Disclaimer: I do not own Total Drama Island or any associated intellectual properties. This story is purely for entertainment purposes, without monetary gain.
Sierra found that she had come to associate flying with generally bad things; in this case, being flown somewhere unspecified after permanently mutating into a vastly larger form. That had been unexpected.
The small and ramshackle plane, a tiny cargo carrier of the same junker fashion as a truck made in and from a junkyard (And with all the lousy make of such) flew from an isolated island in the middle of nowhere; another experiment on behalf Chris McLean's increasingly sadistic reality television competitions.
Years had gone by. One season faded into the other: the contestants were older, and their fame not yet fading, and the draw to ratings and greater profits still not yet abated enough for the producers to tell Chris 'no'. So they kept telling him yes, kept letting him use all the legal manipulations, orchestrate financial emergencies and trick old and newer contestants back into the game, again and again, and more often than not practically forcing them in at gunpoint. (It hadn't really gotten that bad. Yet.)
For the unlucky kids, now young adults and finding unhappily that with technical adulthood had come Chris eagerly exploiting the fact that there were even less restrictions on the horrors he could unleash on them, the seasons weren't too distinct anymore. Islands and other habitats of doom came and went; methods of humiliating eliminating got ever increasingly elaborate and bizarre. Their own order of elimination changed now and then, as Chris arranged things to diminish individual competence or improve the odds for unexpected contenders just to surprise the viewers.
The uncertainty of it mixing with the definite certainty of unpleasantness to come did... things to your head, Sierra had found out the hard way and much too quickly.
Jasmine, for some reason, didn't seem to care about it one way or the other. Sierra was impressed, among other feelings she wasn't sure she knew how to process right now. It went against her narrative.
(She was the fan girl. She liked Cody; as girlfriend or best friend or hopefully both. She was the one who knew how the game worked, the big strong happy dork.
She wasn't supposed to like Jasmine, not like she liked Cody. It wasn't how her narrative worked.
But she did. Sierra felt... conflicted. She supposed it had something to do with the hormone reshaping her body into something really very different.)
("Don't use mutagens on an island, AGAIN," the producers had said.)
Sierra bounced in her seat. It was specifically made for just about anyone of average size. The problem was, neither she, or Jasmine, was of average size. Not anymore. Not in the least.
("Don't be stupid and dump mutation-inducing elements on the island where contestants compete," they had said.)
Sierra winced as one seat belt, tied inexpertly over a thigh now approximately rather bigger than, say, Chef Hatchet, tugged her in place while her backside crumpled the arm rests of the next three seats. Centrifugal forces pulled at her, at the exact same time, for the net effect of feeling like her spine and her guts were trying to be in three different places at the same time.
("Don't be a jerk and key them to the specific biological codes of contestants you don't like," they had said more insistently.)
She grabbed at a seat to stabilize herself in the face of some bad turbulence pulling her this way and that, the pain in her leg insistently pulsing. The seat bent and broke in her grasp. The broken metal bit into her hand; with a yelp she tossed it away, straightening up so that her shoulders bounced against where the plane's roof met the wall.
The broken metal bounced away. There was a bit of blood on it. Sierra looked at her hand and saw fresh scars forming, blood clotted and wound neatly sealed. In a few days, there wouldn't be much more than a mark on her palm.
Strong enough to bust metal, big enough to break seats built for bigger people. Sierra leaned her head back against the wall, making it creak ominously.
("And for the love of all that is decent, do not combine any of those mutagens to abandoned super soldier experiments and, hey, did you hire someone to add in splices from the processes that turned that Dakota girl super big!? Oh, come on!" they had said, presumably before giving up and concluding that Chris McLean was a supervillain who'd broke into reality TV at some point.)
Sierra, formerly pinned as the uber-fan of the series and now likely to be given a lot of references as the biggest fan (or some other use of uber), sat back, nearly twice as large as a man, her body bulkier and wider and curvier in proportion to her new stature than she'd ever been before, her muscles reshaped into superhumanly powerful assemblies that bordered on mechanical.
Sam, she figured, was gonna be put out. He wanted to become a mutant to live with Dakota. She tried to think of a bright side to it. She figured she might be able to hang out with Dakota and cheer her up. That she didn't know Dakota especially well and had no idea if Dakota even liked her or not put her out.
