The four girls couldn’t help but listen as Alexa’s panicked shouts descended into pleasurable groans, joining the lewd chorus that filled the air all around them. Chelsea let out a grunt of frustration and elbowed a wall of blue flesh next to her, eliciting a muffled coo of delight from somewhere above them.

"Be careful!" The shorter girl, Becca, yelped in alarm. "We don't know how fragile they are!"

Harmony, the taller, blonde girl tried to peer between the spherical forest of blue orbs for the red light of the "EXIT" sign that she had been chasing.

"Ms. Stuphenmeyer seemed to say that they were pretty sturdy…" She considered running her hand across a curve of blue flesh, but thought better of it.

"Yeah, and look what happened to her." Chelsea retorted. "This place is a deathtrap, and now our tour guide is gone."



“I’m so sorry Chelsea.” Becca huffed frantically. “I never should have invited you on this dumb tour, they said I could bring a plus one and…you don’t even *eat* this stuff…”



Chelsea laid a reassuring hand on her friend’s shoulder. “Hey, this isn’t your fault Becca…but we gotta get out of here before I end up on an all-juice diet.”



“Here.” Harmony interjected, waving the group around a final grunting, blue obstruction to reveal the far wall and the glowing exit sign. “Someone help me with the door.”



The door in question was metal and heavy-looking, but surrendered and swung inwards after a few good shoves from the tall Harmony and Chelsea’s toned arms. They were the first to stumble past the threshold and into the darkness beyond. Becca and Patricia followed their respective companions, too concerned with escape to notice the door swing shut behind them with a heavy bang and a soft click.

The space they had entered was pitch black, with nothing but the omnipresent hum of machinery and the dull ring of their shoes on metal to hint at the quartet's surroundings.

"Can't see a damn thing…" Chelsea's voice sounded off.

There was a rattle of metal and a small grunt of effort.

"Door's locked from this side…" Becca groaned. "Or stuck."

There was another bout of rattling. "Yeah." Becca sighed, "It's definitely locked."

"Of course it is." Chelsea glowered.

"It's not my fault!" Becca sounded distressed "I didn't-"

"Hang on, hang on." Harmony interrupted as her face suddenly appeared in the darkness, illuminated by a small rectangle of pale light coming from her phone. She tapped at it briefly until the flashlight came on, revealing the other three girls as they blinked in the sudden illumination.

"Thanks." Chelsea nodded. "Any idea where we are?"

The vest-wearing blonde swept the light around her, illuminating the dark, metal catwalk they were standing on, the railings on either side and the thick, jumbled mass of pipes and reservoirs all around them.

"Some kinda utility passage." Harmony said as she traced her light down the length of a heavy, red pipe thicker around than her torso. Everywhere they could see were more pipes, occasional junctions and creaking gauges, pressing in on either side of the catwalk and seemingly extending for dozens of meters below them.

"Maybe we can find a way out through here." Trish added hopefully, adding her own phone's light. "Or at least a service passage, or someone who can help…"

"How's your battery, Trish?" Harmony inquired.

"Not great." The redhead admitted. She scowled as she checked the other symbols on top of her phone screen. "No signal either, figures."

"Are we even above ground?" Chelsea chimed in. "That elevator we took during the tour really bounced us around. We could be anywhere by now."

"Let's get moving, while we still have the light." Harmony directed the group forward. "Keep your eyes out for another Exit sign."

The small group of girls set out, guided by the twin lights that marked the path ahead of them. The pipework that hung around them gave the sensation of crawling through the entrails of some massive beast.

"What do you think all these pipes are for?" Chelsea speculated, trying to get a glimpse of them in the gloom outside of the cold white illumination provided by the two phones.. “Water? Maybe waste? Hydraulics?” She offered a small, dry laugh “You think they just...pump molten chocolate all around the factory?”



“No…” Trish had turned her light on to one of the thicker pipes, until she saw a small, hissing viewport. Past the bolted on glass window was a solid, deep indigo.

“It’s juice.”

Trish turned, pointing her light at another pipe, and another.

“It’s all juice.”

The group huddled towards one another, retreating from the margins of the catwalk. All around them, the overburdened pipes groaned and shuddered with pressure, eerily similar to the skin of the berries that they had left behind.

 Harmony became dimly aware of the sounds of dripping liquid echoing here and there in the darkness.

"Keep…keep your eye out." She warned. "Don't step in anything, and don't step under anything."

The quartet had been walking in silence for a few minutes before they hit a T-junction in the path. At the head of the pack, Harmony swept her flashlight down both pathways, revealing further dark, pipe lined passageways on either side.



