Abyssal Anomaly
Story by DragonMasterX on SoFurry
Commission for drgn2000
A science research team finds a legendary creature under the sea. When the government attempts to do everything in their power to find all about her, it slowly becomes apparent humanity was not ready to make contact with a mermaid.
I think this is one of the most subversive stories I've ever written, taking traditional plot elements and character roles, and flipping them on their head. Can you spot them all?
Enjoy the gargantuan fish 'n tits.
This is a commission for drgn2000 (DeviantArt.net)
Warning: This story contains growth, macro, mega macro, breast expansion, soft vore, and severe (yet sexy) destruction.
Abyssal Anomaly, by DragonMasterX.
Quietude surrounded the depths of the ocean. After a thousand feet deep where darkness spread like an endless mantle, only the high intensity LED lanterns of a deep-sea submersible vehicle could shine through.
“Are you alright, m’boy?” Dr. Myers couldn’t help chuckling at the face his intern was making.
This was Clark’s first time accompanying the doctor on an underwater excursion. It was one thing watching videos and hearing Dr. Myers’ lectures back at the Centre for Ocean Research and Education, but the young man had never expected the descent would have been thing overwhelming.
“You’re not accustomed to the change in pressure yet,” the marine biologist gently smiled while Clark gave him a somewhat pained grimace. “You brought the piece of gum I gave you earlier, right?”
Clark nodded and hastily reached into his pocket, fishing out, stripping and popping chewing gum in his mouth. Even with its minty sweetness though his head was pounding. His ears felt plugged and he felt a little dizzy as well. Clark could see his teacher tapping the bridge of his own nose at him.
“It’ll take a while to get used to it, m’boy. Do you remember the Valsalva maneuver?” the doctor asked and Clark remembered that age-old remedy to use one’s own air to clear his ears. The student closed his mouth, pinched the bridge of his nose and began to blow air as if he was inflating a balloon.
Pop. “Ahhh…!” Clark finally gasped. After a quick, sharp pang in his ears, his head had finally stopped throbbing. Still a little dizzy however, Clark sat back and tried to relax. “That sucked…”
Driving the rover deeper into the trench, Dr. Myers let out a hearty laugh. “Valsalva never fails. If it still hurts, be sure to chew with longer movements. The clenching and unclenching of your jaw will help.”
“Ruh-right…” Clark stuttered. With his passion for marine life, the young man had never expected this kind of excursion to end up being unpleasant. Even after the maneuver and Dr. Myers’ indications, he still felt woozy. He was tethering on the idea of begging his mentor to bring him back to the surface when a grand spectacle opened up before his young and impressionable eyes.
Photos and videos of the great abyss simply did not do the real thing any justice. The rover’s lanterns defined rocky ocean floor below them. Clark could see it all sloping down, converging into a blacker than black hole like the maw of an all-swallowing great beast. “We’re already so deep, and yet it keeps going…” Clark admired. The only reason he couldn’t stand up was because the chamber of the rover was too small for their occupants to move with liberty.
“Isn’t it marvelous, m’boy?” Dr. Myers remarked. “Several creatures make their home just outside the canyon and make their routines deep diving and resurfacing from that passage every day.”
“I bet the abyss looks so different from this layer! I wonder if to them it’s like commuting for us,” Clark chuckled a little, reaching for his backpack to grab his sketchbook and pencil. The student didn’t consider himself an artist by any measure but he enjoyed landscaping. He had to draw that abyssal maw!
“Always so enthusiastic, haha!” the doctor laughed, keeping a firm grip on the rover’s control stick to keep the submersible stable for his student. “Don’t forget to add our…”
“Depth and time, yes!” Clark intercepted with a few eager nods and without taking his eyes off the abyssal canyon. Clark wasn’t there merely on a joy ride with his mentor: This was a sanctioned ocean survey and data recording was one of their prime tasks. Although hand sketches were unnecessary thanks to the high definition cameras equipped in their sub, Dr. Myers saw no issue in indulging his protégé.
Minutes became blurred for the researchers with Dr. Myers driving slow, measured circles around the great chasm, stopping only when they noticed specimens. Clark was taken aback by finally seeing sharks and eels in their natural habitat, taking to sketch not only them but the mossy, rocky surface of the abyssal slopes.
“Topside, we’re closing in to the canyon. Pressure is nominal, life-support OK,” Dr. Myers radioed to their research vessel in the surface. “We’re diving past soon.”
“Roger that, Nautilus,” the radio buzzed in response. “Boys from weather station report nice, clean skies for us topside. It’ll be boring up here. Have fun.”
Dr. Myers smirked, cut the connection and turned to his eager artist of an intern. “How about you take the controls, m’boy?”
Clark stopped chewing, turning his eyes bespectacled eyes away from his sketchbook to meet his superior’s icy-blue stare. “Wuh- seriously?”
“You did pretty well on the simulations. Are you uncomfortable with the idea of driving the rover?”
“Well, no… It’s just, Mr. Jayson was pretty uh… adamant an ‘amateur’ like me shouldn’t touch his tech,” Clark said, his sarcasm exposing his wounded pride.
“Hah! Jayson dinged two subs, one of them really bad, and almost sank a boat when he was just starting out,” Dr. Myers said, gently letting go of the control stick. “You’re way more prepared than he was at your age. Go on. Bring us down.”
With his eyes starting to sparkle, Clark didn’t waste time setting his things down and grabbing the controls.
“There. Slow and steady,” Dr. Myers encouraged as Clark circled them around the gaping obscurity, “There’s more than enough room for us to fit through, but you can aim the lights down so you can see the edges. Good.”
Clark had to temper his kid-with-a-new-toy excitement with the focus demanded of his task. State of the art deep sea rovers were made with the intention to make oceanology as convenient as possible, so there wasn’t a lot of practical difference between this and the simulation equipment back at the research center. However, it was clear he had to fight the urge to gawk at the pitch black abyss while they descended.
Schools of deep diving fish passed the Nautilus. Clark could feel himself moving along underwater traffic. He allowed himself one glance up as they passed the ring of the canyon, but with the lanterns aimed away it was impossible to see the higher tier of the depths they had just left behind. And yet Clark knew; he felt it in the excitement bouncing in his heart. He had driven the rover into the abyssal depths.
“I-I did it, didn’t I?” Clark felt his palms sweating, but he even still he didn’t want to let go of the control stick. So instead of pushing deeper he made the vehicle stop before he turned back to his mentor.
“Indeed,” Dr. Myers wasn’t even looking ahead. His eyes were glued to a stack of papers pushed up by his lap, a pen on his right hand. Clark quirked an eyebrow.
“Uhh, are those… Marine Biology 101 papers? Are you grading right now, sir?”
“Ah, yes, I couldn’t very well pay attention to detail and proper grammar while driving us around, could I, m’boy?” Dr. Myers let out a small laugh, already applying corrections to line after line. The paper’s writer would have to look forwards to an upsetting score, it looked like. “Now, eyes up front. Realign your lights and let’s see about finding some coral samples to bring with us, hmm?”
“Yuh-yes, sir!” Clark returned his eyes to the darkness, turning the rover’s lanterns to allow for smoother descent. It took them ten minutes to reach another rocky slope. Tall algae sprouted from its surface, surrounded by mossy pebbles, sand as far as the eye could see, shells and of course deep sea corals. The Nautilus was equipped with precision claws capable of powerful grips and cameras connected to them to facilitate operation. Dr. Myers took a pause from grading to instruct his intern on how to extract samples with the mechanical arms without badly damaging the slope. After a few moments, he was back to his papers while Clark procured different items for their survey.
It was all going smoothly. Clark felt the task was tedious, but knowing he was a mile underwater where no unassisted human could live made something as rudimentary as picking coral exciting. To a beginner like he of course; since his teacher seemed more absorbed into his comparatively more mundane educational office than the marvels of the abyss.
But then something occurred. Something which took Clark’s attention away from the arm controls and his eyes off their cameras. It seemed like Dr. Myers had been paying attention to his performance after all, because as soon as a piece of coral shattered to the right arm’s grip, he spoke up: “Too much pressure, m’boy. Be sure to adjust…” he paused, sensing Clark wasn’t paying attention to him. “Clark, are you…?” the doctor’s question trailed off his lips much like his papers off his fingers.
Man of science and protégé had become utterly mesmerized. Their eyes were cast hundreds of yards ahead where a single point of light could be seen emerging. The absolute void remained pure black around that iridescent light which reminded the two witnesses of detergent bubbles.
“What is that, Dr. Myers?” Clark finally asked after seeing the multi-colored bubble in the distance start pulsing with every color under the rainbow. “And why is it doing that…?”
Dr. Myers who in all of his decades under the sea had never seen something like the spectacle before them could only breathe out a single answer: “I have no palpable notion, m’boy.”
Amazed and daringly curious, Dr. Myers took the controls from Clark and began an immediate yet cautious approach. Straight away the Nautilus grinded to a stop. “Sir? Is it dangerous?”
“I don’t know,” Dr. Myers quickly replied, not taking his eyes off the pulsating orb of light in the distance, “But I did not stop us. The controls suddenly aren’t responding, Clark.”
Clark’s eyes widened with unspeakable fear. He cast a glance down to confirm Dr. Myers’ grip on the submersible’s controls wasn’t doing anything for them. And then, the lights in their habitable chamber began to flicker. “What the heck?!” exclaimed the student.
“The instruments seem to be going wild,” Dr. Myers explained as he tapped at the various gauges and digital counters on their panels. “But our life support is working…”
“Huh-how can you tell?!” Clark asked, almost shouting.
“For starters, we’re not choking to death, m’boy,” the scientist responded with a softened level of sarcasm. The boy was panicking, so he didn’t want to raise his voice at him and make matters worse. “We’re not even halfway our depth limit, so we don’t have to worry about water pressure either. Calm down.”
Clark tried his best to keep his calm. He breathed in deep and immediately coughed, holding his throat as he began to sputter. “Guh, swallowed my gum…” he grunted, “Is this magnetic interference?”
“Most likely,” Dr. Myers nodded his way to the radio, which Clark attempted to access to no avail. The scientist didn’t have further proof to convince himself when he saw the pulsing orb of light grow to three times its original size, sending out a pulse so strong it rattled the Nautilus like the keys inside of his pocket.
“The lights…!” Clark exclaimed as their chamber went dark alongside the submersible’s lights. They were getting no more camera feeds and all instruments were now officially dead. The student feared the worst when the huge sphere ahead of them began to warp and turn into a spiraling shape.
“Remarkable…!” Dr. Myers couldn’t contain his excitement. “It’s as if the very space is unraveling before us, m’boy!”
“It is?! This is dangerous, sir! We have to get away!” Clark yelped, but no matter how reasonable his request he knew the Nautilus was just as stunned as they were. With the only course of action available to him being looking at that spatial rend causing havoc with the laws of physics, the young student’s eyes finally set back upon the spectacle. And then he saw it. Clark saw something emerging from the spiral’s light. Something unexpected.
It was somebody.
“Doctor...” Clark almost choked in his own words, “That’s a person!”
Dr. Myers agreed. The more the spiral regurgitated its inhabitant, the clearer their silhouette became. “I see her…!” he said, looking at billowing, long blonde hair followed by a slender yet sinuous body shape.
“Is she trapped?” Clark questioned. Something about the strange woman seemed to be calling out to him. “She looks unconscious! We have to help her!”
“M’boy, even if I wanted to…” Dr. Myers tried to argue, but as soon as those words left his mouth the lights inside of the Nautilus’ chamber and all of its instruments came back online. Without hesitation, Clark seized the controls from his mentor and drove them forwards again. “Wait, Clark…!”
But it was too late. The spiral’s luminous intensity seemed to have reached its critical point. As soon as the mysterious woman was outside of the spatial anomaly, darkness viciously began to wrap around the area with the spiral steadily dissipating.
“We’ll lose her to the darkness at this rate!” Clark howled in protest. His usual mild-mannered personality made Dr. Myers flinch. “I think I can catch her!” he insisted, grabbing the mechanical arm controls and stretching them out underneath the slowly descending woman like a catch. Her body gently landed on the Nautilus’ arms. “I got her, doctor! We caught her!”
Dr. Myers’ jaw was hanging. In part due to the feat accomplished by his novice submersible driver, but also what became plainly visible now that they were up close with the mysterious woman. “You… did…” the scientist stammered, rubbing his fingers on his old eyes to make sure age and the brief equipment failure hadn’t damaged his brain.
But senility had yet to grab the marine biologist. After adrenaline had drained, Clark also needed a double take when he finally got a good look at their rescued person. She definitely looked like a person up top. Below the waist; not so much. Smooth cyan scales extended all the way down, except instead of a pair of limbs it was just one large appendage hanging from her mid-section, ending in two curved fins.
Alternating his facing between the fish-tailed maiden and his mentor, Clark’s eyes remained frozen with disbelief. The radio scratched to life. “Nautilus. Nautilus, come in. We lost your signal. Are you okay? I repeat…”
“Topside…” Dr. Myers was the one to respond, although his equally paralyzed eyes couldn’t stop staring at their ‘catch, “…we’re okay. But we had a number of difficulties. We’ll be needing a rescue sub.”
“Dispatching in a minute!” the handler from the research vessel quickly responded, “We’ll have you two up in a flash. Hang on!”
“Three,” Clark corrected.
“Say again, Nautilus? I did not copy.”
Dr. Myers quietly looked at Clark and they nodded to each other. The scientist repeated: “We have a guest, topside.”
Transmissions between the Nautilus and its research vessel had been intercepted by the navy watchmen. By the time Dr. Myers, Clark and the fish-tailed woman were assisted in their return to the surface, their boat had been surrounded by military vessels. Everybody but Dr. Myers seemed surprised to see navy seals boarding them.
“This has got to be a joke, hasn’t it, doc?” Jayson, the research boat’s driver, could not tear his eyes away from the water tank meant for transporting specimens between the ocean and mainland. Occupying it was not your typical shark or moray, but an unconscious lady with the most perfect golden locks and top-heavy build. “You really found a bloody mermaid at the canyon depths!” His excitement turned to scorn when Jayson looked at the decorated official standing next to the doctor and he began to approach him with irate huffing. “And you government vultures are here to what, lay claim to- argh!”
A swift punch to the gut knocked the wind out of Jayson who ended with his hands clutching his stout middle. The navy seal who had intercepted him made no effort to comment or so much as alter his impassive expression. He had simply come between Jayson and his captain.
“Huh-hey!” Clark rushed over to the gasping Jayson, gently patting his back in an effort to allow him easier breathing. “What do you think you’re doing?” he demanded from the steely-eyed marine. “Dr. Myers, who are these people?”
