Sarah collapsed back into her office chair as she returned from lunch. She hadn't had as long to eat as she usually liked, but her editor, Ted, had made it clear earlier that he had a new story that he wanted her to get started with. Anxious to find out what it was, she picked up her phone and dialed her voice mail.
"Hey, Sarah, it's Ted. I'm not really sure what to make of this, but this morning I got a call from downtown. Supposedly some local group is holding a sort of privately-run Olympics this month, starting today. This is the first I've heard about it, and they wouldn't really give me any details about the program over the phone. I would have written it off as some sort of publicity stunt... some bozo trying to get media coverage... except they said that they were giving coverage of the events to us, exclusively. I apologize in advance if this turns out to be a waste of time, but I'd like you to at least go check it out. The address they gave me was '134 E. Redwood Drive, at the intersection of Redwood and Lake, downtown. So when you get back from lunch, could you please head down there and see what is going on? Thanks. Bye."
Click.
Sighing, Sarah hung up the phone and began to gather her things. She slid her micro-cassette recorder into the pocket of her slacks, and grabbed her clipboard. She snatched a mechanical pencil out of her "you don't have to be crazy to work here, but it helps," mug, and shook it to make sure there was still lead in it. Satisfied by the rattle of the lead inside, she tucked it into her pocket as well. She grabbed her car keys and headed for the door, pausing only to briefly run her fingers through her auburn hair at the mirror on the back of her office door. She also gave an exaggerated grin to the mirror, checking to make sure that no remnants of her lunch were still in her teeth. Finding everything in satisfactory order, she headed down to the parking garage.
She found the address without incident, but she was a little bewildered. The lot matching the address was occupied by a large concrete and aluminum structure that seemed to be more akin to a warehouse than any sort of sports arena. There were several cars in the parking lot, and they covered quite the range of vehicles. There were a few sedans in various states of repair, one jeep at the edge of the lot, a few fairly large sports-utility-vehicles, and surprisingly, two limousines. Sarah got out of her car, and walked to the front of the building hesitantly. There was a door there, but it was locked, and no one responded to her knocking. Not quite ready to give up yet, she decided to check around back. If there was no way to get in back there, she'd just call Ted back and report that it looked like this was a prank call.
She rounded the back of the building after a long walk, and began to look for an alternative exit. As she walked along the side of the building, she passed a concrete partition and saw another door, but it was very oddly constructed. The door was painted green like the front door had been, but this door was almost square, about seven feet on a side, rather than the standard narrow rectangle like the front entrance. Even more oddly, the handle of the door was set directly in the center of the door, rather than offset to be opposite of the hinges like normal. A white plastic sign reading "locker room," hung at eye-level on the door.
Well, a locker room sounded promising. The front door being locked was rather odd, but perhaps they weren't officially open yet. Sarah decided that she'd give it a try. She grabbed the handle of the square door, and found that it pushed easily open into a concrete hallway that continued a few dozen feet forward and then made a ninety-degree turn off to the right. Rather cold air conditioning flooded out into her face. She stepped inside and shut the door behind her, as it didn't seem to want to close by itself. She heard a number of distant female voices coming through the bend in the hallway, several women in conversation with each other. Hopefully someone that could relay her to whoever was in charge of this event, Sarah thought.
She began walking towards the bend in the hallway, but she hadn't gone more than ten feet before her right foot caught the lip of a crack in the concrete, causing her to stumble and fall to the ground. Her clipboard clattered to the ground a few feet in front of her. She mentally reprimanded herself with an internal cry of "Klutz!" Wincing at the pain in her knees from the fall, she crawled forward and retrieved the clipboard. She looked back toward the crack that had spilled her, and noticed that her pencil had come out of her pocket. She climbed to her feet and walked back over to the crack in the concrete that had gotten the best of her, and retrieved her pencil. She stood there for a moment, facing the door she had just come through, while she brushed herself off and regained her dignity.
"Excuse me?" said a contralto female voice behind Sarah.
"Oh, sorry," began Sarah, as she stepped to the side and started to turn, "I tripped, I was j...OH MY GOD!" she suddenly shrieked, saucer-eyed, as she got a look at her companion. The woman was, without exception, the widest human being that Sarah had ever seen. She was Sarah's height, and her face was thin, but below her neck, the woman began to... bulge. Her huge breasts rose from a swollen torso that was very nearly as wide as the woman was tall. Her thighs, shoulders, and upper arms were vastly distended, sausage-like. Her thighs descended into hugely swollen calves and then into incongruously normal ankles. Her thick upper arms narrowed into slightly-plumped forearms and graceful, normal hands with very well-trimmed fingernails bearing splashes of pink polish. All of her immense curves had somehow been stuffed into a giant grey unitard. The woman had brown eyes and eyebrows, but her ponytailed-hair had been dyed bright red. She jumped in response to Sarah's shriek.
Sarah could do nothing but gape. Recovering from her own shock, the woman smiled and shook her head ruefully. "Sorry about surprising you, hun," the swollen redhead apologized. "I heard you trip, and I wanted to make sure you were okay. You're the reporter, right?"
"Bu-uh-h-h? Huh?" Sarah stammered.
"You're the reporter, right?" the woman tried again, speaking more slowly this time. "Sarah Alders, from Valley Sports?"
"Uh... Y, yes I am," Sarah finally managed. She was beginning to get a grip on herself again. "I-I'm sorry I stared, I just wasn't expecting..." she began. The woman's rich laughter cut her off suddenly.
"Quite all right! Like I said, I was coming to make sure you hadn't hurt yourself... I hadn't been thinking about how you were going to react to my appearance," the woman grinned. She stepped to turned her immense body sideways and offered her hand to Sarah. "I'm Laurie, nice to meet you." Laurie's body, now in profile, almost made Sarah go into hysterics again.. the woman was almost as deep as she was wide! Quavering, Sarah took her hand timidly and carefully shook it. Laurie grinned at her again, and chuckled "you don't have to look so nervous!" She pressed in with her fingers on various places on her bloated body, dimpling the unitard as she pushed inwards. "This is all just helium," Laurie explained.
"Uh... what?" Sarah asked blankly. Laurie laughed again.
"Geez... I'm not going about this very well. I had it all rehearsed how I was going to explain things... and then you tripped, and I managed to forget all about it," Laurie sighed. "Tell you what... why don't you come have a seat over here, on one of this benches, and I'll try and start over and get this explanation done right," suggested Laurie.
"Okay," Sarah conceded, glad to be on familiar ground again. As Laurie took a hand to Sarah's back to guide her over to where the locker room benches were, she spied the mechanical pencil still clutched in Sarah's hand from when she had picked it up off the floor.
"Oh, um... why don't you give that pencil to me, for right now?" Laurie requested. "We've never had any accidents here at the arena, and we certainly don't want any today... and definitely not any involving me!" Laurie laughed. She held out a hand to receive the implement, slightly anxiously.
"What?" Sarah asked yet again. She was beginning to think she was losing her mind. "Oh." Giving in, she surrendered the pencil to Laurie.
"This way, please," she called as she walked over towards a pair of benches beside a row of lockers. As she walked, Sarah went wide-eyed yet again; Laurie was just as huge from behind as from the front. Each buttock had to be at least a foot-and-half across. In motion, Laurie's gigantic backside beneath the unitard was like watching two cats fight in slow motion inside a sack. She had a rolling sort of stride, almost a waddle; Laurie didn't walk like she was heavy, just like she was too round for walking to be an easy task. As she passed a small green trash bin, she flicked the pencil into the trash receptacle.
"Hey, my pencil!" Sarah called. She didn't know what was going on, but she at least knew that she needed something to write with.
"I'll get you a wax-tip pencil instead," Laurie volunteered. She paused for a moment, and cryptically added, "They're safer." She showed Sarah to a bench, left briefly, and then returned with a new pencil that held colored wax rather than graphite for her. Laurie handed the pencil to the seated Sarah and then sat on the bench herself. She filled almost all of it, even though it would normally have been able to seat four people comfortably. Sarah squeezed as close to the armrest as she could, to avoid being squished against Laurie's body. "Okay!" Laurie said. "The explanation!" Laurie closed her mouth, and Sarah could see Laurie's jaw and tongue working at something that appeared to be at the base of her teeth, like she was trying to get at a particle of food that was wedged there. Abruptly, a torrent of wind flooded from Laurie's mouth, and she was replaced by a very trim version of her former cartoon-like physique, more compact than Sarah herself. Her unitard still fit her as snugly as it had before. Sarah let out yet another shriek of terror. "Ah.... much better," Laurie sighed.
"Please tell me what is going on," Sarah pleaded.
"Sorry about that," the-now-normal-sized-Laurie apologized. "This is how I meant to meet you," she explained as she gestured at her now-trim figure. She looked fit, and there was nothing at all alarming about her current body. "I was working out when I heard you come in and I started to deflate, but then I heard you fall and ran to see if you were okay without thinking. I'm sorry to have startled you," Laurie added. She tucked a strand of red hair behind an ear.
"But... what..." Sarah stammered.
"I know, I know, I'm getting to that, just let me talk," Laurie promised. She pursed her lips in thought. "Okay, here we go. You know the athletic event that you were sent to cover?" Laurie asked.
"Yes," Sarah agreed.
"That was it, right there," Laurie said. "This event is a contest of inflation," Laurie said with a grin. "We all come here every few months to compete, and see who's the best at various things. We see who can get the biggest, who can hold the gas in the longest, who can inflate the most quickly, things like that," Laurie explained. Sarah just stared at her.
Finally, Sarah asked, "Why?"
Laurie shrugged her now-slender shoulders and said, "Why do anything? Why do people play any of the games that they do? It's fun, it's exciting, it's challenging, and it's certainly competitive." She leaned back against the backrest of the bench and smiled. "Frankly, it's pretty hard to come up with a new idea these days, and for all of us here, this was something new and exciting."
"I.... see," Sarah said a last. She could mentally still see Laurie's incredibly distended former figure filling the entire bench to capacity. It was hard to imagine that this was the same woman! Now that her initial surprise had largely passed, she could at least try and cling to a shred of professionalism. "Okay," Sarah began, withdrawing the tape recorder from her pocket and readying her clipboard, "So, um, Laurie... tell me, what do you enjoy most about this... uh, sport?" Sarah depressed the record button on the recorder, and heard the tape spindles begin to spin. Laurie bit her lip and thought about it.
"Well, for me, I really like the competitiveness of it. Also, I think it feels REALLY cool to inflate... well, like you just saw. You feel so stuffed, but there's also a sense of snugness and contentment. I can't speak for everyone, but that's what I like about it," Laurie said.
"I see," Sarah said, who didn't see at all. She began writing on her clipboard, laying out an outline to organize things, in addition to the recording. "Well... one thing that I'm still in the dark about, is how is this even possible? How can the human body even possibly stretch like that?" Sarah asked. Laurie's ballooned-body was still present in her mind's eye. Laurie nodded.
"It can't, not normally anyways," Laurie said, considering. "I don't personally understand it all that well. Some of my friends can explain it better... you can meet them later," she added. "Anyways, I'll try and explain it as best I can for now," Laurie offered. "Basically, skin is composed of two components, collagen and elastin. Collagen is a rigid protein that gives skin its structure, and elastin is a flexible protein that gives skin its flexibility. The thing that prevents skin from stretching too far is that eventually the collagen framework tears. "
"So... what, somehow you've gotten rid of this collagen frame?" Sarah asked, now genuinely curious.
"No, it's not that simple," Laurie said, with a negative shake of her head. "With no collagen, skin is wrinkly. There's nothing that gives it a defined shape to return to," she said. "When we're competing or training, we take special pills. What they do, over the course of a couple of months, is cause new skin cells to make something other than collagen and elastin," Laurie explained. "It's called 'helical elastin.' It's a protein that has some properties of collagen and elastin both. Normally it is fairly rigid, but when enough external pressure is applied to it, it will stretch, and it will snap back when the pressure is released. Under enough pressure, it is a couple dozen times more flexible than elastin, and when not under pressure it is rigid like collagen," Laurie continued. "So basically, my skin is different from yours right now," Laurie added.
"Weird," Sarah observed.
"At first, yeah... it feels a little different too, but I've gotten used to it," Laurie said.
"Okay... so how do you actually inflate?" Sarah asked.
"Oh... there's nothing too terribly complicated about that," Laurie said. She leaned towards Sarah and opened her mouth wide. When Sarah looked in, she lifted her tongue back towards the roof of her mouth. Under her tongue, Sarah spied a tiny black opening. "I just take a hose of compressed gas into my mouth, press my tongue tightly against the back of my mouth so the gas doesn't go down my throat, and the gas goes down into that opening instead. I had this surgically put in when I first got into the sport. Most people have a similar sort of system," Laurie explained.
"So... uh, where does that go?" Sarah asked.
"All over," Laurie said with a smile. "The main tube breaks up into a couple of smaller ones, and it takes the gas to various areas in my body. As long as I'm taking the pills, I just safely stretch along with the gas flowing into me!"
"What gas do you use?" Sarah wondered.
"Helium, like I said before," Laurie said. "Helium is safe because it doesn't react with the body at all, air or whatever would. We can't take in enough of it to float, though," Laurie chuckled. "Well... I can't, anyway," she added cryptically.
"So how do you deflate when you want to let the helium out?" Sarah asked, continuing to make notes on her clipboard while the recorder ran.
"A certain tongue motion opens and closes the valve in the tube," Laurie answered. "When the valve opens, the pressure of my skin trying to snap back just blows all the gas out at once. It's really a rush," Laurie said.
"I noticed," Sarah said dryly, but with a bit of a smile she couldn't quite suppress. This was definitely bizarre, but it was bizarre enough to be interesting! "Okay, so the big question... why did you invite me here today? How come you want this report done?" Sarah asked.
"Well," Laurie began, considering. "We want to share this with people. When you enjoy something as much as we enjoy this, you want to give other people a taste of the fun as well," Laurie said. She seemed to be thinking for a moment, and then smiled to herself. "We only asked your magazine to cover it exclusively for two reasons: you cover a lot of extreme sports already, and if we only invited one magazine to cover the events this month, there wouldn't be much chance of things getting out of hand and turning into a media circus," Laurie finished. "We want to be taken seriously, not made fun of." She turned and looked at Sarah, "Will you do this story for us?"
Sarah thought about it for a second before answering. At the very least, this would be a new experience...
Sarah grinned and said, "Sure, Laurie! You're right about one thing... my magazine does cover a lot of extreme sports... but I think that you and your friends are about to turn the extreme sport world upside down!"
Laurie said, "Great! Come on, I'll take you to meet some of my friends... they're going to be thrilled, too. After that, I'll show you what it's like when I get really round! You just caught me halfway there when you came in, after all!"
Sarah gulped.
Laurie grinned at her reaction. "Welcome to the Inflation Olympics, Sarah!"
Sarah chuckled at that. "Inflation Olympics, huh?" Laurie smiled happily.
"Okay, so maybe it isn't the best name ever, but I think it adequately describes things," Laurie reasoned. "Believe me, Sarah, the competition here is every bit as intense as at the actual Olympics," Laurie added soberly. The redhead brightened then and continued, "BUT. Since this is such a small event compared to the Olympics, you have a chance to get to know people, and make some real friends!" Sarah nodded. By way of explanation Laurie added, "As a matter of fact, I've met all my best friends here at the Inflation Olympics." She giggled then and quipped, "The fact that we come here every couple of months to balloon ourselves to huge proportions is entirely coincidental!" Sarah shook her head and smiled.
"I'm still not quite sure I understand the appeal of that, but I'll take your word for it I guess!" Sarah said. "So anyway, what about the friends that you mentioned earlier? When do I get to meet them?"
Laurie looked at her watch and replied, "Well, you're here a few hours early... most people probably won't get here for another couple of hours. One of my friends is here already though, I caught a ride with her today. We both started at the Inflation Olympics the same month of the same year, and we were both really nervous, So I guess it's only natural that we got to be pals. She's really funny." Laurie rose from the bench and said, "C'mon, I'll take you to go meet her." Her brow furrowed for a moment and she added, "Oh! um..."
"What's the matter?" asked Sarah.
