Cilla sighed and grumbled to herself. A week now since the accident with the growth potion, and the combined talents of Fuzz and her former professor Seamus Apyda hadn't even led her to a palliative. The fruits of their alleged genius had only yielded a hint - a strong hint, but not confirmed - that alcoholic beverages could trigger a rapid reaction.

And based solely on those educated guesses, and a couple of tale-tallers at the Wolf & Wyvern, the damned Archmage had ordered her to stay out of the chapter hall until further notice. The whole thing still seemed rather silly to her; she might have grown a few inches after a mug of beer, but that hardly meant she was at risk of suddenly ripping through the roof!

With the laboratory barred to her and most of her fellow students too frightened by the rumors, she'd had little company other than the odd visit from the Proudfoot girl. Not that the Bobbit was an unpleasant companion by any means... but in a roundabout way, it was her fault that Cilla was in the situation she was in. If only she'd asked someone else for mathematical help instead... maybe that cute, shy Morlock who always sat in the back...

A sudden throb from her head and she involuntarily tensed up, briefly making the ache all the worse. She wasn't sure which was more of a pain - the inability to get drunk to make the time pass more quickly, or the fact that her ill-fitting berthing made her feel hungover in the morning when she hadn't touched a drop. Despite having shrunk a great deal since the previous night, she was still tall enough to turn a Troll green with envy.

Two rapid knocks sounded at the door, but before she could answer, a small folded parchment slid under the gap. Footsteps tap-tapped away down the cobbled road; were her ears deceiving her, or did they sound more like hooves? The mage stumbled to her feet and retrieved the note; it was written in a pretty hand, with what looked like a wax pencil.

  My deepest Condolences for your Accident.
  Look outside the Door; should keep you
  Company for the Evening.
  - A Friend
  

Her mouth opening in confusion, she shook her head and put off her questions for the time being; after all, if there really was something outside her door, it would probably only raise more questions. Cilla nudged the wooden portal open, and quickly saw something that wasn't there an hour ago: a large oak barrel, reinforced with iron bands. From its size, she guessed that it held wine, and removing the lid confirmed this guess for her nose as well as her eyes. Very sweet-smelling, but not sickly.

"Un... Who's 'a friend' supposed to be?"

As if in reply, a large bubble rose to the top of the barrel. Cilla chuckled a bit, until she saw that the bubble was almost completely motionless, neither bursting nor dissolving into the expected cloud of smaller bubbles.

Then the bubble blinked.

She gasped aloud at that, nearly dropping the lid. Was she already going soul-sick from the loneliness? Because there was no conceivable way that - Oh. It was definitely an eye. Another one rose up to join it, and the two fluid organs peered at her intently.

"Er... H-hello?"

The eyes blinked again, and were shortly joined by a small, four-fingered hand. It rose up from the wine, wiggled its purple-red fingers at her, and then gestured to the door; the eyes also followed this motion.

"Oh gods... I must be..."

The hand sank, and a hole seemed to open up where it had been. It shook, and a strange, gurgling voice seemed to whisper to the dumbstruck mage. "B-b-bring me inside... I won't hurt you, promise."

Part of her still thought she must have taken leave of her senses, but the questing part of her - the inexhaustible curiosity that had led her to study thaumaturgy in the first place - was still stronger. She bent down and started to push the cask, doing so with less difficulty than she might have thought. When the barrel was entirely inside the room, Cilla closed the door, and the odd bubbling voice sounded a bit louder than before.

"Thank you... Ooooooh, how long was I asleep?"

She looked at the vibrating surface of the wine. "Eh... Beg pardon?"

The eyes rose up from the fluid, supported by thin stalks that were no more opaque than the organs they held. Squinting at her, the eyes blinked again. "Ah! You're not that furry person..."

"Er... no. I'm a mage."

"I should know b-b-better than to fall asleep inside strange casks..."

As Lucilla struggled to hold up her end of the conversation - a conversation with some kind of wine creature, mind - the occupant of the barrel reached for the rim with two small hands, and started to rise from the surface as the eyestalks receded. After a few moments, the eyes were in place above a small mouth, with a round head on a short neck. Shaking back and forth gently, the head looked at the mage.

"Hi! My name is Amaral. What's yours?"

"Ehh... M-my name is Cilla..."

Amaral smiled. "Nice to meet you, Cilla!"

The two stared at each other, with only Cilla being anything other than oblivious to the awkwardness of the silence. "So... You're, er..."

