The Rendering Pit - Chapter 29 (Patreon)

Getting a hold of Genevieve isn't too hard, and it's through their discussion that Genevieve realises a few things about herself, that she needed to contemplate. 

This chapter is written and illustrated by me! Thank you for your continued support, you've helped make this series what it is <3 

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Genevieve belched. And why not? It’s not like there was anyone to chide her. Anyone to see her, and the pig she’d made out of herself. It had started as a low, rumbling feeling. A burbling in her large, stuffed, jutting stomach, which rose slowly up her throat, released in a putrid cloud that lingered briefly above her face before she slumped back against the trough. She’d been at it for some time, gorging lazily with her gut pushing gently across the floor but she barely seemed to be making any progress in the pile of leftovers that had stacked up since her little vacation from the job. Grumbling to herself, moaning, she pulled herself up onto one side, ignoring the blush that tingled across her cheeks and stirred between her legs while she felt her stomach sliding out across the cool plascrete floor. She had been bigger, sure, but that didn’t detract from the fact that her binging had left her huge. She wondered if she’d be able to walk.

Probably.

But the prospect of getting up didn’t particularly appeal to the pig-fox hybrid, who allowed another lazy belch to drift from her snout before lazily scratching at one of her stomach rolls. This is what she’d allowed herself to become. Nothing but a big, fat, mannerless pig. As though to punctuate the thought, a bought of flatulence escaped her. She didn’t even care anymore. She looked down across her body. Two chins, with a third starting. Her arms had started to gather more and more flab, soon she’d be like those fatties who practically had their own wings. By far, her stomach seemed to steal the show, stuffed as it was. It pushed out feet in front of her, she was sure if it were standing, it would hang a fair distance down, falling ever closer to the ground. She wondered idly, if that would be her timer. When she got too fat to move, would the custodial drones come and take her away? Was that her fate? To end up in that dark, humid room where Samuel, her former roommate hangs, suspended in a mesh net, guzzling enough fat to put him into a perpetual stupor. Something in the back of her memory nipped at her, she recalled something about Samuel being a special case. A vector drone, or something like that. No, likely when she got too fat to move, she’d just be handed some sort of mobility assistance device and allowed to parade herself across the university like a balloon. She sighed and scratched gently at her fur.

The idea frightened her less than it once had, if she was honest with herself. Perhaps once, the thought of being so massive she couldn’t walk under her own power had been a scary one, but now that it loomed above her like some sort of inevitability, she didn’t freeze in fear. She had a lot left to do and walking was a convenience and annoyance that she might be able to sacrifice. If she had to. 

Having sent her little project off to Professor Victoria, Genevieve had snuck her way into the underworks of the cafeteria when it seemed like nobody was watching. She’d gotten sick of the limited menu items that her drones could bring her, it wasn’t their fault mind, they could only make so many trips. And something about the miasmic scent of the food trough had beckoned her. She seemed to have developed a craving for it, and if she were turning slowly into a pig, she might as well make the most of it. So it was there she slumped, against the trough she’d been lazily eating from, looking over the bloated caricature of her body and comparing it to what she’d been like when she first entered the halls. Younger. Slim. Barely even chubby. Back then she hadn’t been coated in hundreds of pounds of fat, nor did she have a pair of crystalline horns, or a small but devoted collection of robotic bee drones. In many ways she’d come up in the world, but she couldn’t help but reflect on how she’d grown out, too. 

With a loud sloshing noise, another load of leftover food made its way into the trough but Genevieve had eaten her fill. She gave a lazy yawn and, pushing away from the trough slumped against herself and the small collection of pillows she’d arranged. It was comfortable, warm, if a little humid, and familiar. She was full, her thoughts had drifted to the pleasantness of her new bee family, and she had everything a girl needed to find some shut-eye. Slowly, lazily, the pig-fox hybrid found herself drifting to sleep.

* * *

“What the hell happened to you?!”

