Passages
Ray saw Jasmin at the far end of the hall, standing in the doorway to their bedroom. Her eyes were clamped shut, her face contorted in frieze of anguish.
"What's the matter?" he called to her.
Jasmin's only response was to draw a breath, and howl a long convulsing cry.
Ray hurried to her. "Jasmin, what's wrong!"
She tried to answer, but could only manage, "I!" between uncontrollable sobs.
Ray began a frantic, visual search of her for anything that might look like an injury.
"Where do you hurt?" he asked,
Jasmin gave her head a forceful shake. Her black hair flew, then settled everywhere over her shoulders, face and chest. When she looked at Ray again through a curtain of luminous strands, it took her two breaths to bawl, "I . . . I'm . . . "
"Where, fer God's sake!" Ray demanded.
"I'm stu-u-u-uck!" Jasmin's quacking stomach forced out of her before she drew another breath, and howled again.
Stuck . . .
Her answer gave Ray pause, and changed the focus of his search.
"Wul . . . where?" he asked her quietly.
"In the door!" Jasmin shouted at him.
The dilemma finally stated, Ray did notice how she filled the doorway. She'd gotten herself into a long, light colored, oversized T-shirt, and wore sky blue socklets on her feet. The shirt was stretched taut over every detail of her upper body it attempted to cover. The lower portion, by contrast, draped loosely from just under her chest to the tops of her thighs. Relieved that she wasn't seriously hurt, Ray started looking for solutions to the problem.
"I'm so big I can't even get through the freakin' door, fer God's sake," Jasmin complained wretchedly, although her crying fit seemed to be subsiding.
"Alright, alright," Ray told her, trying to appease. "Just calm down, and we'll get you out of here."
But, being a man, Ray couldn't possibly understand the awful shame of such a thing. His ignorance only made Jasmin feel worse as she resumed crying, and began stomping her feet with enough force to make the floor shake.
"Where are you stuck!" Ray had to ask her repeatedly as he tried to get her mind off suffering. After she'd quieted enough to hear him, he asked again, this time gently, "Where are you stuck?"
She paused long enough to recover a little more, then quietly sobbed, "Shoulders."
That was a start, at any rate.
"Okay," Ray confirmed, then he asked her, "How did you get stuck?"
"I couldn't get through," she explained, "an' so I pushed, and squeezed, an' then I got in, an' then I couldn't go forward, an' I couldn't go back, an' I'm stuck. I'm jus' big fat stuck in the God damn door!"
She was crying again. Ray got her calmed down, but then came the hiccups.
*Hic!*
She always got the hiccups after a good cry.
*Hic!*
Well, maybe not always, but close enough.
*Hic!*
There was something involved in the convulsive thoracic action of crying that triggered her diaphragmatic tic.
*Hic!*
It was innocent, clinical, it couldn't be helped.
*Hic!*
But, to Jasmin, it was like a liberal application of salt to a fresh wound.
*Hic!*
Her first line of defense against the hiccups was breath holding. That strategy, however, worked as often as not. She prepared herself, then inhaled deeply. Her upper body expanded, but then so did the doorway she was wedged in. At least, it tried to. Loudly.
Hearing the sound of straining lumber caused Ray to loose focus on her predicament as his eyes grew to roughly the size of demitasse saucers. He no longer had any doubts as to her strength.
"You're not helping!" Jasmin hissed at him through her teeth, and through her suppressed breathing. Her hiccups were now coming out as a *Hup!* instead of a *Hic!* The structure of the doorway audibly registered every *Hup!*
"Uh," said Ray, reorienting himself mentally, "let's get you out of the doorway first."
Jasmin relaxed, and exhaled. The doorway expressed its gratitude.
"Fine," she said.
*Hic!*
Between the two of them, they worked on a way of getting her free. After some trials, and errors, Jasmin hunched her shoulders up as high as she could while, at the same time, bending her knees. That relieved enough pressure to where she could work one shoulder free. After that, she simply stepped out into the hall.
Once the crisis was over, she recovered readily enough, got over her hiccups, then padded after Ray to the bathroom where he supervised her passage through that doorway. Leading first with one shoulder seemed to do the trick, but, even then, her chest had become so thick, and deep, that either her back, or a breast brushed against the doorjamb as she passed through.
