Drumbeat (Commission for ZackBarzahd)

After spending a significant amount of time refining her craft to the point where it got boring again, Big Z began to wonder just what she could be doing that would spice things up again. Sure, living a life of pure luxury among her own kind and chugging down fluids like there was no tomorrow made for a wonderful, hedonistic lifestyle, but sometimes she yearned for something a bit… more. It was an odd, indescribable sensation whereby her mind and body demanded she do something to fill them, but didn’t bother telling her what that something was, putting the Ballanose in the unenviable position of being hungry for a specific dish she didn’t even know existed. And yet, it always led her down the same path: downstairs.

It had been… quite a while, since she last visited the mortal plane, to the point where she wondered if people had forgotten about her. Wouldn’t be the first time one of her own had to start a worship from scratch, and her own fears were mounting once she recalled how long it had been since the last time she blessed her followers with any signs of her existence. Thankfully for her, it would appear that a solid core of supplicants had remained, even if most of the outlying congregations had naturally drifted off over the years; it was at least something, a solid foundation from which she could work on. Truth be told, Big Z had no intention of fulfilling any of those weird promises she made back when the church was starting off; she was younger, more naive, honestly thought that she could change the world for the better if she only tried hard enough, all of it thrown out the window the moment she realized that, try as hard as she might, people were just going to find new and inventive ways of disappointing her. It wasn’t all that bad, considering the worship itself was still there, but it did help push it away into the sidelines as something the goddess did only when she was dreadfully bored. Or, in this case, desperate for a special treat.

Worship itself was such a potent source of power and influence that many of her people outright battled one another over the fate of entire populations, posing as gods and goddesses of this and that, hoping to sway mortal kind to their side over anyone else’s. In the end, all of it was done purely to feed their own egos, making the differences in scripture and theology more or less an academic affair in practice; of course none of the mortals themselves knew about this, being perfectly convinced that what they were doing mattered in ways that it… really didn’t, which is precisely why Big Z herself stopped bothering to come up with any excuse. The Ballanose thought to herself, back when she’d given up trying to play the idealist, that if everyone around her was just looking for a way to get off on worship, then she might as well not even try and hide it; people needed their goddess of lust and hedonism after all, and seeing as no one else had taken up the role, she might as well do it herself. This had been quite a while ago, to the point where even Big Z had forgotten when that had taken place, but the result it had on her body really spoke for itself.

It was impossible for her to move around without making a racket. Used to be that she’d slosh and churn, either with the water inside of her or due to the near-constant beat she had going on her body. Nowadays she mostly just wubbed, a low-frequency thrumming that erupted from her in sternum-shaking waves without her even having to do anything at all; striking herself made the beat go faster and louder, but even standing around doing precisely jack diddly, her body continuously emitted a series of low-energy shockwaves that made that glass of water on the table next to her inch dangerously close to the edge by virtue of being too close. And she loved that; Big Z could remember all too well those days where her body needed help to make any kind of noise at all, so clearly her treating her worshippers as living batteries of lustful adulation had yielded some positive results. All the more reasoning for her to do so again!

The goddess had no need to physically visit the mortal plane; it was entirely possible for her to tap into the subconscious worship of those who followed her in order to drain it for all it was worth, but where was the fun in that? Better that she focus and project an image of herself into one of the larger temples, scaled down of course, in order to let her supplicants know that yes, her goddess was there, and yes, she was as amazingly busty as they remembered. Oddly enough, most of the statues around that place completely forgot about that colossal belly she sported, something she chalked up to cultural sensibilities or some poorly made translation somewhere along the way; even her supposed high priests were left confused as to why their “Glorious Mother” was packing enough water in her gut to flood most of the building, something Big Z herself was more than happy to explain. Her word use could’ve been a bit lighter on the descriptors, in retrospect, seeing as that red on everyone’s cheeks grew increasingly brighter the longer she went on about how utterly amazing it felt to just open her mouth and let a waterfall of liquid pour into her waiting gullet, feeling her stomach bloat and expand with each gallon, her body groaning as it struggled to deal with the sudden increase in weight… it was enough to get her going and she wasn’t even there physically, a testament to how needy for attention the goddess was.

Back in her actual home, somewhere a few planes of existence above, Big Z grabbed the glass of water by her side and began drinking. It wasn’t so much a container as it was a portal, an endless spout connected to every single body of freshwater in the entirety of existence and beyond, a marvelous work of magic that defied both explanation, common sense and several laws of physics she vaguely remembered being around to agree to. Its very existence defied reality… and she used it to drink. To be fair, it was a really nifty trick, plus it let her keep on guzzling water until she was tired of it (which was never), which went a long way to explain why her belly was as massive as it was. Slung out several feet in front of her and stretched so taut that even her breasts couldn’t squish it, that thing was one of the main reasons her body produced the kind of sounds that it did, what with it being so strained that even her divine powers had difficulty making sense of it all. On occasion, whenever she felt the need to let her neighbors know who was in charge around those parts, Big Z would spend hours drumming on herself, marvelling at how even her hands were unable to do anything more than leave marks on the taut surface of her body, intensifying the wubbing until the windows in their manors were being shaken off of their frames. It made for a wonderful distraction whenever she didn’t feel like playing with her tits, which had themselves slowly grown out to become… respectable was a word, and one that semi-applied if one only considered their size; there was nothing respectable about the way Big Z conducted herself, and she absolutely loved that.

