Regenerating Rations Ch. 01

The door hinge shrilled as Gia stepped into the dimly lit office. The building was one that she would have considered abandoned had it not matched the exact description and location that she was asked to report to. It was surprising to be able to walk directly from outside into a normal office but the heavy security checkpoints that she had passed through just to get onto the base more than assuaged her concerns for security of the decrepit three-story building.

Holding a pink card in her hand she turned as she felt the door slam forcefully behind her due to the pressure difference. She breathed an inward sigh of relief as warm air kissed her cheeks which were flushed bright red from the brisk winter chill that had enveloped her during the short walk to the building.

Turning, she saw a small office enclosed in transparent plexiglass with a woman sitting inside looking down, preoccupied with writing. Gia put on a friendly smile, her dimples shining in the calm light as she strolled to the small cubicle and slipped her pink card through the opening in the plexiglass.

"Hi, I'm here for the clinical trials?" Gia's cyan colored eyes were wide in anticipation as the woman looked up to acknowledge her. Having initially assumed the woman was an intern or temp-hire secretary type Gia was surprised to note more mature facial features on the woman belying an age possibly in the upper thirties as opposed to the mid-twenties Gia had assumed based on her hair style and bodacious figure.

The women pushed her glasses up on her nose and returned the friendly smile. Gia couldn't help but notice her long black hair falling over what looked like a quite modest DD bust underneath a formal lab coat and dress shirt.

"Yes, welcome to the Irvine Facility Ms. Barnekova," The woman said as she picked up the pink card to inspect the details.

"I see you are here for trial C16, and right on time! If you would please follow me so we can get started?" The women rose from the desk and walked through the door in the back of the office and came back around extending her hand and taking Gia's gracefully yet firmly in a handshake.

"I'm Dr. Ruskin, it's a pleasure to have you here and thank you for volunteering!" Her tone conveyed a profound sincerity but also the twinge that comes with repeating a phrase so many times it starts to lose meaning.

"Thanks for accepting me, I hope to provide a useful service for...whatever is going here...haha!" Gia laughed nervously, but the Doctor's chuckle in response assured her that the joke was taken in good stride.

"Ha! Not to worry; it will be fruitful experience for all of us," Dr. Ruskin replied with a firm yet playful tone reminding Gia briefly of her own mother's comforting but stoic mannerisms.

Gia rushed to match pace with Dr. Ruskin, who moved quite well in her black four-inch heels as they walked through a pair of double doors and down a dimly lit hall, eventually arriving at a door which Dr. Ruskin held open for Gia to enter a small twelve by twelve room.

"Please, have a seat and get comfortable. Our main task today is to run through the parameters of the experiment and complete the administration of the first sample," Dr. Ruskin said as she rummaged through some cabinets, first applying gloves, then opening a laptop resting nearby.

Gia sat down on a metal chair in front of the table and Dr. Ruskin seated herself opposite Gia, placing her laptop on one side of the table as she quickly typed in some notes.

"Ok, this will probably be a recap of the info you received after the preliminary trials, so I'll make it quick. You will be undertaking a month-long experiment where you will ingest an experimental sample and then undergo daily evaluations in addition to 24/7 observation and tracking of vitals using sensors and cameras installed throughout the facility. You will be provided with a room with standard amenities and furnishings in the facilities to keep you comfortable, including a shared digital media library, exercise room, swimming pool, and cafeteria."

Gia nodded politely, smiling at the mention of a swimming pool. She had been a national competitor on her swim team back in high school, and loved to take advantage of any chance she could get in the water, which was not often nowadays.

"Despite the current ghost-town appearance, there are multiple researchers that also work at the facility along with security staff. There are also other subjects currently staying in the facility undergoing similar trials. You'll meet them in the coming days. That's it for the introduction, I just need to take your vitals and we can proceed from there, sound good?" The doctor eyed Gia actively looking for any signs of confusion or worry but found none. Gia had an innocent smile on her round face, hands folded patiently in her lap.

"Yes, sounds good," Gia replied, feeling at ease and eager to get things started. It was hard to comprehend that she was really going through with this. It had started out as just a silly idea suggested by her younger sister who discovered the request for volunteers while authoring a research paper on local government clinical trials.

