24.
Cyllene Ruins a Fine Wool Suit
Eiffel was very concerned about the Munchlax.
It was a forlorn little creature — terribly plump and covered ear to foot in long, shaggy dark green fur. Large black eyes were watering, and whatever it had for a nose beneath the fur on its face was sniffling and sticky.
Then there was the creature's stomach. All of its guts were constantly rumbling and bubbling with hunger, and only growing louder when Eiffel tore off pieces of lumpy salt cake and tossed them down into pudgy, grabby hands. The wide, tusk-filled mouth consumed everything in seconds. So far Munchlax had eaten two whole cakes, three chocolate truffles, and a box full of tea bags. The professor's pockets were emptying rapidly, and the plump feet padded after him far too fast.
"I believe," the professor said in a low voice to Cyllene, "that this is the same Munchlax once cared for by Warden maI of the Diamond Clan. I think it's come looking for her."
Cyllene shook her head. "You'd think it would've noticed the ongoing funeral. Didn't The Sekki schedule his sister's burial for ninety-nine years from now?"
"Munchlax is miserable, Cyllene!"
Together with Rei they swept over the waterwheel bridge toward the ruin of Galaxy Hall. Cyllene kept looking over her shoulder, wondering if the Commander were supervising from afar. She still felt a bit dizzy. The chain on her left wrist was stinging, and she rubbed it with her right.
I have powers. That thing in the dream said I have powers.
"Sorry, I'm distracted," she said, face utterly neutral, yet whole body suddenly flinching when Munchlax grabbed the hem of her uniform jacket in both hands and began to tug at her forcefully.
I wonder if it smells any leftover blood, she thought, sneaking a quick sniff of her armpits.
"It's not carnivorous, is it?" she asked.
Eiffel wiped a sheen of sweat off his brow, luring the creature away with another lump of cake and flinching himself when the large lower tusks almost took his hand off. Something Galarian in him must have sensed the cooler weather because today he was dressed in a fine brown wool suit with a pinstriped bowtie wrapped doubly around his chunky neck.
"Oh, I imagine that gurgling gut can digest virtually anything. It's the same as its evolution Snorlax, which can eat its weight in food every single day. Whether that relates to predatory or purely scavenging behavior is entirely up for science to determine."
"Yes or no. Is it bloodthirsty?"
The professor flicked his eyes to The Wallflower, and Cyllene caught his drift. Better if they couldn't answer the hard questions at all.
She'd also spent so much time dealing with Ginter's crisis she hadn't realized it was lunchtime and she was ravenous too. The professor and Rei slid into their usual spots beside each other at the picnic table. Cyllene slid in on the other side to face them, and Munchlax hopped up beside her, continuing to paw at her jacket.
"I'm sure it just likes my perfume," she put in quickly when it grabbed at her sleeve. "Ginter gave me a new decanter he thought I would like."
She locked eyes with Eiffel, suddenly regretting the fib. At long last, the two of them were finally going to share a meal. And for what? She'd embarrassed him in front of the whole village. He'd readily expressed his distaste for her attitude. If Rei hadn't found the Munchlax they still wouldn't be talking.
"Three orders of potato mochi," she told the stooped old Beni when he trundled near the table to bring Laventon his expected cup of tea.
"All for you, Captain?"
"To start," she said. And after the cook left she straightened her back and said very plainly, "I'll not have you calling me a 'silly girl with a beauty routine' when I can hear you through the walls of my quarters, Professor. Understood?"
Eiffel looked confused, until his eyes widened with the realization. "That was quite petty of me," he admitted. "I do apologize."
"Apology accepted. You and I are civil now."
He didn't respond. Just rubbed the back of his neck and tried to spy something invisible off in the distance.
"I said, 'We are civil.'"
"Well, no. No we're not, Cyllene. Civility involves a fair bit of trust, you know, and I still don't feel that I can entirely trust you."
Rei stiffened at that response, eyes flicking madly between his two mentors. Now Cyllene wanted to bang her head on the table multiple times. She settled for elbowing Munchlax hard in its gurgling stomach, at least so it stopped reaching for her sleeve. The creature gave a long, loud whine and began to dig its ten sharp claws into the wood of the table, its hunger worsening.
"Now right there," Eiffel said. "You've turned all the more impulsive and impolite since you started spending time with that Ginkgo Man, and I can't stand for it."
"Get over yourself," Cyllene hissed. "I'm twenty-seven years old. I can make my own decisions about how I act."
"And you choose to act petulant?"
"I think petulant is an entirely subjective word."
Eiffel blinked, stunned.
