Prompt of the Week - Week 166

Some might say that her chosen method of fulfilling her life goals was too roundabout to make any sense. She would say they were right, but she was going to do it anyway.

It had been a longstanding issue, and she wasn’t going to let go of it just because the means had far outstripped any sort of sensible connection to the ends. Years she’d spent researching esoteric physics, cutting-edge quantum mechanics, and more than a few tomes of forbidden knowledge that mostly (mostly!) turned out to be nothing but bunk, all for the simple purpose of doing what so many wished they could do: hit a reset button, go back to the past, and make right what once went wrong.

Perhaps, some might also say, giving up a career as an illustrious physicists and personal discoverer of about half a dozen subatomic particles and three or so different breakthroughs on the nature of spacetime to pursue a simpler career in the culinary arts, was a “waste of her talent”. These people were, of course, easy to ignore; the inherent chauvinism aside, it was insulting to suggest that something she personally wanted to do was inherently less worthy just because it wasn’t seen as contributing “as much” to a given field. As if one’s dreams had an obligation towards productivity, as if one’s life goals were secondary to whatever society deemed to be “acceptable” for one to do.

It had always been her dream to go into baking. Not just as a hobby, but professionally, scientifically, even; from a deep-set love of chemistry coupled with an absolute hatred for lab environments, along with a dash of artistic inspiration and the need to create, the choice had been simple from the get-go… were it not for external pressures pushing her away from something that was seen as “not a real job”, alongside other, far more insulting takes based on things the Mewtwo would rather just not think about.

Yes, she was good at what she did. Yes, there was a wall full of awards behind her, and yes, her name was on a triple-digit number of research papers as a primary source, but… it just didn’t seem to matter to her, not in any meaningful way. No matter what she accomplished, it always felt hollow, like all she did was scratch off another item on a to-do list she’d written so long ago that it had ceased having any meaning whatsoever; she was going through the motions, which was definitely saying something when “the motions” involved mathematics of a level so high that some elements had to be invented on the spot just to make it work.

So she buckled down. She decided that something had to change, and it wasn’t enough for her to drop everything and start over; she could, absolutely, but that wouldn’t be the same. Her whole life, she had regretted doing things by halves, leaving things undone, half-assing her approach to so many things that, looking back, it was nothing short of embarrassing. Even her current career, no matter how successful it had been, was a result of her failing to stand up for herself and choosing complacency and commonality over honesty, self-honesty as well. It wasn’t enough for her to course-correct.

She had to go back to the beginning.

Time travel, as it was known, was impossible in the backwards direction. Even going “forward” through time was something of a misnomer: one’s subjective experience of the passage of time was simply distorted compared to the rest of the universe’s, at least from one’s frame of reference. One didn’t just vanish from their spot and reappear instantly at a different position on the timeline; assuming that such a thing even existed.

At least, that was what everyone else assumed. She knew better though, as she usually did; the Mewtwo had gone far beyond where her peers would normally go, searched through places that she really shouldn’t have, and, at least on one occasion, made a deal with something that was likely not of that planar reality, assuming it was “real” to begin with (for whatever value that word had for an extrauniversal entity). Really, she did a lot of things she really shouldn’t to get to where she was that day, but that was fine.

She could fix it.

As far as she was aware, going back and altering her personal timeline would inevitably result in one of two things: either reality itself would prevent her from performing any meaningful changes, to preserve the integrity of the timeline, or the alterations would be allowed to take place… now, where she went from there, depending on whether or not the many-worlds interpretation was real and how, exactly, her own subjective experience would clash with all of this, she had no idea.

But she hoped it would work, and after a lifetime of hard numbers and boring calculations, sometimes one just wanted to be able to hope things would turn out well. Was that asking too much?

There were already multiple points in her past that the Mewtwo wanted to act upon, critical moments that decided her life trajectory and had stuck with her for, frankly, too long to be healthy for her. If she were successful, then she would never end up needing to go back in time at all; how she’d beat the causality paradox was anyone’s guess, but given the non-zero amount of eldritch influence in that time machine of hers, she could only guess the non-standard elements would take care of that.

The machine itself wouldn’t send her back in time, though, it wasn’t able to do so; trying would have left her reduced to her constituent particles in a way that wouldn’t be easy to reconstitute. But something simpler, something like raw information that could then be reassembled on the other end with a predetermined set of instructions, that could work; something like a few chosen words popping into her brain at the right moment, or a chance encounter with just the right link during a wiki dive, or a thousand other things that could lead her to taking a different path in life.

