A cloudy Sunday morning, Sue awoke earlier than usual. Having forgotten to even open a single can of soda the night before, there was no caffeine to keep her awake while in bed. The clouds also prevented the sun from peering through the blinds. Sue's morning was off to a pretty good start. She stepped out of bed and immediately headed to make a bowl of cereal. While eating breakfast, she opened a video app on her phone and began playing a meme compilation. Letting out a few chuckles while she loudly munched the cheap cereal. Practically syncing her eating to the video, she finished the last bite right as the video ended, then proceeded to slurp the remaining milk from the bowl, which had been discolored from the food dye in the cereal.

After noticing the clothes dryer full, Sue unloaded it into a pile on a nearby countertop, and dug through it until she found a fluffy pair of bunny slippers. "There you are. I should've gotten you out last night so I'd have some slippers this morning." She placed them neatly beside her bed, right on top of a small rug featuring what is clearly a bootleg recolored version of a popular anime character captioned with a common phrase, except one of the words in the phrase was replaced with what was supposed to be the character's name so that it became a pun, but the name used in the pun was actually a different character's name from an entirely different franchise. She had bought the novelty rug ironically at a local thrift store after returning home from an anime convention a few years back and realizing she forgot to buy any souvenirs.

"Alright... let's get on with today's tests." She took a tape measure from a kitchen drawer and lengthened it across the wood floor, all the way from her front door, and just through her bedroom door before the tape ran out of slack. "That'll be good enough. Let's see how far I can go." She pondered what body part she should stretch for the test. 'Hmm... I'll need my hands to measure, and I'll need my head to see. I don't want my tongue to touch the ground... so it'll have to be a leg or something. Actually I'll need my legs to walk for the test.'

"I'm probably overthinking this." Sue paused for a second. "Arms, legs, head... body. That might work. Never stretched my torso. It being the thickest part of the body should mean something. Now how am I going to stretch my spine? That is the question." She tried various poses against the back of a chair, trying to stretch her torso by bending her spine, but couldn't feel the right amount of leverage. About another minute or two of trying to find something sturdy to grab onto and hang down from, to no avail, a familiar thought crossed her mind. 'I'm probably overthinking this.' She looked down and put her hands on her hips. "Well if this works... I don't know what to say." With all her might, she pushed her hands downwards, and slowly but surely felt her torso lengthen, until her elbows were no longer bent.

Many would call Sue tall before, but now, she could almost touch the ceiling with the top of her head while flatfooted. "Well I'll be darned. Helluva view up here. Now how to make it longer?" She looked around the room, before her gaze fixated on the stepladder in an open closet off to the side of the room. "That'll do nicely." Sue quickly set up the ladder in the middle of the living room, just beside her couch. She crawled under the ladder and gripped the lower support beam on the non-stepping side with her legs, and slid the rest of her body back out from under the first step. "Alright, here we go." She began the motions of climbing up the step ladder using only her arms, taking care not to accidentally fold the ladder in on itself. With her knees holding her lower body in place, her torso gradually stretched as she climbed the steps. This might just be the only purpose Sue would have for a stepladder anymore.

The lengthening of her torso felt similar to when she stretched an arm or leg, but having a noticeable increase in resistance due to its larger diameter. Nonetheless, she reached the top before she knew it. At this point, the resistance was noticeably less prominent. "Huh. I guess it's easier because all the density is being stretched thin? It's not like it's getting thinner though... at least I hope it's not getting thinner, because I don't want to be chubbier than this at my normal. Am I really growing a bit of a gut?" She began to ponder, she didn't feel stretched too thin. It was easier to stretch now, but she expected to reach a stress limit where it'd be harder to stretch the longer she got, much like a rubber band. That is if she even had a limit at all. She unhooked her knees from the support beam, slid her upper body down the ladder, climbed her legs to the upper support beam, wrapped them over the beam and clung to the lower support beam just as before. With all her torso slack redistributed to the back of the ladder, she began to climb again.

Her climbing continued about five times, looping her legs between the support beams each time she reached the top, until the ladder fell forwards from the sheer amount of mass on the back side of it. "Woah!" Luckily, the mass of stretched torso managed to cushion her landing, so the ladder didn't break anything or scratch the hardwood floor on its way down. "Oy vey..." Sue slowly uncoiled from the ladder. "That could've gone better, but it also could've gone worse."

