Side Effects May Include
I
Sasha returned from her lunch break to find Jackie in her lab. The receptionist hadn’t touched anything yet, thankfully, but she was peering curiously at the beakers and test tubes Sasha had left sitting out. One of the few other women in her workplace, Jackie had been the object of Sasha’s secret crush for years. She wore her bottle-blonde hair in a low ponytail that reached halfway down her back, and stood almost a head shorter than Sasha’s five-ten. With her cover model face and low-cut blouses, Jackie must have been a knockout in college, but now, in her late twenties, her metabolism had clearly slowed. A full bottom strained the stitching of her ripped jeans, and a generous muffin top peeked out of a shirt that likely wasn’t meant to be a crop. None of that put Sasha off, but a quiet voice in the back of her mind was disappointed that Jackie’s bust didn’t seem to be getting its fair share of the excess that was accumulating in the rest of her figure.
Of more immediate concern than Jackie’s measurements, however, was that the ditzy receptionist had gone from looking to touching. She ran one enamel-nailed finger along the rim of a petri dish and even went so far as to lift a tube to the bright fluorescents to squint at its contents. One dropped vial or cracked beaker could set Sasha’s work back weeks, if not months.
“Hey…” Sasha said, slowly and carefully, as if trying not to spook a woodland creature.
“Hey Sasha!” Jackie said, spinning on her electric pink heels with a small beaker in her hand. “What’s this?”
She lacked the good grace to look ashamed at being caught snooping.
The beaker was three-quarters full of liquid, nearly clear with a faint brown tint. “It’s my latest experiment,” Sasha said. “We’re attempting to achieve rapid lipid transfer—“
“An expander formula?” Jackie’s eyes widened as her glossy pink lips parted in a grin. She held the beaker up to her nose, sniffing at its contents. The pretty idiot didn’t even have the good sense to waft an unknown substance. “It smells like a latte…”
“The final version is meant to be ingestible, so I was testing for reactions between the artificial flavoring and the active ingredients.”
“Ingesta… So, you drink it?”
“Technically, yes, but—“
Before Sasha could complete her clarifying warning, the chubby blonde pressed the rim of the glass to her lips and dumped it down her throat. As careless as if she were doing a shot at the proverbial club.
“What are you doing!?” Sasha dashed across the lab to snatch the beaker from Jackie’s hand. Nothing remained in the glass but a rinse of Sasha’s formula and lingering hints of vanilla flavoring.
Jackie’s face scrunched up as the flavor hit her tongue, then she fluttered her lashes at Sasha. “You said I could drink it…”
“What? I didn’t… Ugh. I said the final product will be drinkable. That formula hasn’t been fully tested!”
A flicker of shame passed over the receptionist’s face, so quickly that Sasha wasn’t sure it’d been there. Jackie said, “I just wanted to try it. To see if it’ll make my girls bigger. All the other stuff we make is so expensive…”
A montage of inappropriate scenes played through Sasha’s mind at that: Jackie’s coral blouse getting tighter, Jackie’s bra straps snapping, Jackie’s buttons flying off, Jackie… getting fat?
Sasha shook the thoughts away. She took Jackie by one arm, steering her to a nearby lab chair. “Sit.”
She fetched an emergency medical kit from the wall, then checked the impulsive woman for adverse reactions. Her pulse was only slightly elevated, which was to be expected. Her pupils weren’t dilated. Her blood pressure, while a little high, was well within safe levels.
As Sasha worked, Jackie’s carefree demeanor slowly faded into worry. “Am I… gonna be okay?”
Sasha let out a relieved sigh as she packed up the medkit. “I don’t think you’re in any immediate danger, but you should get checked out by a real doctor as soon as possible.”
“Aren’t you a doctor?” Jackie asked with a smirk.
“A medical doctor.”
Her worries evidently gone as quickly as they’d arrived, Jackie asked, “So… how long does it take to work?”
Heat rose in Sasha’s cheeks at the implication in Jackie’s question. “The primary formula hasn’t actually been proven effective. The essential components are all there, but we haven’t been able to make it activate.”
“Activate?”
How could Sasha possibly explain the esoteric processes that the formula was designed to induce to a woman who was so clueless that she’d gulped down an experimental drug on a whim? “It just passes through the body. Our working hypothesis is that the body needs to be in a more active state—an adrenaline rush or elevated heart rate.”
“What about sneezing?”
“Sneezing? I don’t think—”
Jackie had already leapt down off the lab chair and was bounding for the break room. By the time Sasha caught up to her, the blonde had pulled cabinets open and was ransacking the fridge. A partially-unwrapped burrito sat on the counter while the blonde dug through a crisper drawer.
“What are you doing?”
“Spicy stuff sometimes does it, but I don’t think there’s any peppers in that at all.” Jackie didn’t look up, waving a hand at someone’s lunch.
Sasha stood in silence, her analytical brain struggling to parse the other woman’s frenetic ramblings. Finally, Jackie’s eyes locked on something on one of the break room tables. “Yes!”
She dashed across the room and picked up a drinking glass that held a small bouquet of daisies. This, Sasha understood; Jackie was testing a hypothesis, albeit in a supremely unscientific manner.
She pressed her nose into the bouquet, inhaling deeply.
“Jackie, I don’t think—“
Jackie’s nose scrunched, and her eyes squinted. In Sasha’s estimation, she was as likely to give herself a sinus infection as to prove or disprove anything. But then her entire body tensed, her head tilted back, and Sasha flinched.
“Aaah… Choo!”
Jackie let fly a sneeze so violent that Sasha nearly jumped. Despite its shocking force, the blonde’s voice rose into an adorable squeak at the end. Her body swung forward, jolting as her head tipped toward the linoleum floor. When her back straightened, Jackie’s blouse looked a little tighter. Sasha assumed it was simply an optical illusion caused by the woman’s change in posture.