Dr. Myers was quiet by contrast, but he figured it was in the interest of keeping the peace to be transparent. “This is Captain Kayne Gustav; with charge in the Navy fort at Key West,” he deeply breathed in and let out a sigh, “Can I ask you not to mistreat my colleagues, Kayne?”
Captain Gustav had been staring at the sleeping blonde in the science vessel’s water tank, not paying attention to anything else around him. He was a tall, muscular man in his mid-forties, rugged and unimpressionable as they came. And yet he allowed a punch from one of his underlings and two questions become immersed in absolute and awkward silence as he became absorbed in the sight ahead of him. Almost a minute of standing almost completely still, the Captain brought one of his two hands from his middle-back up to the tank, three digits pressing up against protective glass. “It’s no hoax, is it, Myers?” his eyes didn’t tear away from the specimen. “This is the real deal.”
“Why would I stage something like this?” Dr. Myers countered with a growl that made Clark gasp in surprise. With his well-groomed silver hair and beard, Clark had always regarded his teacher as a kind, if sometimes exigent old man. Until that moment Clark didn’t know his mentor’s eyes could get that sharp.
Captain Gustav finally looked away from the water tank to give the marine biologist the briefest of expressions, curling his left commissure as a sign of sarcasm. However, he saw it fit to ignore the scientist’s outburst and returned to the specimen. “Our state of the art sonar technology is active 24-7 with DSVs conducting surveys all over the Bahamas. From the largest whale in the shallows to the tiniest conch in the abyss, we’re always aware of what’s living in this ocean. And you and your ragtag crew just happen to find this? A real, goddamn, fairy-tale mermaid. How does that happen, Myers?”
Calming down, Myers smiled to himself. “Your guess is as good as mine, Kayne,” he said, “My protégé and I were surveying corals when we saw a light in the abyss under the deep-sea canyon. Everything began to shake. It looked as if space was coming undone before our eyes. And then, as if spat out by the anomaly in space, this ‘mermaid’ appeared.”
There was an uncomfortable silence inside the boat. Nobody dared to laugh at the impossibility of Dr. Myers’ tale, however. The captain spoke first. “And what happened to this spatial anomaly?”
“Gone. As if it had never been there,” Dr. Myers quickly replied. “Is this where you declare me mental, have me committed and take my discovery, old friend?”
“Doc…” Jayson was still rubbing his sore stomach. His eyes widened in surprise when he saw the kid take a step forth to confront the tall military captain. Jayson thought there would be another punch would be delivered soon.
“Y’can’t… you can’t!” Clark objected while facing the captain. “We found her! And she needs help.”
Before two navy seals could apprehend the young student, the Captain lifted his hand to stop them. “Your protégé, I presume, Myers,” he said getting a nod from the doctor. “It, young man. You found ‘it’. And why, pray tell, do you suppose it needs any help from you or anybody in this boat?”
“Wuh-what do you mean? She looked weak coming out of that thing,” Clark reported, “Who knows how long she was trapped in there? What if she hasn’t eaten in a week? Wuh-wait… You’re not thinking of killing her, are you?”
“I wouldn’t dream of it, lad,” the captain retorted, “This is a valuable subject of majorly suspect origins. And it is my job to find out everything about it for the interest of our nation.”
“So you are taking it,” Dr. Myers presumed. “I agree this wonderful creature must be examined in detail. Its physiological implications alone…” he let out a thoughtful sigh, shaking his head, “…but I have a feeling you don’t plan to allow the scientific community at large to learn about its discovery.”
Another brief sarcastic curl of the lips. The captain spoke matter-of-factly: “The public must be kept in the dark until we’ve ascertained the creature’s true nature. We can’t risk a panic. It would set back research with unnecessary complications.”
“Awfully convenient for you to simply swoop in and take my discovery, Kayne. But what about us?” Dr. Myers finally cut to the chase.
After a pregnant pause, Captain Gustav answered: “You’re free to go, so long as you appreciate discretion. I have no intention of putting any of you in harm’s way, unless you decide to become threats to national security.” He looked between the research vessel’s crew. One by one, most of them slowly, silently nodded at the navy official’s steely gaze. Dr. Myers appeared nonplussed.
“And I have no intention of walking away from the biggest scientific discovery of the century, my friend,” the doctor assured, meeting both of his balled up fists at the middle of his back as he approached the military man. “My discovery.”
With Myers standing his ground, Gustav didn’t bother to argue, merely remarking: “Pride before convenience, as always,” before nodding. “Just as well. We could use a man of your expertise leading a research team. And I know exactly where to move the specimen to. You know the place from your days in the navy, Myers.”
“She’s… you’re not going to turn her into a guinea pig, are you?” Clark asked, shoulders deflating, eyes a little sunken. But neither the Captain nor his mentor seemed to be concerned with paying him any mind now that they were starting to discuss the specifics of their arrangement. He suddenly felt like a little kid caught in the middle of a grown-up conversation.
“Ah…”
Clark’s head tilted to a quiet yet distinctive noise. Nobody other than Dr. Myers and Captain Gustav were talking right now. Everybody else seemed to be hanging on their words or busy with their own thing. Only Clark seemed to have heard that tiny little moan coming from the water tank. He turned towards it and approached with curiosity.
The mermaid was floating there in all of her naked glory. Now that he was over his initial shock and wasn’t being pushed around by military goons, he could take a moment to truly drink in the mermaid’s figure. If one started at the bottom part of the mermaid’s tail where it bifurcated into fins and then went all the way up to her head, she couldn’t have been any taller than the average adult human female. Her tail was as slender as her waist, tapering down from her wide hips which generously flared under her comparatively diminutive middle. What caught Clark off guard was just how generously ample her bosom was; each globe almost equal to the size of her own head with large, soft-pink nipples capping them. Like most straight guys in college, he had seen magazines with surgically enhanced bikini models that had huge breasts which looked small by comparison.
But he couldn’t remain at her voluptuous chest for long when her placid face offered so much feminine beauty: Petite yet full lips, small cute nose, high cheek bones, pronounced eyelashes and even that full head of incredibly long, silky golden hair that could have made both of his ex-girlfriends green with envy if her extraordinarily large chest by itself didn’t. Her face reminded Clark of Sally. He had been so infatuated with her. He still regretted her moving out to Europe the day after their high-school graduation.
“Nngghh…”
And then he heard it again, cutting his reminiscing short. So soft. So weak. A whimper that was coming from the water tank. From that ethereally beautiful hybrid between human and fish. Clark saw her eyelids stirring, barely showing the mermaid’s sclera, causing the student’s breathing to accelerate. Her lips quivered as she gradually opened her eyes with such peculiar golden irises. Lifeless at first, the mermaid’s eyes quickly began to shine with reflected light and the first thing she saw was Clark.
He gasped. She gasped as well. The awakening mermaid seemed both alert and confused, her eyes clearly asking wordless questions on her whereabouts. Her thin eyebrows furrowed as she attempted to reach out with a dainty hand but upon striking glass she flinched backwards with a scared whimper, indicating she had not been expecting the invisible wall there.
And as soon as the others heard the noise they stopped all they were doing to join Clark at the tank. Even Dr. Myers and Captain Gustav remained quiet as they rushed over to their awakened specimen.
The mermaid looked at each and every incoming person with apprehension. Why were they so intent with their stares? She looked down at her hands first. Her naked chest didn’t seem to bother her, but something about her tail made her yellow eyes widen, bubbles violently spewing out of her mouth.
“Huh-hey!” Clark was the first one to speak, waving his hand to get her attention. “Hey, you’re okay! You were unconscious and we brought you up from the ocean. Uhm… can you understand me?” he laughed a little.
After a few panicked breaths, the blonde finally focused her eyes on the person directing themselves at her. She could understand him and nodded in response. The silver haired, bearded gentleman besides the younger-looking man lifted his eyebrows in surprise while the formally dressed, taller man on his other side began to rub his chin in deep-thought. She couldn’t say she liked the way these men were looking at her.
“Great!” Clark said with a big smile, “My name is Clark, and this is my mentor, Dr. Myers!” he introduced them, placing a hand on his chest and using his other one to gesture towards his mentor, “We’re the ones who brought you here. Do you have a name?”
After a moment of doubt, the mermaid finally replied with a clear, high-pitched, feminine voice that seemed to travel out of water without any issue for all to hear. “Clare.”
“Clare…” Dr. Myers repeated, eyes gleaming as if he already was starting to make mental notes about every little detail he was witnessing: From form and body-language to something as amazing as being able to hear someone underwater speak with clarity.
Immutable as usual, Captain Gustav immediately started his interview. But questions such as “What are you?” and “Where do you come from?” were met with uncomfortable silence. Clare didn’t seem as willing to talk with the military man. He then turned to Clark, who had gotten Clare’s name with almost annoying ease. Perhaps a young element would aid in speeding things up. “Looks like you just earned yourself a provisional pass to the facility, lad.”
“The facility…?” Clark repeated in disbelief, finally looking away from the mermaid. His eyes looked for an explanation in Dr. Myers, but his gaze which ravenously consumed the contents of the water tank ahead of him placed the old man light-years away from them right now.
Clare didn’t seem to be liking anything she was seeing or hearing.
This ‘mermaid’ business had to be tended to with the biggest level of scrutiny, in Captain Gustav’s opinion. The discovery of a species until now seen as merely fantastic wasn’t something the public should learn of until they were a hundred percent sure the creature could be properly handled and every last precaution taken to ensure its containment. His superiors agreed and granted him the use of a black site underneath one of the many navy headquarters scattered in the US coasts.
First order of business was to take care of any potential loose ends that might endanger the secrecy of this project. The helmsman Jayson had no interest in joining the research team; but he was more than happy to cooperate when the alternative to a bribe was to buy his silence with pain. The rest of the research vessel’s crew fell in line just as easily. Myers and the kid would be easy enough to placate and their first-contact experience would prove to be an asset.
If Myers’ hunger for personal glory could be tempered. Captain Gustav was confident he could handle him.
They had a lot of interviews and experiments to conduct.
Clare’s eyes opened to find herself in the same old pen, inside the same old underground laboratory. Bright blue screens surrounded her from various angles, and as usual she felt smothered by strange whirring machinery stationed so close to her pool.
Every day was the same to Clare now. Her routine started with a number of people in white coats gathering around her to start their ritual of poking her on every inch of her body, if not with those cold, sharp machines, then with their perverse gloved hands. The sight of thin, long needles had become commonplace to her. Sometimes they took. Sometimes they plunged odd-looking liquid inside of her. The latter would sometimes make her pass out almost instantly.
Time had started to lose its meaning ever since she had first woken up inside that cramped water tank. Her new living arrangements weren’t that much of an upgrade and the day to day was exhausting. Being touched and stabbed by the strange men being led by that old creep who was always looking down on her from above was infuriating.
And then came the interrogations. So many questions with answers she did not have. The tall man in fancy clothes would take a seat in front of her pen while his followers made sure to record whatever was said.
What are you? They had called her a mermaid. She was invariably going with that answer now.
Where did you come from? She unequivocally started responding with “from the anomaly”, repeating what she had heard.
_What was that spatial anomaly? Are there others like you? What were you doing out there? Do you mean us harm? _
Clare remained silent each time a question she did not have an answer to was asked. This back and forth that usually ended in awkward silence and cold stares had become the second major part of every day. Some days though her interviewer was different: Instead of the tall man, they sent a young man. That same boy who she had first awakened in front of.
The same questions were asked almost as if the tall man was speaking through the young one. And although Clare’s answers didn’t change, she couldn’t help but notice the way he always looked at her. His eyes tended to wander down.
The men in coats had put something they referred to as a ‘top’ on Clare; a piece of black fabric snugly – and comfortably, she had to admit – wrapping around her voluminous chest. A vanity piece, no doubt, since its purported feature seemed to be for support and that was pointless while underwater. Perhaps something to do with decency or modesty, she briefly considered. Whatever the case, Clare could feel the young man’s stare on her generous bust and it disgusted her almost as much as the way that old man supervising everything leered at her.
Still, as annoyed as she was, Clare felt like she commanded the young man’s attention, and that allowed her to be far more casual with him than with the tall man. Knowing he would listen to her without objection, it was easier to get information. However, Clare noted that on some of the times she was the one to ask a question, the boy had to be advised via some unknown means, as he kept glancing back over his shoulder and muttering as if he was talking to a ghost; communicating with his superiors. That convinced Clare that in spite of his youthful and kind appearance, he was no more than a puppet for the tall and old men.
It was through these conversations that Clare learned of the world outside of the depths. Of the equipment around them; of the electricity powering them. These people were marvelous inventors, having mastered technology never before witnessed by her eyes. To them, however, Clare realized she was some sort of prize pet being kept inside some fancy facility to find out everything about how she worked. After all, she always received the same unsatisfactory answer when she inquired about the only question she was interested in asking.
When do I get to leave?
Clare came to realize she was their prisoner, here for their learning and amusement.
After she had stopped counting the days, all she looked forwards to was her meals, which was honestly the one thing she couldn’t complain about. Chest area notwithstanding she was so thin and felt physically weak which was why she hadn’t attempted to flee. If she struggled too much to receive their sedatives, men in coats would hit her with metallic rods that sent electrical currents through her body. Escape was an ever present thought, but not a plan she had any feasible resources to execute.
Clare was starting to harbor a deep resentment for her captors.
“This is going nowhere, Myers,” Gustav slapped the rich mahogany office desk with another manila envelope that scattered documents all over. “This is the third week. ‘Inconclusive’?” he quoted one of the examinations.
“Blood samples have been tough to manage,” Dr. Myers explained, “As you know, the specimen’s blood rapidly denaturalizes when exposed to oxygen.”
“And turns into that sea foam-like byproduct, yes,” the captain recalled, “It really is like a goddamn fairy tale, isn’t it? Next we’re going to find a singing crab and a crazy octopus lady.”
“Familiar with the classics, I see,” Dr. Myers entertained a brief smile that was met by an impatient glare. “You didn’t check the follow-up exam, old friend,” the doctor made a turning motion with his index, relaxing back on his chair as the captain pulled the inconclusive tests over and found the follow-up clipped behind.
“You had a breakthrough.”
“More a stroke of luck, to be fair,” Dr. Myers smiled, “One of the technicians was swapping one of the old power packs. This facility is old as old gets, after all. You’re aware the battery units emit small doses of beta radiation, correct?”
“Too small to penetrate human skin or cause problems, yes,” Gustav nodded in understanding.
