Arge is a dragon good at his job, but everyone makes mistakes. He was supposed to be spending the day working with circular rings to multiply magic, but it's possible one mistake could turn something else—or someone else—into a circle too.

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All ships use a little magic. Arge was aware of that, the dark gray dragon having been in the business of fixing them for a long while. He wasn’t a user of magic himself, but understood how the basic, enchanted ship parts worked when he put them together. Opening the box currently set on his desk, he removed the rings of metal to be fitted on the pipes that ran through the underside of the floor, meant to conduct power. The metal rings needed to be bolted to the pipes to multiply the amount of power inside. Arge didn’t really know or care how it could turn just a little bit of power, into a huge amount of power, but he knew how to put it together, which was all that was needed now that the parts had arrived.

The rather tall dragon sat down at his workbench, leaning forward in a way that made the curve of his gut bulge over his thighs. He’d always been a bit on the heavy side, but was surprised to feel the way his shirt rode up and brushed the table before him. He’d been trying to ignore his slight, recent gaining. It was getting harder, though, with the amount of food he’d been putting away lately, his waist slowly widening all the while.

He pushed those thoughts out of his head, trying to concentrate. Not being a magic user, he needed to pay close attention to what he was doing, as he wouldn’t be able to fix anything he messed up by himself. He carefully lifted one of the metal circles from the box and turned to the ship. It was propped up on a lift at the moment, meaning he’d have to climb a short ladder to reach the underside and work on the pipes where the first ring had to be attached. He sighed. Any amount of exercise was too much exercise, in his opinion, always.

“I’d better get this over with,” he grumbled to himself beneath his breath. He’d eaten a rather heavy meal before this, too, making him even more bloated and tired than usual. He hadn’t really thought that through, but he really didn’t want to put this project off.

He grabbed a wrench and some cable he’d need before realizing he didn’t have enough free paws for everything. He held the wrench in his teeth and threw the loops of cable over one shoulder. That still didn’t leave any spare paws for the first ring, and he briefly considered sliding it over his wrist, but his paw was slightly too chubby; better not to risk it getting stuck or something equally inconvenient. He instead laid it over one of his pale, jagged horns. He also needed to bring a box of bolts to hold the ring in place on the outside of the pipe, but finally accepted he just couldn’t carry everything at once. He stifled a groan at the thought of making two trips, but it didn’t seem like he had a choice.

Before he could take a step toward the ship, though, he suddenly felt an odd, tingling sensation crawl all the way from his head down his spine. He shivered, even though it wasn’t exactly cold. He couldn’t figure out how to describe it, although it didn’t hurt, and disappeared after a moment. Well, that was weird.

He took a few tentative steps forward. Nothing else happened, although he had a creeping feeling that something had changed. He hadn’t the slightest clue what it could be, though. He shook his head to himself. He needed to get back to work. He felt fine now anyway.

Walking across the vast room to the suspended ship, he was snapped out of his thoughts when he reached the ladder. He noticed again that the front of his gut brushed the rungs, but the metal was cool, and Arge realized his shirt had ridden up even higher to reveal more gray belly. He was also standing farther away from the ladder, which should have given him plenty of room. Earlier, had he eaten even more than he’d thought? He scowled. I really need to get my binge eating under control. It wasn’t the first time he’d told himself that, but each time he was a bit more annoyed than the last. Why was losing weight so hard?

He readjusted the cables over his shoulder and reached forward to grip one side of the ladder, but felt oddly off-balance. He frowned. He’d definitely carried heavier things before. Sighing, he realized he probably just needed to readjust them. He leaned to the side to dump them onto the floor. That was when he noticed the way one of his thick love handles seemed to bunch up in a larger, flabbier roll than he expected, startling him into putting both paws on his belly. What is going on?

His pudgy paws sank deeply into the adipose; that was nothing new. But the layers of lard seemed softer somehow, as if the bloating of his meal earlier had vanished beneath another coating of blubber. He gripped at his sides, feeling the way that their overhang filled his paws with soft pudge. His shirt had ridden up to expose them, when he was certain it had fit better several minutes ago. He realized that while the fabric of his shirt was stretched thin, he also felt the button of his pants pushing more firmly into the underside of his belly, the waistband tightening around his hips.

“What the heck?” he said out loud. He could have let out a few more extreme expletives, but was stunned by what appeared to be extra poundage growing suddenly on his frame. The meal he’d eaten earlier hadn’t been anything out of the ordinary, but this was definitely not how digestion worked, and he was at a loss for words as he watched his body expand. It appeared to be all adipose, too, rather than any average bloating from a large amount of food.

