Ratty Rampage (Patreon)

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Finally finished a story to go with the images!

Chapter 1a - Pat

“Day three plus four hours twenty minutes. Treatment twenty-three B, specimen one. Assistant Patrick Difoo, begin recording.” Pat rubbed some sleep out of his eyes, pushing his glasses out of the way. He yawned and took a sip from his coffee, grimacing at his unshaven black-haired reflection in the window between lab rooms. 

He petted the white rat in his hand while he waited for the computer to confirm that and for the maze overview showed up on the screen. When that happened he lowered the rat into the chamber and lowered the one-way mirror lid. Once inside the small chamber, the rat sniffed around, but stopped for a moment and tapped the lid. The tiny creature was not nearly strong enough to push the lid open, and after a few attempts she gave up. Pat pressed enter on a nearby keyboard, causing a small door to open and a timer to start. The rat looked up, roughly where Pat had been when he put her in the chamber, and then set out into the maze.

The maze was different every day. It was built from plastic segments that could quickly be clicked into place. This time only small changes were made that still completely changed the path out of the maze. Pat observed the rat’s movements on the monitor. She followed yesterday’s correct path, until she encountered her first blockage. Again the rat looked up and scurried back, starting to search for other paths again. She found the exit as efficiently as was possible. There was a little bit of kibble in the end chamber to entice the rats to actually go there, but this rat ignored it. She simply sat down and poked at the ceiling lid expectantly. Pat opened the lid and picked her up. “Pretty good score, girl. But I feel like you’re not giving it your all. Judges are going to dock you points for walking slow.” The rat squeaked back at him a few times. He scritched her and put her in her cage. The creature sat down and looked at the human, head turning to follow him as he walked around the cage and started tapping on a keyboard.

A man in a lab coat entered the room unannounced, walked over to the coffee machine, and poured himself a coffee. “Still talking to the animals, Pat?” He asked with his back to Patrick. “They’re the closest thing to good conversation around here, Matt.”

Matthew Everett was a man in his late twenties with chestnut hair and below-average looks. An introvert with a talent for being meticulous, he had been hired by Sparrow Genco eight years ago. He had worked on this one experiment that entire time, spending most of that time by himself. He and Pat did not get along. Currently Matt was responsible for duplicate twenty-three, one of fifty, each of which consisted of a hundred tubes of liquid with a rat in each; ten copies of ten different treatments. The rats were taken out of the tubes once per day and tested. Pat was in charge of said tests.

Matt frowned as he tasted the coffee, and poured the rest down the sink. “Making coffee’s not hard, Pat. Learn it sometime.” He set the mug down in the sink and walked over to where Pat was working. “Experiment going any better?”

Pat pulled up the logs. He would not take the bite, he would be professional. “Neural plasticity is impressive, memory is excellent, problem solving is pretty good. If we want more accurate data we’ll need to come up with a better test. I haven’t heard back from human testing for a few days, but last I heard there was a significant reduction in amyloid plaque. Don’t know if it’s a cure just yet, but it’s probably marketable.” Pat took a sip from his coffee. Regardless of what Matt thought, Pat liked his coffee to register on the Richter scale. He continued. “Cell growth and regeneration is looking good too. Overall the tissue looks healthier than what’s natural. The formula appears to be progressively improving every aspect of the rat’s metabolism.” He paused for a moment, only briefly making eye contact with Matt. “Sure would be nice if the board actually told us what we’re putting in these animals. Couple days ago, I saw one of the rats chase down and eat a cockroach like a predator. Side effects are going to be a problem and we can’t do anything about them unless we know more about the formula.”

Matt nodded, content with the information presented. “They don’t pay us to care, Pat. Just do your job.” He turned around and headed back to his own lab, taking the cage with him. He’d apply the anaesthetic, hook the rat up with all the hoses and put her back in her tube. Pat wished Matt could be a bit more gentle about it.

