A series about minimum wage jobs, and the special hazards they sometimes entail.
Gavin knew he shouldn't complain. With the economy in its current state, he was lucky to be able to find a summer job, and it wasn't unusual for parents to require their kids to work as a condition of car and party privileges. He just wished he could have found something in the IT field, as opposed to making balloon animals for snot-nosed kids. The pay was lousy, the costume and makeup were hot and heavy, the locker room smelled terrible, and every popped balloon meant a crying child and an irate parent yelling in his face. Worst of all, the work was just dull and unchallenging. Nothing interesting ever happened.
Well, almost nothing. To his left he spotted a pretty young woman with long blonde hair approaching with toddler in tow. Her tight white shirt nicely presented her pert breasts, and her blue jeans clung tightly to her lithe, shapely legs. Since their was no formal "line" as such, she just stood to his left and waited her turn. She turned around and squatted down to wipe a spot off her young son's overalls. Bending at the hips pulled the back of her waistband away from her body, and Gavin found conclusive proof that she wasn't wearing panties.
"Ya mind making my kid a rabbit, buddy?" Gavin snapped to attention and reflexively pulled out a balloon from his hip pouch. From his early childhood, he vaguely remembered carnival clowns struggling with squeaky valves on helium tanks and then trying to fit a tiny, floppy long balloon on a furiously hissing nozzle, every time a request came in. This tank, on the other hand, was state-of-the-art. There was no valve on the tank itself. Instead, the hose ended in a black silicone nozzle about two inches long, with a bulge at the base. After sliding on the balloon, he held it in place with his right thumb and forefinger while simultaneously applying pressure to the squeeze bulb. When the balloon was filled, he gave the hose a tug with his left hand, and the slick nozzle squirted out of the balloon's mouth, while his right thumb and finger sealed the opening so he could tie it. The only minor inconvenience was that since he needed both hands to tie and shape the balloon, he had to retrieve the hose from the side of the tank after every request. Otherwise, his job couldn't have been easier -- or more boring.
He was eager to get another eyeful of the woman, so he squeezed the nozzle a little too hard, overfilling the balloon, and the excess pressure ejected the nozzle from between his fingers.
Kendra was tending to her son's clothes when she felt something fall down the back of her jeans. Startled, she stood up, and immediately experienced the strangest sensation she had ever felt. A feeling of pressure, like gas but more insistent, bloomed through her abdomen. As she tried to comprehend what was happening to her, she also became aware that her snug jeans had somehow become positively skin-tight around the hips.
She still felt something down the back of her pants, and her questing hands found a hose... like the one that teenage clown had been using. Quickly putting two and two together, she grabbed it with both hands and yanked upward. It didn't even budge. Although the nozzle itself was slippery, she had taken in several inches of the hose, and her ballooned buttocks held the textured-plastic surface in an iron grip, squeezing the squeeze bulb harder than it had ever been before.
Frantic now, Kendra focused her attention on the front of her jeans and tried to open her fly. Unfortunately, her waist and crotch had also expanded from the pressure, and her jeans closed with a hook, not a button. Every second took her further from being able to exert the necessary pressure to pull open her pants.
Gavin was struggling to shape the overfilled balloon without popping it and getting chewed out by yet another irate customer. Finally, he decided to just toss it and fill another one properly. He blindly reached back to where he had been accustomed to find the hose, and felt only the side of the helium tank. Looking behind him, he noticed several things at once. First, the woman who had been tending to her son's clothes was now struggling with her own. Second, her lower body had expanded from shapely to downright voluptuous, with rounded hips, substantial thighs, and a bubble butt, and her jeans had drawn in to hug every curve. Finally, the hose to the helium tank had lodged down the back of her pants.
Gavin quickly ran over and yanked on the hose. This got Kendra's attention. "Turn off the valve!", she yelled. "There is no valve!", Gavin replied. Desperately, he grabbed the hose in both hands and kinked it, trying to cut off the flow of gas. This worked for about half a second before the built-up pressure forced the hose out of his hands.
Kendra suddenly became aware of a new development. A sudden tugging sensation on her shoulders prompted her to glance downward and notice that the expansion had found another outlet. "Oh, no!" Quickly, she reached back under her shirt, but it was too late -- her expanding breasts had locked the hooks in place. She hoped that her bra would at least give out quickly, but it was not to be; her sizable and sensitive breasts required a lot of support, and the double-reinforced full-coverage brasserie she had chosen could probably have stood up to a couple of bowling balls. She grunted in distress as the tenacious garment dug into her back and sides.
Gavin thought better of trying to undo the girl's jeans, and decided to have another go at extracting the hose. Gripping it firmly in both hands, he pulled upwards with all his might. What happened next surprised both of them. Instead of budging the hose, which was locked tighter than ever, Gavin actually lifted Kendra off the ground. He knew that despite all his efforts at the gym, he was nowhere near strong enough to lift a grown woman. He also realized that he had precious little time to end this situation gracefully. Although, now that he could handle this woman, there was a new option available to him.
Running around to Kendra's front, he grabbed her by her ankles and pulled backwards. "Wh-what are you...", she protested, but Gavin pulled until the hose was taut, and then kept pulling. As he pulled, he took stock of Kendra's condition. Her crotch pressed at the front of her jeans, and her thighs had bulged to the point that, despite being spread, they touched for several inches. Her basketball-sized bosom was still locked in a death struggle with a bra that showed no signs of giving up.
With one more mighty tug, Kendra's rear released its grip on the hose. Startled by the suddenness, Gavin stumbled backwards, arms flailing, and landing on his back knocked the wind out of him, causing him to release Kendra's feet.
She tumbled upwards, flipping end over end, for a moment, but air resistance brought her to a stop about fifteen feet above the ground, and her body righted itself. For a few agonizing seconds, she hovered in place. Then, ever so slowly, she began to rise. "HHHHHHHHHHHEEEEEEEEEEELLLLLLLLPPPPPPP MMMMMMMMMEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!", she screamed, drifting away, already beyond reach, still fumbling with her jeans.
Gavin was fired the next morning. His questions about the woman's fate were met with hard, cold glares from his supervisors, and he was advised not to make inquiries or speak to the media if he ever wanted a job in the county again. Fortunately, the economy had taken an upturn while he was wasting his summer making balloon giraffes, and he found he had several opportunities to pick from, including a cushy tech-support job paying $20 an hour. His parents were therefore rather surprised when he turned them down, instead taking a job at a gas station filling tires for full-service customers. When they asked, he explained that working for minimum wage had "expanded his horizons" and given him a new, higher view on the world.
Cassandra couldn't deny that she was obsessed. When she first saw Scarlett Johansson in "Lost in Translation", she bought a DVD of every other movie she had been in. She even bought the SpongeBob SquarePants movie just to hear her voice. She had subscribed to Internet fansites, and even started one of her own. And now her obsession had driven her to move to Hollywood, join a babysitting agency specializing in celebrities, and screw her way into her supervisor's favor until he assigned Cassie her dream job. She didn't even care that he was taking more than his usual share of her pay.
Her friends didn't understand, but Miss Johansson had... changed Cassandra. She had been a normal girl with normal sexual drives before her fixation, but since then, she had lost all desire for boys. She was now only attracted to girls who resembled Scarlett. Cassie was too ashamed of this to go to a psychiatrist; the only outlet she saw was to get as close to Scarlett as she could. She felt like she'd literally explode if she couldn't be near her.
The entertainment world was shocked when Miss Johansson, a single woman, had become pregnant by sperm from an unknown donor. She denied she was a man-hater, stating that she was waiting for the one she would spend her life with, and didn't want to wait to have a child. Nevertheless, the prevailing gossip was that Scarlett was a lesbian. Although this was Cassandra's only hope of ever having a relationship with Scarlett, it still made her livid to read some of what those gossip magazines and opinion columnists had to say.
Scarlett was there when the agency introduced Cassandra to her daughter, Cheyenne, age 3. Cheyenne had immediately taken to Cassie, who for her part could do little but stand there and gawp at Miss Johansson's beauty. Fortunately, Scarlett had put this down to standard celebrity infatuation, and just blew her off. Since then, to her dismay, Cassie had barely seen Scarlett, dealing mostly with her agent.
One day, Cassandra was called over to take care of Cheyenne while Miss Johansson was attending a charity event. Since it was so hot, Cassie decided to take her swimming in Scarlett's private pool. Unfortunately, she didn't know how to swim, and while water wings were fine for Cheyenne, they weren't a graceful option for an adult. Searching the area for a floatation device of some sort, she only came up with a black rubber inner tube which looked like a relic from the fifties. Still, it would do to keep her from drowning.
