-= The Rendering Pit=-
[[A PATREON series. This story was posted 12 months ago on Patreon, subscribe now to see this arc, AND THE NEXT for as little as 2.50]]
Table of Contents


Rigel sets out to find his own niche within the university, studying the various different student groups to see which might appeal to his interests.

This chapter written by RabidBadger , illustrated by myself!

Buy THE COMPLETE Book One of The Rendering Pit HERE

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Rigel was comfortable. He’d found a nice place to sit in one of the school’s common areas. In his hands was the standard issue student tablet, looking through Professor Xerxsephira’s guide to pragmatic lab ready body modifications. He did find himself a trifle distracted as he shopped around though, people watching was an old habit, or hobby maybe – there was only so much one could do in a juvenile penal colony without getting in trouble, so he’d picked that. Out here it was quite a lot more interesting really, which was part of the problem.

Not that anything had explicitly gone wrong, but he’d been sitting on this grassy knoll in the gardens for about two hours and barely gotten anything done. Neither shopping, nor homework – too much had crossed his path. It wasn’t odd to see body modifications around – the cosmetic alterations here were substantially similar to the colony, just less haphazard overall. Lots of redesigned fur colors, exotic eyes, but he hadn’t expected to see quite so many students sporting love handles and muffin tops. Weight was usually too easy to correct for that to be an issue, and he hadn’t seen anything in the catalogues about a ban on trimming treatments. Then there were the custodians.

Those gave the scaled student the most pause. No two were the same, he could guess at most of their species – underneath he shiny, featureless latex coatings. Mostly featureless that is. It seemed each one of them (also mostly obese) bore a sigil like the eye on the students’ badges on their hip, but the eye was blind. Something Rigel found himself guessing at the symbolism of – wasted potential perhaps, or a lack of it entirely? The distraction was ended by yet another one supplanting it, a glint of something shiny.

Rigel tilted his head gently, feeling the frill hanging around his shoulders perk up just a bit. It looked to be a gazelle, one that had a strangely alluringly plump ass – sporting what looked to be crystalline growths for horns. A handful of quick passes over the tablet with his thumb found something that seemed close to what he’d just seen.

Crystalline Signal Array Seed Bed

Stylish crystalline growths allow you to receive and broadcast wireless signals as well as decode video and audio broadcasts filtered through ocular replacements. Change colors on the fly, and control visible outgrowth as you see fit!

Damaged horns regrow to specification within three to five sleep cycles.

HPR: 20T

“Neat sounding, but not sure how useful that’ll be. Might be a hard sell to get them to pay for it too.”

Rigel pursed his lips a bit, rubbing scaled fingers against his chin. Letting his eyes wander back to the crowds. They were getting thicker, one class letting out – the lunch room was open – it brought up another idea. The cafeteria would have a really dense pack of people, right? It stood to reason, and was enough to rouse the scaled student and set him on his way. Besides, he could stand to learn the paths and hallways better anyway. Trusting internal OS maps was not something he was inclined to – not after the stories he’d heard in the JD station about how easy they could be to subvert.

The lunch room was, as he predicted, bustling. Rigel found himself staring at a lively throng, dozens of students, and a fresh reason to slowly tilt his head. He muttered quietly.

“…They’re all fat. Or, no – there’s some, but…”

Staring further as he found an unclaimed seat, Rigel’s eyes roamed over what looked like the all-too-familiar habit of cliques claiming tables of their own. There were at minimum three of them that he could make out.

Near the windows to the station gardens was a long, oval table full of what were clearly the affluent, upper-crust crowd. Pristine, tall figures – immaculate fur. The tiger with symmetrical stripes and pearlescent fangs, the gazelle with the horns was next to him chattering quietly about something – looking annoyed, but he couldn’t make out what was being said. Most of them were strangely conspicuous just by virtue of looking normal, it seemed. There was a silver fox that was tall enough to be firmly in the statuesque camp, a sculpted looking ram with gold trim on his horns, but all of it paled in comparison to the other tables in terms of how well it held Rigel’s attention. They were rich kids – he’d seen plenty of rich kids who paid for their trip through character creation.

He’d seen guard mods too, but not usually on students. What was clearly the athletes’ gathering place again resembled exactly what he expected on some level – just not on all of them. Lots of posturing, boasting - they were also largely lacking the oddly prevalent pudge, but visibly displaying what he was pretty sure were security-grade physical upgrades, maybe even military in a couple cases, and most of them were at least somewhat customized, at least cosmetically. A pure white ursine amazon with obvious spinal reinforcement caught his eye, as did the lithe black rat whose limbs looked to be entirely prosthetic – carbon fiber and polished edges, possibly hydraulics in the joints – but the one that left Rigel’s jaw hanging was a key-lime rabbit who seemed to be melting. The bunny wasn’t doing quite as much posturing as the others, probably didn’t have to – Rigel had seen him re-texture his physique twice already, and watched little droplets of him fall away and rejoin the whole.

That bore another check at the tablet.

Metamorphic Data Gel Upload

Be physically converted and uploaded into a mass of high density data storage gel, choice of any color you like! Endless shapeshifting possibilities await!

Note: Transformation is complete and irreversible.

HPR: 65T (Approximately 25% of mass for an average male)

Alternative package: Chemical recombination software suite.

HPR: 400T (Substantial mass increase may be required.)

“Irreversible… yeah, no. I could see that one technically benefitting my major but, wow.”

