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The Third Circle

Vision

By Shalion

Patrick "Iron Gut" Devlin sat at the end of the long table atop the stage not just for propriety as champion hot dog eater fifteen years running, but also because his massive ass would have fit poorly between the other contestants. The massive pig, both literally and in practice, sat with a smug confidence knowing that half of the eyes in the crowd were on him, his thick hands resting on a great mound of a belly that suited his title and his lifestyle perfectly.

"Folks, this year's Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest will begin in five minutes!" shouted the organizer over the loud speakers. "Come on in folks and watch Patrick the Iron Gut himself defends his absolute domination of the hot dog universe and title of Epic Gurgitator for the fifteenth year in a row! This mountain of a man has a hunger as big as the belly suggests and knows no mercy. Will any of today's challengers be able to bring the titan down? You'll just have to watch and see..."

Patrick grinned smoothly and raised a meaty arm to wave at the crowd as the announcer lavished on about his title as if he were talking about a pro-wrestling star. He even felt good about the many jabs at his weight from over the speakers, Patrick knew how he looked and was proud of it, it was part of his character and really who he was at this point, and even his talent manager was enthusiastic about playing up his weight as a selling point at every opportunity. Some people argued that putting a man who weighed over six-hundred and fifty pounds up as a major face for the competitive eating world sent the wrong message, but Patrick thought his detractors just did not get the joke. These people, at least three hundred now who were out in front and watching him, were here to see a spectacle, they wanted to see a fat man eat like there was no tomorrow, even if most of them would not admit it. Was he eating himself to death, as some insisted? Well the same people who said that often forgot that he had weighed over six-hundred pounds since his mid twenties. Well, he was forty-one now, and it had not killed him yet, had it? (As much as his doctor liked to preach otherwise)

A microphone was shoved in the face of the corpulent pig. "Mr. Iron Gut, do you have anything to say to your fans today?"

First Patrick gave a good, piggish snort into the mic, he had been practicing on it for months, then he said, "I just want to say that I'm proud that I'll be able to add a fifteenth Nathan's belt to my trophy case today, but I would've thought by now that they'd've made one I could actually wear!" A roar of laughter from the audience, "And also... I'm hungry as hell! Let's get this show on the road!" Another roar drowned out the next words of the announcer as he went down the line at the table. Patrick took a moment to glance at the competition, creasing his chin into the massive neck roll that hung below it.

A lot were newcomers and Patrick dismissed them out of hand. 'Heavy Hoss' Peterson was back after a two year absence, but Patrick knew he was only gunning for second place with Joey "Deep Dish" Bertoletti. Both of them were at least seven dogs behind him at the five minute mark in regional competitions barely a month ago. As for the new faces, there certainly was a variety, including people from out of the country, insofar as Patrick could judge by their looks. They came in all shapes and sizes, from rail thin to real fatasses, but Patrick had at least two-hundred pounds on the next fattest guy on the bench, a hippo who spoke with a British accent. Patrick was already savoring his victory, even more than the hotdogs he could smell in the back behind the big Nathan's banner; he actually was starving, having eaten nothing for the past twenty-four hours. A fifteen year championship sounded real good. Who knew, maybe Nathan's would finally get over themselves and bring him on as a spokesman after this. But if the hot dog company would not, well there were still plenty of other titles Patrick wore: pie-eating, chili, chocolate, pickles, popcorn shrimp, baby-back ribs, even tamales and poutine! No, Patrick had a broad spectrum of talent, but hot dogs were his longest running and most well known winning streak, but only because most of the others had not even existed ten years ago.

Finally, the steaming platters were brought forward, one per contestant, each with a mound of artfully stacked hotdogs, free of toppings, and more than enough to satisfy the twelve minute time limit on the contest, though Patrick had a reputation of sometimes finishing what he was given when contest organizers underestimated the extent of his gluttony. Nathan's seemed to have fixed the matter by piling on an extra dozen or so dogs on top of Patrick's platter, making his rather taller and sloppier than the others', but the pig could not have cared less and oinked enthusiastically for the crowd when his was set down in front of his burgeoning midsection pressed tightly against the table. The crowd cheered and Patrick noticed the many "Gurgitator" and "Iron Gut" T-shirts that people were wearing.

When the bell rang, however, the pig's attention snapped into a tight focus on the big platter of dogs and buns in front of him, already his thick hands were both reaching out to cram his eager maw. The first few minutes past largely as expected. Patrick crammed his face full as much out of hunger as deliberate practice, giving each dog only two or three bites a piece before swallowing. Still, Patrick did not take the lead at first, instead relying on his huge capacity and stamina to secure the win, and after just a few minutes, people were either tapping out or so far behind they could not hope to catch up. At the five minute mark, half of the contestants were gone, with one noisily disqualifying himself off behind stage. Patrick had already eaten twenty-five dogs, a great start to beating his personal record of forty-four in twelve minutes. After warming up, the fattened hog was steadily eating through the rest of his platter two at time. 'Heavy Hoss' was using the same technique, but could not match Patrick's pace and was already down by eight. 'Deep Dish' Bertoletti was eating them singly, but was still behind by five dogs. Patrick was feeling veritably 'high on the hog' as he packed his mouth and intestines full of bread and sausages. That is until the eight minute mark came and went and he took another look at the score chart.

Joey and 'Hoss' were right were Patrick expected them, but there was another high score on the board, and somehow, it was already at forty! Patrick took just a moment to look down the table, hard to do subtly with a neck as thick around as many people's waists. The high score was, unbelievably, matched to a rail thin marten named Ryang Shin Il; was that Japanese or something? The marten was doing something weird with the hot dogs, separating the sausage from the bun, breaking it in half and swallowing it before dunking the bun in his water cup and swallowing that as well. It disgusted Patrick to see him abusing the food like that and he moved with an incredible, machine-like efficiency. But far worse was that Patrick was down by four already and the little guy showed no signs of slowing down. 'Where does he put it all?!' thought Patrick furiously, but had to bring himself back into focus. He could not afford to slow down now.

But by the ten minute mark, Patrick was slowing down. Even his great belly had it limits and he was finding it harder and harder to pack the dogs down the back of his throat. He leaned back from the table, in an attempt to give his aching belly more room in the time he spent chewing on his dogs, two in each fist. But even as he tried, he fell further behind, and the further behind he fell as the seconds creaked by, the wilder and crazier the crowd got.

"Ryang has just pushed past the old world record!" screamed the announcer, "We're watching history in the making, people! With ninety seconds left, how much more can the little guy take?!"

It was a lot more, as things turned out. Patrick smashed his fat fist onto the table as the buzzer sounded, his mouth still stuffed with hot dogs he was struggling to force down. Even pushing himself, Patrick lurched past his old record at forty-eight hot dogs, but this Ryang guy had somehow managed to make sixty hot dogs disappear in twelve minutes. The roars from the crowd as this unknown, stick thin guy usurped the "Iron Gut" in such a decisive manner were unheard of in Patrick's experience. The announcer went over to lift up the guy's stick of an arm and the crowd cheered again as Ryang stood up to reveal a pregnant pooch of a belly on his long, slender body. Patrick just looked on at the crowd emptily, not believing what had just happened. Even though he got second place and a token $500 check, even though he had broken his old record, what used to be a world record, he was an after thought from that point until he walked off the stage and back to his car. The fall from glory was faster than Patrick could ever have imagined and it started the very moment that buzzer sounded.

---

There would be no spokesman offer from Nathan's, naturally, and the upset to the world of competitive eating went on for weeks on end as Ryang went on interview after interview. The youtube video he made of his water dunking technique and the months he had spent perfecting it, literally unpacking the problem of eating hot dogs as quickly and efficiently as possible as if it were a physics problem, even went viral. While Patrick 'Iron Gut,' former champion, was also asked on interviews, he was almost exclusively asked about what he knew and thought of Ryang, and how he felt about losing. After a couple interviewers asked if he planned on losing weight after this, he stopped scheduling interviews altogether.

A few weeks after that, Patrick was lying on his back in bed while a prostitute he had hired sat next to him and stroked his cock. She was a clean-smelling red husky, Patrick had a thing for thick fur, and she was delightfully nervous about reaching her hand under his ball-bustlingly huge gut. Even on his back, the heavy, pronounced paunch sat resolutely on his thick thighs. It was actually really hard for Patrick to reach near his groin himself. He used a long handled loofa to wash himself and instead of masterbating, well he did this.

"I'm not sure if I feel anything yet." said the girl nervously as she poked around underneath the belly which was probably heavier than the girl was herself.

Patrick loved the way his body intimidated and mildly disgusted the young woman, it made him rock hard underneath all the weight. He spent a lot of time looking for bitches like this, repelled by his weight, and yet willing to come home with him anyways for the money. It was too bad that girls like this always got used to him sooner or later, it was never as much fun then as it was the first time. The little sounds she made while her fingers probed blindly under his flab drove the pig crazy, even as he calmly laid on his back, his tits - larger than hers, by the way - pressed under his chin as his belly piled high on top of his frame. "Try reaching in deeper, you're still on my thigh." said Patrick.

The woman complied, pushing her arm under the tremendous gut to the elbow, and then, at Patrick's encouragement, past that. "Is this is?" she asked with no small amount of exasperation, but she had no idea that what she was fingering was, in fact, Patrick's FUPA, which had grown to a thickness that matched the length of his shaft. She did not know it, but her pinky was just coming into contact with the tip of his cock. Patrick was so engorged that he could have come almost immediately, but he held on for a moment longer. "Below that... yeah, shove your hand right in there..." Patrick grunted as she finally wrapped her fingers around his shaft, and at this point the poor girl was nearly pressing her face into the side of his belly and undoubtedly getting a good whiff of the particular smell he had under there, no matter how much he washed himself, and he had not bothered getting himself too clean for this particular encounter. The pig oinked and grunted as he came hard in her hand, his load filling the crease under his FUPA and between his thighs, where his junk was constantly compressed. He sweated and felt his heart pounding hard in his chest as the girl withdrew her whole arm from within him with effort, leaving a sticky, slick trail across his thigh and under his belly.

