Ungrounded

Early-release of Ungrounded: a commission for Borusa

(https://www.furaffinity.net/user/borusa-ryalam)

Science is a risky business, especially when dealing with cutting edge experimental quantum physics. So it's not unreasonable for there to be an explosion or two. But sometimes science can go horribly wrong (Or right, depending on your perspective) and create something truly unexpected... and monstrous. Borusa's now experiencing this firsthand as he rediscovers who and what he is and, more importantly, what he can do after his own little science experiment explodes. 

Some men aren't good or evil. Some just turn into giant monsters with their consciousness and subconsciousness merged together. 

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Ungrounded

By: Dragonien

Noise. Incoherent, inaudible, deafening noise somehow both overwhelmingly sharp and hopelessly incoherent. All he could hear, see, smell, feel and even taste was nothing but noise. It was like his entire existence had become the five-sense-wide equivalent of television static. occasional streaks of color flashed across his otherwise endless landscape of snowy static but otherwise it was all little more than an incoherent jumble. He had long since lost track of any sense of time with nothing nearby to compare anything else too. if his thoughts hadn't been just as jumbled and indescribable as his surroundings seemed to be, Borusa thought he might have gone mad. Then again, maybe this was what it felt like to go mad?

That thought seemed to galvanize Borusa's mental faculties. He began to pull his thoughts back together if for no other reason than sheer stubborn determination refusing to let his mind, the one thing he valued most, be lost to something as disgraceful as insanity. It felt as if his thoughts had been scattered across a large room. Voices, all of his own thoughts, seemed to range from whispers to shouts in different places around him and he had to reach with the bundle of coherent thoughts he had gathered to grab at the distant ones and pull them back into himself. He noticed that as he pulled 'himself' back together, the only way that he could think to describe it, the more of himself he gathered the more detail he could make out in his surroundings. It was still near-incoherent, of course, but he started to discern patterns in the strange static that seemed to invade every sense he had access too. Those streaks of color coalesced into recognizable lines and patterns, often shifting direction at sharp, 90-degree angles. Some were tinged with blue while others sparked with a rainbow of constantly shifting hues as if a nonstop stream of light being refracted through a prism. When he had nearly gathered all of his 'self' from his surroundings it started to dawn on him that he couldn't feel... well, himself. He had no sense of presence, no body to move, no feel to his existence whatsoever. Before he consciously realized what he was trying to do he found himself looking at himself, IN himself.

The shift in perspective would have been nauseating if he could feel any sort of bodily function that was capable of nausea. The best he could think to describe what he had just done was as if he somehow had found a way to roll his eyes back into his head and look inside his own skull. Instead of meat, bone and brain matter, however, all he saw was more colored lights. These were no different than any of the other lights that had flickered around him save for their color; a flickering neon blue intermingled with flecks of brown and red. Yet, somehow, they felt familiar to him on a fundamental level he couldn't put words too. 

'This is me.'

The thought coalesced in his mind like an intuition, pure base instinct overriding any coherent disbelief or confusion of a rational mind. That fundamental sense of self that all living things possess somewhere in their primitive psyche that differentiates them from inanimate objects. It was a bit odd that such a base thought somehow voiced itself in his mind as loud and coherent as any surface thought, but he had more important things to think about. The first and foremost being that he couldn't see.

Just open our eyes.

I can't.

Why not.

I don't have any.

That's wrong, we're supposed to have eyes.

The conversation surged through his existence at the speed of thought, a strange sensation of conversing with himself despite being a single entity. It wasn't so much that there were multiple personalities arguing with one another as it was that the normally silent or subtle voices of lower levels of his consciousness seemed to now be speaking up and thinking just as vocally and loudly as his surface thoughts would. The same voice that would subtly nudge your attention to the emptiness of your stomach when you were hungry now instead simply standing up and speaking aloud "you should eat!" in the same way you would consciously ask yourself if you should have that second slice of cake only to then consciously answer yourself that you'd just get sick if you over-ate. 

That assertion that he should have eyes was quickly followed by an entire string of follow-up expectations of things that should have been attached to those eyes or things that were needed to make them work properly. Before Borusa even realized what he was really doing he was pulling himself back together, or at least, pulling whatever he could reach nearby into himself the same way he had grabbed the other portions of his consciousness. As he did, he started to recognize the seemingly incoherent technicolor white-noise around him for what it was: energy. The shifting flares and cords of varying colors of light were different types of energy like electricity or heat mingling with the general ambient radiation that seemed to exist everywhere. When he had thought to reach out for that energy around him he had found several bits of floating energy that didn't seem to match anything else easily recognizable until he 'grabbed' at it with his consciousness. Only once he had come into contact with it did he recognize it, not so much by what type of energy it was but rather by the fact that it was him. His body, or at least what was left of it, converted into some foreign type of energy he wasn't familiar with. A flare of indignation surged through him at the realization that he didn't have his body anymore. A sense of possessiveness normally too quiet in his subconscious to do more than spark a bit of fear or desperation to get what was his back instead yelling at full volume to take back what was his. 

