Prompt of the Week - Week 101

TAGS: Weight Gain/Hyper Weight/Blob, Spirit Invasion, Somewhat Silly

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Despite the extensive blame game, it was no one’s fault that the gate to the Underworld opened, and certainly not the paranormal investigation group composed entirely of amateurs who had no clue what they were messing with.

The important thing to remember was that the gate was open, the spirits were flooding out, and if no one did anything about it, there was a significant risk of something terrible happening when the amount of ectosplasmic mass reached a critical point. Or, at least, that was what the actual experts said before a few geists showed up and dragged them back down to the pits below; no one was quite sure what that meant, but there they had it.

Panic ran rampant, even when it became clear that not all of the spirits escaping from their underprison were in fact hostile; some were, indeed, quite friendly, almost exceedingly so! Granted, it might be that these were spirits of lust, deliberately trying to insinuate themselves into everyone’s good graces before they struck, but who could resist the opportunity to live out their wildest fantasies at the mere cost of their soul? For some, it was an outright bargain!

With no plans to speak of, it fell to anyone who might have the slightest bit of experience to come up with a way to fix this issue. While the infestation hadn’t spilled over beyond an immediate ten-mile radius, encompassing “merely” a major city and its suburbia, those even slightly in the know were aware this was only a matter of time; eventually, and inevitably, that hill-turned-vortex would only get wider, its area of effect larger, and the type of spirits it let through… far more dangerous.

What they were seeing there was just the beginning: minor entities, the ones that could make it through the gate without losing most of their power; the truly dangerous spirits, the ones that could shake the foundation of the world if ever allowed out of their cells, were far too big and powerful to even coexist with mainline reality. They needed a suitable environment to operate in, a corruption of existence that could only be found in that crepuscular area between the spirit world and the material one, under the shadow of an Underworld gateway.

Much like the one currently looming high above the skyline, where a hill used to be; many thanks were issued to those responsible before they themselves were thrown into a cell, but from there, choices were limited: city authorities had already called for aid, but it was doubtful whether bullets and explosives could do much against a spirit gate. They could summon even more experts, but by the time they found any, there was a good chance the gate would have grown to the point where it couldn’t be stopped.

Even if no one wanted to admit it, it fell exclusively to whoever they could scrounge up from the local paranormal societies and book clubs, assuming any of them wanted to step forward and try to save the day; funnily enough, most of them were content with slinking back into the shadows once confronted with a genuine spiritual threat, with even one of the local attractions, a celebrity tarot reader, disconnecting his phone line before anyone could get in contact with him.

Out of everyone available, the one person that dared put forth any working hypothesis was an entirely nondescript staff member of the municipal library: an old, almost comically wrinkly otter who’d been working at the institution for so long that most joked he’d been there to lay the literal groundwork, he suggested looking at the problem in an inverse manner. Namely, rather than trying to plug the hole from their side, they should try and close it from the other.

Reactions ranged from stunned silence to a couple of demands for the “spirit sympathiser” to be immediately jailed. After security handled most of the rowdiness, the otter offered an explanation via the use of an oversized, definitely much-too-heavy tome they produced from a backpack that looked too small to carry the item in the first place; according to the librarian, the native tribes in the region had a rich history regarding the local “spiritual attunement”, complete with well-documented, suspiciously well-kept instructions for a variety of rituals meant to appease the spirit world and its denizens.

Among these was folklore on the so-called Gate Guardians, great and vast and definitely-not-antagonistic spirits whose sole purpose was to serve as gatekeepers, preventing their brethren from escaping into the material world. Now, why they had suddenly stopped doing said job, no one had any idea, but in the absence of any better ideas, there was little anyone could do but assume the myths were true, the instructions were accurate, and they should get busy with finding the easiest one.

Luckily for those assembled in city hall, the librarian came with his own proposal: hit the Guardians where they were softest. According to the legends, there was one among their rank that never, under any circumstance, left their post… on account of being too fat to do so. While their name was lost to history and deliberate mistranslation, their title as the Glutton, the Ever-Ravenous, among other even less dignified ones, left no room for the imagination: pay a tithe of food, and this Guardian would happily block the gate so none could pass.

Contact was made by recruiting everyone who claimed to have a “connection” to the spirit world, then rapidly weeding out the frauds. Amazingly, the number of people who actually did manage to establish a link with other side was higher than ten; not much, but once the local police commissioner went through both hands twice, just to make sure she hadn’t miscounted, the absolute impossible turned out to be the absolute truth. With the task force thus assembled, it was then only a case of getting them as close as possible to the gate, then allowing them to… do whatever it was they had to do.