"Well," Laurie began, "Sandy - that's her name - Sandy and I do completely different sets of inflation events, and I just wanted to warn you in advance so you wouldn't freak out."
"What do you mean?" Sarah asked. "Why would I freak out?"
"Just by your reaction to me when you walked in. Listen... most of the events that I do are called 'mobility events.' I get inflated, but the object of most of the events that I do is to do various tasks, like running. Those sort of events are scored based on an average of how inflated you are, AND how long it takes you to finish the event. So usually you only want to be a little bit more inflated than I was when you first saw me to do those events, or you're too swollen to do well," Laurie explained.
"Okay," said Sarah. "Where does the part that you wanted to warn me about come in?"
"Well, those are the events I do. Sandy's events... well, the object of most of the events that she competes in is to get BIG," Laurie said, emphasizing the last word.
"Um... like how big?" asked Sarah. She wondered how anyone could possibly be bigger than Laurie had been when she had first walked in.
"REALLY. BIG," Laurie said. "Her type of events are called 'max volume' events. I'm just telling you in advance. She was relaxing, inflated, in the sauna room when I left her. If she's still inflated, I'm just warning you to be prepared for her appearance," Laurie warned.
"Okay," Sarah said. Again the thought crossed her mind that no one could be all that much bigger than Laurie had been... surely Laurie was exaggerating slightly.
"Okay!" Laurie said with a smile. "Sorry for the gloom and doom, I just wanted you to be prepared!" The pair then left the locker room and entered a winding hallway with concrete walls and a checkerboard-tiled floor. In time, Laurie led Sarah into a large communal bathroom, again with a large square door.
"Is that you, Laurie?" a cheerful female voice called, from across the bathroom from behind a closed door labeled 'Sauna.' The door lay perpendicular to Sarah's line of sight.
"Yep! Sarah, the reporter from Valley Sports is here! You wanna come out and meet her, or are you busy?" Laurie called back.
"Sure, just give me a second!" the voice replied. Sarah heard the shuffling of footsteps then, and the door across the bathroom opened, with the doorway in profile to Sarah's vision. Abruptly, two fleshtone spheres swaddled in white towel were thrust into the doorway. The spheres were easily two feet in diameter. The same voice grunted.
"Oh my God... please tell me those aren't boobs," Sarah thought. At least, she thought she thought it... she sure hoped she hadn't said it. In any case, Laurie didn't say anything.
"Ugh," the voice said. "What's the point of giving us the double wide bathroom door if the sauna door is only normal size"
"Need some help?" Laurie asked.
"Nah...I've...just...got...to...push...just...a....bit-" the voice grunted. On the word "bit," the owner of the two spheres burst through the doorway and into the bathroom. She threw up her arms in the air and yelled, "Ta-daaaa! I made it!"
Sarah let out a very, very small squeak. Laurie hadn't been exaggerating at all. This woman was simply GIGANTIC. Those blimp-like breasts ballooned from her round, swollen torso. Slightly cone-shaped limbs tapered down to delicate hands and feet that looked ludicrously inappropriate on the woman's distended frame. The woman's chin nestled into root of her own cleavage, and the tops of her breasts were approximately level with the woman's nose. Her face also looked out of place, though not quite so inappropriate as her hands and feet. Her face was trim, with light brown eyes, and framed by wet, honey-colored bangs. Most of the woman's hair was wrapped up in a towel, and she had somehow managed to find a GIANT towel that wrapped completely around her torso, covering her from chest to knees. She was quite tall, around six feet, though it was hard to judge properly with her hugely ballooned body. Most of her height existed in her very long legs, though they too were swollen with enough gas to make judgment difficult.
Laurie didn't notice Sarah's squeak. "Hey Sandy! Enjoy the sauna?"
Sandy shrugged as she closed the sauna door, an almost obscene gesture on her hugely-inflated frame. "Eh, it was okay I guess. I would have rather had a shower, but... uh, I couldn't fit into the stall. I like the other arena across town better." Laurie nodded. At this point, Sandy turned back to the two of them and noticed Sarah. "Oh, hi there!" She said brightly. "You're the reporter...er...Sarah, right?"
Sarah could only nod. Sandy walked over to Sarah and Laurie confidently. Despite her ballooned endowments being confined within the enormous towel, mental images of bouncing beachballs leaped unbidden to Sarah's mind. Sarah wondered again where on earth she managed to even find that towel... it was like a tarp made of cotton!
"It's a blanket," Sandy said with a smile that flashed bright-white teeth.
"Huh?" said Sarah, roused from her stupor. Sandy adjusted the 'towel' slightly.
"Everyone always wonders where I found a towel this big at. It's really a blanket. It doesn't absorb water all that well, but it works well enough I guess," Sandy said. She suddenly turned, and raised her right hand to her forehead in a mock swoon. "Besides... a woman of my unique figure must be prepared to improvise!" She spun back towards Sarah and Laurie, causing Sarah to involuntarily yelp and duck backwards from the bustline that was suddenly aimed back at her. "And what about you?" Sandy said to Laurie.
"Hmm? What about me?" Laurie asked. Sandy turned to one side so that she could actually approach within three feet of Laurie, and poked Laurie twice in the stomach, above the belly button.
"You've sprung a leak, hun! I thought you wanted to be stretched out for your events today, especially the relay!" Sandy admonished.
"Oh, yeah," Laurie said. "I just deflated for a bit... I'm afraid I surprised Sarah at the door, and my figure gave her a bit of a scare..."
"OOPS!" Sandy said. She looked back at Sarah apologetically. "I'm sorry, Sarah... I forgot... I must have made you uncomfortable too..."
"Um... no, not really," Sarah said. Sandy's body was very intimidating, but in retrospect, she did seem to be nice. "I was just taken by surprise a little bit. Laurie did try to warn me though... she said you were going to be really big, but I guess I thought she was exaggerating." Sandy laughed and then shined a smile at Sarah through the valley of her cleavage.
"Oh, this is NOTHING. If you want to see big, watch me during the events. I'm just warming myself up, stretching out, right now," Sandy advised. "I've gotten in the habit of taking a hot shower while inflated a little a bit, before the events... it always seems to give me just a little bit more stretch. Couldn't do it today - y'know - not being able to fit into the shower stall at this particular arena while inflated, but the sauna helped a little bit." Sandy yawned and stretched. She pointed accusingly at Laurie and said, "And speaking of stretching out, you'd best go balloon up again... if you're not stretched and relaxed, you're not going to be very happy during that 400 meter relay this afternoon." Laurie stuck her tongue out at Sandy and both of them laughed at some shared joke.
"Well, Sarah, Sandy's right... I do need to get prepared... can I leave you with her for a minute?" Laurie asked.
"Yes, I guess she seems harmless enough," Sarah observed with a wry smile. Laurie laughed and waved as she walked out of the bathroom.
"Want to go sit down?" Sandy asked. "It's going to take her a little while, and we don't really have much to do for while anyway."
"Sure thing," Sarah said.
"There're a few benches out in the hallway... I'll meet you there in just a second. I need to go throw some clothes on real quick," Sandy said, jerking her thumbs in the direction of a duffel back in the corner. Sarah nodded, and then took a seat out in the hallway. After a few moments, she heard the duffel unzip, followed by the noise of fabric on skin, and grunts of exertion. Sarah reflected that when you're inflated into a human balloon, it must be very hard to dress yourself. She briefly wondered why Sandy didn't deflate to dress, but she remembered what Sandy had said about stretching out, and figured she was probably holding to some sort of regimen.
Shortly, Sandy arrived in the hallway wearing a huge Lycra unitard similar to Laurie's, except it was blue-green in hue and had leggings as opposed to the shorts of Laurie's unitard. She carried two tubes of Lycra or neoprene with her. "All done!" She said with a smile.
She waddled over to the bench Sarah sat on with careful and deliberate steps of her vastly inflated body and gently eased herself into the bench. Sarah again fought off a wave of claustrophobia as she was trapped between the armrest of the bench and Sandy's hugely ballooned side.
"Oof. These benches get smaller every day," Sandy said. She gave a conspirational wink to Sarah. "But it might be me that's getting bigger." She smiled wistfully and added, "I remember back when I first started... back then I never even dreamed I'd be able to get this big one day." She grinned and craned her neck to look down at her immensely distended body before also adding, "And now... well, now, being this big doesn't even make me feel full! I get bigger than this just for fun at home sometimes." She handed the two tubes of Lycra to Sarah, who took them, despite being confused. "Could you help me with those please?" Sandy asked politely.
"Um... sure, what do you need?" Sarah asked. She was getting over her fear of Sandy. She came on sort of strong, but she really did seem to be nice.
"I need to put those sleeves on my arms so that they aren't so inflated. Normally it wouldn't matter for my events, but I'm in Laurie's relay group today, and I need easy use of my arms... we're trying something new." Sandy said. She held her arms out, resting her elbows on the tops of either inflated breast.
"Sure, " Sarah said. She started helping Sandy tug the black sleeves of Lycra onto either arm, slimming them considerably. "So what's this about a relay?" she asked.
"It's one of Laurie's favorite events," Sandy said. "Basically, it's a regular four-person relay race, 400 meters in length total." She giggled as Sarah finally managed to pull one of the sleeves all the way up to her shoulder, slimming Sandy's arm, but ballooning the accompanying breast on the same side even further. "The catch," Sandy said, "is that they don't do the relay with batons that are handed off. They do it with helium that is handed off! It's so fun to watch." Sandy explained. In the distance down the hall, a vague hissing noise issued forth. Sarah thought it might be Laurie reinflating herself. Sandy grinned and shouted, "Woooo! Pack in that helium!"
"Umm... I'm not sure I get it," Sarah said ignoring Sandy's outburst, as she started to tug the other sleeve onto Sandy's bare arm.
"Simple! The first person on the team, the one who starts off running, balloons herself as much as she can with helium, and takes off running to where the second teammate is. When she gets to the second teammate, she blows as much of her helium as she can into the second teammate. Then that teammate starts running to the third person, and blows as much of the helium into them as she can, and so on," Sandy said.
"Oh, I get it!" Sarah said. Heck, it almost seemed sort of cute, and it certainly fit the spirit of the games as she understood them.
"The problem," Sandy added, "is that you can never blow more than half of your helium into your teammate."
"Huh? How come," Sarah asked, as she finally tugged the other sleeve up to Sandy's shoulder. Both of Sandy's arms were almost normal sized now, but both breasts had distended ever further. She sat back on the bench beside Sandy.
"It's because of the pressure... if both of you have the same amount of gas inside you, you can't push anymore in because the pressure inside both of you is already equal," Sandy said, as she tried to scoot over to make more room for Sarah.
"Oh... I see, that makes sense." Sarah said. "So why is how much helium you get into the next teammate such a big deal?"
"That's how the event is scored," Sandy said, as she adjusted the cuff on one of the sleeves that Sarah had help her put on. "The total score for your team is how much helium the last person has in them, divided by how long it took you to complete the race. So it's to your advantage to get as much into them as possible, but also to complete the race as quickly as possible," Sandy explained.
"Oh, okay," Sarah said. That was a neat little scoring system. "So where do you come in? You said you were helping Laurie with it." Sandy nodded.
"Well, my specialty is getting BIIIG, like Laurie told you." Sandy gently drummed a little nonsense rhythmic beat on her hugely inflated bosom with her palms while she talked. "I almost never do these track-and-field sort of events. But... since you can never finish the race with more than one-eighth of the helium the first teammate in the relay inhaled, it's really important that the first person take in a lot of it, even at the expense of some speed. What Laurie wants me to do for her squad is be the first person in the relay."
"So you're going to take in a lot of helium so that the four of you get off to a good start?" Sarah asked, thinking she understood.
"Yep!" Sandy agreed. "I'm going to get EEEE-normous. It's going to take me a long time to waddle 100 meters after I'm really inflated, but we're hoping that the extra helium is going to win out over the lost time in the scoring.
"So who's the second teammate in the relay going to be?" Sarah asked.
"Laurie," Sandy said. "She's usually first, but I can hold a lot more than she can, so for this experimental run I'm going first. If this works out, I might help her team out with the relay on a permanent basis. At any rate, it's going to be a lot of fun!" Sandy said with a grin. "Her being second was the main reason I was concerned about her being stretched out well... she's going to be really hard-pressed to hold all the helium I'm going to blow into her, even if it's just half what I've got. I don't want to sound like I'm bragging or anything, that's just what my specialty is. Likewise, she's a lot faster at running while inflated than I am." Sandy explained.
"Right, I understand," Sarah said as she nodded. Laurie waddled around the corner of the hallway just then, swollen back into the distended shape her body had been in earlier.
"Woo! Looking nice and round," Sandy cheered appreciatively. "I brought Skinny up to speed on the details of the relay race," Sandy said with a wink at Sarah.
"Oh, good," the now-ballooned Laurie said. "Well, since I'm now stretching out nicely in preparation for my coming overinflation at Sandy's hands, shall we go see if the other two ladies are here yet?"
"Sounds like a plan to me!" Sandy said.
"I'd like to meet them, too," Sarah said, smiling.
"It's settled, then!" Laurie said. She took Sandy by the hands, and pulled her up from the bench. Sandy pushed herself up with her hugely-inflated legs, and the two crashed together in a bizarrely inflated parody of two football players. Their inflated bodies cushioned the shock nicely, and they bounced apart. They both laughed, and even Sarah smiled.
"Let's go, kids!" Laurie said, as she turned to lead them back to the locker room.
As Sandy and Laurie led Sarah back to the locker room, Sarah began to hear noises of activity: the rush of compressed gases, lockers opening, lockers shutting, the hum of many voices of conversation, and the occasional laugh of a shared joke. The sounds themselves left Sarah completely unprepared for the sights that met her eyes as the trio entered the locker room.
Hugely stretched leotards, unitards, and speedsuits of varying colors and designs were resplendent around the room, filled to capacity with the distended bodies of their occupants. Sarah could look nowhere in the large locker room without her eyes falling upon someone's vastly inflated torso, ballooned rump, swollen limbs, or a bosom that resembled nothing so much as a pair of zeppelins attempting to race with each other. All shapes and sizes of women were present. Sarah noted huge, rounded figures much like her two companions, overly exaggerated hourglass figures, women with large, swollen bellies, distended helium-filled bottoms that didn't look like their owner could even sit upon them, and the occasional otherwise-uninflated woman who had evidently had a pair of airbags deploy from her chest. Many were only slightly inflated as of yet, a fair number were quite similar in size to Laurie, and a few were even on the same scale as the hugely-inflated Sandy.
All of the ladies were involved in various preparations. Some struggled to tie their hair back, fighting against ballooned arms that resisted bending. Other women adjusted and pulled at their garments, trying to find a more comfortable fit. Many of the less inflated were still taking deep draughts of helium from small gas cylinders produced from their lockers, and their bodies distending before Sarah's very eyes. Now and then, Sarah heard the "whish-whish" of inflated Lycra-clad bodies pressing together as women milled about in the inflated crowd, walking to lockers, to the sinks, or stooping to zip a duffel bag. The huge locker room that would have been able to comfortably hold more than a hundred and fifty women of normal construction seemed filled to capacity by perhaps only forty.
"Hey everybody!" Sandy yelled, moving into the throng. As she stepped past various other women, either party was obliged to squeeze past the other with a laugh or smiling apology accompanied by the whisper of taut Lycra and squeak of ballooned flesh pressing together.
"Hi, Sandy!" called one redhead bearing an incredibly-ballooned belly. Various other cries and greetings echoed from around the room, with one brunette who was sucking from a cylinder of helium simply waving an inflating arm in greeting.
"Where's Laurie?" asked someone else.
"Over by the door!" Sandy said, pointing the direction with a nod of her head.
"Hi, Laurie!" called several, waving.
"Who's that with her?" asked one platinum-blonde woman with a well-inflated lower body who was preparing to tug on a yellow unitard.
"Dunno... a new contestant, maybe?" replied her astoundingly big-breasted neighbor that was rubbing lotion onto her arms while sitting on the concrete island in the middle of the locker room.
"Hi there! Are you new?" the blonde called to Sarah.
Another woman further back waved to Sarah and yelled, "I've got a space open on my bounce squad if you need it!"
