Hazard Maintenance (Patreon Commission for DesertScales)

TAGS: Growth, Muscle/Hyper Muscle, Bursting Clothes (of a sort), SS13

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Why exactly he volunteered himself to clean up the hazardous waste left behind after Chemistry exploded itself again was something he would never know, but at least it did give him a good reason to break out the hardsuit, and any excuse to do that was always a good one; clanking about in something designed for a sentient at least one and a half times his size was about the only time that Aleksi ever felt powerful, especially considering the sort of people he usually worked with, and while he did his best not to let those particular thoughts slip out, it was obvious to anyone who knew him more than just in passing that the lithe lizard had a complicated relationship with his size and proportions. Hence, his constant struggle to get into a hardsuit as much as possible, leading to such wonderful situations as him being on the receiving end of “sunbathing” jokes thanks to being the only person who bothered to check up on the solar arrays in any active manner. Still, sometimes clean-ups had to be performed, and seeing as he’d drawn the short stick that time around, he was the one sent to fix what Chemistry had broken (again), with secondary instructions to remove whatever it was that caused the incident (again) until such a time as the sub-department’s staff took a health and safety course and was actively reminded not to make experimental drugs while on company time (again). It wasn’t the first time and it certainly wouldn’t be the last, but at least it was something to do while the shift wasn’t over, especially given the lack of anything more substantial; there were days that Aleksi legitimately wanted something terrible to happen, if only so he could have some work to do. In this particular case, not a lot of expertise was required, just a boatload of patience and the janitor’s intercom on speed dial for after he was done cordoning off the whole area… or it would’ve been, had the damage not been far more severe than the original report indicated. With the CMO letting the engineers know that it was a “small explosion” and “just some patchwork needed”, the lizard assumed that all he’d see on entering Medbay would be a few scorch marks on the wall and a lot of chemicals on the ground; the last thing he expected were multiple emergency inflatable barriers set up to prevent depressurization, along with a very concerned medical staff hurriedly evacuating everyone waiting in the lobby deeper into the department, where they could at least take shelter from any potential vacuum exposure.

