The Character Plot Story of the month, as proposed by my patron  drewbermeister

"In the wild west, famed sheriff, Andy Renard, protects his hometown. Unbeknownst to the citizens, Andy is a werefox who dispatches his targets like prey. And with criminal he consumes, he becomes bigger and stronger, and soon he won’t be able to explain away the residual effects for long."

Featuring my patrons

Andy (C)  drewbermeister

Sini (C) sticky-claws

Poor ole teller (C)  Siennathevaloinx

Jet, sticky-clawed crook's kobold accomplice  Midnight_Yamikidate

Clove, cheater of death (C)  Kobuld

Thumbnail art (C)  Eda

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Wild West Werefox

Shadow-enshrouded dragon wings plunged from the late-dusk sky. The wings folded in around the crouched figure, and a ring of dust billowed out from the flap. He rose with a backward-fanged grin that gleamed in the moonlight. He raised a long rifle, and a breeze flapped his cloak as his wings spread. Sini wore round, purple-tinted spectacles that matched his belly, and the black cloak matched his black scales. A black bandanna covered his muzzle. The anthro dragon’s accomplice, a little white-scaled kobold named Jet, had fallen from the landing, but still clutched the cloak. He clambered back to the top of Sini’s shoulder. He took aim at the distance with two little revolvers, his crimson eyes glinting eagerly behind his smoked-up goggles.

Ready for action! every piece of the kobold’s poise seemed to say. Sini broke forward, and his wings propelled him through a short alley of the wild west town with speed that could match that of a feral equine.

Atop the striped canvas of the saloon nearest the bank, Andy crouched, wearing a short cape and a dark-brown hat tipped. He grinned ear to ear—not because he found joy in miscreants attempting a robbery in his town. No, this was the smug grin of someone who feels more than capable of dealing with trouble.

“Oh, boys … You’ve wronged the wrong bank.” Feverishly, his claws rattled over his holstered revolvers. Time to blast these fellas to Swiss cheese, thought the sheriff. He took a “Y” shape in midair, dropped before the saloon porch, then rushed forth, shadowing the outsiders. It was darkening already, so he’d need to be quick about this duel, lest the moonlight touch him before he could return home.

Thanks to the tip-off from a shady fella in the corner of the saloon, he would have the drop on the criminals tonight.

A tubby paw kicked the wooden door. From the teller window came a scream and a plume of paperwork, for she had ducked behind the counter into a foetal position. “Take what you wish, ahh! Oh, my heart, would ya like it in ones? Fives? Tens? Gold? Speak your wishes and I’ll ready the bags!”

Sini had rolled into the room dramatically. He rose, sweeping the barrel at one feller who had happened to be conversing with the teller the moment before. The fat fox-lad put his hands up, and slumped so far to the side in surprise that he spilled himself from his chair, monocle rolling across the quaintly-patterned floor.

“No need for all that baying miss,” muttered the bandanna-ed dragon, and hitched himself close to the window, and lowered his rifle. He cocked his head, spoke across the counter at a cocky profile angle. “You just load up as much as we can carry on our backs shoulder to hip, and we’ll toss ourselves out like gentle-folk, we will. Ain’t that right, Jet?”

“Uhuh, uhuh!”

The teller—an aquatic, lavender immigrant with webby ears and a dolphin tail—said hushedly, “I won’t make any more fuss.” She picked herself up and hurried into a back-room. The ears of the robbers twitched with the sounds of her sufficient haste: sounds of safe-unlocking, code-breathing.

“How are we doing this evening, boys?”

Genteely, Andy stepped into the bank, his hands at his gun holsters. Sini revolved startledly. He backed against the teller window and cursed. “You … you must be the big cheese around here. You’re prettier in the pictures. Hmph. Pursued us to make more trouble than needed, I wager?”

“Oh, I’m not the trouble-maker. I’m the trouble-ender.” He squeezed the handle of each revolver and grinned. “Two for two.”