Still another yelled, "I can squeeze you in on my speed-inflation team, new girl!" Nervously, Sarah took a hesitant step back from all the attention from so many over-inflated women. She felt herself press back accidentally into the distended softness of Laurie's body, and leaped forward again with a yelp. From her place behind Sarah, Laurie took Sarah by the shoulder and gave her a reassuring squeeze.
"She's not a new contestant everybody," Laurie explained. "She's that reporter I mentioned last time, Sarah Alders! Everybody be nice to her and make her feel welcome please!"
"Hiiiii, Sarah!" chorused the inflated occupants of the room.
"Um... hello," Sarah replied, with a shy wave. Normally she was a very assertive person, you had to be to be in journalism... but she'd never had to deal with balloon women before! One by one, the women went back to their preparations, aside from a few now and then that waved to Sarah happily when they noticed her gaping in disbelief at their hyperpneumatic physiques.
"Don't worry," said Laurie, giving Sarah another reassuring squeeze on the shoulder. "Everyone is happy that you're here."
"I know," said Sarah, sheepishly. "This all just takes a little getting used to!" Laurie laughed good-naturedly.
"I imagine it does! It's been so long since I've been new, I guess I've forgotten what it feels like!" Laurie took a step forward and beckoned Sarah. "C'mon, I'll introduce you to the other two girls on my relay team!"
Laurie led Sarah over to the woman with the short, platinum hair and the jumbo-sized inflated backside that had wondered who Sarah was earlier. She had managed to somehow wriggle her way into her yellow unitard.
"Sarah, I'd like you to meet Lindsey. Lindsey, Sarah."
"Hi there!" Lindsey said. She finished smoothing one seam of her yellow unitard that ran down one huge flank, and shook Sarah's hand warmly. "Glad to have you here!"
"Hi," Sarah said. Laurie then turned to the huge-breasted woman beside Lindsey, an otherwise-petite woman with raven locks spilling down to her shoulders.
"And this is Amanda... Amanda, Sarah," Laurie said.
"Hi, Sarah," Amanda replied quietly. Sarah greeted her in return.
"Amanda's always so serious right before events," Laurie admitted. "She's the last runner on the relay team." Amanda did manage a smile. She seemed to be glad to be talking rather than thinking about the competition of the coming events.
"Yeah... I'm the one that goes through the finish line," Amanda said. "That's why I have these," Amanda explained, poking at her ballooned bosom.
"Uh...?" Sarah asked, uncertainly. She had a bizarre mental image of Amanda using her swollen chest to win a photo-finish during a race. She tried extremely hard not to stare or gape at Amanda's exposed cleavage. Sarah had almost gotten used to the appearance of the extremely inflated bodies that abounded in the locker room, but Amanda's inflation evidently existed rather exclusively in her breasts, and on her otherwise petite and slender frame the effect was dramatic.
"It's a lot easier to run fast if you're only inflated in the chest," Amanda explained. "Since I'm the last runner in the relay I don't have to hold very much, so I can concentrate on speed." Sarah was relieved that Amanda's explanation made more sense than her imagined one. Amanda tugged on one of the shoulder straps of her red leotard and adjusted her pneumaticized endowments. Sarah couldn't help but notice that the two orbs jostled and fought for space inside the décolletages of the crimson leotard like a duo of trucks fighting over a parking space.
"I see," Sarah said in response. It made sense, at least. Sandy joined the four of them again, squeezing her way through the bevy of inflated bodies that surrounded them. She sketched a mock salute, and settled her inflated body into a sitting position next to Amanda on the concrete island. She leaned forward, placing her arms on top of her inflated breasts with her hands clasped over top of her cleavage. She rested her chin on the tops of her hands, and she seemed to be merely resting on top of some pillows. Sarah could almost forget that those pillows were Sandy's own inflated breasts and body.
"Hey guys," she said once she'd gotten comfortable. Lindsey zipped up her bag, and pushed it further towards the center of the concrete island. She sat down in the place the bag had vacated. Sarah noticed that even though she was quite short, Lindsey's overinflated backside buoyed her several inches higher than even the extremely-inflated Sandy sat.
"Hey Sandy," Lindsey said. She glanced at Laurie and then back at Sandy. She added, "So are you guys still going through with 'Plan B' for the relay today?" Laurie nodded.
"'Plan B?'" asked Sarah.
"'Plan BIG,' said Sandy with a big grin. "What I was explaining to you about the relay while Laurie was inflating."
"'Fraid so," Laurie affirmed in response to Lindsey's question. "Nobody's tried this with the relay before, like I said, so we're also going to get the element of surprise. Hopefully some of the other teams will be distracted, and between that and the additional helium we're going to be carrying, I think we'll easily make up the lost time."
"Great," Lindsey pouted.
"Heh, what are you worried about?" Laurie asked with a grin. "I'm getting half of Sandy's helium, you just get a quarter of it."
"I know, but she's in all the max volume events," Lindsey complained. "Saying I'm getting a quarter of her helium is like saying that I only have to drink a quarter of the Pacific ocean!" Sarah noticed Sandy watching this exchange with a big grin on her face, and she suddenly got the impression that Sandy rather enjoyed the reactions of people to her impressive capacity. Amanda broke the silence after Lindsey's grumbling.
"Just think of it as just another test of your abilities, Linz," Amanda said. She then barely stifled a laugh before adding, "And a chance to stress-test the seat of those tights!" Lindsey glared at her, but Sarah saw the resigned gallows humor in Lindsey's eyes.
"I dunno what you think is so funny!" Lindsey said smugly. She poked at the side of one of Amanda's endowments with an index finger. "Sure, I'm going to be waddling down the track with a huger-than-huge behind, but you're going to be trying to find the finish line with those pontoons inflated so big they're going to be floating up in your face!" Amanda laughed and leaned back slightly, resting her weight on the heels of her hands. Sarah noticed that the pose caused a rather alarming forward projection of Amanda's balloon-like breasts.
"Well," Amanda reasoned, "I can run backwards. Whereas you're going to be waddling regardless of which way you run!" Lindsey stuck her tongue out at Amanda and crossed her arms before looking away in mock injury.
"Seriously though, Amanda... you probably want to stretch out a bit more than that," Laurie warned. "Even you're going to be holding a lot."
"Geez, you think so?" Amanda asked, concerned. She turned and surveyed Sandy. "Um... how much bigger were you planning to go during the race?" Sandy only grinned and spread her arms wide and puffed out her cheeks comically.
"Oh man," Amanda said, her alarm showing in her raised eyebrows. She looked down at her bosom. "I guess I do need to be ready to hold a lot more," she confirmed. Amanda reached into her gym back and produced a black metal cylinder the length of her forearm that had a pressure gauge and dangling hose attached. She briefly checked the gauge and put the free end of the hose into her mouth. Amanda adjusted the tiny gauge on the cylinder and hissing gas began to force its way into her bosom. As more and more of the chilly helium filled her, her already-distended bosom began to swell and expand like a time-lapse film of a pair of pumpkins ripening on a vine, the material of her top stretching and groaning as it was forced to expand along with Amanda's burgeoning breasts.
Sarah let out a small squeak, but nobody heard it.
Oblivious to Sarah's discomfiture and Amanda's burgeoning mammaries, Laurie, Lindsey, and Sandy began to discuss their plan of attack while Amanda listened in.
"Well, as long as we're really going through with this, we might as well think through it," Lindsey observed. Laurie nodded.
"What do you want to know?" Laurie asked.
"Well, first of all, how do you want to do the handoffs?" Lindsey inquired.
"Directly is probably best," Laurie said. "The handoff hoses we usually use aren't going to cut it... they're too narrow, and we need to pick up all the time we can during the inflations themselves, since we're going to be so slow while running. As long as everyone is okay with that," she said.
"I'm okay with it," Sandy said.
"Me too, assuming we can even GET that close," Lindsey said.
Amanda merely flashed a thumbs-up sign, unable to speak around the hose that was still bloating her breasts.
"Well, regarding being able to get close enough, I don't think it's going to be a problem," Laurie said in response to Lindsey. "Sandy and I are probably going to have to approach backwards to get close enough, but I think all the other handoffs will go fine." Lindsey nodded.
"What about your initial inflation, Sandy?" Lindsey asked, turning to face the hugely swollen woman, who was still leaning forward and resting upon the pillows of her body and bosom that were trapped between her thighs and her arms.
"I've taken care of it already," Sandy said. "I told the starter I wanted the regulator on my tank set to fifteen times starting relay pressure."
"Geez," Lindsey said, awed. "Are you sure even you can take that?" Sandy laughed politely, but with true mirth in her eyes. "...What?" Lindsey asked, hesitantly.
"You need to come watch some of the max volume events more often, Linz," Laurie said, laughing along with Sandy.
"How come?" Lindsey asked.
"Starting pressure for maximum volume speed inflation is about seventy times relay pressure," Sandy said.
"Holy crap," Lindsey whispered, eyebrows raised. Amanda's eyes widened.
"Is that a lot?" asked Sarah. Lindsey could only nod dumbly.
"Fifteen times is going to be a walk in the park for me," Sandy continued. "I'd go a lot faster to gain us some time, but if I go much faster than that I don't know if I'm going to be able to stop at a size that's going to be all that comfortable for Laurie," Sandy said.
"Yeah, really... no more than that," Laurie said. "This is going to be a big stretch for me as it is." Lindsey nodded, agreeing overwhelmingly. Amanda spat the hose from her mouth and quickly screwed the regulator shut. Her breasts were perhaps twice the size they had been and her leotard didn't appear happy about it.
"Man, I can't believe we're doing this," Amanda said with a rueful chuckle.
"Well, even if we don't win there's always notoriety, right?" Laurie asked happily.
"Yup!" crowed Sandy. "People are going to be talking about this for a long time!"
"I can see the headlines now," Lindsey said dryly. "Stupid girls in relay put max volume girl on team as first runner, second runner rolled off field, immobile, after handoff." Sandy laughed loudly.
"Anytime one of you wants to make that sort of headline, just let me know," Sandy said with an evil grin. Just then, a speaker in the corner of the locker room's ceiling came to life with a crackle.
"Everyone participating in the 4-person mobility relay, please report to the arena. Team captains, be sure to sign in with starter," it said.
"That's us, gang," Laurie said. Sandy clapped her hands and laughed. Laurie smirked.
"You've really been looking forward to this, haven't you?" Laurie said in chagrin.
"You bet!" Sandy agreed. "I always thought you should have been in the max volume events, and now I get to see you try that body shape on for size!"
"'For size' is right," Lindsey said. Laurie laughed nervously, discomfited.
"Well, anyway, we ought to get down there and get signed in," Laurie said. Sandy grinned evilly at Sarah.
"She's a little embarrassed about how big she's going to be getting in a few minutes when I hand off to her in the relay," Sandy said to Sarah.
"Hush, you," Laurie said accusingly, blushing slightly. Sandy just laughed, but it was a good-natured laugh. "Anyway, we really DO need to get down there, girls," Laurie said, recovering. The five of them stood, and began moving towards the exit of the locker room, and deeper into the building. Sarah noticed quite a few other girls of varying proportions standing and beginning to leave as well. Several of them looked rather alarmed by the fact that Sandy appeared to be leaving for the event too.
"Well," Laurie said to Sarah, "get ready to see a competition like you've never seen before!"
The girls had lead Sarah to a large gymnasium adjoining the locker room then. She realized now why the building had appeared so large from the outside... its interior contained a standard 400-meter track, layered with that sort of black rubber that she'd heard was made of recycled tires. A tier of mostly empty black bleachers ran parallel to the track on each of its long sides. They took Sarah to the front row in a roped-off section marked "VIP."
"Will you be okay here, Sarah?" Laurie asked. "The only people allowed on the field are contestants and officials.
"I should be," Sarah said. "I can see the whole field from here. She took a seat on one of the black padded seats of the bleachers.
A loudspeaker from the back of the bleachers announced, "Mobility four-by-one-hundred relay in five minutes. If you're signed in, get to the field and take your places, ladies."
"That's our cue Sarah," said Laurie. "We'll be back before too long. I don't have any other events until later on, so I can answer some more questions for you in just a few minutes, okay?"
"Will do," said Sarah. "Good luck, girls," she said with a smile. A chorus of "thanks" and "thank you" issued from Laurie, Sandy, Lindsey and Amanda as they began to head towards the field. Sarah jumped in shock as all four of them deflated back to their normal size in preparation for the start of the event. She was struck this time by how much taller Sandy was than the other four, and thought that maybe that was one of the reasons why Sandy competed in the so called 'Volume' events. It made sense that a bigger girl could hold more than a smaller one.
Over the course of a few minutes, Sarah watched as the four companions made their way to the track and took their places on the track along with the other teams. Sandy stood at the starting line, while Laurie, Lindsey, and Amanda stood at hundred-meter increments around the track along with the other members of each team. One official with a starting pistol blew their whistle then. Any girls on the field still stretched out with helium released the gas out of their mouths, slimming before Sarah's eyes. The starting runners took their places beside Sandy at the starting line. Each reached to the helium tank before them and took the free end of the helium hose in their mouths, their free hand resting on the valve of their helium tanks.
The starter's pistol went off, and an amazing sight befell Sarah. Ten sets of helium tanks were opened, and the ten starting girls began to swell. Sarah could hear the hiss of the gas entering their bodies from all the way up in the stands. Every woman's inflation was slightly different in nature, but slowly but surely each one was expanding. Breasts swelled, bellies ballooned, thighs and buttocks expanded, and the stitches of the contestants athletic suits complained vigorously as the wearers inflated more and more.
Sarah noticed that Sandy, valve on her helium tank almost full-open, was rapidly eclipsing her peers at the starting line. Everyone had started empty, but with each passing moment Sandy's expanding girth increased the margin between their sizes, within seconds becoming twice the size of the rest, then three times, then four. Other girls at the starting line began to cast worried glances in her direction. Some of them opened the valves on their tanks further in a bid to decrease the gap between their respective sizes. Sandy smiled around the hose in her mouth and reached down to the faucet-valve on the helium tank before her. She quickly turned it counter-clockwise until it reached the end of its threading and came off in her hand. She tossed the useless valve over her shoulder and closed her eyes contentedly as the helium now rushed into her body at the maximum rate now unhindered by any restricting valve. She was doing what she did best and knew it. She rested her free hand on her ballooning stomach and swelled larger and rounder with each passing moment.
Seeing that catching up with Sandy's inflation was going to be a sheer impossibility, the other contestants one by one held as much helium as they felt necessary and took off running down the track to their waiting teammates. Their movement struck Sarah as being somewhat ungainly, but it was evidently rather hard to move quickly while so overly inflated. One by one, they slowly traversed the hundred meters to their first set of teammates and quickly began to transfer the helium held inside their bodies to the new runner for their team. Each runner locked lips with her teammate, and flicked open the valve inside their own mouths, allowing the helium contained within their inflated bodies to begin to inflate their partner. As had been explained to Sarah, half the helium flowed into the new runner, and half remained in the first woman's body once the pressure differential inside both women had equalized. The newly-inflated runners took off down the track towards waiting third-leg team members. Sarah noticed that Sandy still stood at the starting line, now enormous beyond anything she'd imagined...she was gigantic, breathtakingly big. The bottom curve of her belly nearly touched the ground, the entire sphere of it nearly as tall as she was. Her breasts nearly occluded her face from view, such was the distance that they rose upwards. She didn't appear to be paying much attention, still resting her hand on her side and smiling around the hose in her mouth.
From a hundred meters down the track, Laurie yelled "Come on, Sandy! We're starting to get too far behind!" One by one, the other runners slowly made their gassy 'handoffs' to their new partners, quickly sending the newly ballooned girls off on the third leg of the relay race. "Come on, Sandy!" Laurie shouted again.
Sandy lifted her free hand from her side, and merely raised her index finger slightly, signifying "wait."
"Hurry up!" Laurie called again. "You don't need any more, that's too much as it is!" Sandy didn't appear to hear, and continued to grow larger. She was so large now that she was virtually covering four lanes of the relay track. Her expanding belly pressed now against the upright helium tank of a long-departed contestant, tipping the tank over as her girth continued to distend prodigiously. Officials began to glance back and forth at one another, concerned.