This didn’t at all surprise Aleksi, nor did it leave him feeling any worse for wear; department heads consistently underestimating the severity of damage done to the station was the company’s bread and butter, and this at least was something worthy of his engineering degree! With a smile on his face, the lizard slowly walked over to one of the barriers, set up his own containment force field around it, then promptly poked the plastic hard enough for it to pop… revealing space on the other side. Chemistry hadn’t exactly exploded as much as it had ceased to be, with it being a downright miracle that the walls separating it from the main access corridor outside Medbay hadn’t been taken in the blast as well; beakers filled with fluids and various bits of bent, burnt metal twirled around in the station’s gravity field, afloat as the entire area had been effectively deprived of any atmosphere whatsoever. Full, extensive repairs would be needed, including an entirely new piping system to keep the place supplied with oxygen, because whatever the chemists did, they had thoroughly gotten rid of anything solid built into the framework of the laboratory itself. With a sigh, Aleksi hopped forward, allowing his magboots to disengage as he floated towards the opposite wall, twirling around as he did so in order to fully survey the damage: the outer walls were seriously scratched, but would hold fast, with it being the flooring that took the brunt of the damage; some structural girders and metal panelling and the whole place would be ready for repressurization… within about two or so hours, as the liz wasn’t about to call for help. No, he’d rather do everything himself, even if it meant missing out on extra pairs of eyes that could spot things he couldn’t, such as that large blob of orange-coloured chemicals floating directly in his path when next he pushed himself off the wall, which Aleksi had completely missed thanks to his own peepers being firmly stuck underneath him, where the stars shone on the other side of the hole that used to be a floor. He only realized what had happened after his visor went completely dark, all light blocked from view as the sticky substance splattered itself all over his front; this would normally not be that much of an issue, and indeed the lizard reacted with naught but mild annoyance at first, if not for the sounds that accompanied first impact: sizzling, and the unmistakable smell of burnt metal. Then did Aleksi panic, as he quickly realized that whatever the chemicals were, they were strong enough to melt through the external layer of the hardsuit, which should theoretically be impossible given the sort of construction employed in it and the kind of materials the chemists had available to them; alas, with his view obscured and his sense of direction compromised, there wasn’t a lot that Aleksi could do beyond flail wildly in a desperate attempt at finding the nearest plastic flap, damn the consequences for if he vented Medbay. He couldn’t exactly wipe his visor clean without the gunk getting on his hardsuit’s glove section, nor did the external cleaning sprinklers respond when he demanded they activate, leaving him stranded in a ticking time bomb about to go off and space him just feet away from the cloning bay; a fitting death, if not necessarily a painless one. Worse yet, the confines of the hardsuit itself, which had thus far been relatively accommodating thanks to his nature as a lightweight twink, suddenly began feeling… stuffed. Inexplicably, Aleksi found the suit to fit him a lot more tightly than before, enough for him to notice and certainly enough for it to be slightly uncomfortable; the pressure didn’t abate either, quite the contrary in fact, and before long the lizard was legitimately dreading the possibility that not only was his entire body decompressing, but the chemicals were doing something to his organic composition that was causing him to bloat outwards in some manner. He wanted to scream, but he couldn’t; the intercom was out, so no one would hear, and the moment he opened his mouth he knew he’d have a whole chunk of the goop thrown directly down his throat, as the universe tended to have a sick sense of humour around those sorts of research stations; with pressure rising and discomfort turning to pain, Aleksi prepared himself for his final moments, right before he woke up somewhere else and had to deal with the uncomfortable reality that the body he was in was not his original one… even though those final moments didn’t really come nearly as fast as he assumed they would. He had expected his body to quite literally burst, some sort of odd vacuum phenomenon that was most likely enhanced by the Bluespace fuckery that the lads in Science were constantly engaging in, but instead, he just felt the pressure rising, albeit in a way that was… odd. It was less like he was being pulled inside out by some unfathomable pressure differential, and far more a case of his body occupying every inch of the hardsuit’s interior, without suffering any reduction in structural stability along the way; for someone used to having plenty of wiggle room inside those things, this came as a surprise to the lizard, who couldn’t even begin to think about how this was possible, and yet, the longer he lived, the more he approached his end without actually reaching it, the more he realized that he was actually filling the insides of his suit! It felt strange as only an inexplicable organic transformation could, and for a few moments he wondered whether the explosion had been the result of some sort of SWF interference, a few moments where he actually had the reasoning ability to produce such thoughts before the pressure began to grow unbearable, before he started hearing the suit itself begin to crack, bend and shatter underneath the unrelenting onslaught of his very own body. He dreaded the notion of moving an arm, for he knew that on doing so, the metal plates holding the suit’s arm would be forcefully ripped from one another; he refused to thrash his legs about, knowing as he did that if such a thing happened, he’d probably rip the hardsuit in half like it was made of tissue paper. Yet, the longer this went on, and the more Aleksi got to experience it, the less he actually cared about whether or not the damned suit remained in one piece or not, and the more he just wanted to… feel it go. It was a sense of power unlike any other, knowing that his body alone was capable of ripping through something designed to withstand both the vacuum of space and the deepest, most overwhelming depths of ocean trenches, that his body had become a thing of such power that all he had to do was clench his fists and he could watch as the metal surrounding them was irrevocably bent out of shape for a couple of seconds before being torn apart, leaving a wide gash where there used to be a solid plate; such was a process that repeated itself again and again as Aleksi slowly came to terms with the fact that his body was becoming something greater than it had been before, and that the chemical concoction had somehow worked to give him the sort of physique that used to be nothing more than an idle fantasy. How fitting it was that it should happen while he wore a hardsuit, that he could undergo a proper metamorphosis, cocoon and all; really, he probably couldn’t have asked for a better resolution, though the whole “being in space” thing was probably going to end up biting him once the suit broke apart completely. But he didn’t care; in fact, Aleksi wasn’t even paying attention to how little the hardsuit covered him already, how he had parts of his scales fully exposed to the vacuum of the cosmos and it hadn’t actually done anything at all to him, anything negative at least. It was so easy to forget, so easy to not even notice, when his pleasure centers were so thoroughly wracked by constant, unending serotonin hits that the only thing left for Aleksi was to take the final step and actually get rid of the, by that point, completely useless and entirely unnecessary shell of bent, broken metal yet keeping him from revealing his full, glorious self. By that point, it wasn’t even a contest of strength between himself and some of the hardest materials known to sentient life, as much as it was a colossus willing something broken and the universe taking care of the details; all he had to do was flex, clench every muscle in his body and feel as not only did he bulge out even further, not only did his muscles pack on even more mass, but whatever remained of the joints holding the hardsuit together cracked like a fragile eggshell, leaving only small bits of the poor thing clinging onto his body from inertia alone.

