During the night, the tigress dreams of being on top of a giant edible mushroom. How will she get down? I guess she'll just have to eat her way through ;)

To avoid posting two of each chapter and to help out those who don't have access to a full sized PC screen, I'm going to post the text here in the description. I still hope that people will download the PDF though. It looks much nicer. Anyways, I'm still working towards the end of Stranded and I am happily many chapters ahead of what I'm posting so I'll be able to keep posting them every couple days for a long while yet. So don't stray too far from your FurrAffinity accounts, It'll only get better, I promise.

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Chapter Nine:

It was a long time before the tigress began to have what she now thought of as “The Dream.” But when it came, it hit her hard and enveloped her completely; it was progressing. The forest wasn’t edible this time, but what she experienced when she awoke into the dream was just as bizarre.

The tigress found herself high above the canopy of the forest, the carpet of green stretching out all around and hugging the sides of the tall mountain where the black rock was not to steep to colonize. Her perch was not an ordinary sort, in fact, as she padded across its white surface, sniffing the ever changing but always delicious scents coming up from underneath, she thought it must be a gigantic variety of the mushroom she had named Manna. She walked all around the circumference, but there was no way down that she could see. It wasn’t long before she sat down in frustration. ‘Certainly not one of my most exciting dreams.’ She thought while she sat stranded high atop the giant mushroom. The sun continued to rise in the sky and the tigress realized that she was totally exposed to the harsh equatorial rays. She knew she needed to get down somehow. And as only in a dream, what she needed to do became obvious to her.

She padded out to near where she imagined the center of the disk to be. Extending a claw, she traced a circle on the thin white skin of the Manna disk, hoping it would be close to adjacent to the stalk. The sun beat down on her and she lowered her head and began to bite into the mushroom. Her mouth worked furiously to clear a path down through the disk to what she hoped would be the side of the stalk; the idea of simply digging down strangely did not occur to her. It wasn’t long before she hit the orange meat of the shroom, this time it was like roast chicken. The orange, dough-like meat of the structure under her was dry, but she kept sucking it down, not even bothering to chew. Fist she opened a head sized hole and then she had to lower her paws in to dig deeper. She laid her chest down on the surface and stuck her head all the way down as she continued her excavation, the effects of which was not lost on her as she gratefully rested her belly on the floor and felt it spread appreciably across its surface. Like the dreams before, she never felt full or sick to her stomach, she just kept inhaling the delicious orange goo as fast as she could, its flavor changing every time she began to tire of its current one.

She had her shoulders down into the hole, her belly and hind legs supporting her above when she finally broke through. The thicker bottom crust of the Manna fell away as she pressed with her paws, and suddenly the forest canopy, still dazzling despite the shade provided by the mushroom was illuminated before her. She backed up instinctually, pressing her forepaws against the walls of her tunnel for support. Looking a little to her right, however, she saw that she had dug with perfect accuracy to the side of the narrow stalk. It was tiny in comparison to the whole cap, but it was still far from wisp-like and it was lined with sheaths of increasing thickness as it went down into the jungle canopy; it shouldn’t be too much trouble to climb. However, as the tigress moved forward to reach for the stalk she immediately encountered another problem.

Her middle, bloated as it was from her activities, bulged around the hole, her soft striped hide brimming around the edges despite how she pulled and pushed herself. She came back up out of the hole and threw herself on her side before she could trap herself. She huffed a breath as she looked down at herself, just like before, it wasn’t just her belly which had expanded. If she wasn’t yet the impossibly obese mistress she had been in the previous dreams, she was still well on her way there. At least twice her normal body’s weight rested on her frame, covering up any hint of definition on her shoulders and hips. Instead wide smooth bulges seemed to be the trend with a chest that matched her belly in sag if not width to boot.

The sun was still rising and the tigress saw nothing else she could do but try to expand the hole. The slight lapse in logic occurred to her, but she thought that she couldn’t possibly match the width of the hole volume for volume. In that she was proven wrong. After increasing the size of the hole by 50% she tried squeezing through again, only to find that her flanks, though now incredibly blubbery, still wouldn’t admit her. And again, with the persistence only available with the aid of dream-logic, she tried to expand the hole for her new, larger size.

Every time she made the hole larger, she seemed to be making progress, she was ever so slightly slimmer than the hole she had carved than the previous attempt, but again and again it was no use. Now the hole was more an oval which would have previously admitted three of her abreast; it was, however, inevitably too small. It was considerable work just shifting herself to the lip of the hole. The fat from her belly and thighs sagged down over her hind legs folded under her and her weight was such that she was reduced to crawling full on her feet like a kitten. It was another disappointment, but the tigress readily went back to work stuffing herself with the delicious orange filling; happily the thought that she was almost certainly no longer capable of climbing down the stalk did not occur to her.