Gia, who at the time was serving in the Coast Guard to pay for college, found the idea of eating and making a living at the same time an enticing offer. After submitting her application for the research trials, it took nearly a month to get a response. Then the preliminary trials took another two weeks and then two more months after that waiting for security clearance. Now she was finally sitting there in the room, about to stuff herself silly for science.

"If you could please remove your jacket, I'll have to take body measurements," Dr. Ruskin said motioning for Gia to sit on a medical table positioned next to where they were sitting. After removing her winter coat Gia sat on the table, wearing a simple white long-sleeved sweater and dark blue cargo pants.

She had a stocky five-foot eight-inch body weighing about 160 pounds, of which a good portion was muscle mass which the doc could tell was built up naturally from working on the family farm growing up. Gia's sturdy frame was masked by a thin yet plush layer of fat, which rested mostly around her thighs and hips, along with a small pot belly bulging outward an inch or two from her torso, a byproduct of the preliminary trials and being out of the service for the last four months.

"Hips, thirty-nine" ... Waist, thirty-four" ... Chest, thirty-nine" ... Inseam, thirty-one"," the doc read out the measurements as she pulled the tape measure around Gia's pear-shaped body, silently admiring her wide motherly hips.

"I don't want to put you under any pressure...but I consider you to be a very promising subject based on your performance in the preliminary trials," Dr. Ruskin did not make eye contact as she continued measuring, but Gia noticed a slight blush on the doctor's dimples.

"Alright, now if you could lay back for me," Dr. Ruskin continued as she made Gia lie on the table and massaged her torso looking for any sore spots that would belay a hernia or some other internal ailment.

"If you don't mind me asking, what led you to volunteer for the trials?"

"Well, I never got much into science research, even in college, but it feels good to help push research forward by helping like this. Besides, growing up I was always a big eater, although I really didn't realize how far I could go until the trials," Gia smiled thinking back to the preliminary sessions, which could probably be better described as meticulously orchestrated eating challenges.

Growing up, Gia's parents and siblings had always poked fun at her for having a bottomless stomach. She consumed so much cake on one of her birthday's the kids nicknamed her "Gia the Cow" for her ability to eat like she had three stomachs. As she got older, she specifically tried to not gorge herself on food to avoid further teasing and because her parents had enough trouble just feeding her four other siblings. The experimental sessions allowed her to really go all out and eat as much as she wanted, and then some, and that was a refreshing experience.

The food she had to consume seemed to increase each time, both in density and consistency. She surprised herself with how her stomach could expand far beyond what most would consider a normal human capacity. If she had to describe it, it truly felt like she did have three stomachs in one. While eating she could track her fullness as each stage of her stomach began to fill up and expand sequentially.

Even once she was "full", she could push further, her stomach stretching, protruding out from her body till she looked nearly five months pregnant, the organ contorting around her intestines to find any vestige of space left in her abdomen until she could feel the undigested food pressing against the entryway to her esophagus. She remembered hearing a report after one of the sessions that she had somehow consumed over ten pounds of food.

The feeling of being packed so unbelievably full was an intense memory and she was surprised at the excitement she felt to be able to experience it again. To be fair, the aftermath of digestion was grueling, but there was also an innate satisfaction at completing a task not only successfully, but better than everyone else by a wide margin. Her body was built for it, even her thick voluptuous legs helped to support her bloated upper body during her post-stuffing trip back home. The hardest part honestly was just trying to resist the urge to massage her bloated belly in public. Gia was thankful that in this case the trials were in a more private venue.

"Take heart, you far exceeded what we were looking for. I honestly hope you have an enjoyable time here. This beta trial will be 'intense' so to speak, but it's nothing you can't handle, and we will always prioritize your health above all else," Dr. Ruskin said as she patted Gia's tummy gently and slipped the sweater deftly back over the pot belly, finishing her inspection. Gia's stomach growled as if responding to the Doc's encouragement, making both ladies chuckle.