Sierra raised herself up. Her arms twitched on their own. She swore she could feel the mutagens inside her; reshaping her down to her genetic code (if that was still a thing, she wasn't sure), reinforcing her bones to the toughness of concrete and strengthening her muscles, and the slow itch of ever more extremely gradual growth...
Still, not so bad. When the Change, as she had come to think of it, had hit her, it put her in a coma for two weeks: she'd woken up from it for about forty minutes in, her insides almost completely liquefied and rebuilding into a more efficient and centralized design. She'd passed out thanks to many, many injections of sweet chemicals. She didn't know if something worse was going to happen to her on the way.
Jasmine was sitting on the other side of the plane with a stoic, laconic interest, possibly because Sierra was the only other person on the auto-piloted plane. The other girl, that Sierra used to think as being bigger but both of them now about the same gigantic size, waved a hand to get her attention. "Didn't always like being so big when I was younger," Jasmine said. She smiled. "Didn't expect to get even bigger." she shrugged. "Eh. Could be worse. Least we're not exactly as big as Dakota."
"I, uh." Sierra shrugged shoulders a lot bigger, proportionately, than she remembered. She smiled uncertainly. "I guess so?"
Jasmine sat back into the space she had made for herself, more comfortable than Sierra. "So, any idea where we're actually going."
"Home?" Sierra tried to remember stuff from what Chris had said in one blurb or another. Nothing came to mind. "Uh. I don't know."
"I suppose if they're trying to take us to a lab or something, we can fight our way out. Not too different from a lot of challenges, actually. This one time, he had us fight a dinosaur. An actual dinosaur. Still no idea where he got the thing."
Sierra forced out a laugh.
Jasmine seemed to understand she wasn't feeling too good. "Don't worry. It'll work out right fine," She sat back, tilted a hat that now looked silly and small, and promptly went to sleep.
Sierra stared at her.
The first thought she had was that Jasmine, stockier than Sierra now and more... not compact, but condensed, probably made the 'giant girl' thing work better than Sierra herself did. She doubted if there was an inch difference in their heights now, both of them identically oversized and out of proportion with any kind of life they might have had.
The second that was that Jasmine was really, really pretty.
She swallowed, nervously.
(She knew all about the plot. She figured it wasn't supposed to be in her plot to... feel like this about Jasmine. Maybe it was hormones stirred up by the freakish transformations. Maybe it was something else and she'd felt this way a long time and she was just now having an opportunity to come face to face with it.
Maybe she was just losing her mind.
That one felt weirdly nice. It took any sort of responsibility off her.)
They rumbled along, towards whatever destination lay in store for them. Jasmine slept, presumably because no matter how worried she might be it would be no good if she wound up there tired. Sierra would have tried, but it was just too uncomfortable.
She was also mildly aware of the discomfort caused by multiple arm rests slowly bending and breaking under the weight of her expansive backside. The creeping awareness kept coming into her mind, distracting her, prying her away from more important thoughts.
Now, for the first time in a while, she thought about times when her mother had taken her home after a bad day of the kids her age but so much smaller making her miserable. Softly, she whimpered, "I just wanna go home."
She didn't know if they were going to let her. The idea chilled her guts, made her belly hurt, her legs weaken for all their new-found power...
That she definitely couldn't fit into her door without ducking and turning and twisting a lot was a secondary concern.
Sierra put her face into her hands, not thinking about Jasmine there, and she cried.
Not loud, not hard. It was weeping, mild and soft. As bitter as acid, and stinging.
It felt worse. She'd volunteered to be on this show, and now it had gotten her here; over eight feet tall (and that was a conservative estimate, perhaps), mutating in ways she couldn't predict, her own body warping completely out of her control, and she felt that her immediate future had the same lack of control now.
She became aware of a creaking and rustling; a grunt and Jasmine sat up, windows flickering as she raised her arms up in a growling yawn, skies tinted purple by windows and on-coming night. "Hey," Jasmine said. "You okay over there?"
"Fine!" Sierra squeaked; on sheer muscle memory and impulse she tried to scoot back, on the impression that's what she was supposed to do in situations like these. She was pretty sure a protagonist was supposed to get blushy and awkward around a potential love interest or super buddy: she was a little too straightforward to handle that very well, but she was prepared to make an effort.
The plane creaked.
