Stranded And Desserted - Part 1 (Commission for Teddypimm)

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

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On the one hand, she was left alone on an island after a shipwreck, with all that entailed. Very little survival equipment beyond whatever washed up as flotsam, no way of communicating with the outside world, and nothing to make a shelter out of; just bits of wood, glass, the occasional chunk of metal twisted beyond recognition, and the odd crate of food that managed to survive the ship going down… not that it was necessary, considering where she was.

For Kela, the notion that she was actually alive still was difficult to parse, on account of where she (presumably) ended up at. Islands were simple affairs: land, in the middle of a large body of water, upon which one might find some plant life, maybe some animals if one was lucky, but mostly just shrubbery and trees and whatnot. What islands were not supposed to be was confectionery, and yet that was exactly what she was seeing all around her.

Initially, the gnoll assumed it was just a concussion; clearly, an island made entirely out of pastries and sweets couldn’t possibly exist, especially not in the middle of the ocean. Sure, the route she’d taken wasn’t that well-travelled, but surely someone, at some point, would’ve found this place and charted it, maybe even released the information to the world at large in order to make it big. So, obviously, she was just having a hallucination brought about by one too many knocks to the head.

Unfortunately for her, this delusion didn’t go away with time, even when the concussion she definitely did have wore off and the gnolless found herself capable of thinking properly once more. Despite everything, the island was definitely still there, the confectionery definitely still existed, and now the main issue became her resisting the urge to try some of it, even when most of her conscious self was screaming at her to keep her hands off of anything that looked remotely edible.

For all she knew, the entire place was like one giant harmless-looking lethal mushroom: enticing, maybe even appetizing, but one bite and she’d keel over, foaming at the mouth as her neural processes stopped and her insides turned to mush. For all she knew, the entire island was one colossal trap, placed there as a result of some odd magical mishap, kept safely away from the rest of the world by way of so many wards that the only way one could reach it was entirely by accident… or, perhaps, it had created the accident, stranding her there as a form of feeding itself, and that was why no one had ever heard of that place.

Whatever the case, it sure did do a whole lot of nothing. Kela did her best to collect as much of the washed-up supplies as she could, all while keeping an eye open and scanning her surroundings; she was expecting animals made out of sugar and dough to leap at her from the thick underbrush, maybe even see the trees unroot themselves to then entangle and drag her away to be consumed by some plant-like stomach thing. But as the minutes turned to hours and nothing happened, the gnolless had to start wondering whether or not the entire island was actually inert, and all of her fears were born more out of paranoia than any reasonable conclusion.

Or, perhaps, the whole thing was a trap, and she was expected to think like this as a form of subtle psychological manipulation. Or maybe it wasn’t a triple quadruple bluff and she was just standing there, as the sun was going down, tying knots in her own brain for no good reason, when she could be eating part of the scenery and taking care of that rumbling in her belly that had been plaguing her ears for a couple of hours.

Kela shook her head. The mere notion of eating parts of the island was enough to get her head to spin; she couldn’t possibly be thinking of falling for such an obvious trap, could she? Besides, there were plenty of supplies there for her to go through, enough that, if she rationed them properly, she’d be able to last… a couple of weeks, maybe? And that was assuming she found an untainted source of water somewhere deeper in the island, or a way to desalinate all the unusable drink she had around her.

Her stomach growled again, loudly enough for Kela to actually hear it through her thin veil of self-deception. Try as she might, she couldn’t ignore the fact that she was hungry, and being larger than your average gnoll, she required a suitably adequate source of calories, one that her meager supplies couldn’t really provide. Even the boxes that washed up on shore were nothing more than a fraction of everything she had on the ship; enough for people of a more reasonable size, but for her? And with her physique?

If she didn’t consume at least twice of what a regular human needed, she’d be wasting away within a couple of days at best, turned into a sluggish lump of diminishing muscle as her body consumed itself for sustenance, unable to even lift a finger, let alone do anything productive to keep herself alive. She could try and make the food she did have last for as long as possible, but it was a race against time that she’d already lost; unless someone came by within three days at best, she was going to have to consider eating parts of the local plantlife… assuming she could even call those things plant.

Worse yet, she had to go find some water, seeing as she didn’t carry waterskin on the ship and the broken barrels were probably on the ocean floor already. Luckily for her, it being summer still gave her a couple of hours before it became too dark to explore properly, and though it pained her to have to dive into the equivalent of a hyper-stocked pastry shop, it was either that or dehydrate to death.