Sini looked at his shoulder-accomplice. They met eyes. They looked back at Andy, and Sini narrowed his eyes behind the tinted lenses. “Plug and pour.”

One shot from his Winchester exploded and enshrouded him in a plume of smoke. Andy barrel rolled over his cloak. He corkscrewed to his feet, having crossed his arms to withdraw his own toys. He slid on one foot to a stop, then gave his extended hands the shakedown.

BANG! BANG! BANG BANG!

Sini dipped—slowly rushed at the sheriff in a crouch, rising with a battle-growl and his rifle homing in. A shot blew shrapnel from a crate behind Andy. He blanched a bit, having felt the bullet graze his cape. Jet had jumped a-flight with revolvers pounding, so it looked like he was ziplining toward the entrance, a series of rapid-fire shots which pressed Andy to the teller wall, at which point he gulped and ducked a couple singing shots that had promised the kobold his throat.

That portly fellow in the corner guffawed, trembling on his side, unable to brave to his feet as the firefight unfolded.

Reload, round two, reload, round three: The two parties revolved around what now looked like a smoke-lounge, the fighters wheezing a bit. Andy shimmied past another shot, then fumbled to reload as fast as he could.

BANG! The Winchester clipped his shoulder. With a soft cry, he pirouetted out of the door. The top step peeled his foot. He fell. Both revolvers clacked beside him on the dirt boulevard.

Yet, as he lay there with his head buried beneath his cloak, his tail started to swish. As the criminals slid out onto the steps, from the sheriff’s downed form came a chuckle that somehow sounded both hearty and barbarous. Dragon and kobold grimaced. They gave each other the same look of comical bewilderment they’d given each other when that math question had stumped them so many years back.

Sini muttered, “What in tarnation? What’s wrong with him?”

“Dunno, boss—but whatever the ailment, I know the cure! Light ’em up!”

He aimed both barrels at that son of a vixen. Then, suddenly, the fox’s cape bulged. The claw-marks of a great bear sheared across over his cape’s shoulder areas and the small of the back … Each of the kobold’s hands twitched open and his revolvers clacked down, for he watched with a trembling jaw as the fox shook as though the devil were in him. His pelt shimmered a dark, sour yellow—a color akin to that of the full moon this night. It was as though his body were absorbing the lunar light! That laughter—the timbre of it had once been much lighter, befitting the “handsome boy with a title, who likes to play dress-up with daddy’s shooters” Sini had wagered the sheriff to be. But now, the laughter rumbled and snarled and could scare off a whole stable of stallions. Sini reckoned this was the sonic equivalent of seeing “red rum” spelled in blood on a bulletin board.

Andy’s shoulders each grew huge from a single rolling motion. The back hulked up in procession, arms rowing out. The sheriff had jolted to his feet. The eyes of the robbers widened as they watched that fur thicken. That chest barreled out to dwarf the average barrels and crates in breadth—at least double as thick as it had been.

Sini found all the poise that had once inhabited his arms defecting as that lycanthropic growl of metamorphic pleasure prompted residents to light their gas-lamps in the windows of the nearby saloon. The werefox, bare naked to proudly display all his ferocity and eight-foot-tall stature, unleashed a roar big enough to turn bloodhounds into puppies at the torrential gust of slobber. One bound was two-footed, the next four-footed. He bowled up the steps. Sini’s grip wasn’t worth a lick anymore. He fired. His shot found the clouds before the werefox’s fores smashed down on the porch. One last superpowered stride, and he straightened his back with both of the robbers’ throats in his grasps, more surefire than any shackles.

Though his sober mind was succumbing to that feral side, he managed to snarl a few last words from a long-muzzled sneer: “Jig is up, fellas … Now, allow me to show you how we keep the crime rate low in Weston.”

