February Surprise (Patreon Commission for MephistonOwl)

TAGS: Muscle Growth, Transformation/TF, Owlformation, Hyper

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It wasn’t the best of starts to a new year. In fact, one might say it was an absolutely shit start and Mephiston wanted nothing more than to forget it had happened, but alas, he had no such luxury available to him; January had happened, it wasn’t going to not happen, and now the owl had to find some way of dealing with it that didn’t involve banging his head against the wall wondering what he could’ve done differently.

In fact, he was better served doing the exact opposite. While it was easier said than done, he knew, intellectually at least, that he needed to find something to do in order to distract himself; Meph couldn’t afford to spend hours mulling over every little thing, but he lacked the mental resources to deal with it properly, so the only real option was to find something else to occupy himself with so his meat computer wouldn’t be too distracted thinking about… well, that. Also that. And the other thing, that was also terrible.

Sighing, the owl looked through a list of local gyms, hoping to find one that was on the way from work to his place, then filtering through the ones with three stars or less so he could handily throw them into the dustbin. The last thing he needed was a shit atmosphere to bring him down even more, and with money being no object, he’d rather pay something extra to get better service than risk making a bad situation worse. Plus, he’d never gone to a gym in his life, so he figured it might be best for him not to start with a terrible first impression.

So February came, and with it a whole new month filled with possibilities for disappointment, and with them, a whole host of new problems for him to worry about. It took all of Mephiston’s non-insignificant willpower to even get him to go through with the gym plans, and even then he practically had to drag himself out of his car after forcing himself to take a right turn instead of carrying on driving forward to his home. He sat in the parking lot for what felt like a good half an hour, perhaps even more, before he mustered up the initiative to open the driver’s seat there and practically slump onto the ground outside.

Walking into the gym, however, was a different experience altogether. Mephiston couldn’t tell if it was the air inside being warmer than the bitterly cutting winter wind on the outdoors, or if the simple exercise of actually making himself do something had been step one towards recovery, but he didn’t feel as crap after the doors closed behind him. Indeed, when he got busy speaking with the front desk clerk to take care of his membership, it was surprisingly easy for the day’s worries to start melting into the background of his mind, especially when he tried tuning into the ambient noises and found them to be… bearable.

He didn’t particularly enjoy loud noises, being an owl and all, but his sensitive hearing was surprisingly not hurt or otherwise offended by what was coming from the other side of the double-wide glass doors separating the gym proper from the entrance and the stairs to the underground changing rooms. There was noise, yes, but it was more of a continuous, low-grade thrum of activity than it was an explosion of shouting and pissing matches between overbulked meatheads with more biceps than brains. More than once, he heard personal trainers counting people down, as well as a couple of celebratory cheers once someone, presumably, beat a personal record or whatever it was people did at those places.

With the paperwork sorted though, there was nothing left but for Meph to head downstairs, change into his workout attire, then get down to business wasting time before he needed to go home and make dinner for himself. He did his best not to think; not just think about anything in particular, but not think in general. Blanking his mind was, as he had heard somewhere, a helpful strategy when trying not to worry too much, but alas, it was significantly easier for him to read about it and think about how it might be done than it was for him to actually do it. There was just… too much: too many worries about his workplace, too many problems with his friend circle, too many little things with his home; none of those were actually major, in the sense that none of them, on their own, would upturn his life, but they all added up to create a potential shitstorm in the making, one that Mephiston spent the better part of January trying his best to curtail and keep from exploding into a genuine crisis.

Thus, once he stepped out into the gym proper, it was… good. Not excellent, certainly not enough to get him to stop thinking about all the nonsense going on outside its walls, but there was enough background noise in there that he could focus on that instead, allowing his mind to melt into the overall scene and not spend too much time held onto any one thought. It felt like flowing water, in a way: sure, he’d have those thoughts, and feel a momentary pang of concern, but then something would happen next to him that would distract him, causing his thought process to suddenly break and restart.

Mephiston figured that, were he to start doing something, then this might be exacerbated, and not wanting to waste an opportunity, immediately picked a treadmill and took up position. No personal trainers approached him, presumably because they figured someone as buff as him wouldn’t need their assistance, leaving the owl to set his own rhythm to get into without anyone nagging him about goals or dietary adjustments. Once the speed was set and his legs were properly stretched, then he could start running at a regular pace and just let his whole self vanish into what he was doing.

