Age of Huge: A Typical Evening

Update: I went back and made a few changes to this pair of images.

Back before Bastionworks (the site formerly known as Outside Eden) imploded, there was an effort in the forums (I don't remember who started it) to create a shared mythos for tales of gigantic bellies. Much like H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, Age of Huge was intended to be open to anyone who wanted to contribute to it, only it featured a weird phenomenon of women spontaneously becoming enormously pregnant instead of tentacle monsters driving everyone insane.

I think the community could really use a collaborative project like this to work on, outside of May-ternity, which only comes around once a year and is frequently used as a cynical fundraiser. But I digress! Anyone who wants to put together an Age of Huge image or story should simply tag it with #ageofhuge to keep everything clumped together.

The core premise of Age of Huge is a mysterious affliction known to the scientific community as Anomalous Multiple Pregnancy Syndrome (or AMPS), but known to the women who come down with it as "The Huge." The Huge takes various forms, filling women with wildly variable numbers of fetuses whether or not they are sexually active, causing them to grow at various and sometimes unpredictable speeds, and causing them to remain pregnant for durations significantly outside the norm of 40 weeks.

The only hard and fast rule of Age of Huge is that the cause of AMPS and the way the world at large adapts to it is off limits. Age of Huge is supposed to consist of snapshots and slice of life moments, not systematic changes. I didn't make this rule, I'm just paraphrasing what I remember from Bastionworks, but I think the reasoning behind it is that even perverts like us don't find the idea of watching the world self-destruct due to overpopulation particularly sexy.

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She started showing before she even realized she'd missed a cycle. She couldn't have been more than 6 or 7 weeks along, by her own estimate, when she made the appointment with her doctor to confirm that, yes, she was indeed pregnant. Her live-in boyfriend was noticeably shaken up when she showed him her bump, mumbling something about staying strong and doing deep breathing exercises every day when he saw her.

As the days passed, the tiny, barely noticeable bulge above her pubic bone grew rapidly. She couldn't deny that she had The Huge, and it looked like it was the rapid gestation variant. 11 weeks in, she looked ready to deliver, so she and her boyfriend made the trip down to the city hospital to get her checked-in.

Ultrasounds proved her guess to be wrong. She did not have rapid gestation variant AMPS. Instead, the images revealed an impenetrable fog of first trimester embryos. Her AMPS was developing at normal speed - she just had a whole lot of it. Her boyfriend fainted.

As more weeks passed, her belly rapidly grew too large for her to handle. Fortunately, her call center job was nice enough to allow her to permanently work from home, and her boyfriend was there for her every evening after work, though his expression and mood were not enthusiastic. She wasn't thrilled about having AMPS either, but there was nothing anyone could do about it, so she simply willed herself to remain calm and make lemonade out of the gigantic - and constantly growing - lemon attached to her torso.

By 15 weeks, she looked ready to drop a dozen healthy offspring, and was having difficulty navigating her apartment alone during the day. Fortunately, she had long term care insurance that kicked in and allowed her to stay at the hospital's physical therapy wing for the remainder of her AMPS pregnancy. Her boyfriend came by every evening with take-out and they would watch the Channel 9 evening news together (the station refused to give their lead female anchor time off when she got The Huge). Every night she looked bigger to him, and every night it became more and more difficult to get her into her pajamas.

By 20 weeks, she had given up on wearing clothes altogether and did all of her call center work from her smartphone. Her belly had continued its trek along her mattress, pushing her legs apart and, eventually, extending beyond the bottoms of her feet as she sat propped up against a mound of pillows. Her doctor estimated that, based on her current size, by the time she reached 40 weeks, she would redefine what it meant to be Huge. That assessment did nothing to reassure her, but she continued to put on a brave face, do her job, and anticipate evenings together with her bewildered boyfriend watching the Channel 9 news.

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Now that the short story's out of the way, I'd like to point out that this image would not have been possible without the sheer awesomeness of Iray lighting. With Iray, there is a texture called "Emissive" that sheds light. You have no idea how much easier it is to reskin a lightbulb with an Emissive texture and adjust a few settings than it is to create a light in DAZ's lighting system and overlap it with said bulb. I even managed to make the flatscreen TV in the background shed light (I'm invoking Fair Use on 's image since you can only see a tiny corner of it, and it's part of the Age of Huge Mythos.) by sticking an almost-transparent glowing rectangle in front of it (unfortunately, it looks like Emissive isn't compatible with bitmapping). I also used (non-Emissive) Iray textures on the brass lamp, steel bed frame, and glass topped table, which I think look amazing.