“It just keeps going and going…” Becca winced.The creaking, hissing and faint sound of bubbling fluids had taken on a recognizable pattern and was sounding more and more like respiration. A vast, slow heartbeat reverberated all around them.

“We need a map…” Harmony set her chin and picked the left path at random. “This way. It’s as good as the other until we find a way out of here.”



As the group journeyed further into the darkness, Chelsea attempted to strike up conversation, awkwardly rubbing at her short, dark hair.

“So ah…I was invited by my friend, Becca.” She began. “Which of you got the free pass?”



“She did.” the red head, Patricia, pointed towards her blonde friend without turning around. “Harmony plays bass in our band and thought this tour might be a good source of inspiration for some music.”



“What kind of…”



“Industrial Rock.” Harmony interrupted. “It seemed like a great idea at the time. Did you get your ticket in your groceries too?”



“It was only a matter of time for this one.” Chelsea nudged Becca. “She’s been a fan of Stuffem’s for years. This was…well. I suppose it was her dream.”



“Yeah.” The shorter girl’s eyes were downcast as she took a moment to clean her glasses. “A dream…”

“We’ll get out of here, I promise.” Chelsea gave her friend’s shoulder a comforting squeeze. “Just wish we could find a-”



The dialogue was cut off by the build of a sudden new, low rumble that had been building in volume and intensity until it couldn’t be ignored any longer. The pipes all around the four girls seemed to vibrate with pressure, and the sound of overexerted hydraulics roared in their ears. Somewhere in the blackness behind them, Chelsea could make out the bang of a rivet bursting out of place, then more, as if a gunfight had broken out in the hallway.

“Run!” Patricia yelled over the din. “Run!”

The four girls broke into a dead sprint, their feet pounding off of the grate beneath them as their dancing flashlights painted a scattered jumble of briefly illuminated images. Somewhere, a loud klaxon was going off, a gurgling horn that discharged at regular intervals. There was the sudden impression that the four were aboard a sinking ship, and they desperately had to get off.



The group reached another junction, and Trish chose the right path, rounding the corner and barreling into the bloated figure on the other side. She fell backwards into Harmony’s abruptly outstretched arms while the other rotund person awkwardly stumbled back, their wide hips ping-ponging off of the catwalk railings. The four girls all clustered together in alarm as they realized that the newcomer in their midst was swollen with blue juice. She wore a full-body white cleansuit that stretched to contain her spherical midsection, a pair of sapphire breasts pushing up past the opening created by a zipper that was gradually being forced apart by the pressure within.

The blue woman's momentum finally conquered her equilibrium and she toppled onto her rounding backside. All four of her shortening limbs flailed without purchase as she rocked back and forth on the swell of her own body like an overturned beetle.

“Who’s that!” Trish yelled over the din of the alarm. Harmony was still moving, half dragging the stunned redhead around the perimeter of the ovoid stranger as she continued to grow wider and taller.

Harmony looked down at the woman’s stretched white jumpsuit, even as it was forced further open by her expanding body. She spotted a familiar logo on the left breast, just before the fabric slipped off the curvature of her gigantic tit, exposing it entirely as her right one followed suit.

“She works for Stuffenmeyer!” Harmony called over the expanding woman’s belly. “Must be a technician or something!”

Becca looked down at the globular employee’s swelling lower half. Her thighs were growing wider and stubbier, slowly being eclipsed by her swollen undercarriage. Already, a faint cerulean blush was staining the wide area between her distancing legs.

“Becca!” Chelsea tugged at her friend’s arm, snapping her out of her trance. She saw Chelsea trying to squeeze her svelte body through the shrinking gap between the berry woman’s side and the hard metal railing.

“Whu-Wait!” The swollen woman cried out. Harmony looked down at her plumping face, already nestled against the curve of what was once her shoulders.

“Gasket…” the technician pressed onwards, struggling to form words past her swollen cheeks and plumping lips. “Valve…right…there…”

“She says there’s a valve!” Harmony called over the ripening woman's belly.

Becca watched as one of the unknown woman’s vanishing legs kicked awkwardly towards a spot past the railing. She followed the motion to a large, circular handle jutting out of one of the pipes surrounding them. It looked like something that belonged on a submarine. Behind her, she could hear the cacophony of stressed metal and spraying liquid growing louder.

“I think this can stop it!” She pulled at Chelsea. “Help me with this, please!”



Wincing with reluctance, Chelsea joined her smaller friend at the valve, gripping it with both hands and helping her wrench it clockwise. It took several hard pulls, but then it was turning on its own, compelled by internal pressure. The entire pipe shuddered with the rush of fluid and behind them, the clang of bursting metal began to abate, though the alarm was still issuing its gurgling cry.