Regardless, now that her astral projection was back in the mortal plane, it was time to start redecorating. After a couple of miracles to establish dominance and confirm she wasn’t some random sorceress trying to take advantage of people, work quickly began on tearing down the old icons and replacing them with brand new marble carvings of her true self, belly and all. She could tell that the newcomers were struggling to try and reconcile the image that had been burned into their minds from years of intensive doctrine study and the way the Ballanose really looked, but as soon as she began making the argument that hedonism involved eating and drinking, everyone began nodding along as if that suddenly made things perfectly fine. Curiously enough, her worshippers began to mimic her penchant for drinking vast quantities of water without her having to bring that up, leaving her wondering if she was having some sort of unconscious effect on them; barrels upon barrels of the fresh stuff were rolled in and stacked up against the walls, with hoses protruding from them. A whole sub-sect of priests quickly began to take over the “honorable” role of deciding who got to drink and how much they received, until a large chunk of her temple turned into the weirdest kind of pleasure den; it was quite funny, enough that she actually began to “take a shot” whenever she spotted anyone drinking more than just a few gulps.

But enough of that, she thought, it was time to finally get her worship going hard enough that she could feel it; the Ballanose hadn’t come all the way down to where most of her powers risked tearing a hole in reality just so she could watch people barely be capable of downing half a dozen gallons of water, she was there because she needed some proper adoration and adulation from the part of her followers. Big Z made sure to tell her high priests just that, demanding that they do something about her cravings, lest she began demanding tribute; the word was enough to make the older men sweat as they thought about the implications, and before long there was a city-wide marketing campaign aimed at getting as many people to head over to the temple and “meet the goddess herself”. Nothing like some actual evidence of divinity to get people to rethink their approach to life, and sure enough there seemed to be no end of volunteers who, at the very least, were curious to see what that nonsense about divine incarnation was about.

Meanwhile, high above them in a plane of existence that would make even the greatest of mortal minds melt while trying to comprehend it, Big Z basked in the increasing amounts of worship being sent her way. Either active or passive, she felt it, seeping into her form and filling her with the kind of raw power that only gods like her kind could ever feel. It was at once the best thing she ever felt and not enough, a hole that filled itself while growing larger, demanding ever greater amounts just to keep itself from imploding. It was an addiction, something that the goddess rarely indulged in precisely because they knew how dangerous it was; there were tales, horror stories really, of those from among their kind who took in “too much” and lost themselves to the worship, no longer able to discern reality from fantasy. They would think themselves far greater than they were, forcing their former friends and allies to cut them down to size and split up their supplicants amongst themselves. Oddly enough, Big Z herself had never met anyone with direct experience in these sorts of events; it was always something that people “just heard” from someone who knew someone else who had totally seen it happen. Personally, she never put too much stock in those fanciful yarns, preferring to stretch her limits her own way and see what happened; hadn’t done anything bad to her yet, and seeing what was happening to her now, she highly doubted it ever would.

The first wave of warmth came when she least expected it, quite nearly throwing her off her deck chair and into the pool in front of her. It was always in the breasts and she never quite knew why… not that she was going to complain. Big Z remembered when they were still somewhere in the alphabet, rather than the two immense mounds of jiggling, soft flesh they were now, so large that, were it not for her belly being what it was, they’d be able to cover most of her body even without any kind of help. It made seeing in front of her somewhat difficult, and at times she had to part them just to get a good look at who might be talking to her, but that was part of the fun really; what was the point of being a goddess and abusing the hell out of the powers imparted upon her by her worshipper’s devotion if she couldn’t take at least some of it and put it towards crafting an obscenely bloated body for herself? All of her friends went ahead and did silly things like make themselves stronger for a confrontation that would never happen, or “enhance” themselves with transformatives that boggled the mind. Her though? Her desires were far more base, linked intimately to a need for raw power and self-indulgence, hedonism at its grandest, most self-consuming scale; simple, yes, but effective, considering how easily she could hit the club and come home with a young twenty-something who couldn’t help but keep staring at her long after it stopped being decent. It was power, in a way, dominance; and Big Z absolutely adored it.