“One of my more careless subordinates tripped and damaged a blood vial, causing spillage over the old power pack which had just been replaced. It was not a big loss, you see, but that blunder let me see the blood was not denaturalizing even after a full minute of exposure to air. At first I thought it was metal…”
“Trace radiation. It makes the creature’s blood analyzable,” Gustav returned his eyes to the report, “This data, however…”
“I might as well have written ‘inconclusive’ there, as well,” Dr. Myers shrugged, “Looks like gibberish to be sure, but definitely more than what we had so far. I didn’t want to wait so we’re conducting experimental radiation therapy. First with bloodwork, but eventually with the subject itself.”
“And we’re no closer to discerning origins or motives. It seems to be corroborating your story, even though it’s clearly playing dumb. It seems to be smarter than we give it credit to,” Gustav sighed, setting the complicated data sheet down. “It looks like a young lass, which was why I thought your lad would be able help open up. Unfortunately, he seems more interested in staring at her fat tits.”
Dr. Myers couldn’t help but blurt out a laugh. “Well, he might be in college and a pretty good student, but he still is a young man in his prime.”
“She appears to have taken a bit of a shine to him in the past few weeks. Enough that I believe we can start an alternate approach for interrogation,” Gustav straightened his tie before standing up.
“Ah. I remember this,” Dr. Myers chuckled, “You’re through being Mr. Nice Guy, are you, Kayne? Just don’t be too rough with my test subject, will you? Future experiments are going to need her to be…” he took a pause, leaning in with his hands joined above his upper lip, “…conscious. Such a fascinating subject… I expected this first test to show similarities to our biology, but it’s so far beyond…”
As he prepared to leave his office, Gustav glanced back at Dr. Myers with a wry smirk. “Just tell the lad to be here on time on the coming days; goop cop bad cop is rudimentary as it gets, but it’s proven effective. I’m through letting that thing yank us around.”
Clare had not been prepared for the intensifying of her treatment at the human facility. It wasn’t sedatives they were pumping into her body anymore. Sometimes it was stuff that didn’t do anything as far as she could tell, while other times it made her insides burn with pain. The bearded old man kept using the words “satisfactory” and “fascinating”, but Clare couldn’t tell what he was so pleased with.
The tall man was becoming more and more ruthless with his interrogation methods. Threats and violence were his common coin, but her brief conversations with him now included insults to her appearance. He taunted her, calling her “freak” and “monster”, questioning her desire to leave the facility, letting her know that she would get harpooned by the first punk that saw her hideous fish tail. And Clare no longer had the energy to rebuke him.
And although she found herself alone and humiliated, Clare would not give them the satisfaction of begging. That was not who she was and that was what these humans had to understand. Still, no matter how much of a brave face the blonde put on, she was starting to feel an increasing amount of concern about these liquids they were pumping into her.
She had begun feeling a number of strange symptoms, chiefly among them an odd tingling sensation that began spreading from her mid-section before receding. Sometimes the feeling went away after swimming around in her pen for a while, but Clare was starting to feel like it would return with varying degrees of intensity depending on where in the pen she was. It was hard for her to concentrate however. She was also feeling weaker after every interview.
“Hey, are you okay?” Clark asked as he sat in front of a seemingly aloof Clare. Her eyes were stuck to the high ceiling above and she certainly wasn’t acknowledging him. “Clare, I know you hate it here, but I asked, for you, and they said they’re looking to release you soon.”
The word ‘release’ seemed to have brought her back. It was the only thing she cared about in the world. Floating in her underwater pen, the blonde rolled her eyes down to meet with Clark’s. This made him smile a little.
“I- I can’t promise you since I’m not in charge but…” Clark was about to continue with his platitude but then he noticed something off about Clare’s appearance. It was easy to see all of her thanks to how fair her skin and how bright her smooth tail scales were. Under the cyan laboratory lights, Clark could see exhaustion and signs of emaciation on the mermaid’s face. “Clare, when’s the last time you ate?”
“The last time they fed me…” Clare responded without much enthusiasm. “The tall man won’t stop yelling. He said, three talks ago, I’m not getting any more food until… bluhh…” she gasped, spinning around and holding her aching tummy.
“You haven’t eaten in…?!” Clark’s indignation almost made him yell, but he caught himself. Involuntarily shrinking his shoulders, he glanced back. The usual guard keeping an eye out wasn’t there as far as he could tell, and Captain Gustav had yet to bark orders at him in the intercom. He wondered if they were on break; they had rescheduled his chats with Clare for around noon time. Quickly turning back to Clare, he frowned, “You haven’t eaten in three days. Why didn’t you say anything?”
“Not… ugh…” Clare clutched her stomach. She was in pain. “They don’t care, boy. They ask questions with answers beyond them.”
Clark was quiet for a moment. “But they’ll feed you if you tell us what we want to know. Why can’t you answer our questions? We’re just… curious.”
“Curious enough to imprison and mistreat,” Clare spat, “And you, I am tired of your game of pretending to care.”
“Buh-but I do!” Clark stood up, fixing his glasses, “The only reason I’m going through with all of this is because I want to see you free.”
“Are you a fool? Don’t you see your ‘mentor’ has no intention of ever releasing me? All he wants to do is test his poisons on me; see how much he can get away with until I break. I am not human, therefore anything goes. The tall man has made it clear I am a monster to him, and if I had the strength for it I… would…” she was interrupted by another pang of hunger.
Clark could hear Clare’s stomach being in pain. It made him sad and to want to help even though he had been told from day one he wasn’t to give anything to the test subject. He kept bags of snacks with him in his backpack but it was always checked in whenever he got inside the facility. Fortunately for him, they hadn’t bothered to search his jacket pockets. He made sure his comms were muted before he started to move.
When Clark was silent for an extended time, Clare naturally felt drawn to look in his direction. He had moved away to the far corner of the tank and was holding something out in his right hand, some sort of dark bar that couldn’t have been thicker than his thumb.
“Do you remember when I told you about chocolate?” Clark asked, shaking what was obviously a treat in his grasp, “This is something made with it. It’s really good. Probably not very nutritious but…”
“It’s food,” Clare interrupted, swimming to the corner where the tingling sensation became the strongest. The mermaid was stopped by her body vibrating from within, as if something was permeating her and shaking her very core. The machine behind Clark seemed to be buzzing, but he could not hear it. None of the humans could. Ever since they had come to replace a part inside it, the buzzing had become stronger. At first it used to make her head hurt, but now all she had was that tingling sensation intermingling with the pangs of her demanding guts in her middle.
Finally, Clare pressed her hands and chest against the pen’s glass windows. She dragged herself up to the surface of the pen, her head hitting the partitioned ceiling which was just narrow enough to prevent her escape. “Give it to me,” she demanded.
“Yes, but…” Clark took a little longer than he had meant to as he stopped to appreciate the top-heavy mermaid’s chest squishing and spreading over the glass, but he eventually looked behind Clare, nodding, “Yuh-yeah, this is a good blind spot from the security camera. You should probably eat it over here, or else I could really get in trouble…”
“Whatever you say, boy,” Clare seemed desperate. She knew not to bang her hands against the pen or else she’d get shocked by the security system, but she really wanted to. “Give it to me.” She ordered and Clark obeyed, leaning up before slipping the piece of candy into one of the thin crevices on the top panel of the pen. With renewed vigor, Clare snatched the candy into the water without waiting for it to sink to her level. She usually poked her head out of the water to receive her meals, but this time she didn’t care. She devoured the chocolate bar in an instant, chugging water along.
“Is it good?” Clark asked, getting a little cough from the hungry mermaid before finally earning himself a quiet nod. He smiled in return.
“…do you have any more?” Clare asked, but Clark could only shake his head negative. “Then go away. You’re useless to me, human boy.”
Clark couldn’t say he had been expecting a thank you. It was only natural that Clare would hate his kind for what Dr. Myers and the navy were doing to her. But what could he do other than bring her snacks? She clearly held some secrets she couldn’t tell a soul, and he didn’t have the conversational tools to bring them out even if it was for her own benefit. “I’ll go, but…” he wanted to tell the mermaid something hopeful, but the truth was he had nothing to offer. He had to give up for the day and go. Fortunately, he didn’t have to wait for the doors to the lab to open, as he was cleared to leave whenever he deemed the interview had run its course. He would report the same as always.
Clare floated back against the corner wall, closing her eyes. That sugary aftertaste was trying to betray her into smiling. She had felt the treat sliding down all the way down her throat after she had chewed and swallowed it. And although her stomach could hardly be grateful for such a pittance of a morsel, it still worked hard to process it. That’s when Clare felt it.
Her insides seemed to growl, but in a different way to how her belly had been begging her to find something to eat. Her eyes opened up wide. The tingling was not receding this time. It kept spreading from her core up to her neck and down her tail, splitting at her arms and head and making her aware of every last strand of golden hair in her voluminous mane. The feeling was something she had become used to in the past week, but after the first meal in three days she had felt it become explosive and electrifying. And not at all painful. In fact, Clare felt a certain degree of pleasure from the alien sensation.
And then it was gone. But even though the tingling had dispersed just like all the other times, Clare certainly felt different this time. She no longer felt as tired or as weak. Understandably, her belly continued to rumble and she still felt nowhere close to full. “What’s happening to me?” Clare asked herself, pausing to look at her hands for any signs of change, but she found the answer at the tip of her tailfins which were brushing along the bottom of her watery prison. Clare found this seemingly trivial detail as off-putting.
Having been confined to the underwater pen for weeks now, Clare had become intimately close with its dimensions and thus she knew exactly how to position herself inside of it to be as relatively comfortable as she could afford. She had complete control over her tail and it wouldn’t swish or wag without her conscious command if she was merely floating. And yet her tailfins which had been floating off the floor of the pen were now sliding across it as if she had bent the tip of her tail against it.
She had never commanded her tail to move, yet it had lowered on its own. Clare decided to swim up and stretch her lower body down before allowing herself to sink. She stopped when her tailfins touched the bottom again. And then she finally confirmed it: Her eyes were poking out of the water’s surface whereas usually this position would barely allow the bottom half of her forehead to emerge.
The words actually gasped out of her lips with a number of surprised bubbles: “My body’s gotten larger…” she put a hand over her stomach, immediately thinking back to the candy she’d eaten before putting her eyes on the buzzing machine so close to the corner of her pen.
What is this place doing to me?
The words were running through Clare’s mind, and although the strange phenomenon should have been concerning to her, she couldn’t hide a smile. After all, hungry or not she still felt stronger than she did in the past few days. Could she exploit this somehow? “What if I eat even more?” Clare thought to herself, theorizing if the trigger to this wonderful new sensation was consuming a meal, she could get substantial mileage out of it. As fantastic as the idea sounded to her mind however, the rumbling in her stomach reminded her which state she was in.
“The tall man won’t feed me,” Clare huffed, “He will continue starving me, weakening me until I start begging. I won’t be able to test my theory unless…” she paused, turning to glance at the opening lab doors where the bearded man and his posse of lab coated men and women were walking in through. “The boy…” The mermaid thought back to Clark and his candies, “…perhaps I can use him.”
“Good afternoon, my dear,” Dr. Myers greeted his subject with a smile as his assistants all got into position. “I trust you and Clark had a good chat?” As per usual, Clare gave him the quiet treatment to which the biologist responded with a chuckle, “Ah, grumpiness doesn’t become you, my pretty. But I understand your foul mood. Despite my objections, Kayne has continued with rather extreme measures to ensure your cooperation, has he not?”
Clare was still holding her rumbling stomach as she nonchalantly rolled her eyes in his direction. She was glad the bearded man or any of his minions hadn’t seemed to notice her change at all; she had only grown about an inch after all. Impatiently, she growled out: “You’re awfully jolly about your friend slowly killing your ‘subject’, are you not?”
The lead scientist laughed, “Oh, don’t you worry your pretty little head. There’re many more experiments to carry out and I still need you very much alive. Even if you decide to forgo eating for the rest of your life, I don’t plan on letting you expire.”
Clare looked suspicious at the claim. “I am hungry right now, old man,” she corrected. “If this keeps going, you’ll only be experimenting on bones and scales,” Clare conveniently left the part of her having slightly more meat in her bones.
“I assure you; we’ve been monitoring your eating habits since before Kayne started to starve you. Your stomach isn’t too different from ours, dear,” the doctor’s explanation should have met a sarcastic little smirk when he tried to compare human metabolism with her recently upgraded one; but Clare didn’t dare expose herself and allowed the gloating man to continue. “And we’ve determined a protein bar every few days should give your system the boost it needs to keep you alive. You might have gotten yourself on Kayne’s bad side, but he won’t dehydrate you, after all. Just expect your comforts to be… notably reduced going forwards.”
Clare had to scoff at that. “All of this has been comfortable so far?”
Dr. Myers exposed an unsettling grin. “As much as I prefer studying your biology, I can’t wait to hear all you have to say about your origins. That day, you or whatever providence that brought you to us warped reality itself before my eyes,” he approached Clare’s tank to drag his fingers down the glass wall, “What exactly are you keeping from me, my pretty? Is it something to protect others like you? Is it something utterly scandalous none should be privy to? Don’t you realize you’re only prolonging your suffering, girl? Imagine how I’d be able to propel this research with additional background information. You’re not just obstructing the captain. You’re also delaying my inevitable return to the front page of every scientific community journals.”
Clare glared, silent as ever when it came to her personal history. Her look of defiance managed to erase the biologist’s smile.
“I hope you manage to stay that quiet for today’s proceedings, dear. I don’t care for your screams, but you always produce such…” the doctor paused and looked at his digital charts with another unsettling smile, “…valuable data. Now, be a good girl and you’ll get your treat at the end of the day.”
Clare sighed and mounted all of her willpower for what was to come.
That night, when only the machines and one bored security guard made her company, Clare found herself floating weakly towards the tab used to deliver her food. Instead of the usual complement of various oddly delicious morsels, the tray now looked almost hilariously oversized with only what seemed to be a fat block of unappetizingly gray solid mass.
With her head still throbbing after the psychostimulants the scientists had administered to her, Clare rubbed at her itching arm where she had been stabbed multiple times. “I hate it here. I hate it here.” She told herself in her head as she reached for the cube; the ‘protein bar’ as the bearded man had told her. Bad looking, foul smelling. It was almost like they wanted her not to eat. But the candy the boy had fed her earlier, although vastly superior in presentation and sweetness, had hardly made a dent in her overstimulated appetite. But before Clare could sink her teeth into that paltry treat, the logical part of her brain stopped her.
That humming machine at the corner of her pen was beckoning her with its constant buzzing. The starved Clare remembered her goal. If her theory from earlier was correct: this wasn’t merely sustenance; it was a fragment of her key to freedom. She swam to the place where the tingling became the strongest before hungrily stuffing that protein bar into her mouth.
