Stranded And Desserted - Part 2 (Commission for Teddypimm)

TAGS: Stranded On An Island, Gluttony/Endless Hunger, Weight Gain/Fat

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How long had it been since last she moved?

Using her legs to go from place to place seemed like a distant memory, even if Kela was somewhat certain that she’d been doing it just a few weeks before… or a few months, it was difficult to tell when she had no clocks to keep track of time, no people to ask what day it was; just herself, the cycle of the day and night, and an island that seemed deadset on making her think about nothing other than itself.

After a certain point, the gnolless had to admit that the idea of being rescued was significantly more optimistic than she initially thought it would be. Much as she would’ve liked to believe that a ship would eventually sail by and notice her, as the days passed by, one after another, and absolutely no one and nothing appeared on the horizon, she had to admit her stay on the island might be longer-term than she originally envisioned it as.

Thankfully, this little slice of the heavens in the middle of nowhere seemed perfectly adapted for long-term habitation; not only was it big enough that she could easily make herself a clearing to settled in, but the rate of regrowth of its vegetation was such that just keeping the clearing clear was enough for her to guarantee a steady supply of food… and an ever-increasing one, given what doing such a thing did to her waistline.

It had been a long time since she last walked, and a longer time since last Kela truly thought about her fitness or physical well-being; after enough of the island’s treats, her mind seemed to have been reformatted to only think about her next fix, her next mouthful, the next batch of sweets that she plucked from whatever was closest to her in order to fill herself even more. It almost didn’t matter whether or not she was actually hungry; it was there, it could be eaten, thus it should be. The maths was simple.

As a result, her body underwent a rapid change from merely being fat to approaching on blob-like, as her fat contents quickly approached the upper ninety-percent ration in relation to her full body mass, and even her extraordinary ability to move while under such extreme stress was taxed until she was rendered fully immobile. It didn’t happen overnight either, hence why it snuck up on her; rather, Kela found herself simply walking less and less the bigger she became, figuring that as long as she could still reach for food, then she should be fine.

This stacked onto itself until, at some point, the gnolless decided she didn’t need to walk anymore, and parked herself right next to the caramel river; the last thing she needed was to go parched because she was too lazy to get up. But this unwillingness to move soon became an inability; without even the most meager of exercise, it took very little effort on Kela’s part to actually grow too heavy to get up, at which point she was effectively stuck there until she stopped eating as much.

Not that this was an option. Even looking down at the gargantuan pile of flab that she’d become, the gnolless couldn’t conceive of any scenario where she’d stop eating; even if her belly was slung out a good twenty feet in front of her as some sort of enormous waterbed of pudge, even if her arms were jutting out from her torso at an odd angle as a result of all the fat in the way, even when the folds of her neck threatened to overtake her head, she didn’t see it as anything other than perfectly normal.

In fact, if anything, Kela saw it as merely the beginning of a new progression, one that she’d been gifted by having landed on that island to begin with. In her head, the fact that the magic keeping that place going was capable of replenishing any lost confectionery in a matter of hours, no matter how often it was consumed, meant that the island was designed to be eaten; thus, it stood to reason that it would only become “too much” when she ate things too quickly for the locale’s ambient magic to put them back. Only then would she need to worry about anything.

And, seeing as it hadn’t happened yet, then clearly there wasn’t anything to concern herself with: flawless logic. Quite the contrary, as she even changed upon a fantastic discovery: the source of the caramel falls was not some underground wellspring, as she initially assumed, but rather the rock face itself! It would appear that the magic keeping it supplied did so directly, instead of affecting an underground stream, with some odd, pale crystal serving as the nexus from which a steady stream of molten caramel flew freely from.

As a result, it was simple enough to rip a large chunk of rock candy from the main wall and park it directly on top of herself, so that, whenever she felt like it, Kela could just tip it over her mouth and allow the stream of caramel to flow directly into her mouth! Even better, whenever she wasn’t doing this, she was letting it run over her body, and not only did this leave her surprisingly cool in the middle of the warm day, but for some reason it felt as if her body was absorbing the caramel itself!

Either that or she was fattening even when eating nothing, which the gnolless found unlikely even for where she was at; plus, the flow of caramel never seemed to reach the ground below, always disappearing somewhere just above her navel. With every second that passed, she felt like she was more and more bloated, and if she paid attention, Kela swore she could see herself expanding outwards, even if just at a rate of a few inches per hour. This was to say nothing of when she did feed though; she could measure the difference between her pre- and post-guzzling selves in the order of feet, and it only got worse the bigger she became.