"Ma'am, you know this is a RELAY, yes?" Sarah heard one venture cautiously.
"Mmm-hmmm," Sandy agreed throatily around the hose in her mouth. Sarah watched Sandy's free hand gently testing her side, pressing in gently to gauge the firmness. Sandy smiled to herself.
"Sandy, come ON!" Laurie yelled again from her position further down the track. Then, with a whispering sigh, the roar of the helium rushing out of Sandy's tank slowly fell silent. Sandy, looking slightly disappointed, spat the hose from her mouth.
"You guys need to fill these relay tanks to the top next time!" Sandy reproached.
"Uh... sorry, ma'am. We didn't really think anyone would use....that...much, for a relay..." the same official that had spoken before replied. Without another word, Sandy arched her back, thrusting her truly gigantic belly into the air, and began to walk carefully down the track. Meanwhile, the rest of the relay teams had all made their final handoff. Sarah noticed that the fourth members of most of the teams weren't very inflated at all, holding only an eighth of the air the original runners had been holding as she'd been told.
As Sandy slowly carried her unbelievable girth down the track, impeded by the size of her belly and overinflated thighs, the fourth relay runners crossed the finish line back where Sandy had just left. One by one, Sarah saw race officials hold a tiny device to the lips of each girl, and write down a number on a clipboard. After this, each woman allowed her body to deflate, then turned to watch Sandy waddle down the track with widened eyes. When the very last girl had crossed the finish line, Sandy finally had reached Laurie. Sarah had no idea how Sandy was going to get close enough to her to transfer her helium. Surely she was too inflated. Sandy said something to Laurie then, but Sarah couldn't make it out over the distance.
Sandy grinned broadly, and then pressed her enormous girth against the ground, her abdomen pressing into the track just below her popped-out navel. The impact produced a loud, drum-like "DUNN!" audible even from Sarah's position. Suddenly, Sandy forcefully pushed off the ground with both her feet. It was almost a jump, but she kept her belly pressed against the ground, having pushed off the ground on a vector tangent to the sphere of her own overinflated belly. Slowly, she began to roll on the sphere of her stomach. She slowly rolled up and over until she was lying on top the great swell of her abdomen, her face held up to a level even with Laurie's despite the fact that she was lying down on top of herself. Sarah gasped at that... even lying down upon it, the bulge of Sandy's belly was over five feet high. She threw her arms around Laurie's neck, and Laurie learned forward to meet her, mouth to mouth.
Sarah could hear it all the way up in the stands when Sandy flicked open the release valve inside her mouth. The roar of helium rushing into Laurie's body was unbelievable. Sandy's mouth was much larger in gauge than the small-diameter hose that Sandy had used to inflate herself with, so the helium contained within her swollen body wasted no time in flooding into Laurie. Laurie's hands flew to her belly as she began to fill, unprepared for the speed of it. Her waistline distended by inches, then feet, then yards. Her leotard grew tighter and tighter about her as her belly, breasts, thighs, and buttocks grew increasingly full and taught. Sandy, the source of Laurie's inflation, gradually began to decrease in size. Within moments, Laurie was now so large that she pressed her own belly to the ground and lay face to face with Sandy, one of them deflating, the other rapidly inflating. After only perhaps fifteen seconds each was approximately equal in size to the other, though the shorter Laurie's belly looked much fuller and tighter than Sandy did. Sandy used her inflated thighs to squeeze as much of the remaining helium in her body out into Laurie by squishing the great ball of her stomach between her legs. Laurie ballooned slightly larger. Sandy at last relaxed her hold on Laurie and rolled herself backwards, landing on the balls of her feet.
Not used to being so enormously inflated, Laurie flailed on top of the sphere of her abdomen, trying to generate the inertia needed to roll back onto her feet. Sandy stepped forward, pressing against Laurie's side with her own inflated belly, rolling the redhead backwards onto her feet. Staggering backwards, Laurie turned and began to run as best she could down the track towards Lindsey, cradling her immense form between her palms. Lindsey, seeing how large the hugely swollen form of Laurie was as she waddled closer, paled slightly. When Laurie arrived, red-faced from the pressure inside herself, Lindsey stepped backwards in awe of the size of her relay partner. She was usually placed behind Laurie in these races, Sarah recalled, but Lindsey's demeanor said that never before had the redhead been of such a gigantic size.
"Take... some... of... this... helium... now," Sarah heard Laurie grunt. Hesitantly, Lindsey stepped into Laurie's embrace, squishing against Laurie's swollen belly. They locked lips then, and Laurie opened her release valve inside her mouth. Lindsey's inflation was not as rapid as Laurie's had been, but it was much more dramatic. Every milliliter of helium that escaped from Laurie's lips flowed into Lindsey's swelling thighs and buttocks. They swelled larger and fuller, stretching her yellow leotard tighter and tighter across her expanding seat until finally....BANG! The rear seam of her leotard busted open, exposing the bronze tan of her overinflated backside. She tried to pull away, surprised, but Laurie held her fast in her grip as the pressure hadn't yet equalized between them. Sarah watched in amazement as Lindsey's bottom distended amazingly, reaching an unbelievable size. Finally, Laurie released her, her own belly finally significantly emptied into Lindsey.
"Go, run!" Laurie urged her. Lindsey needed no urging, and took off at a rapid pace, her waddling run looking almost comical with her inflated thighs and bottom.
"You owe me for new pants!" Lindsey called over her shoulder, holding the rent in the seat of her leotard shut as best she could in spite of the amazing distention of her buttocks. She reached Amanda in a few moments, and the two rapidly pressed mouth to mouth. Lindsey's bottom slowly shrunk down to a smaller, albeit still amazing size. Consequently, Amanda's breasts filled and swelled inside her top, straining the material to the maximum and squishing against Lindsey. When the two at last disengaged, Amanda turned to run for the finish line, only to find her bosom so grandly inflated with helium that her endowments instantly floated up into her face, obscuring her view with an extreme close-up of her own cleavage. Sarah watched as she compensated by turning around again and ran backwards, looking over her right shoulder. At last, she reached the finish line. Grinning, she held her buoyant bosom down against her torso so that the dumbfounded official could press the pressure gauge against her mouth. Blinking with disbelief at the number, she double-checked the value, and then recorded Amanda's pressure and the team's total time on her clipboard.
The official that had measured the pressure in Amanda's breasts calculated some figures on her clipboard, blinked once in surprise, and then walked off the field and made her way to the small room next to the bleachers.
At length, the loudspeaker at the top of the bleachers behind Sarah spoke up: "Four-by-one-hundred mobility relay. First place: Sandy Mason, Laurie Washington, Lindsey Hall, Amanda White." After that, the speaker continued to read off names that Sarah didn't recognize. Down on the field, the four friends grinned at each other, and smiled at the applause from the stands honoring their admittedly odd performance. Evidently, the fact that they had completed the race holding so much more helium than everyone else had more than made up for their much slower finishing time.
Finishing reading off the results, the loudspeaker completed its announcement by adding, "Next event, Maximum volume time retention. Currently registered: Samantha Cartwright, Sandy Mason, Cindy Brown. If you wish to compete in the Maximum volume time retention event and aren't on the list, please come to the announcement booth right away."
Sarah saw Lindsey run back to the locker room, presumably to get a new pair of pants. The other three girls, deflated for the moment, continued back towards the bleachers where Sarah was seated. They had just reached the stairwell that lead up the the VIP area of the bleachers, when a woman in a cranberry unitard with white leggings came out of the locker room nearby the three remaining girls. Most of the newcomer's inflation was in her belly, though she was quite swollen all around. Her hair had been gathered up in a scrunchie up top, and dyed a curious shade of reddish-purple. Her overstretched cranberry unitard had the words "Helium Queen" emblazoned on the belly, each white letter stretched to a huge size by her distended yard-and-a-half belly. Surprisingly, she was just as big as Sandy had been earlier when Sarah had first seen Sandy in the locker room. The newcomer noticed the three, turned, and reached up with one hand to lower her glasses from her eyes and peer at Sandy. The newcomer said something to Sandy then, but Sarah couldn't quite catch it.
Sandy turned towards the newcomer then, and Sarah heard her say, "Oh, hello, Samantha," in a tired voice.
"A mobility relay race Sandy? How... quaint." Samantha said, Sarah barely able to catch her words over the distance. "Don't expect the volume events later on to be quite so easy," she said, smirking. Samantha turned, and walked off down onto the field with a sashaying strut that swung her ballooned bottom back and forth.
Sandy flicked an irritated glance in Laurie's direction then. "All I want is to beat her once. That's all it'd take to get her to stop doing that," Sandy grumbled. Laurie nodded in agreement with her friend.
Sarah reflected on what she'd heard. Evidently, Sandy had a bit of a rivalry with this Samantha woman. That didn't make much sense though, in light of how big Sarah had seen her get at the beginning of the relay. Maybe Sandy had trained so hard for the past few months that this other girl simply had no idea how big Sandy could get now? But that didn't explain Sandy's discomfiture when Samantha had derided her while coming out of the locker room. She must really be able to get to a size comparable to Sandy, then.
As she watched the three companions make their way up the stairs, she reflected on the fact that she'd first thought this building was a little too big. But if there was anyone here that was able to beat Sandy at inflation, then maybe the building was too small after all!
These so-called 'volume' events were definitely going to be something to see...
Sarah waited as the trio of athletes walked up the bleacher stairs leading to the VIP area where she was seated. As they arrived, the reporter realized that Sandy's presence was commanding even in a lack of inflation, especially when viewed from a seated position. The voluptuous six-foot woman towered over her as the three sidestepped through the aisle to seats adjacent to the reporter. Sandy would be considered curvy at half her present dimensions. As she uncomfortably watched Sandy's voluminous, heavy chest bobbling past her, Sarah wondered if size was a common feature among the women that competed in the events of volume-intensive inflation. It was a reasonable hypothesis that a larger frame accepted a larger volume of helium more readily.
"Who was that?" Sarah asked, referring to the encounter she had witnessed with the huge woman in the cranberry leotard down on the track.
"No one of consequence," Sandy said distractedly as she folded herself into a seat. She crossed her long legs, a motion that would have been impossible in her previously distended state. Sandy's full lips formed into a slightly downward pout and her honey-colored brows furrowed slightly.
"Samantha," Laurie began carefully, "Is unfortunately one of those people that possesses both ego and ability in equally vast amounts." She gestured vaguely down at the black rubber track where the inflated woman was busy posing her swollen physique for the spectators as if all the eyes in the building where upon her. It was very nearly true. "She's always been a show-off."
"Well," the reporter offered, "any kind of competition is always going to draw out the occasional person that thinks the world revolves around them." Down on the first row, Samantha was letting curious spectators touch her immensely swollen belly.
"If she gets any better at inflating herself, the world might actually start orbiting her," Sandy sighed with rueful humor. Amanda and Laurie chuckled, but Sarah caught the forced edge to the laughter that indicated Samantha was a sore spot with the tall girl. Sandy's manner seemed a mixture of tension and uncertainty.
Seeking to change the subject for Sandy's sake, Sarah asked brightly, "Um, listen. Who can I ask about getting a copy of the scorecards for all the events? I don't have a good handle on everything yet, but I may as well get started with learning the basics if I'm going to report on this." Laurie sat up straighter, craning her neck. Pointing down at the edge of the track, she indicated a woman at a folding table in a black and white officiating uniform.
"Go see Cynthia down there at the scorekeeper's table," Laurie suggested. "I'm sure she'll be willing to make a second set of copies for you. Just don't go on the track itself, that's for athletes and officials only."
"Thanks." Sarah nodded and stood up. She smoothed her clothing and mentally braced herself to walk down into the otherworldly zone of distended flesh that the track area represented. The reporter hesitated on the verge of asking one of the three to come with her, but demurred. "Don't be a coward," she murmured chidingly to herself. "Besides, I don't think the scary balloon women down there will hurt me," she chuckled.
As she trod down the bleacher stairs, Sarah couldn't help but feel as if this was all a particularly weird dream. At every point around the track there were small herds of inflated women. They chatted in small groups, their roundly inflated parts bulging to the fore or after of their bodies. Some were stretching, their exertions occasionally tugging their spandex garments out of position to reveal swollen curves of breast, belly or hip. Their overstretched skins gleamed balloon-like in the overhead lighting.
Out of her cultural element, Sarah wasn't even sure what to do with her eyes. She tried not to stare at any of the outrageous enormity surrounding her, not wanting to give insult to the curves' owners. "But it's almost impossible not to look," she thought. As a particularly inflated woman waddled by, she internally added, "It's like a train wreck! How can anyone not stare?" Keeping her eyes dead ahead did not work either, as she was constantly at risk of colliding with gigantic bellies that seemed beyond the limits of the human body. Finally she arrived at the scorekeeper's table next to the track, feeling as if she'd walked an awkward mile instead of a few dozen feet. "Excuse me?" she asked the seated official.
"Yes? What can I do for you, ma'am?" the slender official asked, turning her attention to Sarah. She pushed her black cap back, revealing green eyes and a drape of loose bangs. In her fingertips, either end of a wax pencil drummed out a rhythm on the tabletop. Sarah felt an odd sense of kinship with her, two uninflated women in a sea of distended bodies.
Sarah turned and pointed briefly over her shoulder, indicating the stands. "Laurie told me that you might be able to get me extra copies of the scorecards from today. I'm a reporter that's covering the events." The official's eyebrows registered surprise.
"Wow, since when?" the woman asked, curious. "To be honest, I thought maybe the athletes here kind of had figures that were a little outside most news companies' comfort zones." Sarah chuckled uneasily, shifting from foot to foot.
"Uh, well, perhaps just a little bit," she agreed. "But it's definitely, um, unlike anything I've seen in the sports world before," the reporter added politely. She was nothing if not skilled at spinning statements diplomatically.
"That's the truth," the woman responded. She fanned out the scorecards before her, glancing at them. "Anyway, no problem, ma'am. I'll make a duplicate of each of these, and the following events. Just swing by at the end of the games and I'll have them ready for you." The official hesitated, before adding, "and thanks, ma'am. I'm sure the athletes will be glad they're finally getting a little media recognition." The woman turned back to her work, grabbing a blank scorecard and beginning to copy the values.
Sarah murmured awkward thanks, feeling a little sheepish that she couldn't help wondering why some of these women didn't talk to tabloid magazines if they wanted media recognition. "Secret society of balloon-girl athletes discovered," the headlines would say.
The reporter took a pace backwards to retreat to the safety of the stairs and immediately collided with warm, rubbery tautness. Perplexed by the alien sensation, the curious part of her brain reflexively reached a hand backwards to squeeze a handful of something much like a balloon. An inhalation of feminine surprise came from over her shoulder. Only then did her cortex catch up and make conscious realization of where she was and what she'd just done.
Sarah spun, finding a handful of Samantha's considerable right buttock in her grasp. The woman glanced over her shoulder at Sarah with arched eyebrows. Samantha's expression of mild surprise was slowly replaced by a thousand-watt smile of such width that it even revealed a few molars.
"Oh my god! I'm so sorry!" Sarah croaked helplessly. She yanked her hand from Samantha's bottom and banished it behind her back as if she was punishing her offending limb for its accidental faux pas. The reporter's face flushed crimson in embarrassment.
"Don't be sorry, dear," Samantha purred. She reached down with a manicured hand and adjusted the material covering her swollen behind. The woman's disconcerting smile made it clear that Sarah's inadvertent grope had added more fuel to the fires of Samantha's ego. She turned around with a swivel of her huge hips and faced Sarah. This simple act swung her weightless, yard-wide belly disarmingly quickly and brought the distended sphere to bear on the stammering reporter. The bold, white text 'Helium Queen' stood out on the cranberry leotard covering her vast belly. "I always have time for my fans," she said, her voice dipping unexpectedly into a sensual murmuring of smoky, honeyed tones. Samantha stepped forward and pressed her swollen belly flush against the torso of the shocked reporter.
