Chapter 1: Pain

I remember when I was a kid, at least seven years old. I lived happily with my parents in the mountains of Puerto Rico, and my other family members were living with us. We were a big happy family. Playing outdoors and telling jokes with each other, smiling and laughing. 

It was Christmas when it all changed. Our family was poor, but it never showed. We always wore smiles wherever we went, especially for Christmas. It was the best time of year for me, the only time of year I'd finally get a new toy to play with. 

Consequently, our entire family would pool as much money as possible to buy us a present. That Christmas was the day I finally got a bike, the last time I could ride one.

"Come on, Michael! Stop being so slooow! Aren't you excited to use our new toys?!" my cousin screamed excitedly. His name was Abdiel. He was the most hyperactive kid in our neighborhood. As well as the shortest boy in our grade. 

Kids at our school used to bully him because he never seemed to be able to sit still. They called him names like 'gremlin' or 'little goblin.' Point is, whoever said those things would get beat up by me! No way would some random kid bully my cousin and call him names like that! The only person who could ever bully Abdiel and call him names is... me!  

My cousin and I were just about to test out our new gifts when suddenly, pain... then shock, then pain again! It came to me in waves; it was white-hot pain that leaves someone in horror, anxiety, and so much hurt that you can't see, scream, think or comprehend.

 Suddenly, through the blistering pain, like firecrackers under my skin, I felt my bones crack, pop, and stretch. It felt like I was being spread out thin while stuffed uncomfortably full of sharp, crooked stones laced with salt and lemon juice simultaneously. 

"Aaaahhhhh! Gaaaaaaaawwwd! AAAAAAAAahhhhh!" I screamed a pain-filled, bone-chilling, agony-spewing cry that begged whatever higher power to finally end my agony right then and there.

The world turned black; that was the last time I saw my family again. I couldn't remember what had happened to me after falling unconscious. The first thing I recall was that there were doctors all over me, making fascinated faces. Looking like they had just found the most fascinating individual in the world. 

I was in dreamland when apparently, my body underwent perplexing changes? I heard things like, "Amazing! What type of biological miracle must've happened to make this happen!?" or, "I want a sample of his blood right now!" That, even decades after the fact, literally no one would really understand. 

Apparently, I was knocked out cold for one week. 

At the tender age of seven, I was 9'3 or 2.7 meters tall. No abnormalities were found in my skeletal structure apart from its massive stature. No internal organs showed any failure, and not even my skin had stretch marks.

 It was like I was always 9'3, not a seven-year-old child that was 4'2 just last week. In fact, my skin, muscles, and skeleton were even more robust. I could feel it in my bones, the base of my being, a tingly sensation conveying a feeling, a thought even, "Grow..." it said.

"...No more...please..."

I begged before the same sensation overtook my senses, my reason, thrown out the window along with my sanity. This time I would endure for hours on end. This time I wasn't given the mercy of sleep, even if it was forcefully induced by copiously obscene amounts of pain.

Twelve hours passed, and I grew even more. Shocked beyond belief, these scientists could not believe what was happening before them. A child no older than 7 years old was growing to an even more monstrous size than what could be scientifically possible. 

9'7...9'8...9'9...9'10!

I kept growing till I stopped at 10'4.

This was the beginning of my nightmare.

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It has been exactly 14 days, 17 hours, 22 minutes, and 41 seconds since I last felt a growing pain. I know this is only temporary, since in the last 59 days since, I've been in this ever-expanding lab, or prison of sorts. 

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How do I know?

Hard not to know when the scientists come every day to meet me and make records of their discoveries or whatever. And a giant clock, compared to even me in size, is right on the other side of the room.

 Every 15 days without fail, I would have tremendous growing pains. Even without undergoing incredibly painful growth spurts, I would still grow one inch passively every day without fail. 

My days would pass painfully slow with only that giant clock as my only source of company. It's ticking, the only source of sound in the entire skyscraper-size warehouse that imprisoned me. 

Strangely I never grew tired of its ticking. It just made me feel...weird, lazy, and even depressed. But I never found its company unwelcome or annoying.