Bigger body meant more sustenance was needed meant she had to drink more often meant she was left even fatter meant the cycle built on itself until it was rendered impossible to escape from. Add to that Kela’s frequent forays into ripping whole trees from the ground and consuming them in one go, and it was unsurprising that she would end up large enough to even be able to do so at all; hells below, it wouldn’t take long before her head was so constantly beset by the foliage up above that the gnolless took to just scarfing down the leaves whenever they grew in front of her, hoping to at least hasten the process of escaping from the treeline.

It took a while, but she did eventually get there: her body became her throne, a sequence of increasingly bigger fat rolls stacked on top of one another in the rough shape of a gnoll’s body… only one magnified to several dozen to hundred times its original size. And at the top of it all, Kela’s head, comfortably nestled in the middle of a series of concentric rings of neckfat, serving as an impromptu pillow upon which she could rest said head whenever tired.

And, as a result, Kela broke through the boughs of the gummy trees, now possessed of a near-perfect bird’s eye view of… a lot of leaves. She was expecting a great deal more, seeing as the island was clearly big enough that she hadn’t been able to explore all of it before becoming immobile; maybe a mountain off in the distance, revealing the whole place to be some gargantuan mega-construct, or even a volcano for those extra style points. Instead, she saw a flat plain covered in trees in every direction, with ocean visible just on the horizon

The gnolless was actually surprised at how central the caramel spout was on the island, though, in retrospect, whoever built the whole thing was clearly thinking of function over form; and, well, even if there had been a mountain of rock candy for her to eat, she wasn’t going to get up and go there, not on her weight. She’d likely need to gorge her way through a significant chunk of the island before even reaching the base, though, by then, it was anyone’s guess just what she might become afterwards.

Still, she was definitely big enough that the island had become her unquestioned domain… or, at least, she figured that was the case. If anyone wanted to show up and declare the place to be their own, they were more than welcome to try; maybe even the wizard who originally built it, maybe they would want it back after the gnolless so rudely parked their fat ass on it and refused to leave. But for Kela, none of these possibilities were a concern; the island was hers, and as such, anyone who wanted to take it was more than welcome to try.

Try, because she wasn’t going to go down without a fight. Granted, she couldn’t exactly… “fight” fight, at least not the way she did, but when someone was at her size, the concept of a direct confrontation changed slightly compared to what it used to be; at her girth, at her mass, her main method of attacking was to just sit there and dare someone to hit her, then allow them to waste their energy reserves trying to harm her when they could barely even get through her surface layer of blubber.

Even magic would likely be ineffectual against her at that point; with so much of the island’s contents being inside of her, who knew how much protection she had inadvertently given herself, purely through the act of feasting upon her surroundings? She was likely ten percent magic by weight alone, which was definitely saying something by then; even if the original wizard creator showed up, they’d likely be unable to make her move, let alone dislodge her completely!

And if that was the case, then surely there shouldn’t be an issue in her deciding to go a little further than before. If she was already stuck there, if she was so large that, even in the unlikely event of a ship passing by, they’d be unable to drag her out, then she might as well just go for broke and see what happened if she truly let loose; up until then, she hadn’t been going through her surroundings nearly as quickly as she could’ve been, possessed of… not necessarily self-restraint, but the sense that she shouldn’t be going full tilt just yet, that there was still a ways to go before she could justify letting go completely.

Her head being above the treeline, however, effectively removed whatever obstacles there might be to Kela’s descent into full-blown, gluttonous madness. Not that she’d put it in those terms, but what else could it be, when her one purpose beyond that point was to eat? How else could it be described, when the only thing she could think of was to alternate between stuffing herself with the caramel falls and ripping out half a dozen trees to eat at once?

She was lucky to still have a mind to consider these things, lucky that she held onto enough of herself that there was still a Kela that could think about the distinction between gluttony and majesty. But not for long; there would come a time when her mind dissolved into the endless stream of sugar, the constant downpour of sweets that left her bigger, softer, rounder, more pliable. There would come a time when she was nothing more than her impulses, driven to do nothing but consume.

But that was for later. For now, she just wanted to eat to her heart’s content, as she deserved.

