Cluck's Ticking, Part 3 (Patreon)

Story Tier Prompt for Spacebanana

John is a lazy, procrastinating student who is sent to the prestigious Gallus Dee College, an institution on a remote island off the East Coast. It is hoped that his education will improve there, but John quickly starts to notice strange changes among the staff and student body, changes only he can notice. Can he solve the mystery of Galluss Dee before it is too late?

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Cluck's Ticking, Part 3

“What’s wrong, Miss Teeran? Is your nest not comfortable enough?”

I opened my eyes to a very different set of surroundings than I had imagined. I was squatting upon a great bet of straw, circled around my form and glued together, smelling of something pungent I didn’t even want to think of. In the doorway stood Dr Elizabeth M. Roe, her lips pulled back into a sickly smile. She seemed to loom, taller than I ever imagined her, but that was when I realised she was not large; I was small. The walls were immense, the ceiling far above me, and the room itself empty save the nest beneath me. I tried to reply, to tell her to let me go, that I was meant to be human, but all that came out was a strange rasping noise; my lips didn’t seem quite right. They seemed hardened. Numb.

“Oh, my poor little Johnny girl, can’t you talk anymore? But then, I suppose that would be quite odd, wouldn’t it. Can you imagine a chicken that could talk?”

Each word rumbled in the air, seeming to course through my being, carrying horrible portent. There was something wrong with me; it was difficult to move. I felt even more bloated somehow. My arms weren’t responding. It was like they were at odd angles. I tried again to say something, but my lips simply weren’t responding. Again, that same strange rasping noise, verging on becoming something else. Something wrong.

“Cat got your tongue, John?” the looming giant said. She appeared twisted, almost inhuman, her features a parodic expression of malicious intent. She stepped forward upon the wooden floor, and it was then that I realised she had a basket in one hand. “Don’t worry, I’m just there to collect. I’m not a fox in the henhouse. Any minute now, the pressure will begin.”

At the moment she finished her sentence, I felt it. A low rumbling in my core. I was fatter than I was meant to be, swollen. I was squatting low, unnaturally, and my legs seemed to twist and claw in ways not ordinary. But it was the pressure above all that concerned me. I twisted my head from side to side, catching a view of Dr M. Roe in both my eyes.

Wait, that wasn’t right. Why was I having to turn my head to see her like that? What was wrong with my vision?

But before I could even consider the implications of that train of thought, the urge to push came on. I felt pregnant. I felt full. It was like my body was expanding impossibly, unexplainably, and I was but a passive passenger to it. I fluttered my arms. Wait, fluttered?

Something entered between my hips. Something ovoid. Hard and rounded. I grunted as it squeezed into a passage, and the urge to push was all there was. I couldn’t even think about what was wrong with my body, why I was fluffing up. Why I could see brown and black feathers ruggling on my form.

“Good, good girl. Keep pushing, little one. You’ll be a fine producer. You just have to accept it.”

I strained, trying again to speak. No use, just more rasping. I scratched at the straw with my talons. I mean my feat. I wriggled my ass, jutting out my tail feathers in order to best position my rear. Tail feathers, clawing feet, there was something wrong but my mind was molasses. There was only the task ahead, and the need to bear down and push.

“Here it comes, the first of many, many others.”

I strained, it enveloped my passage, widening the strange tunnel that connected out of my ass. It was wrong, it was uncomfortable, and yet there was a pleasure to it as well. An innate rightness, as if my body was fulfilling the function it was always meant for. I bristled my feathers, fluttered my wings once more, and pushed.

The first egg parted the lips of my cloaca and plonked into the bed of straw. The sensation of it leaving was immense, a wicked relief from the alien feeling, but it quickly ended as it was taken up again by more pressure. My womb was still full, I still had eggs to express. I turned my head to take in the egg I’d just laid; it still had a thick coating of translucent slime running down its side, and I was astonished at its size. It had pushed that out of me! But beyond the shock, even worse, was the strange pride. It ruffled my feathers, so to speak.

More pressure, more bulging contents within my womb, more pushing, more laying. The eggs came, more of them, faster and faster. I was a prisoner to my body and a prisoner to the pleasure, and in this strange new reality I found myself in it was impossible to stop. The giant form of Dr M. Roe seemed to become ever more malicious and pleased with herself. She cooed and laughed at my every discomfort, and clapped and danced in an exaggerated fashion at each egg I forced from my birth canal. Her obsessive gaze pierced me to my core; despite her comments, she truly did appear like the fox in the henhouse, her gleaming eyes betraying her glee at my situation.