“Whew,” Jackie said. “I don’t normally sneeze that big… Ah, ahhh…”
It was happening again.
“Aaaaah… Chooo!!”
Sasha took a reflexive step backward as a second sneeze rocked through Jackie’s body. This time, when the blonde stood up straight, the effect was undeniable.
“It worked!” Jackie squealed, gripping her breasts with both hands and squeezing them together. “My girls got bigger!”
Something tightened between Sasha’s thighs and then relaxed, tightened and relaxed in a steady throb. Jackie’s blouse was tight across her chest, buttons straining in radiating ripples and making slivers of pale skin wink between the gaps. By contrast, the lower half of her shirt wasn’t as snug as it’d been mere moments earlier. Jackie wound up for another sneeze, and Sasha resisted the urge to flinch. She watched the other woman closely—for purely scientific, observational reasons.
“Aah… Choooo!”
As Jackie shook with another sneeze, Sasha watched her various parts jiggle. As the jiggling subsided and Jackie straightened, Sasha watched her body… shift. Jackie’s hips and bottom drew inward as if gently squeezed by an exceptional set of shapewear. Her thighs and pudgy arms grew a little less full. And her breasts swelled. Sasha stared, mesmerized by the sight.
Jackie groped herself, sniffed the daisies, and grew. Well, Sasha thought, she wasn’t technically growing. The subject wasn’t consuming anything but air and a bit of pollen, which was being expelled regardless. By Conservation of Mass, all that excess matter testing the structural integrity of Jackie’s blouse was merely the excess adipose from the rest of her body.
“Ah-choo, aah-choo!”
Grrgle
Each time Jackie sneezed, the reaction seemed to accelerate. Sasha could hear gurgling and churning as Jackie’s body worked, pumping fat up and out into her swelling breasts.
“Ahh-choo! Ah-choo!!”
Grrrrgle
Jackie sneezed again and again. The gaps between her buttons changed from winking to stay firmly open, slowly growing wider and wider. Sasha could follow the line of her impossibly tight cleavage from the low collar of her blouse and down to the cups of a lavender bra. The sneezes were so forceful, making the shorter woman buck and jolt, that Sasha only had moments to observe the changes in the subject before another transformation began. Working with Madsgenix formulae, Sasha had adjusted her framework for what was possible in the realm of mammary development and nonsurgical modification, but even Madison herself didn’t change this rapidly. If she could fine-tune this formula, it could become the company’s most lucrative product to date.
Creeeeak
The two halves of Jackie’s top separated at their centermost button, the one straining valiantly at the apex of her inflating breasts. Sasha watched the threads anchoring that button pull and heave against the quaking, swelling flesh beneath.
It’s cotton thread, or more likely polyester. Neither has much elasticity, so it won’t—
Pop! Tick, tick, tick-tick-tick
Before Sasha could complete her thought, the beleaguered threads snapped, sending their small plastic circle skittering across the floor. The line of Jackie’s cleavage ran unbroken from her clavicle, under the sole button still intact above the gaping hole she’d just created, and down into the few below it still holding their ground. The blouse hung like a curtain over her trim midriff, but pale skin bulged and oozed around those higher buttons like an overstuffed sausage trying to escape its casing.
Jackie paused a moment, eyes going wide as a hand shot to her hips. Sasha saw the blonde’s ripped jeans drop a few inches before the woman caught them. This proved Sasha’s theory—if the adipose in Jackie’s body was moving into her mammary glands, the gluteal mass that had held those jeans in place was no longer present.
“Ahh-choo!!”
Grrrrgle
The next sneeze caused Jackie to lose her grip on her pants. They slid down her shapely legs to pool at her ankles. Sasha quickly averted her gaze from the sight of the shorter woman’s pink panties.
As Sasha looked over her coworker again, she revised her assessment of their relative heights. Jackie’s bare legs were soft, smooth, perfectly toned, with the loss of their excess, and longer than Sasha had expected them to be. Perhaps Jackie wasn’t as short as she’d thought; Sasha usually only saw her sitting behind the reception desk, after all.
“Aah-choo, aah-choo!”
Sasha pushed aside her musings on Jackie’s height, noting that the gurgling and rumbling noises from the receptionist’s body had ceased. Jackie pawed at her overtaxed blouse, thrusting her shoulders back, driving her bloated bosom forward. It took a moment for Sasha to decipher what the other woman was doing. Her surviving shirt buttons remained resolutely in place.
“It stopped working,” Jackie pouted.
She sneezed again, stretched her shirt, to no avail. Jackie met Sasha’s eyes, and Sasha tried to ignore the roaring heat and damp slick between her thighs.
“Why’d it stop working?”
Sasha looked Jackie over. The once-chubby woman was now in better shape than she was. Trim arms, tiny waist—had she shown that much midriff before?—pert gluteus, and legs for days.
Sasha’s voice cracked when she spoke. “I, um, don’t think there’s anything left to move.”
Jackie’s face lit up. “Oohhh. Of course!”
The blonde dashed to the break room counter, nearly losing her balance as her new center of gravity pulled her forward. She grabbed the pilfered burrito and tore into it, taking huge bites and gulping them down like a starving woman.
“What are you doing now?”
“Need -homf- more… -ulp- before the potion -nom- wears off…”
Sasha stood stunned. Was there a psychological side-effect? Had the formula altered the subject’s brain chemistry? Curiosity overriding her lust, Sasha patted the pockets of her lab coat. In her haste to follow Jackie from the lab, she’d left her tablet behind. She rushed back to find it—if the formula worked this well, she had to document its effects.