***

It was an odd stretch of ocean for there to be any magical disturbances; as far as the navigators were aware, there was nothing there for there to be a disturbance in, given the lack of any sunken ruins, extant magical constructs, or anything other than a long and barren stretch of water. Yet, their instruments consistently gave out the same response whenever consulted: there was some sort of extreme disturbance in that patch of water, enough that the ship’s crew unanimously voted to at least reconnoiter it, if nothing else.

It wasn’t their job to do so; they were just fishermen, not executors or explorers, and the only reason they were even there to begin with was because of a freak storm blowing them off-course. On any other day, they would’ve marked the disturbance down and carried on, content with passing the information onto the first person they figured would know what to do with it once they returned to shore. But there was something about what the instruments were telling them that set off alarm bells in all their heads, doubly so considering their charts told them there shouldn’t be anything there to begin with.

At first, nothing seemed out of the ordinary: it was just ocean. No matter where anyone aboard looked, they just saw the exact same: water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink. For a few tense minutes, even the navigator and her assistant began thinking their instruments were somehow malfunctioning, perhaps having been given one too many knocks during the storm; they were still spitting out a myriad of sparks and flames of fire, occasionally interspersed with electrical crackling and the odd familiar who popped in and out of existence so quickly that they couldn’t even be said to exist at all.

But there was nothing there, was the problem. The longer the ship sailed, the more its sailors came to realise that they were most likely bamboozled by faulty instruments, as there was nothing in sight that could even remotely begin to cause a magical disturbance of the kind their navigational tools were telling them was definitely there. No talk of mutiny, but plenty of grumbling regardless; there were enough supplies to get them to their destination, but the last thing anyone needed on that voyage were even more delays, especially after the storm added a good three days of travel to an already lengthy round-trip.

Still, the navigator insisted that the instruments had to be correct. Nothing about them looked broken, and even their machinist had to admit that, as far as they could tell, the tools were functioning the way they were supposed to: if they were saying there was a magical disturbance, then there had to be one, even if it wasn’t immediately obvious. Only then did the Captain start bemoaning the fact that they left a promising wizard back on land on account of them being “unnecessary”; had they spent just a little bit more, they would’ve likely been done with that whole ordeal already.

Alas, they had no one to detect ambient magical currents, and the closest thing to a spellslinger was the ship’s bosun, who mostly just learned how to walk on water for the rare case the ship might suffer a fatal tipping incident. Despite their complaints, the rest of the crew voted for them to be lowered onto the ocean’s surface so they could “investigate” from closer range; it was a perfectly calm day, there were no waves… and indeed, there were no waves.

It was only at this point that the sailors all came to notice that, indeed, there were no waves around them. Rather than the regular rippling of water, the constant low-key turbulence created by currents and the wind, the ocean’s surface was as smooth as a pane of glass, and nearly as scintillating under the sun; for as far as they could see, the great big blue extended as one solid, flat mass, their ship being the one thing to cause any disturbance. Even then, whatever waves were created in their wake were quickly swallowed up by the unnatural calm, leaving the crew increasingly antsy as the true nature of the anomaly made itself clear.

By that point trembling from head to toe, the bosun nonetheless agreed to be lowered onto the waters, gulping all the way. The spell for waterwalking was simple enough, but he still half-expected to be swallowed up by whatever great beast had clearly taken those waters for its hunting grounds. It was the only explanation: something gargantuan was hiding beneath the surface, artificially keeping its surface as calm as possible to attract would-be victims with the promise of safety in an otherwise rough patch of ocean.

But even as he placed the tip of his feet on the water, the bosun found that it was… just water. Tiny concentric ripples flowed out from the point of contact before vanishing a few inches away, repeated with each step he took; whenever he walked, he still heard the same tiny splash that he always did whenever he cast that spell, and no matter how much he tried to avoid looking down, he did so anyway, only to see… nothing.

Granted, there should’ve been at least some fish down there, but that was the least of his concerns. The magical disturbance was clearly real, but what had caused it? Was it even malignant, or was it literally just a stretch of calm ocean? The bosun was about to turn around and ask for what to do next when a quake suddenly struck him from down below, causing him to lose his balance and collapse onto the water… but not breaking through the surface.

There were a few moments of confusion as the young man tried to make sense of what had happened there. First off, quakes should not affect water the way they did solid ground, no matter how much he was treating the former like the latter. Secondly, the waterwalking spell worked on the soles of his feet and nothing else; falling backwards meant he was just as liable to break through the surface of the water as everyone else. And thirdly, why was everything shouting about turning around and sailing as far away as possible as quickly as possible?

