It's been a while since I posted something general and whimsical. Let's fix that.

So, over the weekend, I was inspired by a pair of weight gain images to write something with my OC. It was very cathartic. Essentially - Rachel hits the time of the month at college when food money dries up. The mice in her dorm hear her prayers. They set out a plate with magic food for her. The only downside is that the mice want to do more than pamper her with treats.

They want a queen. A pliable, pampered, teasable, spherical queen.

Preferrably one their size, if they can manage it.

Poor Rachel. She just got back from an alien breeding expedition and now she has to deal with this nonsense. What a shame. <3

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Do not accept Mr. Mouse’s gifts.
For he is a possessive animal.
He will make you royalty to make sure you never go away from him.
Because he has nothing else to his name!
And on top of that, he’s broke, so life with him will be rough.
This is why there are many mice kings and queens, but no kingdoms,
They aren’t mice; just humans who didn’t know better.
~Kikiyu Folk Saying, late 19th century

Rachel Manasarovar ran through her financial obligations one more time, hoping to spot an error. Hopefully a dropped zero, some missed income, or an expense she didn’t need, taking up space on the ledger. She didn’t find one.

“Come onnnnn,” she groaned despairingly. She sat back in the kitchen chair, staring up at the ceiling. “Where’d it all go? I had more than this!”

Rachel was referring to her financial aid. The lifeline, the check, the ticket, whatever nomenclature represented it, it was a lifesaver. Rachel wouldn’t be studying biology at a graduate level if it wasn’t for the generosity of the US government (as cruel as it would be to pay off once she got out of college). It took a weight off her shoulders when it came to making a living - but some months, the check didn’t stretch all the way.

This was one of those months. Rachel had exhausted financial aid paying off her utilities, food and remaining tuition over three weeks, and now? She was down to the last couple pennies in her checking account.

She turned her head to the fridge and stared. A dreadlock fell into her eyes. She swatted it away.

“Haha,” she laughed bitterly. “It’s ramen week, Rachel. Get it? Ramen week? Ahehehe hehehhhrrrghhhhh fuck, I wish I had ramen. I wish I had rice. I wish I had flavor packets, for crying out loud...”

Her stomach was in agreement. It growled rapaciously. She made the decision to skip lunch to save a few phantom dollars. Now it was biting her in the back end.

She slid slowly out of the chair. She collected on the floor like a baccalaureate ooze that made noises and could write half-competent term papers.

There were a few solutions to this. They were the same, unchanging options she always considered when times got tough. Free sample picking was viable, once. Rachel got ran out the last time she made lunch out of the mall’s easy pickings. It would be another month before the clerks forgot her face, probably. The neighbors, Calvin Taggert on the left, Lucia on the right, they usually kept the pantry stocked. If anything, it’d just be asking for a loan that would probably never be paid back.

Momentarily, Rachel had a sudden rush of dread that she’d be saddled with debt for most of her adult life - but then the tightening in her gut brought her back to the present. Worry about that later.

Begging online was not something she liked to do, even in the worst case, but it was an option. Theoretically, anyway. Out and out begging, no way. Her guilty conscience wouldn’t allow it when less fortunate people were living on the street, hand to mouth. Emergency commissions added more obligations than she could handle. She could write, and draw a little, but the times when she could actually do either for cash were sporadic, especially while hungry. Handouts produced dread.

Donations, the last and least offensive option, still triggered insecurities. It wasn’t that she thought donations were beneath her station. The opposite was true. She didn’t deserve them. The only donation Rachel wanted to accept out of hand was grant money, and that was not in the cards until her paper on Theoretical Xenobiology finally got out of the draft phase and saw a review board. Until then, it was just lines of code.

She sighed, hoping the ceiling fan knew something she didn’t.

“Crackers’d be nice…” Rachel murmured. “Do I have crackers?”

She got up and checked the pantry. Nothing. Just cobwebs and a wrapper.

Rachel winced. Her body was sore. Breasts especially, but they were always sore. This full body sore, the stiffness digging into her joints, was new, and it wasn’t genetic. Nope. She was a rail-thin, Afro-Indian turbonerd everywhere that mattered except the chest. Barely five feet five inches, staggeringly underweight, chocolate toned, bony and skeptical-looking in the face. The growth spurts went to her boobs only. Her hormones made them bigger, instead making the rest of her more manageable. It was one of those rules about your body you figured out in primary school after being let down too many times.

Crackers would be so good right now, Rachel mused. She imagined cheese. She dreamed of peanut butter, or cutlets, or a fine sushi plate with someone else’s name on the tab.

