Liquid Lunch

Peggy had problems. Big, serious financial problems. A year out of college, no job prospects, the student loan company barking at her heels... desperate for income and willing to do just about anything, Peggy was the perfect test subject.

Testing what, exactly? Well, that depends on how much money you want to make. The more tests you sign up for, the higher your paycheck. It's easy to get someone to check out stretch underwear for a week, or molecularly-bonded oxygen masks for a few days... heck, there's even people out there who sign up for SUMA* studies. SUMA inducement, SUMA reducement, other forms of mammary manipulation... and there are also those who sign up for food testing. Not taste or texture or quality, mind you - high volume ingestion of the test product along with a mix of chemicals designed to totally metabolize the product, converting it straight into fat. Fat that then burns off almost as quickly.

The idea of that last test is to "pump up" spaceflight mission specialists. Pump a few hundred pounds of high-octane nutrients onto their frames, slip them into a deep sleep and let 'em burn it off over the course of a few months or years. It reduces the amount of food that a ship's crew has to bring along, which can greatly extend mission duration.

Peggy technically signed up to test the "quick burn" metabolizer that will turn these pudgeball astronauts back into slim, trim, ready-to-work crew members in a couple of days instead of the usual run of months or years. But to get to that part of the test, she's gotta get fat first. Ridiculously fat. The molecularly bonded feeding tube, the nutrient compound and the stretch undies are all technically a part of that test. The SUMA-inducement is a parallel test - the battery she's signed up for will give her a huge belly and udder. The fat can be rapidly burned off - that's a given, they're down to testing it out on as many forms of metahumanity as possible to work out any kinks that crop up. The real test will be to see if this metabolite can also be used to reduce a severe case of SUMA - the kind of case Peggy's signed up for - back down to manageable levels.

The test battery is designed to run over the course of a fortnight. Two days and a few hundred pounds into it, Peggy has no idea how big she'll be when it's all over with... but she does know that her student loans will be gone and she'll have more than enough money in the bank. Money she'll almost certainly have to spend on a new wardrobe!

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Though we were loosely scheduled to start work on another sequence (which we may yet get to), after finishing my previous commission, Mikilno was in the mood for this, and I was happy to oblige. I don't recall doing a feeding tube before, so that was the real focus of this piece for me.


* SUMA == Sudden Udder Manifestation, Adult. Humans get Adult Onset Allergies, the occasional half-Minoan can find herself with an Adult Onset Udder. It's been known to happen. See the Jeremy bits of my gallery for more detail (but not much more information).