A Bully Balloon for the Ages

(Disclaimer: Any acts of transformation, expansion, or mental altercation have been consented to by the owners of the characters affected. Any acts depicted are meant as explorations of the fetishistic psyche, hold artistic merit, and are compliant with the TOS of Patreon).

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“Apologize?” Thad laughed in the small rabbit’s face. He bent forward and pinched a long floppy ear between his claws, and grinned with a maw full of sharp teeth. “I’m not the short-stack too small to see where he was going. If anything you should be apologizing to me, runt.”

The rabbit tried to wiggle free from Thad’s pinch grip. He failed, and scowled. His blue fur bristled in annoyance. “Let me go you brute!”

Thad released him, only to flick him on the forehead. His paw was big enough to crush the little guy’s head, he had some guts talking back to him. “Brute, eh? See now you’ve insulted me, and I can’t let that go unpunished.” He unslung his blackmetal sword, and slid its edge under the rabbit’s throat. “You gonna ‘apologize’ to me for slandering my good name, or am I going to have to take your pretty robe as a show of amends?”

“Let the hot winds of narcissistic fools be made manifest, in a prison as shiny, and as fragile as the pride of the fool,” the rabbit said. Thad tilted his head at the nonsense.

“What the what now?”

“I have no time for fools, my experiments are very demanding. So off you pop.”

Thad growled and prepared to cut the robe from the rabbit neck-first, but he found that his sword arm refused his brain. He looked down and saw that in place of his right arm. A thick, well-trained limb, covered in dusty orange fur, there was a squeaky mimicry. It was still connected to him, but he couldn’t feel anything except a numbing pressure, like something was pushing outwards against his skin from inside.

“What did you do!?” Thad cried, panicked that his arm had been replaced.

“I made your body match your foul temperament, and gave your ego some room to ‘breathe,’ now if you’ll excuse me.”

The rabbit toddled off without so much as a hint of sympathy.

“Help, help! Someone help! That stupid long-eared asshole’s cursed me!” Thad strained his muscles, he forced every inch of his willpower into his arm to try and uncurl his claws from his sword handle. His arm creaked, and he smiled with joy, which turned to an open-mouthed look of horror when he realized that all he had done was somehow pump his arm bigger. His sword did drop from his paw, but only because his digits were springing up one by one, and rounding out. He grabbed at his wrist with his left paw, and felt the claws on his transformed right. They were hard, like plastic, and when he traced along it he could see seams running up both sides.

No one in the market made a move to help. They stared, and in hushed tones, discussed the inevitability of Thad’s actions.

“He pissed off the blast-wizard,” one woman said from the fruit and wine vendor’s cart. “He’ll be the fifth one this week, poor thing. Do you think he’ll burst like the last one?”

A couple of men by the tavern laughed. “Uh oh. He’s gone and run afoul of Barrazos the Balloonmaker, two gold say this one stays in one piece.” The dwarf at his side chimed in: “Three gold he turns into a firework!”

“Are you all stupid!?” Thad cried out, his arm still growing. “Help me!”

Thad was an adventurer, but he wasn’t particularly well liked in the local guild hall. A fact he relished. He took his badge as the local bully and wore his infamy with pride. The same pride which had turned part of his body into a shiny, bloated parody of the lovely arm he used to flex to entice men and women alike at the pub after a quest.

Ordinarily, when he was free of magical malediction, Thad was a towering self-proclaimed ‘big bad’ wolf. He came from a clan of lycan warriors with rust-orange fur, and cream, shorter furred paws, chests, stomachs, and muzzles. He wore a strange backwards cap he stole from another realm, with holes poked in the top for his ears. His beard-fur and the tuft growing from his chest was blonde, almost golden, and all of that was rapidly turning into something weightless and insubstantial.

Thad tried to take another step through the market to find a willing helper, only to trip over his shiny foot-paws. He rolled on to his back in time to see the transformation race up his legs, and down from his arm. He could feel a tightening around his collarbone, where it slowed, and he somehow knew that he would soon lose his ability to call out for aid. He could feel the cool touch of balloon-skin on his chin, and growled.

“Fine! Fiiiiiine! You bastards! You, you want to punish me!?” He bellowed. “I’ll blow up for you, I’ll swell up like the big stupid balloon you all want me to be, and I’ll block out the fucking sun!”

Thad opened his mouth and took in as much air as he could. His body swelled. It didn’t round out like the soft, malleable canvas of the blimps docked at the sky-port. Instead his body grew larger, and thicker, and somehow more muscular. The muscles he inflated lacked the same vascular meatiness of his real body, but they exploded to sizes that would have been impossible for him to achieve by meat and effort alone. He kept huffing, and puffing into himself. Thad decided, if he was going to be the town’s balloon, he would be the biggest they had ever had. He ascended gently skyward, until he loomed over the marketplace. His shadow yawned until it eclipsed the stalls, and his strange, rubbery body stole the sunlight away behind hills of squeaky air-filled muscles.

“I hope I burst one day and take you all with m--” the magic covered his mouth, his toothy grin cemented as a permanent wide smile as though rendered in white and black ink. His eyes followed, and his indignant expression disappeared. It was replaced by furrowed brows, and inanimate, painted eyes.

Thad, now entirely a balloon, floated higher. The plaid shirt and ill fitting black jacket he wore were fused to him by the spell. Thad was still aware of his surroundings, but there was a peace to being a balloon. He didn’t need water, or food, he didn’t even need to breathe. Though he coveted the hot air swirling inside of him, and wished for someone to add to it so he could loom more impressively over the idiots who had refused to stop his change.

The town tethered him, and relocated him to the mage’s guild. He bobbed in the wind outside the transmutation lab, as a reminder of the dangers of transformative magic. Every now and then, a professor would lead a class on to the grass and have his students attempt to disenchant Thad. When the earnest attempts fizzled, the professor would explain that transformation magic could only be undone, if the victim was willing for the spell to end.

As evidenced by the decade Thad remained above the guild, growing bigger every year, the time where he wished to be returned to normal never came. The local pub put on a prize pool, betting on whether he would burst, when, and how.

So far, no one’s won that bet.