Her legs wobbled unsteadily. Rachel wiped away the drool on her mouth.

“This is dangerous…” she told herself. Her voice was a little hoarse. “If I don’t eat now, I’ll be up all night worrying about this. I need some dinner baaaad...”

She hung on that affirmation for a few moments, staring into her reflection in soapy sink water. No starving furrows developing in her cheeks yet, but give it time. They were bound to show up.

Right as she was about to turn around and figure out a plan of action to feed herself, Rachel heard a click in the dish cupboard. Then she heard the tinkling of good porcelain. Then, she heard a sound that was almost a furtive whisper, except that it was too far away to make out. It echoed from across the room, without being loud enough to carry.

When she turned to investigate, there was no absurdly small or far away person in the room. There was, instead, a plate on the table. An ornate plate hosting the thinnest sliver of cheese Rachel had ever seen.

She jumped a little, but settled when the cheese didn’t attack her. “... what the hell?”

She narrowed her eyes at it, adjusted her glasses. The cheese was a pale, but not unflattering yellow. The plate underneath it was bold red, with orange swirling shapes, pointing her attention away from the rim and back to the occupant. She saw a note folded off to the side, and folded it open to read.

To: Human housekeeper, the note said. We heard your lament, and bring a gift. Please accept our hospitality.

In bold below read an ominous line: Eat me.

Rachel snorted. This was suspicious. She checked around the dorm. The door was locked, and her bed and bathrooms were clear. The lights were on. If someone snuck inside, she would have seen them.

She pinched the cheese sliver and held it in the air. It was barely bigger than her thumbnail, almost translucent in the light. It almost stuck to her finger.

“Did the mice take pity on me or something?” Rachel asked the room incredulously.

She went quiet. To her defense, if there were mice in her dorm, they might have been speaking to each other.

Curious, Rachel sniffed the sliver. It smelled authentic, for lack of a better word. Like someone had cut an impossibly thin sleeve of Vermont cheddar and slid it on her plate. She touched it with the tip of her tongue. The bitter taste made her face scrunch up.

Rachel looked around her kitchen one more time. She was self-aware enough to know not to eat strange food. But the excuses were already starting to pile up. She knew if she kept staring at the cheese, something might give. Her moral fiber first, maybe her sanity in a couple hours when the sliver was the only thing left in her fridge, next to the ketchup and baking soda.

“... just so you know,” she said, “This is sketchy, but I appreciate the concern. Cheers.”

Rachel set it on her tongue. With visible reluctance, she ate it.

To her surprise, there was more meat to the sliver than she expected. As she swallowed it down, the mass was insubstantial, but it landed in her stomach with a thud. “Mmmfh-” Before she knew it a gush of taste hit the back of her mouth. It stole her balance, sending her dancing herkily jerkily into the oven door. One moment, there was a gnawing hole in Rachel’s center, and the next, the hole was being plugged. The walls of her stomach stretched. Pressure mounted. Sharp, bittersweet cheddar taste made her pant and wince.

“Damn…” Rachel strained. She held her gut. It felt like she’d powered through the biggest dinner she’d ever had. She felt full.

Then Rachel’s stomach made a loud sound, like gears grinding to a halt. Her head swam, suddenly thick and heavy. The tang of the cheese got into her nose, and when that happened, she doubled up and…

She clutched her stomach as it barreled out of her shirt. Rachel gasped, watching the impossible happen in seconds. She was slowly gaining weight.

The headache flared out. The heavy, swimming feeling was replaced with a heavy, physical feeling, like bulb petals opening in bloom. Paired with it was the unfortunate, all-encompassing sound of skin stretching tight.

She was pinned to the spot, surrounded by strange sensations. Her nose itched. She blinked at it. It was by far the fairest weird thing to happen to her. When she gave it attention, though, a bushel of whiskers sprouted out.

“Whiskers?!” Rachel shouted - but it wasn’t a shout. It was a squeak.

The pain settled into a full, dull lump in her middle. The blooming feeling stopped. She glanced down, worried. Weight followed her head, nearly making her stumble, but she managed to right herself before tipping over. “Ow!” It was more uncomfortable than painful.

There, straddling a spot between her tanktop and sweatpants, was a bulge. It stuck out of her midsection in all directions, a taut, round, bulky midriff that looked like she’d swallowed a beach ball. Her hips, thighs, love handles and parts of her ass were co-opted into a blubbery swell threatening to plunge over the waistband.

Rachel choked back a wheeze of surprise. “Is that me? Wait, is that my voice??? Excuse me?!”

Her husky voice was a fair bit higher, like she’d been snacking on helium. It was airy now, and light, a complete contrast to the weight digging down on her frame.

