You were terrified when you first arrived to a bizarre world in a completely different universe than yours. However, as you familiarize yourself with the world around you, you find yourself growing a knack for exploration and discovery. Your fun is brought to a halt when you take a step too wide and kill the fox of a revenge-happy clan. With their bizarre flavor of berries, they send you on a journey of inflation and out-of-this-world growth, and you discover along the way how growing past your comfort zone allows you to witness things you would have never seen otherwise.

As a fair warning, this story is quite a bit different from my others, especially with how ludicrous it is and how quickly it escalates. For those of you still here, let me know what you think in the comments. Thanks for reading!

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You push away cherry vines with your hand as your feet step into a ground made of mushy whipped cream. Your head dodges beneath a chocolate-coated branch, your back leaning to avoid being snapped by a dangling cotton snake. It is only your third day in this mysterious, gluttonous world, having stumbled into it from a portal that sat on the outskirts of your home town, and you are steadily becoming acquainted with the world’s abnormalities.

You perk your ears upon hearing a rumbling from below. You swipe your leg away in the nick of time as a molehill made entirely of candy emerges from the ground. The molehill quickly grows to a large mound and then a landfill. You safely jumped on top midway though this transition and stand still as your view of the world expands. When the noise ceases, you stood atop a hill of sweet treats. You pick up a jelly bean and pop it in your mouth, nodding at the sweet but sub par taste, before sliding down the structure like a water slide.

You land steadily on your feet moments before touching the ground, brushing crumbs off your leaf-made attire. Walking away, you hear a herd of creatures crash near the structure of candy. You don’t have to turn around to identify the animals that chomped on the pile. Wings that flapped faster than a hummingbird, beaks that munched like machines, a sweet tooth that bested any other: these were the jelly birds, creatures you named due to their gelatine appearance, who feast on these naturally-made structures every morning, evening and night. They were usually no smaller than an adult cat, but rounded out considerably when they finished their buffet. You look up briefly when they fly away, noticing how their boulder bellies swung wildly like an uncalibrated metronome. You snap your head ahead, determined not to waste a second more than necessary when there’s still so much to discover.

When you hear rustling from a nearby bush, you ready your handcrafted bow with an arrow, expecting a raspberry bunny or chocolate squirrel to pop out. The animal emerges and you loosen your grip as you realize this creature was neither of those. When it turns towards you, you take the opportunity to examine it. With pointed ears and a long snout, it didn’t look much different than a feral fox save for two distinguishing features: skin that shines an oceanic blue, and a belly that juts out half a foot with small, congested bulges all over its skin, as if marbles pushed against it in a desperate attempt to break free from their round container. You tighten your grip, eager to discover more about this unusual species.

The fox’s eyes widen when it notices your offensive stance. It attempts to blitz away, but it acts too late. As the arrow plunges through its stomach, it lets out a few, heavy breaths before collapsing on the floor. Throwing your bow over your back, you walk a few steps and kneel over the prey. You pick up one of the spherical objects that spilled out of its gut. Dark blue, and exuding a bit of juice as your squeeze them, they lean more towards berries than marbles. You cup them by the dozen and drop them in your bag as you decide on a basic but apt name for this newly discovered species: blueberry foxes.

Zipping your backpack, you toss it beside your bow and stand up, only to be confronted by five similar looking foxes, all with furrowed eyebrows and growling teeth. You gulp and take a few steps back, contemplating your options. You could attempt to execute the whole herd, but you’ll likely only be able to kill one or two before being pinned down by the rest. With no visible escape route, you drop your belongings on the floor and throw your hands in the air.

The foxes, however, don’t accept surrenders. They charge at you and tackle you to the floor, crowding around your face. “How dare you kill one of our brethren, filthy scum!” one of them hisses, blue spit dripping on your face. You lay in shock that these creatures can speak English; every other feral creature merely yelped or cried. They continue tossing insults at you until one of them suggests they should return to their tribe and get the “head chief”. They then huddle around and whisper to each other; you miss most of the dialogue, but hear through fragmented segments an argument about who will stay around to guard the “brethren murderer.” Before long, four of them scram away, leaving only one fox to guard over you.

