10-4

"Dema, are you putting on weight? You look a little bustier than usual."

Dema blushed. Kore was right. She'd had a little trouble getting into her jeans this morning too. She'd been purposely eating more than usual, to make sure she had enough natural body mass that didn't belong to the forest. If that was really what had happened. Maybe she had overdone it.

"Yeah, a little," she said. "Maybe I should lay off the bagels."

"Bagels? I thought maybe your cop buddies had been feeding you too many donuts."

"The cops and donuts gag is about as stale as the donuts usually are, don't you think?" Dema sounded a bit defensive to her own ears. She needed to lighten up.

Kore just laughed. "I don't know Dema. The bursting-at-the-seams look is kind of in. Maybe you should go for it. Grab all the donuts you can!" 

Dema did not endorse Kore's idea. In fact she ate almost nothing that day. But the next morning when she tried to button her shirt it wouldn't close at all. She dug out a stretchy sports bra she rarely wore, and left the shirt unbuttoned over it. The jeans were a lost cause. She had to settle for a pair of sweat pants.

Kore's eyes popped when she saw her. "Dema, I didn't expect you to ignore me so completely!"

"I didn't. Not a single donut all day yesterday. Or anything else for that matter."

Kore eyed her doubtfully. "Don't throw out all your old things when you go shopping for a new wardrobe. I've had my eye on some of them."

The idea of needing a new wardrobe made Dema really angry. She stomped upstairs to her room, willing herself into the shaman dream. She stripped off the sweat pants and sports bra, glamoured herself back to normal, and dressed as usual. She didn't care where the extra body mass went. 

Later in the day things seemed to be going fine. She had almost forgotten the morning's incident. Then she happened to lean forward over her desk, and she heard a little pop. A shirt button bounced off of her computer screen. She looked down, to see that her shirt was gaping open and she was bulging out of it. The glamour was fading.

Mortified, she tried to glamour herself back to normal again, but in her anxiety the shaman dream would not cooperate. She regretted not wearing the sports bra.

Then she tried to stand up, and realized that her jeans felt like a tourniquet. Her stomach was bulging over the top of them, and all she could do was tug her shirttail loose and drape it down so her bulges wouldn't be so obvious. 

The jeans were so tight she could barely walk, but she managed to get to her Jeep without attracting any special attention. When she got behind the wheel she unbuttoned the jeans, and her stomach bulged out almost to the steering wheel.

As she drove home, she looked at her hands on the wheel, and at her forearms. They were distinctly plump, almost pudgy, she thought. While she was studying them a tiny gnat that had been crawling across the inside of the windshield flitted down and settled on her arm. And faded into it. 

That was not one of her beetles! It was not native to her body mass. She opened the shaman dream and sought out the dream of the gnat. It was a faint, tiny dream, but it was a distinct dream. It was not part of her dream. But it was not part of the city dream either. This was a woodland gnat, not adapted to life in the human-dominated environment of the city. It had naturally been attracted to her forest dream, and absorbed into it.

Not her shaman dream. Her forest dream. She had taken on something of the forest essence, and was taking on more of it. She was glad she hadn't stayed in the forest, she might be as big as a house by now! But no, in the forest she would not be an attraction. There the real forest dream would dominate. But here, in the city, she was a magnet.

Even as she had these thoughts, the dream began to open her awareness to invisible motes of windborne material that, like the gnat, were not native to the city but carried the forest essence with them, and were drawn to the forest dream in her. She looked at her plump forearms and could sense the infinitesimal accretion as such motes slowly but continually settled and became part of her body.

Reaching home, she parked the Jeep and with some effort squeezed herself out from behind the wheel and walked toward the house. With her new awareness she sensed the yearning for the forest of the small trees in planter boxes that decorated the sidewalk. With a little effort due to the tight jeans, she reached down and picked up a chip of bark dust out of one of the planters. Almost gleefully the essence of the wood joined her forest dream, and the chip absorbed itself into her body. She would have to be careful not to touch any of Sedna's prized woodcarvings!

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