Turnaround - Part 4-A (Patreon Commission for MephistonOwl)

TAGS: Growth/Expansion, Weight Gain, Blob/Obese, Ravenous Hunger

---===---

No one expected the product to work so well, but let no opportunity go to waste! With there now being literal living proof of the effectiveness of the food paste product, it didn’t take long before Delton welcomed Woz into the “family” as… something to do with sales and representation, he wasn’t quite paying attention when he was given the speech and told about how grateful everyone was for him to have given them such a bountiful opportunity.

Honestly, he was just confused; the gator had no clue what had happened beyond the fact that they were given some food in a tube and ended up being big enough to flatten a significant portion of the bayou, but hey, just as long as the food kept coming; he felt downright ravenous for most of the day, enough that he had to exercise a great deal of willpower just to keep himself from falling into the same pit as Antoine had: he was there to be a good alternative, not become another swamp tyrant.

Still, he couldn’t deny that his new body was significantly better than the one he had before. While most people wouldn’t exactly be content in having become a literal hill of fat, Woz was nothing if not ecstatic at the opportunity presented to him: to be able to just be, to sit there and be immense without a care in the world, was about the best-case scenario as far as he was concerned… that is, until he had to start moving, at which point it became something of a problem.

Now, motion was reserved for those whose bodies weren’t so utterly colossal that they became local geographic landmarks. Motion was for people who were people-sized, not him; his belly slung out a couple of miles in front of him, it was a wonder that he was even alive at all, especially with how stretched-out and warped his insides must’ve become in order to accommodate for his new gargantuan physiology. Luckily, however, Delton had an answer for that as well.

While Woz didn’t pay much attention, he did retain an important nugget: the same man responsible for creating the food paste that turned him into a titan of pudge was, surprisingly enough, gifted in the fields of physics and engineering as well; as they put it, their true calling lay in “uncovering the fantastical” and “reinventing the mundane”, buzzwords that Woz found very impressive, yet didn’t bother to try and decipher. What mattered was that Delton had more up his sleeves than just a hyper-caloric paste substitute, and one of those tricks was just what the gator needed to get back on his feet again.

Now, he didn’t know how it was supposed to work, nor even if it was supposed to work, but when he put the bracelets on and suddenly saw himself in a much smaller size, the gator figured it’d be best for everyone involved if he just didn’t question it; with his luck, if he started wondering aloud how this “compression” technology was meant to work, it might just stop working, and then it’d be back to square one! He had Delton’s guarantee, and that was enough for him… at least, for the time being; goodness knows what might happen when he fell off the wagon and began gorging himself silly again.

For the time being though, the bracelets should do the trick. Plus, all he had to do was slip them on and so much of him just vanished: one moment he was sitting there, being so enormous as to be visible from the upper atmosphere, and the next his significantly-smaller self was several feet above ground, ready to fall down once gravity remembered how it was supposed to act. It was cartoonish in a way, but then again, he was so massive that there was no other way for it to go… at least, not within the known bounds of modern science.

Granted, compression wear wasn’t supposed to literally dimensionally compress bodies until they were several times smaller than their real size, but if Delton said it was fine, and didn’t endanger the stability of local reality too much, then Woz figured it should be fine. Besides, he still kept plenty of himself even in this “reduced” form of his, at least compared to what he used to be like: from him being nearly twenty feet tall to carrying a gargantuan boulder of a belly, measuring in at nearly sixteen tons of dense mass, he was everything that a gator could hope to be! That, and it seemed like a significant chunk of his mass was repurposed and redistributed into his musculature, giving him something of a musclegut aesthetic, as he began hearing people call it.

Personally, he didn’t much care for nametags or labels, just as long as he didn’t have to sacrifice himself or his new figure. That was his one demand of Delton and his company: that no matter what they did, he wasn’t to actually get thinner, merely look the part; indeed, it was now their job to make sure that he at least keep his weight, maybe even increase it if at all possible, especially now that he knew he could just hide it away with two fashionable accessories around his wrists.

It was for this exact reason that Woz woke up one day to a communiqué from Delton himself. After being moved to a specially-made house a couple of miles out from where two of them first met, the gator had spent most of his time trying to adapt to this new form of his, while doing his best to ignore the fact that it was only a fraction of his real self; every single day was a challenge, where Woz knew what was waiting for him just beneath his skin, yet couldn’t unleash it for fear that Delton might not be so generous with housing if their prized customer proved to be unreliable with his self-control.

