The otter’s finger mashed the return key, sending the message off into the Twittlesphere, a fresh update for @Minh_Ande and his two hundred plus followers. While such poor spelling would normally be scorned by the denizens of the Internet, but for Minh the fact he could still type at all was a wonder.

On the wall across from him was the newly affixed certificate, cream in colour with royal blue trimming, announcing to the room that as of a few days prior Minh had the world record for the fattest mammalian individual by percentage of total weight. 96 percent body fat, in fact! The wording was a little long-winded, but he was proud.

It certainly showed, the otter was more capable of damming a river than swimming in one; his bulging belly rolling and folding off his torso, across his legs and several feet over the floor from the spot where he sat. Below his ample buttocks lay the ruined remains of a couch, long since overflown by rolls and ruined by sweat; and off his face hung cheeks of a similar size, a cascading waterfall of flab layered over his chins and shoulders.

His tail and thighs overflowed with fat, each presenting a thickness and diameter larger than many normal otter’s waistlines, the former pushed up, bent against the back wall of the room, and the latter so engorged that they smothered his already hidden feet. A similar situation played out in smaller scale at his forearms, each clawed finger thicker than a rich Cumberland sausage, and partially buried by an overflowing bingowing of lard from his arms. His arms were in fact the only part of him he could move that well, their musculature had built up from the endless hours and days moving food up to his greedy muzzle, although any definition they may have afforded was long buried under their fatty coating.

Slowly one of these arms descended, placing a smudged tablet onto a thin shelf set up beside him, just as the otter’s faithful housemate, caretaker and pegasus trotted in. Grey, by comparison to Minh, was minuscule. The top of his ears barely breached three feet in height, and his weight was a fractional amount of that which made up Minh’s sizeable cheeks. Despite this, Grey was heavily overweight for a flyer (a problem he blamed entirely on the habits of his overabundant housebuddy) and his stomach presented a rhythmic wobble as he strode in.

“Hey buddy,” Grey said as he strode in and laid upon the armchair on the far side of the room just below where the certificate hung, a clipboard held under a folded wing. “Your interview with Fine magazine is out on Monday and Inquire’s on Wednesday, also the film crew for the documentary will be coming in a bit later. We should probably pretty you up, blubberbutt.”

Minh let out a squeak of indignation. “Pretty me up? What’re you gonna do, stick me in a dress? I’m the fattest thing alive-”

“Fattest mammal by percentage of body weight,” corrected Grey.

“Yeah, that,” Minh harrumphed. Just wait another month and I’ll change that… “What can you do? You don’t even have any hands!”

Grey furrowed his brow. Always taking jabs at the hooves. “Well I was thinking maybe you could shower for the first time in a month? You’re really starting to stink up the place,”

Minh gestured over his body, an act that was signified by no more than a slight shrugging of the arms. “Yes, I’m totally going to fit in our shower…”

“I could always dump you in the North Atlantic,” sneered Grey.

“Unless you’re gonna build a shower into the wall then it’s not happening buddy!” Minh spoke with finality, making to cross his arms but just having his paws impact the sides of his chest. Old habits died hard, and squishily.

“Oh fine…” Grey got up to leave, “at least try to keep it all in your mouth at lunchtime, please?”

The documentary crew started setting up around one o’clock. Minh, with some effort, had managed to eat lunch (his fourth meal of the day) without leaving too much mess, and Grey has gotten both Minh and the room cleaned up in good time.

Minh looked on with quiet curiosity as cameras, cables, boom mics and lights found themselves being loaded into the increasingly crowded living room. Grey had to step outside for a while so that people wouldn’t trip over his diminutive size. A neck-bearded and lanky fox made a bee-line towards the neck-bloated and lardy otter.

“Minh, I presume?”

Minh nodded, his cheeks wobbling slightly even after he stopped.

“I’m Tony, I’m the director of the documentary we’ll be filming today,” his voice almost sounded recorded, he must have done this a lot, “I think we spoke once?”

“I… think so?” He didn’t remember. He’d had a lot on his plate lately, both literally and figuratively.

“Anyway, as you know, this is gonna be about you and your rise to, err…” he stumbled for a word. Turns out he wasn’t a machine.

“Fatness?” Minh suggested.

“Err… Yeah, that.” Tony continued, “Anyway, there’ll be some interviews, some vox pops, those kinda things. If you have some pictures or something of you before… this,” He gestured along the otter’s wide berth, “that’d be much appreciated.”