After a few hours, it no longer seemed to matter so much about escaping from the mushroom; the sun had disappeared behind a thick bank of clouds long ago. In fact, the act of filling her gullet with the tasty orange stuff began to feel more like the desired goal rather than a means to an end. She ate and ate and her body continued to sport the results of her endless gluttony. So much of her belly rested on the mushroom now that it was impossible to budge, but she just kept on eating all the parts she could reach, skin and all. The fat bunched up around her head in massive rolls and her belly pinned her hind legs in its reckless expansion. Only the loud, yet muffled *Crunch!* managed to pull the tigress’s round head up from the orange cavern she had carved below it. She tried to at least sit up, but her forelegs were no longer up to the task of even lifting her vastly widened chest. The fat of her neck drug along the “ground” as she turned her head towards the center of the fantastically large mushroom. There was another crunch as if something soft, yet sturdy were giving way and she had time to see the cracks emerge on the surface of the mushroom, spreading from the hole and other damage she had wrecked on the surface of it, before her own weight caused her half of the cap to fold down. The tigress tried to sink her claws into the mushroom when she felt herself sliding, but the surface was too soft and her own self induced bulk was too great to even slow her velocity. ‘It’s just a dream! It’s just a dream!’ she cried to herself, but the feeling of the white skin shredding under her claws, the slip of the skin as it slid the wrong way up the great expanse of her belly, and above all the falling sensation, it was all too real. She managed to grip the edge with her forelegs, and despite multiple tons of tigress hanging off the lip of the mushroom in open space, she stopped for a moment; though her arms still felt like they were going to be pulled out of their sockets. She hung only for a moment, however, before the thin, wafer-like edge broke off, and the tigress fell. She twisted with the instinct to right herself while falling, but her bulky torso had become so inflexible, the only result was a jerky spasm in her fat clotted body before she entered the forest canopy at lethal velocity.

* * *

The tigress woke with a gasp. The giant mushroom was gone as well as her muti-ton coat of fat. However, as she stirred, blinking away the gunk from her eyes, and saw the kudzu around her once again littered with even more of white caps of Manna, she became acutely aware that her layers of fat weren’t quite as away as she thought. It was in the way she stretched. She could feel that extra softness all over her, minute in comparison to the incredibly vivid dream she had been having, but frighteningly drastic in the course of a single day.

Her belly had certainly swelled during the previous day when she had sucked down water like a camel and then even more when she gorged herself of the genetically altered beef cow. However, a lot of that swelling still hadn’t vanished, her tummy was swollen beyond what could be explained away by still digesting beef. That certainty was made fact when she reached with a paw and felt that softness under her lush, dense fur; she had a real belly now, not simply a layer of fat on her abdomen. Despite the fact that her belly had expanded the most over the course of the night, there wasn’t a place on her body where she couldn’t pinch up extra folds of thick skin. She tried to calm herself, ‘It’s not a big deal. It’s not like I’m huge, I’m only a little bigger than I was when I was getting ready to carry a cub. In fact this is probably a good thing, I’m in a survival situation here and it could be months before another meal like that comes along.’ That last bit certainly had a ring of truth, but still… she had only been 18 lbs overweight when she landed on the island, now she was certain that she was at least 60 lbs over what had been considered “ideal” back at the lab (Actually it was 79 lbs, but then there were no scales on the island).

A low growling noise interrupted her disturbing, and more than a little vain she had to admit, thoughts and she started in surprise. There was no one around, not even the lab with his tiresome eager-to-please attitude. The noise came again, and this time she located its source: her own stomach. She snorted in amusement, and then the pangs hit her like a slap in the face. It didn’t make sense, she had gorged herself stupid late last night with probably 40 lb of dense, blubbery meat, twice as much as she needed in a day. She shouldn’t be hungry at all today and probably the next as well, but there it was, that hollow yearning in her abdominal cavity. She clutched her belly, thick and plump now with only a minor dip under the ribs, and grimaced. Then her eyes fell on the suspiciously innocent looking white disks that looked as though that had been placed on the log around her… perhaps for her. ‘But why? And who or what could be capable of such a thing?’ For these questions she had no answer, but the pangs stabbed her again and she gave in, lapping up the nearest disk of Manna with her tongue and biting down with a satisfying crunch. Chicken Pot Pie, she had only had that delicacy once in her life when she had been a kitten of manageable size and had had much more contact with humans; she had forgotten the taste. And so, despite a belly still half full with her late night’s feast she proceeded to gobble up the crisps that reminded her of safer happier days and provided at least temporary relief for the protests of her newly heightened appetite.

It was impossible not to notice the increasing density of the clumps, the first morning, they had been widely scattered, only a couple dozen. When she had slept with the pack, there had been a thicker crowding of the shrooms and over a much wider area. Now, as she managed to at least tally the number of the devious little circles as she popped them one by one into her eager gullet, there was 48 disks that had settled or grown all around her, almost equal to the amount she had devoured yesterday despite having foraged over half of the perimeter of the camp. She belched lightly and had to admit that it was frighteningly easy to eat a huge quantity of these things. They hardly weighed on her stomach at all despite the number – also considering that each disk was not particularly small either – but at least her pangs had been sated for now.

Looking up to the sky for the first time, she realized that she had slept late. She debated whether or not to head back to the cow carcass, since that would be almost certainly where everyone would be heading now to get their share. But in the end she decided against it, she no longer trusted herself around food. ‘I need to pace myself,’ she thought as she trekked out to the meadow for the first time in two days, ‘I can’t go around eating 40 lbs of meat every day, not only is it wasteful, but when it’s gone, then what? Live off my fat? A starving hunter is a dead hunter, Mother always said.’ Then she decided that thinking about these things was stupid, ‘It’s not like I can’t control myself. I’m not going to just tear into that carcass again on sight like some mindless beast.’ And yet as she walked, her thoughts again turned to just how juicy and good that cow’s rich blubber had been and her self confidence flagged.