Sarah squawked in disbelief, speechless from the bizarre nature of the situation. Her sense of reason complained stridently that Samantha's belly felt so much like taut, stretched rubber. In any case, nothing had ever prepared her for how to react to someone trying to intentionally push their belly against her. She staggered backwards to escape the socially awkward pressure of Samantha's swollen body and bumped against the dividing barrier of the bleachers behind her.
"There's no need to be shy," Samantha chuckled. Seemingly unaware or uncaring of Sarah's discomfiture, Samantha stepped across the gulf that had formed between them. She pressed her abdomen against Sarah once again, this time pinning the reporter between the barrier and the bizarre, rubbery tension of her stomach. Sarah squealed, wriggling in place like a trapped tortoise. Samantha's belly felt like an immense yoga ball, the taut pressure of the abdomen pressing against Sarah's body and compressing her modest breasts. The reporter struggled helplessly, her hands ineffectually pushing against the doughy resilience of Samantha's belly. The inflated woman chuckled as if tickled.
"I-I'm not a fan!" Sarah stammered, hoping this bizarre treatment was something this lunatic reserved for her admirers.
"NOT a fan?" Samantha asked dangerously, her smile turning off as if it had been shut off with a switch. Rather than bringing relief, this admission caused Samantha to step even closer. The smaller girl's torso was almost engulfed in Samantha's belly, the tip of her chin scant inches from being buried in Samantha's cleavage.
"I-I'm a reporter," Sarah squealed, a pleading tone winding through her voice.
"A reporter!" Samantha repeated. Her disconcerting smile returned again, even bigger than before. "That's different." She leaned back slightly to remove some of her belly's pressure against the squirming reporter. "You must be here to interview me," she purred, no hint of a question being audible in her voice. Sarah looked left and right helplessly.
"Um, yes, y-yes, of course!" Sarah agreed, trying her best not to stammer.
Samantha regally decreed, "Very well, you may begin." There was a slow pause as Sarah's mind processed the situation. Sarah waited for the statuesque woman to step back, but this event was not forthcoming. The reporter wiggled slightly.
"Could you please stop squishing me against the wall first?" Sarah meekly asked, hoping she sounded polite.
"No," Samantha replied simply with her eyebrows raised, seeming sublimely shocked that Sarah had even asked. The reporter's mind raced. She'd never had to conduct an interview in such bizarre circumstances, pinned between a wall and a belly that seemed only slightly smaller than the moon. Sarah squirmed and withdrew the micro-cassette recorder from her slacks, barely able to locate her pocket beneath the swell of Samantha's belly. She set the device atop the bulge of the inflated woman's abdomen and turned it on.
Delicately, Sarah inquired, "Can you s-state your full name, ma'am, and tell me a little about the events you're competing in today? P-please?"
"My name is Samantha Cartwright," the other replied immediately, a smug undertone indicating that she felt everyone should already know that particular piece of information. "In a few minutes, I will be competing in the Maximum Volume Time Retention event. You get as big as you can, and hold it for as long as you can. It bores me." She settled into a more comfortable stance, her belly sliding slightly down Sarah's form.
"Why does it b-bore you, ma'am?" Sarah asked, trying to sound interested, though the only thing she really desired at this point was freedom.
"Because," Samantha yawned, "I'll win. There're always a few that seek to challenge me, but they don't have my will to stretch, you see?" She reached out an arm in a grand gesture down along her body, presumably meant to be indicative of her own greatness.
"I've heard that one of the other competitors n-named Sandy can get rather huge as well, aren't you concerned about her abilities?" Sarah asked. Samantha rolled her eyes, cocking her hips and resting one hand on the higher one. The woman's vast belly rubbed against Sarah like an unruly and worryingly affectionate whale.
"My dear, 'huge' is relative, and compared to me Sandy's 'huge' is not very huge at all. Ask me some questions that are actually interesting," Samantha sighed, tapping an unseen foot below her girth. Sarah tried mightily to come up with anything semi-intelligent, a difficult proposition in the present situation. Meanwhile, Samantha's face began to slowly dip closer to the reporter's own countenance.
"Umm, how would you d-describe this sport to someone that knows nothing about it? What's the essence of it?" Sarah inquired, hoping this impossibly ballooned woman would like the question. Samantha actually thought about the question briefly.
She chuckled, "That's simple. It's a fetish. Paraphilia. We get off on being huge." Samantha brushed back a few locks of her dyed, reddish-purple bangs, her smile larger than ever.
"Excuse me?" Sarah asked, genuinely paying attention now. Laurie hadn't mentioned anything quite so bold, though she'd tap-danced around the issue and said that it felt good.
"We like being enormous. You don't think we make ourselves into human balloons for our health, do you?" Samantha asked rhetorically. Sarah considered the differences between Samantha's statement and what Laurie had said previously.
"Others haven't really played up the, um, erotic value of the sport," Sarah truthfully observed.
Samantha smirked and mimicked the reporter's phrasing, "Others probably don't like admitting to the 'normals' that they get aroused by blowing up like a balloon. The sport context adds an extra element of competitiveness to our quest for size." She wet her full lips, leaning her face even closer to Sarah than it had been before. "Just between you and me, shame is not a quality I possess in abundance, reporter girl. I don't have any problem admitting my kinks. When I say it feels orgasmic, you can depend upon it."
"W-whatever you say," Sarah readily agreed. She squirmed helplessly, her already-invaded personal space being further compromised by Samantha's face drawing uncomfortably close to her own. She pulled her head as far back against the barrier as she could. She tried to squeeze out from between the wall and Samantha's belly, but she was pinned in far too tightly by the enormous sphere.
"Here, let me show you," Samantha said huskily. She leaned forward, her full lips almost grazing Sarah's own. A curious light was in the taller woman's eyes, a bizarre mixture of hunger, desire and playfulness. The enormous woman's lips seemed quirked in an almost predatory smirk.
"Uhh," Sarah stammered helplessly, squirming and pawing against Samantha's waistline in a futile attempt to get free. If anything, Samantha seemed fascinated by the reporter's struggles rather than annoyed by them. Samantha chuckled, a rich, lusty murmur of laughter.
"Open wide and say 'ah,'" she purred. She leaned closer to Sarah, her lips just barely beginning to graze her mouth.
Just then, Sarah's world was shaken by a terrific, reverberant impact from her right. It sounded as if the world's largest basketball had just been bounced. Sarah was disoriented by the impact, stars dancing in her vision. Samantha flew a dozen feet to the left, literally rolling head over heels on the ball of her belly. Sarah's recorder clattered to the side of the track.
"That's enough of that!" Sandy shouted at Samantha, her expression angry. Sandy stood at Sarah's right, her own body inflated once again. Evidently, her swollen form was the source of the terrific impact that had sent Samantha sprawling.
"You're never any fun anymore, Sandy," Samantha pouted. With an air of injured pride, she dusted off one of her swollen flanks and awkwardly rolled to her feet. "See you at the helium tanks." She adjusted her leotard and favored Sarah with a sly wink. Through Samantha's slightly-parted lips, Sarah saw the woman's tongue make an unusual motion against her teeth. Samantha raised her fingers to her lips and made an exaggerated gesture of blowing a kiss towards Sarah. There was a sudden pneumatic hiss from the woman's mouth, and a strong puff of air hit Sarah in the face from a dozen feet away, the breeze blowing a few strands of Sarah's bangs back from her forehead. Sarah gasped in surprise, taking an involuntary step back from the unexpected blast of air. Samantha smirked smugly, chuckling, "Maybe next time we can have some fun, reporter girl." She turned and strutted towards the center of the arena without another backward glance.
"Sorry about that, Sarah," Sandy apologized, embarrassed. She bit her lip gently. "I came down a few minutes ago to inflate and stretch out for the event. I was looking around for you, but I couldn't see you with her body between you and me. It took me a while to figure out where you were. I got her off of you as soon as I noticed." Sarah shook her head numbly, mind reeling.
"Why was she trying to kiss me?" Sarah asked, not sure of what else to say. Sandy looked askance, shuffling her feet awkwardly.
"She wasn't going to kiss you," Sandy replied. She appeared to be uncomfortably considering her words. "She was going to blow you up like a balloon."
"Pardon me?" Sarah squealed in disbelief. She swung her head around, watching back along the way Samantha had gone. Samantha was still walking towards the center of the rubberized track, the woman's wide, inflated hips swinging back and forth as a result of what could only be intentional effort. She sauntered past a shorter woman in a striped, referee uniform going to opposite direction, who stopped as she approached. The official poked Samantha in her considerable waistline.
"Ms. Cartwright, I expect there won't be any issue with you trying to sneak in any extra helium this time around?" the referee asked, Sarah's ears barely able to pick up the distant words.
"Does it really matter?" came Samantha's laughing reply as she turned to face the other woman.
"Just get rid of it before the event," the referee sighed. "Don't make this a circus."
"You're the boss," Samantha said, smirking and assenting with a mocking bow that almost caused her pressurized belly to bump the ground. She continued on her way, proceeding perhaps fifteen feet before she passed a small knot of mildly inflated women in leotard suits, chatting amicably amongst themselves. Unexpectedly, Samantha seized the blonde girl nearest her by the shoulder straps of her orange garment, and whipped her around to face her. "Special delivery," Samantha purred, pressing her lips against the woman's shocked, open mouth.
"Mmmf!" the woman murmured, her arms pushing against Samantha's belly in resistance. Sarah heard another sharp hiss of flowing helium, and the woman's waistline began to swell as Samantha's own girth diminished. The athlete's struggles to push away from Samantha gradually gave way to a discomfited pawing at her own waistline, her facial expression visible past Samantha's cheek as one of strained fullness. When the two each bore a waistline of approximately equal size, Samantha broke the kiss. "Dammit, you know I can't hold this much!" the woman groaned, cradling her strained waist. She put a shielding palm across her lips as she delicately allowed the helium to slip back up her esophagus.
"Just trying to help you build capacity," Samantha said, smirking. She released the woman's shoulder-straps and gave her belly a possessive squeeze. "Later," she added, continuing to walk. The blonde woman glared daggers at Samantha's back, continuing to deflate her uncomfortably full stomach. She turned back to her conversational companions, angry and red-faced. They shook their heads sympathetically. Sarah turned to look back at Sandy, the reporter's mouth gaping. Sandy had her right hand placed over her eyes in embarrassment. Her cheeks were tinged deeply pink.
"Well, um, blow you up like that," the tall woman clarified, dropping her hand. Sandy's expression was one of nervousness. Sarah shook her head in disbelief.
"But my skin isn't even stretchy like all of yours!" Sarah exclaimed. Sandy shrugged helplessly.
"I know. But Samantha doesn't really care about things like that. I've seen a lot of her fans with stretch marks on their waists. She blows people up for fun, sometimes," the inflated woman awkwardly admitted. The shock of Sarah's encounter started to fade and anger began to rise in the reporter.
Sarah put her hands on her hips and accusingly demanded, "Why didn't any of you tell me this was some kind of creepy fetish sport? I'm out of here!" Sandy spread her hands diplomatically, trying to pacify her.
"Whoa, whoa, wait a minute. I don't know what Samantha told you. But yes, I'll be honest, this sport is arousing to play. I never said it wasn't, and I don't think Laurie or the others would deny it either. But hear me out," Sandy said, attempting to mollify the smaller girl. Sarah crossed her arms, waiting. Sandy continued, "Aren't most physical sports enjoyable because they cause the release of endorphins? That's why they're exhilarating, right?"
"Well," Sarah, said, hesitating. Sandy forged ahead.
"So why does it matter if the endorphins are from exertion, arousal, or both? The result is exhilaration either way," Sandy reasoned. "I know it must sound like a very strange thing to get aroused about, but it's harmless. Everyone's involved in this consensually here. "
"I wasn't consenting to what Samantha just tried to pull," Sarah fumed, putting emphasis on the word 'I.' She nervously looked around as if she expected to find balloon people waiting in ambush for her. Sandy shook her head, honey-colored locks waving.
"Samantha is crazy, Sarah! I won't let her do anything like that again." Sandy licked her lips, clasping her hands in front of her enormous breasts. "Please don't judge the rest of us by her. Try to keep an open mind. Please?" She watched the reporter for some sign of her reaction.
"Alright," Sarah murmured. "I guess there's nothing written that says a sport has to be based around physical exertion only. But I have to say, it seems like it'd make more sense to base one around actually arousing things. You know, as opposed to blowing up."
"Hey," Sandy interjected, poking Sarah's shoulder playfully, "you still haven't tried it, how do you know it's not?" Sarah sighed, letting out a small, disbelieving laugh.
Shaking her head, the reporter murmured, "Don't even start." She bent to retrieve her recorder from the ground. As she stood, her head bumped Sandy's belly with a drum-like reverberation. "Sorry," she muttered.
"It happens," the taller girl assuaged her, belly wobbling with the mild chuckle she let out.
"Anyway, thanks," Sarah added. Sandy arched an eyebrow interrogatively. "For not letting me get blown up like a balloon, I guess," the reporter clarified, feeling ridiculous as she said the words. Sandy laughed, her green spandex leotard creaking as she inhaled.
"You're welcome. Now head back up to the seats, the event will be starting soon if you still want to stay. I'll put Samantha in her place for you." The inflated woman sobered slightly. "Well, maybe. I'll try."
"Good luck," Sarah said, with guarded enthusiasm. She turned and walked up the rows of bleachers, Laurie looking at her in surprise as the reporter made her way back up to their row. Sarah sat down again beside the red-headed woman, sighing heavily. She felt vaguely shell-shocked after her experiences down on the field and with the long gauntlet of inflated bodies that she'd had to navigate. Staring straight ahead, Sarah dwelled uncomfortably on the memory of Samantha pinning her predatorily to the wall as she insisted these games were some variety of fetish sport.
"I was wondering where you'd gotten to," Laurie said, an interrogative tone apparent in her voice. "Were you able to find the scorekeeper?"
"Yes," Sarah said, voice taut and controlled. "I found her okay. I was getting the inside story about the games, that's all."
"Oh?" the other woman inquired, one eyebrow lifted. "Who from?"
"Samantha," Sarah flatly replied, glancing down at her knees. A shadow seemed to briefly pass over Laurie's face. The woman crossed her arms, and blew out a short sigh.
Laurie cautioned, "Sarah, Samantha's a bit eccentric, I wouldn't really put too much credence into whatever she said." She turned and glanced down at the field, chewing the left corner of her lower lip in mild anxiety.
"Also, to my very great surprise, she tried to use me as a balloon," the reporter murmured. Amanda and Laurie both sat up, spines straight.
"What?" snapped the two of them simultaneously.
Voice deadpan, Sarah elaborated, "she was apparently going to blow helium down my throat, until Sandy dragged her off of me." Amanda gaped, lips threatening to quirk into a disbelieving smile. Laurie quickly stifled the half-formed grin with a glare at the other woman. Amanda covered her mouth with her hands, fingertips forming a steeple above her nose. The lithe, black-haired woman looked to her left in embarrassment.
"Sarah, I'm sorry. That's unacceptable. I'll talk to her about this," Laurie began, but Sarah lifted a hand from her lap and interrupted.
"Are things like this going to keep happening?" she asked. "I have to admit, I'm feeling rather freaked out at the moment, and I'm pretty close to wanting to leave." Down on the field, several officials were using hand trucks to move some tanks off of the track area. Laurie shook her head.
"It's my fault entirely, Sarah. I shouldn't have let you walk down there alone. I wasn't thinking," Laurie apologized, handfuls of the grey spandex covering her thighs clenched nervously between her fingertips. Amanda recovered her composure somewhat, slowly lowering her hands from her mouth.
"Did she just come up to you out of the blue?" Amanda asked. Sarah glanced over in Amanda's direction.
"Yes. Well, sort of. I backed into her and squeezed her butt," Sarah said, uncomfortably. Disbelieving looks began to form on the faces of the other two women, lips widening. "Not like that! It was an accident," Sarah clarified. Laurie blinked, shaking her head slightly.
"Um, well, I'd certainly recommend not doing that in the future," Laurie laughed. She sobered and continued, "but of course that doesn't excuse her behavior. I'll talk to her about it."
Sarah cleared her throat and admitted, "Also, I'm a little annoyed that you didn't tell me the full story earlier. Sandy and Samantha both agreed that these are fetish games." Laurie waved her palm, interjecting.