There wasn’t much fighting it. The cheese made her fat.

She tried to hide her belly with her tank top, but the end wouldn’t stretch. It refused. The shirt was too small to cover her navel, and to add insult to injury, when she almost made it, her innie popped out. Hairs danced along the summit, tickling their way around.

“Heehee- w-wait, nnngh, stop-”

Hands fumbled to hold it down. The hair thickened underneath, until it was quite content to stop. By then, though, the hair grew into a full layer of dense, bushy follicles, and turned into a patch that spread from her hanks to the waist and the floor of her ribcage. It was thick as a brush. More accurately, it felt like fur.

She sifted through it, and winced. Definitely fur, but more fur than one human should have. The coat had two layers to it, and the tummy underneath resonated when she cupped it.

Rachel hesitated after sifting through it. She tilted her head back, and felt a delayed slump pull her head back a little more. Folded weights, attached to the scalp. She felt for a correlation in her ears. They were missing.

Rachel shuffled to the bathroom. It was hard work, with a squishy belly panging with each footstep. When she reached the bathroom, she tried stepping in, but the weights on her head caught on the doorframe. She squeaked, alarmed. When she flipped the lights on, she squeaked again.

“Y-you gotta be kidding…” she said flatly. “No way.”

The sight was surreal. The mirror couldn’t really do it justice. Her ears weren’t where they should have been because they had been relocated, and then multiplied in size several times over. They were enormous now. Two outrageously big, SETI satellite animal ears, pointed out from the sides of her. Her hands wandered upward, numbly trying to feel where they ended, but her arms weren’t long enough to reach the tips. She could hardly believe these exaggerated things belonged to her - until finger touching corresponded to mild tickling sensations.

One of the ears twitched involuntarily. Rachel’s face scrunched. The thing had more nerves than her face did.

The inner lobes were stuffed with some sort of blonde fur. Lighter cream fur lined the surface. When she tried to touch them again, her hands sunk in, until they disappeared up to the wrist. Rachel panicked and took them out, but the residual impact of rustling through them caused her to shiver. The effect was powerful.

“Nnnnghhohhh,” she moaned. “Okay stop. Stop. Let’s rationalize this. Ob- obviously, these are extremely big skin folds, whose surface area exceeds rational expectations for the needs of a clearly rodent-derived species...”

She took deep breaths. Putting this in laboratory terms helped. “Fur count is excessive, with a texture faintly similar to…”

She felt through the bushy fur in her ears again. “Chinchilla. No indication of fuh-nction. mmmh. And- whew, take it out there, come one, slowly, don’t- haaaaah, focus focus focus focus please focus mmmhh focus…”

The sensation hit again, arrestingly pleasant. Her thoughts blurred into static until she could get her bearings again. She returned to reality to see a naked grin in the mirror. She blushed furiously.

“To note,” she continued, “each ear presents an extreme density of nerve clusters, situated around the ear canal and dermis. Fur is highly, very highly sensitive to touch. If I had to guess, the evolutionary pattern suggests adaptation to low sound fidelity environments. Secondary hypothesis…”

Rachel looked sullenly at her stomach. “... no existing predators.”

She rubbed the fur patch. The skin or hide underneath twitched. It reminded her how full everything was down there.

“Deep breaths, Rach. Deep breaths. You’ll figure this out. Just. Don’t bump into the walls. Remember to sleep sideways.”

“Initiate phase 2! Go go go!”

There was a noise. A chatter in the other room. Stuck in the door, Rachel heard it, and her left ear quivered. Despite how big they’d gotten, her sense of hearing did not improve. If anything, the comical tufts of fur sticking out of her lobes dampened it. She heard words, though, and not only that; Rachel heard clattering too.

She backpedaled away from the bathroom. It was not graceful. She tried to sprint. It was not graceful either. She gave up after her thigh slapped the stomach and sent a paralyzing spasm up her back. “Ooof, too fast! Ow…!”

So instead, Rachel hobbled back to the kitchen, smarting.

The plate was still there. It was no longer empty. A box worth of club crackers sat on it, arrayed around a dip bowl with a dollop of grainy, brown paste that was probably peanut butter. It was expertly arranged, very tasteful, and it said pleasant things about the ten or so mice responsible for it, who were caught in the act of setting it out.

Rachel froze. The mice froze.

The mice raised their paws and waved. Rachel did the same.

She asked the obvious question first. “What are you doing in my dorm?”