Sini gulped when the werefox fisted his kobold prey down his gullet. He listened to the pleads and frantic squirms of the little dragonkin, the kobold’s wings visibly aflutter and contributing to the squelches. They toured down the shaggy neck, the length of it as thick as a horse’s neck. The kobold’s teensy voice tumbled down the neck with his shape. “Nuuupe, nupe. I understand if you want me to serve time, sheriff sir, but there’s no way I’m going to—grbmmgh!” All those canvases of wet flesh smushed his muzzle before he could say the rest, and the tubing continued parading him down to the town jail. Throat gunk smeared his goggles, and they kept fogging up, so he couldn’t see his surroundings until he snatched off the headgear.

“Oh, grody. There are heirlooms of all kinds of convicts in here, Sini. An amulet on a chain, boot spurs … a tiny whiskey bottle? Wait, is that part of a gold bar? Wait, noo! Sheriff, tell your juices to quit digesting my goggles. Those aren’t an accessory, they’re a lifestyle!”

A crass belch mortared the upraised dragon, who blanched as the pair of goggles splatted on one of his horns, then dropped and hung from it, as though he had been ordered the responsibility of hanging onto his sidekick’s eyewear.

Sini scrunched his snout, forcibly converting his fear and disgust into indignation. “I could have lived with you eating my counterpart. But disrespecting my horn like that? What do you think I am, one of those fancy Christmas trees?”

Narrowing his eyes, Andy looked amused in some primal way. His ear flickered, and he looked down at the boisterously churning mound at his middle. Pleased by each subsiding jut and smash, he grinned. He licked his big chops and wagged his tail, enjoying the kobold’s futile attempts to snap his innards as though they were so flimsy as rubber bands.

A lasso could not have snagged his prey so well, no. As for the sloshes and stirs of gurgles, Sini hadn’t heard so slick a fella since his former feline partner-in-crime had conned some settlers out of their seed drill for a raffle ticket.

“Now listen here, ya big waste of muscle. You think you’re so slick … But you’ll have to go through me if you try to digest Jet! And if you go through me, the indigestion will lay you down heavy, like some railroad tracks! So why don’t you be a good pupper and spit him up?”

Instead, the werefox retorted by hurtling Sini demonstrably high. He howled for dear life, felt himself peak at about five storeys up, before the wind started howling in an exponential descent. He scrambled in seeming place in the black of night, twisting like some Tazmanian devil, before the dragon comet granted Andy’s wish.

GULP!

Schnoz-first, Sini dove into the depths of scaletight folds and slather-y rivulets. If the pillowy flesh clenching him toward a certain doom were outside the fox rather than inside, it would have been fit for a king, Sini wagered. As of now, the rank folds were fit only for humiliating the robber dragon, weighing down and glueing wings with too much goop for him to flap his way to freedom. Andy snarled with mirth. His hot, bestial breath washed the scaly midnight snack while his tongue—smooth and slimy like a portobello mushroom—toured the dragon’s purple potbelly to appreciate the malleable flesh and the underlying heaves of breath that curve conveyed.

He wrung his neck with the fervor of a rodeo bull. Each yank helped the sodden flesh-sheets stretch to envelop more of the dragon, who huffed a plume of poison breath in exasperation.

Sini murmured, “Don’t say I didn’t give ya a fair signal. You’ll croak from the cramps, if not from the food poisoning.”

He spilled out into the glossy pouch, where the kobold had stood the gold bar up straight and was now trying to balance on one foot atop the part of the bar which rose over the waves of acid, borrowing fickle time. His balancing act was broken when Sini belly flopped into the juices with his tail spilling in; when Andy’s stomach bloated out fully, more full than the bag of any money ever withdrawn from the bank by the local aristocrats.

Jet complained with the dragon’s butt oppressing him against the wall of shiny cataracts. Sini yelled, “Here, put this on your face for just a few minutes—we’re breaking out of jail.” Jet received Sini’s bandanna and tied it around his face. Sini clutched his middle before his throat filled like a hose. His maw spewed a torrent of opaque purple breath, an outpour of poisons which visibly roundened and tightened the fluffy dome.

