Caveman - Part 1

[tekuno]

This is a... rewrite? reworking? re?nvisioning? of Vga518's original concept, done at his request.

This story will contain no incest, but a little mild macro-ism at the end. (No "grow giant, burst through the roof, and rampage through the town" stuff, though.) On the whole, it's going to be a conventional muscle growth story, at least insofar as you can say that without it being a contradiction in terms right away.

The original idea was here. CelticMuscle wrote a beginning to a story based on the idea, which is here, and then Vga518 tried to start it up as a continuous story, which you can find here. I'm starting it over again; it's going to be a bit more on-stage erotic than the last rewrite I did (BigBearMan94's Ryan, My "Little" Brother), but not so much that sex will be the center of the whole story, or even present at all in the first few parts.

Next part should be posted no later than, oh, let's say Friday. (And Vga518 hereby has my permission to nag me about it by private message if I miss any self-declared deadline. Having someone who can bug me if I don't post seems to work pretty well as a way of getting around writer's block.)

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Caveman
Part One

This story has been completed. Content warnings and general description are included with part one, general commentary will be after part twenty.

Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four | Part Five | Part Six | Part Seven | Part Eight | Part Nine | Part Ten | Part Eleven | Part Twelve | Part Thirteen | Part Fourteen | Part Fifteen | Part Sixteen | Part Seventeen | Part Eighteen | Part Nineteen | Part Twenty

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"My dad taught me to be suspicious of coincidences. He got killed by one."

-- Robert Asprin, Hit or Myth

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You can attribute all the strange stuff that's happened to me to one simple fact: I was a really late bloomer. If I had been a full-sized guy, I would never have fallen down the crevasse, and--

I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me start from the beginning.

Once upon a time, there was a rich, lazy moron. He was the original Trust Fund Baby. He had more money in one form or another than at least 95% of people will see in their entire lifetimes, and because he was a moron, he spent all day every day worrying that perhaps some day he might have Somewhat Less Money. Perhaps enough that he would no longer be able to do anything he liked on a whim. He was sure he had to Do Something To Protect Himself from such a Dire Possibility. Of course, being lazy, he had no intention of getting a job, so instead he married a rich and ambitious woman. She was fairly unpleasant, as rich and ambitious people tend to be, but she had extra money and had the necessary drive to go out and get more.

That was my mother and my father. As you can tell, I never really warmed up to them. That's okay, they never really warmed up to me, either.

I think originally their plan was to settle down in the country, and after they had me to be appropriately photogenic and domestically appropriate, Mom would run for political office and Dad would manage our "estate" (really just a house much larger than we needed on a piece of land much larger than the house needed, on the wilderness side of the most far-flung suburb of the state capital (but close enough to be a mere half-hour drive to the nearest upscale shopping center). Put this way, and ignoring everything else, the plan was nearly perfect.

Unfortunately, there were three big flaws.

First off, I was an ugly baby, and an ugly kid. I was always short, and even I admit that I looked like I had an IQ of about 25 in photos from preschool. I had sort of a dazed expression, with sunken eyes and a receding chin. I was always one of the smallest kids in the class, but I had a thick bone structure that made me stocky and fat-looking even though I was actually quite healthy. And although I was a pretty good student, I wasn't the highest scoring student on most tests, and I wasn't particularly good or bad at sports. (I was actually pretty good at goalkeeping in soccer, but there was no local soccer league or school team, so I never got to play except occasionally in gym class.) Far from being a helpful, photogenic backdrop for an aspiring politician, I was something of an embarrassment. Moreso than if I had been some sort of dramatic flop -- a drug addict, or deformed, or mentally ill; any of that would have given Mom an excuse to champion a cause. The fact that I was just ordinary, and unattractive to boot, made me totally useless for her purposes.

Secondly, Dad discovered that he hated the country. By the time I was 8, Dad had cabin fever so badly that he was usually only at the house about a quarter of the time. And he spent most of his time in the house arranging plans to go elsewhere. Whenever he came home, it was clear he had totally forgotten I even existed.