The beautiful part was that, if it didn’t work, she could just keep trying from her vantage point until it did.

The first trial run was simple: embedding the desire for baking and the culinary arts at an earlier age through strategic application of memetic triggers which would lead her to displaying a deeper, more proactive interest for a longer period of time, hopefully allowing for greater wiggle room in convincing certain elements that it was a worthwhile life choice. The payload was prepared, the destination range picked, and, with one final gulp and moment of hesitation, the Mewtwo turned the machine on and activated the temporal dislocation field.

And the exact moment that she did so, she felt it.

On the one hand, fantastic! Actual, physical confirmation that not only did the “past” exist in some conventional sense, but that she had managed to send information back to it and affect the “future”: her “present”. Truly, a momentous occasion for physics and applied esoteric mysticism for all the peoples of all the worlds in all of reality!

On the other hand, she did like that shirt.

The Mewtwo hadn’t expected the first result from her experiment to be the sudden and explosive gain of what felt like a hundred pounds or so, all of it thrown around her waistline, giving her a hell of a pudgy belly and plenty of extra softness to her lower body; ripping threads and a shattered belt later, she was hefting herself over to a mirror to check the damage, only to confirm that all of her had grown significantly… softer. Rounder. Concurrent with a lifetime of increased caloric consumption, which would… definitely go in line with what she was trying to do.

She had to admit: it was kind of cute, in a way she hadn’t been expecting. More so than what she even thought possible, in fact, to the point where her cheeks broke out in a faint blush the longer she looked at herself. It took a lot of willpower to wrench her eyes off the mirror and go fetch something that could fit her; not that she had anything, having to resort to an undersized shirt with a lab coat thrown on top of it for good measure.

But this was good, this was evidence: it had worked, and now she knew that it worked, leaving her with no excuses not to proceed according to the plan. More memetic triggers, more informational injection, now targeted at her highschool years, prompting her to veer away from “conventional” scientific pursuits and towards extracurricular activities that favoured cooking and baking, hopefully to create a solid ground for later career developments.

Once again, the payload was prepared, and once again the effects were felt immediately upon the machine’s activation… except this time, far more drastically.

The Mewtwo did not have time to adapt to what was, by all accounts, a significant alteration of her life path. Memories began forming in the back of her mind, vivid recollections of things that she had not done… or, well, things she had “done”, now that her present self-

Honestly, it was too complicated to bother with grammatical tenses.

She did those things now, and that was all that mattered. Years of participation in cooking clubs, baking competitions where she would be invited to sample not just her own creations but those of the other contestants, a healthy investment at home as well, to ensure she was just as well-fed at all hours of the day. A whole lifetime where eating a whole cake at once eventually became routine, where, if she were hungry, she would simply bake up a batch of fresh cookies, or cook a whole roast just for herself. Years of her waistline taking an amount of abuse that would border on the farcical, all while she felt happier than ever to have finally gone and done something with herself that she actually enjoyed.

The results on the present day were drastic.

For starters, the Mewtwo found herself unable to walk. Not just walk properly, but just… walk in general, as it would appear that the fat content of her body had become not just the dominant aspect, but the near totality of it as well. She was sitting down next to the time machine, one hand on the activation panel, while the other hand a slice of cake that had already been half-eaten, one that was quickly shoved into her mouth and devoured without a second thought.

Her belly oozed out in front of her, a vast mound of fat rolls and thick blubber that gurgled and churned away whatever five-person meal she had just eaten to satisfy her mid-morning cravings. The soft surface was warm to the touch, eminently pliable, and so large that she couldn’t even reach her bellybutton any more… though that likely had just as much to do with her arms, too, having fattened up considerably, limiting her range of motion.

She remembered why: after a while, her dreams of becoming a professional baker had petered out, with her passion being dampened by constant pressure from others in her life, poisoning the well and sapping whatever enjoyment she might’ve had for the creative process. She turned inward, stopping her appearances in contests, dropping out of clubs, and eventually keeping her love for baking and cooking entirely to herself and for herself, resulting in a drastic and prolonged increase in weight over the years. She was still happy for what she was able to do, but it was always marred by a longing for what could have been.

If only she had gone the slightest bit further.

