Duality - Chapter 25 (Novel Commission for Code-Shark101)

TAGS: Anthro, Transformation/TF, Slice-Of-Life, Milk/Lactation, BE, Hyper, F/F

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At the very least, things were progressing nicely, if infuriatingly slowly compared to what everyone would’ve preferred. The fact that the “treatment” was working at all was nothing short of a miracle, but now that it proved itself to be effective, all those involved in the project were left in an odd limbo where their restlessness increased with each passing day, as if now that they knew for a fact that it was over, they suddenly lost the ability to wait for it to carry on naturally. Rue couldn’t really blame anyone though; her team had been putting up with true insanity for weeks at that point, and the happy couple… well, Beth and Linda very much needed a break, at the absolute minimum, and with the prospect of a somewhat mundane and controllable everyday life now visible in the horizon, neither of them had the patience required to go through everything needed of them without making it very clear that they were positively sick and tired of what they had been through. They were never rude, but it was clear that their ability to withstand more surprise swerves and random growth spurts had run dry and they just wanted to get out as quickly as possible.

As for the good doctor herself, she found her time mostly occupied by bureaucracy. Now that most tasks could be handled by her team as Linda slowly emptied out and burned off the extra weight still keeping her stuck atop a pair of warehouse-sized tits, Rue could focus on gathering every piece of data the project had collected over the course of its incredibly wild run in the hopes of maybe making some sense out of it. After all, even if Linda managed to return to a normal size, or at least one that allowed her to walk around without having to worry too much about suddenly being pinned down by a pair of milky udders, she was still a panda-human hybrid, and therefore so far away from the original, nominal goal of the genemodding project that it was downright laughable to presume they could return to it in any way, shape or form. There was simply no reasonable manner in which to return Linda to her human self, but Rue didn’t figure that’d be too much of an issue.

It was clear from her observations that the two women downstairs very much loved one another and didn’t particularly care for whether or not one of them was covered in fur. Judging from the transcripts recovered from the clandestine surveillance equipment installed in the diner, neither did most people in general. Yes, there were a few outliers that treated her like some sort of freak of nature, but that was to be expected (something that couldn’t be said for those who displayed an abnormal amount of attraction for her, but still); given the amount of money that Rivtech threw at marketing agencies to make their genetics program as well-known as it was, it didn’t strike Rue as surprising that few people batted an eye more than once upon meeting Linda for the first time, and indeed a majority of individuals simply carried on with their life as if she was a perfectly regular part of it. Besides, the young woman was a waitress at a diner, so it wasn’t as if she’d suddenly be making waves in big political circles.

As for the scientific data recovered from the hundreds of blood tests, genetic scans and who knows what else the team had performed under the auspices of her two predecessors, Rue was more than convinced she would never be able to go through all of them in any appreciable timeframe. There were several terabytes’ worth of information stored in at least five or six different external hard drives and even more stored in the research site’s internal storage system, leading to her going through a slight moment of despair as she considered just how tremendously difficult the task of combing through all those data points for anything of use would be. The whiskey bottle she emptied before had a replacement found within a couple of days, with a dedicated coffeemaker soon joining it as the stress of it all began to crack through Rue’s carefully constructed façade, making it difficult for her to even pretend to be slightly in control of her own emotions at times. She knew her job was still on the line; the decision to use the placebo might’ve been a stroke of genius, but getting Linda back to normal was just step one in the long, arduous process of trying to make something useful out of a project that the company had very much deemed to be the financial equivalent of a dumpster fire.

At the very least, the shrinking was developing along quite nicely, with it being the sole positive still left in Linda’s and Beth’s lives. Though, to be fair, it was a sizeable enough positive that it vastly outweighed all the tiny negatives that their attendants had been hard at work taking care of anyway, making those (hopefully) last few days at the compound less unbearable than they had been previously. The panda still complained about the physical exercise she was made to do, and Beth still remained by her side to remind her that it was absolutely necessary for her speedy recovery, all while trying to rationalize away the guilt she felt for feeding her partner medication that, unbeknownst to her, was a double-bluff on Rue’s part; just as long as everything kept going the way it was, then the human half of their equation wouldn’t have to worry too much, and given how much the full hybrid was shrinking down, at least Beth had ample reasoning to carry on “deceiving” her better half, blissfully ignorant of how both of them were being taken for a ride.