Chapter 1b – Matt

The next morning, Matt walked between the rows of tubes, examining the rat in each of them, and took notes on his clipboard. Thirteen years. Thirteen years of research, and two hundred and forty-eight million credits of investment had gone into this project. You wouldn’t have thought it, looking at Matt’s lab. A series of transparent plastic tubes filled with liquid, each equipped with cheap monitoring equipment. Pumps, plastic hoses, consumer-level computers, tanks and reservoirs. The truth was, most of the equipment could be cheap and it wouldn’t hurt the experiment. That way, more money could go to towards specialized equipment and repetition of tests. As a small company, Sparrow Genco punched well above above its weight through efficiency and talent. And… a very lax attitude towards safety and ethics. After doing his routine, Matt sat down in his chair heavily and called the supervisor.

“Yeah, twenty-three B looks promising. The quadruple dosage treatment. It looks like it’s finally working. Eighty-five hours in, but it’s finally taking hold.” Twirling the phone cord around his finger, Matt looked at the excel sheet with data while he waited for a response from the supervisor. He knew the supervisor was looking at the same data at this point, having ignored everything until now. The man was theoretically in charge of both security and oversight of the experiment, but he did essentially nothing and Matt resented him for it. After a long minute of silence, the man on the other end responded. “Yeah, looks good. Take twenty-three B into phase two and get back to me in half an hour. I’ll inform he boss of the good news.” The supervisor hung up and Matt put the phone down, looking back to the rows of tubes.

Chapter 1c – Rat

Awakening from a dreamless sleep, the rat opened her eyes. She could see only green liquid, and felt a thing covering her muzzle. Panicking, she started squirming, grabbing for anything, and got herself tied up in wires. A high-pitched repeating sound sounded through the liquid, muffled and distorted. Eventually she managed to get her forepaws around the thing on her muzzle and pulled it off. Suddenly, she noticed she could no longer breathe. Her panic increased and in her squirming she accidentally swallowed some of the green liquid. Briefly, her skin felt tight but pleasurable and she no longer felt like she was drowning. Instinctively, she drank again, and the good feeling repeated. Then, she started drinking as fast as she could. The rat felt pleasure like never before, but soon she felt confined, trapped by a hard transparent thing. Still drinking, she found herself forced into an awkward position and curve as the space seemed to shrink around her.

Fortunately, the wall proved too weak to hold her. She arched her back and broke free, causing pieces of a hard material to fall away. She fell and the wires that had held her came loose. The rat landed on the ground with a wet thump and crawled to her feet. There had been a brief moment of pain when she landed but it was gone in an instant. She sniffed the air, hungry. She had to get the good feeling again.

Soon she found a sweet smell coming from one of the large objects on the ground. It was coming from a spot where a hose went into the object, and rhythmic gurgling and sloshing sounds could be heard. She bit into the hose and made quick work of it. From the severed hose gushed a sweet liquid, and the rat started by licking it up, and then put her mouth around the gushing hose, greedily sucking it all in. Her furry hide creaked and stretched as she expanded to contain the liquid, while her stomach gurgled as it processed the new materials. Her body grew, slowly at first, but as it grew her capacity to absorb new materials increased with it, and soon she was a roughly normally-proportioned rat with a swollen belly. For a few minutes she sucked and swelled like a balloon as she emptied the reservoir, and when it was done she was a pudgy rat as large as a man.

She heard a familiar noise and sniffed the air. The smell was familiar too. She turned around and waddled in the direction of the sound, knocking over equipment as she went. Reaching a door, she reached up with a paw and pressed the handle down, the way she had seen the bipeds do it. Pushing the door open, she found the room she had been in before, only much smaller. The maze was there, and the biped who always petted her. The rat walked up to him, realizing that she was now much larger than she had been before. The biped turned around and panicked, pressing himself back against the thing he had been working on. To show him she meant no harm she stood on her hind legs, and licked his face. She squeaked and turned around. She waddled to the other side of the maze and looked at the biped. She wouldn’t fit anymore and she was glad for it. The maze was annoying. But, she might as well take the food. She reached a paw into the end chamber and grabbed the kibble, putting it into her mouth. Looking at her biped friend, there was a certain smugness to the rat as she ate the reward kibble from the maze end chamber. The food tasted great going down, and she remembered the good feeling food gave her. She could visit the biped again later. The rat immediately started searching for more food, sniffing the air and going out through the door again. 

