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Mary carefully closed the door behind her. She was so tired. Stock girl at Danny’s Furniture Emporium wasn’t her choice of profession, but she didn’t have to wear a uniform, only a vest. That was her only requirement in a job: no uniforms. Her clothes, only. Most would call her picky, but her reasons for the restriction were more… practical. Her shoes came off first. The 5’5” girl let her long, dark hair down from the bun, and relaxed for a moment. In the refrigerator was a few dozen steaks she’d prepared earlier in the week, a few gallons of milk, two full roasts, and a handful of odds and ends. She grabbed a few steaks and the least-full gallon jug of milk. Oh, and a bottle of steak sauce. Snack’s Spicy Southern Flavor tonight; it’s nice to mix it up every now and again. 2-0-0-Start. The microwave whirred to life with the steaks inside. In the meantime, she started heating her two kettles of water. Her nightly routine continued until she had made enough steak and tea to feed a hungry mob. Happy to be out of the cramped 12’x12’ kitchen, she set the feast out on the far side of the spacious combination living-room-and-bedroom. She’d be lucky if she could ever sell this house after what she had the contractors do to it. Unbeknownst to her neighbors, the house was converted from a four-bed, two-bath home to a practically-single-room building. Her kitchen was a small annex, and the rest of the house had been gutted to make the combined living area she now sat in. The garage, which, being the only other area large enough, now served as a bathroom. Mary had no complaints. The house was comfortable for a girl her size. She flicked on the television and got ready to unwind. “Your Honor” was on. Not her favorite, but probably better than anything else on at the moment. God knows she didn’t want to be stuck watching another night’s worth of “Celebrity Today”. She flew through the TV’s menus to set the sleep timer for 3 hours, just in case. She reached down for her socks, but stopped. A chill ran down her spine. She remembered the day of the accident; she remembered it every night. Her memory wound back to regaining consciousness, upside down in the smoldering car. She screamed for help, but no one answered. Not dad in the driver’s seat, not mom in the passenger’s, not little Matt, previously beside her. Despite the bright light of the flames, she couldn’t see anyone. The flames’ roar was all around her. It seemed like a lifetime before the firemen managed to yank her out through the window. As the man carrying her ran to the waiting ambulance, she kept hearing men yell, “We need a jack!” “Get that side of the car up before it caves in!” She was thankful that was all she saw that day. Her next memory was in the hospital, where a man in a suit told her what was happening. She knew what had happened, but not what came after. There were a lot of things after: she had to recover from the spinal injury first, but Warren, the man in the suit, told her of the other things. The life insurance claims, the lawsuit against the driver who sent their car flying, so on and so on. Mary got to know Warren Pierce well in the months she spent between surgeries and during her recovery. He was a long time friend of her mother, and her employer. Eventually Warren told her he was considering a suit against the car manufacturer. That was what lawyers did, she supposed. Having no one other than the hospital staff to talk to, she listened to Warren’s entire case as he explained it. His entire argument hinged on the driver-side mid-body support’s structure. “It couldn’t have structurally sound if it ended up like that, even after a fire and the impact. See the way the metal bent? There’s an internal bar that’s supposed to keep that straight, and…” Eventually he brought in some of the files his firm had put together. Diagrams of the crash scene, photos of the burnt husk of her family car, and a VHS tape. It took some effort to get a VHS player set up in her hospital room. She wasn’t in rehab yet at this point, so she had nowhere else to go, and nothing else to do. The VHS cost thousands of dollars, and dozens of hours to produce, but Warren thought it would pay off easily when the case saw a jury. It was an engineering simulation of the crash. She watched as a crudely-modeled car rammed the car she had sat in. The screen split and showed engineering diagrams of stress on the car’s body, diagrams of other cars that survived impacts like theirs, etc. Warren paused every now and again to explain the charts and renderings. The final display was a simulated time-lapse of the car during, upside down a fire, compared with another manufacturer’s car in the same predicament. She watched from her bed as a cartoonish demonstration of the event that killed her family played out in front of her. The video ended on a shot of the metal bar that was supposed to keep the car from collapsing in an accident. “It just wasn’t strong enough. That’s all there was to it,” Warren explained. Mary struggled to maintain her composure until he left. As the door shut, she curled up what she could of her body and whimpered until she fell asleep. Pierce and Associates landed the case and won millions, a sizable chunk of which went to Mary. The money didn’t help her sleep, but it did pay for her counseling. Despite the therapy, Warren’s words never left her:

“It just wasn’t strong enough.”