“I think we managed to relieve the pressure…” Becca panted.

“Speaking of pressure!” Harmony called from her side of the catwalk. “You’re out of time!”



The two friends swiveled and realized that the blonde and red haired heads of their compatriots had vanished completely behind the eclipsing stomach of their technical advisor. Chelsea swore and tried to look for a way around the ripening obstacle to no avail, her curving blue sides were already pressed tight against both railings.

“We can double back!” Becca called out “Maybe find a way to meet up-”



“No!” Chelsea interrupted her. “This place is a maze! We gotta go up and over!”



“Up and-” Becca gasped as she watched her friend launch herself directly at the swelling blue stomach in front of them. The taller girl scrambled for contact before the fingers of one hand sank deep into the woman’s navel. On the other side, Harmony heard the fruit’s sinking head let out a suppressed moan. Chelsea grunted as she pulled herself up the curved surface by her single handhold, her sneakered feet kicking at the cerulean curvature beneath her before she finally found purchase on top of the berry’s belly. She lay flat against it, reaching her hand down towards Becca.



“Bex c’mon!” She shouted. “We’ve only got a little time before this one starts to leak!”

Becca gulped as she took in the gravid hemisphere of the blueberry’s lower half. Already the woman’s legs were close to gone, just a pair of twitching feet remained, being pulled deeper into soft divots. Between them was just a smooth curve, in defiance of human anatomy.



“Not a human…a fruit..” Becca muttered.

“BEX!” Chelsea yelled. The bespectacled girl snapped out of her trance and into action. Chelsea’s outstretched hand was growing further away by the second. She squared up for a moment and then leapt, her palm finding Chelsea’s. The short-haired girl grunted as she pulled, hauling her friend upwards against the blueberry’s former abdomen. She felt herself shift, at risk of being pulled back the way she came by Rebecca’s weight, until a warm hand closed itself around her bare ankle.



“Pull!” Harmony shouted to Trish, arms wrapped around her friend’s middle as she in turn maintained her grip on the sportier girl’s leg. Chelsea flexed, yanking Rebecca off of her feet and pressing her cheek against the cool blue expanse beneath her. The daisy chain of girls collectively orbited the peak of the fruit and slid down the other side. Becca instinctively clung to the dome of one growing breast while the other three collapsed onto the catwalk in a heap.

“She’s gonna start gushing any second!” Chelsea yelped as she disentangled herself from the other two. Becca leapt from her perch and landed next to Harmony, offering the taller blonde a hand. Back on their feet, the group backed away from the huge, grunting berry. She was completely spherical at this point, the white jumpsuit that once completely covered her nearly gone beneath the blue mass she had become. Her puffy face was sinking into herself, her shining blue eyes looking back at them upside down. The woman’s circular shape was malformed by the two railings that pressed into her sides, blue skin bulging past the metal bars.



“She’s getting pinched!” Trish pointed out. “Maybe that’ll…squeeze her?”

There was another loud shudder of creaking metal and Harmony’s hand flew from the guide rail as it began to slightly vibrate. With a loud crack, the catwalk bucked and the employee’s round sides pushed outwards, buckling the metal that had tried to press her out of a natural orb.



“God…” Harmony winced. “The pressure in her must be insane…”

“C’mon” Chelsea pushed past the group, speeding them along as they all began to back away. “We can’t help her now. Can’t help anyone here.”



The group ran, Becca offering one last glance before the berry vanished into the darkness.

“Thank you…”

The red glow of the emergency lighting winked away bit by bit until the four girls were back to lighting their way by their phones.

“Where do you suppose she came from?” Becca inquired idly.

“I figure she worked here, the way she helped us turn off the alarm.” Chelsea responded.

“No I mean...she can’t have just been wandering these tunnels like us. Maybe she was out trying to fix something. She could have had a map on her, or at least known the way out…”



Harmony shone her light into the blackness behind her, illuminating the other two and trying to ignore the 18% battery notification on the screen. “Either of you wanna double back and ask her?”

The hydraulic groan of old pipework all around them answered Harmony’s question before anyone else could address it. Any extra second spent here was a second too long.

“How many others do you think…actual human employees work here?” Trish asked her friend.



“Dunno.” Harmony shrugged. The humidity had made her pull her black denim vest off and sling it over one shoulder. “During the tour, Ms. Stuffenmeyer seemed pretty keen on showing off how automated the whole factory was. Just machines all the way down, and a few people to maintain them..”



“Feels like this whole factory has been running on autopilot for god knows how long.” Chelsea grimaced. “They can’t have built all this pipework just to move juice around. Where is it all even going?”