Catching the scent of an animal nearby, she followed it through rooms and corridors before she found her prey. A man in a business suit stood waiting by a machine, and looked at something on his arm while he tapped his foot. The rat scurried around the corner and lunged at him. 

Chapter 1d – Pat

Terrified, Pat immediately ran for the emergency exit. He wasn’t getting paid enough for this. In fact, if things were really getting this crazy and bad, chances were he wasn’t getting paid at all. He made his way through the hidden sliding door out of the back of the facility and ran towards the dilapidated ‘abandoned’ shack where he, Matt, and several others kept their old motorcycles. The facility operated on secrecy, and commuting was normally not allowed. Pat figured the consequences for leaving the base without permission would be less severe than facing whatever was going on inside. He rode his rust bucket of a bike out into the savannah and towards the city as fast as it could without falling apart.

Chapter 2a – Matt

After making sure he had his data and power point presentation ready to go, Matt hustled to the lab entrance. He hadn’t been given enough time to prepare, especially since he had to initiate phase two of the experiment simultaneously. The supervisor conversely, had already sent him a text asking where he was. He was waiting by the entrance. The plan was to leave the facility and go to the board meeting together, to tell the boss and investors about the good news and hopefully get a promotion.

Rushing through the lab, in the process of taking his lab coat off, Matt noticed the mess on the floor. One of the tubes had shattered and there was green suspension liquid on the floor. It was just a splash, not nearly enough to account for most of a tube’s volume. There was a sweet smell in the lab, most likely one of the liquid feed hoses must have popped, or so Matt thought. When he realized the broken tube was 23B, the one he was about to tell everyone about, his heart sank. He ran towards the entrance. “We need to call it off, the specimen is – “ he started to say to the supervisor he hoped to find… but all he found was a giant white rat swallowing a man’s arm, business suit and expensive watch and all. The rat was as large as a man, and it had just eaten one, rendering itself immobile as it rested on its huge abdomen. The massive distended belly however quickly deflated while gurgling and churning while rest of the rat noisily creaked and groaned from expanding as it absorbed the matter. The rat grew mostly proportionally, though its weight increased slightly faster than its size. The creature’s teeth were no longer ‘proper’ teeth for a rat; they were clearly meant for rending meat.

Matt turned and started to run, the giant rat going after him a second later. Fragments of thoughts about the experiment popped into his head as he ran down corridors and pushed open doors. The experiment was… a success. Probably. Technically. There were a few other people in the complex, running past the annoyed lab workers he hoped one of them would know what to do with the growing problem. Unfortunately, all they could do was delay the creature briefly. Going by the screams, the lab now probably had several vacancies. Still, promotion seemed unlikely...

Something smashed behind him, and he stopped briefly to look in that direction. Matt guessed the water cooler had been knocked over. The rat couldn’t be far behind. He resumed running and practically slammed into the emergency exit. Pushing the heavy door open, Matt made his way into the small natural cave. There was another door twenty yards in, a well-camouflaged sliding door that led to the surface. The lab technician reached into his pocket and fumbled with his key chain. The  door remote was on it – it was little more than a garage door remote. As he was doing that, the rat barged through the door he just passed and knocked him on his butt. Drooling, growling, the horse-sized and heavy-bellied monster was about to devour him, its teeth and mouth still red with blood from its last victims. 

|In a moment of clarity, Matt pressed the button on his remote and opened the exterior door. Sunlight came pouring in, and the rat sniffed the fresh air. Perhaps seeking bigger prey, the fat rat turned around, its belly swaying as it went, and waddled out the door. 

