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Ms Mejeri's Diary:

May 7th
Broke 13' today. Other things broken today: a doorway, three ceiling tiles, a conference table, and a jacket button. Meryl apologized profusely about the last one, and says that the next outfit is going to be using steel wire for anything 'load-bearing'. To her credit, almost all of these mishaps have been my own fault; I keep forgetting how quickly food can go through me these days, and I've just been too busy to relieve the pressure every couple of hours.

I really miss chairs. I've been kneeling on cushions during meetings, and at this point I'm taller than most folks standing. I could probably start sitting on the floor, but that'll only buy me a week or so. We will need to start renting out a convention center or something by the end of the month, if this keeps up.

Had a couple of staff meetings about the subject earlier today; until we can get some bigger hallways, I wanted to shuffle personnel around to make it easier for me to get around. This meant meeting with most of the management staff and explaining that, yes, we needed to lose a day or two making everyone change desks so I can stand up indoors. Right as one of the department heads opened their mouth to complain was when that button failed, actually. The surprise knocked her clear out of her chair, and everyone suddenly forgot any other wisecracks they might have wanted to share.

As I helped her up, she mentioned that my hand felt chilly; my physician later confirmed that my temperature is currently somewhere around sixty degrees. Which should be impossible, but so are a lot of the things I've been doing in the last month. No idea if that's new, or if it's been going down as I went up. One more thing to measure every morning.

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Balinology

Naturally, after we found Ms Mejeri's new enhanced state, we started keeping a much closer eye on her. As expected, she was still growing, though comparisons to her baseline sizes on file showed a few unexpected differences.

Much of her body, such as her head, arms, hands, and hooves, were gaining volume at a steady rate of 4.5% a day. Other areas, such as her legs, back, and most obviously her hips, grew and developed considerably faster. Her milk production was also scaling faster than the rest of her, with an accompanying increase in digestion speed. This led to inopportune swelling and the accompanying wardrobe malfunctions until she (and her tailor) became used to planning for the excess. The other disproportionalities all appear to have been in service to keeping her mobile in the face of increasing loads of milk, which was our first real clue on what Ms Mejeri likely already knew at that point.

I know how much you hate dealing with magic, but this trychel was a doozy. Magical doodads that break and do their job too well are almost as common as ones that don’t, but I don’t think we’ve seen one break in such a way that it works without magic. As near as we can figure, whatever damage caused it to run rampant also made it start using ambient heat as a power source. While this did allow it to function long after magic vanished from her world, it did mean that an aura of cold slowly developed around her body, which increased in intensity as she increased in scale. She still required an incredible intake in calories every day to fuel her growth, though it seems the bell was busy altering how her body used that mass and energy, teaching it how to build a bigger, better moof.

Ms Mejeri’s body was clearly an apt student, as shortly after she became aware of her own falling body temperature, she noticed her milk exhibiting the same chilly effects. There were limits, and heat treatment could ‘break’ the effect and cause her milk to return to a normal set of thermal properties, but left to its own devices it could stay the same temperature for extended periods. Given that this was a woman who ran a dairy that was just starting to get into frozen treats, you can imagine how her marketing department became once they heard the news that their CEO’s product could stay cold on store shelves by itself.

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As much as I dearly love how this entire sequence came together, I think this might be my favorite page in terms of proportions, posing, and expressions. Rabid is always a joy to work with, and I think he does his best work within tight, form-fitting constraints. Like that shirt.

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Art: Rabid_Cowolf (original) (Patreon!)