"Wine!" She chuckled, bubbling slightly. "Well, mostly wine. I can turn myself into other things if I drink enough of them!"

"Really?"

"Really! As I remember, the first thing I drank was rum with cream... and bananas, I think?"

Cilla raised her eyebrows at the thought, then winced at the throb that came with even that slight effort. "Ouch..."

"Are you all right, love?" The wine girl was trying to frown, but it was an unusual expression for her.

The mage inhaled cautiously. "Just a headache... oof..."

With a grin, Amaral held up her finger like a baker offering a hard pretzel; a drop of her, dark and rich, hung from her fingertip. "Hair of the dog that bit ye?"

"I'm, er, not hungover," Lucilla managed to stammer. "Though I suppose I could do with a drink... maybe just a drop..."

The two women formed a strange tableau, the one of fluid offering part of her body to be consumed by the one of flesh. A few large drops fell silently into the mage's mouth, and she licked her lips at the taste. "Mmm... You picked a very nice cask to nap in..."

She giggled, and closed her eyes in light concentration. "You feel nice and warm inside..."

"You... can you feel me? I mean, that drop of you can still feel?"

"Of course! It wouldn't do much good to send out pieces of me if they couldn't tell me anything, now would it?"

Cilla smiled. "I suppose not..."

Both girls had their attention drawn to a loud gurgling noise, evidently coming from the mage's stomach. Her joints cracked and popped as if she were stretching, but her muscles remained relaxed. When all the noises had quieted, Cilla realized she was a few inches closer to the ceiling.

"Oh dear..." She blushed a bright red, and rubbed the back of her neck in embarrassment. "You, er... You're a pretty strong batch. Heh-heh."

Amaral looked on, her eyes widening. "Hmm... That doesn't normally happen with Humans, does it?"

"No... Just me, I suppose. Bit of a long story..."

The wine girl nodded. "Should I stop? I mean, is it a good idea to drink more of me?"

"Would you like me to?"

"Perhaps..."

The silence between them was no longer awkward, but expectant. Cilla leaned in close, as if to kiss Amaral, but instead whispered to her.

"If I'm going to drink more of you, we'll need a lot more space for me to grow."

Uncomfortable though it may have been, she had to admit that the clearing was certainly spacious. Almost untouched, with the only evidence that someone else had been here recently a wool blanket lying in a wad near a tree; they had thought of using it, but it was covered in some kind of brown hair or fur. Still, the twigs on the ground were thin enough that Cilla didn’t begrudge having to walk here barefoot... although pulling the cart with Amaral's cask on it had gotten rather tiring after the first two miles.

"You say that this is where you first met the, er, 'furry person'?" she asked.

The wine girl nodded. "It is! We had much fun together, even before all the... you know."

Cilla raised her eyebrows, but quickly changed the subject. "There’s plenty of room... Though I wonder whether you might soak into the grass a bit, if we spill you."

"I'd better stay in the barrel, then."

"All right." She unfastened her cloak, and carefully folded it; underneath, her tunic had started to ride upwards a bit from her most recent growth spurt, and she removed it as well. She was somewhat glad to be free of it - at least this way, it wouldn't rip at the seams like the other one did - and the typical embarrassment she might have felt at stripping down was muted by the thought that a forest clearing had probably seen its fair share of nudity.

Or perhaps it was the wine already going to her head. The girl going to her head.

"You’re very pretty, Miss Cilla!"

Now she was blushing. "Erm... You’re, er, very tasty... Amaral."

"Thank you!” She giggled a bit, and some tiny bubbles rose through her body. "Now that we're somewhere bigger, would you like another taste?"

Like a fish in the desert, Lucilla all but lunged for Amaral's outstretched fingertip, eagerly sucking and swallowing her fluid, savoring the taste like wild berries. The warmth began to reappear, starting in her stomach and slowly spreading outward, and both women took excited notice of the sensation. Amaral giggled again, and her face seemed to turn an even deeper shade of purple. The mage braced herself for another growth spurt, but when the sensation finally came, it did so much gentler than before - almost gracefully, in fact.

"Ahh... That felt... kind of nice, actually."

"I thought it would!" Her smile broadened, gelatinous teeth gleaming inside a slippery mouth. "It isn’t easy, but I can control how quickly I pass into your blood."

"You're... in my blood?"

The wine girl frowned a bit. "Of course! That's how alcohol works. It soaks into your blood, and then goes to your liver and... I thought you were a mage?"