Embodying himself was hard. Letting his thoughts flush out from his brain so it could be put to use governing his muscles and physical exertion instead was a process, and one that Mephiston had to learn from scratch; he’d never had much need for working out, his anatomy apparently agreeing with him well enough that he was always on the buff side with minimal effort, so actually getting on a treadmill to run for an extended period of time was a genuinely novel experience. He had so many little things to worry about that, past a certain point, his brain must’ve thrown its proverbial arms in the air and decided that handling balance and breathing regularity was more important than spending time thinking about what Dave said to Karl and whether or not that would affect everyone’s chances of meeting their quarterly goals.

In fact, the longer he was on the treadmill, the easier it became for him to just not care about anything other than being on the treadmill, mostly because he had no clue how to use one of those things and was almost convinced he was doing it wrong. He was reasonably sure he wasn’t supposed to be swaying so much, or having so much trouble keeping up with the… belt? Was it a belt? The part where he was supposed to run on, he had no clue what he was supposed to call that thing, he was very certain that he was meant to stay on it and not be constantly struggling to deal with himself so he wouldn’t promptly crash onto the floor.

But, at the same time, it was something. Having to constantly think about his bodily balance, where his legs where, whether or not he was going too fast or too slow, then synching everything back up so he wouldn’t crash and embarrass himself made for a wonderful amount of noise that his brain had to deal with, unless it wanted to find itself in a worse predicament than it already was. And given how it only had a limited amount of processing power, it had to start prioritising: hence why, after a few short minutes, Mephiston was no longer thinking about… whatever it was he had been worried about, he had better things to think of now that he was getting into his groove.

What he failed to notice, and indeed what everyone failed to notice, was that his arrival in the gym proper had created a rippling disturbance all around him that rapidly spread between those present and began working its magic long before the effects of it became noticeable. Whether it be because Mephiston’s constant worrying was infectious and had now mutated, or some other, hitherto-unknown aspect of his biology, him simply being in that place was enough to start affecting others, even when they were barely aware the owl was there at all. He was just another customer, as far as most of the gym-goers were concerned, nothing more; that he seemed to have a noticeable presence was easily filed away into them imagining things.

But he did have a noticeable presence, and one that could be very literally sniffed out if one was paying enough attention. While he wasn’t dirty by any means, and had just barely begun to grow sweaty, the scent wafting from him was nonetheless very noticeable, enough so that whoever passed close to him had their nose twitch and their body grow hotter just through proximity alone. It wasn’t uncomfortable though, far from it; in fact, one could say it was the exact opposite, given the sort of thoughts that popped into their heads whenever they came too close to the owl, especially when they looked at Meph himself and began wondering what it would be like to run their fingers across his bulk and feel themselves sink into the beefiest owl they’d seen all year already.

Mephiston himself was blissfully unaware of this, being too busy looking at the display on the screen in front of him. He might be new to the whole gym scene, but he wasn’t an idiot, he knew how treadmills were supposed to work… in theory, at least. He had no clue what each individual speed felt like, but he did know that he was supposed to make it go higher until he found a point where he was comfortable at; seeing as he was used to hurrying around everywhere, Meph felt like he should try his luck increasing the run rate. He was entirely unaware that from his body was wafting a cloud of pheromones so potent that a good chunk of the gym goers around him were, quite literally, around him.

There was plenty of empty space to use, and dozens upon dozens of individual pieces of equipment aligned in multiple rows, enough for over a hundred people to use the gym comfortably without ever bumping into one another. There was no reason why they would all clump up together in one spot, especially near the treadmills where there weren’t those many things to do besides run in one spot, but with Mephiston there, others began feeling an almost unnatural attraction towards that one particular spot.

It wasn’t as if they were doing it on purpose, or at least consciously so, but more a case of slowly migrating closer to the owl whenever they felt like they had to change what machine they were on. Granted, they were changing spots far more frequently than they normally would, a few even finding excuses to do so despite no one really caring, but the end result was the same: a gradual shift of the gym rat population from a more even distribution towards a more skewed one, compacted around Mephiston’s spot, all without the owl taking notice.

