Experiment 601A

"Experiment 601A trial recording number four." She spoke into the recorder. "Eight hours after ingestion, the test mice are yet to lose any hair and the blood and stool samples show no signs of contamination."

Penelope had been working for months on this and was finally starting to show promising results. Her lab-grown bacteria was able to break down anything it deemed as a contaminant, digesting it and purifying its host. Already, she'd managed to get lab mice to live free from microplastics in their bloodstream, though the formula needed to be tweaked to prevent hair from melting as well.

But this latest batch had proved almost perfect. She'd been up with it most of the night, observing the different permutations she'd made and testing different subject samples to see how they were developing. Microscopic examination had already determined the absence of microplastics inside of the mice she'd tested, as well as a few other foreign objects they'd likely consumed in their food.

Just think! The possibilities were exciting! She would be the scientist to cure the world of microplastic contamination - the ramifications of which the academic world still didn't quite understand. She'd already cleared some of her research with an academic board and was planning on demonstrating it to a panel of experts soon.

But her research felt incomplete. While she'd managed to prove it was possible, Penelope still wanted a 'Wow!' for her keynote. She didn't just want to tell a bunch of old scientists raw data and breakdowns of different samples. She needed to show them something they'd never seen before, but hopefully that they would see again.

Penelope had thought about it before. As of the current date, there were no humans alive who didn't have some microplastics inside their system. Even remote peoples in seldom-contacted regions were found to have some pollutants within their bodies.

Penelope could be the only human alive to be clean. That would get their attention.

Of course, human experimentation is thoroughly frowned upon. She understood that. But to experiment on ones self was morally fine. So why shouldn't it be her? It wasn't as though there were many other volunteers to scarf down a petri dish of a mystery bacteria.

She looked at the clock. 2:31 AM! Was it already that late? She'd hardly felt tired at all with all the science she'd been doing that day.

Penelope wrote down the time and got out a small sample. It was time to do what nobody had done before. After swabbing the inside of her cheek for a 'before' sample, she swallowed the bacteria and chased it with a tall drink of water.

It would be a while before the experiment fully kicked in; The bacteria had to acclimate to her system and even then, breaking down microplastics could take a while. To replicate the experiment she'd done in mice, she thought to wait about four hours. That would give her time to start taking new measurements, as well as a few hours to take a nap.

After writing down all she needed to, Penelope took off her glasses and set them on the table at her side, setting her phone's alarm for 6:30AM, taking off her lab coat, and using it as a blanket as she shut her eyes in a nearby chair.

Sleep came to her quickly.

* * * * *

She awoke with a jolt a few hours later.

Still sleepy, she felt around for where she'd set her phone before remembering it was in her pocket last. But as she felt her thigh, there was only bare skin.

"Strange." She thought, but her mind was still too tired to process anything other than the fact that her phone wasn't there.

She felt around a bit more, touching something hard below her as she leaned over to reach the device. She tapped at the screen a few times but didn't see any change. The phone must have fallen out of her pocket as she slept, which was a bit concerning as the floor was hard tile.

Penelope reached for her glasses and slid them on, praying that her phone's screen hadn't cracked. But to her horror, the small fall was enough to make the phone completely unresponsive.

And yet, that wasn't the most concerning thing she saw.

"Why am I naked?" She said aloud - still used to recording her thoughts.

The shock of seeing her own naked body knocked her out of the chair and painfully onto the ground, the impact was still less of a nagging feeling in her mind than her current situation - which she was still attempting to make sense of.

With her bearings gathered, Penelope slowly got to her feet, her phone-bearing hand clutched tight against her chest as her other arm found its way between her legs. She glanced quickly to either side but saw nobody. It was a small relief, but her nudity in such a place still felt wrong.

The 'why' of it was also escaping her. Penelope hesitantly made her way away from her napping spot, keeping the only door to the lab well in view; There was a glass panel on the front that anybody could peek through to see her, though someone else being here at this early hour was unlikely.