Sue slithered the best she could across the floor, pulling herself forwards with her hands, since pushing with her legs didn't seem to help. She then straightened out her torso beside the tape measure, her torso surpassing the measure by a few feet. "Dang, that's pretty long. I wonder if I even have a limit. Definitely going to need some new equipment to figure this mystery out." She began to coil her torso up and slowly retract back to normal length. It was taking minutes to do so, as she had never stretched this far before, so she decided to try and pull herself together and grip a ball of spaghetti-like torso in her arms just so that she could walk upright. It was very strange, not only was her balance off because her center of mass was off, but when she took her first step like this, she felt heavier. "That's... strange. Is it... no... maybe? Just to be sure..."

Sue hobbled into her bathroom and stepped on the scale. It read 351 lbs. "Wh-what? That's not right..." Before she could speak another word, the scale read 340 lbs. "Okay... now I'm even more confused." She watched the scale go down by one pound every few seconds as her torso shortened to normal length. "So wait... it's not about density? And I'm losing weight... er... losing mass? That's impossible... and yet." She rubbed her chin. "Something else has got to be going on. I just have to figure out how to find out what that is. I'll have to put a pin in it right now."

"I guess that'll have to conclude stretch testing for today. Onto squash testing." Sue returned to her kitchen and grabbed a large rolling pin from a drawer. "Seems like the obvious tool for the job. Now I'll need my hands to use the darn thing... but I won't need to walk around to measure myself, so legs it is!" After removing her pants to ensure her legs were bare so that no material would interfere, she sat down on the hardwood floor and spread her legs forwards across the floor, toes pointed forwards. "Well, here goes nothing." She planted the rolling pin on one of her shins and pressed down, rolling back and forth, working her way to her toes. While flattening wasn't something she did everyday, at certain extents it had become a familiar feeling by now. She stopped to look at her work; everything below the knee was no thicker than an inch.

'I can go further than this.' She thought to herself. She moved the rolling pin all the way to her upper thigh, and pressed, rolling across the whole leg in broad, firm strokes. It took a few minutes, but soon her entire leg was no more than half an inch in thickness, though fairly spread out to about twice its width. Unsatisfied, she rolled it further, pressing harder and rolling faster. Her leg soon reaching a quarter of an inch, an eighth, and soon a uniform 2 millimeters. She only stopped because her thigh was now as wide as the large rolling pin. "Huh. Guess I need a bigger pin, or I can find something else. I could probably ask to borrow an industrial press... but that might blow my cover."

Sue examined her flattened, spread out leg. It was about 25% longer, and about 4 times wider than normal. Her enhanced flexibility made it easy for her to reach a toe, and attempt to peel it from the floor. Unfortunately, it seems her leg stuck to the floor during the flattening. Sue let out a sigh. "I didn't think it'd come to this." She reached for a spatula on the nearby counter top, and began prying her leg from the floor. Thankfully, the spatula didn't cause any floor damage.

Sue managed to get her entire leg scraped off the floor with relative ease. She picked it up by the big toe, her leg folding as if boneless, and examined it, the light from the other room peering through it in a faint opaque red glow. The heat from her leg easily escaping due to its decreased volume and increased surface area. It was exceedingly lightweight, and trying to flex any of the muscles in her leg barely did anything. Despite barely being able to move it, it didn't feel claustrophobic or constrained, instead, despite being exceedingly alien, felt quite natural. "Now this is really weird feeling. I've never gone this thin before. Way stranger than usual." She poked and stroked her flattened leg, reveling in the peculiar sensation. After a few minutes of prodding, she folded her leg in half backwards, resting with the sole of her foot facing upwards on her lap. She spent a few minutes rolling her other leg to the same thickness and folding that one onto her lap as well. She planted her hands onto her soles, quickly feeling the warmth from her hands travel into her now room-temperature feet. "Ah. That's the good stuff." Her spread out feet much more sensitive than in their normal shape.

