Once the scientists were confident that their subject would not be able to escape, they spent less and less time worrying about making her enclosure look like the savannah outside. While they continued to dress their synthetic meat up as hippos, they stopped hiding the apparatuses that moved the meat around. But even without having to hide what they were doing, feeding the female cub was becoming more difficult as she grew.

They needn't have bothered hiding anything. Nala soon noticed that she was clearly not on the savannah any more, but, just as when she had noticed that the "hippos" weren't what they appeared to be, she didn't care as long as the mysterious food kept coming, which it did, in a seemingly endless supply. Nala happily spent every waking moment glutting herself, and as a result, her weight skyrocketed. Since she ate to her capacity every day, she quickly became too fat to move under her own power. Even then, she never wanted for food. However the strange, cold things that moved her food about worked, she was grateful that they did.

It wasn't their fault that she eventually started having trouble eating fast enough. No matter how quickly food was put in front of her, it took time for her to bite and chew and swallow. The burning, insatiable feeling had become a reality: Nala was becoming physically unable to consume the amount of food it took to fill her up.

Then one morning, instead of waking up to a hippo-thing sitting in front of her, Nala found that the big room was empty, but there was a snake in her mouth, one made of the same cold, gray stuff as everything else in this place. A couple minutes after she awoke, she suddenly found that her mouth was full of the meat she'd grown used to, flowing slowly out of the snake. She swallowed, surprised, only to find another mouthful in place.

The feeling was...weird. She tried to squirm away, but was so hugely obese that she could only barely move her head. She didn't like this metal snake.