"Is... Is that all?" she asked, turning her head away from his bloated figure.

Patrick waited until his heavy breathing subsided somewhat before lifting his head so he could look at her over his left man-boob. "Nah, baby. We got what, three more hours?" She sighed and in what seemed like an attempt from her, awkwardly leaned an arm against the pile of belly rising beside her. Her elbow sunk in, but she tried to avoid pressing her whole body against him. Patrick already felt himself growing again. "You do oral, babe?" he asked

She stiffened, "N-no, I... I don't think so..." she said shakily even though she had said as much before she had gotten into his car, before she had seen quite how obese he was. The thought of the young girl shoving her head into the odiferous confines under his gut was sending Patrick crazy again.

"How about for double?" he asked. The girl bit her lip. "Time and a half?" he said and then he reached over and slapped the far side of the husky's tight ass, quite intentionally causing her to lose her balance and press the side of her slim body into his mountainous man-flesh. She coughed as she tried not to jerk away from him. Jesus, she was fantastic!

"Go take a shower first." she said finally and to her credit, she barely flinched as Patrick ran his hand up her smooth flank to grope her chest as well as pull her closer to him.

"Fair enough." laughed the six-hundred pound hog. He was at least having one good night, and later the girl performed admirably with plenty a cough and hesitant shake to increase his pleasure.

Patrick was gentlemanly enough to give the bitch a ride home after he paid her. Despite how he was turned on by how repulsed she was by the feel and scent of his body, he never once let the girl know how he was aware of her body language. He told her she had done a good job and that he'd had a great time - and he had at that - and after the money was safely in hand and they were walking out the door, she had had enough grace to lie and say it was good for her too. With the exorbitant pay over what they had initially agreed on, it was not hard to convince her to agree to come back next week en route.

Patrick was not surprised when the girl's directions led to a sad looking tenement in the inner city. He stopped, but as the husky-girl was gathering her things and getting out, a man on the street, a rather scruffy looking fox in a loose Hawaiian shirt, seemed to recognize her and began walking towards the car. The girl froze with her hand on the door handle.

"Want me to drive away?" Patrick suggested, not sure what to make of the situation.

"N-no. It's... alright." she said and took a deep breath, as if steeling herself. Then she got quickly out of the car.

Patrick did not move. He might not be above prostitution, but he was not the type of guy to let violence happen right in front of him. The hog knew his chances in a fight were pretty low if it lasted more than twenty seconds or so, but he was actually pretty strong, not surprising since he carried around a quarter ton of weight everywhere he went. He watched as the girl met with the man and spoke briefly before she handed him some bills. "Oh jeez, is this her pimp?" thought Patrick, suddenly regretting sticking around. He was just about to turn the car back on when the fox grabbed the girl's wrist. Patrick heard, "What about for last week?" She did not cry out, but the pig saw her try and fail to tug her arm free of the man.

Knowing he was being stupid, Patrick still opened his door and yanked himself out of the car, his belly scraping against the steering wheel. "Hey!" shouted Patrick as he started walking around the vehicle towards the struggling pair. He was not exactly good with words, especially in a tough situation like this.

The fox, a man in his thirties and lean in the way that only a rough life can manage, reacted quickly, his free hand diving into his pocket as he faced the fattened pig. Patrick stopped in his tracks, wishing suddenly that his chivalrous instincts had not kicked in. The man, however, seemed to scrutinize him in the amber street light and then his eyes brightened in a moment. "Hey, ain't you "Iron Gut?" Pat "Iron Gut?"

"Y-yeah..." said Patrick unsurely. To be recognized at a time like this... well then again, he was highly recognizable, even from a distance or in dim light was he not?

The fox's hand left his pocket. "Man... I can't believe my bitches be doing the "Iron Gut" hisself. Come on over here, you fat bastard."

Patrick relaxed slightly, at least it seemed less likely that he would be shot dead now. He reluctantly walked over towards the fox and the slender whore, consoling himself that maybe this situation could at least be talked out now. When he was within arm's length the fox, however, the man in the Hawaiian shirt jabbed the pig low in the belly with a sucker punch. Patrick was surprised, but seeing as the fox struck him in a spot with at least two feet of padding, he hardly felt it and his weight was such that he did not even move him a centimeter with the quick jab. Patrick began to clench a fist, but the fox was already laughing, slapping his knee with his free hand.

"Jesus, are you fucking huge! Felt like sockin' play-dough. What are you, like eight-hundred pounds or somethin'?"

Patrick crossed his arms and snorted as a response, and he made a point to glare at where the fox was still holding the girl by the wrist.

The fox did notice and he let go of her with a grin. "Aw, come on man, bitches be crazy, you know that." The girl took a step back from the man, but did not go far, instead just meekly looking at the ground. Patrick did feel bad for her, but did not think that he could do anything more for her at this point. Mostly, he just wanted to go home now. But the fox seemed like he was not done with him yet. "Hey, hey, "Iron Gut," my man. I watch all your shit, you know." he went on, "I couldn't believe how that skinny-ass asia-nigga took you down! I was like 'What da fuck?!'"

Patrick could not help but snort in derision. Even here, it seemed. "Yeah, tell me about it. But he won fair and square."

"No man, that's what I tryin' to say." He reached out and tapped the front of Patrick's prominent belly again, playfully this time. "I think that sucka cheated. Me and my boys said, 'There's no way that nigga can eat that much! He's gotta be on drugs or somethin'."

Even though it had been almost two months now, the loss still stung badly and the pig was sour over what would have, should have, been his life's greatest achievement. "Well, I don't know about any drugs that would make you eat like that..." said Patrick, but already the door was opening. Could Ryang have cheated? Patrick had never seen anyone eat like that in his life after all, and a part of his mind still refused to believe that a rail like that marten could really be the new face - and body - of the competitive eating scene.

The fox snorted, losing some of his starstruck posture. "Maybe you don't, Iron Gut, but I got a guy who does. He said he knows how that skinny guy did it."

Patrick uncrossed his arms. Suddenly the girl standing next to him was the least thing on his mind. "Well, how did he do it? What drug did he take?"

The fox scratched behind an ear. "Eh... I don't 'member the name of the shit, but my boy, he knows a guy whose all up in weird shit like that." The fox looked Patrick up and down again, "Man, it'd be sweet as hell if you got that last belt. They's already talking shit about fat asses like you on TV, saying shit like your stomach can't expand as much 'n shit. It's all bullshit. I mean, jeez look at you! You look like you could eat a whole damn cow if you wanted." The fox sidled up to Patrick suddenly, putting an arm around his shoulder, or at least as much as he could reach. "Listen, this guy... he's real private-like, but if you give me your number, I can maybe get him to give ya a call. No promises, mind."

Patrick desperately wanted to believe this street fox. That more than anything convinced him to pull the pen out of his pocket. As he was writing, he spared a glance at the husky-girl, still standing, mute this entire time, and looking at her feet. "What about her?" he asked before handing the note over.

The fox slapped the pig on the back, sending a nice shockwave traveling across the whole surface of his plump body. "I'll give the bitch a break for tonight, just for you, my man." he said, grinning a fox's grin.

It was the best that could be hoped for. Patrick was not out the save the world. "Thanks." was all he said as he handed over his number. The fox quickly made it disappear into a pocket.

"If you like her, I'll treat her good, Iron gut." said the fox and Patrick wondered if he noticed how much he had paid for her attention this evening. "But I wanna see you back on TV, man. What'cha been doing for the past month? Hangin' out in your crib? Do that, and I'll send her back over an' make sure she does whatever it is you want her to do."

Patrick took a deep breath, looking again at the skinny, helpless girl. "Hmm... that sounds nice... very nice."

---

Patrick received the call sooner than he would have expected. Less than a week had past since the encounter with the pimp before Patrick received an unlisted phone call while he was 'working out.' That is, while he was steadily devouring the second of two extra-large meat-lover's pizzas while sitting on the couch watching Netflix. Patrick tended to skip breakfast in favor of eating a massive mega-meal in the evening. It helped stretch out his stomach, the pig believed, so in a sense, he was "working out," at least where it mattered in his life.

After wiping the grease out of his chin roll, Patrick lifted the phone to his ear. "Hello?" he asked.

"Are you Iron Gut?" asked a woman, surprising Patrick.

"Yeah, I am. Do... you have business with me?" asked the pig, suddenly not sure this was the call he had been waiting for.

She tittered slightly, "Only if you have business with me, Mr. Iron Gut."

Patrick swallowed. His oversized stomach was suddenly seething. "Do you know anything about Ryang Shin Il?" he asked desperately.

But he was met with outright laughter over the phone. "Only that you'll never ever beat him, Mr. Iron Gut. But I do know about about you, big boy."

This woman sounded so calm and authoritative. Patrick hated it. "He cheated!" he flung uselessly at her as his last hope died in his fattened breast.

The phone was silent for a moment, but it felt so long that Patrick was afraid that the woman had hung up. Then she said finally, "That boy did not cheat, but what he did do was completely transform the world of eating contests." She inhaled, "And that world, Mr. Iron Gut, does not have a place for you, any longer."

It felt like she had stabbed him in the heart. It was his darkest fear, and one that he had refused to even think about, but this person on the other end of a blocked number had somehow found the hidden demon in his mind, and thrown it in his face. The hog could not even speak at first and he felt his eyes watering as he remembered the coverage he had been ignoring, the technique that Ryang had applied and was already being copied by other enterprising young people, and even veterans like himself were changing their ways, changing or dropping off the map altogether. But this, eating, was all he had. He had nothing else.

