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The Power of Steam

By Luther

The World's Fair exhibition! It was a grand magnet for attracting the great minds of all the lands, investors and patrons of the sciences -and not to mention tourists with their tourist money. The city had spent the previous months preparing for the inevitable influx of crowd and curiosity that such an honor as hosting the event would surely bring. Great banners hung from monolithic gilded posts, ready to proclaim to the world the ultramodern wonders of the year 1889.

The fashionable scientific trend of the decades before was the utilization of steam and gear, the ideas of which had existed for millennia in the form of simple machine but had only relatively recently blossomed into practicality. The more recent years had taken the basic building blocks of mechanical motion from mere transportation and brute work to what their creators would call finer points of civilization. Though these more lavish applications arrayed for exhibition might be called ostentatious or even gaudy, their function was more to send a message: that this nation was wealthy and advanced enough to produce such things in the first place. They all said that this empire held the technical mastery to mimic the form of man and conquer the skies above as well as the crushing depths of the ocean. It was the echo of the time that rang along every length of piping, every boilerplate, and every polished brass casing.

It was the night before the grand opening day and even now the air was electric with anticipation. The night watch, which stood vigil over the exhibits, was well funded but still stretched thin and one of the more recent hires was making her rounds through the darkened halls. Her lantern reflected the metal surfaces of the sleeping wonders, their glass eyes staring lifelessly back at the passing light. It was easy to see why she got the job: standing at twelve feet in height and clad in the russet uniform of the Expo Authority, the Skea held an imposing stature that could easily scare off any midnight vandal or ne'er-do-well who might dare intrude. That is to say, if the sight of the lizard's majorly voluptuous figure didn't paralyze them in their tracks. Her uniform had to be custom made for her size and even then it barely managed to contain her and thus protect decency for the masses. Coming from around the corner, she was an unexpected sight either way.

At last she finished her circuit for the hour and returned to her assigned wing, modest in size relative to the others yet still enormous in scope. Jonathan Stinson, her collie dog partner, wasn't here yet. She checked the windows -no breakage. He must still be out patrolling the exterior, smoking his pipe. The gas lights that ringed the great hall were left on low for them to see, the space simply too large for lanterns to cover effectively.

And so she was left alone among this menagerie of curiosities, left for her eyes to wander over their many and varied forms. A submersible the size of a small whale sat against the far wall, brimming with details of its recent return from the watery world below. There was a new type of adding machine that could do far more with logic gates than its name would suggest and could calculate leagues faster than anything like it before. A flight of mechanical birds hung suspended by wire above it all, she wondered if they actually worked. In the center of the room was a huge rotund device: the master boiler by Aldebrecht Werks. It contained the capacity as a generator to power everything in the wing at once and more. Currently it threw off heat, left stoked at low pressure to keep everything primed for the morning.

Skea sighed. With all this potential mechanical movement and life in the room, it was hard to imagine what it might all look like in action instead of looking at what amounted to a metallic statue garden. Her eyes spied a curious fellow whose placement was designed to arrest attention. It was a brass covered automaton built to resemble a badger, set apart with some space around it cordoned off with velvet rope, bowed slightly with its arm extended forward to take the hand of a partner . . . as the placard next to it described.

"Hello, my name is Oscar!" it read. "I am a fully automated dance partner, graced with steps both modern and classic. Would you care for a demonstration?"

The thought of a pneumatically driven ballroom dancer brought a smile to the lizard's lips. Oscar stood dressed smartly in something partway between a formal coat and an officer's dress uniform. His frozen yet inviting gesture would be a bit lost on her, considering she stood several feet taller than him. Still, some strange part of her decided to humor the polite machine. She stooped a little and extended her own hand in turn, taking his in acknowledgement.

It was then that Oscar decided to move, to jerk to sudden life and finish his bow. Skea understandably recoiled her hand in alarm, stepping back and looking down at the machine. With clanking and hissing, he took the arm and the small of an invisible partner's back and began the initial steps of a slow waltz. He had yet to be calibrated and was merely following the motions, dancing with a non-existent other as he whirled about the space. Skea backed up quickly, nearly tripping over the rope in the process. She looked at the hose that lead from the wall to his back. How did he have pressure? Was the boiler possibly set hot enough to power him?

Skea regained her thoughts and tried to maneuver behind him to find some way of stopping him before the noise attracted attention. She could find no immediate way of deactivating the surprisingly sprightly fellow. His movement and her large hands would make manipulation difficult. Maybe she'd have better luck with the boiler?