The process was slow and cumbersome at first, akin to try to do something like write with your non-dominant hand. Unlike his pieces of his mind which had, to varying degrees, their own will to come back together this energy was listless and without ambition. He had to 'scoop' up the chunks of his transmuted body and pull them over to himself. Each scoop, though, was like trying to cup water out of a muddy hole so often he had to go back several times to scoop bits that spilled between his metaphorical fingers, and often got bits of surrounding material as well. As he pulled more of his old body together he willed it into the shape that it had been before, pushing and shoving pieces back together through a combination of brute force and several of his normally unconscious thoughts helping to ensure things got put in the right place and were working properly. Finally, what felt like an eternity later, he was finished.

He opened his eyes.

Immediately he had to squint them at the sudden onslaught of flashing red strobe lights that seemed intent on blinding his newly reformed eyes. reflexively an arm raised to shield his eyes from the large red LED bulbs on the wall in optical self-defense. As he did so he felt a momentary sense of tension along his back and left arm which immediately gave way and, out of the corner of his eye, a flutter of white caught his attention. His lab coat had ripped right down the back and his sleeve had burst open around the girth of his arm. Thick, rippling muscle covered in the brown-and-black-striped flesh of his hide bulged out of the torn bits of fabric that had once been a rather loose-fitting lab coat. Eyes a bit wide, the saurian experimentally flexed his arm and both watched and felt the satisfying tensing of his bicep further tearing open the half-shredded sleeve of his coat. It was then that he realized that he hadn't heard the expected ripping sound. Confused, his head swiveled around the room and it dawned on him that there seemed to be something wrong with his ears. Wait, ears? The abrupt realization brought attention to the voice in his head that had been trying to tell him that he had forgotten to fix his ears when he put himself back together. The action that followed was as natural as if he had simply tried to lift his arm, focusing his awareness inwards to rearrange a bit of 'himself' into proper ear canals and auditory senses. 

Instantly Borusa was assaulted by a deafening cacophony of infuriating sounds and his hands flew up to grip the sides of his head as he scanned the room for the source of the annoyances. The red strobe light he had noticed earlier was accompanied by a blaring siren similar to that of a fire alarm that left his sensitive sense of hearing aching. Beneath that was an under-channel of random crackles of sparking electricity coming from overloaded and damaged wall outlets and several light fixtures hanging from where they had been half torn from the ceiling. His gaze focused on the source of the blaring siren and an instant later he was approaching the small speaker set near the ceiling in the middle of the nearest wall. It didn't even register that his heavy footsteps cracked the tile beneath his feet as he lumbered three long steps across the room, only to find the speaker was still a bit out of reach even considering his unusually large proportions. There was no thought, no debate, there was simply the voice in his head taking control of his body as it angrily ranted for the sound to be shut up by any means necessary. 

Electricity crackled and sparked across the room, arcs of blue-white light snapping from the damaged light fixtures and exposed wiring in the walls and dancing across the surface of Borusa's hide. Instantly his body began to thicken and inflate, the already torn lab coat still draped across him ripping across the back and shredding into confetti as he gained one foot, two, then three of height in a matter of a second. All the while newfound cords of muscle spread across his limbs while his normally modest gut seemed to bulge outwards with newfound mass until it stretched far enough in front of him to press against the wall. All of this was only a secondary side effect of his real goal as his arm reached up for the speaker and, when it found it wasn't long enough, simply grew to make up the distance and took the rest of his body along with it. There was no gentle attempt to silence the speaker, no effort for tact, there was just the back of his fist swiping across the wall with enough force, once he had grown enough to reach it, that not only did it smash the speaker into parts but ripped a large gouge out of the drywall behind it! The sound crackled and distorted for a split second then mercifully went silent, at least within the room. he could still hear the alarm coming from other nearby rooms but the walls muffled it enough that it wasn't maddening to listen to anymore. Somewhere in his head there was a voice telling him that he should be concerned he was acting entirely on impulse, simply letting whichever of the 'voices' in his head got to the controls first take over rather than running all of the normal conscious and unconscious  calculations that he or anyone else normally would have. Unfortunately, that voice was instantly drowned out by the much louder chorus of voices exclaiming everything from "Breaking stuff is fun!" to the nearly overwhelming boom of "I want to eat." What was worse still was that many of the counter voices that would be rolling around in someone's unconscious as part of their body were no longer there, such as the one that would counter hunger with protests that their body was full and couldn't eat anymore. 