The increased sensitivity gave Sue an idea. She picked up one of her feet, turned it to face herself, and with her fingers providing rigidity on the top of her foot, she began to massage her sole with her thumbs, all the while letting out massive sighs of relief. Working both her thumbs deep and firm, she pressed her foot to only 1 millimeter thickness. The rubbing motions were also stretching her foot outwards, her sensitivity greatly increasing as it became thinner and more spread out. A few switches in position, and she was soon working on her toes. She had very quickly lost track of time, spending over 30 minutes massaging her foot before realizing she had stretched it to just over 4 feet wide and 7 feet long.

With her foot spread out, yet quite relaxed because of the massage, Sue ignored the time and decided to do the same with her other foot. Sure enough, another 30 minutes had passed. Both feet now spread out enough to lay an entire door on them, per foot. Sue, now relaxed to the extent that she didn't notice she'd been drooling for the past five minutes, began a crawl towards her couch. After climbing on top of it, she lay one flattened foot over her body like a blanket, and folded the other many times over to make a small pillow. Laying down and getting comfy, she was ready to pop on a movie before a thought occurred to her.

'I... still wonder...' Sue pondered. 'Can I regenerate from injuries? I mean I've gotten squashed and stretched, but I haven't gotten a cut since I got my powers...' She rubbed her chin in thought. 'What if cuts are permanent? I'd never know until afterwards. Should I just wait until it happens naturally and just go with the flow, or take preventative measures to try and never get cut?' A few seconds of circling the thought, she eventually made a decision. "Cuts and bruises are a natural part of life, and I shouldn't act so sheltered. I'll just have to think of a spot that I'd be fine with having a permanent cut or puncture... Puncture... Piercing! That's it. I've never had a piercing. Can't be too hard, won't matter if I can't regenerate from it, or if it'd be permanent."

She unfolded her feet and crawled over to a closet near the kitchen and pulled out an old box of sewing equipment. Finding the a needle in a needle stack wasn't too difficult. After sterilizing the needle, she headed to the closest mirror. "Alright... Okay... I haven't felt pain in a few weeks or so... so this might be jarring." She positioned the needle on her earlobe. "Okay... I can do this. I've broken bones before, so this should be nothing." She attempted to reassure herself, but ended up closing her eyes when she finally drew the needle through the lobe.

She felt it, but not like how she was expecting. The needle had broken through the skin, and out the other side. She could feel the needle there, and it was fairly cold. She slowly let off her flinch as she opened her eyes. "So... no pain then?" She let out a sigh of relief. "Time to check on the result." She slowly drew the needle out of the hole in her lobe. She had expected maybe some blood, but there was none. The hole certainly was there, and it appeared just like a piercing would days after it would've healed. "Okay now... can I regenerate from this?" She turned her head a few times to get a better look from different angles. It wasn't very noticeable at first glance, but within half a minute, the hole was noticeably smaller, and by the end of the minute, was no longer visible even when actively looking for it. "Sweet! So I can naturally regenerate from injuries, and I probably don't even bleed... Maybe... Hopefully."

"Now for the actual test... I can naturally heal from injuries, and I don't feel pain from them. Do I actually not bleed?" She looked at her hands, one holding the needle, and decided the thumb on the other hand would be the prime candidate. "I've had my fair share of needle pokes that have made me bleed. Let's try it now." She hesitated again, before slowly pushing the needle into her thumbprint. "This is so weird... I'm expecting the pain, but not having it is kind of underwhelming." She withdrew the needle and looked at the hole. "No blood. And it's healing pretty quickly. I gotta step it up now."

Sue returned the needle to the box, and took a knife from her kitchen. "Here goes nothing." She began a cut on her fingerprint, small enough that it would normally heal within a week. Unsure to be surprised or unsurprised at the lack of bleeding or pain, as well as the fast regeneration at this point, she decided to take it a step further. She rotated the knife. Instead of cutting a slit, she was now cutting a slice. The feeling was extremely unnatural; more alien feeling than even stretching or flattening ever felt. A cold knife she felt not only under her fingerprint, but also on the backside of the very skin that was being cut. "W-woah..." She stopped the cutting just before it would've severed her print, and removed the knife. Her thumbprint flopped downwards, the inside of her thumb should've been bleeding, but it didn't even look like there was an injury. It was as if it was skin all the way through, albeit with a slightly more pinkish hue.