Over the course of several days, the losses became more and more noticeable. It was hard to tell the difference at first, given the sheer sizes that Linda was operating at; what was a foot or two when compared to a pair of breasts that occupied most of a double-sized warehouse that was, at that point, custom-built and reinforced just for her? It was only after the second week came to a close and third one rolled in that everyone involved could really start telling the difference between the panda’s day-ending size and the one she woke up with, at times being enough for even Linda herself to tell from the difference in curvature of the sea of breastflesh around her. It would still take a substantial amount of time before she could even touch the ground again, at least a month or so, not to mention having to reaclimatize herself to the simple act of walking while actually holding her weight up on her own feet and spine, but it was something at least; something to tide her over while her system flushed everything out of it, bit by bit, burned calorie by burned calorie and bucket after bucket of cream manually dragged out from the warehouse. No one involved wanted to get anywhere near the mere concept of a draining pump, lest it end up triggering some adverse reaction in the panda’s body, leaving them with one option: mopping up all the milk.

There was still… plenty of it, to say the least. It wasn’t nearly as ludicrous as it had been before, and in fact the flow slowly grew thinner as the days went on and Linda’s tits continued to shrink, but given the size of those milk tanks, even a heavily diminished production was still enough to leave gallons of the stuff sloshing about at any given time, requiring a full complement of janitors purely to keep the floor somewhat navigable, especially when the sides of the warehouse were finally revealed for the first time in seemingly forever and the team of technicians no longer had to use scaffolding just to reach the other end of the warehouse itself. The walls had been seriously damaged during the time where they had those two colossal orbs pushing against them, and the amount of rust that had built up thanks to exposure to milk and frankly ridiculous amounts of sweat was nothing if not impressive; it would require extensive repairs just to get it up to safety specifications again, but just the fact that anyone could tell that at all was proof positive that their process was actually working, and that progress was finally being made after what felt like months of nothing but setbacks. The one thing on everyone’s mind at that point was the intense desire to speed everything up so they could move onto something that wouldn’t awaken new and increasingly extreme sexual desires in them, even if plenty of the techies secretly felt like thanking Linda for her… unique contribution to their personal lives.

If nothing else, the prospect of finally being able to walk again was one that kept Linda awake at night, though often not for the reasons one might expect. It was an interesting conundrum she found herself in, given that her lust for growth and size, while seriously diminished compared to what it had been before, had never really gone away; she fancied the idea of being able to fit into places designed for actual people and not large shipping containers, but she also didn’t want to be flat again. The idea of returning to her old body type, of having nothing there on her chest to put on full display for Beth, was nothing short of harrowing for her psyche; and indeed, it was purely for Beth, because the rest of the world could frankly take several hikes as far as the panda was concerned. She wanted her bust to remain big, bountiful and fully capable of smothering anyone for her parter, for her lover, for that gorgeous and beautiful young lady who had made her life so much better just with their sheer presence. And it wasn’t even sexual… most of the time at least; it’d be disingenuous to claim that lewd thoughts didn’t occasionally swim around in Linda’s head, but mostly she just missed those lazy days where the two of them sat down doing nothing of worth, simply basking in one another’s presence for hours on end without a care in the world. She wanted to go back to those times, wanted to retain the ability to sit on a couch, pat a pair of tits big enough to overflow onto the seat on either side of her, then feel as her better half sunk into her cleavage with a contented sigh; she used to live for those moments.

The same could be said for Beth, who was very much conflicted on that topic as well, though not to the point where she dared bring it up to Linda; her mind was far too focused on trying to hide the shameful act of giving the panda a pill that didn’t actually do anything to really consider having a prolonged and probably very intimate talk about sizes and size expectations, but the thoughts were there regardless. Neither of them really knew where the shrinkage would end, or indeed if it would end at all; Rue had been surprisingly cagey when it came to those details, leaving both women completely in the dark as to where exactly Linda was supposed to end up. The one point where they both fully converged was on the continued desire for immensely oversized breasts; this was a love they had both developed over their time together and were not willing to let go of, regardless of what anyone on the team tried to prime them for. They’d end up threatening Rivtech with legal action if the company didn’t provide for some size for Linda, an act that would surprise pretty much everyone but Rue at that point in time.

