Another mildly interesting discovery. Textures do not "scale" on a metaball fountain. That is to say, no matter what scaling you place into a procedural (I was experimenting with the Cellular shader, and several of the Shader Ops plug-ins for even more scaling control) the only scaling change you can enact is by changing the size of the particle generator itself. This is with "local" switched on in the particle generator settings. With the other mapping option selected, even re-scaling the generator does not change the relative scale of the texture applied to the final metaball shape.