The change, however, did not stop there; in fact, one could say it hardly even began there all things considered, seeing as it was little more than setting the groundwork for what was to come. For Mephiston’s worries shouldn’t have been his own, or, to be more precise, they shouldn’t have remained as his own; he had friends, he had colleagues, he had coworkers, all of whom would’ve been more than happy to help share the burden instead of leaving Meph to handle it all on his own. And the universe, being the trickster god that it seemingly was, felt that, perhaps, the owl needed to learn a lesson or two about sharing, though thankfully enough not one about sharing issues.

Rather, his presence at the gym was step one towards his recovery, and what this meant was that he was ready for step two: connecting to other people. While normally this would mean sitting down at a lunch table in the cantina and surreptitiously discussing matters that were best left hidden from prying ears and eyes, in the gym, this was far more literal. There was no better way of connecting with someone than through sharing with them, and what better way to share with a fellow exercise enthusiast than to give them a taste of what it was like to be him? Not the concerns and worries, not the constant second-guessing and the overthinking, but rather that moment of brilliance where his brain was fully focused on what he was doing, when his body and mind attuned in the same frequency and Mephiston became fully engrossed in the simple act of working out.

The point of it was not to get fit of course, but to merely distract himself; nevertheless, exercise was exercise, and no matter how much he didn’t care about his gains, they were still there… or should be, if Mephiston’s body hadn’t apparently linked with everyone else’s to give them a taste of what it was like to live like him. It was subtle at first, but those around him began to feel more energised, almost as if they could push themselves further than they usually could, their stamina reserves filling from seemingly nowhere, and so quickly that they wanted to start shouting about how good they felt. They wanted to roar, beat their chest and proclaim to the whole world that they were gods among mortals, bringing the house down as they bent weight benches in half and snapped weight bars with about as much difficult as they would a piece of candy. They wanted to push themselves to the breaking point and beyond, knowing full well that, with Mephiston there, they could do so much more.

And from there, it was a quick trip to stage three. Step two was really just a formality, nothing more than a short middle ground for the real change to take place; a foundational step, yes, but just a foundation and nothing else: once set in place, then the rest of the gym could finally be made to feel what it was like to be Mephiston, in the most literal way possible.

The owl himself, however, was still just as blissfully unaware of what was happening as he had been when he first walked into the gym, and good for that, given what sort of reaction he was bound to have if he had learned of it. Indeed, he couldn’t possibly be more unaware of what was happening to either those around him… or himself either. For even though he had to connect and share, it would be rather rude of the universe not to give him something for all of his hard work, and this something just happened to come in the form of a significantly fitter body than the one he already had.

The treadmills wouldn’t normally have done much for him, especially considering how half of his body was composed mostly of cybernetic replacements, but the longer he kept running, the faster he turned up the speed on the machine, never feeling like he was truly being pushed to his limit like he knew he was supposed to. The purpose of those things was to provide a challenge, not mimic a walk in the park, and if he truly wanted to get his exercise in, then clearly he had to keep pressing the arrow button until he felt like he had to put some effort into it. To Mephiston, it didn’t strike him as strange that he had to do this at regular intervals, nor that the amount of space he had on the treadmill grew surprisingly tight and constrictive.

He wasn’t looking down at himself to notice, of course; everything he knew about exercising (or, rather, what little he knew of it) told him he should keep his eyes focused forwards instead of letting his head hang; something about good habits and posture or something of the sort. He didn’t see how his legs were growing bulkier the longer he remained on the treadmill, nor how much heavier his steps were becoming whenever his claws landed on the plastic below them. In fact, he was a bit too preoccupied with the fact that he just didn’t seem to be exerting himself whatsoever, leaving the owl to wonder whether he shouldn’t be changing equipment instead.

It was with a great deal of awe that the rest of the gym-goers watched Mephiston slow down on the treadmill before finally shutting it off, grumbling to himself about how he couldn’t have nice things before turning his attention to the weights benches nearby. Failing every possible spot check, Meph passed by most of the cliente without noticing they were crowding around him, said cliente completely missing the fact that they were even doing so in the first place. Instead, the owl sat by one of the benches and started picking up weight disks.