Thinking like a spring, she rushed over to the ponderous thing, trying to remember which levers she was told to flip in case of emergency. To her dismay, everything looked to be where it already should. She tried something else: a quick reset. It would mean they'd have to start it cold in the morning but it was better than this commotion. A flywheel turned, she exchanged the pressure on a pair of intakes, tried to redirect . . . something. Her attention soon suffered. Oscar had escaped his bounds and bumped into a mechanical pylon. It was soon wobbling dangerously back and forth back and forth. Again she found herself racing across the floor of the showroom to grab onto the thing and steady it. She couldn't disconnect Oscar from the feed with the boiler but maybe she could on his end. Skea would have to move quickly, his dancing patterns were growing more erratic. This is exactly why he'd have a supervisor during normal operating hours.

The security guard had to do something. She spotted her target and leapt forward, seizing the insulated hose and dug her claws into the floor, pulling on it. With her size and strength it wasn't much of an ordeal to dislodge the thing. What she didn't count on was that she'd now be holding a thrashing tube now venting steam all around her. She kept it pointing away from her but that didn't stop a sizeable plume of steam from rising up all around her body as she wrestled with the thing.

She found herself coughing. Thankfully it wasn't hot enough to burn her but it certainly was a warm sensation. She stumbled forward, blind in the cloud, and nearly tripped when her pants got caught on something that was restricting her movement. It was herself; her uniform was decidedly tighter now! Was the steam shrinking the material or binding it somehow?

A button popped from her front, firing through the vapors to strike something with a metallic clang. Another followed it and her bosom heaved, now poised to spring forward itself after being trapped behind such oppressive fabric. Those titanic tits pressed in against one another as they worked together towards freedom. Skea could see them and with them the truth of the matter. Her clothes weren't shrinking at all, her breasts were surging larger. Where they were barely restrained at twice the size of her head she could now clearly see them advancing further in relative size. Wide, bright pink areola were peeking above the failing bust line of her shirt.

Her face flushed, deepening the scales on her cheeks to a dark purple. It might have been the heat but she knew it wasn't. The embarrassing truth was that the steam felt amazing in a way she could hardly describe, a fiery blissful tingle that danced along her body in a way that was making her care less about the implications of growing. She knew water had an effect on her and was always careful around it but there was something different about this. The steam pulled itself towards her, filled her lungs, and seeped into her scales. Whenever it drew close to her it was literally pulled into her being, drank deep by an ever-thirsting body. The now thirteen foot lizard was absorbing the stuff and her body was using it to expand. Part of Skea knew this was bad, she couldn't get too big or she'd wreck everything. Those thoughts, however, were disappearing like her clothing: being outgrown, shredded to bits in the face of her slowly growing body. How could anything bad be so good?

Those doubts were washed away, subsumed along with the rest of her beneath the pleasure of a misty cloud. Beneath the hissing could be heard the tearing sound of fabric as the hopeless threads gave way. Her widening hips split her pants open, great tears running down the thighs as her supple yet unyielding rear demolished them. It was exhilarating to feel herself winning against her own clothing, like nothing in the world could contain her or stop her. She rose taller, the head fins of a fifteen foot Skea cresting the top of the steam, rising up like the tops of some mountain, eyes soon peeking out followed by a wide smile.

Some new feeling in her midsection crept over her, demanding her attention. It was her belly! The swell of her stomach was starting to grow more pronounced, faster than the rest of her. It was going from a flat front to an undeniably rounded paunch. Patches of blue scale were soon showing beneath the disintegrating uniform shirt and between the straining buttons. She placed her claws against it. Was it something to do with the steam or the heat, the excited gasses filling her up? She felt a wonderful pressure building in her, it was even but constant. Those claws of hers pressed testingly against her round belly. It didn't feel like steam inside her; it was solid and warm and responded like flesh. Skea wasn't merely inflating. Like the rest of her wondrous growth, it was simply more of her! Her enormous blue body was an unstoppable tide, popping the final buttons along her front. Out flew her rounded stomach, followed in short order by huge heaving breasts, each having to be nearly four feet across. They swayed and sloshed as they tried to regain their composure from gravity but no sooner than they could make any progress, the backside of her uniform finally surrendered and burst open. From the confetti-like ripping of tattered clothes bounced a tremendous rump, shaking from the being released on a pair of hips twice as wide as the rest of her. Now she stood without a stitch on her. Everything was now free of constraint to grow and grow and grow!

The sudden shift in balance from her exploding clothing forced her to lean forward, bracing herself against a nearby wall. Her eyes shot open in surprise as she instantly felt the fantastic pull of her gravid front, instantly aware how big she was getting. The giant's arms wrapped around her front, both to try to hold up that magnificently swollen abdomen and better feel it growing further within them, pushing them further apart. She moaned, completely instinctual and completely reactionary when she realized her tummy was half as large as her. It was almost like holding another person against her!