Thirdly, and possibly most importantly, Mom couldn't run a political campaign to save her life. There's a long history of politicians who ended their own careers by accidentally admitting their less-pleasant opinions out loud. Mom was like that, only times a million. She tried running for public office 3 times in five years, once for the state Senate, and twice for Congress, and by the third run she was considered to be so tainted that even the local faction of the Republican Party couldn't force themselves to take her seriously, even though they essentially functioned on her donations. Finally she got so tired of the whole thing that she started "spending more time with her family" -- which translated into travelling with Dad, leaving me at home alone with a series of supposedly-responsible adult employees.

The upshot was that by the time I was 16, I was basically on my own. There was a housekeeper who was around the house for roughly 6 hours each weekday, and 4 hours on weekends, making my breakfast and dinner and ensuring that I didn't invite over a bunch of friends and burn the house down or get addicted to drugs. Other than that, I only had "adult supervision" whenever Mom and Dad decided to come back from Las Vegas or the French Riviera or wherever.

Which suited me fine. You'd think, with a mother who was known far and wide as hugely unpleasant and a father who was lazy, stupid, and usually absent, I'd have a tough time socially. Not so; I got along with just about everyone quite well. I went to watch school sports games, and sometimes friends playing in local leagues, and went to parties and hung around with other people. How can I put this... I was nearly always invited to parties, although sometimes I was near the end of the guest list.

I didn't really date, though -- by the time I was 15, I was definitely the shortest kid in my class. When the Puberty Fairy came and left lower voices and hairy chests under everyone's pillow, or at least between the sheets, she apparently skipped my house, or maybe couldn't find my room. In gym class, I looked like a grade school (or, later, a junior high) kid who had sneaked into the class. The humorist Dave Barry -- another late bloomer -- once wrote that he was annoyed when women claimed they wanted a sense of humor, because when he was in high school, when it really counted, what girls wanted was puberty. Well, that was basically my experience.

That was actually okay with me, too. I'm bisexual, so in theory I have a wider field to play than most people, but... well, I'm picky. I've always had an impossibly high standard for what I find physically attractive. That was kind of my salvation -- out of all the people who attended my high school during my entire time there, only three people (two girls and a guy) seemed good enough to be worth pursuing, and since they were all so far out of my league I didn't even bother. Just based on height alone, it would have been like a chihuahua trying to mate with a great dane. And nobody really picked on me for my, uh, lack of romantic prowess, so it didn't seem to make any difference.

Nobody, that is, except a trio of guys on the basketball team. I don't know why -- even the meanest and dumbest guys on the football and wrestling teams, the ones who were merciless towards anyone they thought was a nerd, got along just fine with me. But the forwards and center on the basketball team -- James Archie, Paul Williams, and John Baker -- just would not leave me alone. It wasn't even height -- other short people got a pass. It was me, specifically, that they couldn't stand. I guess I could do worse.

If it had been a TV movie, it would have turned out that the three of them were actually in love with me, and were antagonizing me to get my attention, or something like that. This being real life, though, they just didn't like me. Fortunately, it wasn't too difficult to arrange my life to avoid all three of them nearly all of the time, and although they were always willing to go after me when I was around they didn't go out of their way to chase me.

Meanwhile, I had a few good friends, as well as a lot of casual acquaintances. Joe Green, who was fullback on the school's not-very-good football team, was my best friend, believe it or not. He had been my next door neighbor, insofar as our house really had "neighbors", since we were 3. And we usually hung around with Mike Taylor, who was on the likewise-not-very-good tennis team. (None of the school's sports programs had accomplished much for years.) Since the beginning of senior year, Mike Clemson had also been included in our group, almost without thinking about it. (For reasons which nobody else understood, he asked us to call him "Norris", so there was no conflict with the other Mike's name.) Norris was... well, he was the one person on the school newspaper staff who actually understood how to use the layout software, which sort of seemed to be typical for him.

That was pretty much the way things stood at the beginning of spring break during my senior year.

My parents, typically for them, had suddenly announced that they were going on a month-long world tour roughly a week before spring break began, and left me alone. They left an itinerary, so I could have contacted them at any time... if I had a reason to do that. Instead, I just looked forward to a week and a half of hanging around with my friends without having to go to classes.