Once inside the bathroom, Jasmin did her chores, but then her eye caught sight of their bathroom scale. She had a running battle with the insidious device in her efforts to maintain her perfect, ballerina's ninety-four pound weight. Now, she could just see the snotty batch of springs and gears maliciously sticking its dial out at her, and blowing raspberries.
As determined as she was on ignoring its baiting jibes ('Fatty, fatty, two by four,' etc.), curiosity eventually won out. Regarding the scale, Jasmin donned the self-protection of her tough Italian chick personae. You wan' me? the hard as nails woman thought at the horrid little thing. You wan' a piece o' me? she challenged. Coomahn, she dared, bravely climbing on board, gi'me yuah bes' shot!
"What's the damage?" Ray asked from the doorway where he stood leaning against the frame. He was trying hard to seem nonchalant, but his choice of words shot him in the foot anyway.
"I'm afraid to look," Jasmin conceded forlornly. "Besides," she added, "I can't see over my chest."
"Well," he warmly offered, coming up behind her, "if you can't look over," then he reached around to cup a small portion her bounty in his large hands, and gently eased them apart, "then look between."
Regardless of his suggestion's merit, she really wasn't in the mood to have her breasts fondled at the moment.
"Would you just tell me?" she ordered him impatiently.
Ray willingly released her, then peered around her to where he could consult the dial. After making sure he was seeing right, he told her soberly, "Two hundred, and ninety-seven pounds."
"What!" she squawked.
With her hands, Jasmin forced the cotton material spanning her breasts in between them, then unceremoniously separated her orbs to see for herself. Confirmation of Ray's report elicited a long, drawn out groan of pain.
"Jasmin, you've seen how large you are," Ray strove to remind her.
"I know . . . ," she conceded unhappily as she stepped from the scale, and faced the mirror over the sink, "but I didn't think I'd be that huge." She lifted her shirt to visually scrutinize her naked pelvis, and thighs.
"How much did you weigh before?"
"Ninety-four, and-a-half," she said as she continued examining her hips. She could not understand how she could weigh so much, and not look totally blimpoid.
Ray did the math.
"Your weight has more than tripled," he said with a tone muted amazement.
Jasmin gave him the look of death via the mirror.
"Did you have to say that?" she snarled.
She thrust the hem of her shirt past her groin. Even though her eyes had encountered nothing, but incomparably defined muscle, she was still scandalized over her now very substantial weight.
"You had the initial reaction," Ray said, thinking out loud, "which was to be expected, and then you grew again, which wasn't expected. And the new growth didn't happen until we were playing," he observed, "or, more probably, just after."
Though grateful for something else to think about, Jasmin regarded him with squint-eyed curiosity.
"What are you getting at?" she wanted to know.
"Well," he ventured, "it would seem that, somehow, your growth process has gotten tangled up with your libido."
Jasmin tucked her chin as she nested her knuckles on the crests of her iliacs. Her entire face now seemed to be squinting.
"Are - you - serious?" she stated in serious disbelief. "That's the craziest thing I've ever heard."
Ray shrugged.
"Can you come up with a better explanation for what's happened?" he asked.
She stood there, for a long moment, in her defiant pose, thinking about it. When her face relaxed, she quietly admitted, "No."
Confused, frustrated, dispirited, Jasmin dropped her arms away from her sides, and walked past Ray, but, as she went to leave the room, she forgot about her augmented width, and got her shoulders stuck in the doorway.
That was it. Way past the end of her patience, Jasmin let out an exasperated growl. It wasn't nearly enough, though, to adequately express her feelings over what she was having to deal with. She'd need a deep breath, a really deep breath, give full vent to her overwhelming sense of rage. A rage that was now every bit as big as she was, and getting bigger by the second.
Determined to have some kind of satisfaction from this awful situation, she started to inhale. It felt good as the air raced through her nostrils. It felt very good. She loved the feel of her huge, powerful chest expanding. She loved the progressively tighter feeling of the door frame's rigid sides against her massively muscled arms. That puny, little nothing of a doorway, she thought as she continued to draw in air, willing her enormous body to match her even more enormous rage. The wood of the door frame began to creak. She heard it. She loved it. Oh yes, she allowed herself to think, letting her head fall back to open her throat so her capacious lungs could easily take in even more air, this is going to be good. Long way to go yet . . . this is going to be sooo good.
