Please make sure you have read all of the previous four chapters of The Girl before reading this one. It will be a much more rewarding experience if you do.
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That night, as Desiree slept, she dreamed.
Desiree opened her eyes. It was mildly painful to experience that much light for the first time, so she reflexively squinted as best she could. With a little time to adjust further, she was able to open her eyes and look around a bit.
A soft chime sounded, and an automated feminine voice spoke.
"Grow-ling P-00098-F6J3 is now fully conscious and fully functional at 100% of capacity."
"I hear ya, Nellie," said a handsome young man wearing a lab coat and carrying a clipboard. He spoke to her. "Good mornin', sunshine. Have a nice rest?"
The young man knew she could not speak yet. He gazed at the display panel beside her liquid-filled Plexiglases cylinder and took notes.
"Time to dry off." he said, pressing a sequence of buttons on the panel he had been taking notes from. She felt something odd... movement. Her cylinder was tilting. In about a minute, it was horizontal. Then she heard something click, a short hiss, and then the sounds of liquids flowing away. The faintly pink fluids in the chamber were slowly replaced with air.
A couple more buttons beeped, and she heard something whirring. Another odd first-time sensation erupted into her awareness as the tubes were removed from the various places they entered her body. The tube in her throat, however, remained. The liquid in her chamber continued going down.
It was about five minutes that the liquid spent draining, and slowly she felt her body growing heavier and heavier. It was a strange sensation. Finally the fluid had retreated from her blank body and her weight ceased to increase. She felt like she was made of lead. Her head would have lolled to the side had the breathing tube not held it in place.
When the last of the fluid had been replaced with warmed air, she felt the breathing tube retract from her throat. It was smooth and slid free almost effortlessly. The air sighed from her unresponsive lungs. Then a small instrument slid down and touched her chest in three places simultaneously, delivering a short, sharp shock.
Bzzt!
With a violent twitch, she started breathing.
Bing! Beep... beep.... beep....
said the panel to her left. He had come around to continue working with the panel's buttons and taking notes.
"Looks like you're gonna be a pretty one, with red hair. I always did like red hair." said the man. He took some more notes, and then pressed one last button. She heard something above her head shift, and then the tube she had awakened in was moving off of her as the specialized gurney she was laying on was brought out of it. She didn't move; she wasn't strong enough yet. Now her head did loll to the side.
The Plexiglases cylinder retreated, and she was entirely free of it. He approached her side, and put a spider-like device on her arm. It had six short metal "legs", three on each side, and as soon as it contacted her flesh, it clamped on and began to move about, searching. A little left, a bit right, and then forward. The tube extending out of its end gave it a bizarre tailed appearance. After crawling up and down her arm a couple times, making minor adjustments to it's positioning, it zeroed in on one spot and then proceeded to insert an IV into one of her veins with precision that was far beyond what any human hands could match. So precise was the spider-like machine that it actually located the best vein and inserted the needle between nerve endings, producing almost no sensation at all. Then it detached itself from the tube, crawled a bit up her arm, retracted its legs, and turned off.
The technician taped the needle in place, and then picked up the spider bot. He turned it upside down and placed it on a small table nearby and then, from a panel of buttons on the wall near her, began pressing buttons again. She watched as best she could. She was getting cold as the cooler lab air started to register on her too-pale translucent skin. Shortly, she was shivering. He picked up a small towel and began patting her down.
"I'm looking forward to seeing you when you've been painted," he said with an odd look on his face, one she did not understand. When she was as dry as the patting could make her, he wrapped the towel around her bald head to preserve her body heat and prop it up.
"Let's see... according to this order sheet, you'll have B-R-one-oh-two breasts... wow, those are some pale aureoles ..." he said, punching it into the panel on the wall.
"And R-zero-W-three hair... damn, this guy likes extreme redheads, doesn't he?" More buttons beeped their response.
"P-fifteen-S-six vulva... again with the extreme! Those are nice, though, I like those... and, body type S-S-five-two-N one-ten. You're going to be a real hottie, F6J63. I look forward to seeing you when you're done." A final beep and then the pleasant female voice again.