She would have to inflate it first, though. It took only a minute of trying to force air into the tiny valve for her to realize that there was no way she could blow it up herself. She didn't own a bicycle, and hence she didn't have a hand pump. Pondering the situation for a moment, Cassie remembered that Miss Johansson had recently hosted a pool party catered with lots of balloons. In the clutter of the party's aftermath, the caterers had accidentally left behind one of their helium tanks. It was a cylindrical model, almost as tall as she was, with a large vertical nozzle on top for balloons, and a long hose ending in a smaller nozzle for inflatable toys of various types. The company would come by later in the week to pick it up, but they'd never miss a little extra helium, would they?
The tank rested in a wheeled hand cart, so Cassie was easily able to move it poolside. The tube's valve was so small that the hose's nozzle barely fit, but she forced it in, and with a turn of the valve handle inflation slowly commenced. To make sure the inner tube didn't float away, Cassandra stepped into it, and sat at the pool's edge, dangling her legs in the water, and listening to the hiss of the tank as she waited for the floater to come up to size.
As she sat there, Cassandra considered her relationship with Miss Johansson. Scarlett had been cold and distant at first, but she seemed to be warming to her somewhat recently. Cassie was grateful she was a girl; she had the opportunity to do things no man would have the chance to. Just before leaving for today's event, Scarlett had asked her to zip up the back of her dress. Maybe this meant she'd be asked to unzip it when she got back...
Cassie was so busy daydreaming that she didn't notice Cheyenne getting bored and looking for something to play with. Zeroing in on the helium tank, she noticed the brightly-colored handle on top. Cheyenne was an active toddler, and had little difficulty climbing to the top of the hand cart. But when she reached for the tank, she lost her footing and fell, pulling the handle fully open before her weight snapped it off.
Cassandra's reverie was suddenly interrupted by bawling behind her. "Cheyenne, are you okay?!" Quickly getting to her feet, she ran to where the child was laying on the ground. After a quick inspection, she turned out to just have a scraped knee, nothing serious. More troubling was the damage to the helium tank; Cassie groaned inwardly as she examined the broken handle. That would be coming out of Miss Johansson's deposit. And with no way to shut off the tank, all the helium would escape, which would be even MORE expensive... Cassie knew she was responsible for any damage Cheyenne inflicted while under her care, but she was barely making ends meet as it was!
Distraught over her situation, Cassie didn't notice that the tank's hissing had increased in volume until she felt a pressure around her waist. Glancing downward, she discovered that in her distracted state, she had let the inner tube overinflate, and its inward expansion had encircled her in a solid grip. She reached behind her to the valve on the tube's underside, but the nozzle was jammed in tight, and at this awkward angle she didn't have enough leverage to pull it out. Getting worried now, she pressed down on the tube as hard as she could -- and her arms slipped down the inside of the ring, getting pinned to her sides. She struggled to free them, but to no avail; she was trapped in a rubber prison which was getting tighter by the second.
Cheyenne had forgotten her fall a few moments ago, and found Cassandra's situation hilarious.
"Hehehehehe! Cassie you stuck!"
"This is *NOT* funny, Cheyenne!" And indeed it wasn't: the old inner tube had thick walls, and she was worried that she'd be deafened when it finally popped, or even cut in half if the pressure continued to mount. In desperation, she ran to the end of her slack, but the nozzle wedged in the valve stopped her short. She strained to take another step, but couldn't break free of her tether. In a fit of impatience, she tried leaping forward -- and shrieked in fright as her buoyant bondage carried her a dozen feet into the air! With the hose still firmly attached, Cassie was drawn into a backward arc before landing hard on her butt.
*RIP* "OoF!" Cassie grunted as she came down. As she shook off her disorientation, she noticed that she was experiencing a certain sensation she hadn't felt since her supervisor had assigned her this job, and also one that she had never experienced at all: the pressure from outside was being answered from within. She suddenly realized that she had landed right smack on the helium tank, and the nozzle had ripped through her bikini bottom -- and kept going. It was now pumping that damned helium directly into her!
With the top nozzle active, the flow from the hose seemed to have ceased, so one of her problems was temporarily on hold. But if she didn't stop inflating quickly, she would burst something more precious to her than an old inner tube. Yet no matter what she tried, she couldn't get loose. Her arms were still bound and useless. She scrabbled against the tank with her legs, but her wet feet found no purchase on the smooth metal. She leaned backwards, but the buoyant inner tube counterbalanced enough of her weight to keep her from falling off. She wiggled her hips, trying to give the gas a way to escape, but the rubber nozzle's surface was designed to grip a balloon's neck, and now it had a tenacious hold on her burgeoning backside.
"Cassie, your butt get big!"
"Grrrr, I know, I KNOW!" As her lower body approached its capacity for expansion, her growth began to slow, and the tension mounted. Cassie winced in fear at the groans and creaks emanating from her ass and thighs. Just when she thought she couldn't take any more, the pressure of her rear against the top of the tank finally popped the nozzle out of her. But Cassie's momentary relief quickly turned to fright as she pitched backwards. Scrunching her eyes shut, she prepared for the mother of all headaches -- but when it didn't come, she opened them, and saw to her horror that instead of falling to the deck, she was slowly rising into the air!
"YAAAAAAAAAY! Cassie, you a balloon!"
"HEEEEEEEEELP ME CHEYENNE!" Her ascent was lethargic at first, but with the inner tube once again inflating, she slowly began to accelerate. When she reached the end of her fifteen-foot tether, the sudden jolt pulled the nozzle loose with a sickening *pop*.
Cassandra never figured out exactly how it happened. As she swung around, she had gasped in fear, and somehow she must have sucked the free end of the hose down her throat. When the disorientation passed, she found herself biting down on it for dear life, the only thing keeping her from being lost to the sky. But her lifeline came with a price; for the maddening flow of helium continued unabated, blowing up her lithe body like a rubber inner tube. Her belly swelled, rising up on her torso as its downward expansion was checked by her restraint. Her burgeoning breasts overflowed the cups of her bikini top, their protruding nipples tenting the fabric until it snapped open in front. Cassie was at least grateful that Cheyenne was distracted chasing a butterfly around the pool deck, saving her the indignity of exposing herself in front of (or above) a child.
But her gratitude turned to terror, as she saw the helium tank wobble in its cart! As the cylinder slowly began to rise, Cheyenne noticed what was going on and ran over. "I hold you down, Cassie!" There were carrying handles on the end of the tank, and she grabbed hold of them as it lost contact with the ground. Cassandra tried to scream at her to let go, save herself, but only muffled grunts emerged from her obstructed throat and clenched teeth. And as the last of the helium trickled into Cassie, Cheyenne's feet lost contact with the ground, and she was carried away, giggling and squealing with delight, on a lazy afternoon breeze.
As she gained altitude and drifted from the suburbs to downtown L.A., Cassandra began to despair of ever coming back to Earth in one piece. Fortunately for her, the hot midday sun beat down on the black inner tube, heating the helium inside and causing it to expand until the rubber finally reached its limit.
The attendees of Scarlett's outdoor charity event were startled when they heard a loud *BOOM*, followed by a shower of black rubber shards. Looking up, they saw what appeared to be a large pink balloon slowly descending toward them. As it drew closer, they saw the helium tank dangling from its tether, and then the small child dangling from the tank. For a few moments, everyone was speechless at this unusual sight, but when Scarlett finally recognized Cheyenne and shrieked in fright, all hell broke loose. Fighting her way to the center of the crowd gathered under the tank, she snatched her daughter off the tank as soon as she got within reach. Photographers immediately began snapping pictures of the relieved mother and daughter.
Cassandra would have screamed if she had her mouth free. With her ballast gone, she was rising again, and she knew she would have to release the tank and deflate quickly, before she gained too much altitude. But Scarlett, sweet Scarlett, was still directly underneath her, and everyone was too wrapped up in that little brat to notice the damsel in distress right above them. If she let go now, the tank would land right on her head. She tried to grab the hose, but her inflated arms were too turgid to reach around. And the breeze that had carried her here had chosen this moment to die down, so she remained dead-centered over Scarlett even as she continued to float away. It was her or Scarlett! What to do, what to do...
In the end, the decision was made for her. The perfume wafting up from the crowd tickled Cassandra's nose until she couldn't hold back a sneeze any longer. As the hose fell out of her throat, the helium in her body finally found an exit. Cassie didn't hear the clang of the tank landing on Scarlett's head; the torrential rush of gas from her mouth sent her spiraling away into the distance.
It took hours for the fire department to reach Cassie where she was hanging from a horizontal flagpole on the side of a skyscraper. Hanging upwards, that is: her swollen backside held shut the only way the helium in her ass and thighs could escape, and though she grunted and groaned, squeezed and strained, and contorted her legs into every conceivable position, still the gas found no release. Far below her, she was certain she could make out the shapes of news vans, and cameras with telephoto lenses filming her predicament for the nightly news. Finally, she had been hauled down, and after one final indignity she was grounded and back on her feet again.
