The lab is full of stuff. There are hydroponics with alarmingly colorful leaves growing out of them, and cages with vervet monkeys and white rats and a sleeping brown bear. There's aquaria, some separated entirely from the sea and some just sectioned off from it with water flow between - a few kinds of jellyfish and an electric eel and a garden of anemones and a tank of extremely ornamental koi. There are many cabinets with cryptic labels on them like "LL 802-209" or "X2* GOONS ONLY" or "CONTRABAND S". There is also a cupboard with "BEAR FOOD" written on it, but, concerningly, it has been left half-open to reveal that it contains something tennis-ball-colored, luminous, and gelatinous, in Mason jars. Goons in labcoats are bustling about, getting out of Monoceros's way as though none of them had ever intended to cross her path in the first place, feeding the rats and taking notes on the jellyfish and pruning something carnivorous and pink of excess tendrils. All the exhibit-looking things are interspersed with abundant sinks and refrigerators and hotplates and microscope stations and similar.

Katie gets brought to something that might once have been a reupholstered dentist's chair and Monoceros picks her up and plops her in it.

"Oh God. Is this the part where you turn me into a blueberry? Getting some real Willy Wonka inventing room vibes here."

"Seriously? I was originally envisioning more of a Doctor Moreau situation but it's evolved a lot since then. Do you want to be blue? It's easy."

"No. Not actually into that, sadly. How about green hair, though?"

"Trickier, give me a couple days to mull on that one, maybe import something. Now then."

She is going to take lots of measurements, both with a conventional tape measure and her second-best calipers, plus standard weighing and suchlike and more obscure devices that output numbers that make even less sense to Katie. She biopsies a buttock - "like taking a core sample!" - and ejects the contents of the wide-bore needle into a test tube and fridges it. Takes some blood. Takes some lymph.

Ow. Ouch. Oww. Not the hottest way a cute girl can hurt her but she'll do her best to enjoy it.

"All done, pumpkin." She bandages up the various perforations.

"Did I get a good grade in blood, something that is both normal to want and possible to achieve?"

"I will tell you your grade in blood over lunch. Run along and digest while I put it through the scantron."

She heads back to her room.

guys mo just did some kinda painful tests on me and i'm all achy please help distract

Mezzopiano: uh um
pithy: surprised you're not just jerking off about it
Aquinas: The convocation sent me a confirmation that they'd received my report. Hopefully help is on the way!
spirulinagalaxy: the new avatar remake sucks
the new avatar remake: hey
spirulinagalaxy: robin,,,,

the hurty part wasn't really that hot, wrong kind of pain, but like, the weighing and measuring stuff kinda was

i might jerk off but idk, maybe i should save my energy for mo

or idk maybe she'll enjoy watching the security footage of me doing it

god that'd be hot

Mezzopiano: there are cameras in your room?

there might be!

Mezzopiano: ick?
unicorn: let's not harsh k's vibe
unicorn: distraction, distraction... uh... [picture of an AI art unicorn]

DM to monoceros: mo are there cameras in here and would you enjoy watching me jack off via them

There are and it really depends on how much fun you are to watch.

only one way to find out

One of Katie's hands heads downward as the other begins to hunt for her preferred erotica and her mind fills with thoughts of her body thickening, swelling, growing heavy and solid and plush.

The cameras don't comment. Her channel on Eris turns into a lively flamewar about the ethics of AI art.

Katie doesn't care. She's too busy getting off to thoughts of feeling her belly plap against her thighs and Mo running her fingers through her back rolls. She's leaning back and has a big stupid grin on her face, as usual for when she's being sexually stimulated. Her free hand occasionally takes breaks from scrolling through porn to caress her own stomach and tits and imagine how good it'll feel for them to swell with fat. She's incorporating a bit of nipple stimulation, which she doesn't normally do when jacking off but the circumstances she's in make it so she doesn't need to be constantly scrolling through erotica to stay turned on.

Her hips buck and her eyes roll back in her head a little as she finishes. Thoroughly satisfied, she pees, gets a change of clothes, and sits back down.

God that orgasm was so satisfying that even fucking AI art discourse can't bring me down

Aquinas: =/
spirulinagalaxy: aq,,,,
basking robin: just block him spi
unicorn: It's a completely valid artistic tool and I'm no more plagiarizing whoever's art trained the model than I'm plagiarizing Stuart Semple if I shove The Glitteriest Glitter up your nose after making sure you are not Anish Kapoor!
spirulinagalaxy: have you looked into eris's block functionality lately
Mezzopiano: That analogy is utterly ridiculous and in such bad faith I can't believe you

wait what's wrong with Eris's block functionality

I've never used it bc I'm built different

spirulinagalaxy: it doesn't work gracefully with notifications at all and leaves really conspicuous holes in conversations
spirulinagalaxy: like no shade on the eris people this is probably impossible to do perfectly but that's why I'm not just blocking him
Aquinas: Blocking is an incredibly hostile escalation over in this case an emoticon.
basking robin: spi I see you typing. go sew a coat for your agave plant or whatever the fuck you do
unicorn: If it's ridiculous you'd be able to say why, but you can't! Found art is art, blackout poetry is art, parody is art, and AI art is art. It's a tool, which at some remove contacted some other art, just like all other artistic tools. Maybe unless you're that guy who does calligraphy with assorted vegetables! He may genuinely be an innovator in the space of what art tools he is using. But no way he learned calligraphy with a spear of goddamn asparagus.

Katie rolls her eyes and begins booting up some vidya to pass the time until lunch. She's too achy to do anything physical and still averse to starting practicing a language like Mo suggested due to the tragic inability to listen to podcasts at the same time.