They squeaked conversationally. Rachel wasn’t sure what she expected. Food maybe…

She shook her head. No, not food. Darn intrusive thoughts. Rachel cleared her throat. “We have a bit of a problem,” she said, in an authoritative voice that was too thready and high-pitched to take seriously. “You were the guys who left the cheese here, right? That tasty cheese?”

The mice nodded. Rachel paused to think about cheese.

“... that was really good cheese. Vermont cheddar, right?” She waited for the nod. “It was tangy. Really fine age on that. Point. Point is - you see what that thing did to me?”

Rachel pointed to the sore spots. The mice observed.

“You did this,” Rachel insisted. She stiffened up, projecting to the lot of them. “You gave me these silly ears and probably thirty pounds of body weight. That’s not edible, guys.”

It was out of her mouth before she could evaluate it. Edible? What did she mean by edible?


“It’s not kosher, is what I mean. Unacceptable. Spoiled. It wasn’t a tasty act, doing this.”

Rachel thought she heard them say “Yes, your highness!” She couldn’t be sure, though. Their voices, if they had any, were tinny to the point of being barely audible.

“I see some of you agree with me,” she nodded. “Does anyone have any ideas about how to change me back, or are you going to just feed me?”

Wait. “Feed me llliies. That’s. What I meant.”

No, Rachel definitely heard ‘feed me’ come out of her mouth. That was clearly what she said. There was no denying it. The mice understood the unintended meaning as fact. They moved in formation together and hefted one of the crackers up to dip in creamy peanut butter.

Rachel wanted to stop them. At least, she thought she did. Her eyes were fixated on the nutty spread malforming as the grainy, perforated cracker platform mashed into the bowl, a clumsy act that left a divot in the spread and an uneven glob on the end. The mice stumbled to hold it up.

“Nooononono,” Rachel protested. “Guys, stop. I don’t want any more. I’m full.”

That was a lie. A lie of omission, at least. She was still full. It was just - there was a craving. The craving was dragging her back to the negotiating table. As haphazard as the cracker looked, it was still appetizing. It made her mouth water.

The mice marched their offering to the edge of the table. Rachel stuttered, unable to tell them no.

Her gargantuan ears folded back. Rachel found herself tunnel-visioning. While they were turning, her head became remarkably clear. Temptation was the only line of thinking that made sense. Filling a want, enjoying a taste. “... okay,” she relented. “Maybe just… one… wouldn’t hurt...”

Rachel took the cracker. She ate the glob side first. “Mmmh! Oh, that’s good.”

She smacked her lips, chewing on the gunky half-solid texture. The cracker bits and their salty flavor disappeared into a general texture of sticky, juicy, delectable flavor. More earthy than savory, more savory than sweet, a medium of various indistinct sources coming together in preserved harmony.

After a while, Rachel swallowed it down. Her dish ears turned forward again, and she stood there, pupils dilated, lost in her head, overawed…

But then, her belly spoke up. It gurgled. Rachel snapped back to attention. “U-uh. Um.”

She glanced down. The fur patch had grown a little wider. Or - perhaps her belly was bigger. She couldn’t tell directly, but the overall condition of it seemed concerning.

“Hey guys,” said Rachel. She tried not to sound annoyed. “I don’t mean to alarm you, but this just made me bigger.”

The mice weren’t paying attention to her. They’d already gotten another cracker and dipped it, and were on their way, hand-delivering it. Rachel licked her lips, over a pair of overgrown incisors.

“I’m sensing a pattern here,” she said. She mindlessly took the next cracker and ate it. “Mmmghhh, mmmh…”

Swallow. Gurgle. Her belly bumped the table. A pudgy shape wiggled out of her tailbone.

“It seems like - hold on, lemme just get my thoughts for a second. Oh. Oh shit, thanks. Mmmh, ggrdd, thish ish sholid shthuff.”

Chew chew, swallow. The cotton fabric in her sweatpants began to creak, stretching around the thigh.

“Aaaah~” she said, “I feel creamy… err, there’s a better adjective there, but, um, the point still - thank you - (crunch) sshhtill rehmaghns…”

Another swallow. Her belly sank lower. It was growing heavier, bigger, broader than before.

“I keep forgetting what I’m trying to say, except… except aaahhh…”

Rachel wracked her brain trying to figure it out. She took another cracker and ate until her pupils dilated again, spilled, and turned her eyes into black pools. Almost exactly like a rodent. They didn’t shrink back.

“Oh!” she figured it out, but after reaching her conclusion, she lost it. Darn distractions. She grumbled in her consternation and took another cracker almost out of habit. “Drat. Ghhhfhghmh, I thhght I haddit…”

Like any snack worth its honor, the peanut butter crackers promised to be endless. The taste pushed itself to the background, humming through her brain as static. Rachel was dully aware it was piling on, that her body was changing, but the thoughts responsible for doing that were occupied by the turning of furry ears and the savory serenade lulling her into trance.