But then a series of coincidences happened.

The tennis team announced their intention to go off on a group trip for training, so Mike was going to be out of town until the last two days of the break.

Joe's grandmother was killed in a car accident two days before break began, and he and his parents were going to leave immediately after school that day to go handle the necessary arrangements. They would be gone for a week.

And Norris had forgotten about it, but his mother had planned a weekend trip downstate at the beginning of the break.

Furthermore, the only major social event planned that weekend was a party being given on Saturday night by Paul Williams, to which, needless to say, I was not invited.

Saturday wasn't bad; the weather was cold and windy, with occasional spurts of rain. I sat at home and ate junk food and played games on the computer and took mild satisfaction that the party would probably be less successful because of the weather -- Paul's house was relatively small, but with an enormous patio and back yard which he had undoubtedly planned to use for most of the party stuff. So much for that idea!

By Sunday, though, I was bored stiff. I'm not a hardcore gamer, I guess -- after a few hours, even the best, most fascinating games start to bore me. Or, at least, I get antsy sitting there playing them. I slept through the morning, went out and had a burger for lunch (more to get out of the house than because I felt like a burger) and then came home and sprawled on the sofa wondering what I could do with myself for the rest of the day.

Finally, I decided that I would go and explore in the woods at the back of the lot. Joe and I used to do that, back when we were in grade school. There wasn't much danger -- no major wild animals, no ponds to drown in (and besides which both of us could swim), just lots of trees where there had been farms a century earlier, before the area started getting developed. At some point, it stopped being our property, although I don't know where and even now I don't know who owned the rest, but the woods went on for a few miles. It had a "wild" feeling without actually being wild in any significant way, in other words. But it was big and largely uncharted, and technically it was my family's property, so why not?

I sent off an e-mail to Norris, just in case -- if anything DID happen to me, he would be back in town the next day and would be able to alert the authorities that I was gone. I mean, if I had to die somehow, it would be satisfying to know that I helped make Mom into even more of a political punchline than she already was, since I was pretty sure she would be an absolute disaster if she ever managed to get into office of any kind, but the idea wasn't so attractive that I was willing to off myself to make it happen. Then I filled a backpack with possibly-useful stuff like a flashlight and a bottle of water and a couple of granola bars, and headed out the back door.

At first, the woods were just like I remembered. Same trees, more or less, same undergrowth, same birds chirping here and there. The stream which ran out of a spring in the back of the property -- Joe and I had spent a whole weekend planning and carrying out an expedition to find it when we were 10 -- was still there, and still as unimpressive as ever. (Calling it a stream was paying it a major compliment. At its deepest point, it was 8 inches to the bottom.)

After about half an hour of walking, with just enough tripping over tree roots to make me glad I was wearing jeans instead of shorts, I came to something new. There was a slight rise in front of me; that might or might not have been new -- there were rises here and there, buried in the trees, so I couldn't swear to every single one -- but in the side of it there was a crack in the ground. A big crack. Big enough that I could creep inside if I wanted to. And I was pretty sure that there hadn't been anything like that when Joe and I had been running around back there. We would have found it -- and probably fallen in like idiots.

Of course, 17-year-old me wasn't an idiot. I wasn't going to so much as climb inside, but I saw no reason not to investigate before heading back to the house. It would give me something to show my friends, and tell my parents when and if they ever called home. Creeping into a crack in the ground, on the other hand, is exactly how I could end up getting lost in the woods and needing a rescue, so I was just going to observe it from the outside. I went over and looked at the crack. It was on the side of the rise, a few feet away from the bottom, and ran along the side of the rise, about 5 feet wide. It was about 18 inches wide at the center, tapering at both ends, and it was definitely a crack almost straight down into the ground. I couldn't see how far down it went from the side.

I took off my bag and took out the flashlight, then carefully carried both up the side of the rise, around the edge of the hole, and looked down, shining the flashlight into the hole. It was a rough surface, on a slight incline to one side, as far as I could see, which wasn't very far because the flashlight wasn't a very good one.