All of the werefox’s facial features twisted and contorted, as though they were undergoing their own lycanthropic transformation. He appeared both grouchy and sublimely satiated. He bobbed and weaved without taking a step, hunching and straightening over his clutched abdomen with a series of panting, gruff chuffing and spitting. But his innards won over their discomfort when he pressed his snout against the bank wall and loosed a lengthy, guttural belch, venting the deathly miasma. His clammy walls constricted both melty prey—the black dragon and white kobold—into a crude yin yang sign, their forms dripping and frothing in the stew of acids hastily.

Fueled by both dragonkin, the hulking shape of the werefox let out a howl of pleasure. His gold eyes flashed. He stooped for yet another evolution. The moonlight did not catalyze this change: It was caused by the pudding of absorbable protein his prey became. His frame soaked up their mass and thrived on all of every inch of their former forms. His horse-thick neck bulged. The mounds of muscle shined beneath the lush fur and pumped out fervidly, along with his chest and arms. Dragonkin essence juiced out his pecs and biceps. He clenched with his face reddening from the euphoric full-body tension, his teeth elongating … claws enlarging … paws swelling several shoe sizes larger …

“Rooaaawh~”

He sprouted without seeming limits; he outgrew his former bigness in a puzzling moonlit display of sinew beefing up and fur standing on end, fluffing up and flowing crazily while every slab of muscle toned up and beefed up to an unfair degree, enough to make the most renown boxer in the Americas seem as skinny as a deer in comparison. One last gurgle restored the flat definition of his belly. It also sentenced the last of the dragonkin to a final fate on his werefox form, an 11-foot tall goliath.

“ROAAARRR~!”

In the nearby saloon, Clove—a beefy, horned, 14-foot tall reptile known as a deathclaw—stood before the drunken sons-of-guns he had just knocked cold. Outraged patrons and staff had made a wide circle around him and the table on which the revolver lay. “Now, you’re a stinkin’, dirty cheat for that,” yelled the coyote barkeep. “That’s no way to treat your opponents in Russian Roulette.”

“It’s the only way to treat them,” Clove growled, “if the game has determined you’re to be shot.” Suddenly, a roar staggered patrons into each other. Bottles on tables and shelves behind the bar fell and shattered. One drunkard fell from the balcony above with an “Oof.” Clove thought, What in Manifest Destiny’s name was that?! Never had he heard such a sound … not in his three months of living here.

The crowd fell hushed and still. The sound of a couple billiard balls still rolling was stark.

“Did you hear that?”

“It sounded just like Old Ham described in his stories.”

“It’s the ghost of one o’ those Indians come to haunt us!”

“Dear Lord!”

The braver folk followed the barkeep outside to see what the fuss was about. He spotted the werefox. “Well, I’ll be … Old Ham was right: It’s the sheriff.”

“Say it isn’t so! Say the devil hasn’t the sheriff!”

“Hush, Adam! Ain’t a soul but yourself say a thing about the devil. Have some faith in Andy. He’s a good, honest vulpine.” The coyote barkeep leaned over the porch and yelled the sheriff’s name a couple times. Clove jolted upright. Surely, the sheriff would give me a pass for something so harmless as a quarrel … if he were himself. But he’s something queer tonight, ain’t he? He wondered whether he should run for it as the floorboards went thump-thump-thump from the approach of the mutant silhouette toward the gaslit window. Andy crouched near the barkeep.

“Evening, mister sheriff. Clove’s starting trouble again. Clocking the guests because he lost another Russian Roulette game. Won’t you have a talk with him, sir?”

That tower of orange-furred muscle turned its gaze on Clove. The vitriolic glows of those eyes were like glows from two great firefly abdomens and fogged the window. Clove clenched his jaw, and he snatched a pool cue from a billiard table. This was no longer a game. He was dealing with the Law.

The saloon’s front facade imploded. A split second later, the wall erupted into splinters with a brusque grunt from the brute bulling forward. Both of his arms—each thicker than the average chest—rippled and flexed like buffalo limbs. Patrons cried out. A path of floorboards smashed by humongous pawprints sundered the crowd. It was as though the floor were no more firm than the mush of a mire.