She spoke again into his silence. "But I have something that might help."

Patrick cocked an ear, "What is it?" he said in monotone. He felt numb.

"Only something I think you'll find particularly interesting. Meet me at the bar on 7th street and Central tomorrow evening. I don't think I'll have any problem spotting you..." After that, the phone went silent.

Patrick let the phone fall from his hand. Then he began thinking, but really, he already knew what he was going to do.

The bar turned out to be a dive called, "The Rotten Apple." Patrick had to park on a street three blocks away as it lacked a proper lot. He hauled himself down the street, puffing heavily by the time he walked in the door, leaning against the frame and making the wood creak with his weight. He struggled to jam himself into a booth, shoving the table all the way to the other side and trying to catch his breath. He ordered beer while he waited...

Six beers, four plates of hot wings, three mozzarella stick appetizers and two trips to the bathroom later, someone nonchalantly slid into the booth just across from him. It was past midnight.

The person was a woman, he saw, and fairly slender, which explained how she was able to fit into the meager space left by Patrick's jutting belly, though she did not have much in the chest department, barely an A-cup. The woman was a cat with startlingly pitch black fur and striking green eyes, iridescent in the dim light. She had a tendency to purr softly as she spoke. "I hope I haven't kept you long." she said without greeting.

Patrick let one of his hands rest on the great swell of belly fat between his heavy man-tits. "I've been keeping myself busy." he snorted, "You have a name? I'm not generally fond of this cloak and dagger stuff."

She laughed that same arrogant laugh of hers. "You can call me Lilith."

"Alright, Lilith." said the pig, calmer now, or maybe it was just the booze. "What have you got to show me?"

The cat studied him without answering right away. Her eyes lingered on his chest, where his thick, pancake tits stood out prominently in his shirt and the wideness of the huge belly jutting out from under them. "Maybe I ought to be asking you what you can show me, hm? Mr. Iron Gut?"

Patrick's eyes widened in bafflement. Now he had heard of girls who were into big guys, but he'd never met one, despite being a grade D celebrity. He had always assumed those girls sort of topped out at around 400 pounds or so anyways, and he definitely was not sure he could get along with a girl who was actually into him anyways. He sniffed loudly and averted his eyes from her piercing ones. He covered his mouth with his hand, saying, "I came out here because I thought you might have..." he dropped his voice, "Something that might be able to help me..." he swallowed, what was he even asking for? "Perform better." He shook his head, "If this was a hoax, I'm leaving."

"Leaving?" she tittered, "After all this time spent waiting? I know you don't really want to get out of that chair and walk all the way back down the street. And what would you be going back to anyways?"

Patrick frowned. He already hated this woman, he hated any woman who spoke to him like this. But his double-wide ass remained in place. After a minute or so, he spoke, "I can go back. I can learn how to dunk the buns in water just like he does." Why was he talking about this? As if she were some kind of life coach.

"But you don't want to." she said cuttingly. Was he that obvious? Or was she just especially canny? "You haven't changed in fifteen years, and you don't want to start now." She reached up and stroked the long whiskers on her face. "And do you really think you can loose all that weight? After so long?" Her eyes tore into him again, "It's true, you know. How the fat constricts the stomach? It really should have been obvious, but then, eating contests never really were about maximizing performance, were they." She shrugged, "It was all about the spectacle, or at least they used to be."

Patrick bit his thick finger. He could not help himself. Who was this woman? How did she know so much about him, not that she had said anything that could not be gathered relatively easily about him, but she seemed to know his heart before even himself. The pig felt like he was on the verge of breaking down, right in front of this stranger. "Please... please tell me that you have something, anything..."

But she just grinned at him with that horrible, knowing grin. "Come outside and meet me in the back..."

She got up, and Patrick followed her helplessly. He really felt as though he had no choice at the moment, even if she had somehow gone through all of this trouble just to have him mugged in a blind alley. But there were no muggers in the back, though the alley behind the bar reeked with refuse. "Can you finally show me now?" asked the pig, looking around and absently rubbing the front of his large, hanging belly.

The cat, her eyes gleaming in the moonshine, opened her purse and withdrew a syringe. Patrick was not surprised and took it when she handed it to him. The fluid it contained was clear, totally nondescript. He looked back at her. "What is it?" he asked with a cutting seriousness.

"Nothing you would be able to remember, even if I told you, Mr. Iron Gut." grinned the she-cat. "But this will definitely improve your 'performance'" she said the last word in a mocking tone.

Patrick grunted, still fingering the tiny syringe. It looked exactly the same as the insulin injectors he had used for his diabetes before he had gotten his blood sugar under control with drugs instead. "How does it work?" he asked.

The cat stepped forward and plucked the syringe out of his thick fingers. "It requires weekly injections and you'll notice a difference in about three weeks, but if you stop taking it, the effects will wear off right away."

"But what are the effects, exactly?" asked Patrick, concerned now that he was going to have to have an ongoing relationship with this woman to keep getting this stuff, assuming it even worked.

She cocked her head, grinning, "You'll notice increased hunger first, but that's a plus for you." she winked at him, and again, she was grabbing his bloated form with her eyes, "But the real effect is that it will change the way you metabolize food. When you take this, you'll be able to process food much faster, fast enough to matter in a contest." She reached out and grabbed a hand full of doughy belly fat suddenly, and she was purring loudly as she spoke, "I'm not saying your... rather prodigious belly will empty as fast as you fill it, but this should give you enough of an edge to regain your spotlight."

Patrick brushed off her hand. It sounded plausible, even if it was also too good to be true. He clenched his teeth, was he really going to do this? "Are there any side effects?" he asked.

Lilith handed him back the syringe. "A few... But you're already acquainted with the most significant one." she reached out with both hands and grasped either side of the pig's grand belly, and shook it side to side gently. "...Weight gain." she breathed. Her slim stomach was inches away from his burgeoning front.

Patrick gingerly took a step back from the woman's groping hands, feeling uncomfortable. He breathed out a sigh, however, he had been expecting her to tell him his balls would fall off, or something. He was not worried in the slightest about a few extra pounds. "I'm fine with that. Anything else?"

The black cat clasped her paws together under her slim breasts. "It might aggravate any existing health conditions..." she said in a more disinterested tone. She reached up with one claw and picked behind one of her large, gleaming white fangs. "Do you have diabetes, by any chance, Mr. Iron Gut?"

A low oink escaped him. He did not usually tell people, but now did not seem like the time to lie. "Type Two." he said simply, now grasping the syringe in a fat fist.

The cat finished with her tooth, but left her paw by her cheek. "Expect that to get worse." she said with half lidded eyes. "It's not going to help your cholesterol either."

Patrick grasped the syringe more tightly. He did not have a good history with his cholesterol or blood pressure either, he was already using blood thinners. His doctor always told him he was taking his own life into his hands by continuing to be so heavy. Was he seriously going to put his health at risk now, and possibly get even heavier? When he had reached his current weight when he was twenty-six, his doc had told him to lose it or he would not live into his forties. Well, here he was now forty-one, but undeniably, his body was not in the best shape, never mind his physical shape. He had gotten diabetes before he was thirty and he had already gotten a stint placed in one of his coronary arteries. It was a very private pain and Patrick did his best never to think about it, nor his long term health prospects and it was not just because his public image was built on being so obese, and being a figurative pig for the cameras. At this point, weighing so much was a part of his identity and he would never be able to let go of it, not even to save his life. But this... this drug she was telling him would make everything worse, almost certainly take years off of his future...

Patrick relaxed his grip on the syringe. But he would have no future without it, not one worth living anyways. "I'll deal with it." he said resolutely. He looked down, then back up at the cat. "How much is it going to cost me?"

"Hmm... cost...?" said the feline and she sauntered closer to him, placing her paw once again atop the great mound, she rubbed the curve of it smoothly, causing Patrick to shudder. "A favor." she purred, looking up to meet his eyes again.

"A favor?!" said the pig incredulously. "Look, Lilith, if you want sex, you can just come out and say it."

She snorted and pushed with force into Patrick's soft belly. Walking away a couple steps, she said, "Well, I was just sort of expecting that." she turned back to face him, "Don't you get enough pussy in your life?"

"Ha, ha, very funny." said Patrick rolling his eyes. He wanted so much to tell her he would never fuck her, to rub it in her smug face. "But I get more than you'd think with this body." He said, but the truth was he would do even that to get this drug, this promise that he could keep going on as he had been before, that he could keep his world from falling apart.

"Oh, how studly." smirked Lilith, "But was it bought and paid for, I wonder?" She licked a paw and brushed the fur on her cheeks as Patrick fumed silently. "But it doesn't really matter. That's not the favor I was talking about, but it could be a side item if you just want to keep me happy." she winked, "I'll tell you when and how you can pay me back."

"Well, that's a relief." said Patrick sarcastically. He was still wondering if he would have to fork over his ego and sleep with this creepy, arrogant woman at some point in the future. "I'm not going to murder anyone, by the way." he said only half kidding.

She laughed, "Oh it won't be that. I promise." She licked her paw again.

"Hmph..." grunted Patrick now pocketing the syringe. "Well, aside from the sexual coercion, it's awful nice of you to keep giving me this drug for just a favor. What, am I going to be a guinea pig for some illegal experiment or something?"

The cat snorted a laugh, "Well, if that were true, I'd need you to come to me for regular check ups." she was staring at his body again. "I won't need any checkups from you, if you don't want, Pat." she leveled her eyes at him, "But I will be needing two-hundred dollars a week, in addition to the favor, of course."

---

Two months later, Patrick was driving down through Mississippi, heading for a crawdad eating contest, his first contest since his disastrous loss against Ryang. The pig's burgeoning belly pressed hard against the steering wheel, making turns hassle some and squeezing into and out of his spacious truck a small daily nightmare. It had only been a month since the mystery drug's effects had started kicking in, but Patrick noticed the difference right away.

