The Room

They sat in a room. The room itself was unremarkable; uniformly square, plainly decorated, and sparsely furnished, with only a sliver of light dimly illuminating it from a raised window along the back wall.

The air was thick and buzzing with sound; the audible strain of floor boards, the drone of air conditioners, the wheezing of those struggling to overcome the unyielding humidity punctuated only by the slurping and gnashing of food and the deep, grumbling belches that followed. The occupants didn’t talk much nowadays, too occupied by gluttony and sloth to expend the excess energy, and the occasional discourse almost always revolved around their current situation anyway.

Along each of the four walls a denizen had made their home. A quartile to call their own as they lived out their strange experiment together.

By the door, Minh. A relatively quiet otter, Minh had strategically placed himself by the entrance to guarantee first claims on the food deliveries that passed through it before any of his louder housemates could appropriate it. His forethought and biology had paid handsomely, gifting Minh with a comparatively broad set of thighs and a thick log of tail fat that now pushed forcefully against the near wall. Glasses balanced precariously upon his muzzle, held on by his fat facial features having grown around them.

To Minh’s right was, Sosh. Although slightly exaggerated by the unkempt tufts of fur that lined the red dragon’s body, the size of his gut was domineering amongst his peers. Like Minh’s thighs, his weight had settled there in abundance, transforming it into a truck-sized heap of rolls, cellulite and sweat that crept further to the room’s centre with each passing meal. He claimed to be the best at belching, much to the disagreement of his compatriots.

Below the window was Kim. The smallest of the group, being at a natural disadvantage from her diminutive stature, the pegasus had carved her way through enough meals to be of compatible size to her colleagues. Being a quadruped she was the first to reach a truly immobile state and had since been beached, stuck laying upon her increasingly wider barrel and unhindered by the calories burned by movement. The eternal optimist, she delighted in the largesse of herself and the group and was by far the most talkative of the otherwise subdued friends.

And lastly, Glaz. Glaz had conceived the experiment, in a roundabout way. No one really knew the details of how it had come to be—not even the others—only that Glaz had whispered to them that they should eat, and that they should grow abundant with fat. Through means no one could decipher Glaz had placed them in the room, organised the food and amenities, and kept the gears of the whole thing running undisturbed for months on end. When not eating, he was encouraging others to or making teases as to how huge they could become. He had encompassed almost his entire quadrant and maintained a remarkable level of dexterity despite growing so huge, which he had solely exploited to stuff himself to ever more engorged sizes.

In spite of some of their best efforts, the room stank horrifically of the pungent child of rotting food detritus and an oceans worth of unwashed, unfiltered sweat. All four of them wheezed and struggled in the humid atmosphere, lungs compressed by the fat that surrounded them, veins clogged with a lifetime of cholesterol, immobilised by the weight of their own bodies.

Discreet monitors beeped quietly away in the background, tracking their vital signs for danger lest the experiment have to be terminated prematurely. They were only five months into this three year study, after all, and any early dropouts would spell disaster for the results!