"The New Me"

“To the address of one Doctor Kyle Stubb.

First and foremost, Doctor Stubb let me declare my gratitude for your contributions to His Majesty’s Academy of Acumen and Excellence. Your advancements in the fields of transformative alchemy have paved the way for levels of progress in medicine which have yet to be overtaken, securing your legacy as one of our most well-known, esteemed, and highly respected alumni. Without your myriad of thesis papers on the proper treatment methods of exotic ingredients we might have made some terrible mistakes in our own pursuits. You are, without a doubt, one of the most brilliant minds of our generation.

So it is with crushing sadness that I find myself the elected penman of this letter. Were the decision up to me I would not have let the situation at hand reach this bitter conclusion.

As of today, September the twenty fifth, as of one o’clock in the afternoon, all funding to your current projects will end and no further payments will be made from His Majesty’s Academy of Acumen and Excellence to the bank account of one Doctor Kyle Stubbs. The board of funding directors have reviewed your most recent updates on the readiness of your latest alchemical supplement, and have reached a unanimous verdict that it is not in the academy’s interests to pursue its development.

Furthermore, the health and safety invigilators have... doubts on the ethical quandaries your ‘True Self Serum’ presents. They believe that it is too dangerous, too worrisome and too rife for abuse by the scum of our society and will be sending a team in the morning to dispose of it. I recommend, as an admirer of your work, that you cooperate with them and the law enforcement officers they are intending to bring with them, so as to avoid a potentially career-altering turn of events.

With regards and best wishes for the future.
Andrew B. Limp.
Teaching Fellow at His Majesty’s Academy of Acumen and Excellence.”

“Sycophantic dribble,” my blood boiled as I poured over the letter again. The patronizing tone of the chinless, spineless cretin they had picked to be the messenger of my ill fortune grated like nails on a chalkboard. The cowards who deigned my experiments too radical for their delicate sensibilities did not even have the wherewithal to fire the gun themselves, they had chosen to hide behind a starry-eyed fool who did not fully understand the gravity of his words. As he penned the letter, did he know? Did he know that the stories about ethical quandaries and moral concerns were fabrications, engineered by the parasites who sat at the top of the academy payroll looking to profit off my genius?

Law enforcement? Hardly. There would be no health and safety invigilators; there would be no men in tall hats and truncheons. What would actually happen was clear to anyone with half a brain. I would open my door to the oil slick faces of the academy crones, they would send their bruisers in to confiscate my precious alchemical equipment and recipes. Then they would injure me, claiming I had tried to fight back or that I had gone completely mad. A lie that would admittedly be difficult to disprove, given my reclusive nature and lack of cooperative persons to corroborate my story.

With my apparent rebellion against the good and right men of the academy pleading for me to consider my work under the scrutiny of ‘ethical concerns,’ my career would invariably be ruined. This would mean I could no longer afford to live my opulent lifestyle, which I am very much attached to, and rightly so by the efforts I went to earn it. It would also mean that, as a disgraced former scientist with an apparent psychotic break under my belt, I would have a hard time convincing people that those vultures were planning to use my serums for their own gain. They would have full control over my work. And I would be powerless to stop them.

They would win.

Or they would, if their opponent was anyone other than Kyle Stubbs, Lemur scientist and master of transformative alchemy. I laugh at their short sightedness. Did they really think I would update them in earnest on the progress of my magnum opus? Fools, the lot of them. I deliberately sent them false information to keep them sated long enough for me to use their funding as I liked. It was all money they had wrung out of students, their families and their sponsors. So I felt no guilt in spending it as aggressively as I had. With all honesty I had hoped I would have another month’s worth of spending courtesy of the academy coffers, but with a scant eight or so hours past the current time of midnight before the brutes arrived on my doorstep, I had to act.

I had prepared the serum and poured it into a bottle of wine to disguise it from any guests to my abode who might have been clandestine agents for the academy board. It worked well enough, there had been no break ins or attempted theft of my work. Though while the trick of hiding an advanced alchemical serum in a bottle of vintage Chardonnay might work on the layman, it would not fool whoever they were sending to ‘politely requisition’ my work in the morning. I poured the liquid into a wine glass; the deep green of the bottle expertly hid the purple hue of the serum. Settling into a crystal glass I had purchased for no small sum, it glistened majestically. It almost seemed criminal to drink a thing so beautiful. Almost.

With wine glass in hand I sauntered over to a floor length mirror. I wanted to watch the effects of the serum. I wanted to take in every little detail, in the interest of science and my own vanity. Would it be an elegant metamorphosis, or would it be a grim and twisted maladaptation as all my negative qualities warped me into something evil. “Ah, you simpletons will be in for quite the revelation,” I said, raising a toast to my reflection for the final time inhabiting this form.