Now, under regular circumstances, Mephiston would’ve stopped at just a couple. He was fit, yes, and his cybernetics definitely helped when it came to lifting weights, but he wasn’t an idiot: he knew that if he tried pushing it, he was going to end up ripping himself in half from the strain and then need to have his organic half reattached to the mechanical one. Yet, for some reason, he felt… differently that day. Not necessarily stronger, but differently, like he could just throw himself into the ring and act like a big boy and not think too much about how sore he was going to feel in the morning.

This extended to everyone else as well, who either increased the amount of weight they had on their own equipment, or just started pushing harder in an attempt at making it look like they were struggling; whether to make themselves look better to impress their resident avian hunk or some other, unknown reason, no one quite seemed to know, but within moments of Mephiston getting ready for the weight bar, everyone else around him had already doubled up on whatever it was they were doing.

Not just that, but their bodies, too, began to warp, and not just outward either. They were definitely buffer, making gains in mere minutes that would’ve otherwise taken them months, but apart from that, their very morphology adapted to the bird they were all actively lusting over, their minds unaware that the bodies they were attached to were no longer their own.

It began innocently enough: the very act of becoming more muscular was, as eventually they would all come to learn, less a result of Mephiston sharing his gains and more the first step for their transformation into a greater form. Not a single person would remain there that didn’t break at least six feet in height; it was important that their frames be big enough to carry what were going to be much more bulky physiques, and the easiest way of doing this was to make sure everyone towered over those of average height, even if they needed to grow upwards of two feet to do so. Even the smallest of pipsqueaks were given this blessing, enough so that a few of them tripped over before they got used to their new centre of balance, while the biggest among them had to lean down to keep from banging their heads against the ceiling.

Mephiston himself, still ignorant of the events unfolding, focused instead on getting comfortable on the weights bench, folding his wings as best as he could in order not to bother anyone else close to him… to mixed results. He might very well want to keep from intruding on anyone’s personal space, but his wingspan being what it was, there was only so much he could do before simple geometry came into play and he ended up brushing up against someone.

He was deeply apologetic, of course, and made sure the other person always knew it, mostly by turning to face them and accidentally getting his plumage all over them or someone else again, creating a cycle of apologies that only ended when onlookers insisted that everything was fine and Meph should return to his exercises. He still tried to keep begging for mercy for a few seconds before eventually relenting, though the redness on his face never quite went away; thankfully, as soon as he started actually lifting, all concern melted away, if only because he was too busy feeling like he was about to die.

He’d heard the first rep was always the worst, but he never expected it to be as bad as that. Surely, people who did that for fun had to either be complete lunatics or possessed of far greater strength than him, because in that one moment, he truly believed his spine would snap and every tendon he had would be sliced from the muscles they were attached to… for about three seconds, after which he found out that it was surprisingly bearable, all things considered. In fact, the longer he held his armsup, the less painful it seemed to become, and it wasn’t even because his limbs were becoming numb from the strain; instead, he was finding the weight to be lighter and lighter, until a point arrived where he tried something immensely stupid: holding it up with only one hand.

He shouldn’t have done it. It was a surefire way of getting decked in the face by enough steel to cave his skull in, or, even in the best of scenarios, still injure him seriously enough to need a hospital visit while leaving behind one hell of an embarrassing scene at the gym itself. It was, therefore, with a great deal of surprise that Mephiston successfully held the whole stack up with just one of his appendages, keeping it perfectly steady and level above him, almost without any effort expended whatsoever.

At around the same time, those around him began to experience the next stage in their transformation: the height had already been taken care of, leaving bulk as the next big consideration. They could just keep their proportional gains, or, alternatively, they could instead be made to grow more muscular, more fit, more more in everything they had: rippling biceps, bulging pecs, biceps that could put heads to shame, growing and swelling with hardened mass with each second that Mephiston held the weight bar above him. The sounds of moaning filled the gym, its customers both regular and new experiencing the sort of pleasure that was often reserved for behind closed doors, unable to keep it in any longer; they had to externalise it, had to let everyone else feel what they were feeling… but Mephiston in particular.