Cassandra spent a week in jail, awaiting trial on charges of child endangerment. She was relieved to learn that Cheyenne had not been hurt. Scarlett, however, had suffered a minor concussion, and would have to bow out of her current film production. At the end of the week, the district attorney's office reluctantly concluded that the case was too bizarre to try, and Cassie was released.
When she finally made it to her apartment, her last paycheck and the restraining order were waiting for her.
Scarlett retrieved a bottle of Perrier from the fridge and walked out the back door to the pool. Her doctor had ordered her not to do any work while she recovered, which meant leaving Cheyenne with a day care center. She didn't trust babysitters after her experience with that creepy girl who had taken her daughter for an airborne joyride. Now that she thought about it, the girl had clearly been infatuated with her; it was obvious from the way she had behaved whenever Scarlett was around. That would explain why her underwear drawer always seemed to have been rummaged through, and why she was always there when Scarlett needed help getting dressed or undressed. And the inflation incident -- she must have been pleasuring herself with the helium tank, and lost control of the situation! Certainly the explanation she had given the police defied all probability. At least with a restraining order, if that pervert ever showed her face in front of her again, she'd be doing hard time.
Cassandra watched through a hole in the pool fence as Scarlett lazed in the lounge chair and greedily guzzled the expensive bottled water. If that heartbreaking harlot thought she had gotten the better of her, she had another thing coming. Early that morning, Cassie had snuck into the catering company and, using a special high-pressure helium tank, had super-carbonated a bottle of water. She had then broken into Scarlett's house and dumped out the Perrier bottle in the fridge, replacing it with the doctored water. Any moment now, the fun should be starting...
Scarlett snapped to attention as she noticed that, although she had been laying perfectly still, her thighs had started to touch for some reason. As she repositioned her legs, trying to get more comfortable, she felt her bikini bottom shifting around on her backside. A gurgling sensation in her stomach brought her hands to her abdomen, where she felt a growing pressure begin to distend her flat belly. Looking down at her body, she was alarmed to see her breasts pushing against her top, peeking out at her from under the fabric.
Sneaking around to the gate, Cassie used a zip tie to bind it shut. By the time that hussy figured out what was happening, she would be too light to have enough leverage to force it open. And with the gate closed, the only way past the fence, was up...
Mai knew she could do better. Puberty had gifted her short frame with a fertile figure, which she had parlayed into a successful modeling career. Unfortunately, in Japan, that only made her an expensive piece of meat as far as most men were concerned. Every guy she dealt with felt it was his prerogative to cop a boob, grab her ass, and make the most disgusting propositions. There was nothing she could do about this except deal with it on a case-by-case basis. It was simply part and parcel with her position, and she was not so naive to think that she would still have a career if she complained to the media or the authorities.
Mai longed to move to America, where sexual harrassment was taken more seriously and most men knew to look but not touch. Unfortunately, getting a work visa was harder than ever. She had briefly considered smuggling herself in, but with the ports and all flying craft larger than a weather balloon under surveillance, the only way across the border was through Mexico, and the thought of being crammed in the back of a van with a dozen strange men made her skin crawl.
She had finally discovered the glimmer of an opportunity in an auto parts company with an American division. She was employed as a "race queen" -- eye candy to attract male attention to a corporate logo. The company was thinking of exporting the concept to America, and with her credentials, Mai would be the first across.
Until then, however, Mai had to endure a job that featured all of the aggravations of modeling with none of the glamour. Where as a model she was able to tell off individual leches as long as she didn't rock the boat, in her current position that would get her fired. She just had to endure the creeping eyes, casual touches, surrepititious photographs, lousy pay, and the bubbleheaded ditzes that were her co-workers, telling herself all the while that it would end in a trip to America.
Mai was at an exhibition promoting a new system developed by the company for race cars. It used a set of powerful pumps to dynamically inflate and deflate tires according to the position of the steering wheel and the condition of the road. The system required compressed gas to operate, and since weight and safety were major concerns in racing, helium was chosen for its low density and nonflammability. The featured event was a race between two cars, one with the system and one without, but there would also be close-up demonstrations of the system and kiosks promoting other company products.
Entering the race queen tent, Mai expected to find the usual bathing suit or gymnastics leotard. Instead, there was what looked like a bodysuit bunched up on the floor. A plastic ring held the neck open wide enough for her to enter. It was collapsed vertically, so she could see where her feet went. A note from her supervisor instructed her to put her arms and legs in the suit and pull it up to her shoulders, but then ask for help before continuing.
Following the directions, Mai noted that the feet of the bodysuit were packed into vinyl slippers, an unusual touch. The stretchy suit seemed snug, but not excessively so. Pulling the ring up to her neck, she yelled for assistance. Her supervisor came in and pulled the ring up and out, allowing the rubber-lined neck to shrink down to a snug fit. The next step she found rather odd -- he snapped a plastic collar around her neck, holding the fabric in place. When she asked what was going on, he told her that it would become clear in a few moments. She felt the presence of someone behind her, and then felt something pressing into what she realized was a valve between her shoulder blades.
This didn't prepare her for what happened next. Mai gasped as with a short, sharp hiss, the fabric of the suit shrank inward to conform to every inch of her body. Feeling around, she found that the thin material had drawn into the crack of her ass, the curves of her crotch, and the bases of her breasts. Even her nipples stood out in almost perfect detail. She also noticed that the surface of the bodysuit was very, very, slippery. Casting her supervisor a stunned look, Mai heard him explain that she wasn't just promoting the corporate logo this time. The company had developed an ultra-slick and durable coating for engine parts, and she was the demonstration model. Before the horrified Mai could object, he got behind her and shoved her towards the curtain.
The next few hours were a living hell for Mai. The bodysuit covered more than any other garment she had worn in her careers as a model or race queen, while at the same time revealing almost everything. Her purpose, of course, was to be felt up while at the same time demonstrating the slickness of the new coating. She learned from another race queen that there were even words on her bodysuit instructing the reader to not be shy and grab a feel, she wouldn't complain. Needless to say, most of the men were more interested in her body than the coating. Every moment, someone was touching her somewhere she didn't want to be touched. The chemically-treated surface of the bodysuit allowed her to slip out of one grip, only to run into another set of hands in the opposite direction.
Some of the men were almost clever in their cruelty. One asked her to take the "pencil test", which needless to say she failed for the first time since she was 14. As she bent over to retrieve the pencil, she heard the snap of a camera behind her. Guys would throw their food and drinks at her and watch them slide off. It never occurred to them how it felt to have hot chili or ice-cold soda washing over her tits. And, as per company policy, she had to laugh and smile through every second of it.
Even the suit itself offered aggravations of its own. Mai was used to her thighs rubbing together as she walked, and the sudden lack of friction threw off and exaggerated her gait, which of course encouraged the men all the more. She found it impossible to rest her feet. If she leaned against a wall, she fell on her side. If she sat in a chair, she slid to the floor. Once, she had the bright idea to ask a staff member to tie a rope around her waist, and then to the back of a chair, so that she could stay on. This only made it that much more difficult to escape from the next group of gropers.
The worst part, however, was her hands. The company had obviously had the foresight to supply her with footwear so she could stand, but had not seen the need to provide her with gloves. She never did manage to pick up that pencil, and when she fell while trying to rest, she had to slide her legs to either side of her body, then "walk" her feet together, since her arms were of no use picking herself up off the ground.
Mai couldn't take another minute of this. Not one more minute. She didn't care if she got fired, she was through. Several minutes of fiddling with the bodysuit later, she concluded that there was no way of getting it off without help. After a search, she found the staff member with the pump, hooking it up to a small helium tank for a demonstration. Pulling (well, ordering) him to a secluded corner, she told him in no uncertain terms to get the suit off her. Cowed, he agreed to do so, but explained that he would have to release the vacuum before removing the collar, lest the suction pull the suit's neck down to her waist. She could then slip out of the suit and into real clothes while his back was turned.
The man had attached the wand of the pump to the valve of the suit, and was about to press the "neutral" button, when a slight shift in Mai's posture caused the sun to reflect off her shiny back into his eyes. Momentarily stunned, he fumbled with the controls, and instead of releasing the vacuum, pressed the worst possible button he could have chosen.
Mai squealed as the skintight suit suddenly ballooned into a bulbous torso with sausage-like arms and legs. Startled, her inflator yanked on the wand, rocking Mai back on her heels. A moment later, excess pressure forced the valve out of the wand's grip, and a blast of gas from the tip sent Mai flying and tumbling end over end.
