Field Research - Chapter 4

I woke up sore, groggy, and physically exhausted.

I wasn’t immediately sure what time it was, but the sun was shining brightly through the window. My back hurt, and something felt odd about the position I was lying in. It took several minutes of sleep-addled thought before I realized that the entire mattress was sunken; Jenny and I must’ve gone at it so hard last night that we managed to bend my cheap metal bedframe. 

Wait a second. Where was Jenny? It was only just hitting me that I was alone.

My body cried out in protest as I forced myself upright and threw my legs over the side of the bed. I stood up and stretched, my back cracking loudly, eliciting a soft groan from me, and I limped toward the bathroom. A whole pack’s worth of used condoms were in the trash; if only I’d bought more, maybe my jaw wouldn’t be feeling like it was about to fall off.

Not that I was really complaining.

I splashed some water on my face and gave my teeth a quick brush before wandering out into the apartment.

“Jenny?”

No response. I was starting to feel grateful for all the aches and pains—without them, I might’ve started to worry that last night had all been a dream.

There was no puddle of protein shake on my kitchen floor. Wherever she was now, Jenny must’ve cleaned it up. Barely thinking, I trudged straight for the coffee-maker, which had a small sheet of paper taped to the front with a note written on it:

Morning little guy <3

Sorry to sneak out, but I have to be at work

Call me xoxo

I smiled sleepily and blew a kiss at the note, far too tired to care about how silly I must’ve looked. I checked the clock: 11:30. I’d wait thirty minutes or so. She’d probably have a lunch break somewhere around noon, and it’d give me some time to wake up before calling her.

By twelve, I was still blinking the sleep out of my eyes as I sipped my third cup of coffee and dialed her number.

“Sean!” The sound of her voice was already doing more to wake me up than the coffee was. “You get my note?”

“I did! You should’ve woke me up, I could’ve driven you!”

“I tried. You were completely dead to the world. Think I might’ve tuckered you out a little too hard last night.”

I laughed. “I’m not complaining.”

“Me neither.”

I smiled, pausing for probably a little too long. It was a natural point for the conversation to hit a quiet moment, but that doesn’t exactly play over the phone.

“Hey, um,” I finally said, “Do I… Do I really need to wait all the way ‘til next Sunday to see you again?”

“Goodness. Someone’s needy, aren’t they?” She was just ribbing me… but she wasn’t wrong. “You get this clingy with all your girlfriends?”

“Only the ones that make my deepest dreams come true.”

She laughed. “Alright, alright… I’ll tell you what. Things are actually pretty slow at the lab here today. How about you come down and I give you the tour?”

“Hell yeah! I’d love to see where you work.” I hopped up from my chair and headed for the bedroom to start getting dressed. “Hey, wait a second…” I added, my voice dripping with mock-concern. “You’re not gonna strap me to a table and start performing mad science experiments on me, are you?”

“Mm, I might. If you’re good.”

Forty-five minutes later, I was in a small waiting area outside of the lab, texting Jenny to come get me. I realized that I was starting to get nervous, and when I tried to figure out why, it hit me that I didn’t actually know how big she’d be when I saw her. Last night, she’d already been a few inches taller than me when we went to bed, but she’d definitely kept growing past that. Lying down in the dark, I really didn’t get a good sense of her ultimate size.

I whipped around as a door clicked open, and as soon as I saw her, I reflexively covered my mouth.

She was enormous. She approached me with a smile, seemingly looming larger with every step. My eyes were level with her throat; she was six-five at least.

And that was just her height.

I thought Jenny had been a big girl before she’d started growing. The woman in front of me now made it clear that I didn’t know what big was. She was a being made entirely of curves, massive, elliptical, swooping curves, far broader than me in every direction. My entire body tensed as I took in the sight of her, too stunned to speak. Her gigantic, bulging body was stuffed into a too-small sweatsuit, her breasts threatening to tear it asunder, her bare belly protruding out from the bottom of her shirt, the sweatpants pulled so sheer over her enormous thighs and ass that I could actually see the tone of her skin through the fabric. She finished closing the gap between us and hugged me, my entire body sinking into her soft, luscious frame. There was so much of her now. I felt like I was going to get lost in that hug, and if I did, I didn’t want anyone to come looking for me. After a moment or two, I collected myself enough to try and hug her back, shuddering a little as I realized that my hands couldn’t reach around her.

“I got a little bigger than I prepared for. This was the biggest outfit I had.”

“Uh. Uh-huh.”

She laughed. “Alright, alright, snap out of it. You’re here for a tour, remember? Lemme show you around!” She partially broke off the hug, moving to my side as she wrapped an arm around my shoulder. My eyes kept glancing downward, tantalized by the enormous tits just below my field of vision. As she led me through the door, I struggled to tear my eyes away and focus on the lab itself.