Chairs bounced off of uprooted planks. Tables capitulated against his corded calves, shredded to pieces. His mere ankles dwarfed butter churns in breadth.

Clove yelled with a thrust of the pool cue. The shaft shattered against the monster’s hard pectoral. His tail-tip twitched with horror. A roar quaked the first storey. An open were-palm slapped Clove several yards back. With a crunch, the dartboard crumbled beneath the deathclaw’s back. The werefox bounded fast. He was about to pound the skull of the ’claw into the wall, but then Clove clenched a fist and WALLOPED the werefox into a teetering dance. With an oafish groan, Andy fell over the bar. A few choice malt liquors shattered.

“Now lookie here, sheriff. I don’t know what’s got you so riled, but harass me like that, and I’ll be riled right back! Let’s settle this!”

Andy poked his head up from behind the bar. He narrowed his eyes then licked his lips. Settle this, eh? He would settle it, alright. Since the deathclaw moved to Weston, nothing but trouble! The werefox’s mind didn’t articulate this thought well, but the sentiment was there, and that was a good excuse for him to sate his hunger.

Clove yanked free from the crater, lumbered a few steps, then progressed into a frenzied forward rush. His calves ran right through the bar. Roaring through the rupturing wood, he rolled his arm back for another meteoric jab. Andy braced, caught the blow with an open palm. It slid his arched bulk back a couple of paces. With a deep hook he retorted. Clove auditioned as a cadaver, a hundred liquors suddenly imbibing his nostrils. He had made a hole in the wall and crumpled on the cellar floor. He groaned and tensed, squeezing glass shards out of his bulk. His breath was gone but blood was unshed.

The werefox dropped into the scantily-lit room, crouched with his palms on the floor. Rising with a heavy glower, Clove assumed a boxer stance. Andy sprinted forward again.

Snarls and panted breaths zigzagged. Titan blows struck kegs of ale. Barrels were busted and leaks sprung. Their eyes adjusted to the dark: They fought down a walkway sided by keg shelves.

Whatever’s gotten into him, I’d like to keep it out of myself. Clove blocked a bullet-volley of jabs with raised elbows, grimacing. Time to make like a horse.

He glanced at the hole in the wall. He snatched a keg, chucked it at Andy to distract him. The werefox bashed his head against the keg, shattered it with a braggadocious snort. That hadn’t slowed him down at all. He scrambled forward, and Clove pedalled farther from the exit. He grabbed another keg, tossed it at Andy’s feet to trip him. The werefox sprung over it then shepherded the deathclaw around the corner into a dead-end. Clove glanced at the wall vexedly. He couldn’t break out underground.

In any case, I don’t mean to stick around too long, not with that hungry look on him. He clapped himself on the skull. Think, brain!

Andy advanced, got close enough to play rock-paper-scissors. Clove didn’t particularly like the “rock” the sheriff kept trying to close around his shoulders. He grappled him off for a few seconds, but then the Law was enforced.

“GULP!”

The reptilian tasted like wild fowl. His trap muscles challenged the werefox’s gullet, but Andy wasn’t apt to let the tough workout get the better of him.

People pounded down the steps with their gas-lamps to see what was going on. They gathered at the end of the dead end and watched with terror and intrigue. They could hardly see the deathclaw from that angle but could hear his throat bloating out as the satiny flesh muffled the deathclaw’s complaints. Andy’s back muscles flexed with rigor. Soon, he leaned against a few kegs and they could see him from the side slurping down Clove’s spiked tail. Andy harrumphed gladly. He clapped his fluffy belly from either side as a fretful dome formed.

One last gulp engulfed Clove’s tail. Andy let out a white-hot huff. Much of his facial savagery then went dormant. His muscles relaxed. The air of the hunting feral faded, replaced by the air of the calmly energetic. His tail swishes now seemed more … domesticated.

