"Yes, Lord Bison! Right away, sir!"

No, that wasn't it.

"Yiss, Lawd Bison! Roight away, sah!"

Better, I suppose. I was having a heck of time trying to get that lousy British accent to sound right, but it had to be perfect if I really wanted to pull off this act. You see, gentle readers, I, Helia Melonowski, had decided, for the first time ever, to put my creative talents and amazing, astounding, expanding breasts to use in an anime convention masquerade.

Otakon, held every summer in or near Baltimore, is the finest anime con in the nation, and I knew that it would be the perfect occasion to debut my flawless recreation of Cammy White, from the Street Fighter series of video games. Now, don't get me wrong-- I'm not generally so much of a fan of video games, seeing as how a bustline of over fifty inches makes it difficult to handle the controls. However, I did enjoy the Street Fighter II anime, and what really inspired me to create this costume was Tekka Maki's opus, "Super Buxom Street Fighter II Alpha Zero Turbo," which I found on the BEArchive. But that doesn't really matter-- what's important is that there I was, in the masquerade green room, dressed to the nines in the leotard uniform worn by the women of Delta Red.

If I may take a little time for some self-promotion, let me just say that the costume was flawless, with every last detail reproduced perfectly. I had hunted down a green, high-necked bodysuit, and cut off the sleeves and legs to match Cammy's bathing-suit-styled outfit. My dark hair was hidden under a blond Lady Godiva Halloween wig, which I had braided into two long pigtails that reached nearly to my knees. My handguards were made of red imitation leather (you can find the stuff at almost any fabric store) and a little bit of plush stuffing to give them shape and volume. I even reproduced that weird little elbow-cup thing on Cammy's left arm. The beret I wore was authentic military surplus-- its burgundy color indicated that under ordinary circumstances it would have been part of the uniform of an Israeli paratrooper. I painted a bright crimson scar on my left cheek, and of course I painted my legs as well, with green camouflage. I could have used pantyhose instead, but pantyhose can be dangerous when you're liable to inflate to outrageous proportions at any moment.

All in all, there was only one visible difference between me and the "real" Cammy--all right, if you insist, two differences. Even in Tekka Maki's wildest dreams, Cammy never had breasts like mine. I was holding steady at an even sixty inches for the occasion, and it's a good thing that I had found a tough bodysuit to begin with, otherwise I never would have been able to squeeze myself into it. Even I thought the effect was incredible, and I see these puppies every day of the week. The anime fanboys at Otakon--lonely, repressed souls, most of them-- were literally tripping over their own feet at the sight of me. My boobs were the size of... well, I could tell you what they were the size of, but who wants to think about fruit, sports equipment or furniture at a time like this? They were the size of really enormous boobs! Needless to say, I wasn't wearing anything underneath the leotard-- visible panty- or bra-lines would have been a big no-no. But at any rate, the point I'm trying to make is that I really wasn't wearing anything between myself and the suit, and anyone looking at me from behind would have gotten a perfect, undisrupted study of my fine, taut back muscles and toned butt. The view from the front was a different story-- remember those breasts of mine I was talking about earlier? Of course you do. One of the advantages of having breasts filled more with good, wholesome air than with anything else is that they hold their shape without a lot of support, and so underneath the green fabric they appeared as flawless spheres attached to my torso. Their geometrical perfection was marred only by my nipples, which pushed against the tight, thin material of the costume, standing out like shot-glasses, D-cell batteries or chapel hatpegs. Waiting around in that green room, I wasn't exactly the belle of the ball (most of the people there were too shy to look me in the eye, never mind say anything to me), but I was certainly the object of many an admiring look when people thought I wouldn't see them staring.

I passed the time before the masquerade grazing on the munchies that the staff had kindly provided for us participants. It was a decent spread--potato chips, tortilla chips, pretzels, soda, and so forth. The only item that seemed out of place on the table was a glass pitcher filled with a murky, unidentifiable green substance. Assuming it was intended for human consumption, I poured a small sample into a plastic cup and held it up to the light. Green it remained, and now I could discern mysterious particles swirling around in the liquid. What the heck was it?