For the first time in fifteen years, Patrick had started putting on weight again, real weight, noticeable weight. He had already outgrown nearly everything in his carefully built wardrobe and had to buy new clothes online seeing as nothing in stores would fit him properly, not at his size. Somehow, he had managed to pack on an astounding forty-five pounds in a month. Patrick only knew that because he had finally broken down and bought an industrial digital scale so he could keep track of what he was doing to himself. That morning before he had gotten in his car, the scale had read: "698 lbs." The fattened pig was still steeling himself for a future where the number "7" featured prominently.

But Patrick had hope of not turning into a blob before next year's rematch with Nathan's hot dogs. He had explained the unexpected speed of the gain and Lilith, after sounding bemused as well as intensely interested in the exact details of the gain, had explained that he was going to need to adjust his daily routine to reduce its impact on his expanding waistline. Admittedly, Patrick had just been going on as usual, eating anything and everything he wanted, and intentionally overeating at times for his 'workouts.' But since the drug had begun having its effects on him, Patrick had definitely noticed his appetite had gone up a notch, but more than that, he never really got full anymore either. It was like everything was Chinese takeout now, he was hungry again a half hour later. Patrick had really made a pig out of himself for the past thirty days. But moving forward, he resolved to restrict himself to a strict four-thousand Calorie diet... Granted, he had never attempted to do anything like that before in his life, even with double the recommended amount of daily Calories, but then he could start after the crawdad eating contest tomorrow. He was already fasting for it and it was not as bad dealing with his increased hunger as he would have imagined. Far worse was getting in and out of his too-tight truck...

The morbidly obese pig woke up early the following morning, his empty stomach churning and cramping with hunger pangs. Grunting with effort, he rolled his fattened body over to look at the clock. At least he tried the first time, but his fattened body just sort of sloshed halfway and then forced him back. Patrick took a few breaths before trying again, feeling how deeply he sunk into the mattress. When he finally managed to roll over, his big tummy falling over to flow over the sheets, he saw the clock face. "4:11" it blinked. Patrick groaned and rolled again onto his back. He tried massaging the huge pile of belly fat that sat on top of his abdomen and clenching his teeth. Anytime a stray thought of food passed through his mind, his mouth filled up immediately with saliva. The hog oinked and grunted softly to himself, there was only, what, five more hours to go now? But he did not find anymore sleep that morning and chewing on his toothbrush later on did not help either.

After having weighed more or less the same for fifteen years, Patrick really noticed the extra forty-five pounds of girth when he was walking. He felt the new weight on his knees like he was wearing a heavy backpack or hauling a big bag of beans. But unlike a backpack, a lot of these pounds were strapped onto his front and the pig felt an added tension on his lower back as a result. His lower belly had dropped another inch or two and added girth, Patrick really noticed this when he had to lift it up to take a piss. It made finding jeans to fit his unusual body shape especially hard and expensive. The crotch point of the pants was not especially accommodating to his belly which hung over a foot lower down, the hog really needed an extra sac out in front in which to support his "Iron Gut."

They did make a big deal out of him as he walked up to the contest stage, however. He had not been seen in at least three months, after all, and there had already been talk that he was retiring like so many other gurgitating superstars. Patrick was surprised at first that no one made a comment or even seemed to notice the difference in his appearance as he stood for an interview before walking up to the stage. The hog grunted loudly as he took the three steps, really feeling the unusual weight on his knees. But then he saw the set up.

The long table did not have a bench, but rather regular cheap folding chairs for the contestants, that is except for the place that Patrick "Iron Gut" was directed to. Even as he walked towards the small, two person sized bench, two stage men were hauling in cinder blocks to place underneath it as a means of extra support. Patrick frowned, thinking that the blocks certainly were not necessary given such a small bench, but then that was not really the point was it? "We're making sure that returning Champion Pat "Iron Gut" has all the support he needs folks!" shouted the announcer to a chorus of laughter from the crowd. Sure, Patrick was used to making a big deal about his weight... but this felt rather different. Then the fattened hog got a better look at his competition.

The change in the composition of contestants was startling. The first thing the pig noticed was that more than a quarter of them were of asian heritage, and nearly all of those were rail thin, just like Ryang. The average weight, in fact, of the other people had plummeted in just the few months he had been gone. There was no one on stage who was over three-hundred pounds, the next biggest guy was a tall, thick stag bearing plenty of muscle along with some meat who was two-hundred and ninety tops. Patrick stood out like a sore thumb among them, more an oddity than anything else. The pig swallowed, well he would show them what he could do. He was all but dying of hunger now and he was pretty sure there was no slick trick to shucking crawdads. Patrick had already mastered the art of breaking and sucking the shellfish years ago.

When the platter of steaming red mini-lobsters was brought out, Patrick swallowed back a tidal wave of drool in his mouth. He had never been this goddamn hungry in his life! Every moment until the bell rang was a conscious effort. But rather than hot butter, a microphone was suddenly shoved in front of his snout instead. "Anything to say to the fans before we start, Mr. Iron Gut?"

Patrick clenched and unclenched his chubby hands. All he could think about was the food in front of him. "I'm starvin'!" he managed and released a massive, greedy oink and snort over the loud speakers.

"He said it folks." said the announcer to a peal of applause and laughter. "Let's get this thing started!"

The bell rang and Patrick moved like it was a trained response. The pig sucked and cracked exoskeletons like the crawdads had murdered his family. There was no art or flow to it in the first minutes as Patrick sought only to quiet the raging empty pit inside of himself. But the hog did find his rhythm again once he was able to focus and began eating more methodically and deliberately, cramming his stomach full as if it were a game of Tetris. With crawdads, the plates were weighed before and after to determine the winner, so it was harder to tell who was ahead, but as Patrick spared a glance down the table, he could tell that he was doing at least as well as the fastest eaters. Several of the new comers had barely put a dent in their platter by the six minute mark, whereas Patrick managed to devour the last crawfish on his plate and place the shell pieces neatly in the tin bucket set aside for that purpose. The fattened pig then had to wait impatiently as a second platter was brought around. "Come on...!" he stammered, tapping his trotter on the ground and banging the table with his palm. Had any of the other contestants finished their plates yet? Patrick did not know or really care, the plates were dreadfully uneven to start with, which was why they all had to be individually weighed before and after.

It took twenty-seven seconds for Patrick to begin demolishing the second platter, he knew because he counted. By this point, Patrick knew that he had broken his old record by a lot and he was feeling pretty darn full and stuffed with shellfish. But as he swallowed each new chunk of flesh down his gullet, it just seemed to push the rest of the massive bolus lodged inside of him a little deeper down. He did not feel sick or like he was hitting a wall, he was not even in very much pain. Patrick felt like he could keep on eating forever, even if he did naturally slow down in the final minute or so. When the buzzer sounded, he pushed his plate away and leaned back on the bench, allowing more room for his brimming, taut belly. He felt bloated, but content, and he released a massive belch that the crowd heard without the benefit of loudspeakers. They cheered and laughed at it and that part at least, felt normal and right.

Still, Patrick nervously awaited the results of the weighing, which they did on stage. The results were read out, "Stanley: two and a third pounds, Kashiwagi: four and three quarter pounds... and so on." But when they got to Patrick, they lifted up his flabby arm before even announcing how much he had eaten. "And Patrick, The Iron Gut himself has just smashed his old record of five and a quarter pounds to pieces with an unbelievable ten point two pounds of crawfish! That's a world record, folks!"

The din from the crowd was astounding as Patrick stood up and basked in the noise, raising both heavy, sagging arms over his head and walking around to the front of the table to receive a golden crawfish trophy and an oversized check for 4,000 dollars. "People have been saying that fat people can't compete in these contests anymore, Mr. Iron Gut." said a man with a microphone. "What do you have to say to them?"

Patrick did not know if it was possible to be happier than he was right now. He grabbed the microphone in a meaty hand saying, "I think they better get ready to get squashed!" he laughed and then grabbed the side of his prodigious namesake and shook it to the sound of applause, "I'm bigger and hungrier than ever, and I'm not stopping here! I'll take back the whole world of competitive eating by myself if I have to!"

"Proud words from a proud man." said the man with the mic, "Where're you heading to next?"

"Arizona, tamales." said the pig simply, then added, "Which is good, 'cause I'm going to kick things up a notch!"

More inane questions followed, but Patrick remained in the limelight, soaking it up, it felt like it had been so long... Finally, a female reporter shoved her way to the front, asking, "Patrick, what do you have to say to those who think your lifestyle is unhealthy and that you're setting a bad example for others?"

Patrick smirked. "Tell them I feel fantastic... Next question."

---

And so it went. Patrick went from a washed up has-been to a rising star once more, and he rose faster and higher than he ever would have expected. Each competition he went to, he demolished the competitors and his old records, eating double and more of what he used to be capable of. However, when Patrick stepped on the scale the morning following his win in the Mississippi crawdad contest, the digits he had read, "704.8 lbs," heralded what was to become routine.

Patrick struggled with the concept of dieting for the first time in his life and it was even harder trying to live with it. The fattened hog had somehow put on six pounds after winning the crawdad competition, but the following week was hardly better. Despite cutting out any binge eating and only ordering in pizza once, he still put on another ten pounds. Already, his brand new jeans were uncomfortably tight.

The fattened pig realized he had to resort to drastic action as he neared a remarkable hundred pound gain since he had started injecting himself with the mystery drug. He threw out all of the food in his house and started buying prepackaged meals so he could keep better track of how much he was eating. Granted, he still ate two or three of the minuscule meals at a time, he still was not interested in trying to lose weight, even though he had lost over ten-thousand dollars worth of clothing already by outgrowing his old wardrobe. Just as long as he could stick to his four-thousand Calorie plan... Though this became a five-thousand Calorie plan before the month was out.