Still on the ground, Matt pressed the button again and closed the exterior door.

Chapter 2a – Rat

Sniffing the fresh air, the giant rat emerged from the hole that had just opened up. The sun was bright, the air was hot and dry, and the terrain was dry and sandy, with some dry bushes and trees. The irresistible smell of some kind of large and tasty creature was coming from nearby. There was a scraping sound and the hole she had just come through was gone; there was just a rocky outcropping now. Not spending a thought more on the vanishing hole, the rat followed the smell across the dry ground. She found a four-legged creature with horns and another creature like the ones she had just eaten. They appeared connected with a rope. With no plan or tact, the huge rat simply charged the creatures as best she could. Her massive belly made running more difficult, but she was still fast enough to catch her prey. Barrelling into her prey, she knocked the hoofed creature over and tore into its neck. Something hit her on the head. The smaller creature had just struck her with a stick. Feeling little more than a brief moment of pain she turned around and bit into the creature’s neck, taking it down quickly. Once both prey were down, the giant rat started tearing into them. Less than a moment later, all that was left was a skull and some bones, and a giant, bloated rat resting on her full belly. |Quickly, the meal started digesting, and the rat drank in the pleasurable feel of skin stretching over expanding flesh as her body grew bit by bit.

A few minutes later she could walk again. The now huge and obese rat lumbered across the savannah towards her next prey. It wasn’t long before she came across a herd of hoofed animals. When she got closer they ran away, and she wasn’t fast enough to keep up. Several creatures were crushed in the stampede however, which was all the rat needed. She gobbled them up one by one, growing larger all the while. Her walking gradually became more difficult, as her body swelled and thickened. Her great white belly hung lower and lower as it filled with food and fat, and before long it touched the ground. Her enormous and growing haunches, neck, and forelegs swayed and jiggled with fat and muscle as she waddled to her next prey. A group of huge grey animals with big ears and long noses stood nearby, confidently watching the great rat draw near…

Chapter 2b – Matt

The first thing Matt did was search for survivors. It didn’t take long. After finding nothing more than a few small blood stains, he concluded everyone else must have been eaten, making him the only survivor. He spent a few minutes thinking about what he was going to tell his superiors. If he wasn’t careful, they would pin this on him. He didn’t want to become a scapegoat. The solution was simple; He swapped a cylinder from one of the other labs and cleaned up the mess in his own lab. If the rat came from one of the other rooms, where someone else had been responsible, he would probably be off the hook. Maybe he’d even get a promotion, now that he was the only person left with experience! Calling headquarters, and explaining the situation – including the small modifications to the truth – Matt convinced the board of directors of the gravity of the situation.

They instructed him to forward all data on the successful variant of the formula, then initiate the ‘blank slate’ protocol. ‘blank slate’ involved low-level formatting of all storage media in the facility, destruction of all biological matter, draining all nutrient solutions and other liquids, sterilization of all equipment insofar as possible. A team would show up later in the day to physically remove or destroy equipment so that no evidence would be left.

Except Matt himself. He figured they weren’t going to let him be a liability, and since they didn’t offer him a promotion or hush money, they weren’t going to be nice about it.

He forwarded the data for a different formula and kept the working one for himself. He executed the command that formatted everything else in the facility, but didn’t bother with the physical clean-up – he had to be gone before the goons showed up. He left the facility through the secret emergency exit, after checking the security cameras. Being on a rat’s menu wasn’t one of his life goals after all. Once outside he walked to a nearby old shed where low-level staff kept old motorcycles to get to and from work. No one really paid close attention anyway, and the authorities were corrupt enough that police never bothered them. An old shed full of rusty motorcycles wasn’t going to arouse suspicion.

As he rode his rusty machine back to the city, Matt heard a commotion. Elephants tooting and stomping, from the sound of it. Taking a slight detour, he took his bike off the dirt road and soon found the elephants. All but one were in the distended belly of a giant beast of a rat, the last being swallowed just in time for him to see. The rat’s head must have been forty or fifty feet up in the air, and it wasn’t even on its hind legs. Its body and limbs were monstrously thick, its belly dragging on the ground, spilling out between its legs on either side of its body.