Minh smiled, “Give me fifteen minutes and a pony.”

In no time at all, Grey was fanning out a series of photographs, blog entries, written works and a selection of twittles on the table in front of Tony. In the last few months he’d turned from a desk jockey into a full-time cook, cleaner and PR agent. He was surprisingly adept at the latter.

“Here’s what I dug out for ya, Tony; Minh’s gain in a nutshell. Give me a bit more time and I could double it,”

Tony picked up one of the printed blog entries, taking a moment to read through what was written and stifling a gentle chuckle as the words hit home, “No need, this’ll do nicely,”

Within half an hour Minh was staring down the lens of a camera larger than any he had been used to before. Grey’s belly was pushed into his arm, the pegasus trying to do SOMETHING to fix the otter’s greasy, unkempt hair. Pressured into defeat by the impatient glare of the people behind the camera, he slunk off until he was needed.

This was the one-on-one interview portion of the documentary, which despite the name had about a dozen people involved in creating it. The armchair had been pulled up next to the collapsed sofa, a darker brown and suited otter named Boris sat in it. Boris. Boris Otterson. An uncompromising documentary maker with a habit for snark and sarcasm, his unconventional manners had won him a few awards and a popular following – although more serious individuals in the field had questioned whether his motives leant closer to entertainment than to the truth.

With the room shushed and the camera rolling, Boris spoke: “Tonight,” Minh stopped himself from grinning, it was barely 2pm, “I’m here with Minh Ande, recently crowned the fattest mammalian individual by percentage of body fat. I’ll be talking to him about his life, his weight, and why he did it. Minh, hello,”

“Hey Boris,” Minh replied calmly. Not a bad start, this wouldn’t be so bad.

Boris reseated himself, “We’ll start with the basics, how much do you weigh at the moment?”

“Well err, I’m probably over 4000 by now,”

“What’s that in? Elephants?”

“I, what, no! In tons! Wait no, pounds! 4000 pounds!” Minh fumbled for words, half embarrassed by the insinuation, and half daydreaming of when it came true.

Boris contained his sneer, intimidation is easy when your target gets thrown off so easily. “And how much of that is fat?”

“Ninety-six-point-two percent,” Minh read off the certificate on the wall opposite.

Boris whistled, starting to shuffle through some papers, “You could feed a starving African village for a year, lardass,”

Minh winced. He suddenly didn’t like this interview.

The documentary went out a couple of weeks later, Grey and Minh nestled in front of the television to watch it. It was just as cringeworthy as expected.

Attack of the Two-Ton Otter was less a documentary and more a showcase of Minh’s recent life interspersed with his stuttering and bumbling answers – the questions that elicited them suspiciously edited out.

Boris’s voiceover spoke over computer graphics, demonstrating how Minh was larger than a car, brightly decorated bar graphs indicated how he had eaten more in the previous months than some people would get in a lifetime, one such graphic made estimates as to how much it would cost to keep him alive once his body started faltering (the answer was a lot). It was all very factual, though Minh failed to hide his glee at the simulations of how big he could be, he couldn’t help but feel that they were meant in malice somehow.

In the last five minutes of the show his suspicions were confirmed. Boris appeared on camera to monologue about the obesity epidemic; he called Minh a bad example, said that Minh glorified unhealthy diets and lazy lifestyles, he called Minh out as being the kind of person who ignored the poor, the starving, and even common decency just for his own selfish desires.

As the screen faded to black and credits started rolling, Minh just stared at the screen, his mouth agape, shocked and disheartened at the tirade launched against him. A tear dribbled down his cheek. For the first time in months he felt unhappy with his weight.

“Oh Minh, you’ve done nothing wro-” Grey started, interrupted as Minh’s phone beeped. Minh kept staring into middle distance, so Grey went to get it.

The phone beeped again:

“Minh, you should see this,”

Over the space of fifteen minutes a hundred or more twittles flooded in, and #twotonotter even became a trending topic. Minh went from distraught to red with embarrassment in no time at all, and Grey’s grin just grew wider. Never before had he received so much encouragement from so many people, and now he was so happy that the horrors of the documentary were already a faded memory. In an hour he had nearly doubled his follower count.