It worked at first. The following week, he gained only two pounds, and only a single pound the week after. But he was also miserable. It was not even so much that he was tormented by hunger, although that did happen at times, especially at night. But after having spent pretty much his entire adult life eating when and how he pleased, all the keeping track of Calories and thinking about adding more vegetables and fruits to every meal, the act of dieting itself, it went against the core rules of how he lived his life. It even kind of went against who he was as a person, despite how necessary he realized it was to avoid weighing over a thousand pounds by the following year. But the fact remained that he was so used to getting food when he wanted it, that Patrick often found himself actually getting out of the couch, and that took some effort at his size, and walking halfway to the kitchen before he had to clamp down and deny himself. And even as he walked back, he was trying to rationalize the fact of his already being halfway to the kitchen to justify getting just one meal box out of the refrigerator for a snack. It did not help that food no longer had any staying power for him anymore.

The fact that Patrick could no longer get full, at least not without a literal buffet in front of him, added to the mental burden of keeping track of everything that went into his mouth. After just two weeks of trying, he was exhausted from the daily effort of it. He felt like his entire life was becoming nothing but the diet, even as he was asked to come on more interviews and even make appearances on day time television. He started to cheat, despite himself, especially when he was out and about, it was too damn easy to stop at McDonalds for their "Big Mac Bundle" which consisted of two Big Macs, two large fries, twenty chicken McNuggets, and two soft drinks. That really did good to take the edge off, and entertain his pallet for a while. And of course, Patrick did not stop with just McDonalds.

The results of his cheating, 'every now and again,' were clearly visible on the scale however. Patrick's rate of gaining jumped right up to 3-4 pounds a week. The pig felt like he was putting on weight just by smelling food at this point. But after seeing himself gain sixteen pounds in eight days, three or four pounds a week somehow seemed manageable by comparison. Patrick avidly avoided doing the math in his head, however. He kept telling himself that he would try harder next week to keep the gains down, but the number on the scale kept rising steadily.

But even if Patrick had been able to totally eliminate excess Calories from his daily life, each food competition he went to provided an unavoidable spike in pounds added to his expanding frame. Patrick ate for a living, and as such tended to go to two or three regional events per month, with major events happening every one to three months. Without exception, each time Patrick competed, he added multiple pounds to himself in a single sitting.

Before he knew it, he hit the big number, "750." He really felt the difference too. Just walking was getting to be a pain and his trotters were starting to hurt from standing like they never had before. He got out of breath just walking up a few steps onto stages now. Patrick started downing ibuprofen because he was getting recurrent lower back pain. The media finally noticed too. Everyone had already known he was in the "600's" but he could not lie anymore about being well over seven-hundred pounds. They could see it in his face now, hell, Patrick compared his old photos with his reflection and could see how much fatter he had gotten; his sagging cheeks and jowls, as well as his thick tire of a double chin looked huge to him. He got more and more questions related to his health, but Patrick was forced to dodge them. He still had not seen his doctor ever since starting on the drug, and was actively avoiding him. He did not want to hear any bad news. But other than the aches and pains, Patrick thought he felt fine. That is, until he passed out suddenly one night as he got up to take a leak.

It happened fast. One minute, he was leaning over the bowl, lifting up his porcine paunch with one hand while the other was braced on the wall behind the tank. He was breathing heavily, having just hauled his fattened carcass out of bed. Then from nowhere, the hog was hit with an intense bout of dizziness like he had never felt before. The pig wanted to sit down right away, but before he could even try, he blacked out. Waking up on the cold tile of his bathroom floor, boxers still hanging around his ankles, Patrick initially had no idea what had happened or why he was lying on the floor. He sat there for over a minute, breathing slowly and feeling weak and generally ill, trying to put together his disjointed memory. There was just a second or two missing right? a few seconds? Surely not more than a minute? There was no way to tell. Eventually, Patrick managed to haul himself up, and on inspecting the mirror, saw that he had bruised the hell out of his left arm and shoulder. It did not hurt much, so Patrick supposed that the fat had largely cushioned the fall. The morbidly obese pig went back to bed and tried not to think too much about what had happened, but the experience continued to gnaw at him in quiet moments.

A few days later, Patrick found himself in Atlanta, sitting in a low brow Chinese food buffet called "Happy Dinner," but not by choice. Patrick still disdained the thought of going to the doctor to be berated harshly and only told that he was killing himself without giving him any advice he could use. There was one other person he knew who seemed knowledgeable at least in pharmacology and would not give him a hard time about his size. However, she was also one of the people he was least fond of. He had wanted to talk to her over the phone, but she refused and had insisted that they meet here.

Patrick scratched the side of his voluminous belly where new stretch marks had appeared and were stretching red and livid up and down his flanks as well as on his arms and the sides of his boobs. He was in Atlanta in the first place for the moon pie contest. Again he had smoked the competition, having devoured one-hundred and twenty moon pies in eight minutes and set yet another world record. The stunt had also pushed him over seven-hundred and sixty pounds. That morning he had taken one-thousand milligrams of ibuprofen for back pain, but there was still a knot in his lower spine that jabbed him whenever he got up from a sitting position.

Patrick sat at a booth by himself for a long time, growing angrier by the minute. He hated playing her games and part of him was sure that she or someone who worked for her was watching him, waiting for him to break. Was there any possible reason for inviting him to a buffet other than to see him eat?

But the pig did not have the patience to sit there in uncertainty and try to outlast the black cat, if indeed that was even what she was doing. But as an act of rebellion, instead of getting up - groaning for the jolt of pain in his back - and moving towards the steaming trays of meat, noodles and rice, he moved to the salad tray and loaded two plates high before carrying them back. He also got a diet soda. He started to tuck in, the hog really did not mind salad. But still, Lilith did not appear. Patrick finished his two plates and waited a while, then went back and got two more plates of salad and munched steadily through those as well. His stomach did not complain about the rabbit food, at least, it just wanted to be filled... always.

Patrick was halfway through his sixth plate of salad by the time the black cat suddenly appeared opposite of him at his table. "Good evening Pat." she said, tilting her head just so.

The pig wiped dressing away from his snout and inside the deep fold under his actual chin. "Lilith." he said briskly.

The she-cat nodded towards Patrick's stacked and empty plates. "Trying to watch your weight?" Her tone suggested actual puzzlement.

Patrick frowned and tossed his napkin onto the remnants of his last salad. "Yeah, I am actually, no thanks to your drug." he oinked, "I didn't come here tonight to give you a free performance."

The cat purred softly, "I'm still waiting for you to give me a performance, big man." she spared a glare at the empty plates, "But if you were trying to mitigate some of the effects, might I suggest not using ranch and Italian dressing next time? That's several hundred Calories right there, and the cheese and the pepperoni probably weren't helping either..."

Patrick snorted his dissatisfaction. Salad was salad wasn't it? "This is not what I wanted to talk to you about."

Lilith looked at her claws, "Oh? Then do tell."

Patrick proceeded to tell the cat about how he had passed out several nights ago. "...And I don't know, is that one of the side effects you mentioned?"

Lilith paid unusually rapt attention to the pig as he described his experience, her long ears twitching as he provided her with all the details. However, she answered, "No, that's definitely not related to what you have been taking."

"Well... what else might have caused it?" the fattened pig stammered. His gut was pressing into the table so hard, he could not even lean forward properly.

The cat cocked her head back, teasing him with her eyes, "Isn't this something you should be asking your doctor, not your drug dealer?"

"Shush!" hissed Patrick.

She only threw her paw forward, "Oh please, Pat. When was the last time they had a drug screening before an eating contest?"

The pig relaxed his shoulders, causing them to become more round, though still thick and ham-like. "Even so..." he turned his head to the side, sighing. "If I wanted an earful of abuse or a prescription for diet pills, I'd go to my doctor. I thought you could get me a quick answer without all the fuss."

Lilith leaned forward, resting her elbows on the table while her long tail rose behind her head, wavering slightly. "Aw, you trust me that much, Pat?"

The pig landed a heavy palm on the table not too softly, "Dammit, Lilith, do you have an answer for me or not? It's your fault this is happening to me in the first place!"

"My fault?" gasped the cat in mock distain. "I thought I was quite clear about what to expect."

Patrick clenched his jaw, "Well, I wasn't expecting this. A hundred pounds in five months?! That's not... normal! And I can't stop gaining."

Lilith shrugged and looked over his shoulder. "Then stop taking it. It's not addictive or anything, you can stop anytime."

Patrick swallowed hard. "I... I can't. The holiday eating contests are next month! I've got four major events lined up in November, two more in December. Didn't you say that it takes a month to get going again if I stop?"

"That's right." said the cat, "And I should tell you that from my experience, people who stop and start using it multiple times experience diminished effects. We think the body develops a resistance to it over time." Patrick just stared at the cat for a while and she continued grinning back at him. Silence passed between them over the topic of Patrick's continued use of the drug. Finally, Lilith spoke, "About your fainting spell, well, I might have a couple explanations. Have you been checking your sugar?" Patrick had not been, and a low oink provided his answer. The cat shrugged again, "Well, high blood sugar usually causes dry mouth and in extreme cases, dizziness, but not usually fainting. Tell me, were you breathing heavily before it happened?"

Patrick relaxed his fat face. "Actually I was. I had just gotten out of bed." Lilith just looked at him with sparkling eyes. Frowning, the pig added, "Which is a little difficult when you weigh over seven-hundred and fifty pounds."

The cat was purring again, "Mmmur... Can you still piss standing up, big boy?"

The pig folded his arms over his huge chest, or rather clasped his wrists due to the girth of his barrel chest. "I think I mentioned that part already."

She chuckled, "And so you did." she winked, "Tell me, do you have trouble breathing when you are leaning forward or bending over?"

