Nikki may have had a surprise up her sleeve, but Amanda was more than ready to up the ante. So what if Nikki's dad had created a secret super-solider formula? So what if Nikki had already taken four doses, each one exponentially more powerful than the last? And who cared if she had access to gallons and gallons more of the magic serum? Amanda had started off the day as a muscle-bound Amazon bombshell, and she wasn't about to be upstaged. This was her one shot at fame, popularity, sex--the teenage dream! She was NOT going to let Nikki, to whom everything had always come so easily, steal her bulging, sinewy thunder on this most important of days.

The gun was warm to Amanda's touch. The power cell vibrated as she flipped it over once, then again. Already she'd experimented a number of times with the strange gun's energy, and even she didn't know what was ahead--or whether her current trials would leave her with any side effects. But desperation stripped these outlying variables from Amanda's judgment. To her, the equation was simple: Gun = Energy = Power. More Energy = More Power. Still crouched behind a row of lockers, Amanda brandished the growth gun and aimed it at her own chest.

Before she squeezed the trigger, she looked down at the two dials, Muscle Growth and Height. Underneath, another set of controls allowed her to manipulate Strength/Size and Size/Sexiness ratios. For pure power, she ratcheted Muscle Growth and Height to 100%. A crackle of electricity coursed from the gun's power source to the muzzle. Motes of green energy began to collect like drops of morning dew on the inside of the barrel. She left Strength/Size at 50/50, so she'd be just as strong as she looked, but switched the Size/Sexiness to a 25/75 split. As she turned the dial, the energy inside the gun shifted. Now, flickering strands of pink and red light wove between the main green beam.

"All right," she said to the empty locker room. "Here goes!"

As soon as Amanda pulled the trigger, the gun bucked wildly, and it took all her considerable strength to hold the weapon steady. The initial zap made Amanda feel flushed. Her temperature was climbing. Her heart pumped blood harder, faster, as more energy poured into her. She felt her nipples rise to full attention in a matter of seconds. Then, as before, Amanda's muscles started to feel tight. All at once, she felt pumped, as though she'd just completed a fulfilling workout. The warm, solid feeling expanded in area and intensity, soon covering her entire body. At first, the pump was amazing, but not impossible--Amanda had felt the same way after an especially rewarding gym class. But, as the gun kept on firing blasts of super-energy into Amanda, the feeling rapidly became harder and harder to believe. One minute, Amanda felt like she had bench-pressed the biggest weight in her school gym; the next, she could have sworn she'd lifted a tractor-trailer for reps.

Amanda kept the trigger held down as these new sensations rattled her body. She was so swept away by the sheer power filling every inch of her frame that she entirely forgot the gun in her hand. By the time she came back to her senses, after a full minute of growth, she had burst through every stitch of clothing on her and could hardly fit in the locker room without crouching.

Now nearly ten feet tall, with comic-book musculature, Amanda looked down at the gun just as a spring mechanism popped the trigger back into its 'rest' position. Amanda could feel that the gun was still hot in her grip, and the power cell buzzed inside the casing. She inspected the side of the gun and was surprised to find that the panel with the dials had flipped over completely to reveal a new console. A transparent plexiglass plate was visible over the new dials. On the glass, a shifting set of letters eventually spelled:

LEVEL 2 CONTROLS POWERING UP--87%

"Level 2?" Amanda whispered. She let the numbers change one at a time, until they finally read 100%. A new message popped up on the screen, first in a symbolic language, then in English:

ACCESS LEVEL 2 FUNCTIONS? YES / NO

Amanda smiled wide.