Feeling the rolls begin to sag more heavily over his hips, he also realized that it wasn’t stopping. There was no way any of this was possible, and yet it was happening before his eyes. He turned around to head back to his workbench, although found moving to be harder than expected, weighed down as he was by the extra pounds. His pants also constricted his movement, bringing attention to the fact that he was fattening all over, not just his middle. It was hard to see anything past his belly, but the feeling of his jiggling thighs constrained by tightening fabric confirmed this thought.

Given that he wasn’t sure what was going on, he wanted to sit and figure out the problem. His workbench hadn’t seemed that far only a minute ago, but now when he stepped forward, his knees squished into the underside of his gut and made his steps slow. The jiggling lard on his body didn’t help his balance either, wobbling erratically, which also didn’t help the jiggling, creating an endless cycle. His expanding thighs pushed against each other with every step, widening his gait. He was determined to make it, though. Just a little farther…

The button suddenly exploded off his pants. He gritted his teeth in annoyance, but it was bound to happen at this rate. He felt the zipper push down as the seams began to separate, bulges of adipose peeking through. His shirt was sitting more like a crop top by now, although when he tried to pull it down, he realized that there was so much lard in the way that he couldn’t have reached all the way down his belly no matter how hard he tried. A large bulge of it squished up between his softening arms when he attempted to reach, and when he groped around his sides to heft the largest curve of his gut, his pudgy paws mostly found themselves resting on the rolls of his love handles. He gripped helplessly at the quivering blubber with alarm.

And how was it possible?

He shook his head to clear his thoughts, although it only brought attention to the fact that his fat, extra chin squished up on either side to restrict his movement. Fortunately, with several more ponderous steps, he reached his workbench. He sighed with relief as he eased himself onto the seat in front, taking a load of pressure off his exhausted legs. He was startled by the drawn-out creaking sound it made. He’d been so fixated on sitting that he hadn’t thought about the actual strength of the seat. It was sturdy enough not to protest any further, at least.

When he settled, he felt his thighs completely covered by the overhang of his gut by now, and the way his pudgy rear drooped over the edges. He still hadn’t figured out what to do. He needed to find a way to reverse it so he could walk around. But he needed to find a way to stop it, first. What did he have in front of him that could help?

With another creak, the chair suddenly gave out. Arge let out a yelp as he was spilled onto the hard floor. He was unharmed, though, completely padded in plush adipose that rippled with the force. It was enough to split the rest of his pants, too, making him blush despite being the least of his problems. “Fuck!”

When he tried to stand, he found it more difficult than he’d expected, his blubbery hips bouncing with each movement of his increasingly stubby legs. He felt like a scoop of ice cream that had been lumped onto the floor, his belly and the rolls of fat on his sides taking up most of the space around him. His increasingly doughy thighs struggled to shift into a position that could get him to his feet, jostling him but doing little else. He growled in frustration. He tried not to panic, but knew he was becoming increasingly helpless to his situation. Reaching out his paws, he was hyper aware of how padded and heavy they felt, groping at the front of his workbench to help pull himself up. He clumsily knocked a box off the work bench, cursing as the metal rings from before hit the floor and scattered. He couldn’t even hope to clean them up at the moment, even knowing that the magic might have consequences he couldn’t control.

He paused, realization suddenly dawning on him. He’d looped one of those over a horn to carry up the ladder with the rest of his overladen equipment.

The rings of metal that were supposed to fit over metal pipes and multiply the power in them.

Arge went to smack his forehead, but there was too much pudgy fat keeping his paw away from his face. Living things produced energy too! It was probably multiplying his, and storing it in the only way his body knew how. Could the magic tell the difference? “Idiot,” he growled to himself under his breath. Idiot idiot idiot. At least he’d identified the problem. He reached up to remove the ring from his horn.

He couldn’t reach.

He parted his jaws in exasperation as his heavy arm raised toward his head, only to be kept away by the rolls of fat on his shoulder and biceps that were buried somewhere underneath. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

He sat stunned for a moment. Was it too late? Was there any way out of this mess?

He thought about the way that energy worked; it came from calories. Which he’d been full of when this started, he recalled. By that logic, it must be multiplying the calories, right? That would mean that when it eventually ran out of calories to multiply, it would stop. Arge wasn’t sure if that meant he’d finally go back to his normal size, or if it would take a while afterwards, but at least he could now assume that he wouldn’t be growing forever.

