Fruiting Bodies, ch. 8

Will stared at the screen, the oversized shorts and jockstrap hanging loose at his waist.  He was slimmer than he’d been in years, his current status as “slightly doughy” a fraction of the heaping mass he’d carried earlier that day.  The former jock had long ago stopped caring about how his ever-changing bulk presented itself to the world, though at the moment he dreaded the reduction.  Not for how it made him look, but due to the cause.  He’d never been more terrified in his life.  Even the anxiety he’d felt years ago, when they’d all started changing in the subterranean fungal forest, paled in comparison to the distilled horror currently skittering through his veins.

The customer service logs were worse than he’d imagined.  After wearing himself out with Tom the night before he’d decided once and for all that he needed to see the real data.  He’d always seen the stats, the numbers labeled in green or red indicating their level of acceptability, but he’d never actually dug into them for the specifics. He’d never had a reason to.  Or so he’d thought.  Now, after having only dipped a toe into the files, he knew they should have been doing this from the outset.  Things weren’t just now starting to get out of hand; they’d been that way since the beginning.  The Transient Muscle Growth people were experiencing with the launch of Spore G+ was actually mild compared to the reports he’d read following the rollout of their previous products, reports that hadn’t stopped coming in about them.  The fact that they were still on the market at all after what they’d done to people wasn’t just criminal, it was nightmarish.

The issue was that no one knew about any of it.  Literally.  After the first few files, Will had started to blame himself for ever having gone along with things so easily.  He couldn’t believe that he’d let the reports of adverse effects become nothing but a vague unease he tried to ignore and justify as the cost of doing business.  But now he understood why, just as he understood that the problem was bigger than he’d originally feared.

He took a deep breath and pulled up the next file, a call from earlier in the month about one of their older products, Spore S+.  It had been on the market for years, a high-priced sexual enhancer that promised improved stamina and an increase in dick size, but as he’d been going through the logs it was clear that the callers’ experiences were far from what the company advertised.

Will felt himself swell slightly when the call began.  Many of them had videos attached, and the sight of the handsome, blonde sparked a reflexive throb, even with the man’s stricken expression.  “Mike M.” looked to be in his early thirties, with an expensive haircut that matched the expensive looking bedroom behind him.  Given the cost of their products none of that was surprising, but everything else about the call certainly was.

“How is this even possible?!  What the hell are you people putting in these things?”  Mike’s panicked voice was shaky, bordering on shrill.  Will guessed that the exasperated hunk spent plenty of time in the gym based on the man’s broad shoulders and the tops of his prominent, chiseled pecs, a suspicion that was confirmed when Mike stood and took a step back a few seconds later.  His waist tapered beneath an impressive washboard, his chiseled torso coated in a wiry dusting of gold hair, but Will’s attention was immediately drawn to the lengthy, rigid cock snaked off to the side of the man’s designer briefs.  “Okay, look, you just watched me put these on, right?  You saw it.  Now watch what happens,” Mike said, pointing to the growing damp spot that began to spread at the outlined tip of his bulbous cock.

The pace of the uncontrollable oozing would have been alarming enough as the dampness started to encompass nearly the entire front of the briefs, but the true shock came when the fabric dissolved moments later.  The briefs melted even where the liquid hadn’t touched, like embers burning through a piece of paper, until the last straps of the elastic waistband fell away, leaving the handsome stud’s ten-inch pole and hefty balls exposed.  The fat head glistened from the clear, oozing liquid that slowed to a trickle, a bead gradually forming and then falling off before repeating the process, like a faucet with a steady drip.

“See?!  See?!  My dick got bigger…a lot bigger…but as soon as I cover this thing up it starts doing that!  If I’m wearing anything on top of my underwear it dissolves that, too.  And I can’t even wear a fucking gown because this happens,” Mike spat, his cock thudding against the desk as he reached offscreen to grab a t-shirt.  He slipped the form-fitting top on, and just as Will was admiring the way it showed off the other man’s athletic build, a pair of familiar damp spots began to form on each accentuated pec.  He watched the muscled mounds begin to rise and fall faster, a red sheen creeping up Mike’s face before, as with the briefs, the shirt suddenly began to dissolve until the fit man was entirely nude.  “I…I’m sorry…” he panted, licking his lips as he looked down at his glistening nipples.  “That just feels so…it’s like I’m cumming but…oh god…what’s happening…” he groaned, dropping into the chair and burying his face in his hands.

