Prompt of the Week - Week 77

TAGS: Way Too Much Worldbuilding, Growth/Expansion, Excuse For Growth, Weight Gain/Fat

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The ticket over to the station was one of the more expensive things out there, but it was worth it… or at least it would be, in the end. It was an insane idea to get what he wanted, but as long as he managed to reach the finish line, that was all that mattered: if it was stupid, but it worked, then it wasn’t stupid, simple as! Now, granted, most people wouldn’t try abusing low-gravity installations in order to grow bigger through the use of experimental supplements, nor would they upend their whole lives just to move out to the edge of known space purely so they could achieve their size goals, but hey, tickets were cheap. Nillport Nine, operated by one of the more prestigious tourist agencies in the market, usually attracted the sort of eccentric upper class twit with more money than working neurons thanks to their fixation on “gimmick” destinations and package offers; while other agencies went out of their way to try and one-up one another in terms of how monotonous and samey their offers were, Nihilus Resorts had gone in the exact opposite direction, sinking ludicrous amounts of money into ventures that, for the vast majority of people, would sound like the maddened half-child of a crazy scientist and a sentient magnetar. And while the vast majority of people were content with the less zany options, William… was not. He had set his mind on growing himself out, and it wasn’t going to be the exorbitant housing prices nor the fact that he was throwing away everything for the sake of becoming an inconvenience that was going to stop him; in fact, the thought of dropping his entire life behind and starting anew just made it that much more of an attractive prospect, enough so that he couldn’t help but keep a giddy smile on his face for the whole time he was in the shuttle ride during FTL transit. That he was surrounded by plus-sized individuals didn’t exactly leave him any less excited either; it was well-known that low gravity conditions were ideal for allowing oneself to blob out and take up increasing amounts of room, assuming one had access to proper genemodding tech and medical professionals who knew how to handle such radical changes to one’s body. Indeed, most low- or zero-g installations weren’t built with that goal in mind, rather keeping themselves as such for the sake of practical concerns: it was easier to move stuff around when one could just float it from point A to point B rather than needing entire transportation networks. For a select few, however, the prospect of living in such conditions was less a case of being able to move around unimpeded, and far more an opportunity to not have to move in the slightest; there was a small, but very active sub-culture of pleasure-seekers whose main source of stimulation involved fattening and engorging themselves in these environments, using the lesser strain on their bodies to bloat in every direction until they became effectively impossible to move outside the stations used for their “metamorphosis”, as they liked to call it. And for William, an absolute pipsqueak of a wolf who’d never quite amounted to much in the body weight department, this notion was nothing if not heavenly, a divine call pulling him towards a destiny he knew was his to fulfill. He couldn’t think of any other fate for himself, not when he had an option that resonated so deeply and on such a fundamental level: he was meant to fatten up, he was meant to gorge himself until he could eat no more, then feast anyway until his body began to bloat with every single mouthful. He wanted to see himself fatten every time he swallowed, to hear his fat groan and creak as his form expanded whenever he consumed even the tiniest crumb. It was the sort of dream he’d had for years, and for years he’d looked for any opening to achieve it… and now, with the opening of Nillport Nine for long-term settlement, he had his chance. The station had been built outside the boundaries of any recognized polity, and even further away from any unrecognized one for good measure, orbiting a lone dwarf star in a planetless system smack dab in the middle of one of the most beautiful nebula formations in the entire galaxy. The sights were perhaps the most famous, and indeed more desired aspect of the Nillpower, but by no means were they the only one; the place had become famous for becoming a haven for those wanting to turn their proportions up to eleven and beyond, especially for the minority who wished to go truly above and beyond in turning themselves into practically-immobile blobs who wouldn’t be able to function anywhere else without extensive mechanical assistance. All well and good, especially for the vast majority of people who both had that kind of kink and the means to go through with it, but for not William. Perhaps it was because of his more humble birth, or maybe his crossed wires were thicker and more conductive than others’, but the fact was, he didn’t just want to be fat. He didn’t just want to be so big that he’d need to stay at the station for the rest of his life, lest he incur in some truly ridiculous expenses with just moving himself from place to place. No, he wanted to become so ungodly massive, so unbelievably gigantic and titanic, so literally massive, that he’d become a hassle even for the Nillport itself! A lofty goal, given who ran the damned thing and how advanced the installation was; he’d have to put in some genuine effort if he wanted to to reach sizes so