"I said it felt good!" Laurie insisted helplessly. Amanda failed to comment, her cheeks slightly coloring.
"Laurie, you said it felt good. Feeling good isn't the same thing as people giving each other blowup French kisses in the middle of what's supposedly a serious relay race," Sarah murmured, shaking her head. "In the past few hours I've also seen a locker room packed with human dirigibles, been pinned to a wall by a belly bigger than me, and escaped nearly being blown up like a balloon. This isn't normal, Laurie. This stuff doesn't happen when I go to football games." Sarah flung her arms wide in exasperation. The redhead looked askance, not meeting the reporter's eyes. Sarah continued, "I'm not some investigative journalist! I write sports columns. I don't want to have to be a detective to figure out what's going on here." Sarah lapsed into silence, evidently waiting for a reply.
"You're right," Laurie soberly agreed. "But appreciate our position. It's hard to ask a complete stranger, 'hey, do you want to come write a story about our perverted sport?' I'm sorry I wasn't more direct earlier. We were worried you might not come, if we said too much up front." Laurie sighed, adding, "Anyway, it's true what Sandy and Samantha said. It's as much a fetish as it is a sport. I'm sorry you felt mislead." Laurie wrung her hands in her lap, her expression not one totally of guilt, but one mixed with nervousness and desire to be understood. Sarah nodded, inclining her head in recognition of the apology.
"If I'd known in advance, I probably wouldn't have come," Sarah admitted, agreeing with Laurie's voiced worry. "To be frank, I'm feeling extremely uncertain about this whole thing. But I'm here, I guess I can try to stay for a little longer." Laurie looked relieved.
"Thank you, Sarah. I know we've sort of messed up on presenting the right face to you so far. We're really grateful for your presence here. I just hope you realize our reticence is from nervousness," Laurie said. Down below the bleachers, most of the helium tanks from the relay had been removed. Several other officials were bringing out more. These new tanks were considerably larger.
"I guess so," the reporter agreed, watching the arriving tanks suspiciously. "But in the long run, honesty is the best policy if you want me to be able to actually write a credible story about this stuff," Sarah pointed out. Both other women nodded their heads in hesitant agreement.
"We'll try to give you whatever information you need," Amanda offered, breaking her embarrassed silence. The reporter considered her response for a moment, gazing down onto the track and watching the preparations of the officials.
"Here's the big question, I guess. What's the appeal of this?" Sarah asked. "Laurie, I know earlier you said it felt good, but lots of things feel good. If you're so determined to have some kind of erotic sport, why make it about being a human balloon?" She involuntarily giggled slightly at the end of her sentence, verbally stumbling over the ridiculous juxtaposition of words. "Why this?" Laurie pursed her lips, tapping a finger on her knee as she thought.
"Pressure," Laurie said, pausing slightly. Her countenance bore the expression of someone confessing guilty secrets. "The fuller you get, the more intense every sensation becomes. The more you have in you, the more you want. Once you reach that point of taut fullness, you feel so stretched that a single poke could pop you, but everything feels so good that you want more," Laurie continued, her cheeks coloring as she talked. "Even though you know it's crazy to want it, and that you're a human balloon." The redhead lapsed into silence then, fingers covering her awkward smile. The reporter shook her head slightly, expression surprised and uncertain.
"Do you do any athletics yourself, Sarah?" Amanda asked. She leaned slightly towards the reporter from across Laurie's seat.
"Um, swimming. I also did track in college," Sarah said. Amanda leaned further towards her.
"You know how you reach that point when you're totally exhausted, and every muscle burns? But for some reason, it feels good, you feel that burn, and it makes you want to keep going?" Amanda inquired, her black eyebrows raised interrogatively.
"Runner's high," Sarah said, supplying the terminology. Amanda nodded. The Asian woman cupped her own breasts in her palms.
"It's like that," Amanda said hesitantly. "When I inflate my boobs, I mean when they start to get really full, the skin pulls tight and the stretch starts to burn." She let her hands fall away from her bosom, staring down into her cleavage. "Even though it's a little uncomfortable, the pleasure is stronger. I want to get bigger. Tighter. I want to push them further," she said, her eyes softly lidded, as if savoring a memory. Sarah was barely processing this information as a pair of black-clad spheres brushed against the side of her head with the whisper of sliding spandex. Sarah jolted backwards in shock, pushing against the doughy, black domes. Her fingers sank into the swollen orbs that the reporter belatedly realized belonged to Lindsey's backside.
"I'm back. With pants. 'Scuse me," Lindsey said, attempting to sidle across Sarah in the gap between the bleachers to an empty seat.
"Guwaah!" Sarah yelped in shock at the intruding derriere, pawing at it as if she was trying to ward off some kind of leak from a dam.
"Whoops, Sarah, I'm sorry!" Lindsey giggled, looking over her shoulder. She minced across as best she could, moving the offending buttocks away from the reporter. "A butt that changes size is hell on your perception of the space you occupy," the blonde girl laughed. Lindsey had returned from the locker room after having replaced her burst pants, now wearing a black tank-top and a pair of black bicycle shorts, the latter stretched to the limit. Lindsey seated herself beside Amanda, her compressed bottom nearly filling three and a half feet of width and making it look as if she was seated atop a black beanbag chair. At the waistband of the bicycle shorts, the enormous, tanned cleavage of Lindsey's rear winked out from behind. Sarah stared for a moment, before finally breaking into a genuine laugh for the first time in quite a while. The three athletes quizzically looked at the laughing reporter.
"I'm sorry," Sarah sputtered helplessly, barely able to speak through the laughter. "Oh god, the laugh just…slipped out, Lindsey, you look…l-like you're sitting in a bucket seat, made…m-made totally of butt!" she managed to say before dissolving into howling giggles. Lindsey's face appeared surprised for a moment, followed by her mouth crinkling into a grin.
"Well, duh," Lindsey replied playfully, laughing. "I basically am." She ran her hands down and up her swollen flanks, ending with an affectionate pat of the tops of her buttocks. Amanda and Laurie giggled lightly. Laurie masked her involuntary smile with her fingertips. "I am unique in that I never mind sitting on hard seats," Lindsey laughed. "The wonder-butt makes everything feel like a recliner chair to me!" Sarah shook her head, stifling giggles. The reporter tossed up her hands in a gesture of submission.
"Okay, okay," Sarah said helplessly. "You're balloon girls and you like it. I'm still not sure I totally understand, but I'll roll with it for now." Laurie visibly relaxed in her seat, smiling.
"Thanks, Sarah," the redhead said. She laughed, "we may be perverts, but we're not all bad. I promise." Laurie seemed as if a weight had been taken off her shoulders.
Sarah peered down at the field, looking at the arriving helium tanks. There were three tanks, each one of them bigger than the officials that were struggling to wheel them onto the track. Sarah watched Sandy, still inflated, stride across the rubber track and help one of the officials heft one of the tank-laden hand trucks up past the concrete lip around the track. The distended woman grunted slightly with the effort of bending at her massively inflated waistline.
Nearby Sandy, Samantha stood idle, inspecting her manicure. She was less inflated than the last time Sarah had seen her, the woman finally having a discernable, slender waistline. The white "Helium Queen" text across her stomach looked positively anemic at this size, tiny and difficult to read from a distance. However, Samantha's curves still seemed outrageously wide, particularly her bust. The huge spheres stood out on the woman's chest, projecting almost eight inches forward. The reporter tore her eyes away from Samantha's improbable bosom. Sarah abruptly noticed that Samantha was no longer inspecting her fingernails, and was instead staring directly at her, smirking. Sarah shook her head and immediately looked away, returning to the conversation.
"Um, aren't those tanks down there a little bit overkill?" Sarah asked. "I mean, you could probably fill a blimp with one of those!" Amanda and Laurie exchanged glances, a touch of shared humor passing back and forth between their bemused looks.
Amanda answered hesitatingly, "They probably could almost fill a blimp, yes. But they're, um, not particularly overkill. If the volume girls really get going, I mean. The tanks do have a little bit more than anyone could take, but not by much." The reporter's eyes widened. Amanda glanced down at the tanks herself before continuing her explanation, "They have to have enough in the tank that the girls can't run out during an event. But aside from that, some of the volume girls could inhale almost all of one of those tanks." Down on the field, the officials and Sandy had finished lining up all three helium tanks a short distance apart from each other.
"But, that's impossible! How can that be?" Sarah asked, gaping. Amanda and Laurie chuckled good-naturedly at her discomfiture.
"Well, if we knew that, we'd probably be doing the volume events ourselves," Laurie laughed. "Some girls are just better at stretching than others. Or have a better mindset that allows them to more easily endure getting huge." Laurie's explanation was cut off as a loudspeaker down near the track squawked to life, one of the officials at the scorekeeper's desk speaking into a microphone. The party seated in the bleachers turned to look down at the field.
"Cindy Brown, please report to the Maximum Volume Time Retention event if you wish to compete. Thank you," the official's voice called. The official down on the field rose from the microphone while Samantha and Sandy looked on, surprised. A concerned look crossed Sandy's face. The honey-haired woman appeared to concentrate for a moment, her distended body slowly slimming as she released the vast reservoir of helium inside her tall form.
"Cindy never misses her events," Sandy called to the official, her distant words audible only with difficulty to Sarah. The official shrugged elaborately, palms facing the ceiling.
"We're already late," the woman called back with emphasis, checking her watch. "We've got to get a move on soon. I'll give her a few more minutes." The official stepped over to one of the helium tanks, inspecting one of the gauges. Sandy chewed her lip, seeming distracted. The official stood, and shot an annoyed glance in Samantha's direction. "Ms. Cartwright, I thought I told you to ditch all that helium?" she asked. Samantha put on an air of injured pride immediately.
"Me?" Samantha squawked, glancing down at her breasts. "Whatever do you mean? I'm totally empty!" She crossed her arms under the spheres of her bosom, hiking them upwards another four inches. Sandy rolled her eyes slightly and shook her head. Without hesitation, the referee walked over crossly and squeezed one of Samantha's breasts with a practiced hand. Samantha gasped, her full lips forming an alarmed circle of surprise.
"You've got helium in there. Get it out," the official responded with an annoyed tone. Sarah noticed a subtle smile on Sandy's lips.
"What's the matter, Samantha? How come you're always embarrassed to show your actual size?" Sandy asked slyly. She raised a pale-brown eyebrow interrogatively. The other woman dropped her arms, placing her hands on her hips.
"I'm not," Samantha shot back. She opened her mouth slightly as she worked her tongue against the valve opening inside her mouth. With a hiss, a burst of air passed her lips aimed towards the ceiling. The blast of helium caused her burgundy bangs to flap wildly in the helium stream. Samantha's curves gradually shrank, losing the unnatural, full roundness that they'd had previously. When the flow stopped, Samantha appeared as a statuesque woman with a respectable bosom and wide hips. "Happy now?" she groused, clearly irritated. Sandy smirked, not replying.
This was the first time Sarah had seen Samantha and Sandy in close proximity to each other without both of them being crammed to the gills with helium. Both women were roughly six feet in height, though Samantha appeared to be a few inches shorter than her counterpart. They shared the same general body plan, both being long-legged and curvaceous. Samantha's hips were slightly wider than Sandy's own, but the taller girl possessed a considerably larger bosom that appeared breathtaking in the body-hugging confines of her emerald leotard even when not in a state of inflation. The burgundy-haired woman possessed a finer bone structure, with higher cheekbones and slimmer arms than Sandy. The overall result was that Samantha appeared to be the slighter of the two by a small margin.
The official picked up the scorekeeper's microphone once more, saying, "Cindy Brown, last call. Cindy Brown, please come to the track immediately." A confused expression flitted across Sandy's face, the amusement at Samantha's discomfiture fading.
"Did you see her earlier?" Sandy asked Samantha, cautiously. The other woman looked surprised.
"Me? I just got here after your little relay, why would I bother to show up early? I don't need to warm up," Samantha scoffed. "Maybe she didn't want to compete against me and lose again." Her fellow competitor glared at her in exasperation.
"Ladies?" the referee asked. "It appears Cindy is a no-show. Shall we get this show on the road?" The official strode away from the scoring desk until she was squarely in front of the two competitors.
"I thought you'd never ask," Samantha moaned gleefully, putting heavy emphasis on the word 'never.' She ran her hands down her flat stomach eagerly.
"I suppose we'd better," Sandy agreed with less enthusiasm. "I'll call Cindy later and find out what the deal is with the absence."
Samantha chuckled, "It's me you really want to compete with anyway, we both know that. Stop worrying about Cindy. Worry about me getting soooo much bigger than you." She sauntered easily over to the helium tank in front of her. Sandy clenched her left fist slightly, taking a long step over towards Samantha and shoving her shoulder with her right palm.
"You pompous balloon," Sandy yelled as she shoved Samantha. "You know you're not that much better than me!" Samantha giggled, taking a step backwards atop her long legs to absorb the shove.
"Hey!" the referee snapped. "Knock it off, both of you! Can't you two do just one event without this constant back-and-forth?"
Sandy sighed, muttering, "Sorry, sorry." She stepped away from Samantha, taking up her own position in front of a helium tank. Only the tank off to the far left stood unoccupied. The referee nodded, reaching up to adjust her black cap slightly.
"Alright, then. Let's get going," the official said. She removed a bulky stopwatch from the front pocket of her black and white shirt. "This is a Maximum Volume Time Retention," she began.
"We know the rules," Samantha chuckled, interrupting her. The officiating woman glared.
"Apparently not, because we keep having these chats," the official sighed. "Get as big as you can, and hold it for as long as you're able. No talking, absolutely no touching, do not interfere with each other in any way. Are we clear?"
"We're clear," Sandy said, determination visible on her face.
"Yes, mother," Samantha irreverently said. "We'll play nice." The judge pulled a starting pistol out of her pocket with her free hand, and stepped back several paces.
"Let's get this show on the road then," the referee sighed. "Contestants, on your mark." Both women bent down to grab the trailing hose of their respective helium tanks. "Get set," intoned the put-upon official, bringing the starting pistol up perpendicular to the ground. Samantha and Sandy slowly brought the hoses to their mouths, lips parting briefly to admit the helium lines. Each woman placed one hand on the valve of their helium tank. The two competitors turned as one to glance sidelong at each other. A mix of emotions played across their faces. Sandy's face was a mixture of nervousness, desire, and the drive to succeed. Staring back at her, Samantha wore a smile of smug confidence, but the woman's eyes were as intently determined as Sandy's. Their gazes bored against each other, seemingly unaware of anyone else around them. Up in the stands beside Sarah, Laurie clasped her hands in her lap.
"You can do it, Sandy," Laurie murmured, half to herself. Sarah glanced from side to side, seeing the intent looks of everyone in the bleachers. There was the strong sense that this is what they'd come to see.
"Go!" the officiating woman shouted, her starter pistol going off with a sharp, simultaneous crack. In the echoing aftermath of the shot, a matched per of metallic whisperings were heard as both women hurriedly opened the valves on their helium tanks. The noises of the valves quickly gave way to the gaseous hissing of the compressed helium flowing down the length of the hoses into the two women. Sarah gasped, the sole sound in the quiet bleachers.
This was not the steady, measured expansion from the previous event. Sandy and Samantha began to balloon so rapidly that their bellies came to dominate their figures within moments. Through the hissing of the helium, the reporter could hear the soft susurration of skin and spandex creaking with tension. Peering through the curtain of the honeyed waves of her hair, Sandy's eyes remained fixed on Samantha's gaze. As her belly distended, Sandy rose from hunching over the helium tank in order to allow the burgeoning sphere of her stomach room to expand. The taller girl released the valve of the cylinder and placed her hand atop the rising swell of her gut, as if she could somehow shepherd the buoyant cargo into her body more rapidly. Beside her, Samantha followed suit and stood erect. As her cranberry-clad waistline inflated, the ivory "Helium Queen" text swelled into legibility as it stretched across the woman's growing belly. The breasts of both women began to swell with helium as well, the implants contained therein distending their full, natural bosoms into spherical, pressurized tautness. The referee slowly began to circle the two women, inspecting them from all of their continually-widening sides to ensure that all facets of the rules were maintained.