"What... the... hell..." Sue spoke under her breath as she slowly set the knife on the counter beside her. She analyzed what should've been the inside of her thumb before slowly rubbing the internal area in the opening with one of her fingers. It was an even stranger feeling, one that even she couldn't hope to describe in any amount of detail. She was silent throughout her examining and prodding. After a few minutes, she decided to close up the wound. A quick fold back in place was all it needed, and the thumb print stuck back to her thumb almost immediately. As quickly as the alien feeling started, it left. Her thumb now had no evidence it was even cut. "This... is amazing." She proceeded to let out a massive sigh at another realization. "I literally have to worry way less about getting injured then ever before now." She chuckled to herself.

"What if I try this? I mean... It won't hurt to try. Well it won't hurt certainly... I mean I'm pretty certain I can based on what I... eh... I'm just stalling at this point." She repeated the same cut she had made before, peeling back her thumbprint, but then continued to slice further until the peeling section was just a tiny bit longer than the knife's height. "Alright... Moment of truth." She pressed the top of her peeling thumbprint back into place, instantly healing over the top of the knife. Now it appeared as if she had simply stabbed a hold in her thumb instead of sliced in the first place. Now knowing that her injuries don't have to heal in reverse of how they occurred, she continued the slice, until the knife broke free. Instead of the skin peeling off the tip of the thumb and anchored at the base like how the peeling section began, it was now peeling at the base and anchored to the tip. She quickly pressed the skin back into place and just as before, within seconds, it appeared as if it was never cut in the first place. By making what would've been a full cut had she not regenerated the beginning of it, she had effectively connected a severed portion of her body, in a sense, though the portion didn't actually disconnect. "Alright. I hope this means what I think it means. I'll have to try full severing next. I'm not willing to permanently lose a thumbprint if on the off chance it does fail, so what part should it be? Maybe a tiny speck of skin from somewhere no one would notice on a day to day basis? That might work, but where? Hmm..."

Sue was cut off by a familiar notification on her phone. "Ah, of course. Right on schedule. What are they wanting now?" She opened her phone and read the message; a fairly informal request from work for some edits to the most recent draft of a game review video. It was par for the course at this point for the proofreader to send over a long list of edits days before the video was due. This time around the requested edits only included some changes to pacing, replacing clips of gameplay that featured any of the game's glitches, removing an entire segment where the narrator talked in excessive detail about one of the game's mechanics for no discernable reason, and some new audio lines that the narrator had rerecorded after realizing they had confused the names of two characters. It was certainly less edits than last time; a 15-minute-long movie countdown list where the whole video had to be redone because the number 1 spot didn't actually meet all the qualifications for the list, and no one noticed until someone did a quick internet search, so the script had to be rewritten and rerecorded so that every entry was shifted forward by one spot, and a new script had to be written and recorded for the new last-place entry just to ensure that the countdown had 10 entries, because even though the studio had previously made "Top-9" countdown lists in the past, they had switched to "Top-10" lists as an event for their 10th anniversary a few years ago and never changed it back, though it should be noted that that was the only thing the site did to celebrate their 10th anniversary, or at least followed through with since many promises were made but a change in management had led to a redistribution of finances, and a few employees got laid off but a few of them did get their jobs back after things settled down when a studio merger with a failing rival website quickly proved financially profitable and allowed for the studio to expand to two more locations, one in LA and the other in Miami, and though that may have worked had things gone on normally, lockdown forced many of the employees to work from home, so many of the new facilities went unused for many months, and that, compounded with many of the employees having to use home hardware instead of studio hardware while social distancing led to many downsizes and studio changes that resulted in another series of lay offs, but luckily Sue was able to keep her job because she was one of the only video editors that the website had, though really the only video editor remaining from before the merger, making the only other video editors in the company people who used to work for the rival studio, though none of them having as much experience as Sue, very often showing the obvious skill difference in editing between the two studios, which may have played a role in the studio's gradual decline, so it might have ended up different if Sue applied for a job at that site instead of the one she works for now, unless the merger would still happen and nothing would really change, except for the name of the website of course, but maybe her boss would've been a kinder person than her current one, relatively speaking not the nicest of people, but not a particularly mean person, though the main thing that ever came to mind to Sue about her boss ever being mean is that she once told Sue the world was going to roll her, and that she wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed, all the while looking kind of dumb with her finger and her thumb in the shape of an "L" on her forehead.