This was followed by a mumbling voice out of frame, and Mike quickly righted himself and spun in his desk chair, fully revealing the naked slab of muscle stretched out in the bed behind him.  Whoever the man was, he was bulky and beefier than the blonde, with a fat, shorter cock that Will watched rocket to attention as the man stirred and sniffed at the air.  “It’s okay dude, you can go back to sleep,” Mike said to the man, a forced calm in his tone.  Will couldn’t make out what the burly bull said, only the blonde’s response that sounded out of place considering the other man’s size and shape.  “I’ll be done in a minute, bud.  You’ll have to play with yourself until then, okay?”  Will felt another ripple pass through him when the man on the bed very obviously began jerking off as Mike turned back to the camera, his voice now barely more than a whisper.  “And that!  This…stuff…that oozes out of me pulls in guys like flies on shit.  I’m supposed to be straight, just like Everett back there.  But once they get a whiff it’s like I…I have to… let them have it?  I WANT them to have it,” he said, a faraway look briefly flashing across his eyes as he spoke.  “But the problem is what happens after.  The first few times Ev and I fooled around he was just a little out of sorts for a few minutes afterwards, but that’s been getting worse and lasting longer.  He blew me a few times yesterday afternoon and now he can’t even fucking read,” Mike hissed.  “I hoped he’d sleep it off, but he’s still just a big, horny idiot this morning.  You…you have to help us!  I can’t walk around naked and hard all the time turning guys into…that!”

Will shut off the video and leaned back in his chair.  He didn’t need to keep watching to hear the Customer Service response.  Reading the transcript left him dizzy enough, and he was afraid that if he listened it might strip away the awareness he so desperately clung to.  There was nothing they could do to cure Mike’s adverse reaction.  Unfortunately for the handsome blonde, he really would be spending his days as a naked, lustful beacon, leaving a trail of horny, dimwitted damage in his wake for any man unlucky enough to come back for repeated servings of his unique nectar.

But what HB&L could do was take the “adverse” out of the reaction.  Somehow, they were able to reconfigure Mike’s place in the world.  Even the Customer Service rep didn’t know how all the specifics would play out, but the end result was a world that no longer saw Mike’s current status as anything out of the ordinary.  Once they “filed the claim”, even the altered man himself would gradually cease to think of his altered existence as abnormal.

The implications were more than Will could process.  It explained why he would always feel a rush of anger whenever a new product launched and he saw the numbers about unexpected results, only to promptly let it go within a few days.  It also explained why there wasn’t panic in the streets over what Spore was doing to some people.  News of even a single instance like Mike’s would have been enough to destroy HB&L, yet business was thriving.  And now Will at least knew why, if not how any of it was possible in the first place.

He shook his head and gave his face a few light slaps as he geared up for the next file.  He didn’t actually need to keep digging, he’d already found more than what he was looking for, but a part of him felt like he had to keep watching and reading.  With the knowledge came a return of the guilt that had been denied for so long, and he felt it his duty to at least bear witness.  He wouldn’t make it through all of them, there were thousands after all, but he’d do at least one more S+ and then move on to the next product.

The accompanying video began the same as the last one, though the finer details varied.  Will pulled up the file and found himself looking at a stricken hulk of a man, his tight, salt-and-pepper fade accentuating the almost exaggeratedly square lines of his stubble-covered jaw.  “Kurt L.” had bare shoulders like cannonballs, while the pair of smooth, barely-covered pecs were plump melons hanging out of his neon muscle shirt.  Aside from his larger size and middle-age, Kurt was also in what appeared to be a darkened gym instead of a bedroom.  And then there was his voice.