The women rapidly swelled into enormous, bellied projection like the sails of ships before a stiff breeze. Sandy's palm atop her vast belly slid down and around, comfortingly rubbing the taut flesh of her side that lay beneath the stretched, green leotard. Her opponent widened her stance, seeking room to grow as her thighs began to distend with helium in conjunction with the swelling of her middle. Samantha's full lips were clamped tightly around her own hose, but her eyes were a maelstrom of lust and intensity that stared across at Sandy.
In a few short moments, Sandy and Samantha's bodies had become inhumanly swollen. From the reporter's vantage point in the bleachers, their faces and limbs were beginning to look miniscule compared to the massive ball that each woman's belly had become. As their midsections expanded into incomprehensible fullness, the arms and legs of the competitors took on their own share of the cargo, their swelling thighs and upper arms gradually tapering down into dainty-seeming hands. Sandy took several straining waddles backward, making additional clearance between the front of her encroaching acreage and the helium tank on the track before her. Glancing sidelong at Sandy as she moved to avoid the tank, Samantha smirked around her mouthful of hose and contemptuously arched her back, shoving her belly forward in a more direct assault on her own helium tank. Samantha's tall cylinder clunked to the ground with a burred clanging noise, allowing her growing belly to surge over the prone tank.
Up in the stands, Sarah shook her head numbly as she watched the women balloon. The creaks of pressure were becoming more audible. The cheeks of the swelling women had begun to pink in an intense blend of arousal and strain. "T-this is impossible," Sarah murmured, her voice tinged with awe. "How can anyone's body tolerate this?" she asked, the whisper cutting through the silent stands and drawing a few annoyed glances. Laurie turned to face her, putting one finger to her lips to shush her quietly.
"Shhh, Sarah," Laurie whispered, not unkindly. Sarah glanced to her left and saw that the redhead was sitting tensely in her seat, nervous fists clenched in a firm grip on the spandex girding her legs. A creak from the track drew Sarah's attention back. She gasped in horror. Even in the brief few seconds of inattentiveness, Sandy and Samantha had swollen dramatically bigger. They were swiftly encroaching on such vast, distended reaches of girth that no automobile would admit them entry. The double-doors leading into the arena would be a tight squeeze.
The two women were still staring at each other, eyes fixed over flushed and straining cheeks. The hoses in their mouth robbed them of any chance to talk, but the intensity of their gazes spoke volumes. A lust-filled determination lurked there, a silent message insisting that neither woman would allow the other to be the greater in girth. In spite of the obvious strain, they seemed to give no thought to their own impossible fullness. Sarah's belly ached in silent sympathy with the two women down below, the swollen duo looking as if they could burst at any moment. The official still continued to circle their bloating forms, a black whistle held in her lips.
Samantha's eye contact broke from Sandy's gaze briefly to flick towards the referee with the briefest of glances. The gigantic, cranberry-suited woman locked her eyes back on Sandy almost immediately. As the judge orbited one side of Samantha's vast body, the ballooning woman held up the swollen arm on the opposite side and pointed her slim, manicured hand directly at Sandy's face. Her hand quickly shifted, the woman displaying a tiny distance between her index finger and thumb. The message was clear. "You. You're small." Samantha's lips smirked as best they could while clenched around her hose. Sandy's eyes narrowed in irritation and she shook her head violently. Her knuckles went white as her grip on her own hose tightened. Samantha nodded mockingly in insistence.
Sandy suddenly pulled the hose from her mouth, the helium hissing from the hose as it escaped into the room. "Stop it!" Sandy spat, plugging the hose immediately back into her lips and continuing to inflate. The referee instantly blew her whistle, waving her arms.
"Oh, Sandy, no, not again," Laurie sighed upon seeing the exchange, shaking her head sadly beside the reporter. Sarah looked over at her in confusion. The redheaded girl hid her eyes in her hands, seeming weary.
"Knock that off, Ms. Mason. Don't distract each other. I'm not going to warn you again!" the referee shouted, holding her whistle while she spoke. Samantha arched an eyebrow at Sandy, who glared at her. The swelling of the women had proceeded rapidly during this interchange, each girl an enormous girth of curves and belly who struggled to see over their own breasts. The creaking orbs of woman flesh were so gigantic that they would occupy a majority of the space in a room of modest size.
Samantha whipped the hose from her mouth. "I'm bigger than you," she gloated, the syllables spilling out in a rapid tumble that blurred one word into the other. Her hose was back in her mouth almost before she finished speaking, pumping her gigantic belly larger. The referee gaped in outrage, whistle falling from her lips onto the thong around her neck.
"Both of you, stop this off at once!" the official shouted. Seemingly unhearing, Sandy shuffled sidewise in a rapid waddle and threw her vast flank against Samantha's belly, the two almost bouncing apart from the impact and rolling slightly. A deep, drum-like thump reverberated from Samantha's belly. A sharp moan of arousal spilled from both women which escaped from their lips with a mutual burst of helium. The woman in the referee's uniform shook her head in disbelief, blasting her whistle again. The duo paid no attention, if they had even noticed.
"Here we go," Laurie sighed. Beside her, Amanda had her hands over her mouth.
"Go?" Sarah asked, numbly. She was unable to take her eyes off the train wreck occurring below. "Where um, is this, uh, going?"
Nobody spoke, aside from Lindsay releasing a drawn-out, quiet, "uhhh-ohh." The words sounded as if the woman's voice was not involved at all, her lips merely shaping a nervously exhaled breath. She was perched atop the towering cushion of her own buttocks, nervously watching the field.
Down below, the pair of massively inflated women were wobbling ungainly around the floor after their collision. Samantha had rolled onto her swollen backside, while Sandy was prone on the floor. Sandy lay inclined slightly forwards, both her gigantic bosom and belly pressed against the floor. Her back formed a ramp aiming at the ceiling. The two struggled to right themselves, looking for all the world like a pair of buoys attempting to stay level in a stormy sea. Even as they fought to their feet, they were taking in more and more helium. Their bodies distended even as they struggled, the girth working against them more with each passing moment. After long moments, the humungous women regained their footing. They were significantly larger than when Sandy had charged Samantha and sent them both sprawling. They glared at each other through the canyons of their expanded décolletages as their bodies swelled with the soft hiss of helium.
"Now then, ladies," the referee yelled, her face bearing an angry flush. "Let's strike this foolishness as a false start and begin again, shall we?" Even though it had been a question, the incensed official's tone brooked no argument, it was clearly a command. She looked for some sign that her words had even registered with the women. Snatching her whistle to her lips again, she blew a loud, angry blast that rang shrilly through the arena. The official strode forward and lay a hand on Samantha's helium tank and began to screw the valve shut. Immediately, Samantha's gaze jerked to her, eyes blazing.
"Hands off!" the crimson-haired woman snapped, turning to squarely face the referee as she yanked the helium hose from her mouth. In comparison to her vast, spherical belly the judge looked positively diminutive. Samantha took a rapid step forward and thrust forward at the hips, throwing the enormous ball of her belly toward the referee as the woman was reaching to cut off her source of helium. A mighty thump echoed from that vast, inflated middle as it struck the smaller woman and sent her flying.
"Unngh!" grunted the judge as she crashed to the track. The landing dislodged her hat from her head, and the black cap fluttered to the surface of the arena. She lay there seemingly dazed. Samantha's glare snapped back to Sandy.
"So that's how you want to play it, is it?" Samantha demanded, addressing Sandy's earlier assault that had sent them both rolling across the track. "Fine by me." The woman plugged the hose back into her waiting lips. She waddled forward as rapidly as she could to slam her middle against Sandy's own, the two colliding this time with belly meeting belly. The pounding reverberation of the impact was far louder this time. Sandy literally rolled head over heels. The force of the impact squeezed a moan of internal pressure from the rolling woman, blasting out of her lips along with the helium hose. Sandy's hose fell to the track, hissing like an angry snake as the unchecked helium vented out of it. The woman herself gradually bounced to a stop, the roll leaving Sandy flat on her back with her gigantic middle rising towards the ceiling. Somehow the woman's scale was emphasized further as her belly projected upward, the massive pressure and light contents laughing off the pitiful influence of gravity.
"My god," Sarah whispered.
On the track, Samantha languidly waddled towards Sandy's supine form, continuing to take in the cargo of the helium hose that left her more swollen with each step. Reaching Sandy, she pressed the front of her unspeakable middle against the underside of Sandy's belly, squashing against her and leaving the other woman pinned against the floor.
"Hnngh," Sandy moaned, squirming. The moan was a curious mixture of tension, discomfort and surprising arousal. As the pressure of Samantha's waist against her own increased, the fallen woman's cheeks flushed pink. In spite of the obvious war of emotions playing across her face, the woman twisted and scrabbled with her chubby arms, seeking for the helium hose that had fallen from her lips. Seeing her struggles, Samantha kicked it away.
"Ohhh no, no," Samantha chided, pulling her hose from her own mouth. She thrust her huge abdomen more firmly against Sandy's, watching with approval as her rival moaned with the corresponding rise in internal pressure. "You're going to lay right there and watch me get bigger than you." The woman's purring words mingled smoothly with the hissing of the two helium hoses.
"Like hell!" screeched Sandy, the screamed denial erupting from the pinned girl. She cocked one swollen leg and stomped upward at the underside of Samantha's gut.
"Uulf," grunted Samantha, staggering backwards and falling unceremoniously to her ballooned behind with her tubby arms flapping gracelessly. The motion popped the hose free from her mouth and left the hissing hose taut between her hand and the tank, rocking the tank slightly atop its base. Sandy struggled to her feet with an elaborate ritual of grunting and squirming. She waddled across the track surface over to her discarded helium hose. Sandy hopped, rolling forward atop the sphere of her belly until she was inverted and on the opposite side of her vast middle, supported by a palm thrust out against the floor. She snatched her helium hose from the ground with her free hand. Grunting, she shoved against the floor with her opposite hand and rolled back the way she had come, ending lightly on her feet. She spun and glared at Samantha, the woman clumsily trying to get her swollen, cone-shaped legs under herself. Sandy faced her squarely, belly aimed proudly at her adversary.
"Get up," Sandy ordered. "Put that hose back in your mouth, and leave it there until you're too damn tight to smirk at me anymore. Then tell me who's bigger than who." Punctuating her command, she shoved her own hissing hose back into her own mouth. She widened her stance, giving herself room to expand. She resumed swelling, ballooning with an expression of determination. She snapped a swollen arm upwards and made a come-hither motion of her index finger, challenging and beckoning Samantha.
"Fine!" the other yelled. Hissing in outrage, Samantha managed at last to get her enormous legs underneath her center of gravity. She jackknifed forward and grunted as she placed her bodyweight on top of her massively distended belly, using the sphere to provide support as she stood to a proud standing position. The woman arched her back, the forward thrusting motion of her belly almost seeming to make her inflate further. Without further comment, Samantha jammed her own hose between her lips and faced Sandy. She began to swell again with the influx of new helium, her swollen flesh creaking with pressure. She waddled forward towards her opponent and pressed the enormous expanse of her middle against Sandy's own waist, as if she was trying to push her opponent using the pressure of her gut. Rather than retreating, Sandy leaned forward against her opponent just as firmly. The arena seemed filled with an electric tension as the two woman glared, struggled and inflated, the whisk of spandex and creak of their straining bellies against each other audible even up in the stands as the two strove against each other.
The referee sat up groggily, one hand cradling her forehead as the other hand sought for her missing cap on the track. like some blind cave-denizen sent on a quest by its owner. Slapping the hat back onto her head, she staggered to her feet and gasped in fury at what she saw. Samantha and Sandy surged back and forth against each other, pressing their swelling bodies against each other in a perverted, reverse tug-of-war. Several times the force of their opponent's abdominal assaults cause one of them to stumble, but they always regained their footing and pushed back twice as firmly against their distended rival. Neither seemed the clear victor, and each woman was red-faced with pressure. Their straining forms groaned with the unnatural pressure distorting their balloon-like bodies as they repeatedly shoved belly-to-belly with each other and swelled.
"Will you two never learn?" the official shouted. Rather than blow her whistle again, she seemed to have decided that physical intercession was necessary. Stalking up to the two women, she attempted to insert herself physically between them. For a long moment she seemed as a woman attempting to wade into a vast gulf of belly rather than water, the ballooned surfaces of their abdomens pushing and straining to fill any gap she attempted to squeeze through. Despite all her efforts, she was unable to squeeze between them and was left straining at the dividing line between their guts in an attempt to force herself into place. The harried judge settled for turning around and leaning her back into the gap as she attempted to physically push the two apart, one hand shoving at each of their middles. "Stop…it, right…now!" she grunted. She may as well have been pushing a pair of hills. The swelling women didn't even seem to notice compared to the monumental pressure they were exerting as they moaned and squashed their distended waistlines against each other. The woman's increasingly desperate shoves were swallowed up and absorbed by the rising swells of the competitors' waists.
With a cry of frustration, the official squeezed back out again in tactical retreat, the creaking orbs covered in green and cranberry spandex threatening to engulf her as they grew. "You two are out of control, you're making a mockery of this competition!" she raged. At a safe distance from the two women, she lunged for one of the helium tanks and began to twist Sandy's valve to a close. As one, the two ballooning rivals turned and glared at the referee, their heads rotating with a smooth coolness that belied the furious anger in their eyes. With seamless synchronization, the two pulled their hoses from their lips with a soft pop and an gaseous hiss of helium.
"Shut up," Samantha grunted, in a forceful but strained voice. She sounded as if she was holding an incredible burden while speaking.
"Sit down. We've got something to settle. Turn my helium back up and get lost," Sandy echoed. Her groaning voice sounded equally under pressure, but an edge of determination still wound its way through her tone. The referee hesitated, hand still on the circular valve of Sandy's tank.
"NOW!" both of the enormous women shouted, starting to turn towards the comparatively tiny referee. Taken aback, the woman meekly screwed the valve of Sandy's tank back open. She retreated to the safety of the scorekeeper's desk, where she talked with an alarmed expression to the other officials in hushed tones. Satisfied of no more interruptions, the colossal women turned to face each other again without a word, and replaced the hoses betwixt their lips.
Throughout the recent altercation, neither woman had stopped shoving her belly against the other, but now they redoubled their struggle. The women resembled nothing so much as a bizarre struggle between alien balloon women vying for dominance, caught on film for an otherworldly nature documentary. With each inch of girth the creaking women gained, they seemed to force their waistline more firmly against their opponent's own in an attempt to physically demonstrate their vast bloating and will to be the biggest. Their swelling continued until the women's torsos began to resemble gigantic trios of balloons, two large swells of the breasts with a belly of unspeakable distension projecting from underneath. The overhead lighting of the arena cast stark highlights on the stretched spandex and bare skin of their forms. The fullness they were feeling was graven on Sandy and Samantha's faces, their intent demeanor beginning to give way to a flushed look of strain. Struggling to bend their cone-shaped limbs, they squeezed and soothed their blimp-like bellies, willing the tortured spheres to contain still more. In spite of their discomfort they shoved and vied just as strongly against one another, barely acknowledging the need to step back to allow either more room to expand.
Even up in the stands, Sarah could hear their disconcerting creaks coming from the women, uncertain if the noise was the women, their garments, or both. She could hear soft, feminine moans of pressure echoing occasionally through the long length of the hoses. Their skin was beginning to take on a taut shininess of a balloon ominously close to bursting. "This is insane," she breathed. "How big can they possibly get?"
As if in answer, the hiss of helium fell silent from Samantha's hose. The cranberry-haired woman turned in surprise, glaring at the offending tank. It was empty. Her eyebrows were raised in shock, plump lips slightly parted among bloated cheeks. Across the vast canyon of abdominal protrusion, Sandy was looking at her opponent in confusion.
"Oh my god," Amanda murmured. "She took it all." Scant seconds later, Sandy's tank went silent as well. The red-faced, straining Sandy let the hose fall from her lips in awe at her own girth. Laurie gasped, hands over her mouth.
"I thought you said nobody could hold all of one of those," Sarah asked helplessly.
"Nobody ever could before," Amanda replied numbly.