With each cracker, she gained weight. A couple pounds here. A tuft of fur there. An advance on her tail here.

Oh. That’s right, she. Grew a tail.

Rachel looked back at it, dimly aware of its existence. The thing was striped. It curled on the floor, long and fat. Only mouse-like in suggestion, really. It was almost as thick as her admittedly chunky legs.

As an experiment, she took another cracker from the mice and observed. The tail shivered. It slithered out of her back end, pulling her waistband down. It gained, by her muddy estimation, about a half-inch of girth and two inches of length.

She laughed. “Guys, this is what I’m talking about look what’s- (crunch, chew chew chew) aaaaaawwwhhh, yessshh, deresh a liddle sugar in dish one…”

It went ignored. Functionally, Rachel was caught in a trap. She kept eating, and her body responded by digesting it all into more bulging fat, and more bushy fur, and more increasingly specific rodent features.

Every so often, the nagging tug of fullness pulled her out of the cycle. She let out a hot breath, patted the belly she swore wasn’t as big last time she checked, and started up again on the next offering before the distraction wore off.

And so, Rachel stuffed her face, and as the cheeks pillowed and dusted with fur, she continued to swell with absolute indulgence…

Until the cracker supply ran out. Her growth stopped. Rachel pawed around for the next one absentmindedly, only to find the furry conveyor belt stopped and her plate totally empty. “... Ehh? What happened? Where’d they all go?”

Into her belly, apparently. The snacks were gone. The dip bowl was scrapped down. The only thing left on the plate were crumbs and salt. A gaggle of mice shrugged ambivalently.

Slowly, Rachel got her senses back, and when she was lucid enough to check herself, she peered downward to find that there wasn’t much of a human body left.

“... ohhhh crap,” she murmured in muted astonishment.

From the chest down, she was simply bigger. That was the only word to adequately describe it, other than maybe ‘ballooned,’ or ‘swollen up.’ Nearly spherical also entered the discourse. She was, almost exclusively, belly, thigh, and ass. A blubbery ball.

Her hands couldn’t get around the sides. The curve was too great. She could see her feet - now stretched out on a dainty profile, tipped with claws - sticking out at the bottom of flared, set apart thighs. She also could see her tail snaking away, the second largest part by associatio. It, curled around the table and the kitchen island and overflowed into the living room like an obese ball python. There was no doubt; it was longer than she was tall, and stuffed to the gills with sensitivity.

Rachel tried sending it commands. The tail brushed along the floor, a slow, ponderous motion, creaking audibly as folds interacted with folds. It didn’t seem motivated to do much else. What an embarrassing sight. She felt ashamed for her tail, like it failed to understand how much of a slovenly detriment it had become. Granted, she never had a tail - but once upon a time, she dreamed of cute neko tails.

This was only cute in the roundabout ‘bless your heart’ dumpy sort of way.

“This isn’t tasty, this really isn’t tasty,” Rachel said nervously. She shuffled on instinct. Her bulk turned and rocked like a boat threatening to capsize. “This is just downright excessive…!”

Somehow, her voice sat even higher on the scale. She cringed as she spoke, only sure it was her voice because it came out of her throat. It was a chipmunk falsetto in all but the most literal definition, shrill past the point of being taken seriously. “Dammit!” she squealed. Her voice cracked up along the way. “Why’d it get sillier?! I’m supposed to be smooth like molasses!”

The worst, or really the best part, was her fur. It branched out from the rinky dink patch on a pot belly, and now took up acreage all over her body, except for her chest, her face, and the extremities - though that was because pink skin and tawny, feathered hair suited a rodent better. Where it was welcome, the fur grew lush. Lush, and uncomfortably thick. She recognized the divot in the bushy canopy as the spot where her outie should have been, but the terrain around it was overgrown, bristling with inch-thick coat. It covered her midsection like clothes.

They might as well, since - well. Her sweatpants weren’t going to last any longer. “Oh man…” she groaned.

Rachel disposed of them as best she could. As she slowly learned, this was impossible. Clawing at her sweatpants only made them bunch and rub awkwardly against her fuzzy hide, another ordeal altogether. She’d need a crowbar, or a dedicated friend who wouldn’t mind disrobing a rodent. So, she gave up.