"It's some kind of health drink," came a voice from behind. Startled, I turned just a bit too quickly, and my bosom plowed directly into the midsection of Ryouga Hibiki, or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof. If my breasts had actually been composed of solid flesh, he could have been seriously injured, but my air-filled balloon boobs didn't have nearly enough mass for such a calamity to occur. As it was, he was almost knocked off his feet, but he regained his balance without even spilling his drink, which I noticed with some surprise was the very same green muck I had just been scrutinizing. "Ryouga" gave me a wan grin.

"Like I was saying, it's supposed to be healthy or something. I don't know what's in it; seaweed, maybe. Give it a try. After all, what would an anime convention be without mysterious Japanese health beverages, right?"

After that kind of whole-hearted recommendation, how could I pass it up? I swigged the whole cupful in one go. I nearly gagged. Based on the principle that the worse a given food tastes, the better it is for you, I judged the green stuff capable of reviving the dead. Sure enough, as the Ryouga-clone had said, it did indeed taste violently of seaweed, and with a heavy dose of yeast or something in there to boot. A foul, foul foodstuff.

"Pretty awful, huh?" asked the man who had introduced me to the wonders of this horrible beverage. "Don't worry, you'll get used to it." He turned to head back into the crowd of costumed otaku, but paused to give me one long, lingering head-to-toe look. "By the way, you've got really nice... uh... a really nice costume. Yeah. Nice costume." He walked away, his yellow bandanna soaked with sweat, leaving me alone by the snack table. I didn't feel like taking him up on his offer of getting used to the seaweed-yeast concoction, so I concentrated my efforts on devouring plate after plate of pretzels and tortilla chips in an attempt to rid my mouth of the aftertaste. It worked, sort of.

Eventually, the masquerade proper began, uneventfully enough. There was a TV monitor in the green room so we could see what was going on onstage. Periodically people left the waiting area, called for their entrance. Some came back glowing with triumph, and others with their heads hung in shame after their one big chance had been blown by a missed cue, technical mishap, or other such minor disaster. I was still occasionally smacking my lips in distaste when a harried stagehand stuck her head in the door and yelled, "Number twenty-four, Helia Melonowski!" I leapt out of my seat and ran over to her, where she got an eyeful of my figure. "Holy mackerel, honey, those fake boobs of yours are huge! I'll bet you're glad you don't have to carry those things around in real life!" I rolled my eyes, but she had already turned away to lead me down the corridor to the waiting area behind the stage.

Not surprisingly, I was getting pretty nervous by this point. I've never really been a shy girl-- you tend to get used to public exposure when your body inflates unexpectedly and leaves you standing stark naked and measuring fifteen feet around your middle on a regular basis-- but like I said, I'd never entered a masquerade before, so I was more concerned with what the judges would think of my costume than with actual stage fright. But I was nervous, let me tell you. Even backstage, I could feel my stomach churning. I watched from the wings as Pikachu pranced onstage, accompanied by My Neighbor Totoro, and the two round, furry beasts began a ferocious battle to the death. After the combat had ended, the participants exited the stage to thunderous applause, and I heard the master of ceremonies clear his throat.

"Entry number twenty-four: Helia Melonowski, as Cammy White!"

My cue. I took a deep breath to calm my trembling nerves, but even as I did, I heard a worried gurgling from somewhere deep inside my digestive system. A light shove on the shoulder from a stagehand stationed nearby propelled me onto the stage, into the bright, hot spotlights, and into full view of the audience of over three thousand anime fans. I paused for a good long while, the better to give everyone an opportunity to gaze upon my costume and, of course, my spectacular breasts. I began my speech.

"My name is Cammy White, of Delta Red!" I projected, in my best practiced (or should I say, "practised") rendition of the Queen's English. "I was born the sixth of January, 1974, and know little of my early years, as--"

I stopped. Something felt wrong, and it was something going on inside of me. There was another gurgle, more insistent than the first, almost a rumble, and I felt a familiar pressure starting to build. No, I thought. Not here, not now!