Off to Sarah's left, visible beyond one of Lindsay's swollen thighs, a spectator stood and cheered, "They're going to tie! There's never been a tie in this event before!" Samantha and Sandy spun towards the sound, sweeping their dirigible middles through the air, the pair seemingly offended by the words.
From the floor below, Sandy shouted, "There's not going to be one today, either!" She spun and shoved Samantha aside with a palm to the belly, sending her distended rival rolling and wobbling onto her swollen flank. The woman let out a howl of outrage and fullness. Waddling past her, Sandy strode purposefully to the third helium tank, the abandoned cylinder intended for the absent Cindy Brown. Seeing Sandy's target, Samantha squealed and squirmed to her feet with enormous difficulty.
"Get away from that tank, it's mine!" Samantha hissed, struggling after her with awkward motions of her swollen limbs.
Up in the stands, Laurie peered over quivering fingers a scant inch from covering her eyes, as if she couldn't bear to watch. "Oh my god, Sandy can't possibly be thinking of forcing in even more. She'll burst for sure!" Laurie fretted.
"Burst?" Sarah said, a ribbon of shock twisting through her tone.
"I've never seen anyone get this full before! Ever!" Laurie wailed in reply.
Sandy pounced on the lone helium tank, twisting the valve wide open. Without hesitation, she jammed the hose to her lips and moaned as her tortured, pressurized body began to stretch outward again with a terrifying creak of overstretched flesh. Moments, later, Samantha pounced on her swollen form. Their juxtaposition immediately devolved into a furious melee of bumping bellies, thrashing, swollen limbs, and smothering breasts. Each woman angrily wrestled frantically for control of the tank's hose. Dragged back and forth between their frenetically clawing hands, the hose spouted vast swirls of helium into the arena.
"I'm the biggest!" Sandy panted, pulling strongly on the hose and managing to take a few gulps of it before it was yanked away again just as rapidly. The woman's voice was strained.
Samantha shrilled, "No, I'm the biggest! You'll never be bigger than me!" while taking her own snatched mouthfuls of helium from the hose they warred over. The two rolled to the ground as Samantha was pushed over, so focused on fighting for the hose that they didn't even both to stand anymore. They struggled on the track surface, each growing more distended in sporadic bursts as they grabbed whatever precious seconds at the hose that they could. As the moments went on, an increasingly frightening sound of creaking began to build in the arena, the sound of the pair of struggling bodies each beginning to reach the maximum limit of their gigantic elasticity.
With a rending, astoundingly loud pop, Sandy's green leotard gave up trying to contain its burgeoning owner and burst, revealing the extent of the helium's effect on her naked, monstrously stretched body. The spectators screamed in alarm, loud bursting noises a potentially disastrous event in the context of the Inflation Olympics stadium. Beside Sarah, Laurie jolted in her seat and screamed along with the crowd. Down on the field, Sandy's struggling, naked body was flushed pink with pressure, the overhead lighting reflecting off tiny beads of sweat and straining skin that was every bit as tight and thin as that of an over inflated air-raft. Her nipples and navel had become almost stretched out of existence, subtle, tiny bumps in the vast acreage of the stretched flesh that formed the enormous swells of her breasts and eight-yard belly. Her areolae had become pale, gigantic circles of tint, barely coloring the apex of her breasts with a hint of rose visible through the body-wide flush. Between her swollen thighs, the pull of skin from her vast, monstrously distended belly stretched her features there slightly lengthwise toward her navel.
Moments later, Samantha's leotard also exploded as she struggled to take in another mouthful of helium from those hose that finally pushed her frame beyond the limits of her garments. The cranberry "Helium Queen" unitard burst, becoming a fluttering, reddish-purple scrap of cloth around her shoulders. Bereft of any force holding it up, the white leggings that had laid underneath rolled down, eager to escape encompassing the enormous swell of her belly, and retreated to her comparatively less-distended calves. There was no underwear beneath the spandex. Her body was in a similar state of strain to Sandy's, albeit with slightly dusky areolae, smaller swells of bosom and slightly more swollen hindquarters. Her entire body appearing flushed, shiny, and dampened with the sweat of her strain in holding back the impossible pressure within her body.
Heedless of their nakedness, the two girls continued to writhe and fight each other for the control of the helium hose. Their dangerously-full bodies creaked and groaned each time they bumped against the other. Each grew in spurts as they commanded control of the black tube for scant moments at a time. Without clothing, the ominous creaking sound that filled the arena was now apparent to be solely issuing from the girls themselves. Their stretched skin was at the limit of sanity and reason. Even their impossible elasticity balked at holding more helium.
Laurie leapt to her feet and stepped over Sarah into the walkway down the bleachers, shouting, "Someone's got to stop this or they're both going to burst!" She began to run down towards the track. Amanda's gaze followed after her, an expression of shocked realization crossing her face.
Jumping to her feet and following Laurie, Amanda called after her, "We've got to roll them apart!" Sarah watched both of them go in a daze, nearly having been knocked out of her seat by the enthusiasm of their efforts to exit the row. She was blindsided for the second time today by the pair of black, spandex pillows that compromised Lindsay's hindquarters, the improbably-reared blonde attempting to pour herself out into the aisle as well.
"Urlf!" Sarah grunted in helpless surprise.
"Sarah!" Lindsay said, spinning around to face her from the aisle. Her sweeping rear collided obliviously with a woman in the bleachers on the other side, knocking her into her neighbors. "I'm going to go help! Um, stay here!" She spun again, freeing the woman she'd inadvertently battered. Lindsay took off running after Amanda and Laurie, her run an odd penguin-like shuffle in the face of her enormously-inflated hips and thighs.
Sarah was left alone in the aghast stands, staring at the chaos below. The three women ran towards the naked, terrifyingly-swollen women that writhed and wrestled each other on the track in a whirlwind of moans, belly-bumping, and chubby limbs groping at each other. She wanted to look away in embarrassment, but the total impossibility of the scene held her view fixed in fascination and horror. The destruction of the women's clothing had ripped a barrier veil away. When they had been clothed, some small part of her mind had still seen them as conceivably normal and merely wearing a strange, balloon-like outfit. With their distended forms laid bare, their gigantic forms could no longer be rationalized.
"This can't be happening," she murmured, numbly. Unable to stop looking at the pair of balloon-women, she noticed to her reddening embarrassment that their frenetic, nude struggles against the distended form of their bare rival now could be taken quite differently. The resemblance of their struggles to a wild bout of rutting hedonism was uncomfortably obvious. She shivered, feeling strange watching the scene. The two of them were rubbing their near-bursting bellies against each other, giving heed to nothing except their own girth and trying to snatch the hose from their rival. Their nakedness and the distortion of their swollen forms seemed altogether too private, to intimate for people to be watching. Abruptly, Sarah stood up. She looked surprised, as if unaware she'd stood.
"I've got to get out of here," the reporter croaked, bizarre feelings washing over her. She raced stiffly down the stairs with her shoes clacking on the bleachers. The reporter shuffled across the arena floor with the abbreviated, staccato steps of someone attempting to cross a hushed library at maximum velocity, heading for the locker room doors that offered relief from this surreal scene. Just once she looked back: people were rolling Sandy and Samantha apart, the pair unable to resist in their state of gigantic fullness. The sole resistance they could offer was to reach toward the distant hose and rage pleadingly for more. She slipped into the locker room, tearing her view away.
Inside the locker room, she raced towards the exit. As she was coming to the final corner before freedom, the light from outer door opening illuminated several feminine shadows against the wall. The reporter balked, feeling curiously guilty and unwilling to run into anyone. Changing course, she darted past a bench into an offshoot of the locker room, an office with the door bearing the placard of games director. Once inside, she slammed the door and locked it. Shaking, she pressed her back against the cool, laminated wood of the portal and slowly slid to the concrete floor. She sat there a long time, dreading discovery and trying to understand the whirlwind of bizarre feelings the final moments of the event had inflicted on her. A few times she thought she heard people calling for her, but she didn't respond. Eventually they went away.
Gradually, Sarah's mind eased and she felt some semblance of normalcy after having a chance to recompose herself. She raised her head and tried to decide if she should merely leave, or seek out Laurie and explain where she'd gone. She felt a pang of guilt for running off so suddenly. Just as she was preparing to rise, she heard a feminine chuckle from outside, and a creak as a weight settled onto the bench that had been outside the office. The locker room lighting on the window blinds of the office showed the backlit shadow of two forms sitting on the bench outside.
Samantha's voice came from one of the forms, chuckling, "Do you feel better now after getting that out of your system?" There was a long, pregnant pause.
"Yes," Sandy agreed, hesitating. "As usual." Sarah heard a sigh issue from her. "We can't keep doing this, Samantha. We're out of control." The reporter could hear the twinge of guilty and worry flowing through Sandy's voice.
"I don't know what you mean," Samantha laughed. "Both of us are getting bigger than ever." A hearty, drum-like slap was heard, the impact of a palm on a belly.
"Sammy, there isn't any 'us!' There hasn't been an 'us' for years now," Sandy murmured back, a sorrowful mixture of venom and regret tinting her voice. Through the blinds, Sarah saw Samantha's shadow shrug.
"That wasn't my decision," Samantha said in a completely different tone from her normally smug rejoinders.
Sandy's shadow slumped, and her voice sighed, "I didn't want it that way either. But we both knew we were a bad influence on each other. Even now." She sat up again. "Frankly, your pride is reaching monstrous levels again, and I know I'm starting to see red when I even think about someone getting bigger than me. Especially you. We just…feed the other's negative traits somehow. We always have." The taller woman's shadow turned to look at the one beside her.
"So what," Samantha chuckled. "Live a little. Who cares what everyone else thinks when you and I compete? A monthly meeting now and then to relive the old times doesn't hurt anyone. It's just our way of blowing off stress. I know you love it." Beside her, Sandy shook her head.
"I do, and that worries me sometimes," she said.
Changing the subject, Samantha queried, "Hey, why didn't you let me blow that reporter up?" Sarah sat straight up, back along the door. Outside, Sandy squawked.
"Do I really have to answer that? She was a guest. Our little performance probably scared her off too," Sandy replied. "Everyone's going to be furious at us. You know why we're after some media attention." Samantha huffed snidely in response.
"I'll bet you just wanted to blow her up yourself," the other woman accused, chuckling. Sandy's shadow reached over and shoved the other woman.
Crossly, Sandy replied, "you know I don't do that anymore." Her shadow pulled her arm back and sat normally. "That's one of the reasons we had to break it off, remember? We were getting so bad we had no inhibition at all. I would have gone to jail that last time if not for that plea bargain."
"Look at me and tell me you didn't want to blow the reporter up," Samantha taunted challengingly. Sandy's shadow turned furiously towards Samantha.
"Of course I didn't want to do it," Sandy said.
"Liar," Samantha snickered. "Liar, liar, pants on fire. I could always tell. Just like me, you want to puff her up until her stomach looks like a beach ball." Sarah wouldn't have opened the door for a million dollars.
"Stop it, Samantha, I don't want to talk about this. I'm not going to blow her up, so stop taunting me about it," Sandy sighed. Samantha's shadowed form against the blinds edged closer Sandy.
Her shadow leaned towards the taller girl, purring, "So let's not talk. Let's puff. No strings attached." Hesitantly, Sandy's shadow turned her head, craning her neck down. The two shadows met and a whisper of shared, muffled moans flitted through the window, punctuated by the occasional hiss of helium and a creak. Abruptly, Sandy grew restive and pulled away.
"Ngh. No. Not here," she murmured. "Someone might see. I don't feel like trying to explain why I'm swapping helium with you."
"Suit yourself," Samantha chuckled smugly, though a hint of disappointment tinged her voice. Her shadow against the window scooted back into a normal posture on the bench. "At the end, when we were both so strained, so tight, I wanted so badly to lean over, plant my lips on yours, and give you just one tiny puff, to send you over the edge. Kaboom," Samantha purred, syllables pouring out lustily from her mouth. Sandy's shadow squirmed on the bench.
"Is that so? Is it possible you've got some sense of restraint after all?" Sandy asked dryly after a moment.
"Absolutely not. I just didn't know which way the helium would flow. From me to you, or you to me," Samantha murmured. There was a moment of profound silence as Sandy absorbed the implications.
"Meaning, for once you aren't sure you were bigger. You were afraid I was the biggest and most pressurized, and trying to puff me would burst you," Sandy gloated. Samantha didn't make a reply. More loudly, Sandy laughed, "I don't think I've ever heard you express doubt that maybe you weren't the best at something."
"Don't let it go to your head," Samantha said. "We got disqualified anyway, it's nothing official. They didn't even pressure check us."
"Oh, definitely not official," agreed the other woman in soothing tones, a note of facetiousness in her voice. "But interesting nonetheless." Sandy's shadow shifted in the seat, holding up a hand. "Anyway, I guess I should call Cindy. I'm a little worried she didn't show up. It's not like her," Sandy said. "Let's see if she's home." Sarah heard the vague tones of Sandy's cellular phone being dialed outside the window.
From the office's closet beside the door, Sarah heard a vague noise. It sounded uncannily like a tinny rendition of MARRS' song, "Pump Up the Volume." She turned quietly, looking at the closed closet door.
"It's ringing," Sandy said from outside.
Drawing her legs up underneath her, Sarah put her palms on the floor and quietly rose to a standing position. She slowly walked over to the closet and took the handle into her palm. The noise was definitely coming from inside. With exaggerated care, she slowly turned the handle and opened the door and flicked the closet light on.
Sarah screamed.
There was a flurry of motion outside, a wrenching of the bench legs against the floor. Almost immediately there was an incredible, rubbery impact with the office door. The aging hinges buckled inward, and Sandy surged into the office with a squeak of inflated sides against the doorframe. The woman was in a state of partial inflation, huge but not absurdly so. Sandy was clad only in track shoes, a grey-colored shirt, and a pair of black panties that clung to the underside of her inflated abdomen. She had one arm and her belly thrown out in front of her and evidently had gone through the door like a wrecking ball. This was the smallest room Sarah had ever seen her inside, and at her inflated girth she seemed to nearly fill the space to the point of claustrophobia, especially given what she'd just seen in the closet.
"Sandy!" Sarah yelped.
"Sarah?" she asked in disbelief, "What are you doing in here? What's wrong?" Beyond Sandy's shoulder, Sarah could see Samantha standing in the locker room through the doorframe, looking alarmed. She was wearing the white spandex leggings Sarah had seen earlier, with the destroyed cranberry unitard replaced with an alarmingly stretched, black tube-top.
Sarah pointed into the open closet door. She was almost knocked over as Sandy sidled into the space, one side of her belly bumping against her as the taller woman came to look.
A woman was in the closet, so inflated that she nearly appeared spherical. Her body pressed from wall to wall. She was blonde, clad in a grey bodysuit, and her eyes swam fearfully above swollen cheeks. A broad ribbon of duct tape crossed her full lips. She seemed far too big to have possibly crossed through the doorframe in her current state. The noise Sarah had heard was a cellular phone tucked between her breasts, the 80s music still warbling from her cleavage.
"Cindy!" gasped Sandy, aghast, naming the missing competitor. Immediately she turned to Samantha out in the locker room. "God damn it, did you do this? If you shoved her in here to cut down on the competition," Sandy began, voice dangerously threatening.
"Huh, what?" Samantha said, blinking and appeared shocked. She slowly squeezed through the doorframe and looked into the closet with the others. "Hell," she murmured, eyebrows raised. "No," she promised. "I didn't know anything about this."
"Hang on, Cindy, we'll get you out of there," Sandy said comfortingly.
"There's a note on her or something," Sarah said. Delicately entering the closet, she plucked the note taped to the terrified woman's huge body. Turning to face the others, she flashed the paper to them. It was neatly type-written, on non-descript, ivory stationary.
'Balloon Girls,
You're behind on your payments again. As you're well aware, our organization's funding of your elasticity pharmaceutical endeavors was no small expense. Please rectify the situation promptly. Don't get so wrapped up in being human balloons that you shirk your fiscal responsibilities. Consider Ms. Brown's condition to be a token of our extreme disappointment in the delay.
Regards,
Your Financiers'