The product was too foul to be tasteless, with an unpleasant mouthfeel and it felt even worse going down her throat. And yet, right now, Clare felt like killing for five more. Moments after it had hit her stomach, the blonde felt her stomach rumbling against her hand. And then the tingling from that strange permeating energy radiating from the machine by the pen began to intensify just like before.
Clare felt like something was bubbling up inside of her. Her drug-addled mind slowly seemed to clear as proper feeling and control returned to her extremities. Along with the same marvelous sensation of her body ever so gradually inching upwards, this time Clare started feeling more aware of her surroundings, almost uncannily so. For a brief moment, her bright eyes were capable of seeing connections and circuitry within the innards of the machines surrounding her, represented as a multitude of differently colored lines; each color corresponding to a different circuit. She felt like she could see what made everything up, including the electrical wiring integrated to her water tank. “That is how they punish me…” she murmured right before her eyes went back to normal and the multicolored lines disappeared from view. “Could I do more than see this machinery from within if I had more food in me…?” she wondered in her mind, cursing her lack of proper nourishment.
To distract herself from her ever increasing hunger, Clare decided to stand on her fins again. This time the bridge of her nose comfortably had made it out to the surface. “I’m even bigger, maybe a full inch longer…” she told herself, lamenting the fact this phenomenon hadn’t been occurring back when she still was being fed full meals. And then there was that surprising new ability she had just witnessed; her eyesight having achieved some sort enhancement she couldn’t quite explain other than calling it electro-vision.
What became perfectly clear to Clare was that her theory was correct and that food was making her stronger in the literal sense and she couldn’t wait to become powerful enough to escape this horrible place.
Clare put her plan into action over the next couple of days. Nothing seemed different to the navy or their science team: She was the same old uncooperative inhuman creature, a petulant little monster in the tall man’s words. Fortunately for her, he was being held up by meetings with his superiors, so for the time being she only had to deal with the bearded man’s horrible experiments and the boy. And knowing how infatuated the latter was with her curves, it was a cinch to command his attention during their conversations.
Just like she had hoped, Clark brought her an increased number of snacks that he was careful to sneak in after relocating to the blind spot in the lab. They weren’t anything special, but their number and high caloric count was more than welcome by her starved body. Clare could feel herself getting not only larger, but stronger after every bite. And yet no matter how much candy the young human brought her, even if it could be compared to the volume of food she used to eat for meals before, Clare found herself to be insatiable.
She demanded from him. “Bring more next time, boy. The more filling the better!” But she made sure to put on a little distraction to get him to stop questioning what he saw before him: A slowly, gradually expanding mermaid. Clare pushed her hands and chest against the glass window, finding that the pervert’s eyes and even his mind would follow her round, squishy breasts as she rolled them over the transparent surface.
At the end of the first night, Clare had not received a protein bar, but she could tell the sweet feast the human boy had brought her had managed to pump her up three inches taller. Her stomach was ever demanding, but the exhaustion from the bearded man’s tortures were all but gone. In fact, she felt truly energized, enough to swim back-to-back in her pen to help expend all that energy which her body continued to produce.
Clare found that her growth had brought with it enhanced physical capability: She wasn’t merely swimming more, she was swimming faster than before. Whenever she braced, water would violently ripple around her arms; which hadn’t grown any more muscular yet she could feel a certain warmth within her biceps that convinced her she was considerably stronger than when she first awoke in this world.
“Just a little more…” Clare said as she carefully grabbed one of the metal strips of the segmented panel covering her pen. She had attempted to move these metal strips numerous times in the past, only to be laughed at. But Clare could feel the feedback on her squeezing fingers now; it was different, she was able to apply almost sufficient force to begin bending it. “Just a little more food…” the mermaid stopped her attempt, worried she might get shocked or found out. As she glanced in the direction of the usual guard too distracted by his device to pay her any mind. A single phrase she had spoken earlier kept rehashing inside of her head.
The more filling, the better.
“You really like chocolate, don’t you, Clare?” Clark remarked as he observed the mermaid ravenously wolf down the most recent haul he had managed to sneak in for her. He was really excited the pretty mermaid seemed to have begun counting on him; it boded well for the project and hopefully her eventual release. “Maybe next time I can bring you something salty, like beef jerky. It’s dehydrated meat so that it doesn’t spoil so it always tastes good. Would you like that?”
Clare was too busy desperately shoving whatever she could down her gullet. Although she was fully energized and felt healthier than ever, her appetite seemed to have grown more than in proportion. All she had heard from Clark’s speech was one word. “Meat?” she repeated, licking the chocolate remains floating off her lips so that no bit of sugar would escape her mouth. “That would be lovely, boy. Do you have any more?”
“Yuh-yeah,” Clark nodded slowly, “I got myself a baggier jacket, so I got a real stash. Boy, they must really been starving you bad, you look…” he paused as he reached for a bag of cookies he unsealed for her. Clark stopped to look at the mermaid in detail now that his eyes were again on her chest. It was hard for him to notice the change to her height considering she was usually floating on her sides and her tail didn’t make things easier for the sake of comparison. However, as someone who always looked at her bosom, he could definitely tell how significantly snugger her top was. It was almost impossible to ignore the tent of her nipples on the fabric now. “…you actually look a little bigger.”
Swallowing the last of her candy in her mouth, Clare began to smile. For the first time, she put a genuinely pleased, seductive smirk on her face as she pushed herself against the glass for Clark to ogle. “Do you like them, boy?” she sultrily asked, “Should I stop eating…?”
“Nuh-no!” Clark waved a hand dismissively, flustered and blushing. “Suh-sorry, I didn’t mean to call you fat or anything it’s just…”
“What are you doing, lad?” a commanding, loud, disapproving shout made the student hop in place. Some of the stuffed cookies in Clark’s Ziploc bag popped out from the open top and rolling in the direction of an incoming Captain Gustav and Dr. Myers.
“Uhh… oh, cuh-captain!” Clark turned to face the stern look of both the navy official and his mentor. “Busted,” he thought with a grimace.
“M’boy, have you been feeding the subject food out of designated feeding times?” Dr. Myers immediately demanded, stepping ahead of the Captain and his lab assistants.
“Buh-but sir, you were starving her,” Clark defended himself, getting a sigh from Gustav.
“No wonder it’s been this uncooperative during interrogations! You’ve been undoing all I’ve accomplished, you idiot!” Gustav finally exploded, causing Clark to flinch.
“You were killing her!” the student cried out, “I-I couldn’t just watch. How can I get her to open up to me if she can’t even talk?”
Clare looked between the older men and Clark, clicking her tongue in frustration. She knew this secrecy would inevitably end but she had hoped for at least a few more days of growth. The sheer amount of calories in those cookies would have to give her the last push she had been hoped for. With her eyes desperately eyeing the bag in Clark’s hand, she murmured out to him: “Give them to me,” she said, both hungry and ready to implement her plan.
“Huh?” Clark turned back to look at Clare.
“That’s enough, m’boy. I know your heart was in the right place,” Dr. Myers held up a hand as he attempted to defuse the situation, “But you have to stop this. You are interfering with my experiments.”
“I’ll have him removed, Myers,” Captain Gustav threatened, although in a much more collected manner. His outburst of anger had been as potent as it had been brief. “The lad has proven he cannot be trusted.”
“No, don’t listen to them,” Clare insisted at Clark. Her stomach was rumbling and the anxiety was causing her fingers to start bending against the glass wall. “Give me the bag, boy.”
“It is so odd, however,” Dr. Myers said after a small exchange with Gustav about Clark’s fate. Stepping closer towards the tank, he squinted at the mermaid contained within, then at Clark’s large cookie bag, “Have you been feeding my subject sweets all this time? I would have detected that in higher blood sugar… This must mean her metabolic processes are…”
“Now!” a yell from Clare not only interrupted the lead biologist’s ramblings but it also made Clark jump. The cookie bag went flying into the air and her eyes locked onto it. In the second that followed she immediately had her hands fly up, grabbing the two metal grates directly above her. With a grunt, she exerted as much physical force as she could allow herself to put out, managing to bend them away and create an opening for her to jump out to grab the transparent bag before it started falling again.
“That was steel…” Dr. Myers’ widened his eyes in sheer shock, followed by everyone else in the lab letting out a unified gasp of surprise.
Captain Gustav was the one to begin barking orders, “What are you gawking at? We have a containment breach! Shock it now!”
Clare didn’t care that her cover was blown. She didn’t care she was betting her one chance at freedom on a bunch of stuffed cookies. As soon as she landed back into the water tank with the bag she had swiped out of the air though, she felt an electric current running through her body, numbing her at first until it was shocking her nerves. Screaming through the pain, she willed her almost uncontrollable limbs to bring that bag close to her mouth, but she couldn’t tip it. So instead, she bit into the bag. Her teeth sank into the plastic with desperation, jaw clenching to add pressure until the bag could be cut. And then she tasted the first of over three dozen sugary confections.
The saturated fats, the artificial sweeteners coupled with all that sugar; that addictive taste which electrified her taste buds better than any shock therapy could. Clare devoured the bag, plastic and all. People could see the bulge in her neck as she forced herself to swallow as if this was going to be her last meal.
“Clare…!” Clark called out as he saw the lit up mermaid growl and swallow. He turned to the scientist at the computer, “You have to stop, you’re hurting her. You’re gonna kill her!”
But it did not kill her. No sooner than Clare had swallowed that meal, he and everybody else noticed a change in the test subject. Her top was starting to tear. “It’s… it’s not killing her,” Dr. Myers confirmed as he looked at something even he hadn’t expected.
Clare could certainly back what the bearded man had come to realize. She wasn’t screaming anymore; she was laughing now. The tingling sensation had returned just as expected but it had superseded the shocking pain. No, it was more accurate to say the shock was being absorbed much in the way the matter in her stomach was being converted into energy for her expansion. Clare could feel herself feeding off the electricity running through the water much like the treats she had been stuffing herself with until now. And the combination was making her grow larger at a significantly faster pace than before.
The top which had been struggling to contain her enormous tits for a while now could no longer stop the advance of mermaid flesh pushing out. The straps were visibly digging down Clare’s shoulders as the now flimsy article’s elasticity was tested beyond its capabilities. She was already beyond six feet long, taller than Clark and rapidly approaching Dr. Myers’ height.
Dumbfounded, Captain Gustav demanded an explanation, “What am I looking at, Myers? Why is that thing getting bigger now?!”
“Something must have changed her cellular makeup, she seems to be absorbing electricity!” the doctor theorized without even looking at the captain, his eyes were utterly transfixed by the transformation occurring before him. Clare was starting to swell out in all directions faster and faster, her tailfins standing at the bottom of the water tank as she pushed out through the damaged grate, chest spilling out over the edge.
“Shut it off!” Gustav cried at the operator, “Why are you not shutting it off, you nimrod?!”
“I can’t!” the operator said, “I’ve tried to reset the system, but it’s not listening to my commands! It’s… Ah!” he screamed as his console blew up from an electrical overload. The equipment in the lab was starting to short out.
And amid that chaos, Clare felt incredible. Not just the pleasure of shooting taller with every passing second, but also how easy it now was to just bend the grated panel whichever way she pleased with only a fraction of the effort she required before. “Mmm… freedom,” the mermaid sang out with a moan as she pushed past seven feet tall. Her chest was so big that her top was busting at the seams, straps snapping on her shoulders as the fabric became useless at containing her. With a gasp of relief, the blonde saw her top explode with her naked breasts slapping down the glass of her increasingly diminutive pen, the force and weight causing it to fissure all over. “This feels so much better…!” she moaned in delight.
Clare’s eyes were simply lit up with power as she grew, her tail slithering to the opposite side of the water tank where it began to coil as she rapidly took more and more space, pushing her higher and higher above the electrified water surface. She could see the wiring of the laboratory once more, watching it all become unified in color as circuitry worked to feed her more and more energy to explosively develop her size and power. “Yes!” the amazonian mermaid moaned in pleasure, grinning down at the ‘tall’ man who was starting to look increasingly pathetic from her increasingly higher perspective. “More. Give me more. I’m so hungry, so hungry for more…!” she demanded, arms outstretched with her fists clenched. Ten feet long, twelve feet long, fifteen feet long… Clare was becoming a veritable giantess among all these people!
Clark and Dr. Myers who were the closest to the water tank had to take a few cautionary steps backwards. For their own reasons, they were both absorbed into the mermaid’s great expansion since she was already so much taller than a giant like Captain Gustav. “So remarkable…” Dr. Myers whispered, his eyes lit up with the possibilities of this development. “Has her biology been altered this much in such a short time? Has she adapted?” the scientist theorized, looking at the now buzzing power pack at the corner of the pool, which made him hit the realization as he recalled his recent breakthrough, “Beta radiation…!”
“Cut the power! Cut the all the power now!” the captain desperately shouted at his phone, “I will take responsibility. Pull the plug NOW, I said!”
Clare’s eyes stopped shining when stopped being electrocuted. The lab was plunged into darkness which was only dimly lit by flickering emergency lights now. The 20ft. long mermaid was seen stretching her immense upper body up and flexing her arms before letting out a drawn out moan and collapsing forwards. Those huge breasts made massive by having grown in proportion with the rest of her body finally crashed through the glass wall, shattering it under their weight. Although Clare wasn’t damaged in the slightest, Dr. Myers and Clark both had to shield themselves from flying, sharp crystal shards. The lab was inundated by water spilling out, although the floors were fortunately spacious enough and with the power cut there was no risk at further short circuiting.
“Nnnh…” the gigantic mermaid purred like a woman after the bliss of orgasm. She felt better than good, but something still bothered her deep inside. There was a craving left. A craving growing even more intense with every passing instant. And she wasn’t going to be able to hold it in for much longer.
“Clare…?” Clark was the only one brave enough to step forth at first, but he was soon followed by his mentor as well. “Wuh-what just happened? Thu-this is insane, look how big she is now!”
“It seems like some if not all of our experimentations have had an effect on her unique biology, m’boy,” Dr. Myers smiled, “Although it appears fairly easy to control. Deprived of an energy source, this incredible ability seems to pose no danger…”
“No danger? Myers are you out of your bloody mind?!” Captain Gustav shouted, “She was draining the entire facility! Now we have to find a way to contain her without electricity. And you, lad! It’s dangerous to get close to that monster. Get back here!”
Clark was ignoring his superiors for now. He was concerned for the mermaid now that she was out of water and seemingly exhausted. “Guh-God she’s even more gorgeous now…” he briefly thought, totally taken by just how enormous all of her was. Kneeling by her face, he carefully put a hand on her forehead, “Clare,” he said aloud, “Are you okay…?”
