Quarians Gain Weight Easily

Shala’Quoras’s pilgrimage was not going as she’d expected. She’d been told by friends and family back in the Migrant Fleet of the many fascinations of the outside world; the diverse peoples and cultures that made Quarian society seem dull and limited, the incredible sights and scenery that made her long to never see another bulkhead again, the bustle and noise and chaotic activity that were so far removed from the organised, unified action of work on the Migrant Fleet that it was almost overwhelming – and indeed, they hadn’t lied. She’d found all of those things just as genuinely wondrous as she’d been promised.

However, what they hadn’t mentioned was the food.
Grunting with mixed satisfaction and discomfort, Shala leaned back from the low table and rested a hand on her swollen belly, feeling its rounded bulk through the straining rubber of her enviro-suit. She was massively, uncomfortably, almost-painfully full, her gut packed with plate after plate of rich Turian stews, braised meats and pasta-based assemblages, every one of which had been astonishingly delicious.

She’d spotted her first ‘Quarian bar’ on one of the citadel’s upper levels, and had considered it a charmingly quaint idea. A bar with environmentally-controlled booths and specially purified Turian cuisine, designed for the express purpose of letting Quarians taste something more interesting than the vegan nutri-paste they were usually confined to eating. Shala had to admit, she’d been sceptical. The idea of taking off her helmet felt strange and unsafe, even secluded in one the bar’s climate-controlled booths, but when her food actually arrived and she saw the rich colours, caught a fragment of its aroma through the purification system of her environment suit, she hadn’t been able to resist.

And, inevitably, she’d been an addict from the first mouthful. Never before had she tasted… well, anything really. The nutrient paste she’d eaten aboard the Migrant Fleet supposedly came in different flavours, but in practice they were often completely indistinguishable. Meat had been determined inefficient when they’d left the homeworld, so it was all vegan, all purified a thousand times over, always thoroughly bland. At the Quarian bar that day, she tasted a genuine flavour for the first time, and it almost blew her mind.

That had been nearly three months ago now. After gorging herself into a stuffed daze that first evening, tasting – and finishing – a plate of nearly everything on the menu, she’d felt her priorities rearrange themselves. Suddenly, acquiring something valuable so that she could finish her pilgrimage and return to the Migrant Fleet seemed an unimportant secondary objective, and finding a way to get more of that divine food into her hungry mouth was all she could think about.
Before she knew it she was visiting the Quarian bar every evening, burning through her credits in short order as she strained her stomach to its limits. She’d never really eaten to the point of being stuffed before but now she was gladly doing so at every meal, hardly noticing the discomfort in the daze of overeating – at least until she was heaving herself back to her hotel to sleep, anyway. It was an almost religious experience, an indulgence unlike any she’d known before.
In the name of sustaining her expensive new lifestyle, she’d acquired herself a job at a local shop, which just about managed to balance the books in regards to funding. However, it was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore another side effect of her newfound habits – one that wasn’t going to be so easy to solve.
She was getting fat.

Shala had never seen a fat Quarian before – the calorie-controlled, carefully monitored diet they all ate aboard the Migrant Fleet saw to that. She wasn’t even aware that her race could get properly fat. After a few months of eating at the Quarian bar, however, she’d been thoroughly educated. Quarians definitely could get fat, and it was even more inconvenient than she could have expected.
Her environment suit was the problem, she pondered as she lounged in the booth, tugging irritably at one of the straps around her midsection in a vain attempt to loosen it. The suit that she’d worn and found perfectly comfortable for years now dug in and pinched in a dozen different places, squeezing and chafing against her bloated, food-swollen body. It cut in under her armpits, between her legs, under her heavy belly – but that was far from the most severe inconvenience. She felt like she was being compressed, her chunkier arms, thighs, backside and, worst of all, gut all squeezed into a space far smaller than it really demanded by her tight, obnoxiously-unyielding suit. The way the thick material clung to her belly and squashed it down made her habitual overeating more uncomfortable than ever, her sensitive overfull stomach crammed into an excruciatingly undersized space.

She increasingly sympathised with the overstuffed sausages she ate sometimes at the bar. They sat on her plate, almost bursting out of their delicate skins just sitting there inert – and the slightest pressure from her fork left them bulging free, the rich, tender flesh spilling out of the spreading splits in the casing. She did worry that at some point the same might happen to her – that she’d finally grow too fat for her enviro-suit and it would split clean down the front, leaving her pale, bulging body exposed to the rigours of the world – but she had no idea what to actually do to stop such a situation.
The way she saw it, she had two options, and neither was palatable. She could either pay for a new, larger environment suit – something her finances most definitely did not allow for at present – or she could stop eating at the Quarian bar and lose some weight, which, frankly, seemed even more impossible.

Still, she couldn’t go on like this forever. Even when she wasn’t stuffed it was getting trickier to so much as breathe in her suit nowadays, her swollen breasts and round, flabby gut taking up so much space that she couldn’t even fully breathe in – and when, like now, she was crammed to the gills with a heavy meal, she could only puff in little half-lungfuls of air one at a time, each stifled inhalation leaving the fabric of her suit creaking audibly. Often when walking around the citadel – or even after simply standing manning the counter in the shop for too long – she found herself exhausted, in need of a moment sitting down just to catch her breath.
She really had to stop eating so much. She couldn’t imagine how everyone on the Migrant Fleet was going to react when she finally returned home – if they’d even let her return. Food was tight there; she wasn’t even certain if any captain would welcome someone so visibly, undeniably gluttonous onto their vessel.

Frustrated, she dabbed the corners of her mouth with a serviette, the irritating feeling of her metal gorget digging in tight about her flabby throat steeling her resolve. She had to ease up on the food, or she was going to eat herself into a seriously uncomfortable situation. She had to cut back.
“Would you like to order desert, ma’am?” a slightly tinny voice came through the intercom built into the corner of the cubicle, “Specials today are the chocolate-fudge-ice-cream-supreme, the super-syrup-fireball, and the quintuple-chocolate-obliterator.”

She shouldn’t. She couldn’t. She mustn’t.

“…One of each, please.”