"You think I can get over myself, don't you? You'd like to gloss over everything rude you've ever said and thought and call us civil. I don't think you've ever learned a spot of empathy in those twenty-seven years."
He took a polite sip of tea after saying this. Cyllene's wrist began to prickle beneath warm metal links. Her whole face was suddenly burning, and she almost didn't know how to respond. The professor sounded so calm as he spoke. So thoughtful. Matter-of-fact, and hurt, but not so hurt he would deign to whine about it.
She caught his gaze. He blinked again, raising thick dark eyebrows that looked combed. His pudgy hands were folded on the table before him, nails all cleaned and clipped. Curls were greased and groomed and his beard was trimmed and squared and smelling of that nominal lavender in that perfectly fine wool suit of his.
Her hair was still damp and bedraggled from taking a dunk in the sea, and the Munchlax reeling beside her could smell the bloodied chain she was wearing as a bracelet.
"You can't control the way other people feel about you," Cyllene said then, her voice as deep and even as it always was.
Eiffel nodded. "Aged thirty-seven I'm well aware of such unfairness. And regrettably, at this point in time that means we cannot rely on each other. I've always wanted to consider you a friend. But I ask myself, is Cyllene honest? Is she kind?"
"Professor," Rei piped up, "you said Cyllene's feelings embarrass her, and that's why she isn't very kind."
Eiffel pulled the brim of the boy's flat red cap down over his face. "Keep yourself out of adult conversations, Reinold Fisher. And by the way, I said Cyllene is doing her best. It means we can use our empathy to excuse rudeness, but we're still entitled to point out how it hurts us. Especially when she's stopped doing her best and aims to mortify her own colleagues. Ah, thank you, Beni."
The old cook whipped several trays of steaming hot potato mochi onto the table. Munchlax immediately began to gorge itself on the crispy puffs of savory, saucy starch. So did Cyllene, chopsticks clicking fiercely. She ate almost as quickly as the creature beside her, savoring the thick, sticky sweetness of mirin flowing over her tongue.
"I've done nothing to hurt you," she mused with her cheeks full, huffing hot steam out her nose.
"You kissed me without asking," Eiffel said. "And decided I'd wronged you for not returning your affections."
Rei's jaw dropped open, revealing unchewed potato. Cyllene grew restless. The chain around her wrist was hot now, and when she glanced at her sleeve the dark blue cuff looked a bit moist and floppy. She pushed herself up from the table, then caught Eiffel's stern purple gaze and sat herself back down. The illusion of civility was hard to maintain, especially when no one would cooperate.
She inhaled another three mochi puffs without even blowing on them.
"I did ask you."
Eiffel had barely eaten three to begin with. He was cutting them into smaller pieces and dipping them in extra soy sauce and waiting for the extra to drip onto a napkin before taking dainty little bites and chewing thoroughly before he'd swallow and speak again.
"You asked if I would love you. After the kiss. At which point you made it crystal clear you did not love me whatsoever. You think I'm a plump, bumbling fool."
"And we decided we wouldn't mention it ever again, Eiffel. That room where we kissed doesn't even exist anymore. What, are you suddenly turning into a gentleman? Do you think you're protecting me from anything?"
"I'd like to see you overcome the severity with which you perceive the world. Do you ever smile, for one?"
She glared at him for that. It was a cold, cruel ice-blue glare that had him breaking that smug expression, at least for a moment. He dipped another small piece of steaming potato in the soy sauce and popped it in his mouth.
"Ginter has learned to be more of a gentleman than you are," Cyllene said then.
"Ginter's so decrepit he doesn't even care that you're miserable. He's not a gentleman. He's a predator, and he'll make you do something regrettable if you're not careful."
"You don't know anything about either of us then. And after Ginter asked for your help, too."
"My help with what?"
Cyllene leaned in so close the lavender aftershave was intoxicating. She hoped he could smell the rice wine on her breath.
"He was transformed against his will. Didn't he tell you that?"
Eiffel's expression went unreadable as he set his chopsticks down. The best Cyllene could tell, he was disappointed. Like he were regarding her corpse and pretending he were civil with it.
"Or didn't you believe him?" she continued. "Because you're a great scientist, and there's no such thing as magic?"
"When will you come off it with magic?"
"When you stop being a gigantic pain in the ass."
"Right," Eiffel said. He pushed his bowl of mochi away from him, toward her two empty bowls and an almost-empty third. "Do you know what you are, Captain Cyllene Selenelion? You're a manipulator. You manipulate people. You manipulate their feelings. You think you can manipulate reality itself to suit your needs. It doesn't work."