"Well, I think I have everything I need, please have a seat and I'll serve you dinner," Dr. Ruskin said as she walked, heels clacking on the laminate flooring, over to an industrial fridge. Reaching inside she pulled out nine by thirteen cake pan filled with rectangular bars wrapped in foil. The pan held eight samples total, each of identical size and individually wrapped in cellophane.

"This recipe is artificially flavored as Thanksgiving Stuffing, no pun intended," the doctor said as she walked over and set the tray down in front of Gia. "Bon Appetit, this set contains four servings worth of the regenerative rations. We will monitor the effects over the next twenty-four hours and then see if we should ramp up. We want to start slowly to get as much data as we can on the samples effectiveness at various concentration levels in the digestive system."

"Let's do this, I'm starving," Gia chuckled as she gingerly unwrapped the first bar and gnawed into it, feeling her saliva flow through it and the taste of bread, vegetables, and other delicious, synthesized flavors filled her mouth. Well, it was mainly delicious because she was absolutely famished. She had been required to get a colonoscopy and fast for two days before coming to the facility. Her stomach and bowels had been completely emptied and cleansed and now they were aching to start working again.

To the credit of the makers of the bars, they were sufficiently well balanced both in moisture and consistency, and even though the flavors were clearly artificial, they were not off-putting. Dr. Ruskin filled a pitcher of water from the nearby water cooler and placed it next to Gia as she finished scarfing down the first bar. After three, then four large bites Gia swallowed down the mass of food, feeling her throat muscles expand as they pushed the mass down and deposited into her stomach which rumbled in anticipation, digestive juices roiling like an angry volcano.

The 'bars' were relatively large, twice the height and width of a full-size snickers bar and Gia's cheeks bulged out as she took large bite after large bite, her eyes squinted partially in ecstasy to be able to eat again and in concentration to keep a steady pace of finishing the meal. The bars were so large she ended up using both of her small hands to grasp them and wrap her lips around them.

If she focused, she could down one of the regen bars in three or four large bites, but the bites took a long time to chew, and the doc couldn't help but smile at Gia's wide-eyed look and large chipmunk cheeks every time she bit off more than she could handle.

After continuing at an even pace for about ten minutes, Gia finished off the fourth bar and stopped to take a quick breather at the halfway point. She could feel her lower stomach expanding from the four bars, pushing a little bit further out and over the waistband of her pants which she pulled down further allowing her pot belly room to expand unimpeded. There was an art to 'self-stuffing' that she was slowly comprehending which involved a delicate balance of consumption rate and mental gymnastics to allow her to not only have great capacity, but also ingest it in a reasonable time frame, which in this case was twenty minutes, per the predefined test parameters.

The bars were, as expected, quite filling, each one about eight ounces volumetrically. After eating four of them she had consumed a quart's worth of solid food and it showed. The density of the bars was quite high, and she could feel them expanding within her stomach, which gurgled repeatedly as it contorted trying to accommodate the expanding load.

Without the process of eating to distract her, Gia marveled for a second as to what was going on inside, bringing a hand gingerly down to pat the upper hemisphere of her stomach which had begun to bulge outward, expanding in front of her eyes, albeit slowly, maybe a millimeter per second, but the small outward changes belied an epic shifting of internal organs wracking her nervous system. Her upper stomach was getting packed, and the now familiar change in pressure made her instinctively rock back and forth, knowing that if she didn't dislodge the blockage it would come make finishing the last four ration bars a chore.

"Have some water?" the doc pushed the pitcher to Gia who grabbed it with haste and tilted it to her lips taking large gulps as she pushed the chair back to get to a standing position, one hand holding the pitcher, the other one massaging the bloated mass protruding out from underneath her perky C-cup breasts. The deluge of water and Gia's massaging successfully broke up the mass in her upper stomach which finally succumbed to gravity, her tank of a lower bot belly expanding to accept the payload, her stomach evening out again but still considerably more swollen then when she started.

Her skintight sweater began to ride up along the curvature of her expanding lower belly, giving a glint of her belly button and the tan skin of her underbelly resting comfortably on top of her waistband. With her stomachache settled and her thirst satiated, Gia gave her belly a comforting pat before plopping back in the seat with enough force for her mind to mentally register that her center gravity had shifted a little. Suddenly, she felt like the pressure in her stomach was somehow off as well...maybe...