With all the excitement of a catnip-riddled kitten, Minh finally tore himself away from the stream of twittles. “We should get pizza to celebrate!”

“It’s past ten o’clock…” said Grey, smiling, “How many do you want?”

“Send,” Minh dictated into the headset he had stretched over his face, pausing as he heaved for breath. His tablet was put out of commission a long while ago, now he did everything with voice recognition and computer glasses. They we’re totally the future.

Indeed, Grimace had paid a visit before breakfast (much to Minh’s dismay, that’d push the numbers down by a few hundred pounds) and done what they could to measure the otter’s immensity. Picking him up and putting him on a scale wasn’t exactly an option by now.

What mobility he had in his arms had long since left him; in fact, any notion of mobility was long gone, as was the house. When it became clear that he wasn’t going to fit into the living room much longer, Grey found it to be much more cost effective to just demolish the house and move their possessions elsewhere, rather than to go through the process of extracting Minh from the building and (somehow) moving him to a new plot of land.

This solution lowered house prices somewhat, but that wasn’t really Minh’s concern. Houses were for the thin.

Minh resembled a vagely symmetrical collection of sagging, brown water balloons more than he did his former ottery self. His body was grossly bloated, sagging and pocked with cellulite and stretch marks. His arms and legs were uselessly buried under their own rolling girth, paws all but buried under the thick waterfalls of lard that commoners called forearms and shins. Behind his still round, almost impossibly pert butt laid a thick tail, which in itself probably held a sizeable portion of his weight.

His face was itself a spectacle by sheer virtue of how little of it there was to be seen. Weight had piled up all around it, smothering and squeezing his facial features together almost constantly. His huge gain had granted him a dozen sagging chins – each as large and as heavy as a few people in themselves – they were now caked in an unpleasant mix of the remnants of long passed mealtimes and a steady amount of the otter’s almost constant drooling. Behind him, a similarly significant build up had occurred in his neck, which had also decided to fold up and thicken out. One had recently taken to growing over Minh’s head, burying a good scruff of hair with it and giving the appearance of a dark, looming orb tickling at the top of his vision.

This prospect did not scare him however, it more excited him! He had been losing his vision for some time now, not for any optical reason, but because of his cheeks. His cheeks were monstrous, ridiculous for an otter even of his size, they had swollen dramatically and had come to smother not only his muzzle and face, but had stretched well over to smother his shoulders too. Collectively they were almost as wide as he was, and had very much grown into his favourite feature.

That is, after the belly of course. The thing that had long ago immobilised him, and the thing that made him what he was today. To even call it a belly now was an insult, it was a mountain – formed over the course of fifteen months – from a molehill. A gargantuan brown, blubbery mass that stretched from one neighbouring house to the next. It was beautiful; just, so beautiful. He would weep with joy at his accomplishment, but he knew from experience that the tears would just collect in the cavities between his muzzle and ever-present cheeks.

He was suddenly drawn away from his world of self-adoration by a notification pinging in the corner his glasses. He opened it up and started dictating.

Grey resided in one of the neighbouring houses slowly being threatened by the blob next door, his once omnipresent goggles gone and another headset balanced precariously over his ears. He laid in the middle of an empty living room, his belly spread out below him and smothering more of the floor than he cared to acknowledge. He was still stuck a measly four and a half feet high, but had blimped outwards a solid eight or nine feet across and was growing steadily by the day.

He had just been told by the Grimace people that he weighed just shy of 4000 pounds, which wasn’t too hard to believe when he counted how many months ago it had been since he could last take flight. Heck, it had been some months since his hooves felt the carpeting too. He had turned into one piggy pegasus since then.

This was definitely Minh’s fault. After all, no one else had bought him a pump-action autofeeder machine for his birthday. And no one else had bought him a second one for Christmas, either. Minh had a decidedly single-minded thought process when it came to presents. Granted, the otter had never forced him to use them – the otter was in no position to – but he could pull off the most adorable puppy eyes…

Since then he too had becoming an immobile, growing, fat slob. His inability to move had rendered him useless as Minh’s carer, so now he worked as his agent; other people were contracted to clean and feed the gargantuan blob, he just managed their wages and the myriad of media appearances Minh went through from day to day. In fact a Japanese station should be seeing him today.

With a gentle sigh, Grey nestled into himself and waited for the autofeeder to deliver his 11 o’clock snack. Maybe this wasn’t so bad…