“No…no!  I’m gonna say my piece and THEN you can talk, got it?  Listen to me.  I mean it…LISTEN to me.  Do you hear this?!”  For a seeming giant of a man, the voice that chirped out of Kurt’s wide neck was high and squeaky.  “I’m six-foot-three and two-hundred-and-fifty-fucking-pounds of muscle!  I can’t run this place and lead my classes sounding like a toddler huffing helium,” he squeaked, motioning to the dimly-lit gym behind him.  It was clearly after hours, but Kurt kept looking around as if he was afraid of being caught.  “And that’s not even the real problem.  What the fuck is this shit?!”

Will’s eyes went wide when Kurt hopped to his feet.  The neon muscle shirt had been cropped at his navel, leaving the bottom half of his lumpy ‘roid gut on display along with the bright, tiny poser underneath.  The stretched, straining garment was clearly too small for his broad frame, but even then the pouch was mostly empty.  With the heaping, meaty thighs on either side, the petite little mushroom of a cock and barely present balls were almost entirely obscured as they poked against the bright material.

“This was supposed to make my piece bigger, not smaller!  You assholes specifically said it could help manage the effects of long-term steroids, but then I end up with this?!  And I can’t even hide it!  How the fuck am I supposed to do my job if I can’t even put some goddamned shorts on?  I even have to cut my shirts like this!  Anything that gets remotely close to covering it any more than…this thing…and it’s like my brain refuses to cooperate.  I even had someone try and dress me but I kept stopping them whether I wanted to or not!  Do you know how fucking embarrassing it was to have to drive over here with my little pecker on display and my ass hanging out?!”  Kurt did a slow turn to show how the back of the poser slipped between his mountainous, muscled rear, leaving the ample cheeks entirely exposed.  He shook his head when he faced the camera again, his scowl growing.  “Uh-uh.  No.  We’re still not done.  This is the best fucking part.  Donny, get over here.”  There was a pause, Kurt’s expression going stern as he folded his massive arms across his chest.  “I don’t care how embarrassed you are.  You talked to Tucker…you know what you’re getting out of this, so do you want it or not?”

Will watched Kurt reposition the laptop as a naked young stud walked on screen.  The chiseled brunette looked to be in his early twenties at most, with the kind of ripped, athletic build that Will once had.  He looked painfully awkward as he stood next to the taller, broader man, his hands hovering just next to his below-average cock.  He went to cover the subpar, though still normal sized, organ but stopped when Kurt shot him a glare.

“Okay.  This is Donny,” the older man squeaked to the camera.  “Donny’s one of my clients here, and this pretty-boy is a massive pussy hound, aren’t you Donny?”  He waited for the blushing young man to nod, a sheepish grin on his boy-next-door face.  “You’ve never wanted to suck a dick before, have you?”  The blushing spread as Donny shook his head and Kurt looked back at the camera.  “Great.  So now watch what happens.”

Will’s eyes darted between Kurt’s tiny nub when the big man pushed the poser down and Donny’s instant look of hunger.  The younger man’s cock twitched and shot to it’s full four inches almost instantly, his eyes going wide.

“And what about now,” Kurt continued, his chirping voice going gentle.  “It’s okay.  You don’t have to be embarrassed.  This is important,” the bigger man urged.  “Do you want to suck it?”

Donny nodded before he spoke.  “Ye…yeah.  Holy shit.  I…I don’t know why, but…but yeah.  Real bad.”

“That’s why you’re here,” Kurt said, nodding down at his little poker.  Donny dropped to his knees in a flash, burying his face against the older man’s muscle gut as he swallowed the tiny package in its entirety.  “Ohhhhhhh fuuuuuuuuck,” Kurt whined in a light squeak, angling the camera so that Donny’s kneeling body was in frame.  It wasn’t obvious at first, but after a few minutes of vigorous sucking the younger man’s cock began to swell and expand.  Four inches pushed past five, then seven, before finally topping out at a thick nine with equally inflated balls.  The eager young man didn’t seem to notice until he finished Kurt off, the bigger man’s high, cracking wail swallowing his surprised gasp.

“Holy shit!  What the hell?!  Is this…this is mine,” Donny cheered, hopping to his feet and hefting his rigid new log.  His previous embarrassment seemed entirely forgotten as he openly caressed the enlarged organ and Kurt repositioned the camera again.