As she compelled her awesome torso to grow fuller, and fuller, the protests of the door frame grew louder. More, she wanted. I want more! and her hands curled into fists as she teasingly threatened to engage the extremely hypertrophied muscles of her arms, and shoulders. The structure of the doorway cracked, and groaned, yielding to the pressure of her powerful flesh. I want this, she wished. Oh God, I want it!
Her fists rose at the elbows as she prepared for what she knew would be a most gratifying contraction of her relentlessly expanding upper body. An ultimate spasm, and release which nothing could resist! The crushing pressure on her engorging upper arms was as nothing as she eagerly listened to the wood complain. You're nothing! she stated. You're nothing to me! she swore, and then she vowed, I will make you nothing!
As if begging for mercy, the doorway emitted a near endless groan. But Jasmin was cold, and hard. No mercy would be shown as she continued to make her huge, unyielding muscles become progressively thicker, and fuller with contraction. More! Grow! she commanded of herself. Make me bigger! In her current frame of mind, she literally thrilled at the sound of wreckage that her awesome strength elicited. It felt so good. She wanted to destroy. She wanted!
Ray stood quietly by as he watched her expanding back. He neither said, nor did anything to stop her. He understood her consuming feelings of helplessness, and he felt it best to simply let her go. She, of all people, had every right to be destructive, considering everything she'd been through, and might yet go through. He felt, and shared with her, in all of it.
Jasmin continued her ridiculously effortless assault on the doorway. She couldn't believe how good it felt as she continued to take in air. She relished the feel of tensing her enormous muscles. She was so big! So strong! She could feel herself. She was getting closer. She could feel herself getting closer, closer . . . almost there. So close. So good! She was almost ready, just a bit more, almost ready, ready to bear, oh yes!, ready to bear down, yes!, bear down, and bring that astounding body of hers into unbelievably full contractual bloom. Bring it to me! she screamed, willing herself toward maddening ecstasy. Bring it! she dreamed. Bring it all to me! Bring with it
the realization
that
if she
broke
the door
she'd have
to pay
to have
it
fixed.
And so, with head hung low, Jasmin let herself relax as she expelled what might've been . . . a really good calming breath. Reality having reared its stupid, ugly head, she regretfully abandoned her anticipated roar of rage, and settled for, instead, a quiet whimper of resignation. She then carefully worked one shoulder loose, as she had recently learned to do, and stepped out safely into the hall. Once there, however, she turned about, and with a look of unstoppable fury, she raised both her fists, ready to let everything in her visual path have it!
But . . .
It's a curious thing about the expression of foul temper. Much moreso than most things, a properly executed tantrum requires precise, split-second timing. Any deviance from, 'The Moment', as it's called, will result in a substantially less than satisfactory expression of temper due to what's known as the, 'Foulness Reduction Factor'.
For Jasmin, in this particular instance, 'The Moment' had unfortunately passed, and she knew it. It was with reluctance then, that she let her daunting physical mass collapse once more, and, after muttering a grudgingly apathetic, "Aw, screw it," she quietly padded off to the kitchen.
Ray followed after her, and silently observed as she got herself safely through that doorway. He cleaned up the mess from the pan he'd dropped earlier as Jasmin washed, and cut, the vegetables he'd laid out on the counter. As he washed out the pan to prepare more water, Ray got to watching her as she worked. He noted how she used the knife against the cutting board - same as she always had - but now with muscles controlling her hands, and fingers, that were many times stronger than before. How was she compensating for her strength, he wondered, scaling it down, as it were, in order to maintain her former touch?
"How're you doing that?" he finally asked her.
"Doing what?" asked Jasmin, not pausing her activity.
"Cutting the vegetables?"
Jasmin did pause at this. She looked at him curiously.
"Was that supposed to make some sort of sense?" she wondered.