She wasn't carrying enough helium to float away, but her descent back to the ground was distressingly slow. Her screams attracted attention, and a staff member was waiting to try to catch her where she was going to land. As he grabbed for her, though, she slipped out of his grasp and sailed back into the air. A small crowd gathered where she was headed to next, but their combined efforts couldn't keep hold of her slippery suit. The next several landings were aborted in a similar manner. At one point, a man miraculously got on top of her, but her supervisor rushing to the scene tripped and fell on HIM, and she squirted out from beneath them, bouncing off a kiosk and back into play. Every time she neared the ground, a man tried to capture her, and her expansive new curves conspired with the super-slick coating to send her back into the sky. She screamed at everyone to stop chasing her, just let her land and settle down, but no one listened. Every male wanted the gratification of saving the damsel in distress.
One relatively bright fellow, instead of failing at grabbing her torso or limbs like everyone else, decided to go for her feet. While this was a swell idea in concept, he pulled a little too hard, and the vinyl slipper came away in his hand. Although romantically reminiscent of a fairy tale, this made things even worse for Mai, since her small body was now just barely shy of buoyant, the other shoe literally the only thing holding her to this earth. A shifting breeze had picked up, and every failed capture was now followed a long, leisurely drift around the exhibition.
Mai had not been totally passive in her distress, but her ability to control her flight was almost nil. The pressurized bodysuit held her arms and legs spread-eagled, and every hand, object, or surface she managed to touch slipped right through her fingers. Finally, she flipped upright to find that a horizontal cord festooned with triangular colored plastic flags was coming right at her face. Thinking more quickly than she ever had before, Mai caught the cord in her mouth. She had a fair bit of momentum, and she feared her head would be wrenched right off her neck as she flipped end over end, but her rotation slowed and then stopped.
Out of the corner of her eye, Mai saw the exhibition staff running over to dismantle one of the poles holding up the cord and bring her down. Unfortunately, their jostling briefly stretched the cord even tighter, and it snapped off that end. It was under a fair amount of tension, and yanked her towards the track, where the race was still in progress.
As the "enhanced" car roared by, Mai was caught in its wake. Flag after flag was ripped from the cord as she was dragged almost to its end. She knew the "control" car, lagging badly at this point, would still be only seconds behind. Mai gritted and gnashed her teeth, but was unable to stop the second wake from ripping the cord from her mouth and sending her spiraling upward with nothing in her teeth but a bunch of plastic flags.
An American cowboy performer had been brought to the convention to help promote the company's operation in the States. He had been sleeping off a bad case of jet lag in his tent, but Mai's supervisor thought that his talents could be useful right now. In his half-awake state, he blearily understood the panicked translator's heavily-accented English to mean that a balloon had become untethered and they wanted him to lasso it. Well, this would be more interesting than yelling and firing a cap gun, at least. Grabbing his rope, he stepped out into the daylight and spotted a shape rotating slowly in the sky. Effortlessly twirling a lasso, he made a leisurely throw that snagged Mai's still-shod foot on the first try. Then, assuming that he had hooked nothing more massive than a balloon, he yanked hard on the rope.
And the other shoe dropped.
And Mai finally earned her trip to America.
Martin Robards, owner of a successful modeling agency, was skeet shooting off the back porch of his San Diego beachfront home, when a missed pull resulted in a loud boom and something landing in the water not far offshore. He rushed into the surf, expecting to find a part from a supersonic aircraft, but instead finding a short but curvy Asian girl wearing what looked like the tattered remnants of a bodysuit and babbling hysterically in Japanese. When she calmed down, she turned out to speak fluent English. Her story on how she had got here was too wild to believe, but he didn't expect her to admit she had jumped off a border runner before the Coast Guard caught up to it. Learning that she wanted to be a model, Martin offered her a proposition.
Mai Robards knew she had it made. By the time NORAD had tracked the mysterious small flying craft to its landing spot, she had already been married and got her green card. Her modeling contract stipulated that she not be touched and not have to wear anything skintight. Although her husband of course expected sex as her end of the bargain, Mai was happy to oblige. Martin was so much more self-confident, stronger, and, well, "bigger" than any Japanese man she had known.
Her career wasn't proceeding as well as it had in Japan, though. After some consideration, she decided it was because of her breasts. Although she was downright stacked by Japanese standards, compared to American models of her height she was nothing special.
She pondered this as she was cleaning out their garage while he took the car for a tune-up. In a corner she came upon an electric breast pump that she deduced must have been used by his first wife. It was pretty much a block of rust after all that time in the humid garage, but what drew her attention was that it was connected to a sturdy brasserie with a Y-shaped plastic tube attached to where the nipples would go.
She look at the bra, and at the portable air compressor for the car's tires, and felt the first faint glimmerings of an idea...
It seemed as though Mai's star couldn't rise any higher. After her freak accident trip to the States, she had been an unknown, working lingerie catalogs at the margins of the industry like most "petite" models. Then, in a flash of inspiration, she had discovered a way to increase her bust size without the need for dangerous and illegal breast implants. Her new voluptuous figure had propelled her into the highest tiers of the business, where her Japanese grace and poise gave her a decided advantage over the balloon-brained bimbos she had passed on the way to the top.
Mai shivered in the pre-dawn air as she headed for her trailer. It would be a few hours before the sunrise beachfront photo shoot, but she needed to get something done now while things were relatively quiet. After locking the door, she stripped naked and walked to the wooden dresser at the end, where the package was waiting for her. Confirming that the seal was still intact, she opened it and retrieved the secret of her success: a portable air compressor. Originally an off-the-shelf model, she had modified it for reduced airflow speed but higher force, added an internal battery pack so she didn't have to risk plugging it in and blowing a circuit breaker, and attached the outlet to a narrow plastic tube leading to the nipples of a brasserie salvaged from a nursing pump. Despite these alterations, it was still small enough to fit in a largish purse.
Mai preferred to pump herself up at home before a shoot, but she had been on location for several days, and had gradually leaked down a cup size, so she had her husband send the pump over by courier. Normally, she waited until she was mostly deflated before filling up again, but people would notice if her designer bikini was hanging loose on her, so she needed to top herself off. After refreshing her figure, she would wrap it right back up and call for another courier to send it back. Secrecy was paramount; if anyone discovered that her figure was "pneumatically enhanced", she'd be laughed back down into underwear ads.
With some difficulty, Mai wrestled her breasts into the cups of the bra, carefully squeezing her nipples into the ends of the hose. She flicked a switch on the compressor, and heard a light hiss as her bosom slowly began its climb to the next size up. Less than a minute later, she was back in full bloom, and shut the device back off. But when she tried to get out of the now-tighter bra, Mai realized that she had slightly miscalculated. For while at home she had Martin to unhook the back, there was no one to help her here, and she was neither as strong as her husband nor working at a very convenient angle. As she twisted and contorted, struggling to get some slack, she heard the sound of a key in the trailer door.
Mai had no time to think, only act. With lightning speed, she slammed the pump into a dresser drawer and shoved it closed. Standing in front of the drawer, facing it so the hose couldn't be seen, she yelled as the trailer door opened, "Who are you?! What do you want?!" "Relax, babe, it's me." Whew. It was Francoise, her makeup artist, and as gay as they come. Still, letting himself in without permission was inexcusable, and she'd have to speak with her manager about this incident. But what she really needed to do right now was get him out of here, as in her panic she had accidentally bumped the switch on the compressor, and her breasts had resumed their slow expansion.
"The supe asked me to check your hair, he doesn't want it falling in front of your cleavage during the sandcastle shots." Her expanding chest strained against the cups. "Well, as you can see, I had it cut short again, so that definitely won't be an issue." "You can say that again, babe. Say, do you hear something hissing?" Francoise always did know how to prolong a conversation. And she'd overfilled herself by a full cup size already. "I put some water on for tea. Francoise, I know you didn't come in here to ogle me, but --"
"Say no more, babe, say no more. Just let me know when you want your face put on. Farewell and adieu!" Mai heard him close the door and lock it behind him. She was a little bigger than she'd like, but she could still squeeze into her bikini if she didn't breathe too deeply, and if anyone noticed she could blame the swelling on her cycle. She'd deflate back to optimum size over the next few days anyway.
Mai yanked open the drawer -- about an inch, whereupon it stopped short. She jostled it this way and that, but still it wouldn't budge. Slightly worried now, she investigated the problem. Noticing that the wood behind the drawer's face was scratched, she remembered hearing a crunching noise when she had slammed it shut. To her dismay, she realized that the pump had gotten lodged in the dresser, in a place where she couldn't reach it!
Mai's bust and anxiety continued to grow as she worked away at this little problem. The tiny side drawer was meant for socks and underwear, and was just large enough to hold the compressor. She was able to work her thin fingers into the gaps around it, but there was not enough space to slide or twist it to any significant degree. And the power switch was in the back, where she had no hope of getting to it. As Mai extracted her fingers from another failed attempt to shut it off, she became aware of something creeping up into her field of view.