It was Lucilla's turn to giggle. "I suppose I never thought of it that way. It's... odd, having a girl in my blood, though." For the first time since all of this started, she looked at her enlarged body and began to appreciate it. Her longer limbs, slightly wider hips...

"Miss Cilla?"

She blushed. "Just Cilla is fine, Amaral. Heh-heh."

"Well, Cilla... How much of me are you looking to drink?"

"Erm..." The mage flushed nervously. "I don’t know... I've mostly been dry since the accident happened, so... I'm not sure how big I could get."

Amaral’s hand on her arm, though slightly moist, felt rather warm. "Well... would you like to find out?" The wine girl swallowed. "B-because I would..."

Though Cilla had never been the particularly flirtatious type, she instinctively felt that this wasn't the time for soothing words. Instead, she gently reached under Amaral's hand and slowly guided it to her lips, as if she were holding the petals of a delicate flower. A gentle inhalation of breath, then a soft kiss that quickly turned into a lapping motion. The mage lost herself in the taste, the warmth spreading through her whole body... she never wanted it to end, and likely would have kept going forever if she hadn't noticed that she was having to bend down farther and farther to keep drinking. She opened her eyes, and saw that the rim of the barrel was now about ten feet below her eye level.

"Mmm..." Amaral opened her own eyes, and blushed again. "I do like being the small one at times, but... you didn't drink as much of me as I'd normally need."

Lucilla's vision was a bit blurred, but she reached down to her new, tiny friend and noticed that her hand was already quite a bit bigger than the wine girl's head. "Ohhhhh... I wonder how talllll I am now..." A tipsy giggle bubbled up as she imagined how much tinier Fuzz would be at this point.

"You feel so warm inside..." The smaller, less solid woman closed her eyes and shuddered as Cilla's stomach gurgled.

"Yer... nice and cool outside..." Owing to her new size and her inebriation, Lucilla scooped up Amaral with one hand, sending both of them into giggling fits as she dripped a bit of herself onto the forest floor. The mage ran a single fingertip up and down the wine girl's jellied body, licking her lips. "Heh-heh... Such a tiny thing..."

"Beg pardon?"

This voice was new. Uh-oh...

Cilla lolled her head to one side and saw someone standing there in the clearing. She squinted to try and clear her vision, but the person looked kind of familiar. Short, curly hair, a bit on the chubby side...

Oh no.

"F-Fuzz!" She nearly fell over before catching herself with her free hand. "I, er... I can explain! ...kind of."

The Bobbit woman was standing there still as a statue. Her arms were crossed in what might otherwise have seemed a haughty gesture, if not for her mouth hanging slack. "All right, what's your explanation for being naked, drunk as a slunk, and twenty feet tall in this part of the woods? Better be a good one, Amell."

"It's Amaral, actually!" Oblivious to the strangeness of the situation, the slime girl stretched her neck and head up to grin at the visitor. "Pleased to meet you!"

Fuzz tilted her head; this seemed to be getting stranger by the second. "Um... Hello… Pleased to meet you too, I suppose." She shook her head and returned to the matter at hand as best she could. "Got an explanation for this one, too?"

"Er... Someone slipped a note under my door, and left a wine cask. This girl - Amaral - was inside, and..." Cilla was red as a beet, her drunkenness and arousal mixing with her mounting embarrassment. "She's, er, made of wine. We... we came out here so I wouldn't get stuck inside the little cottage."

"Made of wine?" A look of realization flitted across Fuzz's face, and the slack in her jaw returned. "Are you... Never mind. Miss Amaral, how exactly did you get inside a cask in front of Cilla's apartment?"

The fluid woman smiled and slithered further around Lucilla’s torso, sitting on one of her tree trunk-sized thighs. "That furry woman brought me! Well, I suppose she did. She offered me the barrel to sleep in, and when I woke up, I met Miss Cilla!"

Closing her eyes and sighing, the Bobbit rubbed at her forehead as if hoping to dislodge the ache that had settled there. "Feckin' un... Alright. Finish your fornicating, I suppose, and whenever you're done, come meet me at Seamus' house. Or... maybe you'd better send word instead. The gate guards may not want a giant and a jelly to come stomping into town."

Before leaving, Fuzz walked over to the wadded-up wool blanket and tossed it over her shoulder. As she stepped away from the clearing and into the woods, her shoes making muffled thumps on the soft dirt of the trail, Cilla looked at her partner and silently wondered just what she had gotten herself mixed up in.