The situation was starting to overwhelm the poor grad student. Her big, black eyes kept searching as she scratched her enormous gut and the frontage of fur that never seemed to end, searching for patterns. “Logical reassessment, in the face of a mild episode. None of this is tasty, not at all. All evolutionary pressure has resulted in a rotund expansion of body shapes into a flabby exterior. There is no chance this is viable in the oven. The field. Extreme obesity indicates the subject is some sort of delicious member of a high stratum, probably delectable, in a rudimentary society that drizzles plentitude out in the open… drizzle, what? What am I saying? What the fudge is wrong with me…?”

Rachel clutched her head. She was high as a kite. Random word association kept attaching itself to food. Synthesizing her condition into a lab report wasn’t helping her at all. Not this time. Her thoughts sloshed around like thick gravy - and if she couldn’t stop thinking in food metaphors, then the whole project of scientific objectivity was destined for the trash.

There was another attempt to get moving again. She had tepid success at it. The muscles controlling her legs were surrounded by scrunched fat layers. They were hardly strong. Not useless - but when she put her feet forward, staggering one mouse foot, two mouse foot, three mouse - weakness hit her knees, and the vast, undistributed weight brought her back down to earth with a thud.

Rachel wondered fatalistically if she’d have better luck rolling. The paramedics would have to wheel her out of this one.

She would have gone on bitterly contemplating her doom, but her ruminations were interrupted - this time by mice. They came back. The furry creatures poked out of the woodwork. It seemed like the sudden drop brought them out. They poked out of drawers, out from behind from the fridge, out of the cupboards, even out of the pantry. A whole colony of grey and white mice.

They chittered at her. Rachel put up her hands defensively. “Hey,” she said, quickly sobering up. “Hey, wait a minute.”

“It’s our queen!” they said as one, speaking as a loosely organized whole. “The bulging one!”

Rachel balked. “What.” She didn’t know what to address first, the assertion of title or the naked insult.

“It could only be our greatest, most rotund of all!” This one came from a slightly bigger, vaguely female black mouse. “The immobile belly! The finest of fatties!”

“You’re killing me here,” Rachel whimpered. She was starting to blush.

She could hear them now. That much was for sure. Her dish-ears detected meaning. The chorus of mice was a tinny, raspy, reedy little thing, but in speaking together, they were clear as day. Which meant she was hearing their well-intentioned mockery clear as day.

“On the contrary, lady of the donut horde, we are not killing you,” said the black mouse, “we are responding to your wish!”

“My wish?” Rachel played dumb.

“Yes! You wanted dinner! We will give you all the dinner you could want, She-Who-Raids-The-Fridge!”

“That one actually stings,” Rachel snorted. It was amusing, in a demented sort of way. The praise was welcome, just- not the part where they poked fun at her pokeable belly.

“You must understand - you need not worry! We will feed you everything you could want, my queen!”

“I’m not your queen!” Rachel said with a huff. She wanted the statement to be intimidating. It came off as petulant, especially when threaded through a range so high it might as well have been coming from an articulate piccolo. “You turned me into this morsel!”

The mice weren’t deterred. They advanced. “Morsels for the queen! The big morsel! Feed the queen!”

Rachel scrabbled backward. “Stop!”

“Feed the queen!” the mice shouted. Their fearsome unison made her jump - or attempt to. It was more of a jolt.

She swayed, waddling on nearly vestigial paws. The back and forth swing of her ears played with her clarity like a radio listing through unoccupied stations on the highway, collecting static along the way. Data was leaking, or maybe bandwidth was too short. She was stupid one second, clear the next.

“No sssssudden moovvesss…” Rachel drawled, barely able to speak. It was unavoidable, though. The ruffling of fur against fur, fold on flab, bone sliding on bone, was too much. There was nothing she could do. The sensory input was overwhelming. Moving at all - one paw, one ear, one hand, one anything - put a tax on her big graduate student brain.

“Listen to me!” she whined at the mice circling around. They were watching her bend and wobble and struggle with acute fascination, which sent an unfamiliar shiver of want down her spine. She pressed on anyway. “Look at me! I’m… I’m t-turning into a squishy…” she squinted. “Juicy… s-savory… ridiculously chunky mouse! Help me out here! I don’t wanna be this big!”

In the process of backing up, Rachel’s focus was understandably limited. No one would fault her for missing the regiment of rodents coming around the flank, clearly faster than her ponderous gait. They brandished grappling hooks made of yarn and duct tape.

“Then we’ll make the queen small!” replied a grey spotted Norwegian mouse. “Bring her down, men!”

“EXCUSE ME?!”