“Hhuuunnn…”
“Huh?” Clark heard her mumbling and leaned in closer, “Are you trying to say something?” he asked, trying to focus on his hearing until Dr. Myers asked him.
“What is she saying, m’boy?”
“Shu-she’s saying…” Clark stuttered at first.
She is hungry.
_ _
Clark and Dr. Myers were both shocked when the giantess began to shift. Her arms moved with unexpected speed and before the two men knew it they had her large fingers wrapped around their waists, pulling them off the ground as Clare rose up to lie on her side.
“Take aim!” Captain Gustav didn’t waste a moment. His three armed guards immediately trained their sights on Clare. “Put them down you supersized fish!”
Clare excitedly tapped the humid remains of her destroyed pen with her tail as she felt the comparatively small humans squirming in her grip. She licked her lips, already savoring the idea that she could simply clench her fingers and make them pop like bloated gnats. “Would a monster do that, puny man?” she responded to the navy officer.
“I’m warning you, you top-heavy beast!” Gustav drew his own firearm for good measure, aiming at the giant blonde’s forehead. “Put those men down, now!”
“Luh-let’s be reasonable here, my dear! Urk…!” Unlike Clark, Dr. Myers was being squeezed by Clare’s giant hand. He could feel her thumb pressing down on his ribcage and making it hard to breathe, “Y-you’re hungry, that’s understandable…! We’ll go back to regular meals, five regular meals, considering your growth spurt! There is so much more to discover, so many more experiments…!”
“Sir, we don’t have a clear shot,” one of the guards told the captain, who grunted in reluctant agreement. With the way they were being held, the hostages might get hit. “Shoot the tail, open fire!”
Firearms discharged, other scientists screaming and ducking out of fear. Entire magazines were emptied but when the gunpowder dust cleared off, the mermaid’s tail scales still looked smooth as ever. “How?!” the captain growled, “Those scales were so easy to peel off just two weeks ago, how can they deflect bullets now?!”
Clare had a look of disgust on her face as she listened to the bearded man, completely ignoring the shooters barely tickling her lower body with their toys. The human boy at her other hand pleaded with her, but her urges were now impossible to hold back. “I am eager to experiment, you awful man,” Clare told Dr. Myers, keeping him in that tight grip, “And I think I will experiment with your taste, first.”
“No, Clare…!” Clark screamed, but his begging was all too futile. His eyes nearly bulged out of their sockets when the massive blonde brought the struggling scientist up towards her mouth. Soft lips parted to expose her tongue, teeth and uvula to her meal.
To that sight rife with absolute finality, Dr. Myers’ vocabulary steadily and quickly devolved from his usual eloquence to panicked shouts and demands. “Stop her! Stop the test subject! Kayne, what are you doing?!” he screamed down at the navy officer, but he looked just as dumbfounded as the rest of the scientists. “She’s going to eat me! STOP HERRRRR…!”
Clare wasted no time in shoving that sadistic bastard over her tongue. She felt his arms flail around, attempting to wrestle her oral muscle, but his grip slipped on its salivated surface. His screams echoed inside of her mouth as she eagerly, hungrily pushed him in inch by inch, working him towards her throat. Clare didn’t even feel like chewing: She was so famished, so starved, so utterly ravenous.
Her struggling prey gave Clare a positive tingle down in her loins. This was the kind of excitement that one didn’t find on the regular and the way she was punishing one of her captors by turning him into a meal was almost as orgasmic as her tremendous growth spurt earlier. She felt him sliding past her lips, fighting all the way down her throat, his feet eventually vanishing into her mouth as she slurped him like the pasta she had once been served in this prison.
Dr. Myers was promptly swallowed before everyone’s eyes. And as he was guided down Clare’s esophagus with the noisiest gulping noises human ears had heard, his last struggles could be seen in the neck bulge traveling down to its final destination. His screams stopped once no trace of him could be seen on Clare’s body any longer.
People’s eyes were filled with terror, yet silence had taken them over. Even Captain Gustav had to take a moment to lament the loss of the man, “Myers…”
With a hand over her stomach, Clare closed her eyes and licked her lips. The taste had been nothing to write home about, but having swallowed that human alive and feeling him drop inside of her stomach had triggered something in Clare. A new kind of instinct that until now had only been a nagging presence in the back of her head.
“Mmm!” Clare found herself giggling oddly enough. She was both metaphorically and literally free, looming over so many tasty new prey. When absorption began, Clare felt that pleasant tingle wrack her brain with the usual sensation of her body swelling out. “So filling!” she purred out, her stomach growling loud enough for the scientists and navy officers to hear now.
It then finally hit them all. Eating Dr. Myers had made her start growing again and she was looking at all of them like a potential next meal. Silence broke out into an uproar of screams and shouts as the scientists dropped everything they were doing and started stampeding towards the exit.
But the hungry mermaid couldn’t let all that delicious prey escape. She bent the metal floor down with her free hand which served to propel her across the spacious lab, the giantess hurtling towards the double doors to block passage with her tremendous bulk. There was no way she could ever go back to candy and cookies now. Human meat was so much more filling.
“Please, no…!” one of Dr. Myers’ assistants pleaded as she looked up past the giant blonde’s massive cleavage and at her hungry eyes.
“You’re the one that liked poking me with those painful shocking rods, aren’t you?” Clare giggled, delighting herself over the dismay in the scientist’s feminine face as she was lifted up. “You’re stockier than that horrible man, too,” the mermaid licked her lips, opening her mouth and swallowing the screaming woman up in one hearty gulp.
Thanks to her continuously enlarging form, Clare was able to swallow her new prey down with considerably less difficulty than her first one. And with the addition of this woman to her ever greedy guts, Clare gained even more height with which to dwarf all these terrified little humans. Seeing their often nonplussed or smug expressions reduced to the utter despair of confronting their own mortality was the perfect seasoning for an otherwise bland meal.
“We can’t escape! She’s going to eat us all…!” one of the remaining lab assistants screamed in a panic, “Captain Gustav, what do we do?!” he begged from the navy man who was no longer standing where he and his guards had been shooting from. “Cuh-captain…?”
During all the confusion, the navy official had finally come to terms with the limits of his power and authority. They had nothing in this facility capable of destroying the specimen outside of blowing all of them up, and even then that would not guarantee the mermaid perishing in the blast. He had his guards begin securing an exit route through a secret door in the back of the laboratory.
As Clare continued to feast with a third and fourth victim, she delighted herself in how easy it was getting to turn these humans into quick snacks to fuel her ascension. Already over 25ft. long and still lengthening, the bigger she got the faster she could add more men and women to her belly where they would be turned into more mass for her developing body.
With each new meal, her breasts seemed to balloon out further in relation to the rest of her frame. They were becoming almost too big on her otherwise slender and curvaceous build, her upper torso becoming utterly dominated by those excellently spherical yet squishy swells of mammary flesh. Clare didn’t seem to mind, completely absorbed by all the size she was gaining. Her tail was starting to encroach along the lab walls, her head rapidly approaching the ceiling.
With half of the scientific team devoured and her body closer to 30ft. long, Clare finally realized a notable lack of armed forces in the concurrence. “Where are you, little man?” the mermaid asked aloud as she scanned their surroundings, starting to grin with self-satisfaction as she taunted him: “Are you abandoning your own after watching them being devoured by the monster you created?” she laughed. And then she finally located them.
Behind numerous machines on the opposite corner of the lab, Captain Gustav and his guards had just finished unsealing and sliding a fake wall, having been using the giantess’ hunger as a distraction to buy themselves some time. Growling, Clare realized she had become far too large to spring herself through the air like before. Instead, she shifted and used her tail to smash the exit her massive body had been covering, ensuring no one would be able to escape as she began to crawl towards the escaping navy captain.
“No, don’t leave me behind, please!” one of the guards begged as the secret sliding door behind the removed wall panel snapped down, trapping him with the remaining scientists and one hungry giantess. The guard smashed his fist on the one-way reinforced looking glass and prepared to start shooting it out of desperation, but when he sensed Clare’s looming presence above him, he turned to face her with his gun drawn at her.
Lying down on her humongous chest, Clare rolled forwards and began to smirk as her gigantic face pushed closer and closer to the shaking security guard. “Please. Try it,” she encouraged sassily.
The guard pulled the trigger aiming at the mermaid’s right eye, wishing to inflict as much pain as he possibly could. But nothing came out other than a resounding, hollow click. His eyes glared at his piece, but before he got the chance to fish for a fresh magazine, Clare pressed him down under her massive lips.
“Firing blanks? Poor you.” Clare taunted the guard before she sucked him in whole, gulping him with hardly any effort. Her body rumbled even bigger, allowing her head to drag closer to the secret exit. “Leaving so soon? And just when the buffet was getting interesting…!”
“That bitch is insane,” Captain Gustav rested his back against the wall of the secret tunnel along with his two panting remaining guards. “She’s going to outgrow the lab at this rate.”
“But sir, we’re half a mile deep into the ocean…!” one of the guards spoke.
“All the more reason to catch your breath fast and hurry back topside, soldier. Come on, son,” he patted his guard on the shoulder and started trotting down the cramped, humid and dimly lit halls, choosing to ignore all those taunts and subsequent screams he kept hearing from the other side of that reinforced door. “We’re going to need bigger guns.”
With a sigh of disappointment, Clare pulled away from the door, annoyed that one of the prey that made her belly rumble the loudest had escaped her. She directed her frown to the one little human still hanging from her left hand. Clark looked positively diminutive after all of her meals.
The young, trembling student was having a hard time looking her in the eye, especially when he couldn’t separate his own eyes from her utterly massive cleavage. He hadn’t expected the mermaid to not only get utterly gigantic but also so impossibly busty! Each boob had to have been half again the size of her own head, which made each tit easily able to engulf him if she chose to. “I…” he babbled once he realized she was staring at him impatiently.
“You earned yourself a head start, boy,” Clare declared, simply, earning a confused and fearful stare. Ignoring him again, she turned towards the remaining humans and gave them a smile. There was nowhere to hide now that her giant tail and bulk occupied most of the lab to the point she had to coil around herself.
It’s time for seconds, everyone.
_ _
And with that, the hungry mermaid ate. And ate. And ate. With nowhere to go but her gullet, the scientists that had once researched this growing monstrosity became little more than component to her unstoppable expansion. And with every meal causing her to continue filling the laboratory out, Clare was soon far too large to remain trapped. Eating the remaining few all in one big swallow, the walls started to groan in protest, unable to contain the giantess any longer.
Highly pressured metal began to pop with bubbles outside in the ocean. Fissures started to branch out where the facility’s ludicrously sized occupant pushed the hardest. And soon enough, the metal ruptured, water starting to spill in. And with her monstrous strength able to bend and rend steel as if it was made out of flimsy paper mache, Clare’s arms inevitably shot out.
Freedom.
How? It defied all logic.
“That thing had to be almost 50ft. long, how are our sonars unable to detect it?!” Captain Gustav had taken everything on the top side of the facility in Key West to prepare their interception. Naval vehicles shored up at the coast and even terrestrial weapons had been mounted as backup, ready to blast anything before them. “Is every bloody sensor in this base broken?!”
“Suh-sir,” the technician in charge of surveillance could only stutter. He had just been told about the escaped test subject and he still was having trouble wrapping his mind around the idea of a giant woman, much less a giant man-eating mermaid. “All due respect, the sensors are all working fine. But there seems to be magnetic interference.”
“Then work around it, son!” Captain Gustav barked out angrily, “We… I just lost a priceless and highly dangerous specimen, and we must get it back and contain it at all costs. Bloody hell!” The tall man couldn’t hold his frustration back any longer. His first instinct was to prepare for battle with the immensely grown sea monster, but it hadn’t come up to attack them yet. With sensors the way they were, Gustav could only appease his anxiety by looking out with a pair of hi-tech binoculars, scanning for any disturbance in the waves ahead of them that might indicate an approach by their quarry.
“Sir,” the voice of one of the seals in charge of surveying the coast for any sightings of the specimen got the navy captain’s attention.
“Lieutenant, any sightings?” Gustav asked without taking his eyes off the sea.
“No, sir. But we found someone at the beach…”
When Gustav turned to look at his lieutenant he almost dropped his binoculars. The armed soldier had brought a familiar civilian in tow. Still dripping with saltwater and missing his glasses, Clark was almost unrecognizable.
“It’s you, lad…” the Captain had mixed feelings about the kid being there, but he couldn’t hide his relief seeing him unharmed. “How did you escape it?”
Clark was still shivering when one of the seals brought a towel to put around him, “I didn’t. Clare let me go. I nearly drowned, I’m not even sure how I didn’t immediately die when the water started rushing in…”
“It… it let you go? It ate everyone else, didn’t it?” Gustav grunted, making Clark frown and ball his hands into fists.
“You…” the exhausted student was coughing and hacking every few words, “Gah… you abandoned everyone.”
“I had to get away,” Gustav responded firmly, “Lad, there was nothing I could do back there. I had to come prepare for the fight! Where is it? Where did the beast go?! Is it coming for us?”
Without the energy to argue, Clark only let out a gasp before his legs gave away and he dropped to his rump. He waved and shook his head dismissively to the soldier trying to help him up. After all he had been through all he wanted to do was sit down. “She swam away. Told me she was giving us a head start…”
“A head start?” Gustav repeated in confusion as the rest of his men began to whisper and murmur amongst themselves.
Clark looked at the captain with sunken eyes that seemed to be trying hard to glare. “She said she was still hungry, but was giving us time to prepare. And she told me to tell the ‘tall man’ to ‘come and try catching me again’.”
Captain Gustav’s eyes were suddenly ten shades darker. His stiff lips subtly twitching, he remained eerily quiet as he walked towards the end of the wharf. “Sir?” his lieutenant left the shivering, sullen kid to join his superior. “What will we do?”
“We’ve no choice, lieutenant,” Gustav grumbled out. “If that beast wants me to hunt it like the whale it’s become, I will drive a giant harpoon through its heart, if it even has one, myself.”
Something in Clare’s mind snapped. Perhaps it had been the electrocution which had triggered the start of her enormous and ongoing growth spurt, or maybe it could have been attributed to her debilitating, extended starvation. But one thing was clear enough: There was only one thing in her head now. To feed.
With an ocean to explore and multitudes of varied and readily available prey to hunt down, Clare ignored the possibility to double back for a scarce few escaped prey on the beachside. The moment the first school of fish was swallowed into her inhaling mouth she knew she would never allow herself to go hungry again. Fish, mollusks, sea mammals; nothing could escape this new apex predator that had invaded their ecosystem. Not even seaweed was spared, as anything with nutritional value was target to be assimilated and converted into more mass for her. If Clare couldn’t suck it into her mouth, she would tear it from wherever it was nailed down before ramming it down her awaiting gullet.