As a matter of fact, Patrick did. In fact, he usually had to hold his breath whenever he reached down for something on the floor. But he had never really noticed, the problem went way back before he had ever met Lilith, but it had gotten noticeably worse with the addition of a new hundred pounds to his frame. "Um... yeah." said Patrick weakly, as he recalled the various instances in his memory.

The cat smiled what actually seemed like a pleasant smile this time. "That's probably it. As you were bending over, your... iron gut was pressing into your diaphragm, making it harder to breath. Your blood oxygen might have already been low since you were just sleeping and once it goes down below a certain point from lack of breathing... pop!" she smacked her lips, "You're out like a light."

The fattened hog sighed in relief. "You really think that's it?"

Without warning, she reached out and touched his hand, Patrick looked up from his hand to her face and she winked at him, "Maybe. But I'm not a doctor."

Patrick continued looking at the cat's face. When she was not being overbearing, she was actually kind of cute. Also, Patrick had not been laid in at least two months, having been preoccupied with his diet and his steadily ballooning waistline. The pig swallowed, he ought to know better. Lilith was the kind of girl he could only ever regret having anything more than a one night stand with, and he needed her to keep giving him his winning drug, even if it was progressively turning him into a blob. But dammit if his dick seemed to have a mind of its own! Even the fact that she was so horny she was practically throwing herself at him no longer fazed him like it had the first night they had met. "Say, um, would you like to get a few drinks... like, at my hotel?" he said, raising a massive arm behind his meaty head.

Patrick expected a snarky response, but instead she only looked at him levelly. "Sounds like fun."

Two hours later, Patrick was on his back, and Lilith was riding him hard. She did not mind doing most or all of the work or being half buried under an avalanche of belly fat which was a good thing seeing as she was currently hugging the ponderous meat sac under her chin, holding back its weight while also sliding up and down his cock with her hips. Patrick had to admit that the small, skinny woman was remarkably strong, stronger than girls with a good fifty pounds on her, in the hog's experience. She was also much better in bed than he was expecting, even if she relished in his expansive form rather than being repulsed by it. Patrick had never had anyone pay attention to him in the way she did as she caressed the curves of his body and slid her small hands into every fat fold and roll on his body, even into creases on his inner thighs that Patrick had not been aware even existed. She would force him to smell the rank odor from his sweaty rolls on her fingers but then lick them clean. Lilith was a freak, and there was no doubt about it, but that night's experience with her, as he came again and again until he was completely tapped and his beleaguered heart was thundering in his ears, was almost entirely positive.

The she-cat had abandoned her pretentious attitude at the door. The first thing she had done was get down on her hands and knees and crawl forward as he sat on the edge of the bed. His overflowing belly draped now more than halfway down from the top of the bed to the floor, but Lilith had bent over low and sensuously licked the bottom swell of it. From that point forward, she all but worshipped his fattened body without actually using the word specifically. And seeing her down on her knees before disappearing under his engorged belly and shoving her head into his folds to suck on his moist, fat-congested cock did as much to drive Patrick into a frenzy of lust as anything he had ever done with any prostitute. He did not even know how she was getting air under all that bulky pig-fat, but the thought of her gasping for breath within the confines of his fat folds made him come harder than ever that evening.

They drank and the she-cat got wasted on half a bottle of whiskey. Patrick drained an entire bottle of vodka, mixing it with a liter of Sprite, and also the rest of the whiskey, but weirdly, no matter how much he drank, he only got a light buzz. They watched pay-per-view on the hotel television, but Lilith could not keep her hands to herself as she spooned and massaged his body constantly, seemingly infinitely entranced by the way his body was shaped and the various consistencies of his lard in different areas. Eventually, she stroked him off, and then later crawled under his belly and just let it rest on her for a long time. Patrick fell asleep, only to wake up and find Lilith giving him head. Morning light came and they were both still awake. Lilith got into the shower with him and helped clean his filthy fat rolls. The experience of having another person in the shower with him was completely new and, the pig had to admit, it was an experience he wished he could have more often, if only for the practicality of it. A loofa on a stick could not compare to hands reaching into the folds under his belly and between his now sagging thighs. A last hand job under steaming hot water was not bad at all either.

Then, just like that, they were saying goodbye and Patrick had nothing to look forward to but trying to cram his heavy body behind the wheel of his truck. Well, that and the important contests ahead as well as what he was going to look like come New year's.

---

All the holiday eating contests proved to be as easily routed as the ones that had come before. Patrick was really making a splash as competitive eating became semi-mainstream during this time and he plowed through the pumpkin pie challenge, the turkey challenge, the cranberry sauce challenge and even the fried butter challenge. At every event he went to, he was immediately swarmed with reporters, begging for a minute of his time which he was only too happy to provide. He signed autographs, hats and other assorted memorabilia. One time, a generously proportioned, five-hundred pound bear asked him to take his belly out of his jeans so that they could compare sizes while posing for a photo. That photo quickly became a meme that spread like wildfire through the internet. More and more, Patrick seemed to be gaining actual celebrity status even as he continued to gain pounds of lard as well.

His manager was also floating various sponsorship offers by his ears on a daily basis. It would have been a dream come true, had not nearly all of them asked that he also drop a hundred, if not two-hundred pounds. They thought they were being generous, asking him to get down to five-hundred, or at least back to six-hundred pounds, but Patrick still had to turn them all down save one. An off-brand pork-rind maker wanted to put his face on their bag, though they did not want the rest of his corpulent figure. It was ironic to be sure, and unflattering, but money was money and the hog signed himself up, receiving a rather nice sign-up bonus and then regular royalty checks from that point forward. For the first time in his life, Patrick felt like he had a real career, like he was going places.

But the hog paid a price with his body as he force fed himself to victory with each event, especially the fried butter contest. He tried and failed constantly to arrest his momentum at least between competitions, but the numbers on the industrial scale continued to grow steadily, bouncing each time he was required to do his job. He hid his credit cards from himself in an effort to stop buying fast food, but he would inevitably break down and retrieve them, usually in the middle of the night for a desperate binge just so he could sleep. He would have tried canceling his cards if he thought that would have worked, but now he was getting regular invitations from restaurants, both chains and locals. Everyday, his manager wanted him to visit someplace new and a lot of the time, he was brought the entire menu before he even ordered anything. It got so that Patrick could walk into almost any place that was not fast food unannounced and expect to eat for free. It was just impossible to keep the food away from his face.

When the scale told him that he weighed seven-hundred and ninety-seven pounds, Patrick fasted for two days in a last-ditch attempt to keep himself at least in the 'reasonable' "700's." But his will broke when he was invited to the opening of a new Indian food restaurant. He made a spectacle of himself as he ate everything they gave him and then proceeded to empty the buffet - it was at least a small one - of all of its goat curry and jasmine rice. A picture of his titanic and sagging ass bending over the counter shoveling food onto three plates appeared in tabloids nation wide and that evening, Patrick tipped the scales again at "801.4 lbs." Weirdly, Patrick accepted what was to be the new "normal" with surprising calm. Now that he was here, he guessed, things did not seem all that bad after all.

Patrick got through the rest of the holidays feeling rather numb to his situation. He did not really relax his eating routine, but more or less accepted the four - sometimes five- pound a week gain, choosing instead to look forward to his December challenges. With a final cider drinking contest concluded - Patrick drank enough to easily give a smaller person alcohol poisoning - the fattened hog finished the year out at a whopping eight-hundred and forty-two pounds, a figure he would have never believed he would attain just half a year ago.

The pig's newfound weight had already intruded into his life in rather conspicuous ways. For starters, all of his clothing had to be custom made now, and at great cost, but with the money he was now bringing in, it was at least affordable, if still costly, especially given the rate in which he out grew them. But more drastically, Patrick could no longer drive due to his sheer size simply not fitting behind the wheel of a car. His manager was good enough to drive him to events where he needed to be and that largely covered his transportation needs, though, and the man was also smart enough to keep from commenting on the need for it. But aside from transportation, Patrick began to notice a myriad of mundane things about life he used to take for granted, such as the width of doors. He used to be able to at least squeeze through a single standard sized door, but now with his gut hanging out in front of him and below his knees like a hammock, it was almost ludicrously impossible to get through a standard door anymore, which actually made more than a few buildings completely inaccessible to him. But perhaps most seriously of all, were the increasing mobility problems the super obese hog was now encountering.

It was not even so much the weight itself, at least not for limited amounts of time. Spending the last fifteen years weighing six-hundred and fifty pounds had sculpted Patrick's body with dense and thick muscles for supporting it, under the many layers of pudge, naturally. And Patrick remained confident that if his newfound weight had come on at a more natural pace, he could have kept up even with over eight-hundred pounds. But with nearly two-hundred extra pounds of pork to try to manage, the fattened hog was well beyond his carrying limit of a couple heavy bags of beans. He got tired after standing up for more than fifteen minutes now, actually feeling his muscles tense up and begin to ache with the effort of supporting himself, mostly in his very thick calves and back. Walking was strenuous at even short distances, after a minute or two, Patrick could feel his heart thudding in his fat neck, pumping double time for his more than quadruple body load. And it was not just standing up and walking either that was much more taxing. Just moving around in general was harder and more awkward. Patrick had lost more range of motion as the lard deepened around him, things like twisting his hips and abdomen, even his neck became harder. His arms were pushed farther out from his body as he kept getting wider and the arms themselves were more bulbous with generous fat now hanging below the elbows like dripping wax. It was harder to move them around and much harder to keep them in the air with the extra pounds, which made most tasks necessarily harder, draining Patrick's already sapped stamina. It got much harder to keep himself clean, hit on both sides with more, harder to reach areas - and more areas in general - along with less mobility in his arms. Even these things Patrick thought he could deal with. They were just a progression of his regular life after all, but what he found the hardest to cope with were the constant muscle cramps and chronic pain that came with the new weight, the last fifty pounds or so most of all.