Still, somebody else must be present, how else could she have wound up completely naked in the middle of a lab? It must have been a prank by a fellow researcher as nobody else had access to this part of the building.

She sauntered over to a cabinet on the far side of the room - carefully inching across despite being alone. Opening the door, she saw several lab coats hanging on a rack neatly. Whoever had stripped her must have forgotten to take these. She slid one off the coat-hangar and over her shoulders, buttoning up the front and not even caring that its sleeves were a bit too long to cover her slim body.

It felt awkward to be wearing nothing but a lab coat inside of the research room, but she was first and foremost a scientist and still had an experiment to run. She could get to the bottom of why she was naked later.

Looking at the petri dishes she'd set up before, there was no immediately apparent difference, but that was part of the reason why her research was so important. The dangers of microplastics were that they were, as the name suggested, microscopic. She grabbed a swab from a jar and rubbed along the inside of her dry mouth.

Quickly scraping the dish, she hastily put it under the microscope and began to look. It took a bit of searching to make sure the results weren't false, but after testing and checking, Penelope found no traces of any contaminants inside her second sample.

It worked!

She scanned the sample again and again, the excitement welling up rapidly as she kept searching and finding nothing out of the ordinary. Her experiment was a success - she had managed to breed a strain of bacteria that could digest microplastics from the human body. The satisfaction of her years of study made her shiver.

Or was that not it...

When she pulled her head away from the microscope, the very first thing she noticed was that she wasn't wearing what she was when she started to look. Her bare breasts spilled out of the white fabric as little strips of cloth hung from around her elbows and shoulders.

Assuming this was the result of her mystery prankster, Penelope turned around to catch them in the act.

"Show yourself!" she pointed.

But there was nobody there. Worse, the act of turning so suddenly caused the scraps of her outfit to fall to the floor. There were small burns in it, almost as though they had been caused by a chemical reaction of sorts. Thinking back to the experiment, she clutched a scrap of cloth that was rapidly shrinking and held it under the microscope.

Penelope felt an awkward lewdness as she bent over to look through the microscope again. After double-checking there was nobody behind her, she glanced down. The fabric was slowly being eaten away by an all-too-familiar sight. Her bacteria. Experiment 601A.

It shouldn't have escaped her system in this way, though - the bacteria was meant to work from the inside and sneak through membranes after it entered the bloodstream through the digestive system. So for the bacteria to appear on her coat, it had to have exited her body somehow.

Penelope held a hand to her chin, scratching at her jawline while she pondered the source of the contamination. Then she felt it.

"Oil!" She glanced at her palm. "The human body constantly secretes a small amount of oil to protect the skin! So Experiment 601A must be getting onto my clothes when it comes into contact with any part of my body!"

She felt accomplished at having pieced together the last few parts of this medical mystery, as well as deducing that E601A didn't merely eat microplastics - it ate away at any foreign object that came into contact with her skin.

But maybe her priorities should have been elsewhere. She suddenly remembered her nakedness.

"Where's that anti-bacterial when you need it?" She said, searching through a few piles on her desk.

Penelope was able to produce a small pill jar of something she'd made while working on her experiment. It was simply labeled 'antidote' as she'd never gotten around to perfecting it in anything but mice, but for the intents of her experiment, it ought to eliminate the specific strain she'd made.

The jar was completely empty. The only other one she had was in her dorm room. Maybe she was just imaging things, though. It isn't science if you can't replicate your results.

Penelope dashed to the closet, grabbing another lab coat from the hangers and pulling it back to her work desk. Almost out of instinct, she pulled a stool over to sit down on, but the sensation of her bare butt against the wooden seat made her pull away immediately. She opted to stand for this experiment.

Penelope placed a hand on the coat and waited. It only took a few seconds before she felt a hole forming beneath her finger. It was exactly as she thought. Any clothes she touched would melt shortly after coming into contact with her skin.

She checked the time on her phone before remembering it was broken and looked up at an analog clock on the wall. 6:45am.