He has a grouchy frown on his face, clearly unhappy about being placed on guard duty. “You filthy anthro,” he hisses. “You’ll pay deeply for believing you can get away scot-free for murdering one of our kind!” The fox diverts his attention to your bag. He sticks his nose in and starts rummaging through it before tipping it over, spilling the berries you salvaged all over the ground. “Look at all these berries you gathered!” it says with a mock-surprised tone. “I bet you think these are simply light snacks, but you’re sorely mistaken.”

He smiles cockily as he grabs a handful of your spoils. “Well, I might as well give you a teaser, given these won’t be the last berries you’ll eat today.” He stuffs blueberries into your mouth until your cheeks bulge. After each forced swallow, your mouth refills with another load of the chewy fruits. He moves so quickly you don’t get a chance to savor their sweet flavor. When the entire bag is empty, he throws it against a nearby tree, his mouth arching into an anticipating grin. Seconds later, a gurgling in your stomach catches your attention and you drift your eyes downwards.

You almost scream as you see your skin turn a pale blue. Your stomach bulges in front of your eyes, gradually straining your shirt. In a matter of seconds, your entire body is a deep shade of blue. The juice begins to plump your other body parts; your arms and legs thicken, your chin multiplies into two, and your butt resembles two squishy basketballs. One by one, your clothes shred as your limbs sink into your spherical belly. Soon enough, your legs become too weak to balance your titanical weight and you fall on your amble rear. You are barely able to move, only sway like a bloated rocking horse. Your body expands foot by foot, passing 7 feet then 10 then 15. Your vision of the ground shrinks as it’s partially consumed by your growing belly.

Your growth stops when you are eye to eye with a jelly bird, perched with a full belly on a nearby branch. Startled, it flies away. Gazing at the retreating bird and then your body, you suspect a hundred of the bloated birds can fit in you, which exemplifies how monstrous you are. Your belly and butt are merged in a giant sphere, becoming the only recognizable part of your body with every other limb consumed by your bulk. You’re filled with juice and regret, but at least you’ll be safe until the “chief” comes around.

Just as you let out a sigh of relief, the fox, which has been riding atop your belly the entire time, wags its finger. Moments later, you feel your stomach rumbling again. A bead of sweat falls down your cheeks, bringing a cruel smile to the fox’s face. “I thought you would be briefly relieved,” he says. “You see, when a large influx of berries enters your system, they don’t process simultaneously. They all patiently wait their turn, allowing a few seconds of rest between each berry.” Your eyes widen. A single berry was all it took to turn you into a 50 foot wide sphere, and you were horrified to find out what a hundred would do to you.

Your body bloats with juice once again, brushing up against the nearby trees. Within the first handful of berries, you scale higher than the trees. A handful later, you were the size of the candy hills you slid down a mere half hour ago. Each berry is more painful than the last, sending your body into a flurry of gurgles and groans. Your hands and feet become more numb as your body further devours your limbs along with the forest that surrounds you.

When a full thirty seconds passes without any triumphant roars, you were free to examine your body knowing it wouldn’t grow bigger for a while. It stretches thousands and thousands of feet, consuming the majority of your vision. The sea of fat hums softly as it wobbles and sends small waves throughout your body. You’re only captivated by the hypnotic sight briefly before becoming hit with worry. You look to the fox, half-expecting him to smirk while revealing another startling truth about the berries, but he simply shakes his head.

Sighing, you take the time to peer through your thinned but widened view of the world. It was only now that you realize how ignorant you are about the world around you. You thought most of it was one big, sugary rainforest, but the landscape ahead of you defies that notion. You see it’s split into separate, distinct sections like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. There’s the rainforest you traversed through for the past days, and then there is a vast, red desert and a sparkling, lively ocean and a cold, mammoth-infested tundra. You are grateful you had a chance to see parts of the world you likely may have never come across otherwise, but grow sad that you’ll only end up destroying them at this rate.