And with each strain, I found it more and more difficult to think. There was something wrong with my body and what it was meant to be. What it wasn’t. Did I always have wings? How many toes was I meant to have? And what the hell was wrong with my lips? With each question, I felt my mind drifting close to the answer, but it was like being rigged to an electric shock; with every question, my body was sent into overdrive, pushing out more and more eggs. I wanted to scream at the Doctor, demand her to tell me where I was, what she had done to me, and what she had done to my friends.

But there was only the laying. The endless push and push and push and push and push of eggs through my body. With each one that passed through me, the pressure only grew, my body only bloated further, and the need to bear down became ever more intense.

Something.

Was.

Wrong.

With.

Me.

The walls expanded. The door grew. And Dr Roe rose to greater and greater heights, leaning forward like a beast from ancient prehistoric past until all I could see was her face and claws and that terrible, terrible basket that seemed to carry such foreboding ominousness.

“Nearly ready,” she said, and her voice echoed across the vast chamber, a thousand slithering snake-like voices seeming to rebound through my aching mind. “Just a few more to go.”

I tried to speak. It was like talking underwater. There was something on my mouth, hard and bone-like, crusted and shaped and formed into a curving point. I twisted my jaw, even as the urge to push came on once more, and managed to open it. And to my horror, I realised that this unnatural sharpness was my mouth. And it could only ever say one damn thing.

“B’GAWWWWK!!!”

A great guffaw, mighty and terrible as the gods of empires long fallen. A hand the size of a house lumbered forward, fingers like talons reaching to pluck the many eggs pulled around my form. I continued to labour, breathing through my beak and trying to understand why, why any of this was happening to me. But there was no resource, no way out. I could only push, and watch as the ‘good’ Doctor plucked my eggs one by one as if held by large tweezers, placing them into the basket over and over until it was near overflowing.

“B’GAWWWWK!!!”

The devil woman smiled, and her teeth were filed to demonic points. Her eyes were yellow, snake-like, as if the essence of her soul had been made manifest. Her face was the moon, the sun, the cosmos, surrounding me with its vastness. I was nothing before it; not John Teeran, not a student of Gallus Dee. Not even human. Just a layer of eggs. A producer.

Ever so slowly, the mammoth titan before me withdrew a mirror, a broken shard of the sky itself, and crashed it down upon the earth before me, puncturing the wooden floorboards. There, in the reflection, was the real me. The creature she had turned me into.

The chicken - the hen - stared back at me, and there was nothing human left in its expression.

***

I woke with a scream, covered in sweat and still reeling from the horrid nightmare. It had felt so utterly real, and it shook me to my core that I had nearly believed it was. Still experienced the post-traumatic jitters, I flung back my sheets to witness the eggs - the real eggs - that I had laid the previous night

There was nothing there. Just empty space between my legs. Even the bed was dry. It made no sense. I patted myself over, trying to find evidence of what I and Irvine had experienced before I had fallen back into unconsciousness and terrible dreaming. Even my clothing was dry and ordinary.

“That . . . doesn’t make sense,” I whispered to myself. “That’s impossible, how could they b’gawwwking do that?”

I did a double-take, shaking my head a little. The chicken-like speech had just slipped out, as if it were totally normal.

“So not everything has been a dream,” I said to myself. “I need to look myself over. See what the cluck has changed.”

I cringed again at the compulsion to talk like that, but it at least lent further credence to my theory - nightmares aside, I was becoming chicken-like. We all we. I got out of bed, and it was impossible not to notice that my body was considerably less bulky than it had been. My belly had lost a bit of its bloat, though my hips were still wide and ass still undergoing growth. Irvine wasn’t in his bunk; he must have left already; a quick look at the clock confirmed that it was halfway past 10am. I didn’t care, it wasn’t like the classes here were real anyway. It felt more like they were just there for . . . stalling. For what, well, that was what I was terrified of.

With some difficulty, I managed to get my pajamas off. Had I gone to bed in pajamas? It was hard to remember, between the dream and the laying I had done. It had been real. I know it had. Something was clucking with me. I waddled to the bathroom of our dorm and stood before the full length mirror.

“Holy cl - shit!” I said. At least one word still worked.

I had changed again, once more overnight. My hips were wide, parodically so. They would have looked ridiculous even on a curvy woman; it was spreading my legs further and further apart. My penis had reduced in size as well; it was basically impossible to see. For all intents and purposes, I no longer had one.

My eyes brimmed with tears. My body was further changed, but for several minutes, I simply had to absorb that horrible realisation. Nothing was replacing my manhood; the skin was becoming flat and absorbed into my being. I could feel my cloaca situated between my legs; the only orifice I contained back there now, fit for all purposes. It disgusted me, and I wanted to give it no mind, but I could feel that it was larger and ran deeper into me. I wiped away my tears, and controlled my breathing. If I was going to get out of this situation, I needed to focus. I needed to finally step up and take action.