When sleep did come to her, it was filled with images from the video, and from the car. Her therapist always assured her that she couldn’t have done anything to save her family. “The car weighed a ton and a half; even solid steel designed by engineers with years of experience couldn’t hold it up”, “You were twelve at the time”, “It took fourteen trained firefighters and rescue workers just to save you”, “You were trapped under burning metal and debris, which nearly shattered your spine in 4 places”, and various other appeals were thrust at her, but she could never shake the feeling of helplessness. By her late twenties, she had put the money to good use. Investors used her millions and made more, she moved around trying to find somewhere far enough away from the highway that she could forget, but every time she ended up back in the swampy coastal town she grew up in. It was on the way back from a trip north that she met her. The woods were thick near her family home, and the trail was dark. She had taken to walking at night to try putting her mind at ease. A usual fall evening for her, but the woods were anything but usual. A faint green glow accompanied the fog rolling on the ground. Mary heard leaves crinkle all around her as she followed the familiar damp path. The path’s electric lamps simultaneously extinguished. In the distance danced a singular flickering light. Warm, like a torch, rather than an electric bulb. The shadows cast around her were foreign, where there should have been paved path were now trees and bushes. In a panic, she ran face-first in to one of the apparitional trees. The leaves around her crunched in steps. The trees lit up as the torch wandered closer. A ghastly cackle greeted her as a tall, shrouded woman glided toward her. The torchlight hovered above her hand. “Oho! It has been so long since one of you ended up here!” the figure said. “One of who? Who are you? Where is this place?” Mary asked tremulously. “One like you, moppet. I… do not need a name. We are the only ones here.” Mary had backed up against the tall, wispy tree. “Here… where are we? What happened to my home?” “You are where you think you are. This place is a broken mirror, young one. It is pieces from all around, strewn together in a stew.” “How do I get home?” Mary asked fighting the awful feeling. “You will get home, in time.” “I see in you a weeping child, moppet. A wound festers in you. A burn from the hottest fire...” The witch threw her hand up and the forest came alight with wisps of flame. She cackled and screeched. Mary cowered by the tree. For the second time in her life, she heard it: the horrible roaring, all around her. Her screams couldn’t leave her shaking body. “I see it in you, child! I see your fear!” the witch shouted amidst the flames. The witched threw a ball of flame above Mary. The tree Mary trembled by leered above her. With a great CRACK the fireball snapped the trunk like a twig. Mary huddled, waiting to be crushed. The witch howled, “Be crushed, or stand firm now, girl! If you do not now, you will surely succumb to a far larger tree of your own creation!” In a fit of fear, Mary reached above her. To her surprise, the falling tree did not touch her hand, but she felt the burn nonetheless. She heard the witch’s cackle fade, but not before the woman cried “Our paths will cross again, moppet!” The fire around her was gone. She had returned from wherever she had gone, but the path was far away. She stood up and hit her head on the trunk of a tree. Caught by the trunk of a forked tree, it sat motionless. She sat in the middle of a pond, drenched from head to toe. As she returned to the path, she saw the pond, and the felled tree, from a different angle. She recognized it: that tree was as it has always been. She had climbed it as a child, despite her mother’s wishes. How could she have seen it fall? She returned home and toweled off. She removed her now-muddied shoes, and slipped off her long socks—

Mary snapped back to the present, no longer needing to remember the past. Her hand sat at the elastic band of her left sock. “Your Honor” was on commercial now. She drew her breath in, and slid the sock down her leg. As soon as the fabric had left her calf, the calf ballooned to the size of one of the full hams sitting in her fridge. The other sock followed suit, and her other calf did the same. All the minor muscles responsible for positioning her foot swelled to gargantuan widths. A sensation of release tingled along her lower legs. She flexed her calves to no smaller than double their resting size, allowing them to stretch from a long day compressed. Her jeans came off next, revealing legs wider around than her car, and a rear each cheek of which would make a mountain’s boulders jealous. She switched the TV over to the projector above her bed, positioned to giver her a good-enough view in her enlarged state. She started on her shirt, revealing abdominals and obliques like massive cinder blocks and suspension cables. Her lower back pressed out revealing the column-like tracts of muscle required to support what comes next. She slipped the shirt above her breasts, which, despite being fairly small while clothed, shook the house as they billowed out atop pecs deeper than she was tall. Her lats flared to a similar size, sliding the shirt up her back to reveal mountainous traps. The long-sleeve shirt, now only covering her arms, snapped up, exposing her immense, rolling shoulders. She threw the shirt across the room as her arms recovered their girth, bringing them far larger than her refrigerator while relaxed, and a good deal larger than her entire kitchen when flexed. She hadn’t seen the witch again to ask how this happened to her, or why it changes back when she’s wearing her clothes. Sprawled out on the floor, she gave her body a light flex. Just enough to avoid damage to the building, but enough to release some of the tension from being cooped up in those clothes all day. She could finally unwind. She wasn’t particularly comfortable having to deal with this… form, but she wasn’t uneasy with it either.

“It just wasn’t strong enough,” she remembered. “We’ll fucking see about that,” she muttered to herself.

-loW

#hypermuscle #flashback #hyper #growth #hidden #magic #nf #f