Maple's Story (part 13) (Patreon)

(This week's character contribution has been in planning for as long as the project has been imagined, Rene Lalique is the brainchild of the amazing artist and sci-fi story teller Kikatsu! Check him out on FA athttp://www.furaffinity.net/user/kikatsu/ )

Part 13:

If lifting one arm was a trial, trying to lift her foot was all but impossible. Maple felt herself suspended in her blubbery body, her muscles lost beneath its rippling mass, now more than she had at any point before. As the damp, spreading evidence of her lust trickled between her legs and her mind unfolded into sharp clarity, she realised just what became of her body and what had yet to come. She could feel herself still processing the nutrient rich paste, every gram, every ounce of it converted into fat that continued to creep across the floor. The goop itself sat heavy in a beach-ball sized lump, stretching the organ of her stomach to preposterous degrees.

Every second I wait, I’ll grow bigger and bigger.

With a panic that rose in her chest like bile, Maple realised that if she stood there doing nothing, she’d soon fill the entire hallway, perhaps even overfill it. At what point would there simply be too much blubber for the nanites to contain? Gritting her teeth, she pushed the grisly image of herself exploded from her mind, but she couldn’t shake the thought that it was a very real possibility. The only thing for it, she decided, would be to move somewhere larger. Safer. Perhaps if she found Dr Lalique, he could reverse what had happened to her. If the collar was removed, surely she would stop growing. But once more she was faced with the reality of her situation. How would she get to Dr Lalique’s laboratory, if she couldn’t even find the energy to lift a leg? The vixen whimpered.

“Come on Maple. You ate yourself to this point, are you going to let yourself pop in some hallway in the arse end of space?” Syn’s voice rang sharp through her mind, provoking a gasp and a sniffle from Maple.

“I can’t move though…” The vixen whined, her voice dull beneath the feet of fat that surrounded her chest.

“By all logic you should have been rendered immobile at eight hundred pounds, yet there you were, waddling your truck-sized ass to the transit hub. Are you trying to convince me, or yourself that you can’t move?”

Maple huffed, since when did Syn have an attitude? The AI had always been playful, but this seemed a little much. “What do you want from me?!”

“I want you to get moving, blimp. If you stay here one of two things will happen: the interior hull of the station will contort to make room for your expanding volume, or and more likely, you will crumple in on yourself, crushed to death by your own gluttony. Since my existence hinges on yours, it is in both of our best interest that you get moving.”

The vixen gulped. Syn had a good point, even if the AI’s argument was rather disturbing evidence of a level of sapience that had been classed illegal for centuries. Maple shook her head, ignoring the way her cheeks wobbled, and steeled herself. If she was going to do this, she needed to have all of her focus on the task at hand. The elephantine vixen grimaced. As she flexed her muscles, buried under layers upon layers of fat as they were, she could feel that thankfully she still had something to work with. Nothing /seemed/ atrophied, it all just felt buried.

Maple remembered when she was young. As a girl of fourteen she’d studied martial arts and done laps around the local biodomes, enjoying the smell of water and cultivated earth. She could still remember the feel of her thighs and legs, the burn of her muscles.

“Well… get ready… you’re about to have a hell of a workout…” She mumbled to herself as she prepared to take her first, wobbling, step forward.

- - -

Doctor René of the prestigious House Lalique was angry. As far as he was concerned, he had every right to be.

Every now and then, a person is born so elevated above their kin that they become almost an alien to their own brothers and sisters. So immense is their ability to calculate, extrapolate, and experiment that they’re able to see past the petty squabbles of their siblings and elders, rising above the idiotic and the mundane. René was one of those people. He knew his House called him eccentric (and worse) behind his back, that he had been deemed unfit to participate in the affairs of the family, but frankly? It came as a relief, it granted him the time and space to conduct his own business, and that meant delving into the research of things that really mattered. Things that could really make a difference. At first it had frustrated him that his family didn’t share his vision, that they couldn’t see the building blocks of reality unravelling before them as he did, but soon their feelings on the matter became irrelevant and only the research was important. The mysteries of the universe.

It was this month’s mystery that was currently vexing Dr René, his impeded progress on what (in theory) should have been a simple exercise in genetic manipulation had become rather a thorn in his side. The weasel frowned, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose as he leaned in to go over the information scrolling across one of the many AR monitors in his lab. It was the third time he’d read over the same information, and for a creature of his brilliance, that was almost completely insufferable.

Around the weasel his borrowed lab bloomed like a greenhouse. The gently sloping walls were lined with shelves upon shelves of plants ranging in shades from green to red. Overgrowth was crawling along the floor and clinging to the legs of tables and threatening to choke the watering equipment stationed at regular intervals between shelves. From every terminal René could see the mystery of the plants hover above the AR plates, everything he needed was right in front of him, if he could just reach out and grasp it.

Potestatium was a simple, dull, boring, /ordinary/ plant. It was classified as a weed in many planets and hated for its ability to cover ground quickly and adapt to poisons and chemical deterrents. What the dull farmers on backwater planets were unaware of, however, was that the plant’s success in covering terrain stemmed not from its ability to take nutrients from soil, but its ability to synthesize them from a sun. Most plants of course relied on sunlight for energy and could not thrive in polluted or poisoned soil. Potestatium however was able to synthesize both energy and key organic components from the light and the local atmosphere. It was the chemical process behind this synthesis that René was interested in, and if his hunch was correct, when combined with half a dozen chemicals easily skimmed from Scylla, Potestatium would be able to store immense amounts of raw energy in the same way that the average tree could store glucose.