Honestly, it was nothing too exciting to look at. With the kinds of things Jenny was doing here, I almost expected to see some giant crackling Tesla coils or vats of glowing liquid. But no, it was just a generic, cream-colored room with some work tables, a bank of computers, and shelves upon shelves of jars and vials with hard-to-pronounce names printed on simple labels. Beyond that was another room with a few large, impressive looking machines.

“That’s the pill printer, this is a centrifuge, over here is some diagnostic equipment for checking up on the test subjects… Oh! Dr. Walker, hello!”

I awkwardly waved at the middle-aged man who’d just entered the room, adjusting his labcoat.

“Jennifer. Who is this?”

“Oh, uh, this is my boyfriend, Sean. I was just showing him around since we don’t have much to do today.”

I moved to shake Dr. Walker’s hand, but he ignored me.

“Did you tell him why we ‘don’t have much to do today?’ Hm? Did you mention that the entire project is suspended because of your reckless decisions yesterday?”

“Uh… no… I didn’t mention that.” I felt Jenny’s arm around me tighten, squishing me a little closer to her.

“Honestly, what drives a brilliant woman like you to do something like this? Stealing? Using untested medication on yourself? Do you realize that you’ve jeopardized your entire career?” He shot me a disapproving look, as though he knew full-well what had driven her to do this.

“I… I’m sorry, Dr. Walker, but I was confident in the work we’d done, and I thought a concrete example that the formula was safe might help accelerate—”

“We don’t know that it’s safe. You don’t know that it’s safe! We’re reconfiguring the basic building blocks of the body; the side effects could take decades to manifest.”

I felt the impulse to step in and say something in Jenny’s defense, but I tamped it down. I’d love to say it was out of respect for the fact that this was her fight, not mine, and maybe there was a little bit of that in there. But to be honest, the main reason was that Jennifer’s looming form, the incredible amount of presence her enlarged body projected, was subtly making me feel like deferring to her was the right call.

“I… you’re right, sir. I’m very sorry. I’ve got a meeting with the department board this afternoon about it, I’ll throw myself on their mercy. I’ll give them whatever they need to keep the project open.”

“Hmph.” Dr. Walker left the room in a huff, and I exhaled, feeling myself unclench.

“Oh my God, Jenny, I’m so sorry. I had no idea you were going to get in trouble over this!”

Jenny rolled her eyes. “I’m not in any trouble, Sean. He’s completely overreacting. They’re gonna take one look at me, see how successful the formula is, and double our grant money. I’m truly not worried about it, and you don’t need to be either. I’m kissing his ass for now, but by tomorrow he’s gonna be kissing mine.”

“But, I mean… aren’t you worried that you got caught stealing the pills?”

“Oh please. The ingredients for those things cost pennies. The only valuable part is the formula, and I didn’t steal that. I mean it, Sean, this isn’t anything to worry about. In fact…” Jenny looked over her shoulder to confirm that we were alone, before turning back to me, leaning down to whisper in my ear.

“I already printed another dose before he got here.”

I swallowed. This was still so hard to believe. Jenny was standing right in front of me, practically bursting out of clothes that would probably hang loose off my frame, and I still couldn’t believe it.

When I didn’t respond, she just laughed and put her arm around me again. “C’mon! I still haven’t introduced you to Andre.”

She led us out through the second door of the room, the one Dr. Walker had come from. This third room was the first to have any windows, though they were heavily tinted, probably to keep anyone from looking in on it. The majority of the room was taken up by a large pen, a square transparent box marked with holes. The bottom was lined with about a foot of hay and littered with blankets, and stray pieces of mottled and splintered wood were strewn all over.

“Andre!” Jenny called out as she moved toward a small refrigerator in the back, pulling out a carrot. “Snacktime!”

Suddenly, the hay began to shuffle around. My jaw dropped as a mouse the size of a small dog emerged from out of it, sniffing the air. Its body was thick and round, and it dragged its belly along the hay as it waddled to the wall of the pen, rising up on its hind legs, nose nearly up to my chest.. I watched in silent shock as Jenny opened a hatch in the plastic cage and slid the carrot through, Andre greedily taking it in his forepaws and stuffing the entire thing into its cheek. Jenny turned back at me and grinned.

“Pretty cool, huh? One of the frustrating things about this project is how expensive it is to keep the test subjects fed. In most circumstances we’d have a few dozen mice, but we’d be blowing our entire budget on feed if we tried that here. It’s a big part of why things have been stalled out right now; everything on paper says the formula’s perfectly safe, but until me, Andre here was the only thing that had tried the latest version, and one data point isn’t enough to satisfy the ethics people.”