Things didn’t get any better once Kela breached the first line of “foliage”, accidentally ripping a few of the “leaves” off with as much ease as she would a slice of cake… mostly because that was exactly what they seemed to be, with the stalk they were attached to being some kind of hardened confectionery that she didn’t even bother trying to identify. Oddly enough, despite being soft and malleable, the cake-leaves didn’t mush up like the actual thing would; rather, they kept their form quite nicely, even if all it took was a slight tug for a large chunk to come right off.

Definitely magic, Kela thought to herself before dropping the leaf in her hand, definitely something created artificially by some weird wizard obsessed with pastries. Trying her best to ignore as the dense under”brush” gave way to what looked to be an extensive forest of gummy trees, the gnolless kept walking, keeping her ears up for the sound of rushing water. Clearly, there had to be some around; even in the middle of such a hot day, her surroundings were oddly cool and soft, honestly feeling like a cake freshly pulled from the fridge: perfectly moist and at the right consistency to be eaten.

Even her paws seemed to leave deeper prints than usual on the ground, which Kela only then realised was made out of the same sort of pastry that the rest of the island was composed of; bits and pieces of it were stuck to her fur, and no matter how much she tried avoiding bumping into her surroundings, she was too big not to accidentally tear a couple of cake-leaves from their stalks, or to rip a chunk of solid gummy tree from the rest of the “bark”.

Her mouth watering, it took every last ounce of willpower Kela had to not succumb to that voice telling her to just eat. It was louder than ever, fed by her lack of nourishment, demanding that she sink her teeth into something, anything, before she dropped dead from instant starvation. The gnolless knew better; she knew her body could last a while before that happened, and would certainly be perfectly fine if she just waited a few more hours before eating the first portion of rations. Besides, her ears had just caught something: the rushing of a liquid, coming from somewhere further north.

Her eyes wide, a smile on her face for the first time since washing up on shore, Kela rushed towards it, shaking the ground around her as the giant gnoll ignored all sense of caution and threw herself at what she assumed to be a source of fresh water. Just as long as she could drink freely from it, just as long as it wasn’t stagnant, then she could at least keep the worst psychological effects of hunger away; it wasn’t the same as eating something substantial, but filling herself up with water would at least let her ignore some of the hunger pangs.

It wasn’t until she cleared the last few feet of distance, turning around a large rock candy formation, that Kela’s expression froze before it dropped into a slack-jawed stare, the reality of it sinking in: that wasn’t water. She certainly wanted it to be, but the slow, sluggish flow of what she had once thought to be her salvation turned out to be some form of caramel, flowing down from a hole further up in the “rock” wall and splashing down into a large pool with a short rivulet to the east.

Kela dropped to her knees. Caramel. Of course it was caramel. Why wouldn’t it be caramel, when the rest of the island was clearly made out of candy? Why exactly did she expect it to be anything else, when the universe so very obviously wanted to taunt her at every step of the way? Honestly, it was almost funny; Kela certainly laughed, though the mirthless noise was more disturbing to her than it was anything else. Her hands close to the “water”line, all the gnolless could do was look on, slightly mesmerised by how the whole thing looked perfectly like a regular stream.

There was the source, cascading from a stone wall like it wasn’t made of a thicker fluid than water, crashing onto some rocks that were probably more hard candy, pooling in a pond big enough that Kela could likely dip herself in it to take a bath, were it not… well, caramel. Tiny swirls on the surface betrayed the presence of deeper currents, leading the run-off down the rivulet that trailed off into the woods, presumably ending in the ocean, where the sweet substance would be dissolved in the saltwater until barely any traces remained.

Well, that was that. Sitting down properly, Kela kept staring at the caramel, weighing her options as she slowly came to the realisation that if she wanted to drink anything on that island, she was either going to have to finagle a desalination system, or just guzzle down the caramel the land was giving her. And as much as she intellectually knew that it was a bad idea, she was hungry, she was thirsty, she was reasonably sure that thing would feel like water anyway on account of its clearly magical nature, and the scent of it was driving her absolutely insane with want.