Certainly, Rigel and Nathan’s combined exclamation was enough to jostle Genevieve from her slumber. It was shocking enough that they were there, in the underworks, her most sacred of spaces, let alone the fact that they were shouting and each was substantially wider than she recalled them being.

“Me?!” Genevieve slowly found her wits returning to her, her bee companion had curled up on her stomach and she reached out to give it a light, reassuring pet as its signals had grown worried with all the commotion. “What the hell happened to you?! I mean, Rigel I remember growing at least a little, but you’re both...” She couldn’t find the words, so she made a gesture that approximated the concept of ‘wide’. 

Rigel almost seemed to laugh, but belched instead, spurting out a heavy cloud of blue smog which rolled through the air smelling strongly of blueberries. “And last we saw you were a fox! Now you’re a pig? What ha-“ His sentenced cut off as Genevieve flung a pillow at him, smacking the slow, sloshing lizard directly in the face. He stumbled backwards for a moment, but seemed to be able to recover his balance.

“I am not a pig!” Genevieve said, finding herself on her feet both a lot faster, and a lot easier than she thought she would. Something in her glare, or her stance, must have made the lizard reconsider his position, as he visibly took a step back, hands in the air. 

“N-no you’re not, I just meant... you know...”

“The nose.” Nathan added helpfully, looking extremely uncomfortable to be standing here. It didn’t hurt matters for Genevieve that her bee drone seemed to be emanating an aura of its own, sensing its mistresses upset, its stinger was unsheathed. She would have to make a note of that, they weren’t supposed to be usable as weapons, yet here this one was all the same... 

Rigel pointed to her nose, and Genevieve’s glare shifted back to him.

“I’m not a pig.” She reaffirmed, as though to herself as much as to him. “I’m... I’m a vixen. I’m the same vixen you met on our first day. I’m just a little... pinker... than I was back then.” Sensing her heartbeat lower, her drone hovered back around to her side, and perched gently on her shoulder, wiggling its antlers respectfully. She lifted a chubby hand to scratch under its chin, before looking back over at her two roommates.

Rigel seemed a little bemused, a little concerned. There was a slight sway to his stance, as though he might just fall over without her help after all. Nathan however, seemed downright distraught. A pang of guilt ran through the pig-fox, she knew she’d been loud, maybe even a little imposing, but she hadn’t meant to make the drake feel that bad. Just quash any question in regards to her species that she herself wasn’t ready yet to answer. 

She shifted a little uncomfortably, “Oh I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to... I just...” The words didn’t come to her, what was she trying to say? Catching sight of herself in the metal of the underworks, she really did see what was close enough to a pig. Her gut fell heavy against her thighs, and pushed out in front of her, so much larger than any pregnancy could simulate, but almost with the same, stuffed looking quality. She felt so round and heavy, so fat. Whatever she was trying to say fell away with a heavy sigh, but thankfully Nathan seemed to get the gist of it, looking a little more relaxed in his massively obese body. 

“But what did happen to you?” Rigel asked, the lizard stepping forward again to get a better look. 

Genevieve rubbed her nose, trying not to wince at the new flatness of it. “I really ought to be asking the same question. Seems like this might take a while.” She looked around for a seat, before realising that of course there wouldn’t be one. Not in the underworks. Her knees were already starting to feel weak, whatever adrenaline had been fuelling her was seeping away. She’d need to sit, or lie down soon. Nathan seemed to be following her eyes, and Genevieve realised that if the massive drake tried to sit down, he might not be able to get back up again. Although he was smaller than Rigel by a little, it seemed as though the blue drake’s stomach would drag across the ground if his back was even a little hunched. With a little blush, Genevieve realised how inviting the softness actually looked from her perspective. She could lie atop his gut, and bathe in the warmth of it. 

“Well,” Rigel interrupted her thoughts, “We could head back to the cafeteria, take a seat, grab some coffee?”

“Uh,” Genevieve didn’t really want to run into anyone familiar, sitting in the cafeteria was asking for a run-in with Tiffany she wasn’t sure she was ready to handle. “Maybe we could go back to the dorms. I could have my bee bring us some coffee.” It wiggled its antennas in the affirmative. 