Patrick's back began to hurt severely and ibuprofen was just not up to the task anymore, at least not for a lot of bad days. Patrick found himself laid up in bed for an entire day, unable to move for the pain just before Thanksgiving. Moving anything but his arms would send a lightning bolt running down his lower back, just trying to get out of bed was intolerably difficult. Patrick had cried like a woman as he walked bent over his own titanic gut which was dangling near to the floor, bracing his hands against the wall for balance and sort of crab walked to the bathroom just so he could relieve himself. That was the first time, but Patrick had seven more days like that before the first day of the new year. Patrick was finding it increasingly necessary to numb himself with drugs, legal and otherwise, just to get through everyday life.

It hurt his pride to admit it, but he needed some kind of mobility assistance and he did not think that a cane or even two were going to cut it. He started looking at mobility scooters online. Little did Patrick know but he was already too heavy by far for any scooter he could find, and even the largest wheelchair he could find for bariatric patients only went up to seven hundred pounds. Patrick sighed in disgust as he learned, after hours of internet hopping, that larger capacity wheelchairs did exist, but were generally built to match the individuals who needed them - more money down the drain! - and that this was typically done at the request of a doctor. In other words, Patrick needed a prescription, and to get a prescription, he had to see his doctor...

Sure, the old iguana, Dr. Iglehart was empathetic and professional enough, even a bit friendly when the engorged pig walked into his office and let his big fat ass fill the bench meant for lying down on with a "Congratulations on your recent accomplishments, Mr. Devlin. It's good to see you after these past two years."

Patrick had kept his arms crossed, it had been closer to three years actually. "Thanks." he mumbled tersely.

The lizard winced as he noted the two-hundred pound increase. "That's definitely not the direction we want to go!" he stammered, "You should have come back sooner when you noticed you were gaining again." The pig just sighed and explained what he wanted, and the iguana did put through the requested paperwork, however, he also demanded several blood tests as well as talking at length to the pig about options for bariatric surgery, although as he put it, "It'd be expected that you lose at least a hundred pounds before you could qualify for surgery. Anesthesia is quite dangerous at your current weight..."

The shit really hit the fan when the blood work came back. Dr. Iglehart walked in, flapping the papers on his clipboard, a frown creasing his scaly lips while the bench under Patrick creaked incessantly. "Your blood sugar level is very bad, Mr. Devlin." said the doctor. "You should know already that it should be under one-hundred but today its four-hundred and seventeen." he looked up over his clipboard, Patrick peeked and saw that it was covered in red circles and checkmarks. "Have you been keeping track of your sugars."

The fattened pig reached to grab the back of his head with an enormous arm, though there was less area back there these days, the number of rolls swelling behind his skull having increased to the point where the top of his head nearly sloped right into the layered outcroppings of his neck fat. "Not really..." he said, which was to say, not at all.

"Well then," said the iguana, tapping his pen on the clipboard. "It's convenient that your A1C keep track of blood sugar spikes within the last three months. I have written here that we were talking about getting it below seven percent two years ago." He paused, gently shaking the frills on the back of his neck, "Well, Mr. Devlin, it's come back as fifty-eight percent crystalized, which frankly is shocking and the highest amount I've even heard of outside of animal testing..."

Dr. Iglehart went on to further chastise Patrick about his life choices and explain in painful detail how close to death he was. As much as Patrick just wanted to shut it all out, however, something actually scared him, such as when the iguana performed a sensitivity test on his fingers and toes, poking them gently with a light stick. Patrick found that he felt absolutely nothing until the iguana applied significant force to the stick and it bent visibly. The doctor explained that he had already lost about half of the sensitivity in his fingers and toes and explained the desperate need to put the super morbidly obese pig on an insulin pump right away. Also, but not unexpectedly at this point, Patrick found out that his cholesterol was at three-hundred and twenty-nine, or over three times the ideal level and his blood pressure was just under what the doctor said would call for "immediate hospitalization."

"I probably shouldn't even let you go home in this state." said the doctor with a sigh. "And if I had a reason to believe that you were doing this to yourself as a result of a mental disorder, I'd be morally obligated to have you hospitalized. You could be dead by the end of the month if you don't do exactly as I say!"

By now, Patrick was feeling depressed and also scared, very scared. And just feeling that way made Patrick feel his pulse in his throat again, which did not help relieve the stress. The pig tended to avoid hearing bad news about his health, but when he heard them he did not dismiss them out of hand. He was not an idiot, he did not think he was somehow immune to things like heart attacks, strokes or losing a foot to diabetes. He just... did not want those things to get in the way of how he wanted to live his life. But here he was, sitting on the metal bench with his bare ass and he was a hair's breadth away from being so sick then and there as to need to be in a hospital. At the same time, his prospective life expectancy had somehow dropped from low fifties to the end of this year, if he was lucky. Patrick could not put up a fight. He accepted everything, even promised to lose weight and consider surgery. He went home with his wheelchair, as well as the insulin pump and so many prescription drugs, that the pig needed to buy a pill calendar to keep track of all of them. The pig called Lilith the following morning to say that he was done taking her injections.

---

After pulling himself off the mystery drug, things steadily became less grim, but Patrick was reminded daily of the damage he had done as he watched his numbers only slowly improve, even with medication. As Lilith had said, there was no withdrawal from her drug, but the weight stubbornly clung to Patrick's body despite his hope that he would gradually go back to his "equilibrium" weight of around six-hundred and fifty. After starting a serious crash diet, Patrick suddenly lost about fifteen pounds in the course of eight days, but it turned out to mostly be accumulated fluid from around his legs. After that, Patrick barely saw the scale budge more than a pound or two at a time, despite how he was killing himself with his diet. Patrick's appetite had gone down, it was true, but he was still a competitive eating champion and his stomach capacity was still larger than it had ever been. While on the twelve-hundred Calorie diet recommended by Dr. Iglehart, Patrick felt somehow even hungrier than when he had been trying to manage himself while on the drug.

It took a full month of hard work to get his blood sugar below two-hundred on a regular basis and it still had a tendency to spike into the high three hundreds when Patrick so much as looked at a plate of delicious cheese fries. Patrick got his cholesterol down to two-hundred fifty, but there was still over twice as much fat floating in his blood as normal and his blood pressure remained so high that Dr. Iglehart told Patrick to "avoid stressful situations." Well, the obese hog put himself off of scary movies, but he could not avoid doing his job.

With things improving steadily in the health department, Patrick felt fine enough to go back on tour, starting with the regional stuff, even though he had not regained the lost sensation in his fingers or toes and was told that he never would. Patrick figured that as long as he did not chew on any of his own fingers, that ought to be fine enough, even if he did noticing the strange numbness when touching things or when flies and other insects landed on his hands and he could not feel them at all.

Patrick's manager got an ordinary van and installed some heavy duty hydraulics to lift Patrick's fattened carcass in and out of it on his fancy new wheelchair. The pig could not stress enough what a difference the chair made in his life as he used it both inside of and outside his apartment. Patrick still readily stood up from and walked around without his chair, but having a ready made place to sit down at a moment's notice as well as negating the need to walk from place to place had a dramatic impact on his quality of life. Naturally, Patrick spent a lot less time on his feet, but as a result, his back pain nearly vanished, nearly but not completely. And since he was not in so much intolerable pain, Patrick was actually able to walk sometimes when he otherwise might not have been able to. That, by itself, helped more than anything else in the pig's mind, even the insulin pump which he kept hidden under a flap of belly fat. He could more easily deal with the added weight of his body and his reduced mobility, in fact, he felt that he was getting stronger week by week, he could just not deal with the pain.

But Patrick hid his disability from the general public. He did this by limiting his appearances to just before and just after the competitions in question, having his manager pull up as close to the stage as possible. If it was close enough, Patrick just got out and walked to the stage, trying his best to get into his reinforced seat as quickly as possible to take the load off of his aching legs. Otherwise, he approached from the back, keeping him and his wheelchair away from prying eyes before getting out, but Patrick was prepared to come hours early before anyone was there and wait for the event if that was what it took to keep his secret weakness safe.

Dr. Iglehart knew he was back on tour almost from the start, of course. He continued to call after each event, claiming that Patrick was in the process of 'slow suicide' and that he was afraid that he was going to have a heart attack right there on stage in front of all the cameras, just from the stress. But Patrick could not heed his advice. After a month of steady improvement, even if he was not in 'ideal' territory, Patrick did not feel the imminent hand of death on the back of his neck as he had previously. He also needed to keep making money as well, and the only way he could do that was by showing his fat face on television and making people happy by stuffing himself with anything and everything anyone bothered to make into a contest.

In fact, Patrick kicked off his new tour with a carrot eating contest followed later in the same day with an apple eating contest at one small town farmer's market. He was the only big name there and apparently it was under the radar of the Japanese and Korean contestants floating around the States. The hog was mainly up against locals, so he smoked the carrot eating contest, but was half full going into the apple eating contest. He was the only one bold enough to try taking on both contests, but with such a large disadvantage, Patrick ended up taking second place to a rather comely bovine female with big tits. Despite making news and congratulating the winner as they held their trophies aloft, her gold to his gold and silver ones, on the inside the pig was far from happy. He waddled back to his two and a half times wide wheelchair within the security of his manager's van filled with shame. Compared to how he remembered himself eating just a month ago, his performance that day was pitiful. And his capacity continued to disappoint.

As Patrick moved from event to event, he was only ever able to succeed where there was no fresh blood around to sweep the floor with him. If there were two or more asian contestants, Patrick struggled to make third place and it was not just the asians anymore, either. Americans, some even as heavy as two-hundred pounds, had seen enough of the new techniques to start putting them to use and making them their own. Everyone was getting better and breaking old records, it seemed, everyone except Patrick who had nothing on his side except an over large stomach too straddled by belly fat to achieve its true potential.