She had to drink it. Eat it, whatever, she needed that thing in her, if for no other reason than to slake her thirst. Easy enough to rationalise it that way: she was just drinking enough to leave her not thirsty, nothing else. She just needed to get herself sorted, and then she’d work on developing a more permanent, non-caramel-based solution; then she could start worrying about everything else, once that was taken care of.

So she dipped her hand in the caramel. It was surprisingly warm. Inviting enough.

Enough that she didn’t notice the second handful going down.

***

It had been a couple of weeks ever since she was shipwrecked, and despite initial concerns, Kela found that living on the island wasn’t nearly as bad as she thought it would be. Granted, her food supplies had ran dry in the first three days, courtesy of her ravenous hunger, but the island itself was more than happy to provide for her, assuming she was willing to take what it had to offer.

And, again despite her fears at the start, the gnolless found that just eating what she had around her didn’t turn out half as bad as her mind was making it out to be; in fact, as soon as she got over the sugar rush and it became a regular part of her everyday life, Kela began slipping away from the concept of meals at all, preferring to just snack whenever she felt like it.

In her head, it made perfect sense to eschew the conventions of civilisation. For one, she wasn’t in civilisation anymore, and much like with her travels, there was no reason for her to adhere to any one strict schedule just because that’s how things were “meant” to be done; plus, the whole island was there for the taking as far as she was concerned. There was no need to prepare food, to cook, to clean, to do anything really; she didn’t need to spend any time getting ready for a meal as much as she just had to extend her hand and grab whatever was close by.

Of course, this did come at the price of her well-trained physique, but sacrifices had to be made for the sake of survival; Kela wasn’t about to kill herself through starvation just because she wanted to leave behind a pretty corpse. Besides, she could go back to training and getting back in shape once a ship passed by and collected her, even if by then she’d likely need a second vessel just to transport her. She was, after all, still on an island made entirely out of confectionery, and as much as she would’ve liked for that not to be the case, this had some serious consequences for her figure.

Not that the gnolless had ever been tight, but still; her line of work did favour stockier builds, possessed of just enough fat that a stray slash wouldn’t immediately cut through muscle… plus, heavier meant a lower center of gravity meant better brawling and a much easier time bowling over opponents, which was always a plus. More than once, Kela had walked into a tavern somewhere and had everyone stare at her like she was some kind of overweight, inept idiot who could barely tell the right side of her firsts, only to be shown, in quite a direct fashion, why she could afford to walk around without much gear on.

Unfortunately, this sort of build wasn’t kept on goodwill and wishes alone; much as she tried not to get too zealous over it, she did still need to exercise some degree of control over what she ate and how much of it she did, lest her occasional moments of indulgence spill over into a habit. It might not look like it, but her form was one that was meticulously maintained through strict discipline and a surprising amount of self-control… making her island stint that much more damaging to it.

She tried not to think too much about it, lest the reality of it catch up with her and Kela find herself despairing over having put on another herself over the course of those two weeks. She had no scales to properly measure it, but the weight she was lugging around on a daily basis was definitely far, far higher than it had once been, enough so that she had definitely crossed the border from stocky, to fat, to outright obese… and yet, she found that she had no issues moving around at all.

She should’ve been unable to move after the first week was done and her belly was slung out so far ahead of her that it nearly touched the floor. When her legs had fattened so much that their bottom half had begun to encroach on her paws, covering them almost completely midway through the second week. When her chubby arms interacted with her round self in just the right way that she lost range of motion, forcing her to physically turn around whenever she wanted to grab something.

Instead, her mobility refused to take a hit, and while she was definitely more destructive to her surroundings, Kela could still move from point A to point B with as much ease as she could beforehand. And good for that as well, because a bigger body required more sustenance to keep it going, and her hunger had been spectacularly fierce for the past few days; it felt that, the more she consumed, the more of the island the gnolless threw down her gullet, the more she wanted to eat, until there was nothing left of her surroundings but whatever the ground was made out of.

That was the one line she hadn’t crossed yet… though mostly because Kela didn’t know how far down the confectionery went, and the last thing she needed was to suddenly transition from a mouthful of cake to dirt and worms; plus, it looked to her that the island itself replenished its stocks at an accelerated rate, enough that entire patches of it that she’d cleaned out one day would be right back there the following morning.

Really, yet another reason for her not to worry about what she was eating; clearly, she had no need to be sparse with her consumption, as the magic that created that place was obviously designed to keep it going even when under assault by someone as gluttonous as Kela. Not that she saw herself as being that, of course; she wasn’t eating merely for the sake of it, she was only eating what she had to in order to sustain herself, and this just so happened to include a large amount of naturally spawning pastries.

