Awkward mad scientist gets an awkward work-a-day bird girl to sign up for an experimental growth procedure. She's satisfied with the results, and yet it's hard to say it exactly went right. If you prefer your buff girls with skin this one might be skippable.
----------------------
Sadi puffed out his cheeks for a few moments as he looked through his scribblings again. He wasn't sure why he was so stressed over this; really, he shouldn't have been, considering the way he stretched out his own lab coat now was more than enough proof his process worked. The pre-test jitters never faded, though, no matter how many breakthroughs and successes he racked up. Perhaps it was due to the fact that his experimentation was a little dangerous. Perhaps he just wasn't mentally prepared for failure and reworking his previous trials—though he'd had to before. Perhaps he was just afraid of looking like an idiot in front of other people. Either way, he did what he did every time—took a deep breath, cut himself off from his cyclical reviews of his own materials, and told himself internally to have a little more faith in himself... and in his patient.
Despite his internal worries, he made his way out of his personal office and down the hallway to the testing room. Really, he should have been heading to the observation deck, but when he wasn't testing on himself, he did prefer to see the results up-close. He could only hope that the volunteer for this particular test was going to be cooperative, considering the potential consequences; if things didn't go well, then the last thing that he really wanted was for them to panic...especially since he'd likely already kept them in that testing chamber a little too long checking things over as-is.
He opened the door and peeked his snout in first before finally opening the door a little wider to fit the rest of his frame through. "—S-sorry about that!" he said, attempting an apologetic smile in the process, "Sorry, I just wanted to make sure that everything was above board before we actually got started on anything, you know...?" He looked the subject up and down a few times, taking firm visual stock of their current state before any potential alterations; another slightly unnecessary gesture, considering that they had been thoroughly scanned and photographed already. Habit, if anything.
"I hope you weren't worried; did you settle in okay?"
"Yeah, was just starting to worry," Sal tried to smile playfully and look up at the doctor, but immediately had to hide her blush behind thick cheek feathers as she saw him. She didn't mind waiting, really, getting the opportunity to fill her vacation fund by testing a new drug meant to -help- the constantly physically active was two lucky breaks in one, but she hadn't expected the doctor she was waiting on to be hot.
Not, like, Hollywood hot. The fox had floppy dreads and was a bit short, but the fact that even dressed for research it was -unmistakeable- how incredibly muscular, shredded, and perfectly proportioned he was it was kind of intimidating. Sal knew enough about bodybuilding to know that contest-day-ready wasn't even a normal look -for- bodybuilders.
It made the experiment seem promising.
But it also made her a bit self conscious.
At 5'6" and less than 100 pounds, she was skinny and forgettable even by bird standards. And she'd just showed up here in her work clothes, tan shorts and a jacket. Flat chest, flat butt, a -bit- of muscle tone but no volume. About the only thing she could boast was that her plumage was shiny and the way her hair spiked out of her cap looked decent.
Seemingly, the doctor wasn't the only one that was a little squirmy. He took note of her blush, though he wasn't sure what to do with it; was it at him? At the thought of being left alone for too long? Was there something that was making her uncomfortable? She was...cute, perhaps a little too cute; of course, when he was attempting to select the right person for this sort of thing, he was going entirely off of their physicality in the abstract—whether or not they had enough room for additional mass, whether they had any allergies or genetic susceptibilities, so on—but even if she was small, there was a certain amount of pep and energy to her that came across as endearing; it helped that she was pretty, too, but...
The doctor cleared his throat, scratching the side of his neck as a few cords within it flared. "...R-right, well, so, if you're still up for all of this, I guess I should explain the procedure, um," he flipped through his clipboard, pulling a few pages out of the way and tucking them behind the others as he refreshed himself for a few moments before looking back up at Sal. "So—there's going to be an injection, that's the first part, then we're going to expose you to a concentrated source of photon radiation—nothing that's going to harm you, mind you...you can think of it as just...getting a tan at the beach." He attempted to offer a reassuring smile. "The purpose of that is just to activate what we're going to inject you with, it isn't anything major." He sighed; he still couldn't shake his nerves. "I think the intake team already processed everything else for you. Did you have any questions before we...gave all this a go?"
“...If it's photon activated, is weird stuff gonna happen if I go -actually- tanning in the future?" it wasn't a hobby she had, but 'sunlight activated' seemed like the kind of thing she should worry about before getting injected with mystery goo. Then again, maybe it was just, like, vitamin super d. Vitamin D but the One Piece kind. Her mind usually worked like that, coming up with random associations and asking random questions, but she wasn't stupid.