So each day was spent finding something to do, no matter how monotonous or innocuous, that would keep his mind occupied and away from thoughts of large sizes or immense feasts. He still gorged himself on a regular basis, though mostly on the food paste, but that was hardly the full extent of what he could do; even after a full-course meal (or the equivalent, at least), Woz still felt dreadfully empty, in the sense that he knew he could take so much more. He could eat until the world was unable to keep feeding him… but he couldn’t, because then he’d be no better than the gator he helped overthrow. He had to control himself, and that meant keeping his feeding to just half a dozen boxes per meal and not a single gulp more.

Thankfully, Delton had just the solution to his hunger woes, in the form of a local eating competition he just happened to stumble onto. Of course, by “local”, it was held at the state capital, and carried with it a several decade-long history, but who was paying attention to the details? Certainly not Woz, who heard the words “eating competition” and immediately beelined for his closet, wanting to get clothed as quickly as possible to make his way down to the big city before anyone had a chance of cutting in line; it took Delton casually reminding him that he had two weeks for the gator to calm down, and even then he was still left buzzing as the man on the other end of the line explained their plans.

There was something there about it being a publicity stunt, yada yada, something or other about it being a perfect chance to “show off the goods”, whatever that was supposed to mean; Woz was more or less zoning out every other word, too focused on the prospect of being allowed to gorge himself with no care for the consequences to really care about anything else. It had, by then, been a couple of months since he last truly feasted, and while the food paste had kept his weight somewhat stable, he desperately needed something big to leave him stuffed and unable to move.

Plus, he had the bracelets, did he not? So even if he went overboard, he could always recover with just a (literal) flick of the wrist, leaving him as good as new; nevermind how those things probably had a safety limit which he never bothered remembering, or how Delton was warning him about overconsumption in a way that Woz seriously didn’t care about. Really, the man should be happy he wasn’t having the phone hung up on his face after daring to suggest that there might be such a state as being “too full”, and it took all of Woz’s energy not to reply to that with a few choice words that he’d regret later.

Good sense persevered, however, as the gator opted to be the better man and forgive Delton  for this brief transgression. Besides, the man had alerted him to the existence of the eating competition, so there was some give-and-take there, even if Woz was vaguely aware he might’ve agreed to serve as living advertisement for whatever company Delton was in charge of. It mattered very little; just as long as he could eat, then everything was taken care of.

The days passed, and with them, whatever little patience Woz still had. Knowing what he did, he had to constantly stop himself from just walking out the door and making his way over to the capital; he’d been told to sit still and wait for transportation, to the point where, when the hovercraft rolled in and the moving crew told him to get on, Woz practically broke the vehicle in half when he jumped onto it, straining its ability to remain above water and very nearly tipping the whole damned thing into the bayou. Not his fault he was so heavy; if Delton and his cronies wanted to move him from place to place, they should be ready to deal with the consequences of their own product.

Even more bizarrely, he was asked to take the wristbands off when they were mid-transit, which seriously confused the gator, considering the hovercraft was definitely not three miles wide and capable of taking him at his biggest; it was only then that he was reminded of one of the myriad of conditions he agreed to when he told his nominal boss that he’d agree to the eating contest, that being to put a show on for the bracelets themselves.

“They’re one of our newest product lines,” one of the techies informed him, “so we’re gonna keep you on a mobile compression field and move you to the venue, then when the contest begins you just put the bracelets on, show off what they can do, and we’re set!”

Simple enough, at least in how it was presented, though Woz was still left with a myriad of questions that were absolutely not answered in the slightest. Instead, he was just asked to take the bracelets off again, and, figuring that the technicians knew what they were doing, the gator relented and did so: almost immediately, his body billowed outwards at a rate fast enough to completely engulf the local landscape… and yet, stopped just short of spilling over from the hovercraft, a blubbery waterbed of fat in the rough shape of an alligator, kept contained through some unknown field.

The company movers congratulated themselves with a round of claps on the back and high-fives as a very confused Woz watched on, but, figuring that they knew what they were doing, the gator closed his eyes and resolved to enjoy the ride. It took them several hours before they were even close to their destination, and it was only through the skin of their teeth that they avoided having to stop for a rest in the middle of the night… mostly at Woz’s insistence, who firmly refused to have to be moved from his spot until he was at the contest’s location and ready to be dumped onto the ground; if he was going to move, he was going to move the least possible.