"Wul," he explained, "I'm thinking that you're much stronger now, and yet you're performing a familiar activity as if there'd been no change in your strength level."
Jasmin considered this, and got to wondering about it herself. She weighed the knife in her hand.
"It still feels the same as it always has to me," she related.
"So . . . something has calibrated your strength, or your energy output, to accommodate your surrounding environment so you aren't unintentionally dangerous to it," Ray ventured.
"Or my experience has carried over," Jasmin suggested. She went on to explain. "Like . . . okay, like cutting vegetables. With experience, you gain competence. You get to know that they're different - the technique for slicing a tomato is different from that of slicing, say, a carrot. If you used one technique for both, you'd either squash the tomato, or you'd never get through the carrot. You adjust your technique according to the material you're working with."
"But that doesn't account for your increased strength," Ray maintained.
"It's irrelevant," she insisted. She turned back to her work on the cutting board. "I still know how to cut vegetables."
They finished making preparations, then sat down at their small kitchen table for their noon meal. As he adjusted himself in his chair, Ray needed to ask her, "How do you feel?"
Jasmin knew that how she 'felt' was going to be an important part of their immediate future. Both of them were keenly conscious of her experiencing distress of any kind due to possible adverse reactions to the formula she'd absorbed. She took a moment to survey her state of being, then reported to Ray, "I feel okay."
"Even with your . . . ?" he said, then he merely gestured to indicate her muscular bulk.
"That - is definitely not okay," said Jasmin, then she was quick to qualify, "not that I don't feel alright, but . . . it feels . . . very foreign. I can't touch my arms to my sides without . . . some effort. My thighs rub together when I walk, and I don't like not being able to get through doorways."
"Are you handling your weight okay?"
"The weight really isn't the issue, Ray," she said. "It's . . . just being so . . . large." She clearly wasn't comfortable with it, but acknowledged with resignation that, "It's going to take some adjusting."
"But, aside from that," he wanted to know, "you feel alright?"
Her fork in hand, Jasmin looked at him across the table. How she felt was important, but . . .
"Deedee, I understand, and appreciate, that you're concerned about me," she told her man. "I'm worried to, but let's not make how I feel the leitmotif of our relationship. If I feel sick, or feel something weird, or strange, believe me, you'll be the second to know."
Ray's eyebrows lowered.
"'Second'?" he wondered. "Who're ya gonna tell first?"
Jasmin's eyebrows rose.
"Me, of course."
Ray's brow relaxed. He smiled slightly.
"Sorry."
"Don't mention it."
"I already have."
"That's your problem."
"Bite me."
"Where?"
Both of them were smiling at each other. After a pleasantly shared moment, they returned their attention to their respective plates.
Jasmin, however, soon discovered another 'adjustment' she was going to have to make. Each time she raised her fork to her mouth her greatly enlargened biceps would rise, and swell with the effort, and impose its hard bulge into the softer lateral swell of her greatly enlargened breast. So, with every bite she took, she would load the fork, raise the fork, bulge - load the fork, raise the fork, bulge. She soon grew tired of the distraction, set the fork on her plate and sighed.
"Is there something wrong?" Ray asked.
Jasmin glanced up at him.
"I'm in my way," she said morosely.
Ray frowned.
"How so?" he wanted to know.
Jasmin took up her fork, and demonstrated as Ray observed her biceps achieve the size of a small cantaloupe, which forced a corresponding concavity in the spherical perfection of her breast. She then lowered the fork, looked at him and waited.
Ray struggled for a solution to the problem, but, in the end, he could only offer weakly, "It's new to you . . . you're just not used to it . . . that's all. In time, you won't even think about it."
They sat gazing at each other from across the table. Both were disappointed. Jasmin had expected more from him, and Ray wished he'd had more to give. They could see that the adjustments to this change for them would be endless, and, often, far from satisfactory. Jasmin looked back at her plate. With sad resignation, she loaded her fork, raised the fork -
"Why don't you . . . ," Ray said.
Jasmin paused. Her Asian eyes rose up to him. Ray was watching her thoughtfully.
"Think of it," he suggested, "as me touching you."