Your relative quiet is interrupted by a rustling a couple hundred feet below. You feel light taps near the center of your gut and you’re soon able to identify the owners of the footsteps. A group of foxes glare at you, nine in total. Eight of them have a stuffed body bag strung around their backs. One of them, which stands in the center, wears a large, licorice-crafted hat. His face-painting is slightly lighter than his dark blue skin and he stands two inches over his followers. Based on his stand out appearance, you conclude this has to be the “chief” of the clan.

“Enemy of the clan!” he booms. “We will not let your despicable murder go unpunished! I see you already got a taste of the potency of our blueberries, but those were only the appetizers compared to the buffet I have in preparation for you!” With a snap of his fingers, one of his disciples hands him a brown bag. Your face scrunches when you notice indents all along the strained bag; there must be hundreds of berries crammed inside.

He pours the bag into your mouth in a funnel-motion. You choke for a good ten seconds while attempting to keep up with the frantic feeding. Soon enough, the bag becomes paper flat. Throwing it to the side, the chief glares at the next fox. With another snap comes another bag. You attempt to guesstimate how many berries they were stuffing in your belly, but when the number reaches thousands, your brain becomes overwhelmed. You decide to just stick with “a lot”. After the eighth bag is emptied, the chief looks down at you with a wicked grin.

The fox lifts a paw in the air as if he remembers something. He removes his hat, retrieving the berry that rests on his head. Unlike the others, this once was cherry red and considerably larger, about the size of a baseball. “This will allow the berries inside you to process at a much faster pace than usual, as well as accommodating your body to keep up with the increased speed,” he explains. “After all, what’s the use in revenge if it takes years just to carry out?”

As soon as the berry falls down your throat, your body pulses out another thousand feet, reaching the size of mountains. Each berry only takes a second to decompress while the pause between each one doesn’t last longer than a millisecond. As your body quakes with juice, it stretches into a mile wide, squishy sphere and approaches its second mile soon afterwards. You frown as your limited view of the world disappears behind a blue blanket. You stare at the sky instead for comfort, though the messy collection of colors makes it look more like a child’s painting than a work of art. With nothing to distract you from the spastic, painful widening of your body, you daydream about a peaceful, alternate future to distance yourself from reality.

When the inflation secedes, your body spans several miles. The remains of the forest – from the runty rodents to the towering trees – poke and prod beneath your belly, along with a few hot rocks that you assume came from the nearby desert. Your body groans and gurgles as millions of gallons of liquid slosh around inside. You look and feel like a literal mountain of furry flesh: huge, heavy, and immovable. Still, a small sliver of hope emerges through the bleakness: the clan that swore revenge on you is nowhere to be seen, meaning they can no longer stuff you with berries. You’re useless and unable to move, but you take solace in the fact that, over the course of months or years, you’ll eventually shrink to your former size.

However, you soon realize the clan has extra tricks up their sleeves. Your eyes are greeted by the sight of a mountainous ball rolling in your direction that’s even bigger than you. When it nears closer, you notice a pair of eyes and thin fur across its body. It isn’t just any furry creature, however; you soon notice tiny bumps that mold around its skin like bubble wrap, much like the blueberry foxes you faced earlier, though you never thought you’d see one so massive. As you see the berries in its belly jiggle like gumballs, you ponder how many are jam packed inside.

The distance between you and the fox closes mile by mile until its face comes within a hair of you. It surprises you with a puffy kiss, blowing a strong gust of wind through your body. When you feel spherical objects drop down your belly, you realize it’s trying to transfer all the berries inside its colossal stomach into yours. The wind flowing through your body cools you, but you sweat furiously as your body expands from the sheer transfer of berries. With a final puff, it blows the last of its berries into your stomach. You notice the fox is a former shell of its bloated form, looking instead like a starving animal. It gives you an apologetic look before scramming down your belly. You gulp; you feel berries occupy every square inch of your body, and when they start decompressing, you fear of expanding to sizes so grand it’ll make your current figure look like an ant.