As it was, he realized that the gaining was finally beginning to slow. The last shreds of his shirt ripped away, letting the flabby rolls of his chest hang free, but the expanding belly chub that had begun to encroach upon the side of his workbench despite how far he was sitting didn’t seem to be pushing into it any harder. And he didn’t feel like he was developing any larger rolls. Even as he stopped swelling, though, he squirmed to move and only felt heavy pudge all around. He was caked in adipose from head to toe, his arms drooping with blubber over the largest bulges of his love handles. The puddle of lard that made up his middle spread over his legs in a way that kept them trapped at this point, only able to twitch helplessly in their doughy prison. They’d never felt so effectively useless before. Arge’s attempts to move only sent ripples through the plush poundage encompassing his body.

He was finally forced to sigh in defeat. He’d just have to wait until the effects wore off. At least no one’s around to see me like this.

The door to his workshop opened. “Arge?”

Arge’s sole employee looked surprised as he stood in the doorway. He wasn’t a young dragon, but had a much more average build, and scales a darker shade of gray than Arge’s. He looked at the large, blob of a dragon in the center of the workshop for a moment before speaking. “Are you in the middle of something?”

Arge glowered at him from the lump of jello his body had become. “I don’t know, Rift, does anything look out of the ordinary?”

Rift scowled. “I just didn’t want to interrupt.” His eyes roved over Arge’s figure. Arge hoped he wasn’t blushing. If he was, though, Rift didn’t comment. Instead he asked, “Do you need anything?”

For a second, Arge wasn’t sure where to even begin, but he thought back to the basics. “Can you get this magic ring off my horn?” Maybe removing it would be the first step to letting the magically-amplified calories disappear. He could fully expect to keep the ‘real’ calories from his meal, of course—that was all his own fault—but the last thing he needed was artificially hundreds of times that amount keeping him an immobilized fixture in the middle of the room.

Rift went to help, but paused at Arge’s side; he’d have to lean way over several chunky rolls piling around the lardy dragon in order to reach. Even then, he tried to just respectfully put a paw on Arge’s shoulder to steady himself, although it sank deeply into the adipose and barely did anything to brace him. He grunted a brief apology as he pulled the ring off. “This thing?”

“Yeah.” Arge waited a moment to see if anything changed. He didn’t feel any kind of difference though; no shrinking, no magical tingle. “I wonder how long it’ll take to reverse the effects.”

Rift turned it over in his paws. “It did this all by itself?”

Arge briefly explained his theory about the calories. When he was done, all Rift had to say was, “But if it already converted the calories into fat, then wouldn’t it not matter if they were amplified magically? Because it’s just fat now. There are no extra calories to just disappear.”

Arge’s heart sank. “Well… then the fat would still only exist because it was amplified!” He suddenly felt less certain, though. He wanted to slam his fist down, but was abruptly reminded of the fact that an absurd amount of blubber was weighing on every appendage, allowing it to do little more than twitch and jiggle. He growled.

Rift looked away uncomfortably. “I mean… if it makes you feel better, I don’t mind picking up extra shifts.”

“That’s not really the point,” Arge sighed. “I can’t stay like this.”

“You can just lose the weight naturally,” Rift encouraged.

Arge rolled his eyes. “Yeah, I’ll be getting tons of exercise in this state.” He squirmed again, sending more ripples through the blubber that made up his figure. He wasn’t sure he could call it a figure anymore. Unless a figure could just be described as ‘round’.

“And if you need help getting food, I can make sure to only bring you healthy food,” Rift promised.

Arge growled. Needing to be fed hadn’t even occurred to him. He was about to protest, but paused. In this state, he did need the extra help. He couldn’t afford to chase off his only assistant. At least until he lost all this weight. In the meantime, he’d be forced to lounge around hoping the dieting was enough. No excuses to put off a diet, Arge suddenly realized. He could normally think of a dozen reasons he ‘wasn’t ready’, but this was way past that point.

“Alright,” he conceded. “I’m temporarily assigning you all projects. Although I’m still going to oversee them,” he added. Leaving Rift without supervision was the surest way to run his business into the ground.

He gave another experimental wiggle, but could hardly move a muscle against the surrounding pudge. Rolls of scaly flesh piled around him, holding down his body. It wasn’t really how he’d expected to spend his afternoon, but it seemed like he’d be here a while, and knew he had to get used to it. He sighed. Maybe he should think of it like a vacation. A very soft, cozy vacation, for all the foreseeable future.