"--as my first memory is being taken in by MI6, Her Majesty's Secret Service, at age sixteen." I tried to continue my speech, hoping to relax and calm my stomach, because even if I couldn't prevent the process from happening, I could try to hold it off long enough to finish my presentation and dash off the stage. "The members of Delta Red, MI6's elite squadron, were impressed by my physical prowess and seemingly innate martial arts skills, and I soon--" An astonished whisper began to spread throughout the audience as my already skin-tight leotard begin to constrict around my chest. Suddenly, realization hit me like a soaking-wet R-cup brassiere in the face. The yeast in the health drink had interacted with the flour from the pretzels and tortilla chips, and under the influence of the hot stage lighting and my nervously churning innards, it was causing my body to do exactly what it did best: inflate. This all may sound ridiculous to you, even impossible, but face it--you just don't know what it's like being a balloon girl!

There was nowhere for me to run or hide, and I certainly couldn't continue my speech. All I could do was stand there as I began to inflate right there on the Otakon stage, in front of more people than I'd ever had to face at one time in my entire life. As is usually the case, the expansion began with my breasts. The tightening-skin feeling you read about in a lot of breast expansion stories really isn't a problem for me-- I'm probably just used to it by now--but it's not often that I start to blow up while wearing something as tight and form-fitting as that leotard. It wasn't long before I started finding it hard to breathe, what with all of the extra boob mass in there with me. Instinctively, I clutched at the sides of my inflating twins, trying, I guess, to keep myself in one place so that I wouldn't start to suffocate from the rapidly-shrinking costume. Those naughty, naughty nipples of mine, of course, just loved all the attention, and they immediately sprang into action, triumphantly pointing the way of expansion, onward and outward, to fulfill our manifest destiny! James K. Polk would have been proud.

My breasts grew bigger and bigger, and my outfit tighter and tighter. Something had to give, and sure enough, at just about the time my titanic tits had reached the size of inflatable beachballs (an apt analogy, all things considered), the first few telltale tears began to appear in the front of the costume. I don't know why it started to rip in the front instead of the back-- maybe they're making stronger zippers these days-- but rip in the front it did. Just Helia the Balloon Girl's dumb luck, I suppose.

The spectators, I'm sure, didn't know what to think. Was this all a joke I was playing at their expense? Were they witnessing a once-in-a-lifetime event, like a Halley's Comet fly-by? Whatever the nature of the goings-on on the stage, nobody was willing to miss an instant of it for any reason. My fellow masquerade entrants had crept up onto the sides of the stage to get a better view-- strictly forbidden by masquerade rules, of course, but the stagehands and masquerade volunteers were themselves far too enraptured by the spectacle of my sudden inflation to notice the transgression, or care. And the most incredible thing of all, in this room of over three thousand people, was the silence. Nobody moved. They barely even breathed. There was not a single gasp, not a single moan, not a single cry of "Look out! She's going to explode!" The only sounds that I could hear were the creaking of seams stretched far past the point to which they had ever been intended to stretch, and the occasional pop or ping of yet another thread giving up the ghost, contributing to the ever-increasing network of holes which revealed ever-increasing amounts of my ever-increasing bosom.

If the expansion had stopped right then, everything might have been all right. I might have been able to stiffen my upper lip, hold my head high, and walk very slowly and carefully off the stage. But of course, this was not to be. The yeast-induced inflation of my pneumatic mams had, thankfully, by this point slowed down almost to a complete stop, but I could feel another sensation of building pressure, this time inside my belly.

My belly's inflation took quite a bit longer to be noticed by the audience. After all, the crowd had been staring at my boobs even before they began expanding, and now that my breasts covered the vast majority of my torso (and stuck out quite a ways on either side) I could forgive the audience for being too distracted to notice another development lower down. If anyone had been paying attention, the first thing he or she would have noticed would have been my taut, concave midsection starting to lose just a little bit of its definition. My abdomen slowly filled out under the inexorable pressure of the gas building within, and soon there was a definite protrusion, as though I had just eaten my way through the better part of the buffet at Sizzler's. Even this went unnoticed, but as the metaphorical smorgasbord diminished and my waistline continued to increase, my tummy became more and more difficult to ignore, dwarfed though it was by my mammoth, pillowy, air-filled breasts. Under the added strain, the holes in the front of my costume grew still larger, and the physical connection between the left and right sides of the leotard became increasingly tenuous.