The idea of consuming and enlarging had become such an all-important tenet in the giant creature’s brain that she became obsessed with the instantaneous gratification that the entire process granted her. All the tens of thousands of calories so desperately ingested were almost instantly used to add more and more inches to her already gigantic frame. With those inches mounting together into feet of height, she was soon on the path to becoming larger than any whale.
Try as they might, the navy hunting her down could not intercept Clare. Even when she wasn’t consciously trying to evade them, Clare’s enhanced body no longer had the spatial constraints of being imprisoned within a small pen in the underwater facility. She could now propel her gigantic body through the ocean, putting the world’s fastest submersible to shame. Although they were hunting a quarry that continuously got harder to hide by virtue of her expansion, the sea was still much too vast for them to successfully find her with the magnetic interference.
Prey in the first tier of the ocean floor was soon starting to become too scarce, unable win out against the mermaid’s gluttony. With most oceanic life diving into the abyss in an act of self-preservation, Clare eventually found herself in the dark depths where she had been first found in this world. There her eyes immediately adjusted to the darkness, the blue of her irises turning almost crystalline as electricity crackled around her. She could now see better than any of the abyssal creatures that made their home where humans could hardly survive without their toys.
Clare’s eat-a-thon took a small pause as she floated within that empty underwater space. Her hand reached out grasping at seemingly nothing at all. She began to huff, as if convinced that something was wrong. “It’s not enough…” bubbles floated out past her supple lips.
And then, multiple sets of eyes began glowing even deeper down below: Where black became blacker, where all of her prey from above the abyss had escaped to. Those sharp stares belonged to gigantic predators which had turned all those fish, even panicked sharks swimming for their life, into mere snacks. They were the rulers of the deep abyss.
With a hand on her tingling cheeks, Clare bit one of her fingertips, meeting the ravenous beasts’ gaze with her very own. Only Clare’s pretty face was split by a wicked grin. “…but it’ll soon be,” she told herself in her mind before boldly swimming downwards.
Eating had never felt so good for Clare. There was simply no worry about ever getting fat. All of the calories from consuming her prey, no matter how big or numerous, worked towards rewarding her with increased size and strength. In no time at all, she had surpassed a hundred of feet in length. Her gargantuan tail slithering through the murky waters had become powerful enough to disrupt currents and warn once uncontested predators that the apex hunter was after them.
Try as they might to flee from her, to use their environment to camouflage or the terrain to hide, Clare invariably found these creatures. She had something they could not compete with: Her electro-vision which had refined to the point she could detect and even track the minimal voltage all living creatures generated. In no time at all, the dangerous abyssal depths had turned into her buffet.
Where do you think you are going, little morsels? You are all mine , hehe! Clare was in utter bliss. Shoving smaller deep-sea monsters into her mouth, slurping gargantuan long beasts in as if they were noodles, cramming entire groups of smaller creatures unfortunate enough to meet with her hands; all of it making her swell ever larger, even bustier, ever more mind-bendingly strong and capable of a hunter: Clare had turned herself into the uncontested queen of the abyss.
But that, of course, had not been enough for the gigantic mermaid. Her plans didn’t involve her descending further into the planet’s most impenetrable depths. No, she still required something from the world above and she licked her lips to the thought of going back to expressive human meat. And they also had something else she could probably use.
The Navy was running out of options. Their hunt was going nowhere. Captain Gustav and his team had yet to return to land. Tensions were running high between headquarters and high command. After two days of getting absolutely no leads on their escaped test subject, something came to light which brought a shiver to all those in command.
Numerous fishing villages had been reporting the same disaster. Their already diminished yields were now under direct threat by a monster which had emerged from the sea. The never before seen creature apparently took the shape of an amazingly well-endowed young blonde who would lift the fishing boats right out of the water and tilt the small civilian vessels towards her mouth as if she was shaking popcorn out of a bag, eating everything on board including the people if they had been unfortunate enough to miss jumping off.
Some tales included eyewitness reports of the monster biting into some of the fishing boats, tearing them apart and swallowing them down once everything they had to offer had already been consumed. She would not come into the mainland, for she sported the lower body of a fish, but if she found anyone within arms’ reach she would swipe them up and eat them without hesitation as well. The attacks only stopped once she no longer had anything within range to eat.
“She’s starting to eat vessels now?!”
“Every account seems to differ on the mermaid’s size. Jesus Christ… Has she been growing all this time?!”
“Can we even fight something that keeps getting larger and more dangerous? We can’t even effectively track her!”
Captain Gustav’s lieutenants and analysts couldn’t have been fuller of worry. Their state-of-the-art battleship which counted with marine support from deep submersible assault vehicles suddenly started to feel lacking. With the numbers from each fishing village reporting the creature to be from 120ft. long all the way to 150, it was starting to feel less like a whale hunt and more the pursuit of a leviathan.
“We can’t give up, men!” Gustav was under the most pressure by the majors, who were being in turn being pressured by the admirals themselves now that their escaped specimen was quickly becoming a public sensation; an inevitably sensational blunder by the hand of the US Navy, in other words. And yet the Captain’s composure was almost uncannily steely. “This beast is single-minded. It must have run out of food underwater, so it naturally wants ours. That gives us knowledge. It gives us an advantage!”
“She wants to eat us all, Captain. She ate all those researchers and only let that kid go to taunt us. Can’t you see she’s toying with us? There is no way to win this…”
Gustav’s widely-open eyes practically stared daggers at his objecting lieutenant. The bags under his eyes were prominent and darker than his skin. None of them had slept in two whole days. “This entire coast is our battleground, the seas separating two sub-continents, soldier! We are at war right now. It is no longer about saving face. I might be punished for my mistakes, but civilian lives are at stake now. And we will end this bloody threat even if we have to blow it to smithereens until no trace of it remains. Do I make myself clear?”
“…sir!” the cries of dutiful men reverberated within the bridge of that cruiser.
We will be ready when it next appears.
The seas had been calm for only a few days, but after all those rumors of man-eating monster from the depths, it had been certainly not been long enough for merchant vessels to be given the pass for voyage. The recent coastal attacks had not only dealt blows to local economies but also hurt maritime trade and deliveries.
That didn’t sit right with some merchants. Especially those who had to transport highly luxurious imported foods under threats from the richer families from the mainland. Either way, it would take a fool or someone desperate to leave port for the cordoned area.
“I-I’m still not sure about this, George.”
“Relax, Kenny.”
Ken couldn’t relax, the drugs and his anxiety were playing him foul. “I-I’m pretty sure that guy back at the wharf was a narc. He uh- he might- he might be snitching on us right now, y’know.”
“Kenny, relax,” George repeated, starting to regret having brought his brother-in-law with him. “We paid good money to the polis to look the other way.”
“We… what if we’re being tracked by some P.I. that thinks we’re suspicious, huh?” Ken was already looking around the bridge of their freighter, “We might be bugged already.”
“Kenny, fuck’s sake. I’ve explained it to ya before. This is below Panamax. Nobody’s gonna bat a fuckin’ eyelash over a Feeder container ship,” George grumbled. He thought he’d have an easy time with his contraband now that the cordoned off route was free from most scrutiny, but his jumpy crewmate was starting to get on his nerves.
“Buh-but what if we run into the monster?” Ken turned to George with a whimper, “Ooooh, I knew this was a bad idea. Why did I tell Linda I’d come with you…?”
“’cuz you’re a fuckin’ marica, Kenny,” George snapped at his brother-in-law, “Always wanting to prove you’re a man even though you can’t stomach a simple delivery. And what’s with what stupid tabloid crap about the monster? It’s just the gringos up North making shit up so they can control ‘n regulate all the trade routes. Bunch of assholes. ‘least they’re all cleared out, I guess...”
“Duh-doesn’t that mean it’s serious then, George?” Ken brought up a good point, but before George could respond, their ship began violently shaking before suddenly grinding to a stop. Ken practically jumped in place. “Gah! I knew it…! We’re doomed!”
“Cálmate, will ya?” George let go of the steering wheel after a huff, “Damn faulty generator must be acting up. Been meaning to replace the hunk-a-junk… I’ll go check it out, you wait here. And don’t touch shit, ¿entiendes? Hey, sit your ass down and try to breathe in and out, you’re way too fuckin’ high right now.”
Ken rapidly nodded and sat down on one of the swiveling chairs as his gruff brother-in-law left, trying to exercise with his breathing just as he had been told in order to calm down. With the ship shaking again, Ken was prompted to shut his eyes and try even harder to clear his head. “Just a power failure. George’s a really good electrician, he’ll have us out of this fix in a…” he paused, another violent shake making one of his eyes open, “…in a…” he stammered, second eye joining the other one bulging.
The view across from the bridge had been replaced with a sight even a teen drugged out of their head could have hardly come up with. Instead of the distant land that was their destination, all Ken could see was two of the largest eyes he had ever beheld staring back at him. Icy blue irises as cold as a blizzard looked like massive pools one could sink into. But those eyes didn’t belong on the countenance of any old reptilian or overgrown sea squid like in the movies. No, that fair skinned, blonde head belonged to a gorgeous smiling woman. A woman of utterly massive proportions.
And she was the real reason their container ship would no longer move forwards.
With a new human toy found, Clare decided to emerge halfway above water level. She was now over two hundred feet long, her shadow casting over that puny looking vessel. Its crew must have come out to shout and scream at her because she could clearly hear them, but thanks to her voluminous rack it was nearly impossible to properly see most of the ship below her.
For once, Clare found herself giggling a little. “They’ve grown again, I see…” she told herself, absentmindedly reaching up to cup one of her breasts with casually holding the entire container ship in place with pressure from one of her index fingers. Indeed, the giantess’ ongoing growth had not only continued increasing her power, but it seemed to have had an effect on her already impressive curves. With the way the soft, squishy flesh overflowed her hand and forearm, she could estimate each of her boobs had to have become at least twice the size of her own head. Ignoring the pleas and shouts of the crew of humans below, she mused out loud, ensuring they could hear her: “I think I could sink this vessel with my tits alone right now…” she sang.
“A gi-gi-gi-giant woman…” Ken stuttered after a panicked George had dashed back in, almost kicking the door open and nearly tearing the steering wheel off. “G-George, please tell me you’re seeing this, a giant breasted woman is talking about sinking us with her…”
“I can see the giant fucking tits, Kenny, puta madre…!” George yelped, grunting as he uselessly tried turning the steering wheel again, “Help me turn this fucking thing! Gah! She’s got us pinned down with just one finger on the nose of the bridge…!”
Clare seemed to be in a playful mood. “I don’t think I want to sink you just yet,” she purred down, letting go of her breast which bounced and rocked the other, her chest jostling for a long moment as she brought her hand underneath the container ship. With her immense strength and size, the freighter left the water and was lifted several dozen feet into the air, inevitably used to stop the jiggling of those house-sized mammaries as the giantess curled the whole freighter against her chest. “Mmm, I smell something good in those little boxes,” she told the crew hanging on for dear life whether it was their tilted vessel or her skin in the case of the sailors that had been shaken off-ship.
What have you brought me, you little sea fleas…?
_ _
The little freighter had not been built with mid-air suspension in mind. At the angle the boat had been tilted its many containers began sliding across the already humid deck, support cables failing to hold down all that weight. Briefly interrupting her scanning eyes, Clare moaned when the cables closest to her superlative bust smacked her. “Mmpphh…” her cheeks puffed out after the fact, looking slightly annoyed as she murmured, “…with great size comes great sensitivity.”
George, Ken and the rest of the on-board crew were doing what they could against the constantly shifting environment they were in. To the ship captain and his extra-terrified passenger, it was almost like gravity was constantly shifting inside the bridge. Those on the outside ended either falling overboard or into the soft, squishy depths of the giantess’ vast cleavage.
Shifting her left arm underneath the vessel, Clare curiously dipped her hand down to grab one of the containers. She ignored those that didn’t seem to have anything of interest and let them fall overboard, focused on the one box which seemed to hold living things according to her electro-vision. “Mmm, these seem to be exotic animals,” she smiled, twisting the top of the container by pinching one of the corners between her thumb and index really hard. “How delicious…”
Before the crew’s eyes, the mermaid had popped open a reinforced steel container for transporting special cattle by twisting it like a carton of milk and was already bringing it up towards her open mouth to feast. Tongue expectantly rolling out to welcome her meal, Clare shook the container to the mixed cacophony of onomatopoeias which, although not half as satisfying as the terrified whimpers of those tiny humans below, tickled her taste buds with anticipation. And once her mouth was full of squirming prey she swallowed all twenty-two imported specimens in two mighty gulps and hurled the empty cage over her shoulder.
“She ate all of those beasts… That was enough meat for months!”
“Just like that! Look at her discarding that container like it’s a box of Chinese!”
“How is the ship still rocking this bad?!”
“It’s not the ship it’s… it’s her!”
It was all the humans could do to remain coherent throughout their unexpected spectacular cleavage-on-boat voyage. What broke them was the moment they realized the impossibly large Clare was starting to visibly enlarge before their eyes.
Vibrations coming from her growing body not only stirred the ship but also the waters surrounding her waist. Swelling chest pillows crashed into the poor vessel, making metal bend and groan in protest at the ever increasing pressure. And all the while, the colossal blonde moaned with that innocent, high-pitched near-angelical tone. The process which was so terrifying to the crew of that small Feeder-class freighter had become standard to Clare. And with the additional containers so neatly nestled down against her cleavage, the hungry mermaid could only look forwards to more.
Fishing a red container from between her jostling mammaries, Clare popped it open even easier than the cattle container. What she saw inside made her smile as a familiar scent wafted up: “I haven’t had candy in a while!” she declared, tossing literal tons of bundled up chocolate, wrappers and all, down her awaiting mouth. Like this, she worked through every piece of cargo, mindlessly consuming the containers and growing larger until her appetite had been whet so thoroughly she no longer cared to crack the metal boxes open.
Desperate and gluttonous as always, Clare bit into her treats the same way as she would bite into the plastic wrapping bag for cookies. Everything about her, even her pearly white teeth, had become capable of untold levels of damage, so tearing metal apart was simplicity itself. It was like she was eating a stuffed piece of confectionary with the containers playing the role of hard-shell candy holding even more treats inside.