She thought about it with her fork still poised some distance from her mouth. After a moment, Jasmin resumed the raising of her fork. Her biceps muscle grew in size, invading her breast again, and then Ray watched her arm suddenly expand to inhuman proportions as she deliberately forced it to contract fully. The impression in her breast became deep, and round from the hardened surface of her huge biceps. He shifted his attention to her face. Jasmin was looking up, but her eyes were closed. Her fork was empty. She was chewing slowly, leisurely. He saw her pause a moment, then swallow. He heard her breathe a little sigh as she relaxed her arm, and lowered her fork back to her plate. Her eyelids fluttered open, and her perception let the outside in again. She quickly looked away when she saw Ray watching her, and then she blushed so prettily.
"I may never be able to concentrate on food again," she confessed to him demurely.
Ray thrilled at her loving inference. Her improved mood encouraged him to broach a sensitive subject.
"I've been thinking about your reaction to the serum," he said.
"Um-hmm . . . ?" Jasmin intoned melodically as she enjoyed the taking of another bite of food.
"The question is; why did you develop so much?"
"Well, you said that the dose I got was . . . out of balance?"
"Yeah," Ray conceded, "but that alone couldn't account for your getting so big."
Jasmin looked up at him.
"What are you saying?" she asked.
"That there seem to be variables involved that I hadn't anticipated," Ray told her thoughtfully.
Jasmin continued watching him, her active mind awash with possibilities - none of which boded well.
" . . . 'seem - to be'?" she asked.
Ray could see that the topic was upsetting her. Along with everything else, he expected her to, eventually, express anger over what had happened.
"Jasmin, it was never tested, okay?"
"I'm aware of that."
"There may not be a problem - "
"You don't consider the way I look to be a problem?"
"Not to that extent - "
"I've suffered an overdose of a chemical you made, and which you are only now realizing you didn't know all that much about?"
"Impy - "
"I think I would very definitely consider that to be a problem, Ray."
"Jasmin," Ray stressed, "it may not be a problem."
"You said I absorbed it," she declared at him. "Absorption - that is so basic!"
"I know," said Ray.
"You're a chemist, for God's sake! You should - "
"I didn't know - "
"You should have!"
"I didn't see you holding the fucking napkin!" he shouted at her.
"It changed me," she shouted back at him, "made me something I'm not. It's made me into a monstrosity . . . a mutant!"
She squeezed her eyes shut, and perched an elbow on the table. Her teeth sank into an upraised knuckle. Ray chastened himself for loosing control, then reached for her remaining hand. Jasmin jerked away.
Torturous silence consumed them both. After a time, Ray tried to bridge the gap.
"I'd give anything to undo this," he told his woman. "But I can't. And neither can you."
Jasmin heard him, looked up at him and met him the other half of the way.
"I'm scared," she whispered.
Ray reached for her hand again. She accepted him.
"So am I," he whispered back.
They made up, and forgave each other, as always, through their touch, Their fingers came to dance an intimate pas de deux of delicate strokes, and brushes.
"Turning on each other isn't going to solve anything," he said.
"Is there a solution?" she asked him hesitantly.
"I don't know," he admitted. "We just have to do our best to see it through - to wherever it leads."
Jasmin clutched his hand in hers. Tighter, tighter, now enough.
"Yeah," she quietly agreed.
Ray tightened his grip on her.
"And you are not a monstrosity," he told her.
She managed a smile, then managed to mean it.
"Please go on with what you were saying," she bid him. She resumed eating, but with little interest.
Ray begrudged a little attention to his own meal.
"I can't really be sure without running a test on a new model at the lab," he began, "but, off the top of my head, I think I can say that I made two mistakes."
He noticed Jasmin pause. He kicked himself.
"Guess I'm not putting this well."
"No," said Jasmin.
Ray saw her looking at him.
"You're being honest about it," she willingly granted him. "I'll see if I can handle it better."
"I'll see if I can be a little more diplomatic."
She smiled weakly, then gave him a nod.
"That would be nice." She returned her attention to her plate. "So, you were saying?"
"Well, first a little background," Ray began. "After I had the initial idea, and had worked out the basic structure for the serum, I needed a genetic model to complete, and test it. I chose you, because . . . "
"I was there?" she suggested, looking at him with a smile.