Hearing a familiar roar from below, you brace yourself for the next round of growth. You tense up as your skin stretches to contain the immense influx of juice. Your body covers miles faster than a car on an empty freeway. As each minute passes, your body pulses to outlandish sizes, scaling past a city, a landscape, then a country. Even as you grow past the moon, your body churns to decompress the last thousand berries. When the last berry finishes processing, you’re wider than three moons glued together and mere miles away from breaking out of the world’s atmosphere.

You take the time to let it sink in how colossal you were, but it was becoming harder with each round of inflation. Being mall-sized was far fetched and becoming your own mountain of flesh was one too many pills to swallow, but now that you were the size of celestial bodies, it was becoming difficult to discern between fact and fiction. Your body feels so thick even a bazooka would fizzle out without puncturing a fourth of it. Gravity pulls you titanical weight towards the ground with such force you fear of breaking through into the world’s core. You feel every corner of the world, from the familiar rainforest to the cold tundras, beneath your gigantic body. Despite multiplying your prior weight by unfathomable degrees, your predicament hasn’t changed in the slightest. You’re still impossibly large, immovable by your own will, and so bored you beg for a drying wall of paint to stare at.

The sky, misinterpreting your pleas for entertainment, amuses you with a small dot of white that spreads out like a droplet of paint. The splotch reveals itself to be a humongous ball of white – as big as the planet you’re sitting on – falling towards the world like an asteroid. Moments later, you discover it isn’t aiming exclusively at the planet; it’s aiming at you.

When the object is close enough to examine it with a sharper eye, you tense up. With fuzzy fur, a slanted face, and thick, spherical indents across its skin, it’s near identical to a blueberry fox. Its one distinguishing feature – its pure white tone – whirls terrified thoughts through your head. Was this no more than a single gene alteration, or did it signify an advanced iteration of its species, capable of inflating its victims to more ludicrous degrees?

When it comes eye to eye with you, it locks onto your muzzle in the same fashion as the last, whisking its berries to you in a windstorm with the power of a nameable hurricane. It feeds you more efficiently than the last fox, stuffing your belly with half the breaths in a quarter of the time. The fox is as bare bones as the last when it finishes, maybe even more so. You, on the other hand, are positively stuffed with berries and rock nervously as berries float peacefully inside your juice-filled stomach.

Seconds later, your stomach screams, and you clench your eyes in anticipation. Each berry pops like a hyper condensed kernel, filling your body with a mountain’s worth of juice. With jet speeds, you bloat to the size of the planet you rest upon. When you open eyes, you are surprised to find your blue horizon has been tainted white, dyed by the berries that have already decompressed inside your body. You are finally free from the grotesqueness of the sky as your eyes are introduced to the vastness of space. One by one, each other planet in the solar system bows to your superior form as you grow past them. It ends as quickly as it begins, leaving you the second biggest entity in the universe, second only to the Exy, the red star that serves as the solar system’s sole source of light.

You find yourself floating in space, watching the asteroids orbit you like toys strung from a baby’s carousel. Some of the planets, looking like balls of cookie dough from your perspective, also choose you as their orbital master over the Exy. As you glance over them, your frown crooks into a slight smirk. Being confined to the planet you were teleported to, you never had the chance to explore the neighboring planets. You can’t see the fine details of their surfaces never mind their wildlife and environments, but analyzing their varying shapes, colors, and sizes keeps your curious mind entertained.

With a flash, they disappear around you, along with the stars you were admiring in the far distance. You blink once, twice, five times, but the scene doesn’t reappear. You find no trace of your solar system, not even the Exy. Searching for an explanation, you remember the fox clan. They likely grew tired of you causing chaos within their solar system, teleporting you thousands of light years away. Disappointingly, if your theory was correct, that means they could have sent you right in line to the next fox in their symphony of feeding.