“Tanks, I hope. Reservoirs.” Harmony responded. “All those berries we saw, all getting…pumped. It all had to go somewhere.”

“But for how long?” Trish pointed out. “None of them looked any smaller. Do they just keep…keep producing?”

“Maybe these pipes weren’t meant for all that juice. Maybe they used to pump, I dunno, chocolate or something.” Becca theorized. “They’re just using everything they’ve got.”

Chelsea looked down at her friend. The other girl’s brown ponytail swayed behind her as she looked over her shoulder. “What if… what if the tanks are all full…what if the pipes are the only storage they have left?”

“Light!” Harmony pointed ahead. All eyes followed her gesture to a sliver of white light that slashed through the rusty gloom. The group picked up the pace and pushed their way into the brightly illuminated space, squinting and blinking as they all collectively adjusted to the comparatively blinding light.

It was a clean but dingy space, a large staff area that looked as though it had spent years inhabited by a fraction of the number it was built for. An untouched television hung over a cluster of faded furniture resting its legs on hard tile. The other side of the room was lined with faded blue lockers that shared a wall with some sort of emergency station. First aid kits and fire extinguishers were clustered around what looked like an industrial shower, like the kind intended to hose down someone covered in chemicals.

“No one’s here…” Chelsea observed as she tentatively entered the space. There was an abandoned board game festooned with multicolored pieces collecting dust on the coffee table. It looked like blue was winning. There was the barest hint of activity in the room, a few areas close to the lockers and another door on the far side of the room were slightly more polished than anything else.

“Was hoping there was someone else here who could help us.”

“I’d settle for an exit..” Harmony grunted. She picked her way through the room to inspect a small placard against the other door, reading out the list of pathways and areas it led to.

“Storage…refinery….composition….Yeah, nothing here points to a way out.”

There was a faint rusty creak as Patricia experimentally pulled open one locker.

“Hey…” she waved at the others. “Come and have a look at this…”

The three other girls all drew closer as Trish revealed the contents of the locker; a thin white set of coveralls composed of a slick, vinyl-like material. She held up the bodysuit, which was stamped with the Stuffenmeyer logo.

“Looks like one of the suits that that mechanic was wearing.” Becca postulated. “That material doesn’t look very porous…maybe it’s supposed to be waterproof?”



“Didn’t do her many favors.” Chelsea snorted. “How protective can it be?”

“Hang on, they’ve also got this…” Trish reached back into the locker and pulled out a sizable plexiglass helmet, which looked like a cross between something a firefighter and a scuba diver would wear. She experimentally squeezed it down over her own mop of red hair and looked out through the flat, transparent plastic window that revealed her face.

“Looks like a fancy fishbowl.” Harmony raised an eyebrow.

“It looks like a cleansuit!” Trish responded, her voice taking on a static rasp as it was transmitted via speaker from some microphone in the helmet. “We’ve been dodging drops and floods, maybe we can stay safe inside these if we seal them up!”

The other three girls shared looks, but none of them had any better ideas. Each one moved between the lockers, scavenging them for intact suits. Vestments in hand, they each took a separate corner of the room to strip down and change.

Harmony peered over her shoulder as she wriggled out of her tight jeans, trying to imagine a scenario where her blue body fought against the riveted denim to assume a spherical shape. Like that woman before, bending metal with her bulk. She shook her head, trying to banish that train of thought from her mind. She couldn’t entertain a scenario like that, she had to keep pushing forward.



Chelsea opted to keep her snug top and shorts on underneath the suit as she wriggled into the white, form-fitting garment. Woven fabric moved against her skin as she hopped in place to pull the vinyl-lined suit over her legs. She spared a brief, sympathetic look at her stockier friend Rebecca, who had hidden herself as best she could behind a couch as she changed. It looked as though she had resorted to a seat on the floor as she yanked the tight garment over herself. Who in the hell thought such form-fitting coveralls would be a good idea in this place?



Becca kept her eyes on her own work as she struggled to pull her suit’s zipper up over her soft stomach. The suit certainly felt waterproof, thin layers of liquid-repellent coating giving the white material a plasticy sheen. She just dreaded the thought of being seen in such a skin-tight garment. The bespectacled girl’s mind drifted to the expanse of blue flesh that she had been recently scrambling over. The wide horizon stamped with a single deep navel she had bodily pulled herself over. It helped, in an odd way, to put her own issues with body image in perspective. She lingered on the thought of her hands sinking into the taut cerulean skin, and before that, the girl she had been on the tour with before she became the first of many. How both had felt so cool under her hands, despite the excitement and fear of both would-be fruits. It hadn’t really been them she had felt, just the gallons of juice that had overtaken them, defining their new world.