Nathan nodded with the kind of enthusiasm reserved for those who are finding it harder to keep standing with all that’s weighing them down, and it was agreed. The three of them slowly made their way to the lift that would take them back up, into the cafeteria. 

* * *

“So you just woke up and it was there?” 

“Yeah that’s about right. I’ve been trying to get a hold of Jen- I mean, The Lunch Lady, but she hasn’t been answering. I figure she probably knows what’s up, and it’s less stressful waiting for a response from her than it is thinking about going to see the nurse.” 

Rigel nodded, while Nathan blinked, “The nurse isn’t that bad.”

“Depends on which day you get her.” Genevieve replied, shrugging. In any case, to her it seemed more like a matter of comfort. The Lunch Lady was familiar. The Nurse was a riddle wrapped in an enigma. “So then you followed my child to the underworks and found me? What for?” 

“We sort of wanted to know about your opinion on mobility assistance devices.” Nathan replied. He was sitting on his bunk, gut brushing the floor, while he pulled out his dataslate. 

Rigel was practically dominating his bunk. The lizard couldn’t dream of accessing his dataslate without first propping it on his chest, so he seemed to be going with a visor to access his data, lying on his bed and gurgling like some sort of massive volcanic boulder. “Y-hic-yeah. I mean... you know it’s probably a long way out but you know more about the tech stuff than either of us.” 

A long way out... for who? 

Genevieve dug around in her pocket for her own dataslate. “Well, I have been looking over the equipment on offer. A lot of it has resources that cross over into wireless drone production, you know.” The catalogue of mobility assistance devices would have seemed a little grim at one point. The end of the line. She used to not really understand how much fatter you could get than needing a hover plate to lift your stomach for you. But her weekly visits to Samuel’s net have taught her that there are worse things than a stomach you can’t lift by yourself. Or at least, bigger things. 

“I think standard,” Genevieve continues, browsing through the selection, “are the hoverplates. Most stations and cities have a hovergrid, so you just attach a plate here or there and suddenly the weight you’d been carrying around before doesn’t seem so much. It even allows you to continue walking, maybe in the hopes that students might lose some of the excess.” She looked up at her roommates and realised that probably wasn’t going to happen. “There are some other options though, mobility rigs.” She scrolled across and the tablet displayed a set of throne-like chairs. The kind of chairs that, once you climbed into one, you wouldn’t really ever need to climb back out. “That said, the physical rigs like this, while impressive, aren’t really pushed by the school a lot, and tend to cost a lot more. They prefer students to experiment with other things. The rigs come with inbuilt robotic arms? They like students to learn how to control new robotic drones of their own, or cybernetic attachments, and so on. You know,” She scratched her chin and smiled, “You could get drones like I have. To help you with things when you’re too big to, you know, reach.” 

Engrossed in their devices, it was hard to see what the other students actually thought of that idea. Rigel let out a belch and shrugged. “Kinda thinking about just getting around, for now.” 

“Well,” Genevieve considered, looking at the swollen lizard and imagining how he’ll be when he’s fully rounded out again, “The first thing you’ll probably want to look into is an internal infosuite. Something that’ll allow you to interact with the world of computers, without having to use your hands...” 

The pig-fox allowed herself to smile, perhaps for the first time in far, far too long. It wouldn’t take too long to put her friends onto some augments that they might get some use out of, and their problems, regardless of how heavy they were, at least seemed solvable. Certainly more so than her own. No rigs would explain her new look to Tiffany, nor did she imagine the university would be too keen to perform a cosmetic surgery on her, when it was likely their technology that left her like this in the first place. She considered Nathan, the drake was several times the weight he’d been when they first met and although he was blushing and squirming and perhaps uncomfortable with his sudden new growth, he wasn’t afraid of it. He was looking for solutions, attempting to adapt to his new life.

Genevieve resolved to do the same and, while the three talked about their options, she tapped out a quick message on her dataslate:

Tiffany, we should talk.