“Yeah, you need to have all that ready as soon as possible. I’ll be there in a few minutes, and the rat will show up a bit later. It’s super fat but also pretty big so it won’t be slow.” He put his phone away. He had chided others for texting or calling in the car or on a bike before, now he felt he was a bit of a hypocrite. After seeing the experiment growing out of control in the savannah, Matt had made a video with his phone and sent it to the city authorities. He had told them the creature was probably regenerating – that was one of the goals of the experiment after all. He hadn’t seen that regeneration in action, but it seemed the right decision to go on that assumption, given how well the formula had worked. The only way to kill the rat, he figured, was to explode it.

He pulled up at the syrup factory, at the outskirts of the city. Assuming the rat was coming for the city, it would pass here, and they’d get one chance. The plan was very simple. The rat would smell the sweet syrup leaking from a giant hose. It would drink the syrup, at which point an inflatable device at the tip of the hose would be triggered and become stuck in the rat’s mouth, fixing the hose in place. The syrup would be pumped into the rat, causing it to explode, regeneration or not.

Chapter 2c – Rat

Drawn to the smells of food and people, the rat made her way to the city. Inhabitants started taking pictures and making videos, but once the rat started eating people, panic took over. The rat was obese, but also enormous – large enough that even in her fattened state, she could outrun a human on foot. People ran into buildings, and out of buildings when the rat started tearing through them. They fled in cars, which quickly formed traffic jams and pileups, and then had no choice but to flee on foot. Only people on bicycles could reliably escape the giant monster of a rat that barrelled down the streets, devouring people left and right. The ground shook as giant rat paws carried the massive white furred body after people. Cars were crushed, alarms triggered and then violently silenced as the huge rodent obliterated everything in its path. The people it was chasing were tiny morsels however, not at all the filling meal she wanted. Her belly never felt full anymore.

Then she smelled something sweet. Following the scent, she flattened a metal fence and came upon an open area with large storage tanks and a tanker truck, all of which were connected with thick tubes, one of which was leaking syrup on the asphalt. Wasting no time, the giant rat lumbered over to the syrup and licked it up, then taking the tube in her mouth and started sucking on it.

Suddenly, the tip of the tube inflated with a loud hiss, forcing the rat’s jaws apart and fixing the tube in place. It was bothersome, but because she still wanted to drink the syrup, it was not really a problem - at first. Then the liquid started flowing faster and faster. The giant rat felt her belly fill up rapidly, stretching and groaning as she was pumped full of liquid. It was a pleasurable sensation, she felt no need to protest – at first. She started growing again, limbs and body becoming longer and thicker, but the growth was completely and utterly outpaced by the expansion her gut was undergoing, and soon she was lifted off the ground by the rising bulk of her own abdomen. Every part of her body started expanding faster than it was growing, causing them to squish together and become less flexible. She was in rat heaven.

Before long however, her belly started aching. The pressure was getting more and more intense as hundreds of tones of syrup were being pumped into her, inflating her like a balloon. Her skin creaked and protested as it was unable to keep up with the volume it was being asked to contain. Patches of skin were stretched so thin now, they were practically bald, and angry red spots were developing. Her limbs and neck soon followed, being inflated too large and too tightly for comfort, and still there was no end in sight. Underneath her, the tanker truck was crushed like an empty beer can under the expanding bulk of the enormous rat’s swelling belly.