Glancing downward, Mai was horrified to see her breasts swollen far out of proportion to her body. Even if she stopped inflating right now, she was in trouble! She had never found a way to deflate herself other than just waiting for the air to osmose out naturally. There would be no time for that to happen in the couple of hours before she was due in front of the camera! Even if they could find a swimsuit that would still fit her, her incredible growth would be difficult to explain. And they'd have to fashion her a makeshift top out of beach umbrellas if she didn't stop growing, and FAST!
Mai grabbed hold of the bra straps and tried to pull them down, but they had gone rigid from the tension. Next, she turned her attention to the front, but the full-coverage cups could not be peeled off either over or under her bosom. Starting to panic now, she grabbed the plastic tube with both hands and pulled as hard as she could, trying to detach it from where she had superglued it to the compressor. As she strained against the tension, the constricting bra began to interfere with her breathing.
Collapsing to her hands and knees, gasping for air, Mai was about to pass out, when with a quiet *whoomp* her chest dropped several cup sizes in an instant. As she caught her breath, she was wondering where the air had gone, when she found that she couldn't quite stand up straight. Feeling behind her, Mai discovered that her ass, hips, and thighs had taken in a substantial portion of the air in her body, and even now were expanding in sympathy with her bust.
Mai groaned as her hands surveyed the damage. She knew a decision had just been made for her. For while she could finesse her engorged breasts into other, less prestigious types of modeling, a big butt was career poison. Like it or not, she was going on vacation for a while. She didn't know how many weeks it would take for her rear to resume normal proportions, but she'd just have to wait it out and hope no one questioned her unexplained absence.
Her bosom was still too engorged to take the bra off, and Mai was wondering what the hell to try next, when she realized that she could just cut through the air hose. Remembering that her eyebrow scissors were in a plastic cup on her makeup table, she waddled awkwardly towards it -- and was abruptly yanked to a halt as she came to the end of her slack. Reaching for the cup, she found that her hand was well short of the lip. Even when she turned sideways, her outstretched fingertips were still a few tantalizing millimeters shy of reaching their target.
"Fine," she thought to herself, "I'll just grab it between my toes." But the air in her hips and outer thighs held her legs together with pneumatic force, preventing her from spreading them sideways. When she turned away and extended a leg backwards, she lost her balance and fell over. And turning to face the table twisted the plastic tube around her, taking up enough slack that she still couldn't reach the cup with her outstretched foot.
Exasperated, Mai was about to give up, when one more idea came to mind. The makeup table was too heavy for her to move, but unlike the dresser, it wasn't bolted down. She moved toward the table as close as she could, and, turning to face away, thrust her hips backwards. The rebound almost knocked her off balance, but he heard rattling behind her, and turned to see that she had jostled the table's contents, although not the cup. Again, she thrust herself against the table, knocking over a bottle of nail polish. Over and over, she bumped her ballooning butt into the table, tentatively at first, then with greater and greater force. As her ass continued to grow and firm up, she had a progressively harder time keeping herself stable after each thrust. One last bounce sent her stumbling halfway across the room, and she quickly turned to survey the effect. Back and forth, the cup wobbled, teetering precariously on its near edge -- and then toppling in the other direction, spilling its contents far out of reach.
Mai had to bite her lower lip to keep from screaming. As she agonized over her terrible luck, she noticed that she was involuntarily bending at the hips, as her burgeoning buttocks expanded into her lower back. Realizing that for the second time in her life, she was losing control of her body to inflation, Mai grimly resolved this time to fight it with everything she had. Bracing her hands against her knees, she gritted her teeth as she strained against the pressure fighting to bring her thighs up to her torso. Her entire body quivered with tension as her protruding ass became rock-hard from overpressurization, bending her lower spine into a curve as the inexorable influx of air fought for room to expand.
Just as Mai was wondering whether her arms would snap like twigs before her butt blew itself to bits, she heard another *whoomp* as again the pressure in her body abated. The sudden loss of tension knocked her off balance, toppling her onto her back. As she struggled to get to her feet, she saw the curve of her stomach rising between her bosom like a sunrise over a pair of hills. This time, Mai couldn't stop herself from screaming. For while up to now the changes to her body had been reversible, if her ballooning belly got stretch marks, her career would be over!
Starting to panic now, Mai ran back through all her failed attempts to separate herself from the pump. She clawed at the back of the brasserie, but the hooks had twisted together from the strain. She tore at the front, but the cups would not stretch over her massive bosom. She shook the drawer until her fingers felt like they would fall off, but it refused to budge. Turning around, she ran to the end of her slack, straining against the restraint like a plow ox, but she might as well have tried to pull down the Hoover dam. Finally, inspiration struck her. Grabbing a length of tube, she tied it into a slipknot and pulled it tight with all her might. Slowly, ever-so-slowly, the the airflow was choked off until it hissed to a stop.
Mai cursed herself for not thinking of this in the first place. Oh well, she thought to herself, she had other things to worry about. She had to get out of this bra, out of the trailer, and to her car without being seen. She could hide out with her husband, out of public view, while she looked for a plastic surgeon who wouldn't ask awkward questions. If she couldn't find one... well, all she could do was wait a few months for the gas to pass out on its own, and hope she hadn't slipped too far down the modeling ladder in the meantime. She knew she should get moving, but vanity got the best of her. Grabbing a hand mirror from the dresser top, she inspected her tumescent belly for signs of stretch marks.
As Mai was obsessing over her appearance, another danger was brewing. The compressor was still running, and with the air's outlet blocked, the motor was encountering lots of resistance. As the internal friction mounted, heat began to radiate outward. A bottle of nail polish remover was jammed in the back of the drawer, and as the ethyl acetate boiled, the plastic bottle softened until it sprung a leak, spraying the volatile, superheated liquid all over the thin, gauzy fabric inside the drawers.
Mai shrieked in terror as the wooden dresser suddenly burst into flames. Panicked, she screamed for help before remembering that she'd demanded a soundproof trailer, and furthermore that the last thing she wanted was for someone to barge in right now. Pulling against the tube once again, she found that it was softer and stretchier from the heat, and she made some progress toward the door before having a horrible vision: losing her footing, being yanked off her feet by the elastic restraint, flying toward the raging inferno... Quickly, Mai shuffled forward until the tension had abated. It looked like she'd just have to wait this out. Fortunately, the fire didn't seem to be spreading, and once the dresser was charcoal at least she could get the damned pump out.
Rivulets of sweat ran down Mai's body as the dresser continued to burn. As she nervously stood there with her hands on her hips, she noticed that those hips had resumed expanding under her hands. Shocked, she inspected the knot in the tube, but it looked as tight as ever. And the device had to be a lump of molten plastic by now, so how could... to her horror, Mai realized that she wasn't being pumped up with more air, but that the air already in her body was heating and expanding! Her hips, thighs, and rear blossomed to Callipygean proportions. Her burgeoning belly developed a vast and intricate array of stretch marks. Her chest returned to and surpassed its former glorious size, and when the nursing-pump bra could not accommodate any more expansion, her lungs again began to compress.
Just before Mai would have suffocated under her own cleavage, she heard a *SQUIP* noise and felt a release of pressure. Gulping for air, she was wondering what part of her body had blown up this time, when she look down and saw that her boobs were hanging free of the bra! They must have gotten so slippery with sweat that they squirted out the top! She knew she couldn't pull the bra off over them or under her belly, but now that the tension was off she could unhook the clasps! Reaching behind her, she found that they were warped from the heat and force; she would have to bend them open one by one. As she worked at them, she mouthed a silent prayer to the Japanese gods that she could still fit her ballooned body through the trailer door.
When dawn came and Mai was nowhere to be found, her angry supervisor told Francoise to drag her out of her trailer even if she was still naked. Mai had just broken the last hook and dropped the bra at her feet when she heard the door open behind her. With a whoosh, the hot compressed air in the trailer rushed to the exit, plucking her off her feet and carrying her screeching with it. If Francoise had been of the heterosexual persuasion, he might have appreciated the sight of a tiny Asian woman's enormous backside flying toward him. As it was, he barely managed to duck out of the way in time as Mai squeaked through the door.
For several seconds, all she could do was shiver as her body acclimated to the chilly dawn climate. When she came to her senses, Mai found that she had come to rest... but not on the ground! For she had so much hot air in her body that she had achieved buoyancy, and even now she was beginning to ascend. "Help me! Somebody please help!" By the time her supervisor got to the scene, Mai was almost out of reach. Jumping, he got hold of a foot -- but the sweat-slicked appendage slipped out of his grasp. And like the world's smallest and most beautiful hot-air balloon, Mai rose into the morning sky, drifting away until she was just a dot disappearing against the sunrise.