absurd as to actually turn himself into a logistical nuisance, but that was just it: he had no reason not to do it. He’d left his job on good terms, claiming he needed some personal time off and would likely be back within a couple of years, liquidated whatever assets he had, even sold off most of his investment portfolio, then threw everything he had into Nihilus’ “New Frontiers” program. The offer was quite simple: in return for a hefty initial investment, he would be offered lodgings, a stipend, and near-limitless access to their facilities, provided that he agree to participate in all further Nihilus publicity and marketing-related activities; in practice, he was offering himself up to be a background extra on demand in exchange for basically living for free, and all it cost him were his entire life savings! Not exactly an orthodox trade, and the jury was out on whether it was a good one, but as far as William was concerned, it was all he needed to get what he wanted, and so, when he stepped out of the shuttle and onto the landing platform, he did so with a spring to his step and a wide grin stamped on his face. Granted, this didn’t last long after he was faced with the absolute mountain of paperwork that came with being granted entry into the station proper, but once those five or so hours were done, that was it: his new life had begun, and when he walked into the main hub and then out into the residential mega-district, it was… beautiful. Everything he could’ve hoped for was right there, from the artificial landscape simulating the rolling hills of some of the most pristine pleasure planets in the galaxy, to the commercial areas filled with high-rising arcologies and flashing neon signs, down to the lake kept at the perfect temperature for round-the-clock swimming, it was a small-scale world just for him and the select few allowed to reside upon it. Or the myriad of tourists visiting it, those also counted; fortunately for him, he didn’t have to worry about his visa expiring, not when he had a home waiting for him at the other end of the station’s residential hub. It wasn’t much, but it was certainly more than most people could hope for under those conditions: a simple apartment block, each unit having a kitchen, living room, bathroom and bedroom, enough for one person to live comfortably and without much hassle. Every day, groceries and assorted supplies were to be delivered via automated drone, and that was about it; as long as he wasn’t needed for a photoshoot, then William was permitted to do whatever he damn well wanted (within reason, of course), under the assumption that most of his money would be spent in the company’s own stores anyway. Of course, what the company didn’t know was that in one of his pockets, stashed away where he knew no one would check, was a bottle of pills; these were the last thing he ever bought before handing over all of his money to Nihilus, the last item he ever dared purchased in his old life. They were quite simple, and indeed used by a significant amount of people throughout the galactic community, and for entirely innocuous purposes as well: metabolic boosters, designed to improve fat build-up. There were plenty of perfectly legitimate uses for them, including ones that weren’t technically the most wholesome, but William didn’t settle for the regular stuff. Rather, he’d gone out of his way to purchase a very special lot, one that had been recalled due to issues with “chemical contaminants” making the effects “unpredictable and dangerously unstable”. In practice, what this meant was that those fortunate enough to have taken the pills before they were called back and shunted into an incinerator ended up a lot fatter than they expected, and while most argued this was a frank breach of basic consumer safety, the wolf thought otherwise. It was an opportunity, and he was going to take it… hence why the first thing he did when he got home was pop open the bottle and take two pills. There were about a hundred in there, so even spacing them out would only do so much, especially given it was his only one; thankfully, the effects were designed to be semi-permanent, with a full course effectively forcing his body to completely restructure itself as a form of less invasive, long-term genetic therapy. All it took was a couple of pills every week and he was set; given how there was technically no upper cap to how much food he could request, in so far as it was deemed “sufficient” to maintain his nutritional balance, the second thing William did was punch his ID code into the requests terminal in his living room and start adding checkmarks to just about anything he could see in there. He wasn’t quite thinking about how he was going to cook any of it, being more concerned with the simple action of having the food in the first place; it made for quite a surprise when he heard the first drone knocking on his door, only to open up to a whole group of delivery automatons waiting to drop their packages in sequence, forcing him to spend the first couple of hours in his new home getting everything into the pantry and then splitting off whatever needed to go into the fridge. Once done, however, it was just a matter of beginning a feast that would never end; he wasn’t technically expected to do anything other than the occasional media appearance, so he might as well get comfortable and start microwaving pizzas en masse while getting accustomed to whatever channels were available for him to watch. It was so easy to fall into a rut as well: heat something up, go to the living room, wait for the loud beep, collect food, return to