On cue, you identify a smudge that blends in with the blackness of space. As it enlarges and draws near, you recognize fuzzy fur and tiny bumps along its belly, confirming it as yet another oddly-colored blueberry fox. From your angle and distance, the fox was as big as the Sun. Judging by its black color, you predict it’s even more capable than the white fox at ballooning your body to even more preposterous sizes. Minutes later, it comes close enough to consume your entire vision as it connects its muzzle with your face. With only three massive gusts of air, its entire belly is emptied and the fox becomes thin and animated.

Before you get a chance to blink, you feel your body rumble and shift. As one of the trillions of berries decompresses, a planet’s worth of juice diverges across your expansive body. Within seconds, you outsize the fox that once intimated you, at least in its size pre-inflation. Your skin begins to darken until its almost as black as space itself. Your solar radius soars, breaking into double digits then triple digits, still with no end in sight.

It lasts only a fraction the time of the previous inflation, yet its effects are astronomically greater. Your trembling, stormy belly reaches the width of over a thousand Suns. Just minutes ago, you were a hundred times smaller than the famed star, but now you can fit more Suns inside you than the Sun can Earths. You admit it was mesmerizing to take up such a monumental amount of space, and being a living creature that’s larger than most stars is certainly a unique experience.

Whether or not the positives of your colossal form outweigh the negatives is up for debate, but there’s one thing you’re near certain on: the feeding chain of foxes is finally over. You become more and more convinced as you mull over the details. Now blimped to the size of the largest of stars, they’ll have a nice chuckle or two at your functionless orb of flesh and then leave you alone for good. It seemed highly unlikely they’ll put in the effort to make you even larger at diminishing returns, especially for such a minor crime; you were hardly a hunter much less a mass murderer. Besides, they’ll run the risk of inflating you so large you’ll interfere with the neighboring solar systems, and they couldn’t possibly want to claim responsibility for something as catastrophic as that.

You gaze at outer space for several minutes, the long pause suggesting the indefinite barrage of inflation was indeed finished. No longer terrorized by inflation’s plethora of thrills, you utilize your clear mind to note the features of the novel sights around you, sights that could only be witnessed by someone as large as a gas giant. Looking to the top left, you notice two streams of blue and red that cross each other like a figure eight; you see blast of purples near the center where they kiss, and though you don’t know their function, you admire by the spectacle of light. When it bores you, you turn to the top right. You glare at an orange circle; its center was buzzing with activity, a collection of colored light that chases each other around in a tight circle. In a blink, the light expands and morphs into a bright white; as white consumes the inside of the citrus outline, it looked like the outline of a frosted donut. The light suddenly vanishes, leaving a single creature in its center, curled like an unborn baby. It slowly opens it eyes and unwinds its body, looking no different than a red kangaroo. A beam snatches it away; the roo darts nervously as it disappears in the distance. You were in awe the entire time as you witness the birth of a new species; you would have never seen it if you were confined to a single planet.

You set the circle of creation aside for a moment, focusing your eyes to the top center, where a group of stars were glued to space like colorful stickers. They were mere bodies of gas, no different from stars in your old universe, but you caught yourself admiring the subtle beauties of each of them nonetheless, from the small one that glowed a dazzling orange, to the moderate one that shone a volcanic red, to the rather large one that glimmered a rainbow of colors. Your eyes only drift away from it for a split second, but its bizarreness attracts them like a magnet. You’ve never seen a rainbow-colored star before, so you look at it more intensely, with more care. You soon regret that decision as your blissful state is shattered by the realization that this is anything but a star.