Jason had taken a summer job at the Franzetti bakery in order to bulk up. He was ashamed of his small, thin physique, and wanted a job where he would have a chance to get some exercise. At the same time, he didn't want to be out sweating during the hottest months of the year. He thought that kneading bread dough would be a good work out.
Franzetti's bakery was known throughout New York City for the light, fluffy, and tangy sourdough bread it turned out in surprisingly high quantity. According to Mr. Franzetti, this was because of their proprietary sourdough starter, containing a rare strain of yeast that could raise a loaf in a matter of hours, and were impervious to acid and salt. The yeast worked so quickly, in fact, that if a loaf was left an hour too long before baking, it would dissolve into a slimy puddle.
Mr. Franzetti explained that Jason would be at the register during the busy hours, and on breadmaking at the beginning and end of the day. He was replacing a longtime employee named Hector who had a drinking problem. "We knew he hit the bottle on the job occasionally, so we told him not to bring booze to work. Then one night I was closing up, and I catch Hector drinking a cup of starter. He thought the yeast produced alcohol like in beer! After that, I knew I had to let him go. I was sorry to do it, but I can't have someone like that working for me."
That evening, after Jason had shaped the loaves, he considered Mr. Franzetti's words. His parents were strict teetotalers, and he had never had so much as a sip of wine at dinner. Jason didn't dare try to get a fake ID, for fear of getting caught and being grounded for life. Maybe the starter wasn't very alcoholic, but it was still "liquid bread", and it had to taste something like beer.
Carefully, he ladled some out into a cup and drank it. It was runny and sour, and he didn't want more. Carefully he washed out the cup and ladle and closed up shop.
Jason had a dinner date with his girlfriend, Rina, at a local pizza parlor. As they were eating, he felt a bit of wind. He tried to hold it back, but it kept building up until it found release, downwards, making quite a bit of noise. Rina glared at him, but he apologized. A few minutes later, however, he felt gassy again. He clenched as hard as he could, but the pressure kept growing and growing until he couldn't contain it anymore. The cycle repeated several times until Rina finally pushed her plate back and stormed off in disgust.
The gas returned the next morning as Jason was on his way to work, and he got some angry looks on the bus. It had cleared up by the time the store opened and he got on the register. The store was very busy that day, and he wolfed down the calzone he had bought for lunch in a couple minutes.
As he was working the register, Jason started feeling gassy again. He knew that breaking wind in front of customers on his first day would be a bad career move, so once again he tried to hold the gas back. Fortunately, standing seemed to afford him more "leverage" than sitting, and he was able to maintain his dignity, even as his discomfort mounted. As he worked away at the steadily-growing line of customers, he felt his shirt come untucked from his jeans. Glancing downward, he saw his stomach bulging out like rising bread dough. He knew if he didn't release the pressure soon, he'd be in real trouble, but he couldn't take a break with customers at the register, and every time the line was almost empty, a few more customers would manage to get in.
Jason groaned inwardly as the pressure continued to mount. Fortunately, the counter and register hid his growing gut from view, but his last customers must have wondered why he was standing so far back. At last, the final customer had been dealt with, and Jason could slip out to the alley the store shared with the Muslim butcher's shop next door.
Ripping off his apron and yanking his shirt up to his chest, Jason saw that his belly would look at home on a woman well into the third trimester. Finally, he relaxed his clenched innards -- to no effect. He waited for several seconds, nervously listening to his stomach gurgle and hiss as it continued to gradually expand, but when nothing else happened, he pressed his hands against his belly, trying to press the gas out. Its surface was taut and rubbery, like a sitball, and despite his best efforts, his hands were forced outward until they barely dented the surface.
As Jason wracked his brain for a solution, he became aware of his jeans cutting into his waist, and suddenly realized that their waistband was constricting the gas's escape route. Quickly, he tried to open up his jeans, but the tension on the zipper frustrated his efforts; then, it slipped out of his hands entirely as his belly waxed still larger. Bending at the hip put even more pressure on the fly, but still it held. Desperate now, Jason grabbed the legs of his jeans and pulled. The fabric slipped out of his hands, and his torso sprang back to attention with enough momentum to launch him into the air. He screamed in terror as he rose thirty feet and did a complete backflip before landing unsteadily on his feet. Jason knew he was lucky to still be standing; he didn't think he could get up in his current state, and he needed his body weight to help force him down. He didn't want to think about what would happen if the gas continued to build...
Getting a more secure grip on his pants legs, Jason pulled with all his might. The groaning sounds coming from his belly were interrupted by a faint popping sound from the front. The strained denim pressed into his "equipment", and he briefly considered life as a eunuch.
Just as his arms were getting numb, the front of his jeans popped open. With a deafening whoosh, Jason deflated back to normal size. Quickly he threw on his apron and ducked back inside.
As the weeks went on, Jason's condition got harder and harder to deal with. Every time he had an "incident", his belly bulged bigger, faster. It took progressively less gas to visibly inflate his stomach, and he had steadily less time between becoming aware of the pressure and being able to excuse himself before other people noticed. His parents wondered why he had taken to wearing baggy overalls and running up to his room for no particular reason. As midday temperatures approached 100 degrees, he longed to take a swim in the local pool, but he would be hard-pressed to explain his copious stretch marks and protruded navel, which he could not seem to press back in.
He got the gas several times a day, and eventually worked out that it was worst after meals. With this in mind, he tried varying his diet, and after some experimentation (and another brush with explosive decompression) he worked out that food containing flour or sugar caused the most gas. As he was puzzling over that fact, his mind suddenly wandered back to that night he had tasted the sourdough starter. Those yeast must have colonized his stomach! And every time he consumed wheat- or sugar-containing food, they fed on it and produced the gas that was making his life miserable.
He knew what his problem was, but the solution eluded him. Even chugging a cup of salted vinegar didn't cure him, and he rejected bleach and ammonia out of hand. Then he remember the former employee, Hector, who had been drinking the starter for years, but no one had mentioned him having these types of symptoms. Perhaps by interviewing him, Jason could figure out why!
After a lengthy search, Jason tracked him down to a hospital, where he had died of cirrhosis. Although he knew this was a bad time to feel sorry for himself, Jason had expended his only lead, and his condition had gotten so bad that all he could wear were overalls, since any other clothes would expose his ballooning belly before he even felt it expand.
Jason could only think of one more option. If he couldn't kill the yeast directly, he could starve them. He adopted a strict flour- and sugar-free diet. It was bland as hell, but it seemed to work, as the gas didn't trouble him again.
On his last day of work, Mr. Franzetti called Jason in the morning and told him to skip breakfast. When he got in, Mr. Franzetti told him something that made his heart sink. The baker in charge of taste testing was out that day, and Jason would have to take his place. He would have to sample from every batch of muffins, rolls, cinnamon buns, and pastries the shop put out. Jason was terrified of what would happen when all those sugary baked goods hit his stomach.
As he ate his way through the day, Jason noticed that he had eaten more in a few hours than he had ever eaten in a day, and yet he didn't feel full. More importantly, he didn't feel gassy. Had he finally overcome his condition?
Little did Jason realize that although most of the yeast in his stomach were indeed dead, a few were merely dormant from lack of food. Repeated swelling had stretched his stomach to several times its original size, and the dormant yeast awoke to a veritable feast of partially-digested bread.
As Jason scarfed down yet another donut and gave the batch his OK, he felt an all-too-familiar gurgling noise. Horrified, he asked to step out a minute, then quickly ducked into the back. In the time it took him to to reach the alley door, he had already ballooned to full-term-with-twins proportions. Thus, when he reached it, he failed to take his new dimensions into account, and *BOING*ed off it, landing hard on the tile floor. As he recovered from his daze, Jason felt the straps of his overalls digging into his shoulders. After a brief attempt to unfasten them was thwarted by the tension, he decided to just make a break for the door and got to his feet as quickly as he could.
Maneuvering the inward-opening door around his bulging belly took precious seconds, but Jason got it done, and was mere inches from his goal when he ground to a halt. Jason groaned as he realized that with no way to expand forward, his stomach had spread to the sides, and he could no longer fit through the doorframe. He twisted this way and that, but every second the doorframe's vice grip grew tighter, until he could no longer budge forwards or backwards.
Desperate now, Jason pondered his options. He could release the gas here and now, but with the door open, everyone in the back, and possibly the front as well, would hear it. He'd lose his job, get a bad recommendation for any new ones, and become the laughingstock of the city. On the other hand, at least he'd be alive.