Rigel felt a shiver run through him from toes to frill, looking up for another glance at that rabbit – only to end up watching a mobile clique pass in front of the table, drawing stares of disdain from a substantial percentage of the rest of the lunch room. The group was, unlike the other two, definitely sporting the ‘school build’ as it were. Six or seven of them, he thought – mostly well overweight, two of them (a very fluffy sheep dog and some manner of reptile he couldn’t place) were explicitly obese and then some – came squeaking past. The squeaking wasn’t hard to explain, ever last one of the students was wreathed to some greater or lesser degree in what looked like latex, or rubber. It was hard to tell where it ended for the ones wearing robes, which was all but two – one of the smaller of the group was in a tank top and had himself encased in gray-green from the waist down – and the quaking, jiggling reptile was wrapped up to his neck in featureless sky blue.

The tablet had nothing for this, but Rigel checked it anyway. He was still left with only the reactions of the others to go on. Lots of jeers, scoffs, the occasional muttering of ‘degenerates’ and ‘drone lovers’ along with a single instance of ‘breeders-in-training’ that got a wince like it was impolite even for this situation, whatever it was. The group didn’t seem to pay much attention to it all, merely continuing on to their own staked out territory in the lunch room and settling in amid a great deal of random hip bumping and overall hands-on affection, all of which sounded like a bunch of party balloons having an orgy. The lunch lady, he noted, could very well be an alumnus of whatever club that was.

If there was something in the catalogue about whatever they were doing to themselves Rigel wasn’t interested.

Rigel’s eyes did not have far left to wander, one more large collection of students was present in the room. Where similar trends and appearances tied the other groups, this one was characterized by disparity itself. No two people among them looked the same, nor did half of them come from any one recognizable species.

One of them looked vaguely feline, and was sporting bioluminescent blue/green fur that left color behind on everything he touched. Another, a cow he was guessing, seemed to be wearing some kind of pump apparatus as a backpack hooked to several areas on the front of her – the backpack strongly resembled a cappuccino machine. There was a student he knew was avian in some fashion, but Rigel couldn’t guess beyond that. The woman(?) was a dizzying haze of blacks, whites, and flickering as feathers that moved like ribbons danced around her when she moved. The one that made Rigel legitimately uncomfortable bore the spotted fur of a large cat (he never could remember which was leopard, cheetah, or whatever) on its body – and smooth black discs with silver trim against his torso where his limbs out to have been. The boy seemed to be moving just fine, probably floating on maglev, and there were limbs in the vicinity of each – but they were clearly holographic, and Rigel couldn’t tell if they were supposed to be hard light, or if the cat was using some kind of precision magnetic control to manipulate his silverware.

And every last person at that table had a quantifiably fat ass (especially the cow).

Rigel stared at that last table, glancing briefly at his tablet again. He had no idea where to even begin. That thought was spared him when a heavy thump and loud stomach churn joined him at the table. The vixen to his left was as familiar as anyone in this place, looking thoroughly miserable where she sat – just as pudgy as he’d left her.

“You uh, sound hungry – Genevieve, right?”

The vixen whimpered weakly, eyeballing the enormous sow behind the lunch counter.

“I am.”

Rigel’s eyebrow raised slowly. He glanced from the portly fox to the many other heavyset students in the room and once more found himself not quite sure he understood the subtleties at work. In this case however, it seemed safe to just ask.

“So, why aren’t you in line to get food then?”

He was expecting to hear something back about her being fat enough as it was, which marked yet another area where Rigel didn’t quite have the script.

“Because she doesn’t want me eating between breakfast and detention.”

There were things that he didn’t understand (like the gelatinous rabbit) and then things that damaged his already fragile grasp of the situation. They demanded responses that deviated a little from the norm. For instance, normally ‘what’ is a question.

“What.”

Except when it’s a statement of disbelief or utter confusion.

“I said something stupid on the first day here, she heard it. Now she seems bound and determined to make the rest of me match my fat mouth.”

Rigel blinked slowly there, looking up from Genevieve to the lunch lady. There was a moment where the blue haired pig looked back to the vixen pointedly, and it said everything it needed to.

The scaled student’s appetite fled him immediately, and he tucked his nose back into the tablet in an effort to remove himself from the social situation.

Internal Biochem Replication & Recombination Suite

A wide variety of internally housed chemical storage tanks and synthesizing apparatuses!

Choose from the inconspicuous organ doubling model, housed primarily in the chest and complimenting your existing digestive system, or customize a combined internal and external model with expanded storage and more advanced mixing capacities.

HPR: 45T (Internal only)

HPR: 120T (Combined advanced model)

Rigel’s eyes sought out the cow again – that had to be what he was looking at. Probably in more advanced classes than his, he’d have remembered if he saw her otherwise. For a brief moment, he considered walking over to ask how helpful the implants were – in fact if it weren’t for a loud ‘ding’ and the room’s speakers flaring to life he probably would have.

Attention students: Lunch is ending in fifteen minutes. Please finish up and deposit your trays in the reclamation devices. Dinner will begin in four hours, thank you.

The vixen next to him groaned again. Rigel couldn’t quite tell if it was pain, indignity, or anticipation that had Genevieve’s face pulled so tight, but he felt sympathy well up regardless as he decided he could stand to skip lunch for the day, and turned to head back to their dorm.

All of this was going to take some serious thought, and a lot more people watching.