the couch and eat. Occasionally remain in the kitchen for longer in order to prepare what he found to be an automatic kitchen unit, only to then fall back on the usual; nothing was really expected of him but picking what he wanted to eat, as well as pressing a few buttons, turning the exercise into one that fed directly into William’s desire to do absolutely nothing with his time at the Nillport. Bite by bite, his dream was thus slowly realized; while the effects of the metabolic boosters were definitely there, they weren’t so exaggerated that he managed to see them in real time… at least, not yet. It was a slow process, one that was only truly noticeable when he got up from bed and happened to feel slightly more off-balance, one whose progress could only be tracked by getting on the scales every day and writing down what the display said on a small booklet. Only after a couple of weeks, when he had to take his second dose, did the wolf notice that he was a bit rounder around the edges, at least noticeably so and in a way that he couldn’t rationalize away as just being his imagination. Still, he didn’t get his hopes up; he knew he needed to keep his eyes on the prize and never slack off (at least, in his own unique way) if he wanted to keep gaining weight. He had to keep devouring ungodly amounts of food, had to keep eating even when his brain was telling him he was full and didn’t need any; it was an instinct that had to be surpassed and then silenced if he truly wanted to achieve his size goals… and, much to William’s delight, ignoring it became noticeably easier as time went along. While at first he had to actively fight against his own instincts and sense of self-preservation, over time the mere act of eating became an end in and of itself; he wasn’t eating to anything, he was just doing it, bypassing so many of his automatic regulation systems that it took his brain a significant amount of time to catch up to the fact that it was supposed to be sending signals to make the wolf stop eating. By then, of course, he’d already gorged himself even further, burying that response even deeper, until by the time he fell asleep in the living room again, he was surrounded on all sides by discarded boxes and empty plates, a stack that only grew bigger by the day. It was a process that very quickly, perhaps alarmingly so, moved to the back of his head; past a certain point, William wasn’t even writing down his weight or checking himself in the mirror anymore, preferring to place most of his energy and mental resources in procuring more food for himself. Besides, he had better ways of gauging just how fat he was getting, like whether or not he found himself stuck in the doorway that led into the living room proper, or how long it took him to get back on his feet after sitting down, or hell, how much time it took for the jiggling to stop after he did sit down. Meanwhile, the amount of food he shoved down his gullet only increased with time: if at first he was only eating like a “regular” person would, soon enough he’d be devouring entire cookie packets in one go, or dumping the full contents of a take-out bag into his mouth and chewing it all down in a single mouthful… and, to him, this was nothing if not perfectly normal. And not the performative normal, where part of him recognized it wasn’t something he was supposed to do but he did it anyway; rather, he had reformatted his brain to such an extent that when he had to nearly tip over to grab a whole pizza, only to then swallow it in one go with barely any chewing, he saw this as merely the natural endpoint to what he had assumed his life would end up as. It was what he wanted, so why bother spending any time trying to find a deeper meaning where, frankly, there was none? He was fat, getting fatter, and that was the only thing that mattered, especially when he reached a point where the sofa could no longer hold him up; most people would be at least somewhat embarrassed by the fact that they completely ruined their upholstery just by sitting on it, but as far as William was concerned, that was just stop one. After all, he could still walk, and that was the biggest mark of shame he could ever imagine being bestowed upon him. Yes, he hadn’t actually walked in a while, having asked for a handful of drones to come help him out around the house, but he was still capable of walking; if he actually put his back to it, motion was still an option, which as far as the wolf was concerned was just not acceptable in the slightest. He needed to be bigger, needed to be fatter, needed to be so immense and unwieldy that he couldn’t even think about moving an inch without having a couple of anti-grav pads to help him. And the best part was, he knew exactly how to get there: he just had to keep eating.

It was odd, how Nihilus had never called him up for anything, and had just left him to his own devices. Almost as odd as the amount of camera drones floating around his house on a regular basis, though William tried not to worry about them too much; he had better things to do, like eat all the food that was being delivered to him despite him not having touched the requests terminal in… how long was it? A month? A couple of months? He could barely even remember when he first arrived, in between the haze of constant feasting and the chemical cocktail running through his veins. But that was fine; just as long as he had food in front of him, he could be happy in knowing that he had everything needed. So just keep eating, just keep devouring and gorging, just keep growing and fattening.

There’d come a time for rest.

Eventually.