As Jason was considering this, he felt the inflation spread from his belly outwards. With both its forward and sideways expansion blocked, his stomach was leaking gas into other parts. His hips and rear took up what little slack the overalls had left to offer, pinching his privates until he couldn't feel them anymore, and the curve of his belly crept upward towards the neck of the overalls. His pectorals ballooned, briefly taking on the appearance of massive breasts before flowing together and merging with the growing mound that was taking over his body. The inflation even starting creeping along his back.
As his shoulders and thighs began to swell and stiffen, Jason thought quickly and hooked them around the doorframe. With his inflation now fighting itself, he slowly, agonizingly, inched forward in the doorframe until he suddenly popped loose, falling forwards and sliding on his belly for a moment before coming to a stop. The pneumatic-mounted door swung shut behind him. Gasping with relief, Jason unclenched himself.
Nothing happened.
For a few moments, Jason thought his muscles must be stiff from exertion, but when he had not started deflating several seconds later, he realized to his horror that his ass was inflated so large that it was pinching off the balloon that was his stomach!
With no other options left, Jason used his feet to push himself, inch by inch, towards the delivery entrance of the hallal butcher's shop. He intended to find a suitably sharp implement to puncture himself with. As dangerous as he knew this was, it had to be safer than simply exploding. He had reached the middle of the deserted loading dock when it finally happened. Unable to bear the strain, the straps of his suspenders finally gave out. Free from all restraints, Jason's body assumed a spherical shape, with only stubby arms, legs, and head protruding from the giant ball. The sudden expansion of gas knocked him backwards, onto his feet.
He tottered back and forth for a few moments, before gravity won out, and he slowly tipped onto his rounded back, bouncing a few times before coming to relative rest. After struggling fruitlessly for a few moments, Jason admitted to himself that the battle was over, and he had lost.
As the gurgles and hissing from deep inside his gut were drowned out by the squeaks and groans of his overinflated body, it occurred to Jason that even microorganisms that can survive acidity and salinity could be killed by sufficient concentrations of alcohol.
"In breaking news, an explosion in Brooklyn today leveled a butcher's shop next to the famous Franzetti bakery. Police rushing to the scene discovered what they describe as the remains of an Islamic terror cell, including high explosives and a detailed map of the New York City subway. No word yet as to the cause of the explosion, but we have unconfirmed reports that an employee of the bakery is missing. More information as the story develops."
Patricia was used to people looking down at her -- literally. Puberty and growth spurts had passed her by with barely a glance, leaving her 4'10" and just shy of 90 lbs. "Trixie the Pixie", they called her in high school. Boys treated her like a disposable sex toy. Girls saw her as an object of pity and scorn, when they weren't just stuffing her into lockers. Her intellect, talents, and assertive personality went unnoticed, wrapped up in such a tiny package. But Patricia was determined not to let her body's failings define her destiny. She put her mind to work, applied herself, and got a job with an internationally-renowned catering company right out of school. She had to start at the bottom, of course, but she knew she could expand her skillset, impress her supervisors, and rise up quickly.
Just on her first day, she'd already learned a few things. First, obscenely wealthy families holding multi-million-dollar weddings would invite people they didn't know or care about for social purposes, then corral them in a tent hidden on the outskirts of their property, full of cheap snacks and booze. Second, they'd specify a certain bottom-shelf wine for their little Siberia, then blow up at the caterers on the morning of because the brand they very specifically requested wasn't sparkling. Third, when you have to carbonate a lot of beverage in a hurry, hydrogen gets the job done much more quickly than carbon dioxide. Patricia just hoped no one would be smoking over their drink.
This is where she found herself working her first assignment, wielding a carbonation gun, sticking the needle through the cork, gassing up bottle after bottle. The uniform her employers had custom-ordered for her hadn't arrived yet, so Patricia was wearing one made for an adult-sized woman. She was practically swimming in it -- she'd even had to take in some waistband with a binder clip to keep her pants up. This was probably why she was exiled to this remote corner, where no one would see her. Her pants legs kept falling down over her ankles, tripping her up as she raced to complete her task on time.
Patricia had only a few bottles left to go when the gun ran out of gas. She'd been hoping this wouldn't happen; the receptacle had a pin which was supposed to puncture the end of the gas capsule, but it was blunt and difficult to poke through the metal. For the umpteenth time, Patricia wished she had a little upper-body strength, as she struggled to force the slender tube into its socket. So focused was she on her task that she didn't realize she'd forgotten to lock it in place first.
The instant the pin pierced the capsule, the slick metal slipped from her grasp. Patricia barely had time to blink as it rocketed into her mouth and down her throat, coming to rest in her stomach.
As she stood there, stunned by the events of that split second, a gurgling from her midsection drew her attention. She grasped her abdomen, feeling its softness give way to firm resilience. To her astonishment, it then starting pushing out, inflating right under her hands. Seconds later, Patricia felt a sensation she hadn't experienced since she was ten: wearing clothes too small for her. Her belly had blown up as far as her shirt could accommodate it, and she grunted softly as the stiff fabric gripped her in an unfriendly embrace that grew tighter by the second.
A sudden sound made Patricia's heart leap in her throat. Relief washed over her as she realized she hadn't popped, only popped a button off her shirt. Several more followed in quick succession, and her stomach sprang forth from its confinement. Patricia was stupefied to see such an enormous protrusion projecting from her body. She'd worn a fake pregnancy belly (much too big for her) for sex-ed class, but it was another thing entirely to have one made of your own flesh and skin. The way it tugged upward instead of downward was especially disconcerting.
Patricia's brain finally snapped out of its paralysis, and she realized that her pneumatic problem was only going to get worse unless she did something about it. She squeezed her midsection, trying to deflate it. The gas shifted under her grasp, but always settled back where it started, no matter which way she pushed it. And as her swelling tummy grew into its newfound freedom, it firmed up and presented increasing resistance to her attempts. Patricia pulled hard on her underbelly, and felt a gas bubble begin to well up inside her. Gritting her teeth, she redoubled her efforts, fighting with all the force her pipestem arms could muster. If only she could make herself burp, she might not burst...
There was a soft gurgle, a gentle hiss, and the strange sensation of the pressure pushing its way up her torso. Before she knew what was happening, her small, pert breasts blew up, advancing through cup sizes faster than Patricia could have pronounced them. Her flimsy bra, more an affectation than a necessity, yielded to their expansion with only a token protest. But her shirt was made of sterner stuff; its top half held on tenaciously as it filled to capacity. She let out a strangled squeak as the pressure on her chest crushed her windpipe.
The bubble in her belly finally broke loose and worked its way up her throat, only to find the exit closed. It seemed to hesitate for a moment, then took the only path available to it. Patricia's eyes bugged as her bosom ballooned further, stretching her shirt, which in turn further compressed her chest. She cast about frantically for help. Nothing. She was all alone in the tent, out of sight of the other staff, and over a minute's walk from anywhere. With her oxygen rapidly running out, she pawed desperately at her breasts, but their expansive curves under taut fabric slipped from her grasp. Just as her consciousness began to fade, her chest exploded out in a shower of buttons, thankfully without causing Patricia to explode as well.
Sucking in lungfuls of precious air, she shrugged off the tattered remains of her shirt and bra as she surveyed these latest developments. Her mother was a spectacularly busty woman, and Patricia had often wondered what it would be like to be as well-endowed as her. Now that she finally had a rack to put Mom's to shame, though, she would have gladly traded it back for the cute little set she'd had less than a minute ago.
But the capsule wasn't finished wreaking changes on her figure. It had worked its way down her system and found a new part of her body to pump gas into. Patricia blanched, her mouth forming a silent O of horror, as she felt the pressure mounting in her pelvis. Her flaring hips and rounding rear rapidly took back the bound-up slack in her waistband. In no time, her once-baggy pants had drawn as tight as spandex disco jeans against her crotch and backside. Her questing hands felt the hem of her panties standing out in sharp relief against the thin, taut fabric.
Patricia had never been jealous of her mother's lower body. She'd never wanted childbearing hips or a big ol' butt, and even with no one to witness it, this obscene distortion of her body shape was deeply humiliating. "Patty the Fatty" would have been her new nickname, if her classmates could see her now. Her embarrassment compounded itself when she personally and involuntarily made a major contribution to global warming. Rather than deep and low as she would have expected, it was piercingly shrill, and almost deafening even through two drum-tight layers of cloth. She could have sworn she saw the tower of wine glasses tremble slightly under the sonic onslaught. Maybe "Patulent the Flatulent" would be more appropriate.
As their legs grew tight around her thickening thighs, Patricia realized her pants weren't going to give up the ghost as easily as her shirt had. Her hands flew to her fly, which she found was already under heavy tension. Undeterred, she worked her thumbs under the waistband and grasped it tightly, fighting to push it together. She managed to get the hook three-quarters of the way unhooked before the mounting pressure forced it back out again. When she couldn't even budge it anymore, Patricia was forced to admit defeat. Only then did she realize her bulging belly had wrapped around her thumbs -- she couldn't pull them out!