Not wanting to argue with him, the techies instead took shifts driving the hovercraft, then eventually the truck it was loaded into. Plenty of eyes were drawn to the sight of the colossal gator being driven down the highway; plenty of rightful attention, as far as Woz himself was concerned, as his form was worthy of such wordless praise. Or, at least, he assumed it was praise, he couldn’t imagine how anyone would look at him and not see the pinnacle of perfection.

Arriving at the state capital in the middle of the night, Woz was the first one to suggest the team turn in, causing several eyerolls and plentiful grumbling from a very tired team of techies who’d been saying the exact same thing for hours. This, of course, after being driven to the back of an old theater that had been repurposed as a staging ground for the eating contest a couple of days later. Not enough of a service entry to fit the truck, but they were close enough that Woz didn’t object; besides, he was feeling groggy after a late night snack, and really just wanted to go to sleep without being on the move.

He became something of a minor local attraction in the short time before the competition began, though he wasn’t allowed to leave the truck. No skin off his back; it just meant he had to sit there and eat, doing nothing but gorging mindlessly as he was brought case after case of food tubes… food tubes that, oddly enough, didn’t seem to fill him nearly as much as they used to.

Yes, he always felt somewhat empty even after eating, but this was more a result of his stomach having turned into a voracious bottomless hole rather than actual hunger. He wanted to eat, he didn’t need to, which was why this sensation of emptiness was so much more terrifying to him. If he never felt sated, if he never truly felt satisfied, then there was a good chance he might turn into a ravenous monster, one who cared only for his own gluttony and nothing else! It certainly didn’t help that Delton was around, preparing a company stall for the competition; Woz felt that, if he made a scene, there might be a chance the man would cut him off from his one source of proper nourishment.

So he kept eating, and he kept feeling the hole in his stomach growing deeper, more yawning, until his belly gurgled and rumbled aggressively loudly with every minute that went by, demanding sustenance that it was not getting. He was tortured, horrifically so, and it wasn’t made better when Delton hopped on the truck and then onto himself, biggest grin on their face and holding a solid metal briefcase on one hand.

Woz felt like eating the man. In his madness, in his hunger, he truly and earnestly thought about grabbing Delton and throwing him down his gullet, as then, surely, he would feel some manner of fullness. Alas, his arms were too stubby in that form for him to do so, and besides, Delton was quick to ask him if he was feeling any different, bearing a smarmy grin that made it obvious they already knew the answer.

“A little preparation for the contest,” he mused aloud, seemingly attempting to be sneaky and sly despite very clearly wanting to monologue, “the boys suggested we keep you on a diet until the allotted hour, leave you nice and empty so you’d clean house when the ball rang. I do truly apologise for the deception, Woz, but I’m sure you can understand, we do have a lot ridin’ on you winning this competition. Besides, you ain’t actually wasting away, you just… feel like you are. You’re fine, promise.”

Woz didn’t know whether to be supremely pissed off at the deception, or whether to kiss Delton for giving him the greatest gift that anyone could: plausible deniability. There was no question as to who would win the contest, that much was already decided, but it would look terrible on Woz and his sponsor if he just gobbled up all the other entrants’ meals without asking, not to mention it likely breaking several rules. But if he was famished? If he hopped on stage and truly looked like he was starving and in desperate need of sustenance?

… well, it would likely raise a number of concerning ethical questions, but at least no one would be able to blame him for going into the whole thing with so much gusto that he cleaned up, ate seconds, fourths, and then demanded more. Something along those lines, it was hard to think when one’s mind was constantly beset by hunger pangs; at the very least, the competition was slated to begin about three or so hours after Delton’s little reveal, giving Woz a deadline to work for, and a goal to reach.

Ten minutes before the official start, a techie appeared beside Woz and told him to put the bracelets on. “Show’s on,” were the exact words, along with a tiny smirk on the corner of their mouth as they dismounted the vehicle and rushed to Delton’s side by one of the larger corporate stalls. For Woz, the time had finally come, and with a final, long exhale, he dug around in the folds of his neck and pulled out the two compression bracelets he’d been keeping in there.

For the gator, it was just another move among many, done only to get him as close to more food as possible: he put the compressors on, his body returned to its more mobile state, and he stepped off the truck to take up position on the table set up on the stage. For everyone else, they saw an enormous, behemothian alligator, seemingly having crawled out of the bayou after devouring most of its inhabitants, strolling through the plaza as if it were the most natural thing on the planet.

Reactions were mixed. Despite Delton’s advance warnings that their sponsored participant was an “unorthodox choice”, no one expected him to be something like Woz; on the other hand, the sight of him was so extraordinarily out of the realm of the expected that it effectively short-circuited most onlookers’ brains, rooting them to their spots as their minds rebooted to try and make sense of what they were looking at.

