Shocking Developments
      
      
      “Are you really sure this is a good idea?” Vivian asked nervously for the tenth time in as many minutes.
      
      “Of course it’s a good idea!” Katie replied, the same answer to the question each time it had been asked, and then followed up with a more ludicrous claim of “Have I ever gone wrong like this before?”
      
      “…Yes, you have,” she said glumly.
      
      “Oh hush, you just have no sense of adventure,” the Pikachu said with a dismissive wave of her hand. Before her friend could have another chance to object she suddenly exclaimed “Aha!” and pulled out a black garment from her dresser, wasting no time in putting it on. Her head, topped with long, pointed ears that sprouted from a mane of wavy auburn hair reaching just to her shoulders, popped out through the neckline of the dark tank top, its lower hem not quite stretching far enough to cover all of her swollen yellow gut and lovehandles. She was wearing a matching pair of shorts that fit snugly around her thick hips, thighs, and buttocks and reached just barely to her knees, her signature lightning bolt tail poking up into the air from above the waistband.
      
      “There’s a big difference between being adventurous and being completely reckless,” the Joltik said from behind her, sitting on the bed of the messy bedroom with her arms crossed over her chest and clutching each other. She wore a similar ensemble of clothes, but they did a much better job of covering her smaller, though by no means completely thin, body, a slight potbelly protruding from her abdomen beneath a modestly endowed chest, her hips only providing a small amount of tautness to her shorts. Her straw yellow fur was about the same color as Katie’s, but instead of being smooth and silky it bristled in wiry strands, puffing up slightly around the edges of her clothes, and her short black hair similarly spiked upward from her head. “Wouldn’t it be easier to get bigger if we just ate a lot of food?”
      
      “That would take too long!” Katie said with a tone that wouldn’t be unheard from an impatient child still fresh from kindergarten. “It took me months, maybe years just to get as big as I am now!” She lifted up her flabby gut by its sides, in turn pushing up her pert breasts against their confines, yellow flesh oozing and sagging as gravity pulled it toward the ground. “I’m going to need to be at least twice as big as this if I want to have a chance of standing out in the Heavy Pokemon League, just eating for that would take forever!”
      
      Vivian didn’t say anything, knowing how difficult it was to convince Katie when she got worked up like this; the most she could do was stare at her with her four blue eyes, pouting and pleading silently for her to reconsider.
      
      The plump Pikachu had an eager, almost manic expression on her face as she waddled away, approaching a space that had been cleared of the mess of discarded clothes and shopping bags covering the rest of the room. On the nearby wall, there was an electrical outlet affixed to the painted vertical surface just below waist height, which she now eyed hungrily as she stood next to it, angled with her right hip toward it. She didn’t know why she hadn’t thought of something like this before, if electricity would have such an effect on her before than it ought to still be the same. She felt positively giddy with anticipation as she reached behind her to gently grab her tail, remembering the sensation when she had been filled with volts by that Luxray, and she poked the zigzagging appendage into one of the narrow slots.
      
      It wasn’t nearly as pleasant as she had been hoping for. The jolt that coursed through her body was instantaneous, and before she could even think of pulling her tail away from the outlet she was wracked with the pain of energy flowing all throughout her like lightning. Vivian shrieked and covered her head as the single lamp on the ceiling flared up blindingly bright like a miniature sun before popping, leaving the room dark. A crackling noise filled the air and then there was a loud booming noise outside, and the next thing they knew the entire street outside had gone dark from the power surge as well. In the distance, one could just barely hear the annoyed shouts of neighbors as they complained about the sudden lack of power.
      
      Vivian opened her eyes again, however, when she heard Katie giggling to herself, and she gasped at the sight of what lay before her, even in the dim light of the room. The yellow rodent had taken well to the electricity, and as her feet shuffled around in place to turn back toward her friend she was preoccupied with gazing down at her own body. The black outfits they had procured were renowned for their stretchiness, but even now they were faring poorly at covering her, the tank top having ridden up further over her gut now that it had turned into a vast blob of tawny flesh, protruding in front of her and hanging heavily down to her knees even with her holding up its sides. The top was being further tested by her bosom, the two spheres ballooned into giant globes that were each twice as big as her head, which was almost completely eclipsed by their bulk from being pushed upward in the taut fabric, pinched in and overflowing around the edges. Her legs, each thickened out to be wider than truck tires, were similarly spilling out of the shorts confining them, the upper slopes of her buttocks bulging up from the waistband behind her and her hips to her sides.
      
      “Told you…it would work…” she said between hoarse chuckles, and with an immense thud that shook the room she fell forward onto the bed, revealing her bloated face over the horizon of cleavage, the red spots on her puffy cheeks stretched out of shape and glowing brightly, her hair standing on end. “Your turn now.”