"Not after this dosage runs its course," the fox said with another attempt at a reassuring smile. He walked over to a nearby stainless steel table and unlocked a similarly-textured lockbox atop it, revealing a small syringe—not much larger than what one would use for an insulin shot. "The combination should cause a reaction in your body that will influence your hormones and metabolism, but there's only so much of it to go around. Once it's done, it's done—unless you receive more, of course." That was the theory, anyway; though, the fox was pretty sure that he had balanced everything out correctly. "If that's all you had to ask, though, you can go ahead and give me your arm and we can, um...get started."
Sal was in enough now anyway. She nodded, took a deep breath, clicked her beak and held out her arm. She wasn't the most afraid of needles, but everybody was a bit afraid of change. Especially when said change could involve permanent changes to her hormones. Supposedly ones that would make her build muscle easier, sure, but she could envision all kinds of other problems. Maybe she'd be aggressive. Maybe she'd break out.
Sadi was certainly thinking about the very same. But, at the very least, nothing had gone wrong yet. He took a deep breath as if he were the one about to go through the experiment before giving the bird a light jab with the needle. A quick pinch—by the time it had registered fully enough for the woman to react, it was already out and being cleaned and set aside instead. "...There...that wasn't so bad, was it?" he said; though his words were presumably directed towards the blackbird, most of the reassurance was for the desert fox himself. Deep breath in, deep breath out.
"...Alright," he said, making his way over to a device on the other side of the room; it didn't look like anything more than a rather large and bulky heat lamp, a cylindrical tube with lights embedded on one end attached to a rather hefty-looking stand and large power-cable. Like getting a tan indeed. The doctor stopped at a laptop hooked up to the device and entered in a few commands, set the timer, pulled his clipboard and pen close, and gave the woman a slight smile. "...If you want to describe anything that you feel, feel free," he said. The time counted down, and the machine hummed to life, bathing Sal in the brightness of a stagelight and, indeed, something that felt like the warm, enveloping touch of summer sunlight.
And for a while, that was it; the pleasant heat may even have been enough to make someone drowsy as if they were, in fact, on the beach. Then, the pleasurable sleepiness began to give way to a weird sort of itching, almost a tingling, like her nerves were firing without much in the way of cause. And were her feathers starting to fluff upwards...?
At first, Sal felt warm. Energy rushing through her veins, filling her body, the results of the experiment rushing into her extremities as she started to change.
Then, Sal felt hot. Tight. Constricted. Her veins were starting to bulge and her feathers were starting to get pushed out. Like a pump after a workout, blood rich with oxygen was rushing into her limbs and not leaving, making them look thicker, stronger.
Then... Sal burned. She could feel her skin stretching, her bones creaking. The -press- of something threatening to tear her outwards. Sal got one glimpse - just one - of her arm intact with black feathers and bulky biceps.
Then Sal burst into flames. The heat was not metaphorical. It was very real. Her feathers flickered in the hot air coming from her arms as flame licked up from where her skin used to be. Her bloated, blood-filled sinew burst through her flesh and HISSED as gore steamed where it met flames.
There was no pop, no crack, no moment of injury. Feathers and flesh slowly gave way to gore and flame as her body rapidly gained in mass... but lost elements it was supposed to have.
The fox's eyes widened; for a few moments, he froze, uncertain where the error had occurred. Had he dialed the emitter up too high? Was there some unforeseen reaction to the injection itself? No—judging by the singed feathers, it was definitely the emitter. He spun around, panicking lightly as his wide eyes searched through the parameters he had outlined before deciding that it would be better to pull the plug entirely. Should he say something? Would that cause her to panic further? He glanced over his shoulder, attempting to take stock of whether or not she was in pain, whether or not there was anything else] going on that he should be worried about, before turning back to deal with the issue. He clicked on the abort function on the screen—only for it to quickly become clear after a few more clicks that the UI had locked up.
Now panicked, he cursed under his breath, glancing over his shoulder a second time before attempting to squeeze his bulky form under the table and grasp at the power plug for a hard shutoff. All the while, within the blackbird's body, her muscles were practically boiling over, the sudden surge of whatever was inside of her pressing against her outer form with reckless abandon. It was as if she could feel every nerve in her body, all of it alight, yet at the same time each possessing the potential of a firecracker; the slightest of thoughts or twitches prompted heavy, rapid thrums of motion and force, enough potential between individual fibers to snap branches and crush stone...
Sadi grit his teeth as he found himself stuck in the table. With a mild groan, he continued forcing himself through, at one point snapping one of the cross-bars that helped with the table's structural integrity out of desperation. He yanked on the cord, hoping it wasn't too late to prevent the potential worst…
Sal didn't know what to do. Which wasn't unexpected. When something goes so horribly wrong, so against what you know about biology, what -could- you do.