It was Cyllene's turn to raise her hairless ridges. She chewed her final puff of potato and pulled Eiffel's bowl toward her. His puffs were no longer steaming, and the sauce had hardened into a gelatinous skin over the crispy outsides.
"What if it did work?" she asked. "What if I could manipulate reality?"
Munchlax growled beside her. It reached out a pudgy paw-hand for the untouched mochi, and she blocked it, not flinching this time when it opened its mouth to gnaw on her arm instead. She elbowed it sharply again and it fell off the bench entirely, moaning until Rei felt sorry for it and crawled down and over to feed it the last of his own bowl.
Cyllene pushed Eiffel's mochi bowl back over toward him. "Eat it," she said.
"No," he told her. "I've no appetite sitting with you. I'm joyful I didn't starve on that morning you first suggested breakfast."
"But you won't starve," she replied calmly. "You'll eat no matter what because you're extremely hungry, especially for Beni's famous potato mochi."
It was entirely experimental. Nothing she could prove would work, but only the twinge of inclination she'd felt before in her quarters. The sheer idea that she could watch the impossible happen right in front of her. A warm, tingling feeling flowed into her fingertips. Her heartbeat quickened, and the heat of the chain around her wrist dulled to a pleasurable thrum.
"Eat, Eiffel. Or do I have to prove how hungry you are?"
Still he balked, scrunching his nose at her.
Cyllene snapped her fingers beneath the table. Instantly a soft yet audible burbling sound emanated out from Eiffel's gut. His face loosened as a deep rose blush overtook his light brown cheeks. His shoulders shifted. He placed both hands over the center of his waistcoat and pressed in, confused.
"How did you do that?" he asked.
"Do what?"
"My stomach. I feel… strange…"
She merely shrugged, fighting off a genuine smile as she reached her fingers toward that waistcoat beneath the table. A louder, deeper, more obnoxious wave of gurgling rolled beneath the wool. The professor hunched over, eyes going wide as he struggled to conceal his embarrassment.
"I think I should leave," he said.
"But you're only getting hungrier."
The thin fingers twirled and stirred the air. Eiffel's stomach suddenly gurgled so loud he had to grit his teeth and brace himself against the table.
And then he grabbed a huge handful of potato mochi and shoved it in his mouth, slurping it in and swallowing all in one guttural gulp.
The professor gasped at what he'd done. The tannish palm of his right hand was coated in cold, sweet sauce. It collected in the creases and dripped steadily down his wrist onto the table.
Without hesitating, his other hand seized another fistful, and he licked it clean.
Cyllene waved her hand for Beni. "Beni, could you bring Professor Laventon three more bowls of hot potato mochi?"
"Double that," Eiffel growled. He was shifting uncomfortably in his seat. Sweat broke out on his brow as his fingers curled like claws, clipped nails scratching splinters from the wood of the table. Whatever had started happening inside him sounded deliciously painful. His guts were violent with hunger, squirming and crawling as the gurgles rang out louder and louder.
"You're doing something," he choked out. "What… are you… doing to me? I feel… warm. Feverish, almost. Agh, my ears hurt!"
He slipped off his outer wool coat and looked down at his hands, concerned. His fingers began to twitch. He tried pressing them flat on the table, but the knuckles seemed to move beneath the skin, creaking wetly as they forced the fingers out into odd angles. Suddenly the sauce wasn't covering as much skin as it had before.
Were his hands… growing?
His ears were definitely stretching. Already they'd poked up past his curls, cartilage reshaped into cute little points.
"It's just a little magic," Cyllene insisted, and she smirked.
The bowls of mochi came. Cyllene leaned back, crossing her arms as she watched steaming-hot puffs of potato get squished into sticky white mounds and stuffed into a pair of puffed-up brown cheeks. Eiffel was demolishing piles and piles of potato, scooping it up with both hands like a shovel and letting it slide down his throat, gulping like mad and then gasping for air.
There was no need to gesture at him anymore. Now the nature of his changes flowed far too easily from her imagination. The way his stomach would rumble and vibrate like he were poisoned, and he'd burn his hands trying to force mouthful after mouthful of hot potato and mirin down his throat.
His labored breaths. His strained, anxious little burps. The way he'd grip his stomach — no — his plump, bulging belly in both hands as it swelled out beneath the brown wool waistcoat.