Meat, sugar, fat, bone, plastic, metal- it didn’t matter anymore; the mermaid could eat it and her stomach would melt it all down and generate energy and mass for her body to nurture with. Already fifty feet taller, Clare realized she still hadn’t had enough. With only a few containers left though, she finally started lifting the ship of her bosom and viciously tore into the vehicle, biting whole chunks out of the freighter for her to satisfy her seemingly endless cravings with.
The screams of the maritime ship’s crew hardly could reach Clare anymore. At this size difference they were barely garnishes for her much larger meal. “So hungry…!” Clare moaned between bites, eyes closed as she enjoyed indulging in feeding and growing more and more. With the mass of the freighter and most of the men crewing it added to her, she only swelled larger; her body pushing out to 260ft., 270ft., 280, 290… But soon, like with every other meal, Clare had gone through all of it and was only left with the mess above her titanic shelf of a chest.
Finally half-way opening her eyes, she glanced down to confirm a number of containers had slid off the ship at the start of her feast and were indeed lodged between her tits. With both hands free, Clare began to lean her head down as her palms pushed her monumental mammaries up, bunching all that food for her to polish off the surface of her breasts as if she was someone licking the crumbs off their plate. Her teeth sank into the containers, popping them open like hard candy, and her tongue lapped up every single last thing, be it junk or straggling cleavage-riding humans, into her mouth. With another loud moan, Clare shivered all over and finally swelled into three hundred feet tall; her tail tip lashing out into the surface to wag and slap the waves in ecstasy. She was so huge, so utterly massive! The largest creature of the sea to ever exist!
And yet it was impossible for Clare to stop craving for more. All those experiments back at the facility, all that radiation blasting her cells every single day of her confinement; she wasn’t the same weak little mermaid that had woken up in the depths of the human world’s ocean anymore. Her stomach continued to rumble, making its demands loud and clear. Clare knew she would have to show every last human what a beautiful, living disaster looked like.
A sinister smirk curled the giant mermaid’s luscious lips when she began to sense strong electrical signals rapidly approaching from multiple directions around her. “Looks like they finally caught up,” she said to herself, letting go of those breasts which heavily slapped against her chest and a good amount of her upper torso, jiggling for a few moments before settling down. Clare casually suckled at her fingers as one of those presences, the only one which was above water, entered her regular visual range.
An echoing but familiar voice filled the seas, easily reaching Clare’s ears. “We finally meet again, monster!”
With the tip of her tail hiding underwater and her voluminous upper body submerging down, the mermaid looked like a massive woman with two floating, half-way sunk squishy mountains attached to her. Before she could swim towards the battle cruiser for long however, Captain Gustav’s amplified voice made her flinch.
“Stop right there!” the Navy captain ordered, “You’ve grown even larger, I see. I imagine even now you think humanity is nothing but a snack for you. But you listen to me, and you listen good, fish-woman. Our species is nothing if not resilient. We’ve been preparing for threats like yours for a long time.”
As she let the captain speak, Clare could tell the other, smaller yet more numerous presences underwater seemed to be intensifying. Their electrical output appeared to be rising, which made her smile. Foolish humans, she thought.
“I see that smug smirk from here,” Captain Gustav continued, “But you can wipe it off your face, beast. The Admiral of the U.S. Navy has authorized the use of our entire naval might against you. You can sense them around you by now, can’t you? There are currently sixteen fully-armed nuclear submarines aiming their high-yield weapons at you from a safe range. The trident missiles they’re equipped with are capable of unleashing untold amount of destruction. Their payload will not only decimate you, it’ll burn you away until not one cell remains. So I will make this short: This is not a negotiation. You have one chance and only once chance at standing down. If I ever so much as see you twitch in a way I don’t like…”
Clare didn’t twitch. She began to submerge without taunt or rebuttal, eager to see the submarines which were producing such a high energy output. The moment this happened however, multiple long-distance objects started lighting up all at once.
“FIRE!” Gustav angrily shouted into his radio, finally deciding that giant was not worth allowed to live anymore. Before the creature could make any significant distance by swimming, a barrage of underwater projectiles torpedoed after her from virtually every direction at once. With the first impact, superheated explosions vaporized water, causing everyone atop the battlecruiser to be able to observe from a safe distance at how the once clear ocean waters stirred and gushed out into the air like a gargantuan geyser. Not wishing to chance it, Gustav ordered everything to be unleashed onto their target, making good on his promise to blow everything about her up to smithereens.
Those brutal blasts of nuclear-powered weapons released such immense shockwaves they shook the shallows and caused small scale earthquakes to rattle the coasts on either side of the sea. Just one of those missiles was capable of erasing almost a million human lives in the blink of an eye, and each of those submarines had fired four double-shots. Anything and everything around their target would be hopelessly incinerated in nuclear fire.
When it was all said and done, with the decimation of the shallow ocean floor and its ecosystem, the Navy could finally rest easy. Their enemy had been conquered by the pinnacle of human technological advancement, a seemingly hopeless threat finally removed for their species to continue thriving as at the top of the food chain. The only thing that put them at ease was that they were all fortunate this had not been an on-land threat, for this much destructive power would have been capable of destroying a large portion of the of the planet. The sea would eventually recover.
Captain Gustav was about to let their superiors know via radio that their problems were finally over when a panicked voice rang out in the battlecruiser’s bridge. It was one of the submarine pilots begging for help. As the analysts of the crew scrambled to find out what was going on, a heavy, dense ball made of iron seemed to have sunk into the pit of their Captain’s stomach. Dread filled the room as they all heard an electrical-crackle through the radio before a feminine voice started to echo, deafening the submarine’s crew’s cries for help.
Mmm. What is this delicious looking blue thing…?
The Navy had failed. The giant mermaid had proved hopelessly invulnerable to their best and strongest weaponry. What was worse: She had torn into one of their sixteen submarines like it was some sort of toy!
Clare had little idea of what a catastrophic amount of damage she had just absorbed by virtue of her natural evolution. Each and every explosion on her colossal form had hardly felt like a quick sting that didn’t so much as make her flinch as she swam towards those glowing underwater human transports.
These submarines were smaller than the carrier full of goodies she had just devoured, yet something about their color drew her in and made her belly growl. She found out just what their mysterious appeal was when she grabbed one before it could escape her and split it in two, exposing the nuclear reactor powering them. The unstable blue glow inside of the sub made Clare’s eyes light up with anticipation and her mouth salivate. As if she was sucking the meat from a mussel, she pressed the submarine half to her mouth and instantly devoured the reactor, pulling it inside.
Almost instantly, Clare felt a new sensation at her middle. With the core being rapidly digested by her gastric juices just like anything else she ate, nuclear energy started releasing out into her body, further stimulating her upgraded cells and inviting new changes in her body. Of course, this level of energy caused the mermaid to explode with growth, causing her to experience growth in violent spurts. This was one of the changes that could immediately be observed in Clare. However, the rest of them were not as obvious. And this was just one of sixteen powerful snacks.
“This isn’t happening! Please tell me this isn’t happening!”
“She ate a nuclear submarine! What are we going to do?!”
“She’s only going to get stronger if this keeps up, go! Tell them to go!”
“Captain, Captain please snap out of it! Guh-get me the Admiral, we need advice…!”
Panic arose in the battlecruiser when they all realized their assault had not only been ineffectual but their vessels of war had become a way for their enemy to gain power. Although the electromagnetic interference made it impossible for their sensors to keep proper track of Clare, they didn’t need their fancy technology to see that incredibly long, sinuous and top-heavy form growing ever longer and increasingly visible underwater. She seemed to be growing fifty feet longer with every nuclear submarine she caught and devoured.
“Goddamnit! Why aren’t they retreating?!”
“Lieutenant, look!”
“This can’t be, the subs… they’re driving towards her?!”
“They’re not in control! The subs are being disabled as she gets close, she’s… she’s shocking them?!”
“Oh God no. Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ… didn’t they say radiation is what changed her in the first place…?”
And now radiation is changing her again, giving her more powers…!
Indeed. Clare’s hunting capabilities were rapidly evolving. At first, her eyes lit up with electricity arcing away. When the second submarine vehicle had attempted to escape her and her hand was too far from it to capture it, her willpower was enough to cause an electrical current to shoot out from her fingertips, disabling the nuclear sub for her to be able to consume it. With each reactor that fell prey to her, Clare felt herself becoming stronger in addition to bigger. She could control electricity now, not merely sense it. And with even more power filling her, the submarines could easily be drawn to her by merely wishing it so. For once in her life, the prey was automatically swimming into her mouth.
In less than fifteen minutes, the entire squadron of nuclear subs had been converted to mass and their radioactive energy absorbed to fuel the mermaid’s new mutations. Over a thousand feet tall, she emerged out before the battlecruiser with breasts that looked like literal flesh mountains about to crash into the ship from the side.
“Is the little man there?” Clare giggled as she stretched her arms over her head, tits jostling as she taunted the panicked little germs below her with the sway of her deliciously thick, round chest. “Witness me,” she said, her feminine voice rocking the waves as it echoed across the sea, “Witness your monster as it lays waste to everything your kind has achieved. You, your world…” she lifted the cruiser off the sea as easily as she had lifted the container ship from earlier, bringing it to eye level with her, “…and everything you know will…” she paused, feeling a hefty amount of gurgling inside of her stomach. A strange, unfamiliar feeling since Clare had never ever felt her belly aching even when she had started devouring matter which traditionally was not considered edible.
Her speech interrupted, Clare’s grip on the battlecruiser was suddenly shaky and although she had been planning to devour it much like anything else, her grip loosened up and the giant ship slipped off. The remaining navy officers could do little more than scream with hopeless abandon as their cruiser was dropped and ended crashing into Clare’s cleavage, where it exploded for very little harmful effect on the retching giantess. The short-lived battle was finally over.
“Urk…” the blonde put her arms around her stomach, suddenly feeling ill. Had she truly eaten too much? Clare found herself submerging back into the water, floating curling up while hoping for the sudden cramps to go away. And she was completely unaware whether it had been her wish or her body had finally processed that ill feeling, but soon the discomfort turned into relief. “I’m feeling… feeling so hot all of a sudden…” she panted underwater, starting to moan as her loins became inflamed with a sudden itch followed by the feeling of something stretching her from within.
Clare’s moans turned to loud bellows as the sensation escalated in intensity, her mermaid tail violently thrashing about, curling above her and slapping massive waves above in the surface. All she could do was thinking of pushing out whatever was stretching her this much. But beyond the initial pain and discomfort, it now merely represented a challenge; a challenge which she very much wanted to overcome so that she could go back to eating and terrorizing these pathetic little humans.
And then, with an underwater pop, the first thing pushed out. Followed by a second and a third. And with much more to come, Clare felt each consecutive object ejected with far more ease than the one before it. At one point it actually became a pleasurable sensation, the relief of having suddenly felt burdened and now unburdened for immediate gratification. With her eyes rolling up and her tongue hanging out, the mermaid found herself floating back up to the surface, emerging belly up on the ocean’s surface. The last thing Clare saw before physical exhaustion finally claimed her was a number of translucent spheres the size of her fist floating up to gather around her.
A while later, Clare’s eyes opened to a number of voices calling out to her. Each voice sounded exactly the same, and strikingly familiar. The words they spoke seemed to be gibberish but there was no way Clare could deny the gentle tone carrying them.
It was her own voice.
_ _
The giantess rocked and gradually sank her lower body into the sea, gigantic breasts floating up along her torso as she adjusted vertically. With her groggy blue eyes blinking several times, her blurred vision cleared and she finally glanced down at the sea to see one breath-taking sight. Clare was exchanging stares with herself. And it wasn’t just a reflection on the water below her: The fellow blonde mermaid and her dozens of lookalike sisters were far too small when compared to Clare to be a product of mirror images. All of them were the exact same height, with Clare judging them to be about a tenth of her size.
One could have argued that the radiation from all those reactors she had devoured had done away with the giantess’ mind, but when Clare reached down to scoop one of the smaller giantesses off the water, she got a surprised whimper from the chosen one. “Who are you?” Clare asked the mermaid hanging from her fingers.
“I’m Clare!” the little mermaid responded, calming down once it had gotten easier to cling to the much bigger one.
Clare understandably frowned at the answer to her question. “I’m Clare. You can’t be…” she immediately dropped the pretense of arguing with the small doppelganger and looked down at the rest, “Are you all also Clare?”
“I am!”
“I’m Clare!”
“I’m Clare, too!”
It was like being stuck in an echo chamber, hearing her own voice speaking over and over. The largest Clare stopped them with a command. “Be quiet! How… Where did you…?” she was about to ask, when her brain made the connection after finding all the little mermaids where all those floating objects that had come out of her had been before she had fallen asleep. “You all came out of me. But you’re not my daughters per se, you’re…”
Clare!
The cry in unison was loud and conglomerated enough for it to carry wind through the seas. Although Clare had a deeply confused expression owed to the impossibility of what she was witnessing, she could no longer contain her excitement. “When you get down to it, I must have developed the ability to copy myself…” the thousand feet tall giantess giggled, “And I bet I can make more if I keep feeding. An army of me to help me take over this world…” Clare looked down at her excited, smaller versions. They all broke out into an uproar of happiness, as if sharing the mental image she was drawing for herself. The humans and their world would feed them and their ever-lasting appetite.
And the 100ft. tall mermaids all agreed with the one that was ten times larger. They were all Clare, after all.
The entire planet would belong to Clare.
It didn’t take long for the news in every single media outlet to reveal the existence of the marine threat. Try as it did, the government eventually became unable to keep Clare under wraps. The gorgeous, voluptuous blonde mermaid of unbelievable size became a viral sensation within a day after the Navy’s defeat in the west Atlantic.
At first, her mere existence was doubted but the public had no choice but to come to terms with Clare once she started making appearances at multiple coasts in the American continent, while faraway lands such as Europe and Africa received their visits a day later. The creature was described as a “myth come to life” by almost every single newscaster and amateur photographer that covered the story. A lady the size of a blue whale with a tail like a fish. Multiple ladies, in fact, when everybody realized she had appeared on many places at the same time.
Captivated, the civilians, press and authorities of every coastal city in the world came to welcome these towering mermaids who were happy to greet them and answer most of their superficial questions. Some were immediately crowned as ancient deities, others turned into touristic attractions, while the rest were immediately interviewed by those curious to learn of the mysterious giantesses’ origin. But amicability only lasted until enough individual humans had gathered in one place.
The mermaids’ plan was to lure in as many people as they could within arms’ reach. Having inherited all of the prime Clare’s characteristics, it took all of their willpower to ignore the ever-present void within their stomach demanding more food. Once they judged their potential buffet was sufficiently packed, whole groups of humans were captured and summarily devoured.