My belly quickly surpassed the reasonable limits of having eaten any sort of meal, no matter how huge, and was approaching dimensions commonly associated with being late in the third trimester of pregnancy. There was no way anyone could have failed to notice it, especially as it was now doing battle with my breasts in an attempt to gain more territory. The twin swells of my breasts (swelling in the way that a tidal wave swells) tried to hold their own against the new interloper, but my belly continued its campaign, driving itself between my breasts and forcing them to give ground and slide slowly apart. My rounded belly expanded in front of me and out to the sides, splitting my poor costume even further.

Anyone looking at me directly from the front (and there were about a thousand people in the hall with this vantage point) would have seen more flesh than fabric as both my belly and my boobs took advantage of the area yielded by the outfit, which was bravely holding its own for the time being, by a few small threads stretched across my front. Remember what I said earlier: I wasn't wearing anything underneath the costume, so there was nothing for the tearing of the cloth to reveal but pure, one-hundred-percent Helia Melonowski. The audience got a clear view of my cavernous cleavage and the inside curves of my smooth, creamy breast flesh. My nipples were still concealed by the material of the leotard, but only by a matter of millimeters, and my rich, red areolae were already exposed for all the world to see. Below, the audience's field of vision was filled by a belly which now rivaled my breasts themselves in size. There was no sense in trying to use even pregnancy as an analogy, because no woman has ever contained enough babies at one time to expand her belly to the size that mine reached there on the stage at Otakon. My feet had disappeared from my view long ago, and I knew that I would never be able to reach around my own stomach, even if I had felt like trying. I must have looked like I had swallowed-- what? A beachball? A medicine ball? A small Chesterfield sofa? None of these are accurate, because there was no solid object inside of me, pushing outward and conforming me to its shape. It was gas that was building up inside of me, and making me inflate. I didn't have the shape of someone with a beanbag chair inside her belly, I had the shape of Helia Melonowski, her breasts and belly inflated to sizes almost impossible to imagine. I guess you had to be there.

It was a vicious circle. My inflation in front of all these total strangers, made me nervous, and my own nervousness gave me butterflies in my stomach, and the butterflies fanned the yeast and flour with their tiny little wings, making me inflate even further. There was another rush of inflation, this one fast and sudden, and my belly grew even larger at an unprecedented rate. It only lasted a matter of seconds, but it must have added nearly a foot to my total circumference, and this unexpected surge was exactly what was required to bring an end to my costume's valiant struggle against impossible odds. The leotard exploded, sending scraps of green fabric in every direction. I saw one piece land straight in the lap of a scrawny young man wearing an Akira T-shirt in the front row, but he was so entranced by what he was seeing on the stage that he didn't even notice. The only part of it still on my body was the collar, which encircled my neck and only served to call more attention to my otherwise total nudity.

As though my body had somehow realized its new-found freedom and was determined to revel in it, the next thing I knew I inflated yet again in one massive rush that involved nearly my entire body. My ass and hips, which had previously been spared, picked up the slack and inflated all in one go, leaving me with a rear end that couldn't have measured less than five feet across. I would never have been able to sit on an ordinary couch with that butt-- in fact, three or four people could have used my butt as a couch itself. My legs and arms inflated, too, so I no longer looked like a composition of massive spheres with tiny, ineffectual sticks protruding around the sides. Instead, my thighs and upper arms grew to sizes that, if they had consisted of muscle tissue, would have driven the most celebrated bodybuilder in the world into retirement. Now my limbs tapered more naturally from huge dimensions at my hips and shoulders to normal sizes at my feet and hands-- that is, they tapered naturally only insofar as any of my immensely-inflated figure could have been described as natural. And of course my body didn't sag or fold in any way, like what you see on enormously fat people, because I am not fat. I am not fat, I never have been fat, and I hope never to be fat. I am a human balloon, and like ordinary balloons, I become tighter, firmer and smoother as I inflate. As I stood there on the Otakon stage, there was not a single crease or wrinkle in my skin to disrupt my shape: the perfect form of a woman, inflated and enhanced to the nth degree.