Thus, while a handful raised objections, and a tiny minority ran screaming out of the plaza, most just stood there, doing their best to comprehend what Woz was, what their purpose happened to be, and just what in blazes they were doing in a competition designed to be attended by humans, not beasts. Delton standing by with the widest smirk on his face certainly answered a few questions for those who knew the man, but for many more, he was just a random face in the crowd, someone with enough money to spend that they could apparently throw it at a bayou gator to serve as their representative.

Woz himself missed the presentation that followed. Delton had it all planned out to the most minute detail, waiting for the moment when the gator sat down to go on a long diatribe about the bracelets, what they did, as well as the effects on oversized bodies; he even brought slides to help along, projected onto a wide canvas he’d set up in his company’s stall. But Woz wasn’t listening; all he saw was the wide, absurdly spacious table in front of him, and immediately his brain went to work imagining just how much food could fit on there, at which point his salivary glands went into overdrive and several contestants began inching away from him with looks of terror on their faces.

Everyone knew how things were going to go. It was plainly evident from the expression Woz wore that he wasn’t going to abide by the rules, nor was he going to hold back when food was placed in front of him; even the contest’s organisers knew this much, hence why they avoided placing any of the gumbo in front of the gator when they were distributing the first round of pots to the competitors, eyeing Woz with a mixture of abject fear and trepidation whenever whey got close enough to see his nostrils twitch at the scents.

Woz himself didn’t take it personally. Not a lot he could do there beyond throw himself at the staff and most likely make a pariah of himself, and then he wouldn’t be able to gorge himself on some delicious gumbo, now would we? Patience was key; he held out for over a day, so he could hold out for another ten or so minutes as the rules were announced, the contestants introduced, and Delton did his best not to take over the show whenever anyone decided to ask why the gator was still on stage.

Ten minutes, that was all he had to wait, before a pot of gumbo was placed in front of him. To everyone else, it would’ve been a sizeable task indeed, considering the damned thing was big enough to feed a family of five for a couple of meals; hell, it wasn’t even an eating competition as much as it was an endurance test to have to eat all of it, enough so that the rules of the competition itself outright said that finishing a pot wasn’t even a requirement: the winner was simply the one who could take the most before giving up, under the assumption that no one would be able to clean it up.

Unfortunately for the organisers, they had never met Woz, nor had they seen what he was capable of. A sense of dread spread throughout the staff when they all looked up at the gator and saw that he didn’t appear famished anymore: he was disappointed. Indeed, for the gator, being given the equivalent of a morning snack as some sort of “goal” was nothing short of insulting; if they actually wanted to put him to the test, then surely they would’ve done something a bit more substantial. He even looked towards Delton, who simply shrugged and gestured for him to carry on, at which point the gator huffed and sat with his back straight waiting for the order to start eating.

When it came, delivered by someone whose voice was shakier than their knees, it was over before it even began. The contestants directly by his side were barely started with their cutlery when Woz unceremoniously dumped the entire contents of the pot into his mouth, downing the whole thing in one go; not only that, but the moment he put it down, he automatically reached for the nearest pot and swallowed its contents as well, the contestant it was assigned to wisely choosing not to complain about it.

From there, anything that happened to be within range was fair game as far as Woz was concerned, and given the contest’s organisers were in no position to stop him, it didn’t take more than a minute for every table to be cleaned up, leaving everyone present stunned, and those in the backstage scrambling to try and find something to replace all the gumbo. There were some backup plans for the rare occasion someone might finish and need to go into round two, but all of a sudden, several dozen pounds of steak didn’t look like much compared to the ravenous appetite of a beast of Woz’s size and girth.

Still, they had to try, if for no other reason than to ensure the safety of those watching; for all they knew, the gator would turn on the crowd the moment they had nothing else to eat, and then how would they explain the losses? No, best to just get the steaks on the grill and beg with Delton to tell his sponsored competitor to wait a few more minutes while the meat was being prepared, the kitchen staff to worried about their own safety to notice as the man utterly ignored everything they said and hopped onto the stage, addressing the crowd himself.

Once again, Woz wasn’t listening; the gumbo helped to alleviate his hunger somewhat, but it wasn’t anywhere close to enough to fill the hole left behind by Delton’s scheme. He needed to eat something more substantial… which was why his first reaction on seeing a few familiar boxes being carted in was to lean over and grab the handtruck they were on, dumping the contents directly into his gullet and causing most of the crowd to recoil in shock as a gasp erupted from it.