Sal didn't know what to feel either. Which was... considerably stranger. Should she be in pain? She wasn't. Should she be angry? She wasn't. Should she be dead?
She wasn't.
The burning flesh and broken gore wasn't... useless. Wasn't inert. Though she could -see- her blood pouring onto the ground and the lost remains of her skin around her ankles, she could still see that, and still parse it.
Sal moved. She held up her arm, she curled it, and the snapped, gushing pile of bare sinew that was her arm curled. And flexed. And swelled even further.
Sal put a hand to her chest. Nipples gone, mammary tissue roiling like boiling water, and a palm that was only tendon and talon wrapped around it, feeling her tissue as the striations of growing pec muscles caught her claws and pushed aside. Sal groped herself without skin or softness and figured out what to do.
She said the most unlikely, impossible thing she could under the circumstances.
"I think it's working!"
The doctor looked back around, blinking. She wasn't in pain? He looked back at the device, then out at Sal herself, opening his mouth in an attempt to formulate something that at least resembled a response before utterly failing for several more moments. He wasn't sure whether he should stay where he was and see about the machine's deactivation or ride this out with the plug still part-way in the wall and see what happens.
"A-are you okay?!" he called from under the table, now attempting to wedge himself free in order to get a proper look at her again. With the machine not entirely out of commission, the bird-turning-beast was continuously bombarded with body-altering energy, and that strange tingling and itching started to become something increasingly pleasurable. The sensitivity of her transforming body almost made each nerve feel as if it were an erogenous zone in and of itself, the slightest contact with her own body prompting a wave of pleasure, nearly enough to distract from the transformation wracking her body...though not quite.
Moving, flexing...it was starting to feel good, actually, despite the gruesome visuals that may have come with it. Maybe she should flex a little harder—what was the harm? If anything, the more her body moved and shifted, the more it seemed to actually swell and grow; it was as if her body's normal functions had been supercharged, her muscles more than ready to tear and strengthen themselves, the slightest of idle flexes enough of an excuse to cause them to bloat into even more twisted piles of sinew, all while feeling as if she were rubbing herself off in the midst of a passion-filled evening alone.
There was nothing that said she couldn't have a little fun with it, right? Her once-scrawny arms were quickly approaching the size of pears—no, cantaloupes now, bigger than the envious breasts of some of the girls out on the beach. Surely they'd get even bigger if she just squeezed...
Sal squeezed.
She pressed her hand over her bicep and -flexed- into it, the growth of muscle bending her fingers back, sending out a slight snap before they cut into her bicep. The blood that dripped burst into flame. And both grew more.
Sal stretched, reaching up towards the sky, shuddering as bones creaked and crackled and she wrapped her arms around each other, grasping her forearm where the strongest, tightest sinew on her body should go, feeling the strength behind it and tearing out a vein in her clumsiness. It burned. And it was repaired.
She got it now. She understood her new body. It was simple.
Flames that built, rather than consumed.
Sal tore at her chest, and her breasts grew. Every crope, every claw, every -shred- tearing out another inch of the thick mammary tissue she'd never had. She would break herself and the flame would follow, filling in all damage with mass.
"I've never been better!" Sal answered gleefully as she started to raise her legs up, letting her back talons cut through her flat ass, using her hands to pull out her wing bones and stretch out her spine. She was fully shaping her body, now, flames following her will as much as her hands
Finally managing to pull himself out from his prior wedged position, Sadi looked up at the continually-growing mammoth in front of him. She had started out shorter than him, notably so— and now she was already blowing past the six-foot marker with just as much mass as the doctor sported...maybe even a little bit more.
"You're not in pain?" he remarked, blinking several times at the revelation. As gruesome as the sight was, if anything the bird appeared to be enjoying it, letting her body do the work while she simply sat back and enjoyed the ride. His eyes flicked towards one of the nearby stainless steel tables, a heavy, industrial fixture that had been bolted to the floor. He swallowed for a few moments, his thoughts and hearts racing as blood pulsed through the entirety of his body at the quickest pace that he had perhaps ever felt.
"Can you...do you think that you can pick that up?" he asked, his breathing taking on a shuddering, shaky component as he grew more and more excited. Not merely by the prospect of a breakthrough, but at the sheer physicality of the sight in front of him, too...
"Hm?" Sal almost snapped out of her, taking a moment to actually -consider- the fact that her talons were caked in her own blood and there were pounds of her in scraps on the floor. She had been so focused on her own body she was only just now remembering the room. And the experiment.