"Why do I want to keep eating!?" he forced at her. Three sticky fingers pressed into his lips to stifle a belch that echoed in the back of his throat anyway. The other hand was massaging his belly in circles. Cyllene stood up to view it fully. In less than five minutes, he'd managed to pack away so much food that the waistcoat had stretched to fit snugly around a developing set of curves. Something deep inside his body rumbled angrily. The messy fingers dug inward, smearing the wool until it was dark and damp and smelling like a crude mixture of rice wine and sweat.
He bit at a quivering, plump lower lip. No, his stomach wasn't packed tight. Not stuffed. Not even close to full. It still felt as monstrously empty as it had before. All that mochi had been digested already. Gurgled away into nothing as fuel for a ballooning mass of fat.
What Eiffel Laventon gripped at now with a pair of noticeably larger and thicker hands was a jiggly mound of pudge that was slowly oozing out from the bottom of his shirt. He tugged at it, freeing it from the tightness of his wool trousers, and watched with growing horror as it sloshed audibly forward, surging into his hands. The brown skin was striped with lighter stretch marks, which quickly widened, quivering and pulsing as the bubbling sensation within forced him larger.
In seconds, his navel was exposed, wiggling as it stretched into a deep, wide line. Parts of him visibly bubbled like wax, the brown beginning to deepen to an ashy gray, slicked and dripping with sweat.
"Incredible," Cyllene whispered. "You're growing right out of your clothes. It's like you're evolving."
"What's… happen-ing!?"
His accent came out stunted, like something damp was clogging up his throat. The bowtie rippled around his neck. He clawed at it, wincing when he felt it puff and swell around his fingertips. Soft pools of fat had begun to worm up under the skin of his face, thickening his cheeks until they smacked wetly with each new gulp of saliva running out from under his tongue.
With a crazed, desperate sheen in his eyes, he hunched over and started to bite his discarded wool coat with his teeth. It tore like paper, and the whole coat itself disappeared down his throat, into the thunderous bubbling of his overinflated gut.
The bowtie snapped; his neck spilled free.
And then the bench broke beneath him.
Fantastic! Cyllene thought as she rushed around to where he now lay thrashing and gurgling in the dirt. A whole crowd had gathered, with Rei practically dragging Matron Pesselle behind him.
"Some kind of bad reaction to the food!" the boy was shrieking, tears in his eyes. "Professor!"
Eiffel forced his head up as best he could at his young charge's voice. He tried to croak out a response, but his voice had become garbled — too deep and indistinct for words. The same odd pulsations of his belly had fully overtaken his hands. The palms had more than doubled in size and thickness, and were still broadening as weight bubbled on. Fingers were looking more like fat, stubby sausages, gone bloody at the tips.
"He's bitten himself!" someone shouted.
But those closest could see the truth. Ripping up out of the grayish skin unnaturally quick were ten curving yellow claws.
RRRIIIIIIIIPPP!
It was surprisingly the trousers that went before the waistcoat. The seam of the right thigh had completely split along the inside, letting piles and piles of gray-brown flesh spill free. Eiffel moaned in pain, gripping the fabric with his new claws and tearing it fully away so he had something more to stuff down his gullet.
The place where a knee should've been looked… undefined. So much fat had bubbled up over the creaking, snapping bones that all the wrinkles in the skin had disappeared. Now the leg resembled a rippling, blobby gray tree trunk, ending in a twitching ankle attached to a foot that was still too small inside its leather slip-on.
The other pant leg was looking ready to burst as well. Pesselle had moved in close, dodging the claws and quickly cutting it all away with scissors.
But a massive arm shoved the matron's whole body aside. She fell flat on her back, watching terrified as a violet silk dress shirt was torn and shredded to loose, snapping strings around a pair of growing shoulders, the bones within making gruesome popping sounds as they broadened.
The crowd started backing away. Commander Kamado had discovered the debacle and looked upon Laventon like it wasn't the absurdest thing he'd ever seen.
"Move," the Commander growled at Rei, scooping the sobbing boy up and away from the two massive mounds of fat on the man's chest that had finally managed to pop open the buttons on the waistcoat. The claws then grasped and ripped the ruined vest off entirely. A fully-gray belly oozed free, triumphant, and set to work rumbling and rippling so violently it looked like the skin could tear open at any moment. Flesh was multiplying. Fat was seemingly endless, conjured by the bubbling, gurgling gut.
"Captain, what's happening to him?" Rei cried. "What's happening to the professor? Captain! CAPTAIN!"
Cyllene could hardly hear his screams. She was in a wonderful kind of daze, a pleasured smile teasing at her lips and her mind in control of the whole fantasy, brought completely to life out of nothing. Her body was tingling and warm like she was drunk. Blood-red light spilled out from her left sleeve where the magical chain bit hungrily at her wrist. Her fingertips glowed with it, and so did her eyes, glittering like two full moons gone totally into eclipse.