And then it all stopped. It may be a cliche to say so, but the inflation ended as suddenly as it had begun. No more growth, no more expansion, and hopefully no more surprises. I was immobile, unable to do much more than blink, never mind walk. I just stood there on stage, nude. I was huge. Obviously, I was no taller than when I had walked on from the wings (how long ago that moment seemed!), but my breasts now preceded me like a matched pair of sumo bodyguards, and they rested on top of a belly which could have easily contained a desk, chair and matching file cabinet without the office supplies even touching the sides, and which hung almost to the ground. I was aware of my ass behind me, its cheeks like twin, pale moons. Years ago, when bustles were in style, the fashion was to make all women appear to have rear ends a yard across, sticking out like shelves behind them, but there was not enough whalebone in the world to manufacture a bustle that would match the size of my own air-filled posterior. My arms were so full that I couldn't even move them, except for a small, impotent wiggling of my hands at the wrist. Ironically, while the leotard I had so carefully designed had been unable to survive, the costume's handguards remained intact, as did my boots. My naked belly and breasts covered nearly all of the front of my body, and around the edges were the last tragic remnants of my Cammy costume: Huge, round shoulders tapering off to red, textured handguards with wiggly hands at the end; two legs the size of tree trunks painted with green camouflage blurs and squeezed into shiny black leather boots; and on top of it all, straining to see over the peach-complexioned orbs in front of it, a small, sad face with tear-filled eyes and a painted scar, topped with a blond wig and an Israeli paratrooper's burgundy beret. Somehow, my headgear had withstood all of the action without becoming dislodged, and I could feel the wig's braids disappearing down my back into the crevasse below. And as if to add just one last modicum of insult to my already substantial injury, I felt a sudden breeze from the air conditioner skim across my acres of taut, sensitive skin, and my cherry-red nipples engorged and hardened, leaping forth with an almost audible cry of "Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

Honestly, I don't know how long I stood there on stage after my inflation had finally reached its conclusion. It might have only lasted a few seconds, but it felt like hours, or even days. Eventually, a couple of stagehands broke out of the spell and recovered their wits. Wordlessly, they gently tipped me over and rolled me off the stage.

After a while, I did deflate enough to be able to move under my own power (obviously, otherwise I never would have been able to record this story), but not until after several hundred people had passed by so they could gawk at the helpless balloon girl. Some of the braver souls even asked if they could touch me, and I let them brush a hand against the side of my belly, or my thigh, or my breast. My skin was so sensitive that each touch was like a lick of painless fire across my flesh. Nobody tried anything indecent, and I was grateful for this, but in hindsight, I realize that this shouldn't be surprising-- after all, these were shy, introverted anime fans. They may fantasize about making it with a real live inflating woman, but it's unlikely that they would broach the subject if the opportunity ever presented itself, and they're certainly too polite to make any unwanted advances. When I had deflated to a more manageable size-- still with a huge belly and huge breasts, but otherwise approaching normal human dimensions-- one generous otaku brought a bedsheet from her hotel room and tenderly draped it around me. The nightmare that had started when I stepped into the spotlight was over.

And what of the masquerade itself? Well, sad to say, I didn't win anything for my painstakingly constructed costume--there was some silly rule about the judges having to be able to inspect the costume for workmanship after the masquerade, and with the leotard torn into a thousand shreds, there was nothing for them to inspect. But you know what? I enjoyed my first taste of an anime convention masquerade. In the future, I plan to stay away from any mysterious green health drinks, but with sufficiently stretchy material and a little bit more self-control, I just might be able to come up with something mighty impressive to present at next year's Otakon masquerade.