For now though? Growing bigger; that was the main objective for that session. She couldn’t wait to tell everyone about how she managed to pass herself off as a top goddess to some backwater planet that was barely out of its diapers in the grand cosmic dance; the last time anyone of her kin managed to do that, everyone got such a laugh out of it that it turned into a kind of running gag among the members of the pantheon. There was even a betting pool for whoever could achieve full control without resorting to manipulating events via direct intervention, something that Big Z herself flagrantly ignored whenever she damn well felt like it; money and prestige were nothing compared to the drug-like high that imposing herself over mortals gave her, to say nothing of the effects it had on her body.

One person praying to her did nothing. A thousand tickled the back of her head and maybe allowed her to feel slightly more bloated than usual. Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands maybe? Those were the numbers that created a solid foundation to work on, going straight to the millions as soon as possible so that the real growth could get started; she hadn’t gotten as big as she did by peddling her spiritual wares to two-bit runic cults and the occasional prosperity preacher, she did so by large-scale displays of her immense power… and the occasional miraculous gift. Nothing really spelled “godly power” like turning a scrawny beanpole into something resembling an inflation fetishist’s wet dream over the course of several barrels of water and half a ton of fresh fruit, and as soon as that much was established, it was simple enough to keep going on the momentum accrued and solidify her control over the minds of more and more mortals. The knock-on effect it had on her body was evident… but she needed more. It wasn’t enough for her to just be that large, Big Z had to be the largest the next time she showed herself to her people down below.

Therefore, the best course of action was to help spread the word as far and wide as possible, having her projection appear in multiple temples at once in order to remind her worshippers of just what exactly they were meant to be worshipping in the first place. Acceptance came quickly, though a few schismatics insisted on keeping up the fiction that those apparitions were nothing but a “power grab” (which wasn’t technically that far from the truth); ultimately going nowhere, these splinter cults were doomed to wither and die over time, reduced to ash by the burning flames that were the souls of the true believers. Millions upon millions of candles, lighting up in the darkness, each combining to form an endless, sumptuous feast that the Ballanose goddess could draw from. It was a table, laid it for her, one that would replace any item taken with three more of itself; with the sudden intrusion of the goddess’ avatar, it was as if the whole planet was undergoing a spiritual awakening, drawing an ever-larger number of supplicants to the temples, all of them beyond eager to meet the “Mother Above” and beg her for some sort of boon.

As for Big Z, she was certainly enjoying all the attention she was receiving; after so long since the previous time they’d visited that planet, the goddess would’ve expected the little ones to have completely forgotten about her, or worse, misrepresented her message into something wholesome instead of the mindlessly debauched statement that it was. Fortunately for her, though things seemed to have been made more palatable for the sake of the cultural context, the core tenets were still there, making it easy as could be to divert everyone’s attention towards whatever it was that made their giblets tingle the most. She could provide for them, give them as much sustenance as required without even so much as breaking a sweat; drawing from her true power to produce food for all of her believers was so easy that Big Z barely even had to think about it, to say nothing of solving the other, secondary problems befalling the planet. Honestly, how exactly a species could do so much wrong in so little time was beyond even her, but at least she had to appreciate how it was all done in the pursuit of self-interest; would’ve been terrible if that level of devastation had been wrought for sake of morals or anything dreadful like that.

Size averages were the first thing to go, thrown aside and replaced with something more convenient for what the Ballanose had planned. It was true that one’s worshippers were a reflection of the kind of deity they followed, but the reverse was also true; growth was very much relative to what her supplicants were like, and assuming their fervour remained the same throughout their transformation and uplifting into a form closer to her own, then the amount of power generated by a whole planet’s worth of valuable souls would allow her to enjoy a few hours of unrestricted, mindless inflation herself. In truth, it was all limit-breaking; having a healthy follower base simply allowed her to become greater, leaving the effort of ascending into a higher being squarely in her hands alone. Thankfully, how a deity accomplished that was entirely up to them, to the point where the whole effort was, at times, more or less a formality, a ritual to be followed for the sake of tradition. For Big Z, this often meant snapping her fingers and producing for herself a table filled with the most delectable of snacks: tons upon tons of fresh fruit, plucked and picked at just the right time to offer the best ratio of consistency to juice. This too was purely a formality, as very rarely did she take the time to savor any of it; most of the repast was simply shovelled down her gullet and made to add to her already gargantuan belly, making it wub ever louder and allowing for some truly impressive feats of drumming. And that time would be no different.

Even still, the Ballanose goddess had to admit she wasn’t expecting that side project of hers to yield as much energy as it was; seven billion souls, most of which were more than ready to throw themselves at her feet if it meant being given the chance to transform their bodies into something close to their dream selves? It would be obscenely indecent if it weren’t for her absolutely agreeing with every single person down below, gleefully turning even the most unimpressive of shrimps into a small-scale replica of herself. It seemed as if her influence on that world had left quite a lasting impression on its dominant species’ psyche; even if many didn’t wish to adopt a form similar to hers, they still operated on the same principles, still desiring nothing but over-indulgence and the ability to do naught but relish in their carnal desires. She had to respect that; her own people were reticent to give in like that, even at the best of times, making for a refreshing change of pace when she could literally wave her tits in front of a crowd and have them kneel before her.