Still, everyone was happy to just ignore the potential issues mounting right in front of them, so long as it let them focus on taking care of the immediate problems of flooding and skin care, something that occupied most of the lab team’s time over the course of the month or so it took before Linda shrunk back down to a size where she could put her feet back on the ground without needing a crane to lift her back up onto her breasts. It was seen as a momentous occasion for all those involved, even if there was still plenty of time left before she was properly mobile again; take-out was ordered, a single bottle of champagne was opened purely for ceremonial purposes, and for one fleeting night, Beth, Linda, Rue and every single technician, janitor, custodian and security guard assigned to that disastrous genemodding project allowed themselves to celebrate a proper, actual victory. They’d all regret it in the morning, but that hardly mattered; a milestone had been reached.

From there on, it was relatively smooth sailing. Linda’s breasts continued to shrink day after day as their liquid contents were emptied on a regular basis, the panda even going so far as to openly massage herself to ease the process; she was desolate at the possibility of ending up with regular-sized tits again, but the prospect of being able to walk on her own two feet without mechanical assistance was just too good to pass up. In fact, when she actually managed to pull her two breasts up from the ground and take a few steps for the first time in what felt like years, Linda had to hold back from jumping in pure joy, knowing that carried a non-zero risk of just snapping her back in half before she had a chance to stop it. Nevertheless, now that she could move, she had to; her exercise regimen was intensified in order to get her body to recover from all the time spent lying down, in conjunction with a slight, very tentative and cautious increase to her caloric intake. Despite the team’s fears that it would trigger an additional growth spurt, no such thing happened, leaving the techies relieved and Linda herself disappointed that her precious milk makers were probably doomed to becoming nothing if not ordinary.

Still took a while though; the panda gal had plenty of time to appreciate her tits still being big enough to hang an inch or two off the ground if she bothered to stretch her back, and with her being capable of moving around on her own, both Linda and Beth were afforded a little more privacy now that the former could squeeze into people-sized rooms. The cameras were still on, as was the recording equipment, but it was better than what they had to deal with it for the past couple of months or so; no interminable sloshing, no endless churning, no constant fear that they might just end up squished against a hard metal ceiling… just the two of them, alone in a room, on a bed, enjoying one another’s presence in warm, pleasant silence. It was a throwback to simpler times, where they didn’t have to worry themselves with things that were once exclusively the purview of highly fantastical lewd artwork, and a prelude to what their life would be going forward. It was a shame that Linda was still shrinking, but as she became smaller, so too did she come to realize that there were worse fates, and the two of them could very much learn to live with that if it came down to it.

Meanwhile, Rue’s life turned into an endless series of board meetings and emergency update phone calls as she tried to wrap up the project as best as she could. There was simply no way she could justify carrying on with it past the point where their test subject was declared fully rehabilitated, not when the nominal goal had already been reached who knew how long ago: proving that yes, it was possible to splice animal DNA with human one without it resulting in a mild case of death; the fact that Linda turned into a panda hybrid and everything else that followed was, as far as Rivtech’s Board of Directors was concerned, an unforeseen experimental variable that had been “handled surprisingly well” by someone who they brought in as a last-minute resort, something they all made painfully clear whenever that subject was broached. The one thing Rue could do was try to spin it into some kind of a positive, which, as she found out, required a lot of inventive bullshittery and an unfortunate lack of concern for the many people that the company insisted weren’t affected by Linda’s milk.

Even then, there was a light at the end of the tunnel, that being that her ideas worked, that Beth and Linda were well on their way to recovering some semblance of normalcy for their lives, and that, ultimately, the Board knew that she was a valuable asset, even if they had to keep toeing the bottom line as a reason why she wasn’t being showered in promotions at that very moment. She was damage control, nothing else… for the time being at least. As soon as she put her now-honed self through the wringer again, then they’d see what it was like to deal with a true mad genius, or so she kept telling herself whenever she had to wait for the damned computer to process the ridiculous amounts of data she was feeding into it on a daily basis.