One side threw their hooks. Rachel tried to weave away, but sluggishness slowed her arm to a crawl. They got one. A second flank rode in and tossed, locking down the other hand. Rachel struggled weakly, but the mice knew how to handle her weight. All they had to do was pull her back, just enough, until tipped back and fell right on her tail.

“HHNNGGGHHahahahaaaahahahahggnhhaaaaa~ Nooooo~”

Her world tumbled back and crashed into spots. The world of her little dorm unit spun overhead. Fan blades danced, turning into three, then five, then three again, while Rachel’s head struggled to sort out the cascading fizz of euphoria crashing into her body from the vertigo doing work on her balance. It was a wonder she didn’t pass out. Just pitched back, and let the tickly feeling play out. After all she’d been through, she deserved a break - and not just because she couldn’t get back up at all, even if her loans were due.

Little feet pattered around her. Her ears twitched, trying to follow what they were doing. It was difficult to do that, when she was squirming, stuck on her back, straddling a flabby hulk. She heard the vermin relaying commands.

“Tie her down! Her last order was to make her small, yes?”

“The donut will do it!”

“The donut, huh? Alright, get the strawberry and sprinkles confectionary, on the double!”

One by one, they fastened her arms down. Rachel did her best, but she was so blissed out after the crash, the fight was gone. It was already decided.

When she came to, it was over. Rachel found herself strapped to the kitchen floor by stakes and yarn line. The lines criss-crossed over her chest and buckled her hands apart. She kicked and fidgeted to no avail.

There were mice sitting on her belly. And her knees. And pretty much any fluffy surface that could support their weight.

“Hnnngh, you’re really desperate for a queen, huh…?” she said in a sardonic bent.

The horde celebrated. They raised up their little paws in triumph. “The queen is awake! The queen is awake! Bring up the donut!”

“Butter my biscuits,” Rachel sighed, defeated. She sank her head back, making ear angels out of a spilled bag of Dominos sugar. “I was bested by mice. Damn, I’m supposed to be sweeter than this...”

Soon, she felt climbing on her belly. Rachel craned her neck, and saw it come into view, cresting over the fuzzy hill. A fresh donut, with a pink glaze and steam rolling off the surface.

Her thoughts of escaping when limp. Rachel licked over her buck teeth. “Hey. H-hey.”

They rolled it lengthwise down the curve. She swallowed. “Is that for me?” she said with an understated intensity.

The mice forded her boobs with the donut held high. It was so close, Rachel could smell the dough cooling. Sniffing made her nose stretch toward it, pushing out long and pointy. “I wannit.”

She wriggled. “Pleeeeeasse?”

It was a shameless display. When the mice took the time to clean stray Rachel fur off the donut, she started whining. “It smells so gooooood, pleeeease?”

“The pudgy one is hungry?” asked one of the leader mice.

“Mmmhm,” came a desperate sound. “I wannit.”

“Feed her, post-haste!”

“Feed her!” was the battle-cry in high-pitched unison. “Feed her!”

Upside down, inside out, you couldn’t find a scrap of defiance in Rachel anymore. The mice’s conditioning had done its job. When she saw sweets, or really anything crunchy and tasty, her critical thinking shut off.

Tell a lie - there was something faint inside her left. A glitter in the eyes that told the world she wasn’t completely cowed. The glitter wasn’t thinking critically about the situation, though. It was mild, disaffected, the objective core of a rational mind, processing what was happening with a sort of ambivalence.

Ambivalence was not the right word, but do give Rachel some sympathy, she lacked a basic vocabulary. Maybe the right word was… whimsy.

Did it matter what they turned her into? Did it seem unfair to be pulled down like a log and wracked with spasms if the end result was pampering? As long as ‘her subjects,’ if that’s what they wanted to call themselves, kept bringing her food, kept this full feeling going, what was there to complain about? What was the problem? She reasoned, rather dimly, that this was a temporary thing. If it wasn’t, well, the Manasarovar legacy might as well become royalty, right? Even if it wasn’t exactly human royalty.

After some finagling, the mice offered the donut to her mouth. Rachel nipped, pulled it in, and nibbled contently. She submitted to them. She was delighted to be their queen.

The mice scurried away from Rachel as her lips smacked with pink all over them. There was a gurgle in her belly. Her fingers pop-popped into fat sausages as she licked them clean, four to a hand. Her cheeks inflated with pudgy dimples. Fur bristled over them, then bristled over her face, and with a final swallow, her dreads unraveled into fine, luxurious drill curls, all the way to the root. They were blonde, naturally, like the tufts sticking out of her ears. A brilliant blonde that didn’t belong to primates.

When there was nothing human left to convert, the shrinking began in earnest.