"Oh, of course!" It wouldn't do to be ungrateful, after all, and her thighs were -probably- thick enough now, her chest -probably- massive enough to impress. She couldn't -really- tell without skin anyway.
And as soon as she had the idea, she was already recovering. Now that she was no longer tearing herself apart, the flames she'd mastered and pushed to their limit were free to add the things -unnecessary- to her new body. Gray skin started to form in nets and patches over her as she stepped over to the table, and her hands were no longer quite so leaky as they wrapped around it and she gave it a tentative tug to see how heavy it was.
The answer was -very-, and she took a moment to awkwardly reposition until she felt she could put -most- of her leg strength to lifting the table while still keeping the ray trained on her...
Sadi pursed his lips. Had he jumped the gun on this? Did she need a little more time? He finished pulling himself out from under the table, now feeling a little embarrassed about his earlier panic. He had checked things over so many times, after all! Maybe it was just...well, a little more shocking in reality than it was in theory.
He looked back to the laptop. Now that he was sure that Sal wasn't really in any imminent danger, he decided to take a few moments to reboot the interface; once he had, he took a deep breath, considering the ramifications of what he was about to do...before upping the amount of radiation coming the blackbird's way. The sudden surge was enough to prompt another wave of pleasure to cascade throughout her body, a sudden eruption of strength in the pit of her form rippling outwards to the extremities in a series of powerful pulses. These sensations were even more powerful than the last set, and even more overwhelming to the mind, too. Not only that, but all of a sudden, pulling in an attempt to rip the heavy table right out of the ground felt good, actually; the harder she worked, the more rewards she received in the form of ecstasy and endorphins, not to mention the sight of all that muscle bunching and curling beneath her feathers again. Yeah—there was no mistaking it, by that point she was definitely bigger than the doctor had been, and he was more than aware. Clenching his jaw, Sadi repositioned his labcoat, doing what he could to keep a healthy amount of cloth bundled between his legs in order to hide his growing excitement.
"C-come on, just a little more! You're doing great...!"
It was like a phoenix.
On one level, Sal rising from under the table was an expression of superhuman strength. Literal -tons- of force snapping bolts and curling steel as her shoulders supported the table and her thighs pushed it up bit by bit, tearing flesh giving way to tearing concrete. She struggled. And twitched. And flexed. But she rose.
And so on another level, it was a rebirth. She was still growing with every injury. Still improving from every drop of sunlight. But the part where her body could not contain itself was over. Webbing gray scabs gave way to soft dark skin, and skin gave way to feathers. Calami like steel pushed out vanes like flames, and the Sal that raised the table to the ceiling and kept pressing, shifting it to one hand then tossing it aside entirely.
And then Sal was there. Black, and fluffy. Whole and hearty. Shoulders and back as broad as a linebacker. Abs and arms as defined as a bodybuilder. Tits and ass as big as a porn star. Her legs were as wide as a person and as strong as ten. Her claws were caked in ruddy gore and hardened past steel. She was a bit wet, and a bit sticky, her former insides still coating her outsides... but the constant ripple of flame constantly playing across her body was rapidly drying her out.
Seven feet tall and more ripped than any woman had ever been.
Sadi swallowed. Hard. She was cute before—but now, well, was calling her a goddess a little awkward? It was the only moniker that came to mind for him, at least initially, especially after witnessing what he just had.
He had completely forgotten about the machine at that point, instead walking forward as, almost absent-mindedly, he pressed a palm against her midsection, visibly shuddering at the feeling of warmth currently cascading from her. He jerked his hand back after a few moments, uncertain as to whether the coursing flames were going to burn him or not. It wasn't something that he had accounted for at all. In fact, none of this was; where had all this potency come from? Was it the mixture? Some oversight or improper calibration somewhere, or was it her?
"You're...y-you're amazing," he eventually managed to force out, either forgetting or not caring that his handiwork was responsible for what was now standing in front of him in a major way. What wasn't there to be captivated by, with someone looking like this? Previously the blackbird looked like she'd flop over in a stiff breeze—now she looked like she could charge through six or seven brick walls and maybe a steel one right after. Yes, yes, this had all been a rousing success, but that wasn't the thought on the fox's mind at all. "C-can you flex? I—I-I um, I just...w-want to measure the changes, and all that," he said, flicking his eyes off to the side as his ears pressed against the base of his head. There was that bashfulness again...and in the midst of his excitement, he had entirely failed to hide the tent that was now pressing through his lab slacks.
Something told him she’d probably be able to handle it.