By: vormon
"No thank you. I wouldn't want to crowd Carly." you say hastily. Katie pouts, but you resolutely avoid looking at her and instead put your ear to her bloated midsection. You will eventually need to be swallowed again if you ever want to be a full member of your house, you suppose, but Katie isn't offering you ideal accommodation right now. And you can't let yourself be charmed down the gullet of every girl that smiles at you.
As you listen to the wet gurgling of Katie's stomach (is that potion even working?) you realize that its occupant has calmed down. It seems that she's more aware of what's happening outside than you are of the reverse. You put your mouth next to the bump as if you were speaking to an unborn child, and ask "Carly? How are you?"
"Ffii thhk!" comes the barely audible reply. It takes quite a bit of back-and-forth to communicate successfully, but eventually you puzzle out that the experiment seems to be working as intended and Carly wants some of her equipment to record data. It seems a reasonable request, given that the entire pretense of this experiment was to create a potion that would inhibit digestion, but you run into trouble almost immediately upon trying to convince Katie to swallow some relevant objects.
"Isn't it enough that I ate her?" Katie protests, crossing her arms over her gut, "She gets to enjoy my stomach acid-free for however long her potion lasts. I'm already doing a lot for this project; I'm not going to do anything else."
"Didn't you volunteer to swallow her?" you reply mildly, not sure if it's worth escalating this confrontation.
"Well, yeah, but only because anything's better than being eaten by her. She's a scientist." Katie says as if that explains everything.
Carly chooses this moment to interject. Katie frowns at you as you again lean down to converse with her meal, but doesn't object. Although it takes some time for ,you to puzzle out her comments, when you do you realize that she's suggesting that you offer yourself to Katie along with the equipment. That would probably work, but you'd just decided against a very similar course of action a few moments before. Carly should have thought this experiment through a little better before performing it.