When the mermaids’ fans and doubters realized the true nature of those angel-faced sea bombshells, only a scant few had the chance to escape their voracious ire. Although not of unlimited range, the girls possessed the ability to telekinetically lift prey too far away from their grip and into the air only to be brought to their open mouths.
Even if authorities or other concerned groups reacted with firearms and explosives, the mermaids’ skin and scales appeared to be entirely invulnerable to their various arsenals. Even if these flimsy attacks happened to bother some of the mermaids, their telekinesis wasn’t the only ability they possessed. When their eyes started crackling with energy, electricity jolted their aggressors with just enough voltage to disable them. Armed with this and their size advantages, entire beaches were consumed all over the world in a matter of minutes.
And to the dismay of those watching the horror safely from their mainland homes, they witnessed the terrifying sight of those super-powered man-eating monsters growing ever larger with every new bundle of victims they ate. Militaries from various countries were ready to let loose their nuclear weaponry upon these big-breasted villains to stop them for good, but once video footage of the battle in the west Atlantic and its unintended consequence was shared with them, a worldwide ban on ballistics was put into effect. They could not risk strengthening their enemy further.
Within only a scant few days, the staggering worldwide casualties and the inability to stop those beach-side threats had forced every government to declare a state of permanent emergency. Evacuations proceeded to remove every human being from the coast cities, as the only recourse until a new plan could be devised was to starve the monsters in hopes of buying themselves time.
But that only worked for one week. While her ‘daughters’ fed and worked to catch up with Clare’s size, she descended once more into the abyss. The ocean depths trembled with the thousands of feet tall mermaid who continued to feed upon the largest of the large creatures she could find. Various creatures from depths no human had ever reached, sea monsters that would have been too horrible for the mind to comprehend became little more than snacks for Clare who would devour them, grow larger from their mass and used whatever energy was left to continue releasing more and more copies of herself into the world above.
_More. More. More. _
Clare could not stop. Her ambitions and her vices had become one and the same, and that in turn fueled the behavior of her duplicates conquering the continental coasts. She greedily devoured, and everything that ended up in her stomach was processed by her inhuman cells to further her ascension, to develop her amazing power further until she felt it would go no higher. And once she felt ready, once every menace that used to make the very bottom of the darkness within the deepest void had been given its new purpose as mass for her colossal form, Clare finally decided to bid good-bye to a barren ocean.
It was time for her to put her final plan into action.
One day, the mermaids all left the empty beaches and coasts they had come to claim as their territory. Depending on how much they had fed, they now ranged from 200ft. at the smallest and 860ft. tall at the largest. Regardless of how big they had become, as if something had called them away the giantesses all seemed to decide to push themselves away from their coasts and dip back into the ocean they had come from. As confused and scared as they were, humanity collectively let out a sigh of relief.
Relief did not last. For hours after the last mermaid had retreated into the seas, satellite images of the waters of the rivers separating New Jersey and New York stirring violently became the new popular source of concern. The island of Manhattan saw an utterly mind-blowing sight when Clare, now over half a mile long, emerged from the seas feeding into the massive metropolis and began making her advance into mainland through the shallows, slithering forth like a biblically huge snake.
The city and its surroundings felt the presence of that mermaid nearly instantly. With water being displaced by her sheer bulk, waves violently crashed into the coasts and decimated everything in their way. As bridges and their supports easily snapped and crumbled against her monstrous size, smaller islands were utterly buried under the soft yet no less outrageous weight of Clare’s humongous breasts. The Statue of Liberty overlooking once peaceful bays disappearing under giant bust flesh like an afterthought when Clare parked the immensity of her feminine attributes at the tip of lower Manhattan. Clare looked like she was using the rivers and its surrounding landmass as a mattress to lie her hugeness down on.
Drones with cameras caught the encroachment from various angles, with the ones trailing behind finding out the smaller Clares had not vanished from the face of the Earth so much as had gathered behind their natural leader. Although the rest of the mermaids were gigantic in their own right they all looked small when compared to the main one.
When Clare got bored of crushing an abandoned warehouse under her index finger, she finally lifted her blue eyes over the New York and rested her chin upon a palm, playfully chewing on a fingernail. The role of legs kicking whimsically behind her was filled by her massive fish tail squirming with barely bated anticipation.
I know you can all see me.
Clare’s voice reached out far and wide. She seemed to be ignoring the hundreds of drones taking footage of her arrival at one of the largest cities in the world, but it was impossible for anything with an electrical charge to escape her perception at this point.
I know you can all hear me.
She began to giggle. “And I know you all think you’re safe as long as you don’t get close to the sea. But what you don’t know…” she paused, closing her eyes and letting out a sigh of relief. In the next moment her eyelids became covered in light, the light intensifying until it began to overflow and cover the entirety of her eyes, “…is that my reach improves with every passing day.”
It made no difference to the witnesses whether her eyes reopened or not because in the next second, the white light turned blue and it shot out of Clare in the form of twin laser beams. Extending for dozens of miles ahead of Clare, the blue lasers cut through everything in their way. Wood, glass, concrete, metal; it didn’t matter. With almost surgical precision the tallest buildings were bisected with one turn of her head.
People everywhere were forced to watch as the mermaid looked down and began to slowly crane her neck back up, guiding her powerful laser sight to wipe out the entire bay area, evaporating moisture and incinerating everything in its way. Lower Manhattan was suddenly in flames.
Is this enough?
Clare could only smirk as she blinked her eyes, returning them to normal and making the beams disperse. Before she could get any form of answer, Clare straightened her upper body along the burning coast and licked her lips, a bit of saliva trickling down into the beach and burning through the scorched sand, eating through it like acid.
With a glance to her right, Clare opened her mouth and breathed out, generating a cloud of blue-tinted smoke which advanced through the urban areas on the other side of the river; the area her laser had spared. The effects of that noxious cloud were clear: One after another, buildings, vehicles, the roads themselves; everything began to corrode and melt as Clare breathed on it. She stopped, turned her head to the Long Island side and repeated the process, laying waste as far as her acid breath would reach.
Have you had enough, yet? No, I don’t think you yet have.
Her verbal taunting ended, but the terror had only just begun. When Clare closed her eyes once again, everyone was expecting eye lasers to start slicing New York and its surroundings apart, but the showcase was different this time. As Clare concentrated, the cells in her body responded to her will and began to alter her from within; in particular, the insides of her lower body.
The mermaid’s tail squirmed for a few moments before settling down. Its scaly skin seemed to harden and dry out, creating a craggy layer running down from the first indication at her lower waist all the way down to the tip of the tail. Then, like a crumbling aged mountain, the dried out scales began to peel off the giantess, falling down to the ground with chunky thuds. Instead of exposed muscular tissue however, what lay beneath Clare’s tail surprised everybody.
Instead of one long skinless appendage, what greeted the viewers was two perfectly white legs matching the fair skin tone of the mermaid’s torso. As withered scales slid off her wide hips, thighs and buttocks of plump and feminine thickness were revealed. Perfectly articulated bone structure supported the rest of those slender legs, and when one got to the tailfins they could see Clare’s feet emerging from them as if they had been sunk within the flatness of the fins, pushing them away and outgrowing them as if her feet had torn out of too-small footwear. Five curling toes on each foot got rid of the final vestiges of scaly skin, finally leaving Clare with a pair of newly grown human legs.
“The mermaid…”
“She has legs now…!”
“The giant mermaid grew legs!”
Uncontainable chaos was starting to grow among the masses being televised with this newest development. If she stood up, then it was all over for humanity.
Sighing again, Clare put her hands down on the half-scorched, half-melted landscape and started pushing her gigantic breasts off the ground. At first, she whined to the numbness in her newly manifested limbs. She had spent such a long time swimming in her mermaid form that right now she felt like a toddler learning to walk for the first time.
She transferred her weight to her knees as she set off to crawl at first, but soon, just like riding a bicycle, it came back to her. Gaining purchase on the plant of her right foot first, the giantess managed to prop herself up on both of her feet, rising to her full height. Even had she not sliced the Empire State building in half, it would barely reach her pelvis at the tip. Clare’s shadow totally dominated Manhattan.
And just when things seemed totally hopeless, the hammer struck again, harder than ever. With a mental command from their leader, all the other Clares, now numbering the thousands, started going through the exact same changes as the half-mile tall giantess; shedding their mermaid tail like a snake sheds their skin and growing a new pair of legs that they quickly learned how to stand on.
Mainland became a panic-stricken group of boroughs as Clare and her army invaded and immediately began to wreak havoc. Since every one of her copies had inherited all of her abilities, no one was safe any longer. Civilians who had remaining living at the limits, at the permitted fringe of where safety had been guaranteed, – they tried to hide, but there was simply no escape – they had no hope. Hungry giantesses would punch holes into the ground or into buildings to get to their prey, if not outright cut holes in the ground with their laser vision or melt down passages with their acid breath to prevent escape. And as if the brutal implacability of their predators was not enough, electrical fields disrupting all communications put humans at a severe disadvantage, while telepathy ensured the horde was always aware of what was going on at all times.
Mankind’s era at the top of the food-chain was officially over.
Within hours, the New York boroughs were only a shadow of their former selves. Flattened, torn, burned to the ground or outright devoured, this was the fate of the world now that Clare was in charge. That was what the general populace, what every government in Earth had come to understand. But then, out of nowhere, the attacks ceased. Just like when the smaller Clares had pulled back from the different continental beaches not too long ago, Clare Prime called them all to her side.
After partaking with her growing creations, the principal Clare now sat well over four thousand feet tall, having taken the center of Manhattan as her throne where her smaller selves would bring her entire buildings full of humans to feast on. But she stopped eating. She made the others stop as well. And then she finally spoke again, her voice louder than ever:
“ Bring me the human boy I want. He was with your Navy before I destroyed them. The young one who is called… Clark. Do this and you will all be spared. ”
A manhunt was not necessary, fortunately. Clark had been safely guarded by the Navy in case any of his knowledge was necessary. But they were prepared to sacrifice one more life to save what remained of humanity. Either way, they had no choice but to acquiesce to their new ruler.
Carried by chopper and dropped onto the tallest remaining building in the area, the young student who had seemingly been forgotten by the destructive force known as Clare was suddenly the focus of her attention. Everybody selfishly came together with the wish that she would eat this boy and finally leave their species alone, but the towering beast of a blonde did something unexpected. She started talking with him. They spoke at length with each other with no one else being privy to the details since the smaller Clares would electronically disable the drones surrounding them.
Clark was given a deal he simply could not refuse. It was a deal that affected the entire human society. And he, as the one responsible for dooming almost half of the world’s population to become food for her and her copies, would also be responsible for saving what remained.
There was no other choice but to obey.
Weeks after the incursion, Clark had been returned to the humans when he was sequestered to the United Nations. The leaders there heard of Clare’s intentions. Earth no longer belonged to humanity. Every last piece of the planet and its resources had been claimed in the super-powered giantess’ name. All territory would recognize undisputed sovereignty and be granted the privilege of living under the yoke of the God-Empress.
Clark informed the nervously muttering leaders, holding no greater confidence than them, yet relaying their new God-Empress’ command, that there would be no negotiations permitted. There was only one choice and only one chance to submit.
The collective of humanity chose to follow their conqueror.
Within a month, carefully feeding when necessary, the God-Empress was an utterly towering beast at a mile tall. Human slaves had been commissioned to build her History’s greatest throne for her to sit at as she observed engineers working on a contraption born out of a single desire. She couldn’t run out of capable humans until that desire was fulfilled.
Clark, having reluctantly been turned into Clare’s spokesperson for the rest of the humans, usually sat at a little balcony built into the right side of the gargantuan throne’s headrest. “What is all this, Clare?” he one day asked.
“Hmm?” Clare barely paid attention to what was immediately around her. Her telepathically linked brain was so organically weaved into the minds of her copies that they no longer exhibited any manner of individuality. What had started out as a network of interconnected goddesses had finally evolved into a true hive-mind led by one main consciousness. As a result she was everywhere on Earth at once, even if her biggest body resided at the place of the incursion where the device was being built.
“You’ve… you got your freedom, and you’ve enslaved humanity,” Clark looked out a mile below where the giant circular machine was being worked on, “What could you possibly desire right now?”
“Why, that’s simple, my little human insect,” Clare smiled, turning her beautiful face to the side to look down at her ambassador, “ Revenge. ”
“Ruh-Revenge…? Buh-but… haven’t you already destroyed all of Earth’s military…?” Clark argued, stuttering.
The God-Empress couldn’t help but chortle, “Oh, heavens. Your species truly is as egocentric as they come, isn’t it?” she grinned, “I need you all to help me get back home.”
Clark’s eyes widened, “Wuh-wait…” he looked really hard at the donut shaped contraption and then back at Clare, “The spatial anomaly we found you in… is this some sort of teleporter?”
“A dimensional portal, I believe your scientists called it, yes,” Clare nodded. “As much as it hurts my pride to accept it, I don’t have the power to go back to my home, no matter how I’ve evolved in your world.”
“In my world… you’re not from Earth?!” Clark gasped. “Thu-that’s what you couldn’t talk about! But why?!”
“Because the fools back in my home world banished me to yours, but not before cursing me into a pathetic form that would forever be prey to those bigger and stronger than I,” Clare explained, her frown transforming her gorgeous countenance as it filled with anger.
Clark couldn’t wrap his mind about the idea of another world yet, but he had no choice but to believe in what Clare was telling him. And yet it was so hard for him to accept it! He had to say it out loud: “You were never a mermaid…” and then he had to ask her: “You… you said you were ‘banished’ here, what… what did you do?”
The scowl in Clare’s face disappeared suddenly, replaced with a mellow expression even more unsettling than the pissed off face she was making while talking about the people ‘back home’. And then she started to smile, and smirk, and wickedly grin. “Something not a fraction as bad as what I’m about to do once I get back with all this power, boy.”
It then finally hit Clark. It hit him so bad that he had a flashback to the instant the spatial anomaly in the Bahaman canyon appeared before he and Dr. Myers. This had not been someone in need of rescue that had emerged before them. This had not been an innocent soul twisted into her evil ways by the greedy and fearful hands of mankind. The moment Clark took the controls of the Nautilus away from his mentor in order to rescue Clare he had not just doomed one world, but two.
With every shred of empathy gone from Clark’s eyes, all that remained was the sullen look of somebody who had given up. The way Clare’s eyes had shrunk and were staring at him admitted to wickedness beyond compare; she was vile. Clark felt so manipulated and outraged, yet so exhausted that all he could mumble out was: “…you really are a monster…”
Clare’s eyebrows lifted just a little. Her gaze softened and for the first time Clark saw an honest-to-goodness, sincere smile of happiness and pride.
I never denied it.
The End.