With his self-preservation no longer threatened by the painfully loud noise, another base instinct was more than happy to take over the driver's seat instead. Saliva began to dribble from Borusa's muzzle, only to seem to flicker and spark as it fell before dispersing into the air as tiny crackles of discharging electricity. His stomach didn't rumble as his digestive tract had no real substance too it anymore, but with no part of his mind telling him when to stop his culinary cravings were completely unchecked. This being the worst possible time for someone to wander by, of course it was just the moment one of the laboratory's security guard's burst into the room to investigate what had set off the alarms and forced the laboratory onto emergency power. 

The Doberman was impressively tall and built by any normal standard, filling out the blue guard uniform in all of the right places to show he certainly knew his way around the gym. Normal standards didn't really apply when he burst through the door to find himself staring up at the back of a monstrous saurian creature who stood there facing away from the door in the tattered remains of pants and a lab coat, their body so immense their head was pushing up the ceiling tile above them to make room for itself. His ears instantly flattened against his head and, were his tail more than a nub, it would have tucked between his legs. As Borusa heard the commotion of the door being flung open his head swiveled around to look over his shoulder at the intruder. A disapproving snarl rumbled up from his throat as the light from the Doberman’s flashlight momentarily pained his eyes, the only light in the room up to this point having been the darker red color of emergency lighting. It didn't help that the light began to flicker and twitch across his vision as the guard's arm began to shake from the fear that was welling up inside of him. Unfortunately for the guard he wasn't the only one that had the primal part of his brain yelling at him. 

"He's smaller than us. That makes him prey"

"He's kind of cute."

"EAT. EAT. EAT."

"We can't eat him, he's a person."

"We can do whatever we want. No one can stop us."

All of these thoughts simultaneously rolled through Borusa's head in the span of a microsecond. It was a strange sensation, having your thoughts ruled through committee rather than debate. No longer did his mind rationalize the situation and choose a path based on a culmination of careful consideration on multiple levels. Now it was simply a crowded room where everyone was yelling and the body did whatever was yelled the loudest. Which is why there was neither hesitation nor remorse in the monstrous saurian's actions as he reached down to grab the security guard. Hands larger than dinner plates pinned the Doberman’s arms to either of his sides as they lifted him effortlessly off of the ground. His panic morphed to defiance a split second after his entrapment and he began to struggle for all he was worth. Sadly, his efforts were futile. Borusa's maw spread wider than it naturally should have been able to, the false bone and muscle of his jaw warping slightly to accommodate his more-than-bite-sized snack. Like a snake unhinging its jaw to swallow a mouse whole his muzzle clamped down over the Doberman’s middle, muffling the canine's yell a split second after it had started by stuffing him muzzle first into the slick flesh in the back of Borusa's throat. For the Doberman the sensation was made that much more unusual and uncomfortable by the fact that the slick saliva around him left his whole body constantly tingling like when you pressed your hand against a Tesla Ball as if his saliva itself were statically charged with a low-grade electric current. Three mighty gulps was all it took to force the security guard's body down his throat, leaving the canine rolled up in the fetal position inside the unnaturally distended belly of the beast his former coworker had become. 

As he finished swallowing, Borusa looked down and grinned smugly as he watched his belly bulge outwards with its new contents. That odd sense of satisfaction that you feel after eating a large meal radiated through him and, were he still capable of feeling physical exhaustion, he knew he'd be ready to curl up and take a nap right there. Instead, all he felt was a new pattern of energy within him. Even though he had regained his biological senses he could still 'feel' the various energies around him that comprised everything from the floor he stood on to the broken remains of the alarm he had destroyed moments ago. Now that he was in contact with it, though, he found himself much more aware of the energies that made up the Doberman in particular even as the guard squirmed defiantly inside of him. It wasn't like the familiarity of the bits of himself he had pulled back together to reform himself. Instead it was simply a deeper knowledge of what he was directly in contact with. It was like the difference between seeing a strand of hair laying on a tabletop, and examining it through a microscope. More important than seeing it, though, was that he UNDERSTOOD it. And with that understanding, came the knowledge of how to unravel it; to reshape it. To add it to his own energy. 

