into removable growths? It was an elegant enough solution, in theory.”

Rigel was still relieved, pain or not, when the finger removed itself from his body. More so when the nurse’s next act was to take his hands and help him ease himself to a seated position that didn’t leave him worrying quite so much about sliding off the edge of the examination bed. 

“It… it was?”

All other factors aside, seeing the doe nod and smile commenting on his work still left Rigel with a warm feeling inside.

“Yes. Or still is, perhaps. I see no reason these would not work on people who aren’t suffering that extenuating factor with the fungal colonies in the nervous system. Which I now suspect I can track down in future patients – so we have you to thank for that.”

The reptilian student squirmed a little. That wasn’t exactly the kind of impact he wanted to have regarding the fruits of his research, but it still sounded like a good one. 

“You though?”

She reached out at that, taking his belly in both hands and giving it a gentle, fond little shake that felt rather like a sack of pudding being wobbled around. 

“Well, I can’t begin to imagine how all three of those things interacted, since the introduction of the third influence will have altered the behavior of the other two. I wouldn’t even begin to want to risk trying to tamper with things further, it’s a minor miracle that you didn’t end up a little primordial puddle!”

Rigel blinked slowly, caught somewhere between the horrible mental images he was having and the less catastrophic, but still exceedingly noteworthy reality of what she’d just said. 

“Wait, it – but – the swelling! What about the…”

Trailing off, Rigel watched as the nurse reached for his navel again. Still slightly out of sight, the horizon of his gut getting in the way while she moved something that abruptly halted the internal twinging, a dull ‘pop’ played across his body like a single drum beat after. Once it had, the nurse straightened up again and handed him a small device, with a small pipe on one end and a tap on the other.

“You won’t be swelling quite as much dear, and you won’t be shrinking down much past what you are now either. Ever. Your innards aren’t so much retaining juice now as they are processing and fermenting it, and they’re a lot clingier about it. It’s good stuff, though!”

 That was well worth another slow blink or two.

“I’m stuck like this, and… Chrome, so that’s why I’m buzzed, and – I’m just gonna always… be a bit-”

The nurse’s face twitched briefly again, looking tense – pained even. Sneering, instead of smiling.

“You’re two drinks in for life kid. Call me envious, if you weren’t such a bloated heap too. Also, if you start feeling gassy that’s the fungal digestion at work. Or maybe you just get that way now. Who the hell knows? Nobody else did this to themselves before, so kudos on that.”

Blinking down at the thing in his hands, which was still a bit sticky with a viscous purple fluid, Rigel shook his head again.

“Can’t we just… make a better one of these or something?”

The smirk stretched a little.

“Sure, try if you want, but I’m fairly certain if you try to force out more than your body naturally pushes loose with that thing you’ll cause serious harm. Right now, your musculature is weirdly adapted to being a muscle and a sponge at the same time. Suck it dry and you might cripple yourself.”

Rigel didn’t actually intend to slip down from the bed at that, but his body was gradually moving that way regardless. He would’ve been quite content to stare at the doctor/nurse for a bit longer, or into space, at the news. Apparently, his center of gravity had been just a tiny bit off the edge of the bed though, as he felt it dragging him more and more each moment. It was a fairly short drop, though. An easy landing. Albeit one that forcibly reminded him (not that he’d stopped thinking about it) of just how huge he was.

That dull impact set his whole frame wobbling. His balance suffered a bit for it, chest and belly swaying about fiercely. Butt quaking and dancing about behind him. That, and the nearby door out to the halls, reminded him of the last little detail he had honestly managed to forget.

“…Wait, how am I supposed to-”

A loud, fleshy smack brock the room’s silence and left a sizable handprint in Rigel’s bottom, along with setting off an undulating cacophony of impact tremors in his blubbery bulk.

“Get back to your dorm without showing all this off? We’ve got a few loaner robes for situations like this – students suddenly ending up blimps isn’t that uncommon, funnily enough.”

The doe stepped past him while Rigel fidgeted and blushed, trying not to stare back at her. Thoroughly confused, at least emotionally, and the woman’s face shifting back to that more demure and supportive ‘nurse’ just added to the maelstrom.

“Come dear, I’ll help you get into it. You might need assistance with dressing in general at this size – but the drones will be happy to help if your room mates don’t want to manage it.” 

Rigel let his hand be taken by the nurse, who led him to within a few steps of the doors. She turned back and smiled softly, producing from one of the shelves nearby something that looked more like a tarp for covering small vehicles than a garment.

“Also, when you get back to your room? The university mainframe hosts an application your tablet can use to take your new measurements and order you some clothing. I recommend doing it sooner rather than later. Now if you’d be so kind as to face the wall and hold your arms up?”

Briefly, Rigel found himself comparing this moment – arms up and facing a wall in a state where he had no power left to him, where he was helpless and staring down some very harsh realities about where his life was going from this moment forward – to the one right before he’d ended up in the juvenile penal system to begin with. 

He’d expected some aspects of his time before coming to The Rendering Pit to follow him, sure. The brewing of homemade hooch (in his butt no less) had not been one of them.

*** 

About fifteen minutes later, Rigel was making his very slow way down the corridor leading away from the nurse’s office, cursing quietly about makeup homework he had to do for his middle period class of the day. The doe watched him go, staring perhaps a bit too openly at the barely covered hindquarters of the reptilian student. It wasn’t until he was well out of sight that she turned back to her office’s dim and warm confines, feeling a familiar tugging presence in her mind direct her arm to pluck a flask out of her coat and take a sip from it. 

Inside was something ungodly rich, and thick. She’d watered the syrupy blueberry mixture down some, but it remained a bit like vodka and blueberry maple. She’d have to work on the dilution later. Her lips moved again after, still without her direction. The Doctor was in.

“So you got samples post-change right?”

Finding a mirror to face, the doe nodded.

“Of course. As well as the schematics of his gene therapy delivery system. There’s an excellent chance either, or both, will be of use to our efforts.”

A quick snort and another drink later the doctor nodded.

“That damn kid had everything we needed today, didn’t he?”