Now, there was the slight issue that whenever she ate from the island, the sugar and calories left her heavier than before, as the confectionery appeared to be extra fattening, even compared to what would be expected; one bite seemed to count for several, and as much as Kela tried to convince herself that it would be easy enough to burn it off, every pound gained was a pound she didn’t feel like sloughing off herself out of sheer laziness.

Thus, it didn’t take long before her body reached a tipping point where the more she ate, the bigger she became, the more she needed to eat, and the more she fattened up; locked in this cycle, the only thing that could ever break her out would be her own discipline and self-restraint, and those were somewhat lacking ever since the gnolless first tasted of the natural wonders around her.

But it was fine, she figured, just as long as she didn’t go out of her way to eat any more than she technically needed to; it was fine, so long as she only ate what she needed… even if this amount grew larger by the day. Just as long as she could still move, as long as she could get from point A to point B without collapsing, then things were perfectly fine.

Besides, what was she expected to do? Starve to death? With a whole island filled with delectable wonders for her to consume, an entire land built from the ground up to service those living on it should they find themselves stranded? Clearly, whoever put the island there to begin with knew exactly what they were doing: they had done so not as a magical mishap, but as a means of providing a safe haven for any who might find themselves adrift in the ocean!

It made sense as well, given the relative scarcity of any landmasses around there; hells below, if it hadn’t been for the floating confectionery stand, then Kela would’ve been alone, stranded in the middle of an ocean, with not a speck of dry dirt for hundreds of miles in every direction! If anything, she should be thankful for having the island be there, and the sincerest form of flattery could only come from accepting the bounty provided without questioning what it would do to her.

There were still moments of hesitation though, she couldn’t deny that; still moments where Kela, occasionally possessed of something resembling a functional fight-or-flight response, froze when she looked down at herself and noticed the sheer roundness of it all. But these moments were just that: moments, quick to pass, quicker to be forgotten, left behind in the fog of her memories as the gnolless’ old life slowly ebbed away from her mind, replaced with naught but the everyday existence she was carving out on that island.

Not that she was forgetting what she did; her experiences were still there, locked away in her long-term memory, untouchable and effectively unassailable. It was just that, when confronted with the immediate threat of her survival (or lack thereof), thinking about anything other than making through another day became secondary; she didn’t have the luxury of being able to worry about making it to another inn, or having a contract ready for her at the nearest city over, or whether or not the next bandit group would put up a fight.

Instead, she had to go through every day, not knowing whether it would be her last… in theory, at least. There would come a time when Kela, so used to the island and what it could give her, would eventually become comfortable enough to start concerning herself with secondary-level matters, but that day was still a long ways away; after all, she was still having to live off the land! Truly, if she had the time to think about her contracts or fighting style being affected by her weight, then it had to mean she had things sorted out; seeing as she was still foraging on a daily basis, then she clearly didn’t have things sorted out.

Simple math. Not necessarily correct math, but simple regardless, and one that the gnolless could understand: foraging meant precarious meant not worrying about anything other than foraging. She might still have issues with how the cake leaves were starting to fill her less and less, but beggars couldn’t be choosers; she had no more fresh supplies from the ship, and the leaves kept growing in, so she had to eat them.

Sure, she was having to devour the whole damned plant now just to feel the degree of satisfaction she used to with a single leaf, but there were plenty of them there, they were quick to replenish themselves, and what else was she to do, starve to death? No, she had a right to survive and a duty to keep herself alive until help arrived, and for that, she needed to keep herself well-fed.

And slaked as well, couldn’t forget that. There was only one source of potable drinking… well, not water, but the closest equivalent, in the entire island: the caramel falls. Thankfully, they performed the job admirably, enough that Kela had taken to parking herself underneath the cascading sweetness, opening her mouth, and letting the sweet mannah roll down her tongue and throat. At times, she could practically see her belly bloating, but filed that away as a trick of the eye.

She couldn’t really be fattening in real time, that was preposterous; it was just caramel, it wasn’t as if she’d plugged herself with a hose linked to a vat full of fat in it. And besides, she was thirsty; what was she to do, not drink? Utterly preposterous; it was her island, and she would drink as much as she wanted to!