Earlier he had sucked electrical energy from a nearby damaged electrical wire purely on reflex when he had 'needed' to be larger, to be taller to smash the offending alarm apart. That energy had gleefully leapt to him at the slightest beckon and hze had intuitively added it to himself. Now, though, as he unraveled the Doberman inside of him, he chose where he wanted the energy to go. His belly began to bulge outwards not with more mass filling his stomach but instead with overall mass, or at least his new existence's version of it. Grinning stupidly to himself, Borusa watched himself pack on pound after pound of newfound fat onto his already bulky frame. The remnants of his clothing burst apart what few seams had remained as bits of his flab muffin-topping over them finally overwhelmed their stress-limits and he reveled in the slight ripples and jiggles that rolled across his new flabby body. When he had finally depleted everything that had made up the Doberman and added it to himself he took his first step with his newly engorged mass. He felt the floor shudder underneath his mass and felt the corresponding ripple roll up through his prodigious girth like his body were some kind of tuning fork for the impact. The beast wasn't satisfied, though, and found himself frowning down at the swell of his belly blocking his view of his feet. 

He had always loved the heavy footstep sounds he had made when walking around in thick work-boots and, while impressive by any normal scale he felt like his step should have had much more impact considering his new, monstrous size and appearance. With hardly a thought he intuitively began to reshuffle the 'mass' of his body and soon felt his toes creeping across the cracked tile beneath his feet. Inch after inch they spread out, paws both broadening and lengthening until they had swollen easily half again their previous size. While certainly respectable in proportion before now his paws were utterly monstrous. Even if he were still his normal size he doubted that even shoes from the big and tall store would have been able to fit the monstrous stompers that his paws had become. At his new size? Each of his feet would have overflowed serving platters. His new, nearly apple sized toes clenched against the floor hard enough to shatter the intact tiles they had spread over and he simply took a moment to revel in the minor yet effortless display of power. He could feel that he had lost a few dozen pounds of mass in his newly padded body to make up for the increased girth of his feet but he was alright with that for the moment. Especially considering the devious idea in his mind a few pounds here or there wasn't anything to concern him. 

All the while he had been 'altering' himself that voice had still been yelling in his head to eat more and more, while other voices slipped in their own adjacent thoughts. Any sense of self control, morality, or social responsibility was drowned out beneath thoughts of power and self-indulgence. He wanted to eat, he wanted to grow, he wanted to be powerful. Thanks to whatever had gone wrong with his experiment he not only had the means to do all of these things, but the will to do them to the exclusion of everything else. It was time the world got its first look at the new quantum energy-manipulating monstrosity science had created. 

With a careless swipe of an arm, Borusa smashed more of the ceiling tiles and their grid out of his face so he could more easily see without having to hunch down. Bits of plaster dust rained around him like snow as he plowed his way back towards the opposite end of the room, a self-satisfied grin spreading across his lips as he heard the now more potent WHUMPing impacts of his enlarged feet across the floor. After only four steps he found himself back in front of the now ruined, half-slagged machinery that he had been experimenting with before the accident. Part of him was saddened to see his experiment as little more than debris but that voice too was drowned out by all of the louder, more primal voices in his head reveling in the unintended side effects the experiment had caused. Arms as thick as telephone poles reached out to either side, one grasping at the already exposed wiring of one of the light fixtures that had shocked him earlier while the other grabbed at the industrial-grade power cable still connected to the remains of his particle accelerator. With an effortless jerk of one arm the cable was ripped from the remains of the machine, leaving more exposed wiring sparking and crackling with the charge still running through the wires thanks to the building's backup generator. 

"For me?" Borusa rumbled to himself. "You shouldn't have."

As his jaws parted Borusa reached with his new sixth sense that allowed him to perceived and interact with raw energy towards the wiring and the electrical energy held within. Blue arcs of electricity instantly began to whip out from the exposed wiring towards his jaws, attracted to his ivory fangs like each one were a miniature Tesla coil. Greedily the beastly former scientist began to guzzle down the electrical energy like someone at a party hefting up the punch bowl and guzzling its contents straight from the bowl. As he 'drank' from the building's power supply the electrical energy coalesced inside of him and his body once more began to grow. Pound after pound, inch after inch of newfound mass was generated to store the excess energy Borusa was pulling from the wiring. within seconds his head was pressing against the cement roof above the tile ceiling and he was forced to hunch down to keep close to the wires or risk pulling them from the walls. More out of a desire to stay close to his 'food' source rather than any concern for damaging the building, Borusa flopped down onto his front with a resounding THUD and sprawled out across the floor of the lab. As he continued to drink the red emergency lights began to flicker and dim, the distant alarms became distorted and sluggish like an old cassette stereo with the batteries running low. All of this was inconsequential to the monstrous saurian, however, as he simply continued to gorge himself.