Struggling against her entrapment, Patricia once again tripped on the pants legs pooling around her ankles. Without her arms free to catch her balance, she found herself falling backwards... and falling... still falling...
It took her a while to wrap her mind around the reason she hadn't hit the ground yet. It couldn't be that -- there was no way the capsule had enough gas -- she knew she was a lightweight, but she couldn't possibly be light enough to... but when she saw the ground tilt into view from the top of her vision, she was forced to accept the fact that her condition had progressed to this absurd extent.
Patricia was lighter than air!
For a few seconds, she simply rotated in place, but her body was still inflating, and hovering soon gave way to slow rising. Her fear finally won out over her unwillingness to be seen in this state, and she screamed for help. But the hydrogen on her breath made her voice come out as a barely-audible squeak; the sound wouldn't carry beyond the tent, let alone to the nearest person. Patricia let out a high-pitched burp -- too little, too late to arrest her ascent, it merely set her drifting towards the central table. As the centerpiece floated into view, she desperately snapped at it with her teeth, but succeeded only in snagging a single leaf. Her hands were still uselessly bound to her waist, and her buoyancy built until her leafy lifeline broke, and she floated up, writhing in vain against the forces controlling her body, until she came to rest face-down against the top of the tent.
Minute after minute passed, her boobs and belly blew up bigger and bigger, her butt, hips and thighs redoubled their assault again their fabric prison, the canvas pressed against her back with increasing insistence, and Patricia was beginning to resign herself to becoming a human Hindenburg, when something shifted in her bowels. The capsule that had inflicted this confounding condition upon her was completing its journey and coming up on the exit. She felt it beginning to poke out of her, propelled by the pneumatic pressure it was responsible for. It stalled just as it was almost out, and for a heart-stopping moment Patricia was afraid her swollen cheeks would hold it in place -- but all of a sudden it took off like a rocket, launching right through the seat of her pants and the tent, off into the sky.
Tears welled in Patricia's eyes as she sobbed in relief that she wasn't going to burst. She was pretty sure she'd be okay now; all she had to do was wait to deflate and get back to the ground. Her pants were starting to tear apart, and once they were done for, she'd have the use of her arms again and could pull herself down a tentpole. But when she felt a draft on her exposed backside, Patricia's blood ran cold as she realized the hole in the tent was also ripping open from her upward pressure on it; if it gave way, she'd join that stupid capsule in the wild blue yonder!
The battle lasted for what felt like hours, even though it must have been only a couple minutes. She would gain some ground, twisting and bending her legs to accelerate the destruction of her last item of clothing; then the tent would counter, widening the hole she was inescapably falling (or rising) into. In the end, Patricia lost by a nose, slipping out before she could stop herself. Her pants fell apart a split-second too late, her thrusting hands falling a quarter-inch short of the canvas, and Trixie floated up like a pixie past the point of no return. All she could do was cry for help in a voice that only a dog could hear, as she rose into the clear blue sky.
Without constricting clothing to contain its growth, her lower body made up for the expansion it had been denied for so long. A torrent of gas from her upper half flooded into it, swelling her thighs into zaftig cones, blowing her butt up beyond all reason, and making her hips spread wider, wider, and wider, until Patricia thought they'd emancipate themselves from her and become independent citizens. Her newly pear-shaped body reoriented itself, and she ended up face-down with her ass in the air, giving her a nice view of the ground as it swiftly fell away. Why had something like this happened to her? She was just trying to do her job. If only she'd been stronger, so she could have deflated herself. If only she'd been heavier, so she wouldn't have floated away. If only she hadn't been working alone, so someone could have helped --
No. For years Patricia had thought of herself as small and weak. She'd let boys use her and girls push her around. And now she'd let a handful of hydrogen humiliate her and put her in this peril. She had only herself, no one else, to blame for her current situation. And she could get out of it all by herself. She'd already disposed of the source of her condition, so all she had to do was relieve herself of some of this gas and she could get back down to Earth. And Patricia was going to do that if it killed her.
She tried squeezing her breasts, one at a time, then both at once, then her stomach, then her hips and ass. In every case, the gas just moved over to other regions, then flowed right back as soon as she let up. She needed to make an exit for it, and only one way came to mind. She tried pulling her legs up to her chest, but her belly got in the way, and she couldn't deflate it without forcing gas into her thighs, which just made them uncurl again. Swinging her right leg to the side, she leaned over and grabbed it under her knee. This tilted her broadened hips at a severe angle, and her left leg dangled just out of reach. But she heaved, and huffed, and through dint of persistent effort managed to tilt far enough the other way to grab her left knee too. With all the strength her slender arms could muster, she pulled her thighs inward, squeezing them against her tummy. Her breasts swelled in protest, welling right up to her chin, but she knew they couldn't blow up big enough to hold ALL the gas she was displacing, and there was only one way for the rest to go...
When her wind finally broke, Patricia almost thought it would break her in the process. Her body vibrated from the sheer force of the sound, and it took her a while for her vision to unblur and her inner ears to stabilize. When she came to her senses, Patricia was relieved to find herself descending; not as fast as she'd been rising, but that meant she could make a soft landing. Lower and lower she dropped, until she guessed she had only a minute of air time left, and --
She barely noticed the approaching hiss. The sudden penetration of her rear entrance, though was impossible to overlook. At first Patricia was indignant at the violation and the interruption of her train of thought. What in the world could have -- no. Oh no. There was just no way. Even on a windless day like today, how in the world could that stupid freaking hunk of metal have POSSIBLY come down EXACTLY where it took off from?! But the now-familiar sensation of pressure building in her body told her in no uncertain terms that that was, in fact, what had just happened. The force of impact, and the additional ballast, had given her a little extra downward impetus. But the buoyancy she was building back up would soon take that away, along with all the rest of her body weight and all her hopes and dreams for the future. There was no time to try to force out another fart, so with no other options coming to mind, Patricia desperately started swimming through the air. She had no idea if this was actually helping, or even if it made aerodynamic sense, but she couldn't just drift helplessly like she'd done all her life. Slowly the tent crept up as she thrashed toward it, until she stopped short just feet away from the hole she'd torn in it. With a desperate swing of an arm, Patricia just barely got one finger around the edge, and just barely managed to pull herself down and get a grip with her other hand before the first slipped free. She gasped with relief, having overcome yet another wrinkle in what had become a very long day.
Her struggle against her situation, or more likely the thunderous announcement of her triumph over it, had finally drawn some attention to her, and a small crowd soon gathered around the tent. Patricia yelled in her comically squeaky voice at the people taking camera photos of her; she had no desire to have her naked, bloated body put on display, but regardless of her wishes she was probably going to be blowing up Instagram within the hour. As long as that was the only thing she was blowing up. Her supervisor came running over, apparently caught in the middle of his break.
Of course, he hadn't bothered to put his cigarette out.
"*BRAAAAAAAAAAP*" *KABOOOOOOOOOM*
For a while, Patricia wondered if she was dead. After all, she felt like she was floating, and she could see nothing but bright whiteness. Then her vision cleared, and her ears stopped ringing, and she found herself very much alive, very much aloft, and with very little chance of ever touching land again.
Fighting her inflation was an unwinnable battle. She'd grunt, and groan, and strain, and finally pass some gas, maybe even descend a little, but the capsule would just fill her right back up again. After countless cycles of no real progress, her thighs got too thick and turgid for her to reach her knees anymore; then her arms swelled up, sparing her from even being able to try. Burping became her only outlet, but the gas wanted to go up, not down, so her eructations weren't nearly strong enough to manage her buoyancy. All they really accomplished was to propel her even higher in the air.
As she blew up, and flew up, and tried not to give up, Patricia found one last ray of hope. The capsule was almost finished with its second trip through her body. If she could manage to cough it up, she might, might, be able to belch her way back down within, what, three weeks? Assuming she wasn't struck by lightning, or sucked into a jet engine, or popped by a passing bird that got too fresh with its beak. She'd take those odds right now. Slowly the tube made its way down her throat, propelled by the gas it was still leaking out. Just another minute, and... wait. What was happening? With horror, Patricia realized that her body had filled almost to capacity, and the gas was forcing its way into the only place left -- her face! First her neck swelled up, merging into the curves of her shoulders. Then her chin and cheeks filled out, puckering her lips. Finally, her lips themselves swelled firmly shut. And so, when the capsule reached her mouth, it found no exit, but lodged in place, continuing to pump gas into a body that, at this point, simply had no room for any more.
"I should have taken the sign-twirler job", Patricia ruefully thought to herself, as her skin began to creak.