In front of René, the chemical process as he understood it was mapped out. A sigh escaped his lips before he realised it. Even after extensive genetic alteration, it seemed like the weasel was no closer to unlocking the true potential behind this specimen than the day he’d boarded the backwater aerohab.

He rubbed his eyes. It was the boon of lesser men to allow themselves the luxury of ignorance.

“Perhaps you should take a break?” One of the plants beside him offered helpfully. As far as René knew the plants were unable to talk, so he must have skipped missed some of his medication. He made a mental note to check that later, for now he was waiting for a courier to show up. Where /was/ that vixen? According to the station’s AI the shipment of chems he needed had already been processed and were on their way to the lab, typically one porter could move faster than customs ever would.

With a frustrated grunt the weasel dropped his work at the terminal. Doubtless the vixen was wandering, lost through the hallways of the labs. “Habitat, give me a direct commlink to the visiting porter, Maple.”

“Porter Identification Maple Jasmine Fairweather, membership number 100392, is not responding to pings.” The station replied, its voice echoing from the station’s inbuilt speaker system.

René sighed, is it so hard to reply to a simple ping? “Very well, I’ll come to her. Habitat, what is the porter’s location?”

“The porter is outside.”

- - -

As René opened the door to the labs of Floor 7, quadrant 4, he realised that the computer had been more literal than he’d anticipated. Immediately he was pushed back by a wall of fluffy white flesh, the blubber of some immense creature oozing to claim the space of the newly opened doorway. At first the weasel thought that something had gone wrong, some experiment had been poorly contained or worse, some idiot had sampled the fruit of their genetically engineered labours. But standing back and observing the blubbery flesh oozing into his precious laboratory, René was able to pick up the subtle panting breath of a fat swaddled being. An eyebrow slowly perked.

“H-hello?” A slightly shaky voice came from the other side of the door, “Hello is that Dr Lalique?” It asked, in what René realised was the feminine register.

Never one to back away from a new puzzle, the weasel approached, curious as to how someone not only got so fat, but how someone as fat as this being managed to end up outside of his laboratory. He pressed into the blubber that eclipsed his door until, with a little bit of luck and a lot more physical exertion than he was used to, René was able to squeeze outside. Immediately his vision was swallowed by the wall of white furred blubber, it pressed him into the wall beside his doorway and smothered him with its scent and silky fur. His sensitive nose reeled for a moment, fabricated meals, milkshakes, meats and fruits rolled like oil across his mind, mixing with the musk of sweat, unwashed fur and flatulence. The combination was dizzying and the blubber’s host squeaked and wobbled.

“Can you not back up? You’re smothering my door!” René asked, gasping for breath after a few moments of struggling to push back the tide of blubber he was trying to squeeze past.

After a few humiliated moments of silence the creature replied, “No… I-I’m too big… c-can’t walk… is this Doctor Lalique?”

“Too fat to walk? Then how did you get here, hmm?” René asked as, finally, he managed to squeeze out from beneath the creature’s colossal stomach and stumbled, out of breath into the hallway ahead of it. Once composed he pushed his glasses up and found that he had all the answer he needed right in front of him.

The vixen was massive, she must have easily weighed in at a ton, her colossal body wedged firmly between the walls either side of her. From the front, René struggled to see much more than the girl’s stomach, which lay at rest like a massive, white furred hill between them. No, to say it lay at rest would imply a lack of movement, and the weasel’s keen eyes saw the girl’s gigantic gut growing, consuming more and more space. Resting atop it were her massive, sagging breasts, both growing at an alarming rate and behind them, René fancied, he would find the rest of the vixen. It only took a moment for him to work out who it was that he looked upon.

“You’re the porter.” René said conversationally, clasping his hands behind his back and once more looking over the pile of blubber and fur.

After a moment, a meek, “Yes.” Came from the direction of the furry hill.

“You’re bigger than you were in your picture.” The weasel replied, effortlessly summoning the picture supplied with Maple’s Porter ID. The girl in the photograph couldn’t have been over a hundred and thirty pounds, less than ten times the mass of the creature in front of him.

“I… I need help! I need you to help get this collar off! I-if you don’t, I-I’ll be crushed!” She replied, flustered and panicked sounding. René could see why, concluding after a brief moment’s calculation that if she were unable to cease her growth she would be crushed in the hallway by her own mass as it pushed in on itself, with nowhere else to grow. That only explained half of the equation though.

“Collar?” The weasel asked, tilting his head.

“Y-yes! The one your f-friend put on me to make sure I get here on time! You have to get it off, oh gods please!”

“I don’t have any friends.” Came René’s response, but still he turned his mind to fill in the missing pieces of the puzzle. With a mind like his, it wasn’t too hard. His contact on Leah’s Point had made an example of the last two porters who had drunk away his hard earned credits whilst his time-sensitive cargo slowly expired on their ships. They had made headlines briefly, resembling little more than marshmallows by the time the scientists nanos were finished with them. Seeing Maple now, René could easily see the resemblance, although the creature wedged in the hallway was many times bigger than those that had been caught by the media. The collar was no doubt a medium of injection, able to control the target whilst injecting it with a fresh supply of machines. “Very well,” He announced to the growing wall of flesh. “I will let my contact know that his supplies have arrived. As soon as,” He paused to examine where the door to his laboratory used to be, now blocked neatly by Maple’s stomach.

“As soon as I can access my private terminal.”