Maple's Story Part 2 (Patreon)

It was three hours after the stardrive engines were engaged when Maple felt the first pangs of hunger. She'd been distracting herself with a VR game when her hardware's internal monitors started bleeping obnoxious warnings at her, telling her that her body was in danger of malnourishment. When she emerged into reality and the empty void of space beyond her cockpit she was instantly crippled with pain. The vixen clutched her stomach, fingernails digging into her flightsuit so hard she thought she'd tear it. It felt like she hadn't eaten in days! Weeks, even!

Lurching out of her seat, she lumbered away from the cockpit of her little ship and towards the galley. It was a small room, no bigger than a bedroom really, but even that sort of space was a luxury when it came to one-man spacecraft. An intense pang of hunger struck so hard it left her dizzy, falling against the fabricator unit like she was drunk. She knew this had been coming, she'd tried to convince herself that she could weather it out in VR but she realised now how dangerous that had been. Whatever the collar had injected her with was potent, so potent she felt as though her stomach had turned in on itself and would start digesting the rest of her body. Maple dismissed the fear as silly but that didn't stop her fingers from sliding across the fab unit's command console.

"Wake up! Syn wake up! T-two, no three apple pies!" She cried, clutching her stomach and groaning as tears trickled down her cheeks. She could feel the presence of her A.I as it turned its attention to its host and away from the other duties it maintained onboard the Kit.

"Apple? We only have repro." The A.I replied, concern sounding alien on its 'voice'.

"I don't care if we have to make them out of algae! M-make it four." Maple groaned again, fighting the urge to curl up into a ball. It would only worry Syn if she did.

The fab unit gurgled and within seconds churned out not one, but four steaming apple pies. Fab units weren't perfect chefs but they were good. Maple could see why others might turn their nose up at Fabricator food, it was all made to algorithm and had no creativity to it - but at this point the vixen felt as though she wouldn't be exaggerating to say she could eat a horse. She bundled the pies into her arms and made for the table, cursing as one of the dinner plate sized pastries tumbled to the ground with her clumsy gait. She'd clean it up later. The other pies spilled from her grasp and slid onto the table where, forgoing any sort of cutlery, Maple slumped onto a bench and tore into them like a girl possessed. She needed this food! Bits of apple and crust splattered her face and her hands as she scooped the luke-warm goop into her mouth without regard for anything but filling her stomach. The first pie was gone before she could even register the taste. She could feel it sitting heavily in her gut, dulling the hunger but only a fraction. She was able to savour the second pie a little more but it still disappeared in record time, the taste of apple was never more welcome in her life.

"You should enter a competition." Syn remarked. Maple just huffed in response before dragging the third pie towards her. She'd thought that it would help, three pies must be enough to sate this ungodly hunger, right? Wrong. Half way through she knew that it wouldn't be enough, she could feel her stomach bloating out, resting heavily on her lap as though she were pregnant with child, but she didn't care. She couldn't care about anything but the hunger that felt like it was tearing her insides out. The pie tray fell like the other two, all but licked clean before the vixen threw herself from the bench on which she sat and onto the pie that had spilled on the ground, sweeping the sweet chunks of apple and crust that had splattered into her mouth. She knew it was wrong, dirty, whatever. Syn could judge her after she was done, she had to eat. Nothing was going to stop her.

"Another pie? I knew there was pig in your bloodline somewhere." Maple hadn't even heard the fab unit gurgling, acknowledging its presence only when the pie on the floor had been mostly deposited in her bloated stomach and a tray slid out of the unit holding two more pies. She fell on them like a creature possessed and something in Syn wondered if she kept fabricating pies, would Maple keep eating them? Perhaps forever?

Finally the last two warm, pastry lined treats were in her stomach and boy, what a stomach it was. Finally she was sated, at least a little bit. She groaned, lying on her back and rubbing the bloated, sloshing orb. It looked as though she'd swallowed a volley ball and felt as though she'd eaten a bowling bowl. The large mound of digesting food sat so heavily she thought it must be crushing her other organs, she wondered how she hadn't burst, how her stomach hadn't split open like an overfull balloon. The crazy scientist's warning came floating back to her, his coffee breath wrinkling her nose as he chuckled at his own insanity. "I'd never put a porter in danger, you'll make it to the destination and you'll make it there with my package. In one shape or another." Maple was beginning to suspect that shape might be more round than it had ever been before. Helpfully, Syn directed one of the cleaner bots to drag a pillow and blanket from her room and the fox, too bloated and uncomfortably full to dare standing up wrapped herself in her covers and drifted to sleep, praying that this misadventure would prove to have been nothing more than a bad dream. Along with the horrible and alien weight of her stomach, the collar around her neck told her she'd have no such luck.

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