And why was he so warm all of a sudden?

On the ship, just a few moments earlier, the navigator had run out of their room shouting about “something big” being directly underneath them. After they were given enough of a rum ration to calm down, they did their best to explain how they had, at long last, finally figured out the reason behind the magical disturbance, the source of all the wild currents fudging up her instruments; sadly, she barely got started with the explanation before the rumbling began, at which point the officer demanded that the captain turn the ship around, leave the bosun to his fate, and get the rest of the crew to safety.

Normally, this would not be an option; as the captain himself liked to put it, “that bastard” was the only reason the ship even functioned properly half the time, and he’d be damned if he left him alone in the middle of a magically-contaminated stretch of ocean. Unfortunately for said bosun, what broke through the surface of the water immediately after the quake was enough to convince everyone aboard the ship that maybe leaving the young man behind wasn’t that bad of an idea: a head.

Not just any head, but the head of a titan, the head of a… gnoll? Hard to parse at first, but after a couple of young sailors proclaimed it to be one, the resemblance became quickly apparent to everyone else: a gnoll, large enough that one of their eyes alone could likely engulf the entire ship, rising from below the depths! Their mouth open in a wide, predatory grin, some sort of thick, pasty substance leaked from their lolling tongue, the creature’s deep, rumbling cries powerful enough to nearly rupture the crew’s eardrums!

It took some time before those aboard the vessel realised those “cries” were in fact moans, and that the “substance” they were seeing coming out of the giant’s mouth was, in fact, not some exotic form of drool or blood, but… caramel? It certainly helped that the bosun, so thoroughly flabbergasted by the emergence of that creature as he was, decided he was clearly hallucinating, and thus tried some of the stuff when it reached his fingers; though none of the crew wanted to believe it, the more they stared at the emerging titan, the more they noticed that it was completely ignoring them.

It soon became clear that whatever that thing was, it was clearly uninterested in the ship; in fact, it could be said that it didn’t even know the ship was there at all, given that its attention was focused on something directly in front of it, hidden beneath the surface of the water. A second rumble later, and the plain, glass-like ocean was disturbed once again by the emergence of a gargantuan rock, easily thrice the size of the ship itself, one from which the selfsame substance was flowing from!

“It’s a… fountain of caramel…?” the navigator breathed out, one hand on the captain’s shoulder and far too much weight being placed on it, “Captain, what are we-”

“I don’t know. I… don’t know.”

Thirty years at sea, and not once had that old man seen anything that could even remotely come close to explaining what he was looking at. The slow, steady emergence of an underwater colossus, one so gargantuan that it effortlessly pushed their ship aside as it rose from the water, one who seemed more interested in guzzling down the seemingly-endless stream of, again, caramel, cascading from their pet rock formation. The sheer description of it was enough to leave his head spinning; how was he supposed to report this without being called insane?

The worst part was that it wasn’t even over yet! Whatever that giant (giantess, actually, once her bust became fully evident) was, it was definitely gargantuan, as it simply kept rising from the below water to reveal more and more of its enormously bloated, swollen form: rolls of fat stacked atop one another, thick enough to crush buildings and so wide that one could build a whole shipyard on and around them, getting bigger and bigger the further down they want, the creature’s form one clearly nurtured by years of gluttony.

Whatever or whoever that entity was, it had obviously been there, gorging itself (or herself, as it turned out) for long enough that the captain was surprised no one had ever reported an encounter before; surely, something on that scale would’ve been noticed already… unless they had been caught up by the titaness’ appearance, missing their window of opportunity to turn tail and get as far away as possible while they still had the chance.

Not on his watch.

“Someone throw a rope at the bosun!” the old man barked out, his sudden shift in tone enough to snap everyone back to reality, “Jenkins, back to the helm! Martha, find us a route out of here and back to land as soon as possible; have James mark this place down on the charts. Everyone else, why are you all standing around gawping?! We’re leaving, let’s go, everyone at the ready!”

A resounding wave of “Yes, captain!” rose through the air, enough for even the gnolless beside the ship to momentarily turn her attention towards them, before her one eye went back to the caramel springs. A moment, that was all the crew had: a moment to throw a rope overboard, turn the ship around, and get as far away from there as possible; with the boiler properly fed and the helmsman already cursing under his breath for having to execute such a tight maneuver, it was back to the usual for the crew.

Well, apart from what they were leaving behind.

But that was someone else’s problem.