As it hovers towards you, your optimism cracks further. It is the largest entity you’ve seen, larger than you or any asteroid or planet or star. It’s so large, in fact, that you can fit every one of the hundreds stars in your line of vision inside it and still only fill it halfway. You analyze its belly, its skin stretched and contorted by incalculable amounts of spherical indents. You weren’t surprised it was another blueberry fox – though after the past few foxes you contemplate broadening the adjective – but its multi-tonal color was enough to revive your anxious mind. Never mind how many berries were stuffed inside it – trillions, quadrillions, or even quintillions – you fear a species with this many sparkling colors was so genetically superior to its peers that it’s capable of inflating you to exponentially greater degrees.

Even if your mind wasn’t consumed by terror, the next five seconds would have dazed past you. In the short span, the fox manages to approach you, empty its entire belly into yours with a dizzyingly strong blast of wind, and dart away to who knows where. When the last second ticks, the first berry explodes into an enormous flood of juice, stretching your body several thousand solar radii. Your body vibrates and spins out of control, barely able to handle the insane potency of the rainbow berries. Your skin dazzles as a variety of colors paint the black canvas of your body. You weren’t fattening at the speed of light; you were fattening at tens of thousands times the speed of light, allowing you expand three times the Sun’s circumference in a millisecond. Your solar radii climbs to tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands, then millions. It soon became more appropriate to measure your body in light years as you grow large enough to become your own solar system.

The stars that were dozens of light years away rocket towards you at blistering fast speeds. Or, rather, your body reached out to them, and a light touch was all it took to cause them to explode in an extravagant light show. When you outsize galaxies, your prediction comes true; as you invade neighboring solar systems, every star and planet within their vicinities erases in a second-long bang. Every attention-grabbing sensation overwhelms you – the constant fattening, the frequent collisions with the stars and planets, the spastic flashes of light as stars blitz in and out of your line of vision – and you drift into unconsciousness.

You didn’t sleep very long, maybe ten minutes at most, before a sensation causes you to wake with a start, but you quickly realize it was the lack of sensation that interrupted your sleep. Your body, finally finished fattening, ends at a mind boggling size of 1.5 million light years. You were preposterously huge, so large you can fit a dozen modestly sized galaxies inside your ginormous figure.
Your body still shakes as the juice that whirlpools in your body creates light-year-wide waves against your skin. You notice thousands of exotic sights around your body, enough to keep your mind busy for weeks.

Despite your vastness, you took half-relief and half-misery in the fact you weren’t the biggest entity in the universe. There were still galaxies that toppled your size, and the universe itself was a hundred times larger than you. It meant there were still intact planets, stars, and galaxies to entertain your exploration-hungry mind. However, as long as there was something bigger than you, there was the possibility that somewhere in this universe was yet another humongous fox, likely of some new, obscure color, eager to fatten you up. If and when it does – if it even exists – the observable universe likely won’t be able to contain you, a thought that both worries and excites you.

~

Smiling, the chief withdraws from the telescope, allowing his followers to have a look at the newly-created, fleshy galaxy. “Honestly, Drew,” he begins as he walks with the adviser, “We’ll never have an excuse to instigate our domino chain of foxes if that anthro never came along. Sure, we acted out of irrational anger when we decided the furry humanoid should be our fated victim, but those Draken would never come back here so we could carry out that ‘destroy their own universe with their own species’ plan we were going for; we were merely procrastinating. Now we have a bloated furry that has already destroyed most of the Draken’s solar systems. When the rest of our pumped foxes come in contact with it, the Drakens will get a taste of their own bitter medicine once and for all and pay for all the dastardly deeds they carried out against our kind and so many others!”

Drew nods, only half-listening to his leader’s ramblings while attempting to balance a crate’s worth of astronomical equipment. He would have kept quiet at that point, but a question spontaneously pops in his mind, and he fears it would drive him insane if he didn’t have it answered. “Hey, chief? What do you mean by ‘the rest’? How many foxes did we even blow up?”

The chief chuckles, as if admiring an inside joke. “I guess we’ll see soon enough...”