He met her gaze. He could see the warmth in her eyes.
"Yes," he readily conceded, "because you were there," but then he went on to say, "and because I love you, and because I wanted you to be the first to enjoy the benefit of my work."
His 'confession' touched Jasmin deeply. She looked at him kindly, lovingly, and then urged him to, "Please go on."
"Well," he continued, "I got your genetic profile from a strand of your hair. After fine tuning the formula to your genetic makeup, I derived a model from that match. It worked perfectly. According to the theory, you would gain twenty to twenty five pounds of muscle, and support structure. Your strength would increase by seventy percent, and your endurance improve by thirty percent. The reason that your endurance wouldn't improve as much was because it was in good condition to start out with from your ballet training. Anyway, just to be on the safe side, I generated five more models, six altogether, and all of them concluded with the same results. They deviated from one another only by a few millionths of a percentage point either way."
"So why did I grow so much?" she asked, pausing to look up at him. There was a trace of fear to her voice as she asked, "What happened?"
Ray looked at her intently, and answered, "You happened."
"Well, that's cute," Jasmin replied flippantly as she stabbed a bite of food with her fork. Thinking that he was joking, she then gave him a sidelong glance, "but seriously."
"I am serious," Ray insisted, "and this is where I made my first mistake; I used your hair when I should've used your blood. It would've yielded a more accurate model."
"Hmm," Jasmin intoned, mulling over what he'd just said, "I hear what you're saying, but structure is structure, regardless of where it comes from, isn't it?"
"Uh-uh," Ray answered, shaking his head.
"Well," she qualified, "within a given organism."
"Uh-uh," he said again, and then he explained, "your hair is dead tissue, your blood is living tissue, so even though the genetic structure of dead, and living tissue may look the same, they're different, because they behave differently from one another. So, basically, I derived my model from a static, none functional entity; your hair, and then applied it to a vibrating, functional entity; namely you."
"So the missing ingredient was . . . movement," she ventured.
"Right."
"And since the formula was designed to amplify, and facilitate, movement in the first place," Jasmin ventured, elaborating on Ray's thought, "and to increase the efficiency of movement, then the affect on something already moving, as opposed to something stationary, would be that much greater."
"Exactly," Ray agreed. He then continued. "My second error was in calculation. I derived the model through mathematics. You responded to the serum, and developed, geometrically."
"So, basically what you're saying is that the affect you anticipated was made bigger, and then made bigger again," Jasmin surmised.
"Yeah," Ray said disconsolately, "because of my . . . screw-ups . . . "
'Deedee," Jasmin sighed, then she tried to point out that, "I screwed up when I held the napkin."
"I wish I'd seen it," he went on in the same vein. "I thought the waitress had taken it away, and threw it out."
"Will you stop beating up on yourself?"Jasmin advised him seriously.
Ray looked up at her. He could tell that she'd meant it in the best possible way.
"I don't want to face this alone," Jasmin confided to him. "I need you. Probably more than I ever have. You've said yourself that it's going to take both of us to get through this, and that's not going to happen if I have to keep pulling you out of the abyss."
"Look who's talking," Ray stated, being more than comfortably familiar with her well documented tendency for self flagellation.
But Jasmin's little rouse had worked, because he wasn't 'down' anymore.
"You have every right to kick my ass too," she assured him, "when I need it."
He reached for her. She reached for him. Their fingers played with one another. Jasmin groped a bit to get their discussion back on track.
"Okay, so . . . I'm a lot more than you expected."
"Man!" Ray exclaimed to the air. "Is that an understatement!"
Jasmin's hooded eyes narrowed.
"How do you mean that?" she wanted to know.
Ray looked at her across the table. He caressed her fingers lightly.
"Why do you think I love you?" he told her quietly.
Her eyes relaxed. Her lips curled to form the kind of smile he lived for.
"Is there any way to determine where I am?" she asked. "What I'm capable of?"
"Not knowing of any possible results based on an unbalanced formula, I haven't got the slightest idea," Ray told her, then he ventured to suggest, "I could take a live tissue sample at the lab. We could scan the structure, and generate another model based on the same formula makeup."
"Then let's do that," she stated.