This further accentuated the intense loneliness I felt, as if I was the only one in the world that existed in this god-forsaken place. Even though I knew better and that scientists would visit me every day.

Though, they would never speak to me.

[Time Skip: 8 Hours Later]

Today was the day for a scheduled visit that I didn't find satisfying, enjoyable, or even remotely pleasant. I was about to have growing pains; I dreaded this... I dreaded this just as much as it left me in agony for hours. I hated the anticipation, the knowing I couldn't stop whatever was wrong with me from happening.

The clock's effects failed to contain my growing negative emotions. Anxiety hit me like a freight train, caused and exacerbated by the scientists around the edge of the building. With notepads out like eager students for their favorite teacher, hoping for extra points on their science paper.

Then a familiar pain hit me. I learned from my last sessions of my body's self-induced torture to just let it happen. Let whatever was happening to transform me into whatever it was that I was changing into. Maybe I was transforming into a monster, or perhaps I was simply changing into......a larger-than-average human? 

Who knew? What I did know was that I was becoming more than I was.

I instinctively knew this somehow.

[Time Skip: 13 Minutes Later]

Something was different. The pain was different. Though my growth spurts were never consistent in how tall I would grow in one growth spurt. They were always consistent in pain. The pain would always, always, always, be consistent. But right now? Right now, it was building up to something horrifically painful, I'm sure. 

Then fire from deep within me, bone deep. Blisters appeared throughout my skin, the heat emanating from my body, turning the steel floors yellow and red. My chest was glowing red, and my heart was pumping a million miles a minute, siphoning lava all over my arteries and limbs. 

I would scream if my vocal cords weren't cut because the scientists didn't like me crying.

So instead, what came out was hoarse notes of pain that would give chills to the spines of the onlookers.

My skin was red, like a cooked lobster.

 Blisters, bubbles with mysterious substances adorning my skin. Thankfully, my sense of pain had dulled somewhat, but what I felt, I felt with great agony. 

I craved death.

My blisters grew and multiplied till there was more blister than man. The blisters grew and grew, and the fire grew and grew.

Somehow still alive through all this, my heart pumped and pumped till that was all I could hear.

I felt the blisters burst, their liquid wash around me, envelope me. Then I felt my body rise from the ground, the rags barely hanging from my body disintegrating into the warm liquid surrounding me. Then the liquid, as if alive, throbbed like the thrashing of a worm in its last moments under the sun.

Tu-Tump.....

It's throbbing weakly at first, but then as if gas with a motor engine, it's throbbing, it's beating, it's pumping, it gained traction and ran with it.

Tu-Tump...

Tu-Tump..

Tu-Tump!

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[Scientist POV]

We watched agape as our revolutionary biological miracle of a human being suddenly burst into heat and blisters. 

His blisters soon enveloped him into a giant bubble of flesh and liquid. 

As if he was being enveloped in a womb made in the bowels of hell.

We watched his blister burst; his fluids eat through solid reinforced steel, their smell and heat felt across the room. 

It was the smell of metal and cooking meat.

Then we saw lines forming on the outer layer of the liquid, now brown, red, and dirty looking, thanks to all the contaminants in the surroundings. 

Lines turned into more lines, turning into more lines, till they turned into a network of lines that turned into veins.

Some veins turned into arteries till they covered about 65% of the blister's fluid.

All the while, the heat increased even more.

What the veins and arteries couldn't cover fleshed adorned it. Like the imitation of a mother's womb, its distorted and unholy visage brings shame to the word.

 The veins every now and then would throb, and with each 'thump,' the heat increased.

The ground was no more liquid than the fluid surrounding it, though it was more apt to call it amniotic fluid. Heat is coming in waves, each hotter and hotter than the last. 

Then, the veins are as if they are finding water in a desert. Latched into the now thoroughly melted reinforced steel floors, it began sucking in the red hot metal as if it were cold soup.

It inhaled the metal till there was nothing left of it on the floor, then it moved on from that to cement, glass, acrylic, ceramic, copper, and wood. Some unlucky scientists were included in the menu. 

It would be wrong to say that only scientists were included in the creatures it ate. 

No...

...Any and all things were included in the menu... with no restrictions.