I grinned; this was something interesting, at least -- much better than I had expected for my day's walk in the woods. I clicked off the flashlight and started to turn around...

And then the dirt under my feet gave way and I fell into the hole. In retrospect, I don't know why I expected anything else to happen; there was a certain inevitability about the whole thing.

I fell and slid until I couldn't see the exit any more. Then I fell some more, a bit more slowly as the tilt of the tunnel became more extreme. I think it must also have expanded a bit as it went down, because I didn't hit my head or scratch myself against the ceiling after the first few seconds.

Fortunately, I managed to hang on to both the flashlight and the bag. So at least I wouldn't starve right away, and I had a chance of getting out on my own. After I stopped shaking and caught my breath, I clicked on the flashlight.

Directly in front of me, exactly where the beam of light fell, there was a caveman embedded in ice. A big caveman; lanky and muscular, with hairy arms and legs, sticking out from around some kind of blanket or cloak. He was in an improbable position for someone who was frozen: it was like he was suspended by invisible threads hanging under his armpits. His feet were dangling down from about a foot above the ground, and in general he looked like he was asleep, his head hanging down and his eyes closed.

I was amazed, but I had heard about people finding ancient stuff before. But before more than a few seconds passed, my brain kicked back in and started asking inconvenient questions. The first, and most obvious, one was: if this caveman is encased in ice, why is this cavern not cold? Shouldn't you be able to see your breath, at least?

I got up and shuffled across the floor to the block. I reached out and touched it; it felt like plastic, and I frowned. What a letdown! This was just a fraud, some kind of caveman exhibit that had been buried, and I thought it was real at first. Probably stuck here as some kind of landfill before the development started. I was glad, at least, that this was at the bottom of a pit, and therefore couldn't possibly be some kind of prank. Falling for something this fake would be embarrassing.

Then the ground started to rumble. Which was absolutely terrifying. I dropped the flashlight and fell down. The rumbling was strong -- I could feel the ground shaking -- but not as powerful as the one minor earthquake I had been in, when I visited California with Dad years earlier. Just a buzzing coming up through my feet (and, now that I was sitting on my backside, my rear end and my hands). Then again, being this far underground, any tremor might seal off this cave and bury me alive. I decided I'd better get out of there, and FAST.

I grabbed the flashlight, which was still turned on, and took one last look at the caveman.

His head was up, his eyes were open, and he was looking straight at me.

I panicked. I'm pretty sure I gave out a scream. I turned around and ran in the direction I had come from, shined the light against the curving wall of dirt and found what must have been the hole through which I had fallen, and scrambled as hard as I could. I had never done well at this sort of thing, either in gym class or the couple of times my friends and I had tried rock climbing -- being a shrimp, I lacked the upper body strength to really do much climbing. But I was absolutely frightened out of my mind, so somehow I kept going.

Between the rumbling -- which was getting stronger -- and my flailing, more and more dirt rained down as I climbed. After I left the main chamber, though, the rumbling began to fade a little with distance. I finally made it to the surface and flopped out onto the ground below the rise. Within seconds, the ground gave a shudder and the hole collapsed on itself; the rise lost about half its height within a few seconds.

I did what any sensible adolescent would do after a terrifying experience which nobody would ever believe and with no adults or friends within reach: I ran back to the house, locked all the doors and windows, and spent the rest of the afternoon and evening in my bedroom with the door locked and the drapes pulled, with my head under the covers.

At some point, I fell asleep. I had a predictable dream involving various elements of the afternoon; I fell down cracks in the ground and got stared at by mysterious strangers in store windows. Suddenly a voice broke into my dream: "wake up, Mitchell, I want to talk to you". It wasn't a normal voice, it didn't have any timbre or pitch; it was just words.

Naturally I woke up.

Standing by the side of my bed, holding his hand against my cheek, was the caveman. He was looking down at me, and smiling.

Next Part

[vga518]

I saw this was posted and even though it was late (at this point it's 2:54AM) I had to read this. It's an AMAZING set up! I look forward to reading the rest. And I will say there is nothing wrong with Busting Thru The Roof Growth. LOL
But anyway again I look forward to where this will go.