Muffin was in agony. She was squatting in the shower with an egg pressing tightly against her vaginal opening. In the same way that the egg’s shape played havoc with the design of her uterus, it also didn’t fit right given the design of her birth canal.
Human babies are designed to squish down as they’re birthed, but Muffin’s egg had a firm, hard shell that wouldn’t compress in the slightest. And while it technically fit through the gap in the center of her pelvis, it did so with so little clearance that laying the egg was a game of seeing how much tissue she could compress between egg and bone.
Every contraction, every push squished the flesh tighter and tighter as the egg worked its way down. Every millimeter of movement brought with it unimaginable pressure, as though her hips had been blown up into a big, egg filled balloon.
And in the middle of all of that, Rusty had come in and given her a ray of hope. He’d slid the Book of Body next to her and told her a spell that could fix all this.
She slammed the nub of her arm into the book the instant Rusty was out past the door. Muffin tried her best to form a picture of herself in her mind, just like she had done as Troy, but her brain was too simple to achieve the same level of detail as before. Instead of a well thought out picture of herself with a flat, permanently egg free stomach, the best she could do was come up with a crude picture of an anthropomorphic hen along with the idea of no more eggs. It would have to do.
“Gestate.”
Pain ran through her stomach as another contraction hit. She tensed her arms and squinted her eyes as her muscles pressed the egg against the thick walls at the end of her birth canal.
Had the spell caused the contraction, she wondered? No, this was normal, this was what it was like every time she laid. The spell just hadn’t worked.
She cut through the pain to reimagine the same crude picture of herself while another “Gestate” choked out of her beak. It was all she could do. It had to work.
Again, nothing. The egg was still there. Her muscles were still straining, her sex was still burning as it tried to stretch around the oversized object pushing its way out.
Why wasn’t it working?
Rusty had been talking to her in the bathroom. She remembered him telling her that this was the Book of Body, that the spell was Gestate, but what else had he told her?
The sensory overload of her contraction, of the egg pressing down into her vagina, of her vagina refusing to stretch that last millimeter that she needs to get it out – it was all too much for her chicken brain to handle, so her brain was currently in the process of dumping the memories of her conversation with Rusty to make more room for thoughts about laying.
She remembered Rusty saying the spell worked on pregnancies. Was what she was experiencing a pregnancy? Muffin knew that mammals had periods. Maybe eggs were periods? Did that mean Gestate just didn’t work on them?
That couldn’t be it. Rusty had a smart brain. He could think big, strong thoughts. Rusty wouldn’t have given her a useless spell. He must have told her something about how to use it, something that she had forgotten. Muffin cursed her brain. Why did she have to be Muffin? Why couldn’t she remember more of what Rusty had told her? Why did she have to be this stupid? Why couldn’t she just be Troy again?
Would Rusty help her when he came back? Was he coming back? Why didn’t he just use the spell on her while he was in the bathroom? It was all too much for Muffin. She wasn’t used to asking questions and now her head was overflowing with them.
The feeling of the egg begin to move as taut muscles bore down on it, of her vagina begin to stretch, made her realize that was she needed to do right now wasn’t to think, it was to push. She shut her eyes as tight as she could, grit her beak, pressed her arms tightly into her stomach, braced her thighs and her tail, and clenched down as hard as she could. She pushed.
Her vagina stretched. The egg slipped down slightly.
“Push! Push! Push!” she told herself as she took a long, deep breath, “PUSH!”
Muffin heard the egg’s hard shell clacking against tile flooring as it slipped free from her body, the sudden shift of her center of gravity causing her to fall forward against the shower wall. She did it! She laid the egg!
Panting in relief as she leaned up against the shower, Muffin was so proud to have laid another egg, to have justified the decision to uplift her from a normal hen. Troy, meanwhile, was horrified as he looked though Muffin’s eyes at the massive egg resting in the middle of the shower. Troy never wanted to lay another egg, not after what she had just been through, but she knew that Muffin’s body wouldn’t give her a choice in the matter. She knew that the Book of Body was her only salvation. But she didn’t know how to use it.
RK did, she realized. RK could see things with his book, things that would tell him how to fix her. He just wouldn’t. Why wouldn’t he? They had talked earlier. He was mad at her. He said she was bad and he wouldn’t help her. Did RK just not like her? Both Troy and Muffin had known Rusty for most of their lives, but RK was new to both of them. Maybe he wasn’t a friend?
Muffin didn’t know how long it would be until they realized she had the Book of Body. She had to do something, but the only thing she could do was to cast a spell that couldn’t help her. Or could it?
She couldn’t help herself with Gestate, but maybe she could force RK to do so instead?
A rare glimmer of hope and inspiration lit up Muffin’s mind. Yes. She could use Gestate on RK, make him lay eggs. But not like Muffin’s eggs – fertile eggs. Pregnant eggs. The kind of eggs that Gestate could affect.
Muffin still didn’t know if it would work – if the spell should have affected her but she had just forgotten something important about it – but hoping that it would affect RK, putting him in a position where he had no choice but to figure out how to fix them both, was the only chance she had to avoid her fate.