The happy valley set

Chapter 11 - changes

Sarah was getting old, but not too old not to know what was happening. The Happy Valley set had exploited her country and it's people. They had ruined the native culture thousands of years old in a few short decades.
Even war in their own country could not stop them.
She was determined to bring their lifestyle to a stop. She was not sure how she was going to do it without comitting a serious crime. But after much speculation, she knew what she had to do.
She had one of April's maids steal a vial of her precious medicine. It was only one vial out of many. No one would miss it.
She adulterated it with a filtered, refined mix of her own, then had it replaced with the others. Gradually one by one, she adulterated the entire batch of drugs.
Then they watched from the sidelines as the effects of the adulterated mix took hold.

April was the first to be affected. After all, she used the most. By now she was a shadow of her former self. A bony skeletal zombie, with infected abscesses in her legs and arms. She ate barely anything... then as Sarah's mix got into her bloodstream, she became hungry. She stood by the buffet and stuffed all kinds of food into her mouth until she could not move.
In the next week, more victims succumbed to the phenomenon. Valentine, Charlotte, Lavinia, Jane... and more. All they could think about was food!
They fed themselves and each other in a frenzy of gluttony, fell asleep in a stupor, then started eating again.
Sarah's milk mix appeared on the table. They drank it with the same fervour as they had drank their champagne. Indeed, with Sarah behind the scenes, the rich liquid replaced champagne at all their social functions. It became a key ingredient in every cocktail.

As Sarah increased her campaign, she began to remove the morphine from the vials and replaced it with more of her own zenithian mix, it was just as addictive, but had a very different outcome. Over a period of four months, she decreased the morphine content until they were injecting only her Zenithian cocktail.

The changes in them all were very evident.
It was most noticeable in the men first of all. They grew little paunches. Their shirt buttons gaped around their middles. At first they covered the widening gaps with their waistcoats. Then their waistcoats struggles to close, their trouser buttons became tight. In complete denial, they walked around with their lightweight jackets and waistcoats open, revealing their extraordinarily tight shirt over a swollen belly. They wore their trousers low, beneath their new appendages, their super-tight shirts were simply too small to tuck into their trousers and more, exposing their lower belly to the air.
As they got bigger, they abandoned all attempts at sport, preferring to simply lounge around all day eating.
They appeared to be completely oblivious to how fat they were becoming, therefore, they did not order new suits. They abandoned their tight collars and ties as their necks broadened.
It soon became the height of fashion in Zenn for men to wear suits and shirts that were two sizes too small, even though the working class in town were not overweight, they followed fashion trends led by the upper classes.

Women's clothing tended to be looser, so Their weight gains were not so apparent early on in the campaign. But after two months, no pantie girdle of corset could hide the fact that they were getting fat. As all supportive underwear became too uncomfortable to tolerate, they were abandoned. Every roll and every pad of fat was now visible in their once loose dresses that now clung, creased and bulged in places that had once not even existed. Hem lengths rose as they struggled to keep up with the increased fabric tension. Fattened breasts oozed out of low cut tops.