The first classes in this building would begin at 7:30, but many students and professors opted to come to class early. It was reasonable to expect that a few people would be showing up at any moment. This was bad.

She threw the mostly-intact lab coat over her shoulders and set her now-useless phone aside. A part of her wanted to button up the coat to cover more of her nakedness, but remembering that her skin melted clothes, she thought it might be better to have poor cover for longer than full cover for a shorter time.

Penelope ran to the door and meekly peeked out the window at the front. The hallway outside seemed empty, the only sources of light on either end of the hall. This was good, she had the floor to herself, most likely. She slowly turned the doorknob - careful not to make any noise - and poked her head outside to confirm.

Her bare feet padded against the empty hallway as she rushed through the corridors, her breasts poking out from the front of the lab coat as her pussy was still out in the open. Already, she could feel holes forming by her butt where the cloth was resting against her cheeks. And the fabric on her shoulders also seemed to be giving out. She adjusted the garment and it slipped right back down. Even alone, she still felt self-conscious.

Her gaze entered each doorway as she passed by, hoping that they were indeed empty. As she jogged, she could feel parts of her body bounce with each step. It was an awkward run, made worse by her lack of athletic abilities - Penelope was a scientist, not an athlete.

She was panting by the time she'd reached the end of the hallway, standing at the top of the stairs. It was a one-way route and well-lit. But there was nowhere to turn back to. She had to risk it.

She gently went down each step, the rough non-slip rubber making her bare feet feel awkward as each stair caught her foot a bit. There was no noise but her quiet breathing as she made her way to the turnaround halfway, an area lit by a combination of natural and artificial lighting. She peered around a corner and her heart sank.

Two figures were illuminated against the lights of the east-facing front door, headed her way. She clutched the coat tight in her hands, pulling the fabric shut but feeling it give away at her grip. Maybe she could pretend to be dressed and hope that they didn't pay her any attention, but she couldn't take that risk. From this distance and with this lighting, it was impossible to tell who it was at the end of the hallway - but there weren't very many names she could think of that she wouldn't be embarrassed to be seen by.

If it was a stranger, they might do something to her. But if a friend or acquaintance saw her like this, she wouldn't know if she could face them ever again.

She looked back up the stairs, the second story was a dead-end outside of a fire escape at the far end of the hallway. But if she went through that door, it would take her out to an elevated walkway while the alarms would go off - immediately alerting everybody to her presence.

There was nowhere to run.

Penelope checked her labcoat. Since she had left her front exposed, the coat was mostly intact there. She could probably clutch it tightly to her chest and fake that she was decent - as long as she made sure to face anybody she saw. There was a coldness on her butt as she could feel the coat slowly giving away behind her.

She inhaled. She shut the coat. She walked down the stairs.

At first, the two figures in the hallway didn't pay her any mind as she approached - good, so far. But once they stepped further from the light she began to make out their faces and they clearly made out hers.

"Hey, Penny!" A tall Asian man said, waving an arm at her.

"Oh! Penny!" The shorter girl beside him smiled. "Did you spend the whole night here?"

"I - er - ehe." Penelope didn't know either of their names, she merely recognized their faces. She was never a very social person and tried to focus on her own research. "Hello."

Penny almost waved back to them, only to suddenly feel her coat move when her arm did and remembered that that would be a bad idea.

"You're always working so hard." The man said. "I hear you've got a big keynote in the auditorium later today - something about microplastics?"

"Oh, are you the one who got all those professors to show up?" The girl seemed excited. "It's basically all the biology department is talking about. You're kind of a big deal!"

"I - er - yeah..." Penelope stuttered. She could feel the coat on her back getting thinner, the tears in it working their way up, almost to her neck. "I need to, um, go..."

She slowly began to sidle against the wall - awkwardly stepping past the two as they gave her a strange look. If they knew she was naked under the oversized lab coat, they didn't say anything.

"Er..." The woman scratched her head. "Classes start in a few minutes. Why are you walking like that?"