She stood, her muscles now straining less to hold everything up. Her massive breasts rolled gently to rest atop the still expanding shelf of her stomach. Her fins twitched, a tinny whistling sound caught her ear. Then she remembered. In her rush to perform damage control and stop the disorder she had left a valve closed on the boiler, an important one by the looks of it and the sound signaled it reaching a breaking point. Her eyes went wide at the realization; fins folded down low from what she knew would happen.

"Bugger-"

The thing didn't exactly explode. Its design was too wise and valuable to allow the idleness of a negligent operator to doom it. Instead it triggered an emergency release and purged itself of pressure long before the catastrophic would occur. What this translated into was a cloudburst of steam, a great outpouring from all the vents in all directions that flooded the hall entirely and created a tumultuous noise far greater than anything Skea's prior efforts would have prevented.

The steam was everywhere now. At this point there was no shuffling to the other side of the room to avoid it even if she wanted to. It was completely inescapable. Her thoughts shifted: what started as a momentary joyride could have been ended by stepping beyond the vapor. Maybe she wasn't thinking perfectly clearly but she knew she had the option at any time. Now things were different. Now she had no choice. Now she was being forced larger.

The doors of the hall were too small for her to escape through. She could feel it beginning. Rather she could feel a new, far more powerful flooding of power overtake the first, pushing her ascension faster and faster well beyond her control, if she ever had any. It was feeding her in waves now: the fifteen foot Skea gave way to eighteen feet, then twenty-three, then further and beyond with each resurgent burst of size. Her body was breathing in the steam, taking it in it great gulps. Her body wracked by so much at once, she couldn't help but fall to her knees as she panted.

Just as these surges began to grow faster and stronger, the oversized and ever-growing lizard spotted a shadowed figure moving about in the steam. It was standing near the doorway and its shape had the cut of a uniform, perky ears, a mane of thick fur around the neck, and a long feathered tail. It was Jonathan. The noise was enough to have been heard outside and in rushed the collie with his blackjack truncheon in one hand and smoking pipe in the other.

His eyes narrowed to cut through the poor visibility but he couldn't see much. With his weapon raised he ran into the cloud shouting: "Whoever's in there, come on out and you won't be harmed!" he warned.

"John, it's me!" the mountainous lizard replied, her voice loud and powerful.

"Skea?" he asked. He heard her but it sounded somewhere above him.

He continued to move forward in hopes of finding her. Maybe she was in danger. Before he knew it he found himself running straight into something, bumping his nose into some light blue wall, an object he knew shouldn't be there. His ashen pipe fell to the ground, dropped when he went to grab reflexively at his muzzle.

It was a curious sort of wall that had a give to it, squishy yet taut when he pushed against it. Moreover, the wall was pushing back! A stretching, rumbling sound emanated from the scaly mass as it practically shoved him backwards. His vision adjusted, proximity cleared the fog, she felt him and then he saw her -all of her. His lower lip trembled as he tried to take in what he was seeing.

"Bloody hell . . ." he said, the words tumbling from his slackened mouth as he eyes uplifted towards the sight of her. From his view, he saw this great and round ice colored shape -her belly- with her arms, legs, and neck jutting from the peripheral of it. Some part of him might have thought she had somehow swallowed the submarine if it wasn't right over there. Her giant face looked down at him and blinked as if trying to find some way of explanation. For a moment all she managed was yet another dark purple blush at the passing embarrassment of him finding her like this.

"J-John," she said. "You have to move or I might crush you. I can't stop growing!" Skea rose to her feet as she spoke, still mobile despite being so gargantuan. Powerful legs, those.

"Growing?" he repeated in confusion. Yes, that's what it looked like was happening. Impossible, but there it was.

He stepped back towards relative safety and gained a better look at her. To Jonathan she might as well had been some swollen version of the goddess Aphrodite herself, stepped straight from a painting of one of the masters. She towered above him some thirty-six feet in air and was clad only in the elements of the natural world; the mist and her own beauty were all the trappings she needed.

He could feel the temperature difference, the slight breeze made by her body pulling in the steam, he could see it all draw towards her as if she were the center of an ever-growing and ever-gathering storm. Or rather, that she was the storm itself, the center of it all. Awe and fascination took him and he fell silent, though that didn't stop his swelling erection from voicing its throbbing approval.

She moved. Ponderous and careful steps were taken around the room, trying to maneuver and tiptoe around the exhibits without damaging them as he scrambled out of the way. Her wide feet shifted, growing and spreading across more ground with every movement, making it more and more difficult. When they paused, she could feel her feet sliding across the smooth floor as they expanded along with her

Her thick tail shifted, forced outward to counterbalance her immense front. It swung and impacted something, knocked it over with a clatter, and she turned around to see what she had done, bumping her head into the miniature flock of metal birds that were so far above her just minutes ago. Had she really gotten that tall? They fell from their perches and bounced off of her stomach before hitting the ground. So much chaos was flying about that, even discounting her partner, there was no way she wasn't going to be caught.