"Weelll," he began hesitantly, "there may be a problem with that."
Jasmin frowned.
"Why am I not surprised to hear that?" she droned quizzically.
"It's part of the geometry factor," Ray explained. "Once the process has been initiated, it continues, and would, theoretically, remain ongoing. So any future model we generated would only tell us where you were at the time the sample was taken. Like . . . "
"I'm not liking this," Jasmin interjected.
Ray continued, using hand gestures to demonstrate, " . . . it would show that you were, say, this strong at the time the sample was taken. Where the problem would lie is in the fact that you're still moving."
"Movement again," Jasmin intoned.
"Yeah," said Ray.
"So, in other words," she rephrased for her own benefit, "this," she lifted a finger, "would render a most recent model obsolete, because I'm now stronger than before I did that."
"Yes," he agreed, "and that doesn't include the effort it took for you to say what you just said."
"So, even if I remained perfectly still, I'd still be growing stronger, because my minimal life functions are still operational."
"Right," he agreed. "Movement."
Jasmin toyed with the lonely segment of carrot that was left on her plate, but her mind was elsewhere; thinking over what they'd discussed.
"Hmm," she intoned, then she noted sardonically, "Cheer up, it gets worse."
"You're no longer consuming energy," Ray told her with that dazed look he sometimes got when he'd just been struck by an epiphany. "You're actually generating it."
"But that's not possible," Jasmin pointed out. "DNA deteriorates over time, and, eventually, it wears out."
"That's only as the evolutionary system of genetic checks, and balances, apply," Ray stipulated. "If those restraints were removed . . . who knows?"
Jasmin gazed at him with a frightened look in her eyes.
"So you're saying is that the whole way my body functions has changed."
Ray held her gaze for awhile, then had to look away before he could answer, "Yes."
They both sat in reflective silence. Finally, Jasmin rested her elbows on the table, and rubbed her face, and eyes, firmly with her hands. She then rested her mouth on her folded hands, and thought for awhile. What they'd talked about was a lot for her to handle. In a very few, short hours, she had changed so much, and, if Ray was right, she was still changing. But then she knew he was right, because she could feel it. She had a vague awareness of being on the threshold of a redefining. She could feel something gathering in her, and, although she couldn't tell just what that something was, she knew it wasn't merely physical. She wondered if these feelings were coupled to her physical strength, or if they were independent of it? There was so much to think about. So many things to consider. She raised her head a bit, and asked Ray, "Would my strength gain be proportionate to the amount of stress overcome?"
Ray considered this for a moment, then answered, "Presumably, but that depends on how long the serum remains intact in your system before your body's defenses break it down chemically."
Once again, she continued the thought. "And since it was crafted to match me perfectly, my body might never perceive it as an invader, or even a foreign entity."
Her observation took Ray by surprise. It was yet another variable which he hadn't considered.
"That . . . is . . . possible," he acknowledged cautiously. It was a notion that would require investigation.
Jasmin went back to resting her mouth on her hands once more, reflecting on the implications of what they'd discussed. She didn't like it, but then she had to wonder why she didn't like it. Was it just because it was new?, or was it because there were so many, many unknowns about it? So much that neither of them understood had happened to her, and was yet still happening. She felt helplessly out of control, because there appeared to be nothing she, or Ray, or anyone else, could do about it. But then again, as she felt her now tremendous strength surging through her now extraordinary body, she knew that she had never been so completely in control, and, curiously enough, it wasn't because of the strength she now possessed so much as it was that gently flowing sense of peace which allowed for that control. 'Such welcome, and unwelcome things at once,' she thought, recalling the line from Shakespeare. It was very hard to reconcile.
She resolved to put it all out of her mind. Let it sit for a bit, she thought, then see what it looks like. Finished with her plate, she stood up and announced with unexpected cheerfulness, "Okay. Let's clean up, and go shopping."
Ray looked up at her blankly.
"Shopping?" he asked, wondering where she was coming from.
"Well," she explained, "from all indications, I'm going to be like this for awhile," then she put on an air of blimpoid, ultra-femininity, complete with liquid wrists, and strobe lids on her eyes, "and I haven't a thing to weah."
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