Easy enough to get rid of, as all that was required of him was to propel himself backwards by extending one foot towards the plastic barrier in front of him and pushing his mass towards the opposite wall, coincidentally creating one hell of a dent when he landed far faster than expected and was given a lesson in just how dense his new body was. It almost felt natural to just be destructive without realizing it, so much so that by the time he had course-corrected himself and faced the right side up, Aleksi had already carved several more gashes into the plasteel he’d been leaning against, without so much as a scratch on his claws. It was impressive really… or would be, if it didn’t register as a completely natural accomplishment for the lizard’s brain; if anything, the most surprising part was that he was suspended in a breach and his body wasn’t collapsing, but instead holding so firm that he was surprised his cock was only at half-mast, though granted, even in that state it was far bigger than it had ever been for most of his life. Trying to breathe though, that much was still out of the question; it was a vacuum, and thus he needed to be somewhere else if he didn’t want to suffer a slow and quite monotonous death by lack of oxygen. Thankfully, there was an entire medical bay on the other side of those plastic barriers, so close that if he truly wanted to, he could just throw himself at them and let the automatic atmos locks do the work for him; fortunately, there still remained enough of his old self in there to stop him from doing something so ridiculously stupid… but not enough that he wouldn’t just open the barrier he had come in through anyway, only remembering to grab the holographic barrier projector when he had already jettisoned himself away from the breach. With a simple flip, however, it was easy enough to use the tip of his tail to hold onto it before he broke through the dividers he’d set up earlier, effortlessly nailing the landing at about the same time as the atmospheric alarms went off all around him. It almost felt like a waste, honestly, that everyone was too preoccupied by the sudden lack of a stable atmosphere to pay attention to the colossus that had just emerged from within the breach, to the ceiling-high, chiseled titan of a man whose shoulders had grown broad enough for him not to fit through the smaller airlocks, to the Adonis of raw muscle mass whose mere presence was enough to make even those franticked little ones stop in their steps for a few moments before the pressure differential made them remember why they were running to begin with. It would be simple for Aleksi to fix this issue, trivial in fact, so much so that all it really took was a flick of his tail for the projector to go to work plugging the breach, after which the atmos systems began to restabilize the area; the device was thrown away almost immediately after, because ultimately, the big hole where Chemistry used to be was no longer important, he was. The destroyed sub-department, the breach, the atmosphere loss, all of it was entirely irrelevant next to himself, and how perfect and glorious he was… and how much he was owed a certain degree of attention that he very much was not receiving, a situation that required addressing posthaste.

Aleksi smiled, looking up at the digital clock above the medbay entrance, indicating the shift still had a few hours left to go. Absolute perfection, as far as he cared.

Plenty of time to impress himself upon the crew.