But that wasn't to be the crowning moment in her accidental rampage. As she grew and grew, her options were erased. Where could she soon go? The top of her head bumped against the domed, forty-five foot ceiling. Even though it seemed so a casual a knock to her, the damage was already evident. The strength in those massive cords of muscle in her neck alone had sent huge cracks streaming along it and chunks of plaster began to fall. It began to collapse some, just a partial hole opening above her. A little sunlight streamed in. The first rays of morning were here. Well, maybe she could stick her neck out of it just before she destroyed everything. Wouldn't that be a sight for the whole city?

However it was a saving grace for the building. Forming a release for the massive impromptu sauna, steam outpoured from the hole and formed a column that rose high above the fair in the morning light. With its freedom to the world outside Skea's growth slowed. She was left filling a significant portion of the hall even while sitting while the other displays were pushed and knocked to the sides and corners.

The exhibit was in disarray, that much was sure. The pounding of hurried footsteps could be heard and the doors to the antechamber outside swung open. No less than a half dozen of her fellow guards came storming into the room. Most of them recognized her after a second or two. Having expected vandals, they were quickly disarmed by what they found. Jonathan had recovered as well and together the whole lot of them did the only thing they could think of: try and figure out what the heck just happened.

Some time later another figure arrived to assess the situation. He was a bespectacled rabbit well-dressed in a fine silk waistcoat. Skea recognized him as one of the curators of the fair. He was her employer.

"Oh heavens!" the curator exclaimed upon first entering and seeing her nudity. He tried to avert his eyes. "Is she done -er expanding?"

"We think so, yes. We still aren't exactly sure how it happened but it might have been the steam," explained Jonathan.

The rabbit thought a moment and chuckled. "Steam powered elephants, a steam powered orchestra . . . and now a steam erm- powered lizard. Why not?"

"Sir?"

The gears in his head began working as he took stock of the situation. "Well . . . this exposition is about scientific discovery, not just innovation. Most of the things in here seem salvageable. Consider the remarkable nature of what we have right here."

"Sir, what are you getting at?"

"Well we can't just hide a colossal lizard in the exhibition hall now can we? Trying to move her now will only result in more damage and would leave us with an empty space." He turned to address Skea. "Well, my very large and lovely friend, I say we promote you from support staff to attraction! At least for the first day, until we can think of a better solution. There's only a matter of hours before we open, we have to improvise!"

Skea thought a moment before nodding her consent. She did cause the damage whether she meant to or not. The least she could do was throw up a little smokescreen to save the fair's reputation.

The rabbit smiled and turned again to ask the room: "Didn't Dr. Rauthus propose an exhibit on advanced paleontology?"

"Yes, sir. He had quite the impressive display but the committee never approved it and-"

"Damn the committee! I'm approving it now under emergency powers. Someone get to his house and tell him to bring whatever he's got over here straight away. We have a hell of a centerpiece for him and the show must go on!"

Soon engineers and workmen began to arrive and we tasked with moving the debris. A passing mink assistant was charged with going to the printer's at Carmichael's and getting new signs printed up: "A Glimpse into the World Primordial!" was the theme to be.

The flop-eared curator then spent a few moments considering how to instruct his biggest employee. "Look, if anyone asks, you're a dinosaur we managed to hatch from an egg we found." He turned about and stopped, spinning back around in afterthought. "That we also taught English," he added. "They'll love that. And someone get something to cover her up a little! This is the nineteenth century, people. We are not barbarians!"

All in all it was a surprising success. The display was changed masterfully: the roof was lifted aside, as it was designed to with winch and cable, to create an open air forum and hide the hole. The damage was swept away and new showmen were quickly versed in rattling off the praises of the ancient world brought to life. Thanks to her, she brought in the interest so that Dr. Rauthus' work was allowed to flourish around her instead of languishing in obscurity.

Throughout the day Skea was the obvious center of much awe and admiration. She became an almost instant celebrity among the visitors. Her image was captured repeatedly in daguerreotype with smiling and well-dressed furs, dominated by that massive belly of hers with her own happy face just in frame. As strange as it all was, the attention was certainly nice. The children absolutely loved her.

Shortly after midday the curator stopped by to see how his star was doing. He looked up at her and spoke, beaming. "I've got eight other wings filled with hissing and buzzing contraptions and none of them are as popular as this one."

"I'm happy to hear it," she said. "So many people, so many smiling faces . . . it's a lot to take in!"

He nodded back in affirmation but his brow soon furrowed at the sight of dark clouds on the horizon. He huffed. "I hope it doesn't end up raining."

Skea gulped and looked up as well. It seemed he didn't quite grasp the implication the weather would bring. The biggest attraction of the 1889 World's Fair might soon get even bigger!