"I'm turning Professor Laventon into a Snorlax," she told Rei then.
"You're… you're WHAT!?"
The thing's stunted legs jiggled as they continued to grow. Unlike the arms, which were merely piling on hundreds of pounds, the legs were seeming to shrink, bones becoming hidden by the absurd amount of round fat pulsing out from the belly. Now the feet were big enough to tear free of the slip-ons. Two toes had vanished from each, and what remained was a pair of padded, three-clawed pillows of flesh that couldn't look more deformed as they inflated.
Rei had to yank on Cyllene's arm before she came out of her stupor enough to respond:
"Well, I can't have him sharing Ginter's secret with anyone else, even if he doesn't believe it. Plus he was annoying me. It's not like the mutation is difficult. He was plump enough already. I just made him a whole lot fatter and made his bones stronger. Oh, he should probably have some fur, though."
She pressed the index and middle fingers on her left hand together and spun them in a low circle. The creature that was once Eiffel Laventon spasmed. It was larger than the picnic table and was quickly reaching a half-ton in weight. It snarled and roared in continued hunger, piggish nose flattening and sinking into the flab of its face while huge twin tusks thickened up from a widening lower jaw.
The sweat-slicked curly black hair layered across its chest and stomach instantly started to thicken and change to a light, creamy beige. More of it sprouted in waves, causing the creature to writhe even faster, claws scraping with increasing strength along where gray flab was consumed. Luckily the skin itself had thickened to the point where it wasn't in danger of ripping apart.
The hair on its head, meanwhile, had gone a dark and shiny emerald green, and it was growing longer and curlier, spreading down over the back of the neck and erupting in soft new tufts all along the arms and reshaped legs. The pointed ears shot out longer and pointier, green and twitching, alarmed by the noises of the crowd and the stomach.
She could see it now. Everyone could. The body was settling heavily into a general egg-shape — a vast, voracious belly onto which a tusked, sleepy head, stocky arms and seemingly only feet were attached.
The rippling of that belly began to slow. Long, soft, very curly fur concealed any final pulsations anyway. Cyllene amused herself, remembering Eiffel Laventon's first draft of the Poké Dex:
It is a common disaster for Snorlax to appear in villages and consume everything in sight. Its laziness is only surpassed by its hunger, and when it works up an appetite, it becomes filled with incredible strength.
The thrashing had ceased. This Snorlax lay on its back heaving and moaning, too tired from the warping of its body to act on its appetite. Cautiously, Pesselle crept near again. She put a gentle hand in the center of its stomach, which still burbled softly as the sized-up organs finished shifting into place.
Cyllene felt something shift within her as well. Like a sigh, the spell diminished, and the red glow dissipated fully from her fingertips.
She stumbled, feeling too much tingling pleasure now to even care when Kamado slapped the great beast in the center of its forehead with a Poké Ball and it was sucked inside as steam. Too tired to care when Rei screamed. Too drunk on life to watch the young ragged fists pounding on the back of a black kimono as a warrior saved his village from a ravenous monster, or the Munchlax still crying as it tore around searching for its caretaker.
"SHE'S A WITCH!" screamed the boy. "SHE TURNED HIM! BECAUSE HE WOULDN'T FALL IN LOVE WITH HER! SHE'S AN EVIL WIIITCH, KAMADO!"
"You are coming with me," said a man without any clothes on who grabbed Cyllene by the shoulder and pulled her quickly behind the nearest house.
"Okaaay," she sang, bouncing along beside him. "Where are we goinggg?"
"Mount Coronet. After I disguise myself better."
"Ooh! I can help you with that~! Do you wanna be a… a… how about a…"
adamaN didn't catch her drift. But with the way things had just gone down, humans turning into Pokémon and all, he didn't want to know anyway.
"That won't be necessary, Miss Witch."
~N~
Yeah, Rei's traumatized now. And reality-bending powers get Cyllene very happy. XD
This is my first time writing a transformation that involves weight gain, but I've wanted to work with fat for a long time! It was fun! Definitely good practice, though I think I prefer my tortured transforming males getting muscle. ;P
Also I HAVE A NEW ONE-SHOT OUT! It's a dark-humored surrealist take on S/V, starring Larry and Arven with just a bit of Turo. "Hammond Sting" is the title!
Published by Syntax-N on FanFiction . Net October 9th, 2023 and by scrivenernoodz on Ao3 October 10th, 2023.