Rebecca broke away, blinking and trying to flush the strange thoughts from her mind. She glanced at Chelsea, and noticed that she had pulled her thin jacket over the snug jumpsuit, granting her a little extra coverage and more importantly, pockets. The blond girl, Harmony, had seemingly taken the cue and pulled her denim vest back on. Rebecca reclaimed her discarded sweater, gratefully sliding the loose knit top over the various folds and ripples of her body, gracelessly outlined by the suit. She afforded a look over at the redheaded Patricia, noting that her own set of coveralls had barely been pulled past her hips. Then her eyes migrated north and a yelp came to her lips before she could stop herself.

All eyes snapped to Becca, who stammered at the sudden focus of the room, and then pointed a trembling finger at Trish. The half-clothed girl looked down at her own body in alarm, wondering what on earth had alarmed the others, before she noticed the large, blue stain on her elbow that was steadily growing bigger.



“Wha….what? When!? How?”



“Must have been when we were climbing over that worker…” Chelsea guessed. “Some little squirt, a few drops…”

Harmony approached her friend with a look of fear and sympathy mingling on her face. “Don’t…don’t panic Trish…” She tried to keep her voice steady. “None of it got in your mouth. It’s a small patch, maybe we can…”

Trish backed up, watching the sapphire stain creep higher along her arm. She stifled a sob of alarm as it reached the back of her palm and began to creep up her hand. She dug at her skin with her fingernails, scratching and scrubbing at her own blue flesh, as if she could strip the tint away like a layer of paint.

“You’ll hurt yourself!” Harmony shouted. “Patricia! Stop!”



“I’ve gotta get it off…” Trish’s frantic gaze rose from her own blue arm to the chemical shower in the far corner of the room. She pushed past Harmony in a scramble to reach it, desperate for anything that could cleanse the taint from her body.

Becca watched the gradually bluing woman collapse into the emergency station, knocking over plastic cartons full of bandages and collapsing past a workplace safety chart. She saw the reinforced shower head hanging over a drain in the floor, and glanced upwards at the network of pipes enmeshing the ceiling that fed into it.

“The pipes!” She cried out, just as Trish wrapped her hand around the plastic pull-handle to trigger the shower.

“All of the pipes!”

Trish pulled hard. The handle dangling from the cord came off in her hand. The showerhead trembled slightly as the plumbing it was connected to shook violently. The redheaded girl was looking directly upwards when a geyser of blue fluid erupted from the overtaxed nozzle and struck her in the face.

The other three girls scrambled away from the rushing torrent of blueberry juice as it pelted the sputtering fourth member of their group, building on the floor too fast for the miniscule drain to take it in. The blue pool began to spread across the white tiles, creeping forward and forcing the others to retreat to the exit on the far side of the room.

“Everything, every tank, every reservoir…” Becca panted. “They’re all full! Even the pipes! They all just pump juice!”

Harmony zipped up her jumpsuit as she kept her eyes locked on her friend. Her body was completely dyed a deep blue now, and swelling at an alarming rate. The half-applied set of coveralls was slipping down her widening legs, pushed from above wide by a round, exposed belly. She pressed at it desperately, even as her arms began to thicken. Her red hair had turned a deep violet color and the inevitable bloat was starting to ratchet her breasts up the cup scale, bulging out and over the inadequate brassiere that snapped off in a matter of seconds. The ruined underwear landed in a soggy mass in front of the ripening berries friend, her bandmate. The reason she had even come here.

Harmony made a half step towards her, then shrunk back at the widening pool that was overtaking the break room. One of the others was pulling at her shoulder. She met Trish’s gaze. Even her eyes were blue now. Scared, pleading, forlorn, and blue.

“I’m sorry” Harmony uttered, half pleading as she backed away, towards the waiting darkness of the utility door. “I’m sorry!”



Harmony, Chelsea and Rebecca all slipped away, sealing themselves under layers of laminated protection and offering their last regretful glimpses at their fallen compatriot, waddling in place as her body continued to inflate. She struggled to move her fattening legs, even as her widening hips and stomach began to descend, robbing her of mobility. Trish moved back into the ceaseless stream of juice jetting from the showerhead, feeling it thud against her already tightening stomach, pouring into her, permeating her.

It felt good…

The three others were on a stone staircase, retreating down the steps in a panic. The factory was larger than ever, and they had no option but to flee further into the blackness. Their new boots squeaked against the stone steps, mingling with the faint sounds of the juice that had seeped underneath the closed door and was dripping, step by step, down after them.