Meph, who, for all that he failed to react to any of this, might not even be listening for all that anyone knew. He was just baffled at how easily he managed to lift the damned bar he had in one arm, and the organic one as well! This time around, however, he didn’t lie there thinking about how terrible it was that he couldn’t find any challenge in what he was doing; rather, something clicked in him, something that drove him to go further still. Perhaps it was his deep and almost desperate desire to find anything to distract him, maybe it was the fact that his body was so much larger than it used to be that only about a third of his back even fit on the bench at all, but he wanted more.

And what better way to get more than to hold the bar above his head with one hand while using his free one to add more weight? Sure, it needed some weird acrobatics to make it work and he ended up feeling like he twisted his spine by the end of it, but the more he threw himself into it, the more he got out of it… and quite literally, as it turned out. Though he failed to notice still, he wasn’t even on the bench after the tenth or so additional disk was added, having broken straight through it and onto the ground, where multiple radial cracks emerged from the point where he fell down and first hit the floor. But that hardly mattered when he was so ready to keep going; he had better things to do than worry about whether or not the structure of the gym was intact when he could be lifting more weights.

Around him, the scene repeated itself, mass and bulk adding themselves onto unsuspecting bodies as they turned Mephiston’s supplicants into not just size copies of the owl, but full copies as well: though the change was slow, gradual, and so subtle that few even noticed anything was different at all, their forms began to warp to better fit how the owl looked like. First came the feathers, sprouting from their bodies in long, thick curtains starting from the middle of their torsos and spreading outwards, their colour often matching whatever fur or scale had been there beforehand. Then came the bone structure, shifting and popping rather painlessly to grow complex wings on their backs, the sound of flapping filling the gym for several minutes as those transformed adapted to deal with the new upper body they had been gifted.

Then came the final touches: feet and paws had to be turned into avian talons, skulls had to be morphed to better service a beak protruding from the front, herbivore eyes had to be moved towards the front to better serve a predatory function, even internal ear arrangement eventually mimicked that of Mephiston’s. Oddly enough, however, not everyone’s species turned out to be the same: while most of the gym rats turned out to become owls themselves, the individual kind varied wildly, seemingly dependent on whichever species they’d been before; in fact, some weren’t even owls at all, developing into eagles or condors instead, odd choices given who was at the centre of the transformative plague. Still, their changes were taking place and there wasn’t much anyone could do to stop it… not that they would, but still.

Minutes, that was all it took for most of those present at the gym to transform into avian versions of themselves, then seconds after they were finished before it was wrapped up with a second growth spurt leaving even the smallest among them struggling to fit within the main gym room without almost bending over in half, all of them crowding around their progenitor, a truly colossal Mephiston who had, contrary to all expectation, carried on working out without realising how enormous he was getting.

Even when he pushed aside entire rows of metallic equipment, even when the ground beneath him groaned as he strained the foundations keeping the whole building up, even when his head clanked against one of the large wall mirrors and promptly shattered it, he kept on lifting. Even when the bar became so tiny compared to him that he was barely even noticing its weight at all, Mephiston was still insisting on acting as if everything was normal, to the point where he really had no idea whether or not it was even an act anymore.

Maybe he was aware, in some weird subconscious way that he didn’t want to experience, so simply shunted off to the side. Or maybe he was well and truly oblivious, and just happened to be very good at ignoring the obvious; whatever the case may be, he eventually did have to let go of the weight bar on account of it becoming too small for him to hold onto: there was only so much effort he could put into pretending like a toothpick was a boulder, and after discarding the tiny little stick to the side, he did his best to sit back up… and promptly went right through the ceiling.

To him, of course, this barely registered. Once in a sitting position, it didn’t occur to Mephiston that maybe being able to see the outdoors as half of his body poked out from a destroyed roof was at all strange; in fact, it felt downright natural, like he should be there and should be experiencing it. Granted, all the screaming coming from below him and off to the side, where people on the street were running away from the disaster area, struck him as entirely unnecessary; really, what did people think he was going to do, smush them? He was only there to relax, a lesson he figured a great many other people should learn as well; hell, if not for that gym outing, he might’ve been just like those little ones, freaking out at something terribly minor on account of it bothering their schedules or something.

Honestly, it was hard to remember why he was even in there to begin with, but he felt better about himself, and that was what mattered at the end of the day. So he got up, dusted his plumage of all the bits of concrete and rebar, then began the journey back home, stretching his limbs to the sound of groaning leather.

He’d be back the next day.