Bloomp

Prg gazed in awe at the planet that filled the view from his cockpit.  Water, in at least three of the fourteen known states of matter.  Plant life.  And that’s just what he could see with his own borp.  Turning his attention to his scan readouts, he also found the planet teeming with life in numerous forms.  Countless structures made of alloys and composite materials dotted the landscape in varying densities.  There were even thousands of artificial satellites in orbit.  Not just life, but intelligent life!  With primitive spacefaring capabilities!

The life of a planetary surveyor was one of boredom and monotony.  Prg catalogued tens of thousands of planets - almost always lifeless rocks or uninteresting balls of gas - every glumk, and this glumk was no exception.  He was also grossly under quota for finding planets such as the one staring him right in the fleeb.

There was just one problem.  Prg glanced at his chronometer and made an expression that most closely approximated a human frown.  It would take him about a hundred zytugs to complete his scans, then about thirty zytugs to get back to his home planet, ten zytugs to download his logs and clock out of work, and another five zytugs to get home.  “I’m going to be late for flarg,” he said to himself in a language that did not at all resemble English.  “Again.  Klrda will never let me hear the end of it.”  Prg could already hear his wife’s droning about how she works hard at home all glumk to have flarg ready when he gets home and he’s always late and never calls and then just lazes around watching grax until he goes to bed and never spends any quality time with her.

That weighed heavily on Prg’s mind.  But… this planet!  He hadn’t found a planet like this in at least a couple of aeqs.  Reaching a decision, Prg rattled off a quick message to Klrda (he could at least extend her that courtesy), then dusted off the controls to his biological testing suite and began moving into a lower orbit to better study the planet’s life forms, making sure to avoid the satellites in orbit.  At least he’d finally have something good to take back to the boss.

--

The moving image of a three-camera sitcom abruptly froze, became pixelated, then was replaced with a black screen and the words “WEAK OR NO SIGNAL.”

Alyssa groaned.  "Not again," she muttered in a language quite unlike Prg’s - English, in fact.

"What?" Katie called back, also in English, from another room.

"The dish just cut out again."

"It can't be raining, can it?" Katie said.  "I mean, the sun was shining a minute ago."

"No rain," Alyssa grumbled.  She got up from her recliner, walked to the patio door, and looked out.  About 30 feet away, on a pole in the middle of the yard, the two roommates' satellite dish pointed to the wild blue yonder.  And yet, instead of transmitting $60 per month worth of high-definition programming, it was transmitting $60 per month worth of nothing.  One could easily obtain such nothing for free simply by not owning a TV at all.

"Isn't this like the third time it's cut out today?" Katie asked.

"At least."

"Well, good thing I’m leaving town for a few days."  Katie appeared in the living room with a suitcase and garment bag.  “I gotta go catch my flight.”

Alyssa smiled, then walked over to Katie and hugged her.  “Have fun.  Hopefully you’ll be able to watch your DVR’ed shows when you get back.”

“Yeah, you’d better get that thing fixed.”  Katie smirked, then shuffled her way out the front door.

Alyssa turned back toward the patio door and put her hands on her hips.  “Maybe it’s something simple,” she thought, walking toward the door.  Stepping out into the warmth of the late spring day, she followed the coax cable from the side of the house out to the dish.  Everything looked okay, and the cable was snugly connected to the dish.  She reached up to fiddle with the connection.

Then her body fell apart.

It only took a split second for Alyssa’s limbs and head to separate from her torso.  There wasn’t even any pain to get her attention.  Her trunk hit the ground, bouncing her head a couple of feet forward while her body tipped backward.  Before she realized what had happened she was staring at a pile of her body parts, her torso face-up surrounded by her arms and legs while her head rested in the grass, surrounded by her long brown hair.  There was no blood or anything at her shoulders or in the leg holes of her shorts, just smooth skin.

“Oh my God!” she screamed.  “What the hell?!” Alyssa instinctively flailed her arms and the arms on the ground did the same, flopping around like fish.  She then noticed that her chest was heaving up and down within her halter top, still responding to her breathing.  Alyssa realized that she could still feel - and move - her body, even if it was in six different pieces.  “Somebody help me!” she shouted.

Then, in the blink of an eye, Alyssa’s body reassembled, all of the separate parts quickly snapping back and reattaching where they were supposed to be.  Now laying on her back in the grass, she scrambled to get off the ground, frantically checking herself over with her hands as she stood.  It felt like nothing had happened at all.  She massaged the base of her neck.  “What---”

In that instant her body dissolved into water and splashed toward the ground, her clothes falling loosely - and damply - to the ground.  Alyssa could no longer see, hear, or move, but she could feel the majority of her body absorbing into the soil while some of her remained in her soaked clothing.  Tiny ants crawled on top of her.  A worm wiggled its way through her thigh.  She could even feel herself begin to evaporate away slightly under the sun’s warm rays.

After what felt like an eternity, Alyssa suddenly found herself back to normal again, this time nude and standing upright with her now-dry clothes underfoot.  Alyssa yelped and reached to cover her groin and breasts, frantically looking around to see if anyone in a neighboring house was watching.  She almost wished someone were.  She randomly noticed that her hair was dry, and realized that she was somehow surprised by that.

She reached down to pick up her clothes, but a bright orange flash filled her field of vision as her body spontaneously combusted and turned to smoldering ash.  Her sight and hearing were gone again, but she could feel the embers of her body being carried on a light breeze, some settling into her yard while others were swept away.