His change in demeanor didn’t quash the crowd’s fear entirely. And yet, the barkeep—who stood in the front of the crowd—reckoned the sheriff looked somewhat pettable.

A belch of satiation soused his lips, fracturing some of the wall boards. Dust smoked up and crumbles of earth trickled down. The returned flavor of roast duck on his tongue tasted somewhat gastric.

The clicks and slurps of him licking the flavor off his fingers sounded as he pushed the peak of his gut inward a couple of times with prolonged claps. Clearly, he was quite possessive of the jailed criminal. Clove would sooner bulk up the big canid than receive bail.

And then, his fluff stood straight up as though a low wind current had swept up from beneath a bridge, and he loosed a deep yowl of euphoria, for his already bountiful beef burgeoned. His pecs ballooned, and his ball midriff sucked into a tyrannical eight pack. He grew tremendous, like a forest shroom enshrouded in shade!

His dopamine rush excelled as he flexed his arms. He felt much resistance as the influx of his prey’s essence pumped his biceps and forearms to beef him up even more. His lat muscles burgeoned, clustering and tremoring in bunches of enigmatic size. The low hills that his back muscles rose over his shoulders, and his chest outgrew the breadth of a buffalo.

A tempestuous groan escaped him as the soles of his paws elongated. His claws and teeth scythed out further. His head scraped against the ceiling, and the force of his giddy growls reached the extent of displacing air veritably enough to start crumbling more of the earth exposed from the hole in the wall.

All the protein which had once produced a superfluous potbelly at his middle relocated onto his unprecedented frame, making more prominent every hook and dip between muscles and every peak of them. His bulk expanded and contracted with each breath, growing steadily for a full minute before cresting.

The former troublemaker had been sentenced to gurgle. Now, he was part of Andy forever. With one last growth-spurt and a roar of elation Andy flopped backward, crushing a shelf and a multitude of kegs.

Atop a spillage of liquor he lay. He breathed in raw gratification, having grown 18 feet tall. He now measured thrice the height of the average citizen of Weston. Despite that every inch of him teemed with dangerous power, his drooping tongue and the bunches of overlapping fur suggested that he would be potentially open to cuddles? This assuaged much of the crowd’s last traces of fear.

With an “Urrroap,” he expelled a half-digested ram horn. He turned on his side to blink at the townsfolk. Would he treat them with hostility as well—devour them, even the innocent? Or would he be civil enough to have friendly conversation? Friendly enough, even, to let them stroke his fur?

He poked his nose toward the crowd and sniffed. He slathered a bit. They cleared away a couple steps from him, more curious than they were shaken. For a second there was the soberness of the normal Andy in his enlarged pupils. He seemed to make a decision after some consideration and then rolled into a crouch, and then he bounded through through the hole into the saloon, his tail chipping a few boards. A few destructive buckles of the saloon, and then all was quiet, for he bounded into the night. One last sound he left them with: a sonorous howl, which would travel for miles and miles.

Most of the townsfolk just wanted a bloody damned drink after all that excitement. The barkeep gladly served them, disregarding the tornado-touched look of the interior. But some of them stepped outside to see where Andy went. They found only a trail of ankle-deep pawprints, each of which had several yards between them. It faded into the black of the desert, the same way that, after that night, crime caused by residents of Weston faded into the black of its history.

When the sun rose and Andy was back as his cheery, clothed self among the locals, he confessed to them his lunar identity after years of concealment. They didn’t outcast him as he feared they would: They instead regarded his alter form and persona with wonder and reverence, the way you might treat your uncle after learning he was a sharpshooting assassin entrusted with the life of Andrew Jackson.

At first, the following drop in crime saddened Andrew (the sheriff, not the fox-in-chief) whenever he was a werefox. But eventually, sheriffs of other towns started shipping their criminals in crates to Andy as a gift … or a tribute … call it as you may. In any case, it cleaned up some overcrowded cells and improved town relations within the county.

And, perhaps, it improved the werefox’s size a little TOO well.

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