The rat started to panic, but in her inflated state, was unable to do more than wiggle her limbs slightly. So bloated was every part of her, that she could barely move at all anymore. Angry stretch marks started appearing everywhere as an ominous creaking echoed throughout her body. Her skin protested ever stronger against the inexorable expansion…

Chapter 3a – Pat

He couldn’t allow this to happen. After all the experimenting, he couldn’t allow them to kill her for standing up for herself. Local infrastructure had been devastated when the giant rat came through it, so internet and phone coverage was non-existent. Rumor was that the rat had hurt people, but Pat hadn’t personally seen it. His first indication of the rat’s presence had been when he saw her rising on a huge white dome that he realized was her inflating belly. The experiment must have somehow gone awry and turned her into a giant – and now they were trying to cause her to explode, from the looks of it. He rode his bike into the facility where they were keeping her, some kind of syrup factory from the looks of it. No one came out to tell him to leave the premises. From the ground, all he could see of the rat was the curve of her great belly, slowly creeping across the parking lot. The skin looked tight as a drum, and sounded like rubber being stretched close to breaking. He had to move quickly; from the looks of it his friend was going to pop soon. The sound of metal creaking and protesting came from afar, probably some metal structure was being crushed by the rat’s expansion on the other side. He hoped there wasn’t anything sharp over there…

Following the giant pipe through which they were inflating the rat, Pat ran into one of the nearby buildings. He had no knowledge of syrup or factories, but shutting something down shouldn’t be too hard. He came across a series of what he figured had to be enormous pumps, their noise was deafening. He frantically searched for buttons, breakers, and switches, pressing or flipping them all. It had the desired effect; the pumps went out, along with the lights and all the other equipment, and the factory fell silent. In the dark, all he could hear was the ominous creaking and groaning of acres of skin stretched tight, and the gurgling and sloshing of a vast body of liquid.

Chapter 3b – Matt

“What’s wrong?!” The foreman shouted. Technicians examined their control panels, trying to determine the cause of the malfunction. “Don’t know sir. No malfunctions or damage reported anywhere, but everything has shut down. Pumps aren’t turning. Looks like we lost power to the entire production floor.” The foreman angrily pushed his subordinate aside. “No, this can’t happen! We have to finish this, or it’ll backfire!”

Something outside rumbled, and as everyone looked to the camera feeds, Matt bolted. He didn’t want to wait around to see what he already knew was going to happen. He made his way out the factory building and onto the parking lot outside. The impossibly enormous bloated white mass that was his experiment filled his view. It was laid out over the factory compound like a gigantic water balloon, several empty storage tanks had been half pushed, half crushed aside. It was already changing shape. The body proper, and the limbs, barely visible at first, slowly grew, becoming longer and regaining their mobility as their bone and muscle structures outgrew the sphereoids of fat they were in. The creature was the size of an ocean liner at this point, and it wouldn’t be long before its enormous and massively thick paws touched the ground again. Matt did the only thing he could think of. He got on his bike again and drove off, hoping to leave the growing creature behind him.

A deep, low rumble shook the ground when the first paw touched the ground. The shaking was so violent that Matt was nearly thrown off his bike, forcing him to stop. The flesh of thick toes spread, huge claws dug into the ground, and the asphalt and pavement underneath cracked and crushed as more and more weight came to rest on the paw instead of the shrinking belly. Another low rumble told Matt that another paw had touched the ground. The rat lowered its head to the ground, apparently letting someone climb onto it and cling to one of its ears.

He decided he had wasted enough time. He took off again, hoping to stay on his bike when the next rumble happened. The earth shook two more times soon after that, and then there was a dreadful silence. As he sped through the streets, Matt could see bystanders gawking at something up and behind him.

His plan had been to go to the edge of the nearby lake, find a small boat, sail to the middle of said lake, and wait while the military deals with the giant rat somehow. His plan was derailed by a terrible shaking, which threw him off his bike and into a row of bushes. Everything shook. Windows shattered, people fell over, some old buildings even collapsed. An impossibly large shadow fell on everything, drawing closer as the rumble became louder. Getting up, Matt saw the incredibly huge rat drag her enormous bloated belly across the city. Buildings were knocked over by huge powerful limbs and flattened by the belly that spread out from either side of the giant monster like a giant water balloon. Giant rat paws landed heavily, leaving paw-shaped craters in the ruined asphalt as they crushed everything and anything underneath. Whereas before the monster had hunted people, now she ignored them. They were insignificant morsels now, not worth the effort of scooping up. 