"Hey!" Chef Hatchet's voice said from an intercom. "Don't wreck the plane again! You any idea how annoying Chris gets about it! Tempting, yeah, but easier ways to drive him nuts without killing me too!"
The intercom switched off.
"Priorities are messed up," Jasmine said, almost totally woken up.
Sierra didn't respond right away.
"You all right?
Sierra stared at the ground. At herself, at her vastly expanded dimensions, at that she didn't know the thread of the story anymore. This wasn't supposed to happen.
"I wanna go home," she said again. "I. I wanna. Wanna go home."
"It's, it's uh, it's gonna be fine-"
"You think so?" Sierra said hopefully.
Jasmine shrugged. "Sure. Why not?"
Sierra looked down, her hands twiddled together. "Mm." The knuckles a little too big for her hands, faded scars crossing over them in abraded cords and twists. Her fingers swollen with old bruises and calluses hard enough to be like crude punching implements. And her fingernails, delicate and painted a soft pink, capturing a sort of delicacy the rest of her didn't have (and maybe sometimes she looks at herself, bigger than most people she'll ever meet and not just physically big; she's too loud and too vibrant that it grates on people and the worst of it is when she remembers it after they want her gone).
She twisted around in a seat too small for her. "You know, we could always have died on this competition thing," she said, apparently to the air for all that she focused on Jasmine. "Chris is getting crazier with each season. Soon he'll... you know. Be trying to kill us because it's funny. I mean, I'm pretty sure he's already doing that. He'll get more obvious about it."
"We'll beat it," Jasmine said, lounging back. She'd found an easier way to deal with the seats being too small for them: she'd ripped the seats right out, forced the cushions back in, and sat down there. Not safe, but comfortable. The seats were too small for her or Sierra to sit in, so safety wasn't important, she had said.
(Sierra tried to squeeze into something too small for her. Jasmine had made a place for her that was just fine. Sierra supposed there was a bit of a character lesson in that; it never would have occurred to SIerra to do something like that.
Jasmine was cool. Sierra wished she could be more like that. Not worry about stupid things and just do what seemed good and appropriate at the time.)
Now. Sierra rested her face on her hand. She looked at Jasmine, brave and tough and barely aware that you needed to be scared of anything at all.
Sierra bit her lip, chose her words carefully.
"When stuff goes bad and you have to fight hard, do you... I dunno. Do you worry about dying then? Like... worry about who'll miss you? Get scared worse when you figure that probably no one will really care?"
Jasmine's eyebrows raised. "What? Nah, nah, people'd miss me."
Sierra squirmed against the confines of her seat, punishing against her wide hips and edges of her stomach.
"Is that," Jasmine said. "Something you worry about?"
('Probably no one would really care. The polls have the numbers, the numbers say the voices and the voices of the fandom say they hate me. No one likes me unless I just fit into their cute squares. Cody miss me? I don't know anymore. Cameron? He was a friend, I think, but... I don't know. Izzy? Does Izzy even know my name anymore?')
Sierra grinned, teeth crooked and in need of brushing. She felt acutely aware of feeling slovenly, smelling weird, being all kinds of gross; she'd never thought about these things until she went on TV and all of a sudden kept thinking about how much she couldn't compare with what she used to think she was-
Jasmine, Sierra noticed suddenly, had dirty hands. Old soil and blood caked her knuckles and fingers, her hair barely considered at all save for her particular stylings. She didn't know if Jasmine even bathed regularly beyond a 'as long as I feel okay' basis.
Jasmine didn't care if someone thought that was gross. She didn't get bothered if people got bothered about her. And Sierra thought about her own insecurity with her great size, and thought about how Jasmine did too but flat out confronted people over it instead of stewing on it.
"No," Sierra said. She didn't like lying. She did it a lot anyway. It didn't hurt as much as saying what was true and awful, like speaking razors and getting scared of the blades inside your throat. "Uh. No! I don't. Um. No, nuh uh. Who'd do that?" She giggled, low and nervous.
Jasmine just looked at her. "You don't need to worry about stuff like that," she said. That said, she sat back, shoulders above the window frames.
Sierra smiled faintly. "That'd be nice to think about."
Maybe, she thought, there was a new narrative here; not an old one that she needed to salvage but a new one to consider.
And it was nice to have someone to be friendly with.