"She's got more important things to do than go to class, I suppose." The man shrugged. "Not all of us can be geniuses."

Penelope didn't say a word as she slowly backpedaled away from the couple, careful not to move too rapidly lest the last few strands of fabric keeping her outfit together break apart.

"Whoa!" A voice called out. A voice behind her.

Penelope let out an 'eep' as she turned around to face the voice. A blonde girl had both hands over her mouth as she was looking down to where Penelope's butt used to be. When the shocked girl made eye contact over Penelope's shoulder, she realized she was now flashing the others.

"No!" Was all she could think to shout, not sure which direction to face. "No! No! No!"

As she spun, she felt a tension release in her hands - the coat she was clutching to her chest hung limp as she felt a breeze across the sides of her body. When she looked down, she noticed her pussy completely exposed beneath the minuscule scraps that remained tightly clutched between her fingers.

"I'm sorry!" She shouted, pushing past the blonde and into the front entrance of the science building. A few dozen early-risers were already through the doors, headed to class. But the sight of a naked girl clutching both arms to her body and sprinting through the crowd caused the entire room to freeze in place.

"Is that Penny?"

"A streaker!"

"Man, it's too early for this."

Voices rang out from all around her as she ducked her head down, moving faster. She felt something soft brush up against her as a student barely moved out of the way in time, somebody she didn't see. It was too much to look at the faces glancing at her; She kept her eyes on the floor and her bare feet.

The doors flew open, the sound of which attracted a few more glances as the nude form of Penny's small body burst into the courtyard. She immediately turned to the side, realizing how hard it was to turn while staying modest and ducked towards some hedge rows near a side passage. She didn't have the courage to check to see if anybody was looking over their shoulders at her butt - but she had to assume everybody was doing so.

Her flat chest skidded along the ground as she got to relative obscurity behind the bushes. The dirt was still damp with morning dew along the adjacent grass, and she could feel the water building up on her body like a slime. But she didn't care. As long as she stayed low, Penelope was out of sight.

"What do I do, now?" She thought. "I'm halfway across campus from my dorm, half the science wing has seen me naked, and now I'm covered in dirt, hiding underneath a bush!"

Penelope glanced to the side, the mud smooshing against her cheek as she saw dozens of shoes padding along the sidewalk adjacent to her. A single dropped pencil or a shiny penny on the ground might make somebody look down and see the naked girl hiding just out of view. She shivered.

There was a small gap beneath the bottom of the hedges that she was able to squeeze through. That took her to another bushy area beside the courtyard that would lead to one of the side passages. From there, she tried to make a mental map of the area but that part of campus was unfamiliar to her. She mostly stuck to the main paths on a normal day.

"Still, these sidewalks all have to lead somewhere, right?" She though. "If I can just go east and south, I should be able to get back."

Penelope realized she had dove into a set of bushes to the west. She'd still need to cross the main pathway, but maybe she could do so somewhere further down where it was less crowded. Lifting herself onto her hands and knees, she crawled under the cover of the bushes until she reached the far corner of the garden, her head sticking out just next to a bench. It felt awkward to be in such a position next to these bushes and anybody looking at the shrubs from just the right angle would see nothing but a naked butt poking out - but as she hadn't heard anybody calling out, she had to assume she was safely out of view.

Penelope waited for an opening. And waited... and waited...

But the walkway only got more crowded as the minutes went on. She realized there was no way to cross unless she felt like waiting until nightfall to come, which was almost what she planned to do before she remembered.

"The presentation!" She almost shouted. "I have to present my findings this evening!"

A brief idea entered her mind - that she wouldn't be able to find any way to counteract this affliction before the presentation. The thought of walking up in front of the most respected minds in her field totally naked, her whole future staring down at her nudity...

Penelope gulped. She wouldn't let that happen. She needed that antidote from her dorm room.

There was no telling how long it would take to purge her system. When she administered it to mice, it could take upwards of six hours to fully take effect, and she was much larger than a mouse - although sprawled out on the ground she certainly didn't feel as such.