With the utmost trepidation I raised the glass to my lips. My hand would not stop shaking, a gyre of fear and excitement spun in my chest and made my heart beat faster. The taste was bitter, then as the serum coated my tongue and flowed down into the pit of my stomach it changed to a sweet, almost sickly flavour. My eyes opened so wide I was convinced they might erupt from the sockets. An unfamiliar feeling wracked my body, somewhere between pain and pleasure. A deep transformative ache presented itself everywhere from the tips of my furry ears, to the ends of my clawed toes, to the depths of my bone and marrow. My body convulsed and a violent spasm nearly brought me to my knees. But I did not submit. I stood resolute, staring myself down in the mirror, demanding my body obey my wish.

Reveal yourself. Reveal your true form to me, my body. I chanted in my thoughts.

The first change took me a while to notice. Perspiration beaded the thin fur of my brow; I was entering a state of delirium from the otherworldly sensation which engendered my transformation. Things shifted in my vision; everything was off by a slight margin of error as the room tried to spin. But I held tight to my consciousness and, yes, my suspicions were correct. I was growing taller.

My entire life I had been a short man, though average by lemur standards. The other more vertical peers I shared a laboratory with during my years at the academy would often play tricks on me, or deride me because of my comparatively diminutive form. Oh they would be sorely wrong now. My body grew taller, my ankles and then my lower legs, baring themselves as my fine grey trousers became inadequate as a consequence of my new height. A part of me felt underwhelmed if this was the full extent of the serum’s capabilities, though it wouldn’t have been too much of a loss. With my new looming stature I could defend myself more readily, command more respect.

Then the second change began. What I had thought was an unholy volume of sweat leaking from my short-furred body was actually my fur colour turning to liquid and running off me in rivers of pale greyish blue paint. It stained my beautiful red waistcoat until it resembled the exact hue my fur had once been, and I marvelled at what stared back at me in the mirror. With the puddle of my old self at my feet, soaking into my shoes, I stood and admired a tall man with deep Vermillion red fur. The brighter blue which used to mark the fur above his eyelids now a crimson so bright, it gave his countenance a devilish look. His eyes were red too, deep and alluring.

“Oh how handsome you are.” I said, impressed but not satisfied. “But there’s more to come, isn’t there?” I rubbed my stomach. There was something welling up inside of me. The fire of vindication, ready to unleash its heat and blow me up like a hot air balloon. I welcomed it, squeezed my stomach and bared my new, sharper teeth. “Come, gluttony.” I said, my waistcoat began to squeal. “Come, grandeur.” My shoes buckled, the leather peeling. “Come, my grand, inflated ego which I have held wrongly in check all these years. FILL me to the brim with your lustre, for the girth of a man as great as I, should match my brilliance!”

Like a fur covered balloon filled with a dense sloshing liquid, my stomach surged and newly appointed rolls of fat creased the edges of my silk waistcoat until the fabric could hold no more and it burst in a clatter of falling buttons. “Yes, don’t be shy. Grow!” My feet, my paws, grew sharper claws and so too broke free of their expensive leather confines. I picked the loose straps of imported silk from my shoulders just in time to see my double chin coming in, framing the hungering eyes and sinful beauty of my fattening face like a fine cushion. “Oh how ravishing,” I said. Envious that I would never find a man as fat or as beautiful as myself to embrace. Jealous that whomever I took to bed with me would know of such fine softness and heft, that I would only be the bearer of, not the recipient.

“But you cannot be done, can you? I still fit the mirror!” My body kept ballooning. It responded to my demand with gusto. My width nearly exceeded my height in seconds, the shape of my belly had gone from a diminutive pot belly, to a sloshing sphere, to a softening Vermillion expanse. I cupped my newer, fuller breasts. Each was heavy and voluptuous enough to be the size of an average man’s head. “Oh how salacious,” I said, pressing them together in the mirror to admire the cleavage. “I could easily crush a man’s head with these. The tailors will be receiving quite the volume of business to clothe my new dimensions.”

I pulled an odd face. I realized my trousers still held, cursed things. My belt dug a trench around my lower belly so deep it nearly disappeared between the parallel folds of fat, which threatened to collapse on one another to hide the leather entirely. I worried for a brief moment the belt might cut me in half, but a golden object ejected from my belly with hurricane force and destroyed my mirror. I felt enormous relief, and my trousers finally burst like congratulatory strips of confetti. Revealing the stunning width of my crushing hips, and the soft, rounded curvature of my new buttocks.

I laughed darkly into the myriad reflections of myself in the cracked pane, each as fat and decadently handsome as the last. With a satisfied grin, I proudly declared. “Time to clean up, I cannot have company with things in such a state.” I walked towards my alchemy table, the floor quaked with each step. “Everything must be perfect for the world to embrace the new me.”