Down she went. Down down, descending down, shrinking through, up and down…

“Wheeeeeeeeeeeheeeheeeheheheheh~!” the dopey Rachel squealed and giggled, high on sugar.

She shrank precipitously, from a human size to something that was much more fitting to her new species and rank. Shrank until her handpaws got lost in sleeves, and her sweatpants drooped, until the bindings sagged and she wriggled loose, kicking helplessly with glee.

Rachel dwindled down until there was a pile of clothes where she used to be. A pile of clothes, and a furry little ball stuck somewhere inside them.

The mice fished Rachel out. They lifted her up, straining as a team, until they could mount her on a portable dais, recently fetched.

“I dub thee monarch of the modern era,” cried the black mouse attendant. “This fair house of one hundred mice, spread across this great land. Thy royal name shall henceforth be… Lady Rachel Paunchbelly the Peanut Glutton!”

She earned the name, by far. Rachel, once properly proportioned and humanely human-sized, save for an obnoxious chest, was now the opposite of that. She was now mostly a sphere of mouse. A belly with a body and head attached. A hair taller than the average mouse, while also being several times heavier.

Her legs had gotten appended to the curvature on the sides, shrunk down to stubby limbs made mostly of elongated foot. The same thing happened to her hands, though she was grateful to still have opposable thumbs with her puffy, three-fingered paws. Her tail tapered at the top of her butt before flaring out into a farsically fat appendage. Comparable to a comical bridal train, except the folds were immediately huggable. To top it all off, sitting in a nest of blonde curls and flanked by circular lobes, was a pudgy face defined by double chins and puffy cheeks, and big, dim, innocent-looking eyes. They were now pools of black with glinty white spots. Still expressive nevertheless.

This expansion and emphasis had side effects. Most notably - she now was too big to walk. Even if she made it on her feet, which would have been a challenge in its own right, the constant fullness and strain on Rachel’s tummy would’ve reduced her to a shivering mess if she tried so much as shoving it around. Fuzz took care of the rest. Moving, gesturing, jostling of any sort stirred up a pleasant buzz that lanced memories and dissolved thoughts into bubbly, carbonated nothings. Escaping was not in the cards, to put it simply. Mice magic made sure of that.

A trail of attendants produced a crown, a gold bottle cap. Rachel was too out of it and giggly to put it on herself - not that she could reach it - so the black mouse solicited help. The crown was set neatly between her ears, a gorgeous mantle for a mouse monarch.

Plus, it had the neat side effect of scrambling her brains whenever the crown’s edges so much as scratched behind her ears.

This happened pretty quickly into her coronation. She bowed too far, and oops, there went her cognitive faculties. All gone.

“Three cheers for the pudgy one! Hip hip!”

“Hooray!”

“Hip hip!”

Rachel threw her fuzzy arms up. “Horaaaaaaaaaay~” she squeaked, dim as a dull bulb and grinning so hard her snout hurt.

The black mouse gathered around with her subordinates, the commanding mice. They chattered in low tones until they came to a decision. “Come, lady waddle-butt! We have a feast prepared for you!”

Rachel became dizzy at the prospect of more food. Sure, she might have been full, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t stuff more in. Hee, and grow even bigger too…

She forgot to give her blessing to go forth, but the mouseguard didn’t seem to mind. This was the responsibility of their station, after all. Mice royalty ate well, and enjoyed the simple pleasures, and set an example for the rest of the ‘kingdom,’ such as it was. They were the fattest, more content rodents in all the land, and they earned that spot every day.

The dais was lifted. Slowly, they carried Rachel off. Her tail dragged behind. Her ears, meanwhile, drooped as she did, until they were flapping halfway off the dais into the hands of curious citizens. They squeezed the fur in wonder. Fuzzy static blared.

She couldn’t tell where exactly the mice were taking her, but the crowd seemed to be taking her towards the pantry, to a hole she could fit through. Since she wasn’t exactly as compact and squeezable as a smaller mouse, though she was squishy, and that counted for something.

Rachel marinated in good feelings. She rubbed the fur on her belly, and flicked her ears again and again, shorting out the fuses over and over again. Feeling stupid and hungry was its own reward.

Maybe someday, she’ll want to be human again. Right now, though? Now, there was blank space where her mental checkbook used to be. Papers were old hat, yesterday’s mail. Money was no object. The new tenants paid in sweets and peanut butter, and Rachel was buying. She had an endless appetite and a mental bandwidth in the single digits, constantly in flux, but never to the point of existential doubt.

This was the life. Fat. Happy. Stupid. Pampered.

And teased to oblivion.

~ The End ~