He felt the taste on his tongue, one he was unfortunately very acquainted with: cardboard and plastic, encasing the true prize in the form of Delton’s proprietary food paste. Woz failed to notice the sales pitch, as he did fail to note that he had just become the centerpiece for an impromptu corporate presentation; all that mattered was that he consume, and as long as he had that delicious, filling food substitute to eat through, then everything else was irrelevant. It was the good stuff as well, none of that hunger-inducing nonsense: every bite he took, every mouthful of it that he gulped down, left him ever fuller, ever more stuffed… and, just as before, ever more wanting.

It wasn’t the need that had beset him for the past day, but the same want for more that he had been gifted ever since meeting Delton for the first time. He didn’t need to eat more, but he did certainly want to to do it, and now, absent any reason to hold back, the company was happy to throw most of its stock into the gator’s gut; after all, whatever money they lost would be recouped a thousandfold once the real orders came rolling in, with their investment in Woz paying off more than even in their wildest projections.

It was certainly a sight to behold. For a crowd used to the same-old eating competition, seeing something that looked like 60s astronaut food being dumped into the gullet of a ravenous creature who seemed to bloat with every mouthful… made an impression, to say the least. Especially with the explanation provided by Delton on how the bracelets were supposed to work; if the stuff was so nutritious and filling and it visibly fattened the gator up even through the compression field, then clearly it had to be good, or at least high enough in calories to warrant experimenting.

And Woz, being Woz, was happy to show off, even if he wasn’t intending on doing so. There was no thought behind his mindless consumption, only the need to feed himself and gorge on as much of that delicious food paste as possible; if this ended up having a positive knock-on effect for the company providing him with the snacks, then it was entirely incidental, given he had absolutely no intention of providing free publicity: he just wanted to eat, so he did.

Eat, until the compression field created by the bracelets inevitably began to falter. There was only so much that those two things could do, and as much as they tried their best to keep the gator under control, there came a point when the amount of mass hidden away in their dimensional pocket exceeded their top safety limit. Beyond this point, it was no longer a case of the gator’s body being allowed to bloat up in order to alleviate stress; rather, once the cap was blown through, the entire compression field simply stopped working altogether, resulting in Woz billowing outwards all at once, covering the stage so quickly that most of the contestants were pinned down underneath his enormous self!

Of course, the gator himself didn’t really notice this happening, nor did he take note of Delton’s men activating a secondary compression apparatus meant to keep him from blobbing over the entire city. He was used to far greater sizes, after all; what did it matter if he overtook a plaza, when his real self could carpet the whole capital in a thick blanket of gator pudge? Best if he focus entirely on eating more, on consuming his body weight in hyper-caloric food substitute, just so he could make up for all that lost time in which he wasn’t doing it.

With the contest thus thoroughly ruined, it fell to the crowd to figure out what they wanted to do on a per-person basis. Most ran, only to turn back around at what they deemed to be a safe distance, while a few actually stuck around, literally sticking to Woz’s body as they tried to get a slice of the proverbial pie. One after another, they threw themselves onto the gator’s swollen form, rubbing themselves indiscriminately on it to the point where even Woz himself began to notice… as did his stomach.

By this point, that gargantuan gut of his had already rolled over most of the plaza and began encroaching on the buildings directly in front of him. No one wanted to believe that it could really do anything truly destructive, but once the first dust clouds formed and the first windows broke, that’s when the reality of it all sank in.

Once the first building came toppling down, courtesy of a belly too immense for it to withstand, that’s when everyone either began running or doubled down by holding onto that enormous pile of fat rolls. Which, ultimately, only reinforced the cycle which caused an already-oversized gut to become even more agitated, which didn’t help the theatre when it began collapsing underneath the strain of an encroaching mound of pudge.

It was inevitable that the whole thing would end in a belch. It had done so the other three times, and this one wouldn’t be any different. All Woz could do was smile when he felt the by-then familiar sensation gurgling up from his stomach, bubbling into one gargantuan pocket of air that would soon rise up through his throat, ready to burst forth into the outside world.

When he opened his mouth, there were people and buildings in front of him; this was normal, as he was in a large city. When he began burping, Woz had a moment or two to appreciate the sight of said buildings buckling outwards under the strain. And when he was finished burping, a good deafening hour or so later, there were no buildings: only a cone of flattened terrain, with nothing left but foundations and the occasional chunk of wall, stubbornly refusing to drop down.

But he was finally full, at least.

For the time being.