In all fairness, no one in the task force itself had any clue what they were supposed to be doing; half of them weren’t even aware that their supposed spiritual link was even real, and now faced with a legitimate threat, had nothing but well-practiced, yet still fraudulent theatre to fall back on. The one saving grace was the old otter, who showed up with a basket full of food, unceremoniously threw it in the air, then, as it was sucked up towards the vortex up above, shouted the magic words:

“Wake up, you lazy bum!”

Everyone blinked simultaneously. If it wasn’t enough that they were allowed to get close enough to the vortex that they could hear the wind howling without the spirits accosting them, now they had that old coot outright insulting the one person-thing that could help them get out of that mess. Not that any of them had the courage to step up and tell the old man to cut it out; even if they had, the sudden appearance of said lazy bum was enough to dissuade them.

The Guardian didn’t shift into existence, or appear in a puff of smoke, nor indeed make any dignified entrance. Rather, and with a yawn loud enough to almost be painful, something immense, towering, and definitely round around the edges, seeped out of the vortex up above and promptly fell flat on the ground below… and by “fall”, it of course slammed into the dirt at such high velocity that not only did it throw the medium task force back several feet, but kicked up such a dust storm that all of the living present on-site were left coughing and spitting out dirt for several minutes.

Once they recovered… things didn’t get any simpler. Where they stood, the spiritualists were somewhat safe from the vortex storm raging all around them; eye of the hurricane and all that. While most of the entities spilling forth from the hole in reality up in the sky chose to go bother someone else, that didn’t make it any easier on them to understand what they were even looking at, nor what that mountain that had fallen from the hole was.

When hearing about a guardian spirit, an entity so powerful that it could protect the material world from spiritual incursion, the last thing anyone expected to see was a ball of lard of a girth so colossal that it couldn’t even move. None there could tell what they were even supposed to be; whatever species the spirit belonged to, or indeed if it had any species at all, was obscured by the simple fact that most of their body was fat. Fat rolls, fat slabs, stacked on top of one another to create a conglomeration of pudge orbs in the rough shape of a regular body plan; while the “legs” and “arms” were visible, as much as wide sausage tubes of meat could be, the hands and feet (or talons or claws) were not, having sunken into the valley of flab presumably eons prior.

Even the guardian’s head was invisible, surrounded by neckfat in every direction. Presumably, if one were to climb that half a mile-long belly and pull back the many layers of flab, they would find something down there: a face, perchance, embedded into a wall, serving no purpose but to further gorge the creature it was attached to, until it was rendered even fatter and wider still, if that was even possible.

While most of the group was busy gawking at what they presumed was supposed to be their saviour, the librarian took point by turning around and heading back to the city, running far quicker than his old age should even begin to allow him. The mediums, left to their own devices, did the only thing they could: approach the… thing they were looking at, and ask it what it wanted in return for blocking the gate.

The first five times yielded nothing but stomach gurgling. The sixth had silence, followed by louder gurgling, leading the task force to think that maybe they were going about it the wrong way; maybe, if what they were seeing was, indeed, what they were meant to take at face value, they shouldn’t be asking what the Guardian wanted, they should be giving it what was clearly its preferred sacrifice: more food.

Luckily, the librarian was far further ahead than any of the supposed experts were, and by the time the group was done electing who would go back to deliver the news, there was already a throng of volunteers trailing back all the way to the city coming up the hill towards them. At its front, the old otter, carrying half his weight in grocery bags and looking about as pissed off as he was exhausted; once he reached the people he was meant to be helping, he dropped his load, poked the one closest to him, and issued a simple command:

“Start hauling.”

In between keeping the convoy safe from spiritual incursion, and occasionally having to replace people who fell prey to the odd intruder who got through, the rest of the afternoon was spent bringing offerings to the Ever-Ravenous… or, at least, dropping bags upon bags of food close to them and hoping that would be enough. At first, it seemed as if nothing was even happening: there was a great big stack of perishables just sitting there under the sun, with the Guardian just… sitting there as well, doing absolutely nothing.

But, in time, something changed. There was a rumbling, a low, growling roar, distorted and distended over time, emanating from where the pile of pudge in the rough shape of a spirit was sitting. Imperceptible at first over the howling vortex, it eventually became impossible to miss, especially when the stack of food offerings began to disappear into thin air.