"Ooooo-UUUurrrrrPP!!" Gia's eyes widened and crossed briefly in surprise as her esophagus opened unexpectedly and she unleashed a hearty belch, her hand shooting back and clutching her stomach as if to scold it for surprising her. "Oh...urp-Excuse me!" Gia blustered sheepishly at the doctor who returned it with a reassuring smile.

"Nothing to excuse dear, just part of the job," Dr. Ruskin replied empathetically, taking her eyes off Gia momentarily to type notes into her laptop. Internally the doc commended Gia for keeping pace and surpassing the other test subjects in her rate of consumption of the first set of samples.

Looking at her screen, Dr. Ruskin inspected a window that showed the real-time vitals and measurements being taken from the medical smart band attached to Gia's wrist. Things like heart rate, breathing consistency, and even the percentage of digestive bifidobacteria in the stomach were accessible to her to monitor Gia's condition internally, and so far, everything was stable and normal.

"Aa-gllompF...Horfl!" Gia's throat spasmed unleashing strange guttural sounds from deep within her belly as she took an abnormally large bite out of the fifth regen bar, her brow furrowed in concentration as she tried to ignore the pressure pings on her nervous system from the continually expanding mass inside her gut. Dr. Ruskin had briefly considered providing more context to Gia regarding the samples' properties but ultimately decided it would skew the results and so that knowledge was kept private unless requested by the test subjects. However, Dr. Ruskin could tell by Gia's sudden increase in consumption rate that Gia already was intuitively adjusting her approach to compensate.

When eating these regen ration bars, slowing down would not make finishing them any easier. In fact, the faster Gia could consume them the better, before the expanding mass inside her stomach increased enough to take away her appetite. The first round is always difficult due to the fasting requirement, which generally would lead to the stomach shrinking and being prone to register fullness faster than normal.

"AAar-MMph!" Gia's eating turned ravenous, losing the dainty etiquette she had begun with as she shifted gears up a notch in a race against time to outpace her stomach's internal and external protests telling her to stop. The sound of her scarfing down each bite was just barely drowned out by the gurgles and groans emanating from her increasingly packed gut, which began to round out like a cylindrical drum, her sweater stretching to accommodate, the loose wool stitching spreading further apart as it did it's best to encircle her steadily distending paunch.

"GrrrooAoooRR...gurgle!" an internal roar from her stomach punched through her ferocious eating with a thunderclap of a growl with stray sounds of digestive juices trailing off. Gia barely paused a second as she continued to the sixth bar, unwrapping the foil, and grabbing the seventh with her other hand, duel wielding the two bars like swords and alternating taking bites from both, her auburn hair tossing back and forth as she scarfed them down. The food that was already being compacted in her stomach felt like a dense cannonball slowly expanding inside her. It was a new feeling as the spherical mass put pressure in places she had never felt before. She could no longer even focus on the taste of the bars, her only priority was somehow getting them inside her belly within the next two minutes

"Umpf-GLK-cough!" Gia gagged for a second as she tried to swallow a bit more than her throat could accommodate, the remains of the sixth and seventh bars halting halfway down her packed esophagus. Grabbing the pitcher of water, she took three deep swigs feeling the water soak into the food mass which slid further down into her already overfilled stomach. Not knowing what to do with the new food parcels, the over-taxed organ saw fit to expand painfully outward and upward, her sweater riding up a bit more revealing her navel as her skin stretched. Her lower stomach was now maxed and the only way to expand was up and out, her stomach fought to surpass her tits as the largest thing protruding from her torso.

"Oooooh," Gia grimaced as she felt a twinge of pain in her side which she could only speculate was her expanding stomach beginning to exert pressure on her left lung.

Little bits of foil rained on the table as Gia furiously unwrapped the last bar and shoved half of it into her mouth. While chewing the mass of food she smartly grabbed the water pitcher and took a couple sips to help with swallowing the crumbly mass of fiber and protein. Her stomach peppered her brain with "_I'm full_!" signals, making her gag. Unphased, Gia slowly got up from the table and executed a technique she had seen in eating competitions on TV.