Five living pooltoys and one ordinary human were crammed together, tightly and awkwardly, into one small bedroom. Of course, if this was uncomfortable, it was about to get a whole lot worse. There was a rolling suitcase bag lying on the floor between the girls, its zipper pulled open, the space within mostly filled already by swimsuits and other beach essentials. What little empty space remained, unbelievably, was going to be enough to fit five people inside when Amber was done with them.
The girls had varying degrees of experience with the capabilities of their unnatural bodies, but this was pretty far beyond what any of them had tried before. This was going to be a legendary spring break before they even got to the hotel. “Are you guys ready?”, Amber asked the group. She got back an assortment of nods and yeses.
It’s too late to back out of this now, Hwan thought to herself. As Amber reached over to the other girls and started to open their nozzles, Hwan grabbed her own. She had insisted on being in complete control of her own deflation this time around, even though her plastic fingers would be a lot worse at undoing the clasp.
Hwan braved herself as she pulled it open, but when she did so, nothing happened. At least, not right away. She was full of air, not helium - others had tried that one before, but it was risky to stay like that for long without floating away - and her insides weren’t going to just rush out of her immediately. It took pressure to empty the air out, and without a guy lying on top of her it wasn’t going to happen so quickly this time. She was going to have to do it herself, or maybe with a little help from her friends.
It was easy enough to get started. With the valve wide open, any movement Hwan made would squeeze a little bit of air from that part of her body to the outside. She barely even noticed at first - only when her fingers started to droop and lose their movement did she realize how much air she had already lost. It was much less painful to take it slowly, but she was going to have to speed things up - they were supposed to be at the airport in an hour.
With a little trepidation, Hwan laid back on Amber’s bed and pressed an arm gently against her chest, just above the nozzle. Immediately, she felt the same sort of drowning sensation she’d experienced before. She immediately went to pull her arm away, but it was like moving through quicksand. Everything was impossibly heavy. She must have already been half empty - or, as the optimist would say, half full.
Hwan took a deep breath, metaphorically speaking, and tried to relax herself. This was a safe scenario. She could take her time. But Amber was already starting to fold up one of the other girls, and the rest seemed to be nearly flattened out as Hwan looked around on the bed. This was going to be done soon, one way or another.
Hwan was already past the point of being able to get up off the bed. Her legs and arms were weak and getting steadily weaker. She was not going to be able to completely empty herself without outside intervention. It would be a lot easier if Amber would just finish the job for her, but it was too late to say anything about that. None of them could speak anymore - the room was eerily quiet as Amber continued packing the girls up one by one.
Before long, Hwan was the only one left to fully deflate. She couldn’t get a good look at the luggage on the floor, but from the corner of her eye, she could see a pile of rolled-up sheets of pink and brown plastic sitting inside it. It was hard to imagine that four people were inside of there, or that there were about to be five.
“You still need a little help?”, Amber asked, breaking the silence that had fallen over the room. The only response Hwan could still give was a feeble thumbs-up, which ended up being more like flailing her hand around a bit. Amber just giggled. “I figured you would. Don’t worry, I’ll be as gentle as I can.”
A light touch from Amber was enough to render Hwan completely inanimate, in more ways than one. Hwan had been wondering whether her newfound attraction was just the result of being filled with Amber’s breath. She wasn’t about to go and test that theory by having someone else deflate her and fill her back up, but it made her question the wisdom of getting into a real relationship with her friend. But right now, even as the last of that same air was escaping her body, she still got a thrill from being pressed under Amber’s loving hands.
A moment later, she was being hoisted into the air and squeezed against her own flattened self. The transition from living thing to inanimate object was a sudden and disturbing one, even in the most caring hands. She simply had things done to her, and couldn’t resist in any way, let alone do things herself. The sensation of being rolled up was incredibly strange - parts of her body were touching that shouldn’t have been able to, but she could only watch as Amber started at her feet and pushed the mass of plastic closer and closer to her head.
She was left as a wadded-up cylinder that Amber could easily carry in one hand, thankfully with her eyes still facing outward on its front. Hwan couldn’t appreciate that fact for long, though. A moment later, Amber gave her a little kiss on the forehead (through the translucent surface of which, Hwan’s mouth could just barely be seen), then stuffed her next to the other girls and zipped the bag closed. They were all plunged into darkness now, an almost complete sensory deprivation broken only by the muffled sound from outside and the occasional quiver of one of the other girls - some of them still had a bit of air trapped inside.
The sound that Hwan could hear changed as time went on, from the trunk of a car rolling down the highway to the busy conversations of an airport terminal. Possibly the riskiest part of the plan was getting through the TSA line. Reports of human trafficking, unsurprisingly, had skyrocketed with the popularity of Fruits and their transformations. It was of course impossible in most cases for authorities to tell whether the thing being trafficked was once human, so enforcement was practically nonexistent. But if a security guard opened up their bag and connected the dots, Amber could be in big trouble before anyone thought to give the other girls enough air to explain the situation.
Fortunately, it seemed that nobody suspected a thing, because the sounds of the airport soon gave way to the rumbling of a jet engine ready for takeoff. They were actually getting away with this, Hwan thought with excitement. Maybe all of her worrying was for nothing.
But then again, she had little to do in these long, boring hours other than to worry. She was completely alone with nothing but her own mind for company, despite the fact that she was pressed tightly between friends who must have been equally bored.
Hwan didn’t even notice when she started to doze off - in her inert, senseless state, there was little difference between being awake and being asleep. It certainly helped to pass the time, though, because the next thing she knew, her vision was filled with light again.
In the privacy of their hotel room, Amber quickly got to work setting up the air compressor and bringing her assorted passengers back to life. But, as promised, she gave Hwan at least a partial inflation from her own mouth, before her lungs started to tire and she switched back to using the air hose. It didn’t have the same personal touch, but Hwan was a lot more relieved to be mobile again than she was disappointed to not have Amber’s lips a few inches above her featureless crotch.
When she was done, Hwan sat up and looked out the window. Their hotel room was cheap, but it still offered a slightly obstructed oceanfront view. Almost as impressive as the endless blue horizon, though, and certainly more eye-catching, were the people that crowded the boardwalk below.
Panama City Beach had always been a rowdy place during the spring break holidays, but this year promised to be a lot crazier. Unlike most other states, Florida had done basically nothing to regulate the flow and usage of Lilith Fruits, making a place like this a nationwide destination for transformation tourism. Even from a distance, you could see it - a flock of colorful man-sized birds taking flight over the crowd here, a sand sculpture suddenly coming to life and walking along the beach there. You could probably find any variety of Lilith Fruit imaginable in a place like this, and probably a few that were beyond your imagination too.
That, not the beach, was the real reason the floaties had wanted to come down here. Well, except for Hwan - she had no desire to add another complication to her two overlapping changes. She was content to stay back in the small hotel room with Amber for most of the weekend. It had only one bed, but the other girls were expecting to find someone else‘s place to crash for the night, in whatever form they might end up with.