There was no real consumption, as much as the Guardian simply willed the gifts into them several hundred mouthfuls at a time; while it was slow to start, once the gorging began it grew in intensity so quickly that even half the city helping to transport food just wasn’t enough! The moment anything was placed on the prepared ritual circle, that something just vanished, with the blob-like Guardian swelling outwards at a visibly higher rate than they had any right to.

It could just be a simple stack of pizzas, but it still made them fatten up by a good foot in every direction, almost as if they had a pump plugged into some part of their body, hooked directly to a vat full of pure mass… or pure fat, as the case may be. Their entire form rippled like it was made of some soft, gooey substance, looking ready to lose its entire shape, yet never quite going that far that it lost itself; it might as well be made out of pure, condensed flab, with the skin being naught but the final barrier keeping the deluge from splurting all over everyone.

And yet, it was clearly possessed of some form of intelligence, given that it was seemingly communicating with the librarian and a select few others. On occasion, someone would stop moving, usually after depositing their offering, then turn to the otter; the two would share a nod, then the latter would take the former by the hand and lead them closer to the Guardian, where the one spoken to, seemingly unprompted, would climb up the immense body of the spirit and then vanish somewhere up above.

No one knew if they were being devoured, but they felt like they weren’t. It was difficult to explain, beyond it being a sense of understanding that went beyond the declarative: the spirit was not eating people, but it was asking for their help to do… something. What this something was, no one had a single clue about, but it couldn’t possibly be a negative considering the flow of spiritual energy from the vortex had begun to wane.

None present dared to suggest how and why it was supposed to work, but just as the Guardian was rendered fatter, so too was the hole above them made to close up further; this despite the fact that the immense, ravenous spirit was definitely down below and not up above… nevermind how they had grown so massive that their head, would it to emerge from the valley of neckfat, would likely come close to the vortex itself! It wasn’t until then that the reality of it finally dawned on those helping: the Guardian was going to literally plug the hole, and to do that, it needed them to help it physically get there!

Did it make sense? Probably not, but they were also in the middle of a spirit invasion, so “sense” was thrown out the window quite some time prior. As long as it worked, then no one was going to ask questions or throw out snide comments; just bring in more food, drop it on the ritual circle, and occasionally disappear into the cavernous “maw” where the spirit’s head was buried under.

It took the better part of the whole day, and well into the night, before the plugging was complete. Luckily, the closer the city’s people came to achieving their goal, the less distractions they had: as the Guardian became fatter, there came a point where the amount of other spirits coming through was reduced to near-zero, then nothing but the tiniest, faintest of wisps that could swatted away as easily as a fly. Granted, the people who vanished into the Guardian itself were nowhere to be seen, but as soon as the last bite was taken, and the last inch was grown… it was over.

By then, it was well past midnight, everyone was exhausted, and even the National Guard detachment sent to help had to take five to recover from what had likely been the most intense workout of the last year for them. Darkness all around with only a corridor leading down to the city illuminated by high-powered floodlights and the hum of generators amidst a tangled mess of wires, with volunteers and military personnel strewn about, trying to forget what had just happened.

Next to them, taking up about as much space as the hill that used to be there, was the Ever-Ravenous, living up to its name after having become a landmark, likely visible from well beyond the horizon for most of the people there. Their head, if it had one, was so far up that it went past the spot where the vortex had been generated, and with that, their body had served its purpose by plugging the hole and keeping further spiritual intruders from entering the material world.

No one wanted to think about what was going to come next, seeing as no one had any real plan on how to deal with… that. The main concern had been to stop the spirit invasion; if they had to resort to any more drastic solutions, they would’ve, the main incentive being to stop disaster now and worry about clean-up later. Unfortunately, it eventually became clear that the only people who could ever possibly know what to do were all gone; while it had been easy to miss during the frantic, near-panicked rush to get food to the Guardian, a headcount revealed that those chosen by the spirit gatekeeper were the ones with the most attunement to the spirit world itself… including the librarian, who was nowhere to be seen.

None of those that remained truly knew what to do; no one had the book the otter had used to begin the ritual, nor did they have the knowledge needed to make that mountainous spirit go away. Most of all, none had any idea what to do next, now that they had a pile of flab the size of a hill to clean up… and a hungry one, as it turned out.

That hum wasn’t the generators.