“See?!  As soon as they actually see my dick guys get this compulsion to suck it, but then THEY end up with the bigger piece, not me!  Turns ‘em into horny cock hounds, too,” Kurt sighed, his little button looking smaller than ever with Donny’s new girder looming nearby.

The younger man stopped his stroking when he heard that last part.  “Wait…it does what?”

Kurt gave a short, squeaky laugh.  “Oh, did Tucker not tell you that part?  Yeah, hope you enjoyed sucking cock, kid, ‘cause you’ll be doing a lot of it from now on.  What?  You never stopped to wonder why a stud like Tuck was suddenly so interested in getting fucked by dudes?  You all got a bigger dick, only problem is you aren’t going to want to use it like you used to.  Don’t worry, Tuck can walk you through growing that ass to match.”

Donny’s eyes were wide, his face pale while his cock throbbed harder than ever onscreen.  “But…but I…”

Will closed the file.  The outcome was just like all the rest.  Unfortunately, HB&L was unable to undo the effects, but they could smooth things over so that it all became perfectly normal.  They could also provide some complementary wardrobe items to makeup for the loss of clothes, meaning that somewhere out there was a helium-voiced, middle-aged beefcake walking around with his micro-dick proudly on display in an HB&L-branded thong, turning anyone who stopped to suck it into overly hung powerbottoms.  And no one would ever give it a second thought.

“We can’t keep doing this,” Will groaned to himself, pushing away from the desk.  The huge shorts and jockstrap landed at his ankles when he stood, but he just kicked them free and strolled over to the wall of windows overlooking the city.  His body rippled slightly at the memory of Tom, as a dumb, hung jock, slamming him up against them and taking him the previous day, but the pleasant tingle was shortlived.  Looking down, Will wondered how many people were walking around in a drastically altered existence, with only a digital file on the HB&L servers as proof that their lives had ever been anything else.  And he wondered again at his own acceptance of their circumstances, at that sense of connection to the thing in the cave that had made it all seem so okay when it happened to them.  Is that what the company tapped into for everyone who called?  Was any of it even real?  Were his own memories actually what he remembered them being?  If it all became the new reality afterwards, how would he even know?

He lumbered back to his desk, his plans for the evening taking a different turn as he dug out a small hard drive.  He’d had to push with a surprising amount of force to even gain access to the Customer Service logs, something that someone in his position shouldn’t have had to do, and he couldn’t take the risk of losing what he’d just learned.  He knew that if word got out the higher ups would know where it came from, but at the moment that didn’t matter to Will.

Tyler had been right all along, ever since the boat anchored off that small island nearly a decade earlier.  They were part of something much larger than a company selling health supplements, and despite what a gentle, purring voice in his head tried to tell him, he knew, at least for this moment, that it wasn’t for the greater good or to “connect” people to something bigger than themselves.  It was to consume them, to devour aspects of their lives in order to feed something ancient and hungry.  What him and his friends’ true roles were he still didn’t know, but whatever it was had to stop.  Will loaded the files onto the drive as fast as he could, hoping the burner phone Tyler had given him all those years ago still worked.  “For emergencies,” the now-slender blonde had said.  He’d never told Dave or Tom about it, and he still wasn’t sure if he should.

The first step would be getting out of the building, then he’d call Tyler, then he’d stash the files somewhere offsite.  It was a simple plan, but there was still quite a bit of room for things to go wrong, and he clearly didn’t know the full weight of what he was up against.  “Emergencies.  If this doesn’t count, I don’t know what does,” Will murmured, turning away from the desk to go get dressed while the files finished transferring.

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Voting Options

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When attempting to leave the building…

Option 1: Will is met by Ethan, who shows him some extreme examples of what happens to people who try to leak company secrets.

Option 2: Will discovers that it won’t let him leave, depositing him in different, fantasy-filled realities every time the elevator doors open.

Option 3: Will makes it outside but notices that he’s being tailed, forcing him to knowingly use some of the fungus samples to shrink the man down to pocketable size.

Option 4: Will manages to make a clean exit and meets up with Shawn and Tyler, getting to know more about the Learned and the people who’ve been altered by HB&L in the process.