Nala awoke, still monstrously overfull, to find her face buried in the side of a hippo carcass. Her memories of the previous day were hazy, but she vaguely thought that she had already eaten the hippo. Oh, well. There was no point in letting good food go to waste, so she started eating again. At first, her pace was slow: She was already pretty full, after all, and she absolutely loved the taste of hippo. Soon, though, the strange, fevered excitement of the night before overtook her once again, and her eating sped up until she was wolfing down the hippo as fast as she possibly could.

It still wasn't enough. She whined as she ate, desperate for more, faster. Unlike the previous night, however, when she had had to resort to some interesting contortions to reach her food, something kept the remaining meat pressed right up against her face, so she needed only the minimum of movement to continue gorging. When she finished the hippo, she experienced the same blissful feeling of relief and then passed out again.

Unbeknownst to Nala, two humans watched her from the other side of a one-way mirror. The female cub really was a curious study. She could have been no more than a year old, and yet during their time observing her, she had eaten herself into being taller than a full grown lion, and nearly three times as wide. They had had lion subjects before, of course, but this hugely stuffed cub with the seemingly endless appetite was something special. She would be perfect for their ________ experiments.