I only half-listened to her explanation, still completely absorbed in watching the giant mouse. Carrot still stored in its cheek, it grabbed a mostly intact two-by-four and started gnawing on it.

“Jenny… how big did that thing used to be?”

She shrugged. “He’s a normal mouse, so, you know…” she held up her thumb and index finger, spaced a few inches apart. “He’s had about a 2000% increase in his overall mass.”

“Two thousand percent?!”

Jenny beamed proudly. “Yes, but again, don’t get your hopes up too high. Andre could afford that much of an increase because he started off so tiny. It’s less about the factor you grow by and more about the hard limits of what a mammal body structure can handle. I’d collapse under my own weight if I grew as much as Andre did.”

I continued to watch him, fascinated.

“So… stupid question.”

“No such thing, babe. Shoot.”

“Why does… I wanna be clear, you look fucking incredible, please don’t take this the wrong way. But why does your drug—”

“Cause weight gain? Or, more weight gain than just getting bigger?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s got to do with the ways the formula adjusts the human body to be resilient enough to handle the increased size. It’s sort of counterintuitive at first; adding weight seems like it would put more stress on your skeleton, not less, right? I mean, that’s literally what it does. But this,” she gestured to her body, “isn’t just me getting fatter. I’m bulking up from the inside out. My bones are getting thicker and denser in addition to getting longer, and my muscle mass is increasing as well. The added fat is… kind of a side effect to all that, really, because we’re sort of cheating. I sure as heck don’t know how to build the DNA for thicker, stronger bones from scratch, do you?”

I shook my head.

“So, we didn’t start from scratch. Instead, we studied the DNA of animals that are already big. Primarily, bears. Bears are much larger and much stronger than a human being, but they also have lots and lots of thick layers of fat. The formula sort of… God, how do I explain this in a way you’ll understand… this is grossly oversimplifying, but I guess you could say that it nudges your DNA in sort of a ‘bearward’ direction. So the subject gets the increased strength and resiliency, but you also end up with a much fattier body. It’s probably something we’ll have to iron out in future iterations—not a lot of people want to get fatter, and it also makes the drug less efficient if what you’re looking for is increased height. But I don’t really mind it, and I don’t think you do either, do you?”

“God no.”

She grinned and stepped close to me, her rounded, gorgeous face staring down at me.

“This is so fucking cool,” she exclaimed. “I’ve been trying to play it cool ‘cuz, y’know, I’m at work, but I can’t get over how incredible this is. I mean look at you! You’re six one—” of course she still remembered my height— “and you look so… shrimpy!” She took another step forward, her stomach pushing into me and forcing me back. She did it again, and this time I tried to resist, but with the barest hint of effort on her part, she shoved me with her body, sending me stumbling back against the wall. And then she was pushing against me again, the generous softness of her body squishing against me, her breasts deforming and pushing upward as they pressed into my shoulders, causing them to rise up to the level of my chin as I stared up at her in lustful awe. I think I heard a few threads in her sweatshirt begin to tear.

“Well?” she asked. “How’s the real thing living up to the fantasy so far?”

“Pretty, um. Pretty fucking well.” That’s what I said, but what I thought was “will you marry me?”

“So, um…” God, I was not used to finding myself at a loss for words this often. “When are you, going to…?”

“Hm?” she asked coyly.

“The… the other pill you made. When are you going to… to take it?”

“Oh, that. Well… given that I’m already in the hot seat, it’s definitely not going to be today. And I’m gonna be so busy for the rest of the week… I might just have to wait until next Sunday night. Oh, don’t look so disappointed! You’re going to need the time to prepare, anyway.”

“...Huh?”

“You remember, don’t you? The drug needs fuel to function. Law of Conservation of Mass, y’know? I can’t get any bigger unless I eat, and the more I eat, the bigger I get.”

“No, sure, I remember, but what does—”

“I’m not binging on multivitamins and protein powder again. That’s efficient, but it’s gross. No, I’ve decided that if you want to see me get bigger, you have to earn it. From now on, the only food I’ll touch when I’m growing is food you make for me.” She bent her head low to kiss me, driving her tongue deep into my mouth. Below, one of her enlarged hands grabbed my crotch through my jeans.

“My body is a temple, Sean,” she said as she broke the kiss off abruptly—I almost let myself moan aloud as she continued to grope me through my pants. “And as of today, it’s the temple you worship at. Got it?”

“Y-yes.”

“Good.” On that, she backed up slightly, before hooking her hands beneath my armpits and lifting me up to her eye level. Then she was on me again, pinning me to the wall with her body as she drove her tongue down my throat again, my feet helplessly dangling.

The door clicked and she was off me immediately, my feet hitting the floor with a thud as Dr. Walker walked in.

“Oh, doctor! I was just getting ready to show Sean out and come find you!”