His legs spread out behind him, gaining additional girth and padding as well as overall size until his gigantic foot-paws were pressed against the far wall with enough force the plaster began to crater and crack. Meanwhile his upper body forced its way in the opposite direction, elbows spreading out to either side while his broad chest bulldozed over the broken remains of his particle accelerator. Borusa didn't even notice how his body began to take 'liberties' with how it was distributing the mass the energy was providing, too wrapped up in his own gluttonous self-indulgence to care that other, more primal, pieces of his psyche were influencing his changes. Claws on both his hands and feet sharpened and lengthened well beyond their previously well-groomed and blunted state into razor sharp, predatory weapons. His already sharp fangs thickened and grew in his mouth into natural daggers that gleamed in the crackling blue light of the electric arcs, each sharp enough to puncher sheet metal with ease even without the prodigious strength of the saurian's jaws behind them. The low-profile bumps of vestigial spines running down his bulged and swelled into true back-spines that began to tear into the ceiling despite their owner not yet noticing he had grown so that even laying down his body had become thicker than the room was tall! Hips flared as thighs and legs burgeoned with newfound muscle and sinew to give him a more bottom-heavy proportion better able to support the burgeoning girth of his stomach and prodigious overall mass. All the while he reveled in the sense of empowerment, both from feeling his physical improvements as well as the actual sensation of his body, his entire being of condensed energy simply becoming MORE. He was like a self-aware battery, basking in the satisfying sensation of charging himself yet with no ceiling to his capacity to end the sense of fulfillment. When the last dregs of electrical energy finally stopped flowing the lights had gone completely out. No sound remained within the building as every spare watt of power that the generator had been able to produce now resided within the monster filling one of the main laboratory spaces. The only light left came from the two glowing blue orbs that were Borusa's eyes and the lingering arcs of electricity occasionally still crackling between his fangs. But it wasn't enough. He wanted more. 

The entire building began to shake a split second before an entire corner of the laboratory simply exploded outwards in a shower of wood, cement, glass and other miscellaneous debris. Out of the cloud of dust rose a caramel and tan colored titan, towering over the entire facility in the light of the fading afternoon twilight. Borusa's ego squealed in glee inside his consciousness and shoved its way into the 'drivers' seat to take a moment and simply bask in his own feelings of power, of utter enormity. Monstrous, clawed hands ran over the powerfully built muscle of his pectorals and down over the prodigious swell of his gut. He couldn't help but chuckle deep within his barrel chest as he noticed that even with his enlarged feet he still couldn't see them past the enormous stomach jutting from his middle. yet even as the mass jiggled and jostled with his slightest movement he didn't feel weighed down in the least. He could feel the steely tendons and cords of false-muscle running beneath the flab supporting him. Even though he could feel the telltale jiggle of excess flab on his arm as it moved, even that soft padding wasn't enough to soften the monstrous bulge of his bicep straining the skin covering it. His toes clenched and he reveled in how they effortlessly tore through the solid asphalt of the parking lot as if it were nothing more than wet sand. A tongue as wide as a twin bed licked hungrily over fangs now so large they protruded from his lips slightly even when his jaws were closed, as if tasting his own power and dominance. Yet even as he stood there, marveling in his own feelings of power and superiority another voice began to shove its way back against his ego, not so much fighting it for control as joining forces in agreement of what they intended to do next.

The ground rumbled beneath his feet with enough force to set off car alarms in the parking lot has he took two half-steps to turn himself to face towards the setting sun. More importantly though, he now faced the city. Even as he stared out at the chaos of the bustling metropolitan his new sense saw it not as a collection of buildings, automobiles and the people inhabiting them. Instead, all he saw was a glittering jewel of coalesced energy: tens of thousands of condensed energy-forms parading around as people going about their lives while untold millions of volts of electricity surged through the city’s infrastructure. To Borusa, it was no longer his home, the place that he lived and worked alongside his peers and equals. 

It was a buffet.

As the behemoth that was Borusa began to lumber his way towards the city saliva began to dribble from the edge of his lip and drip by the gallon onto the ground below, each drop cracking with a lingering electrical discharge before dispersing back into the air as raw ionic energy. All the thoughts in his head of restraint, of social norms and even of morality were all drowned out by the primal parts of his brain growling out a single demand so universally powerful that his lips moved of their own accord to echo aloud what his thoughts were saying, were demanding.

"More..."