And then she was back to normal again, still nude, still covering herself as best as possible.  “What is happening to me?!??!” Alyssa screamed, as if whoever or whatever was causing this would hear her.  A gentle breeze was the universe’s only reply.

Furious and scared, Alyssa bent over and pulled up her panties.  When she bent over again to reach for her halter top, she wasn’t able to bend as far.  Her stomach was in the way.  In just a few seconds her trim abdomen looked as if she had swallowed a basketball, and it was growing before her very eyes.  Ignoring whatever modesty she had intended for her breasts, she reached down with both hands and clutched her rounded midriff, feeling it grow, stretching her fingers apart.  It felt light and was painless.  After another few seconds she caught a glimpse of her reflection in the patio’s sliding glass door.  She was larger than any pregnant woman she had ever remembered seeing, and it wasn’t especially close.

The door!  Alyssa tried waddling toward it but understandably had trouble.  When she had made it a few wobbly steps the rest of her body began to grow.  Plump legs rubbed against one another, further complicated her gait; rapidly swelling breasts obscured her view of her stomach (not a small feat, she realized, given her unbelievable new waist size).  Her panties dug in between the globes of her enlarged buttocks; she reached plump arms down to try to mitigate the discomfort this caused but could not tug the waistband far enough to get them off.

Alyssa’s legs spread apart as she grew, becoming unable to move them at all.  Her arms, similarly, stuck out to her sides.  She had only made it halfway to the house.  Breathing hard from the effort to move her body, she cried for help again but not as loud, doubting it would do any good.  Her hips flared out, panties finally snapping as her body widened from side to side to match her dimensions from front to back.  Alyssa found that she couldn’t bend her knees or elbows; from what she could see, she didn’t even have knees or elbows, just puffy, conical arms and legs.

Her feet slid further apart along the grass as she grew, her body seeking a rounder shape all over.  Her view was still dominated by her colossal breasts, tight domes of flesh that stood out dramatically from her rounded chest.  She realized that she was very warm, almost uncomfortably so.  She figured it must have been because there was so much more of her to soak up the sun’s heat.

Another faint breeze kicked up.  Alyssa, with her decreasing density, caught it like a sail, gently rolling to one side.  But as she felt her body pitch she felt the grass fall away beneath her.  Realizing she was floating, she half-yelled, half-whimpered.  “No!  I don’t want to float away!”  She felt her long, flowing hair drag along the top of her rounded shoulders and back as she rotated in midair.  Her body fell gently, making a slight “bloomp” sound as she bounced off terra firma for the last time, then rising two feet off the ground, then three, then five, then ten.  She instinctively tried to reach out and grab the roof, but it was no use.  She had nothing to reach with; she could no longer feel her arms.

The wind nudged her still-growing body sideways, causing her to drift over the neighbor’s yard, the wind better able to grab hold of Alyssa and carry her away as she rose higher.  She felt herself growing faster, her body beginning to reshape her breasts.  As her body spun on its axes, she would occasionally catch glimpses of the ground below.  She was very high up, and rising fast.  The air was cooler up here but she still felt quite warm inside, a dichotomy that she decided was strangely comforting, a sensation that soothed and calmed her.

When Alyssa’s breasts finally stretched out to the point of flattening, her body had become her own horizon.  She had no way of knowing exactly how huge she was; she only knew that everything she had left - her hands, her feet, her vagina - felt so, so very far away.  Despite this, and an unusual sensation of pressure building inside of her, she felt like she could continue like this for some time.  When she mentally asked herself how she knew that, she failed to come up with an adequate answer.  As her body claimed her neck, her tight skin swelling up around her head, she simply decided that since she had already grown this big, why couldn’t she keep swelling up?  

The air was starting to get pretty thin; at the right angle Alyssa could see the curvature of the earth.  Her brunette hair whipped about her face and slapped against her tight surface; Alyssa thought she sounded like a snare drum in a jazz trio.  The pressure continued building inside her, becoming first mildly annoying, then slightly uncomfortable.  Alyssa began to hear her heartbeat in her ears.  She felt her hands and feet ball up, then she felt nothing from them.  Something was happening behind her head; she realized her body had begun absorbing it.  The pressure pushed against her face and throat from within, making her feel an urge to gag.  She felt a dull, throbbing pain creep across her circumference somewhere in the distance... across her distance.  She wished the pressure would just go away so she could relax again.  But maybe she was wrong.  Maybe she couldn’t do this forever.

A deafening boom proved that Alyssa was indeed wrong.  Or right, depending on the timeframe upon which you judge her assumptions.

--

Prg grunted, then sighed.  He knew not every species in the galaxy could be bloomped, but it was a rare occasion indeed when a planet had such an infinitesimal success rate.  In testing one sample from each of the hundreds of thousands of species he found on the planet, only one biped species (the dominant intelligent race, he surmised) and a select few water-borne species tolerated it to any acceptable standard.

The success rate was too low, though.  With a gesture most closely resembling a human shrug, he summarized his report on the planet as “More evolution needed; reassess in 15,000 aeqs.”  He then closed the file, shut down his testing suite, and moved to a higher orbit before spinning up his Flurpf drive.  As was the case at the end of most glumks, a disappointed boss and disaffected wife awaited him.

Maybe he would have more luck tomorrow.