The creature sat down on her enormous haunches, butt flesh squishing out to the sides and pushing aside smaller buildings and vehicles. She grabbed a tall building with her chubby fore paws and started nibbling it, like a normal-sized rat might nibble on a fry. The building lasted no more than ten seconds, and the rat resumed her trek, apparently not liking the taste enough to try another building.

The rat made her way towards the lake, her belly flattening everything in her path. The entire block in front of Matt was wiped out as a white wall covered in short soft fur smooshed it. After the monstrous belly came an equally monstrous ass, furry butt cheeks competing for space and rubbing against each other as powerful legs pushed the giant monster closer to the lake. Matt picked up his bike and drove off in the opposite direction, the lake seemed a bad idea now.

Chapter 3c – Rat

After experiencing a moment of fear, the giant rat had absorbed her enormous liquid meal and grown proportionally. Now larger than anything around her, she was once again looking for food. There were tiny things scurrying on the ground, but they were not worth bothering with. She noticed a body of water nearby and headed in that direction, leaving a trail of destruction in her wake, not to mention a dust cloud. At her size it was a short distance to the water, and once she arrived she lowered her head and started drinking. Immediately feeling herself expand up and out, she was annoyed that the water receded. The rat walked forward, and drank again, repeating as the water receded further. The white behemoth expanded in all directions, her chest was now so fat it dragged on the ground like her belly, and her fat neck spread out on the ground as she drank. A minute later the lake was gone, and in its place stood an impossibly large and obese rat.

Still craving more, she bit into the ground. It tasted like nothing, but it filled her, which felt good. She couldn’t eat as fast as she had drunk, but there was no reason not to keep eating. Stone and dirt felt dry and gritty, and after eating a sizeable crater into the ground, she decided to look for water. So fat was she now, her movements had become annoyingly slow as her fat limbs squished against her fat body and generally competed with it for space. Dragging her bulk towards a distant sea, she left a trench half a mile wide and many miles long, obliterating everything in her path without even noticing. On her head, a tiny figure clung to a giant rat ear, hanging on for dear life.

The white furry behemoth reached the sea and lowered her head, eager to drink away the unpleasant dry taste of rock and dirt from her mouth. A vortex formed in the water near the giant rat’s mouth, and her body started swelling. A terrible creaking and groaning, sloshing and churning came from her body as every part of her inflated. Her belly ballooned up and sideways, and her limbs becoming so round with fat that she was once again immobile. Not even slightly deterred, she drank as fast she could, her head getting pushed forward by her growing neck and body. Soon the front of her body was in the water, her head on a growth-powered voyage across the sea, and onto the opposite shore. Struggling, she found she couldn’t turn around to drink more. Her head was stuck where it was, pressed into the green landscape. Seeing no alternative, she started chewing on the land once again. At this size, the rock and sand was almost like a liquid, and she was able to eat it faster than before. Half chewing, half drinking the crust, the rat continued expanding like a white saggy water balloon filling and spreading across the landscape, her head and limbs becoming smaller and smaller dots on an ever expanding flattened sphere.

Before long she had grown so large that she could drink the rock and stone, and the hot gooey material underneath it. It was not quite pleasant at first, but she became accustomed to it quickly. Having no concept of the formula that was altering her, she simply thought it was something hot that she could eat. Swelling ever further, she found that it became easier to drink – At some point, the meal simply started falling into her. The crust cracked under the rat’s massive weight, turning into a layer of islands on a roiling mass of magma. As the rat grew exponentially, the flow of magma increased and drained the world quickly. Feeling herself expand ever larger and tighter, the rat had become a white sphere, drinking up the last of what was once a world as her giant head and paws.

Then there was silence, and a rocky orb floating nearby that looked mighty tasty…

The End