The power and control it offered were possessed of even greater allure, however. Yes, the growth and self-inflation were fantastic, and Big Z was absolutely loving every handful of fruit she dropped into her mouth, but it was more than that. It was knowing that her presence alone was enough to completely destabilize societal order, rather than be seen as an unimpressive and, frankly, blasé move to try and garner support. On that planet, on that plane, she was someone, rather than merely one amongst equals, giving her a degree of power and influence she hadn’t felt in goodness knows how long. It was enough to leave her hooked on it all like some sort of drug, the attention and reverence paid to her leaving the goddess feeling lightheaded and dizzy. For a few brief moments, it was as if she was about to lose control, the worship being just too much for her to absorb at all without some form of repercussions… at least until she got a grip on herself and slapped her own forehead, waking up at just the right moment to notice the banquet table she’d set for herself was about to fall onto the pool.

Readjusting her position took enough time that her projected selves vanished from the many places of worship, with the high priests all desperately trying to come up with some excuse as to why their goddess had suddenly vanished from sight from everywhere at once. Calming everyone down took a significant amount of effort after Big Z blessed them with her presence once again, and wouldn’t she know it, more schismatics showed up and demanded an explanation; it was like people on that planet relished the idea of making up conflicts and arguments where there were none, purely for the sake of it. Thankfully for her, they were just as ready and willing to throw themselves into the same pits of depravity as everyone else, even if they dressed it up in their own unique, often strange ways; as long as they were doing it in her name, that just meant more fruit for the feast, more water down her gullet, more flesh and wubbing for her body.

Finding a rhythm wasn’t easy, but she managed… eventually. It was very much a case of making her house and property grow alongside her body, making sure to encroach upon the yards of many of her divine neighbors just to let them know who was in charge around those parts. Their pitiful attempts at carving out small empires from within their own people had only succeeded in diverting their attention away from the real moneymakers, the endless series of inhabited planets that just screamed for someone like them to show up and establish themselves as the true spiritual leaders of their entire species. How exactly she ended up being one of the very few who even bothered to try was confusing even to her, but Big Z wasn’t about to complain; less competition meant more juicy morsels for herself, meant more food and drink, meant more growing.

The dimensions around her home were becoming increasingly distorted as it burgeoned outwards at the same rate as its owner, the other deities living next to her forced to feel as their own properties were becoming increasingly more insignificant next to hers. She revelled in imposing herself on others like that, especially when she did it by cutting loose and becoming an even bigger and louder pile of delicious, soft fat and pudge. There was no longer any devouring of fruit or guzzling of water, but a near continuous stream being floated into her mouth by her own powers; one side had the solids pouring in, the other was the receiving end of a waterfall cascading down from her portal-bottomed drinking glass, mixing together in a current that should, by all means, be choking her, but instead just made her… more. She didn’t quite see it happening, courtesy of her home and pool remaining the same size relative to her, but a simple glance at everything else around her let Big Z know just how colossal she was becoming, growing fat off the adulation of a people that barely understood her. They ascribed all sorts of meaning to her teachings, sure, but very few truly realized what her point was.

Self-indulgence. Endless amounts of it, forever and always, until there was nothing else left in their minds. Meanwhile, their goddess would take a cut off everything as her tribute, using it as her own way of lording over her tiny ones, becoming increasingly tinier as time went on; it hardly mattered for Big Z, for whom they were little more than living batteries, but she did have to appreciate the sheer amount of effort that went into their little displays of adoration. In fact, she’d been so distracted by her growth spurt that the Ballanose almost failed to see how many new temples had been built in her honour during that short intermission (time being as screwy as it was made for wonderful dilation effects in her godly realm), every major city now sporting at least a dozen or so places of worship dedicated to her. Schismatics were everywhere, but most were content in following the same kind of tenets that everyone else did, barring some minor disagreements on scripture that, quite frankly, didn’t really matter. For Big Z, the only important thing was that she had somehow achieved world peace (of a sort) on that backwater planet by force of will and presence alone, giving them nothing but more time to devote themselves to their worship of her and her alone.

Already she could hear the grumbling of her neighbors, complaining about all the “dance club music” emanating from her body, or how they had just finished cutting their lawn to the exact, precise measurements needed to stroke their own egos. The goddess didn’t care; if anything, it was just further incentive to take a dozen more swigs of water from her glass and wub her way to even larger sizes, drawing increasing amounts of ire from everyone around her.

Life was good.