Things were quick to slow down after a certain point, as Linda’s size reductions began to plateau after a while, showing minimal, if any progress. This would’ve been great news for the eternally size-hungry panda, if not for the fact that her bust had stopped shrinking when it was barely even above average, and had been completely dry for days by then. It was almost too much for her to handle, after having spent so long with a pair of breasts so large attached to her; to suddenly be back at her old self, plus half a dozen cup sizes or so, felt almost… wrong. Like she’d been given a wonderful gift and then had it taken away right when she learned to play with it properly, leaving her with all the good memories of having it and literally nothing else; by sharp contrast, Beth was just happy that things had gone according to plan, and that she could finally stop slipping drugs into her partner’s drinks whenever they weren’t looking. Rue, in the meantime, had decided to simply not mention the fact that those were placebos at any point in the future, having (correctly) deduced that it was better for the two young women to just carry on with their lives while trying their best to move on from what had happened under Rivtech’s care.

Just like before however, nothing was as simple as adding one and one to get two when Linda was involved, especially not when it came to her breast size and lactic production. If the research team was under the impression that she would shrink down and remain shrunk, then they were in for a great big surprise, because her body very much refused to step down completely from the heights of madness that it had climbed. It had abided by every request made of it, it had allowed itself to be diminished, it even listened to the brain it was keeping alive when they begged it to stop growing, but there yet remained something in there that kept the dream very much alive… something that Linda herself had gradually become aware of as time passed and her size woes became more and more prominent in her life.

She didn’t want to say anything at first, lest it turn out to be nothing more than a fluke, or even just her imagination playing tricks on her, but the panda was reasonably certain that her breasts were still capable of growth, even if it was so imperceptible as to leave her wondering if it was actually real or not. Oddly enough, it didn’t come from stress either, but from arousal, leaving her in a position where she very much wanted to explore it, but any situation that would let her do so would invariably end up monopolizing her attention when she really should be grabbing a measuring tape and wrapping it around her bust. Still, whenever a few select thoughts crossed her mind, Linda could swear that she felt a tightness around her newly-fitted bras, along with a little more overspill that absolutely hadn’t been there just moments prior. Even worse (better?), the effects seemed to be lasting for longer each time she noticed they were there, until the panda started to suspect that it wasn’t her imagining things at all, but her body rebelling against the dreadful size limitations that had been imposed on it. If this were true, it was a potentially terrifying revelation…

… but an oddly alluring one as well, all things considered. After all, she’d already shrunken down to a size where she could wear bras that could actually be bought in stores rather than very large tarps or long stretches of cloth, not to mention had her productivity reduced to the point where her tits were actually dry rather than flooding entire buildings. Even with her arousal spiking whenever the memories grazed her, not to mention the… more intimate activities that she and Beth got up to whenever no one else but the cameras were watching, one would expect the same thing that happened at the diner all that time ago to repeat itself, but it just… didn’t. There were no insane growth spurt, no losing control of her size even when her arousal became “worse” the more she fed it, just a constant size boost that always remained discrete enough that Linda could never truly tell if it was really there or her desperate lust for extra breastflesh was making her eyes see and her hands feel things that weren’t really there. That is, until the effects became pronounced enough to be undeniable, and Beth herself decided that something had to be done about it.

Truth be told, the human half of the couple had noticed as well, but chose not to say anything out of a combination of shame for having deceived her partner for so long, even if it was supposedly for her own good, and a non-insignificant amount of, frankly, arousal of her own. The two of them had been rather insistent that Rivtech try and find a way to maintain some of the panda gal’s size, and had to be actively dissuaded from pressing the issue by both Rue and a large number of the techies attending to them, so for that size to just come back, even if inexplicably? It set off several alarm bells inside Beth’s head, sure, but it also told her that this was an opportunity that the two of them wouldn’t be getting ever again, and if they wanted to experience the softness and warmth of a pair of body-sized tits at their beck and call, they’d do well to shut up, say nothing, and pretend like Linda wasn’t growing again. Besides, it helped Beth feel slightly less guilty over her own contribution to the panda gal’s size woes, even if she knew it was just something she told herself so she could rest easier at night; as long as Linda herself was happy, then Beth would be too… plus, it was hard to deny that the thought of having the “most perfect” version of her better half be her default state was anything other than extremely alluring.