I continued to scan over my form, taking in every detail. The feathers had spread; they now coated my fat thighs, and ran right up my back. They were longer on my expanded rear; the flesh and bone had warped there to push outwards yet further. There was no way I wasn’t growing a large, chicken-like tail. The fact that my legs from the knees down had thinned considerably, the skin becoming grey-ish and scaled, was further evidence of that. The skin itched, and I knew it would only get worse. My toes were longer, but there were still five of them. That would likely change. My arms were largely the same, though feathers covered more of them now, with several brown and black quills beginning to jut from my forearms.

How far would it go? Was I doomed to become a full chicken? Would I shrink, like in my dream? Or would I become some strange man-chicken hybrid to be paraded before strangers as some weird display?

“Why - why is this happening?” I said. My voice was raspy, but thankfully there was no sign of a beak developing; just the red puffening of skin rising; the first sign of the red comb crest I would surely develop.

The tears flowed freely as I looked over my bloated, mutated form. Already my gut was churning, the twisting sensations inside it slowly building. If what happened last night was real, then it was undeniable that I was growing my eggs inside of me. Which meant my body was now on a timer. I could only hope the dream was an exaggeration. My gaze in the mirror changed from one of confusion and fear to an angry determination.

“I am not ending up any more like this,” I said. “I don’t care what happens. I am getting off this island. Time to finally clucking act.”

I took a shower, uncaring how it would affect my feathers. Afterwards, I patted myself down, feeling a little more swollen than I had five minutes before. I ignored it, just as I ignored the way my ass was a little sore, the skin and tissue stretching a little further with each passing minute. I dressed in the clothing supplied to me - better not to arouse suspicion - and sketched out a plan in my mind:

First, I had to find Ellie and Irvine. They were the two I knew the most and trusted the most. Even though their memories were being altered like all the rest, I would need allies of some kind if I was to reverse this insanity and escape. They still saw me as a friend - Ellie more so, but Irvine was at least tolerably amiable - so I could use some ploy or favour request to get them on my side.

Second, I had to get to Yarrow’s lab. The rake thin man knew what was happening, he had to. He and Dr Roe were thick as thieves. If I could find out what the biology teacher was doing to us, then the whole mystery could be unravelled. Maybe I could even find a cure.

Third . . . third, I had no real idea. What we found in Yarrow’s lab would determine everything. So I decided that third would be finding a way to organise a ferry. The sea was wild at this time of year, but in the right kind of emergency a rescue boat or craft of some kind could be called over. Roe’s office could well hold the key to that. Either the office, or perhaps the dock, which was off limits to even most staff.

It was a barebones plan, but in truth, I had never planned anything in my life. I had wasted my efforts in life, and now this was my punishment. Well, no more. No more procrastination. No more videogames. And certainly no more lounging about getting fat and lazy and pumped full of eggs. John Teeran was going to change for good, and not in the way Roe wanted me to.

My stomach growled with hunger, but I restrained myself, only eating what was strictly necessary from the food leftover in the dorm fridge. It pained me not to eat more, my body demanded it, but if I was going to save myself, I needed to strengthen my will. So, stomach growling, I stepped out into the hall, waddling down to the cafeteria to find my friends.

Only, it was empty. There was barely a student or teacher in sight. Had something happened when our eggs were taken and our beds cleaned right from under us? For several minutes I nearly went into another state of panic, until I saw a fellow student named Sanjay passing through. Like me, he was bloated, and he had dark feathers from his neck. His ass was distended, pushing out between his shorts and shirt, but he didn’t seem to notice.

“Sanjay? Where is everyone?”

He looked at me like I was an alien, and for a brief moment, I was overcome with hope that someone else at least recognised the changes that were happening to us. But instead he just gave me a condescending laugh.

“John! Too much time in your room, man! Didn’t you know the big game is on today?”

“The . . . game?”

Another laugh. He seemed almost to caww and cluck like a chicken as he did so. It was unnerving.

“The football game, man! Reds and Blues are playing their first big game today. Everyone will be there.”

A football game played by bloated, egg laying chicken people. It was absurd. Unbelievable, were it not happening to me. That’s where Ellie and Irvine would be. And that was where I needed to go. I began to run, as fast as my bloated body could take me, across the island to the playing field. My stomach lurched as I moved, already behind schedule.

A football game. A damned clucking football game that would grab everyone’s attention. This would complicate things. It might also be an opportunity.

I ran faster, clutching my belly all the way.

To Be Continued . . .