"Painting program specs are: Breast type B-R-one-oh-two. Hair on all locations is designated as R-zero-W-three. Warning: All body hair is the same color and style. Are you sure all hair on the body should be the same color and style?"
"Make the hair on her head that style. Give her R-six-W-zero eyebrows and body hair, but her pubic hair should be set to style N-zero-zero-zero."
"Styles accepted. Vulval style is P-fifteen-S-six. Body type is S-S-five-two-N one-ten. Please verify all selections are correct." said the female voice.
"Authorization J-one-six-one epsilon, verifying that all specifications are correct."
"Verification is accepted. Is there anything you forgot?"
"Not that I can think of, Nellie. Do your thing."
"Activation of painting program in sixty seconds." the disembodied voice replied.
The man picked up his tuna fish sandwich and took a bite.
"Activation of painting program in forty-five seconds."
He casually chewed and swallowed another bite, and took a drink of his cherry flavored soda.
"Activation of painting program in thirty seconds."
He did a quick double check of his settings, and found them all in order. Another bite and another sip.
"Activation of painting program in fifteen seconds."
"Go to it, Nellie."
"Five... four.... three... two... one... and mark. Painting program activation commence. Painting program is locked: No alteration or shutdown options available. Stage one: Body type sculpturing. Shutting down grow-ling's pain senses. Success. Commencing program execution..."
There was a soft whir and a red fluid began traversing the tube that led into the grow-ling's arm. Immediately, her body began to shift and change. A sheet of light began scanning her from head to toe, showing up as a thin line of light that led from side to side. It scanned down, then up, then back, and continued at abut two sweeps each second.
"Growling is responding with ninety nine point nine nine eight three percent of expected growth," chimed the machine's calm voice.
Desiree looked down and saw her body shifting, her breasts began to grow, her hips flared and filled out. There was a pulling, pushing, tense sensation through her, but she felt none of the pain that would have been present if her nervous system had not been partially shut down during the process. The first stage took ten minutes.
"Stage One complete. Stage Two: Awareness programming. Commencing program execution..."
Suddenly, her mind flashed full of things. New things, images, thoughts, sounds, all coming in so fast she could make no sense of them. They took over, and she was only able to see, hear, feel, taste and smell these flooding images that battled for her awareness with dozens of others like themselves, each being unique in content. She was lost to it, and blacked out.
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Desiree awoke with a start. Her heart was racing. She could feel it pumping, and hear it in her ears. It shook her entire body with each powerful thump. She was panicked but did not know why. Her dream had been very strange... Reaching out, she felt... feet. Feet? In the dark, she wondered why there should be feet here, instead of Johnathan's chest or head... she began to get scared.
"Johnathan?" she meekly called. "Johnathan?" But there was no answer. The fear grew another step. What was she to do? She wasn't sure where she was, she wasn't sure what had happened... where her owner was... who she was in bed with... why their feet were here... Tentatively, she reached out to touch the feet again in the dark. They were covered. She followed one leg up, and ended up slowly turning around to follow it up the length of the body next to her. She reached the arm, and could feel the heartbeat in his chest on the way past.
"Johnathan?" she begged, her voice quavering. "Please, Johnathan, I'm scared..."
But still no response but the slow, steady breathing from the body next to her. She began to cry, utterly unsure what to do...
In his own dream, Johnathan sensed something was wrong. It was a strange twist on the dream, in which he had been handing out papers he had graded to a class of adults sitting in ridiculously undersized desks in an old 1800's one room schoolhouse. There was something wrong, his name was called, then again, and finally with desperation. He could hear someone crying outside... It was Desiree! He dropped the papers, bolted for the door, and -
He sat bolt upright. It was almost pitch black, but the crying continued.
"What's wrong, baby?" he said groggily, as he turned on the light.
The darkness fled. She saw that her beloved Johnathan was in bed next to her. Relief coursed through her like water into a sinking ship, and she burst out crying even harder and grabbed him into a death grip hug. Johnathan hugged her back, still not sure what was wrong.
"What's wrong, baby?", he repeated.