She knew what she had to do. One more payload, one more delivery, just another step: even if it meant having to push people away from her and cutting them from her life, the Mewtwo knew it was better to suffer in the moment if it meant living a happier life afterwards. And besides, anyone who would be so unkind and cruel as to dash her dreams for the sake of a paycheck was not someone she wanted in her life anyway!

Some minor adjustments: she was going to go big; if she got this far with only some tactical applications of information injection, the Mewtwo could only imagine what might be possible if she cut loose and threw back everything she knew she could, everything she’d ever wanted to say, everything she’d ever wanted to be. The dam would be broken, the floodgates opened, and for once in her life, she would pick a direction and stick to it, remaining as true to her heart as possible!

With a smile on her face, a manic grin really if one were to be honest, preparations were conducted over the course of a good hour, far longer than normal owing to her mobility-impaired state. Then, finally, when everything was prepared, she reached for the activation panel, input the sequence, a-

-the thirtieth anniversary of the long-running “Cooking For You” series had gotten started with only some mild delays; it had become progressively hard over the past few years to know when the Mewtwo would be available for a stretch of time longer than what it took to produce a standard episode, doubly so after they ceased being able to cook by themselves and were forced to take on an advisory role.

Not that she minded. For the Mewtwo herself, she saw it as the apex of a brilliant career, one that, quite honestly, couldn’t have ended any other way. She liked eating too much; she liked cooking too much, and those two factor put together made it all very much inevitable. But, while it lasted, it had made the change she wanted to see: spreading the joys of the culinary arts, the wonder of artistic creation as applied to anything you could eat, the whimsy of just getting ready in front of an oven or stove and making something out of spare ingredients that you could then delight yourself with, knowing it was made by your hand.

Really, it was all she could hope for that the show even survived past the point where she couldn’t film it herself; the fact that it lasted that long was a testament to how good of a job she did, and she couldn’t have wanted it any other way.

She recalled a time before, when different choices were made, when she wasn’t what she could’ve been, wasn’t what she was then; a different time, when she’d made all the wrong choices and ended up a minute little insignificant thing in an office somewhere, pouring over equations and grant money rather than gorging herself with her latest creation. A fainter, lesser version of herself, who traded happiness for stability, fulfilment and self-actualisation for empty awards on a wall.

But she was better now. Granted, she hadn’t seen the light of day in quite a while, the direct result of her gluttonous self having developed a keen interest in her own productions; she remembered with fondness those days where she was still mobile, before trading that in for a fuller life, being ferried around on a high-capacity truck, no longer able to even move her legs, much less make use of them. Once she’d hit that stage, it was so easy to justify just… carrying on. Why bother holding back, when clearly she had gotten that far?

It got her fans as well! Her cooking channel had already been a hit when she first seriously invested into it, and as soon as she was picked up by a larger network, it became a viral sensation almost overnight! And with fame came more and more incentive for her to dip into her own supply for views; after all, what was best for engagement than a mukbang cooked by the very person eating it? And she got to come up with the theme for every episode, rather than relying on whatever was available as well!

The effects on her waistline were evident, but the Mewtwo didn’t much care for the consequences so long as she kept being able to engage with her passion for cooking and baking. Granted, it did reach a point where she couldn’t use the kitchen without the use of specialised mechanisms, then eventually she became so enormously fat that she required wireless devices and a whole set of remote-controlled drones for her to continue interacting with her love and joy, but this was really just another reason for her to keep going: the further she indulged, the more involved the process began.

Nowadays, she spent most of her time gorging herself on whatever she felt like making at any point. She had an entire kitchen warehouse complex kept constantly stocked with the best ingredients money could buy, furnaces for whatever confectionery she desired, and a whole staff of workers and volunteers eager to do whatever she wanted at any time of the day, no questions asked. More often than not, she would lose herself in a cycle of making something, eating it, then cooking up replacements while still in the process of devouring the first dish, then the second, third, fourth, and so on. Hell, she’d already made overtures towards moving the kitchen closer to her; there was plenty of space in that fat cave, after all.

And so the days went. She was the happiest she could recall ever being, and with the latest syndication deal, generations more would be privy to the wonders of cooking, courtesy of herself; soon enough, there’d be others like her as well, ready to give it all up in pursuit of their dreams, just like she herself did.

Really, it was the best decision she could’ve made.

So why was there still an activation panel next to her…?