Lumpy Lisa's Transformation
Copyright© 2025 by Tori T. Jones
Chapter 1
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.” C. S Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics
Zqwsxdrfvbgthnmjklp settled into a light mind meld with the AI of Its ship. Its race were Travelers, explorers and considered a bloody nuisance by most space capable races. So this Traveler was doing Its best to pretend to be a bit of flotsam or jetsam among the various bits and bobs that the race that inhabited the fine blue orb beneath it had launched in their energetic effort to reach space.
Nothing had disturbed Zqwsxdrfvbgthnmjklp’s stay in this orbit for as long as it had been here, and It had hope that in a few of the planet’s centuries It would have enough information to decide whether the race of humans would make good symbiots. When one is small and much hunted hiding among and within the bodies of another race is always a good strategy.
All was well until the space ship of a race that could detect Zqwsxdrfvbgthnmjklp’s ship appeared from the shadow of the Earth’s moon. The Traveler immediately began evasive maneuvers as below it on the planet It had been exploring a different life or death struggle was playing out.
Lisa was obese to the point of being nearly morbidly obese. For as long as she could remember she had been at least a bit overweight. At the age of 19 she had reached the stage where her flesh literally drooped, rather than being firm and somewhat attractive, she was hung about with sheets of flab that wouldn’t attract anyone.
From the time she was ten years old Lisa knew she had been over weight and had gained at least ten percent excess body mass every year. Even at the age of ten she’d been considerably heavier than most of her peers. This fact had lead to Lisa being teased or harassed about her weight and earning or being given the nickname Lumpy Lisa. Part of that of course had been her weight, but far worse was that her family name was Lumpen.
On the first day of October of her twentieth year Lisa decided she’d had enough misery and set out to throw herself off the bluffs that overlooked the river which ran through her town. She drove her rattletrap car which was at least ten years older than she was to the trail-head that had the shortest trek, because she knew that if she had to walk too far she’d give up before she reached a point where she would have a deadly fall. Suicide was her plan and intent as she swung her awkward bulk from the car and began what she hoped would be her last moments on Earth. Fat, friendless, and miserable, so far as Lisa could see she was out of hope.
As Lisa took the beginning steps of her deadly trek, high above her another flight and fight for life was taking place. Zqwsxdrfvbgthnmjklp, a member of a race known if its name was translated to English as the Travelers was fleeing a mortal enemy. In a last ditch effort to remain alive the Traveler put its neutronium hulled ship into an extreme power-dive into the atmosphere of the planet it had been surveying.
Travelers have two habits which make everyone their enemies. Their first and worst habit is that they tend to be more than a bit parasitic in their mode of existence, thus earning them enmity whenever they are spotted. The second habit, though it isn’t one for which Travelers were hunted was that they were endlessly nosy, the insatiable curiosity of Travelers had gotten many members of their species into almost as much trouble as being a parasite had. Their main saving grace is that they are generally quite small, so small indeed that even before the Traveler had begun its power-dive its ship had been little more than 25 cm in diameter. Zqwsxdrfvbgthnmjklp (hereinafter The Traveler) withdrew to a lifeboat that was barely 2.5 cm in diameter. This craft contained a basic interstellar navigation AI as well as what could provide the information necessary for The Traveler to rebuild a space-going vessel if it had to lie low to avoid the enemy that had sought to eliminate it.
The Traveler ejected its lifeboat and set its ship to self-destruct in the hope that the explosion would confuse its enemy. When the passive tracking system of the lifeboat that was doing its best to simply appear to be a piece of the destroyed star-ship’s hull detected the signature saying that its enemy was leaving the vicinity of the planet that was host to a race that was nearing the capacity to become at least interplanetary in its civilization it began emergency breaking to shed its velocity. Hopefully there wasn’t another watcher, and the technicians who would be watching from the world below would miss its small size. It wouldn’t do to smash into the surface, even of the multitude of oceans of the world below it at hyper-sonic speeds. By the time its lifeboat made contact with Lisa, the traveler had slowed its speed to something akin to what might be expected of a large caliber rifle bullet. Thus when it struck Lisa squarely between the mounds of suet that she could charitably refer to as breasts it swept her off from her feet and landed her squarely on her back. The capsule continued its emergency breaking and lodged itself against Lisa’s spine.
Two things or perhaps three saved Lisa’s life that night, though she hadn’t wanted to live and the life she would embark on soon would make all of her previous experiences a pale imitation of misery and fear. She had seen the air-burst of the meteor and almost tracked the piece that struck her, she even laughed a little that here she had gone to throw herself off from a high point, and she was almost definitely going to be struck and killed by the lottery winning strike of a meteor. Too bad I only have bad luck was Lisa’s thought as she felt the object’s impact and realized she was airborne.
Lisa was mercifully unconscious before she landed on her back, so she didn’t see the gaping hole that was opened in her flesh. In most cases the amount of kinetic energy that was transferred to her body should have splattered her being like an overripe melon dropped from the Empire State building. But in the instant before the impact The Traveler had extended its inertia damping field to its greatest extent. For The Traveler had realized that its impact point on the planet would be a living being, and a living being would be both an excellent hiding place and a good source of food. Thus it did its best to not cause the death of the being it had impacted.
By the time that the body The Traveler had impacted had struck the soil of the planet it realized that the impact had caused critical damage to the being. While the body wasn’t yet dead, if emergency measures weren’t taken The Traveler would find itself resting in a dead body. A pseudo-pod extruded from The Traveler as soon as its trajectory indicated that it wouldn’t exit the body of the being it had struck. By the time the whole mass was at rest on the soil The Traveler had enough information to repair its newest host. It made the quick calculation that it would be better to either master this being or at least enter into a cooperative existence with it until The Traveler had gained enough knowledge of the society the being existed in to not reveal its presence to the members of the being’s community.