Testing the effects of obesity on wild (not to mention near-endangered) animals was a tricky subject in the scientific community. It was less ethically sticky than testing on humans, but still questionable enough that they'd been forced to move their research to this unpeopled land, far from the prying eyes of animal rights groups.

They had wanted to weigh the female cub upon her arrival, but it was impossible to tell what was permanent weight and what was food weight. Healthy weight for an adult female lion was about 350 pounds, and their subject was more than twice that heavy, not to mention only a year old. Even if it was mostly food weight, the female cub was clearly an outlier.

Their next task, before they could start doing any serious studies of her, was to find out exactly how much the cub could eat. She did not yet seem to realize that she was no longer in the wild, and the scientists preferred to keep it that way until they discovered her capacity, lest her habits change from the realization that she was in a new environment. However, they didn't exactly have many more huge African mammals laying around, so they were forced to improvise.

Synthetic meat was a fairly new development, and the stuff wasn't quite up to the standards of human food yet, but it was easy to make, and they doubted that the lioness would know the difference. While she was passed out, they put together massive piles of the stuff, covered it in something that was as close to the physical composition of hippopotamus skin, and moved the "hippos" into another chamber in their facility, one that had a scale built into the floor. They (or, more accurately, their assistants) moved the female cub into the scaled room, and then kept her knocked out until she had digested all the food that had been in her system. She was much smaller when she wasn't stuffed to the brim. Her heavy paws just brushed the dirt-covered floor, but her belly surged around them. By the scientists' calculations, she was about 200 pounds, not as big as a full-grown lion, but still several times heavier than a cub her age should have been.

They let her wake up within easy reach of the first "hippo." Each pile of synthetic meat weighed precisely three short tons, so it would be a simple operation to find out how much the cub packed away. She attacked the first "hippo" like she hadn't eaten in days (and from the scientists' time observing her in the wild, this was probably the first time her stomach had been completely empty in over a month). To their relief, the cub did not appear to notice that the meat wasn't what it appeared to be. She quickly immobilized herself, but they had been prepared for that: As in the last room, several cunningly-concealed mechanical arms pushed more food toward her constantly.

Nala didn't know where she was. She'd woken up ravenously hungry, and had had what looked like a hippo lying right in front of her face, but it smelled and tasted wrong. Oh, well, she thought. At least it was food. She didn't know how she'd digested that string of animals so fast, but her stomach was screaming at her to eat, and she was never one to disobey her stomach. The meat wasn't bad, just strange, and there was a lot of it, which was the most important thing. It came to her like it knew what she was thinking, which was good news, because she was barely a third of the way through the fake-hippo when she could no longer move.

The previous day's binge had stretched her stomach out to the point where a hippo (or a weird thing the size of a hippo) wasn't a huge ordeal, so she finished it happily...only to find another of the same thing right behind it. Oh, she must have died and gone to heaven!

That weird pleasure-pain feeling she'd been having recently hit her when she was in the middle of the second hippo-thing, and she redoubled her pace. Two hippos was a lot of food, even for her, but the burning emptiness in her chest kept her as hungry as she had been when she woke up. The third fake-hippo disappeared into her increasingly massive stomach, and she was midway through the fourth when her vision exploded into stars and she had to stop eating.

The researchers were stunned. The female cub had managed to ingest nearly ten tons of meat. Even based on their previous observation of her, they hadn't expected such huge numbers.