Without constant wins and frankly unbelievable records supporting him, Patrick found that the winds turned right around and started blowing in his face again. People noticed right away that he was no longer able to eat with the endless gusto and sheer ferocity he had once mustered and they asked questions that he simply could not answer. In place of his victories, they made an even bigger deal about his weight, especially seeing as he now weighed over six-hundred pounds more than most of his opponents. People over night became more likely to laugh at his appearance on stage than to cheer. Patrick found that he hated how fickle his audience seemed to be.

Bringing home silver and copper trophies, or in some cases no trophies at all, hit the fattened pig hard. He threw his new trophies into a box in his closet along with all the clothes he could no longer wear, refusing to put them along with his golds. Slowly, Patrick felt himself dropping into a deep depression. It drove him to at least try to learn how the newcomers were doing so well, but there was a different technique for every type of food and quickly Patrick found out that what they were selling was more of a method than a magic trick, that method being, of course, the attempt to break down the act of eating into its core actions and making it as efficient as possible, shaving off a half a second by moving your arm this way, or chewing exactly two times before swallowing... rinse and repeat. It still rubbed Patrick the wrong way. Food was not about physics, goddamn it! Food was about pleasure, it was about enjoying itself. These people took no pleasure from the food itself at all. The food was merely an obstacle to them. Patrick found he could not bring himself to think like they did, refused to. Food was too important to him to treat so frivolously and so without passion.

As a last resort, Patrick hired a driver - off of craigslist, Patrick was too fat to fit into a normal cab or even an Uber - to drive him to New York where he met with Lilith for dinner, hoping at least for a pity fuck to help him feel better.

He agreed to all of her conditions instantly, and there were a lot of them. They met at an expensive steak restaurant and Patrick dismissed his driver, Lilith had told him he would no longer need him. And then the cat ordered for him. "How do you like the new wheels?" she asked him as the pig made a show of devouring a thirty ounce T-bone steak. "They... suit you." she added, noticing the way Patrick's belly jiggled between his calves while sitting.

Patrick oinked and grunted while eating. The black cat looked so damn appealing this evening in an acid green and sparkling dress that perfectly matched her eyes. He wanted to get her close and mash her face in between his sweating man-tits. But he kept the thought to himself, saying instead, "I'm not going to lie, the chair's been a life saver... 'oo really 'id a 'umber on 'ee." Patrick spoke through a mouth full of steak and mashed potatoes.

"I did?" said Lilith in mock surprise and dismay, a hand on her small chest. "I don't recall being the one who shoved those millions of Calories down your throat."

Patrick shoved the last of the steak into his mouth only to have his plate taken away and immediately replaced with a bacon-wrapped fillet mignon with fried shrimp and a new pitcher of beer besides. "Well, it was your drug that turned me into such a fatass." said Patrick as he began dismantling the new plate as well as draining his second pitcher. "It was literally killing me. That's why I had to stop taking it."

The black cat tittered, "You were already a fatass when we met, Patrick. That's what I liked about you."

The obese pig rolled his eyes, "Yeah, you're a freak who likes to fuck blobs like me, I get it." he took half of the remaining fillet and lifted it to his mouth before swallowing it down whole for her benefit; to his credit, she did purr at this. "Why do you think I'm breaking my diet for you tonight? I've been going through hell since January just to get back to where I was less than a year ago."

"Ugh, don't tell me you're losing weight." she said, making a face that in a second seemed to remove all the hard work he had already done.

"No! I meant health-wise, you know my diabetes and such." The pig sighed, and grabbed a handful of pork from his side. "I think I've actually lost about as much is going to come off now. This is probably the new 'me' at this point, though I'd like to lose the chair at some point, if I can get a little stronger..."

"Ah, who cares about the chair." said Lilith, waving her paw at him. "I say sit in it and let your ass grow." she stirred her cocktail with the tip of a claw, speared an olive and yanked it out. "Why don't you set your sights a little higher in life, Patrick? You're so close to a fourth digit."

"Sheesh, woman, why don't you just tell me to kill myself. I'm already practically drowning over here and you just want to keep smothering me to please yourself." said Patrick with a vehemence that caused his neck waddle to shake and vibrate uncontrollably.

The slender cat snorted derisively and cocked her shoulders, "You sound like you've been listening to your doctor too much."

"And good thing I did!" said Patrick as an entire fried sweet onion was put in front of him and he began to eat it with spicy horseradish sauce. He was hate-eating now and knew it, but he could not control himself. "Do you know how high my blood pressure was, still is? My sugar was over four-hundred when I went in that day, I was mortified."

"Oh?" she said, her interest suddenly peaked, "Why don't you tell me about it?"

And Patrick did tell her, he told her everything he could remember off the top of his head, including about the insulin pump, which he showed her by lifting up the side of his belly apron. Her eyes seemed especially light as he told her how close he had come to potentially having a heart attack and how close he still was. And all the while the plates of food appeared and were taken away until Patrick was thoroughly glutted and struggling to finish the last of a large chocolate eclair with vanilla ice cream meant for a party of three to five. "...And this isn't helping... erp!" he belched loudly, causing Lilith to giggle like a young girl.

"Well, if it's helping you have a good time, then I'd say it's working." said the black cat, giving Patrick a big wink. "When was the last time you got to eat how you wanted? And I don't mean choking down six pounds of cocktail shrimp at once either."

Patrick leaned his fat, sagging cheek against his thickened fist, "I know you're trying to get into my head, woman." he said, "I don't know why eight-hundred pounds isn't good enough for you."

Lilith tossed her shoulders. "Call me a perfectionist."

"Perfection?!" gasped Patrick, who in his own less than humble opinion was about as damn far away from it as possible. He chuffed, causing his jowls to shake up and down, "You can always get fatter."

"That's the point then, isn't it." she said again with a sly wink of her green eyes.

Groaning, the fattened hog pushed the last plate away from him. "Well, Lilith, you've gone and completely stuffed me." he let his arms hang limp, palms out, "You can put an apple in my mouth and have your way with me."

Lilith paused to examine the morbidly obese pig for a long moment before saying, "Mmmm... I think I'll pass tonight, but thanks for the offer."

"What?" asked the pig dully, he was dumbfounded after making all the arrangements.

Her brows furrowed, "Thanks, but I think I'll pass tonight."

The pig pressed his lips together, he felt the old hatred he had once felt towards the cat rising inside of him again. "We talked about this on the phone, I drove all the way out here... I... I paid for everything and broke my diet because I was expecting..."

"Expecting what?" asked Lilith, raising an eyebrow.

"To fuck, at least." he said, lowering his tone. He reached for her hand, but she pulled it away easily out of his reach.

"Well, if you thought that, then you got the wrong impression, Pat." she said with a sniff.

Why was she jerking him around like this, toying with his heart and his libido. All he wanted was a distraction, and release, not more mind games. "What is it?" he hissed, causing his belly to shake under his shirt like a drum, "I'm almost a hundred fucking pounds heavier than when we last did it. Isn't that what you want? How many other eight-hundred pound guys do you have lined up around the corner?"

Despite trying to keep quiet, Patrick was starting to turn heads in the restaurant, that is more heads than were already turned to gawk at his sideshow level physique. Lilith got up suddenly. "Don't get me wrong, Pat, I think you're hot as fuck. But I don't just give it up for the asking." She leaned in close to put her delicate hand on his puffy cheek, slipping her fingers into the multiple neck rolls.

He reached up and grabbed her hand. "What is it then?"

"Nothing, I'm just... busy." said Lilith.

"Busy with what?" The pig demanded.

"I... have a headache, now let me go." said the woman.

"Don't fucking lie to me!"

"Let me the fuck go!" said Lilith sternly and then suddenly slapped the pig with a powerful blow to the side of his face. Her hand burned a red afterimage into the thick meat that began to swell even larger.

The pig did let her go, lowering his chin down into his spare tire neck. His cheek was hot and it hurt despite the padding. He worked his jaw, not knowing how such a slight person could be so robust. She stood there for a moment, face full of anger and pity and then turned to go. "Is it because I've been losing the competitions?" he asked, face down and voice breaking.

The cat stopped, hunching her shoulders before heaving a sigh. "It's not that." she said.

"Then for god's sake tell me what it is." said Patrick who could not help his eyes watering at this point. "One way or another, my life's been falling apart and you're the only thing that's made me feel happy since the start of it."

"I can't make you be happy, Pat." said Lilith, her back still towards the stationary pig.

"Then tell me why you won't at least fuck me!" said the pig, lifting his face up now with tears streaming into the fat folds on either side of the base of his snout.

"Because I only fuck guys who don't settle." blurted the cat, now turning back to face the fattened pit, a tight frown on her face. "And you've settled, Pat."

"I... what?" stammered the pig in incomprehension.

She lifted her paw, "You've settled for second best, and at this point, I just don't see you going anywhere that I find interesting."

Patrick growled at the cat's arrogance like a dog. "I told you you're fucking drug was killing me."

The cat shrugged, "Drug or no drug, it's no excuse for giving up on the only thing that made you who you are. If you really wanted to, you could do what those kids are doing and win. But you don't want to. You're stuck."

Patrick bit his tongue until it hurt. Then he said, "You're just trying to get me to go on that shit again, so I could really get up to half a ton like you want!"

The cat just sighed and looked down at the pig with pitying eyes that drove him wild inside with rage. "Pat, you're practically already there. Do you really thing that less than two-hundred pounds would make that much of a difference?"

"Then..." started the seated pig, but was hushed by the slender cat.

"Feel free to give me another call when you find your passion again, Pat. If it's not competitive eating... well, have you tried sumo? Chao."

And just like that, she had turned around and was swishing that long elegant tail of hers at his face. Patrick had never felt so angry, hopeless and alone in his entire life.

---

Patrick continued as he was going for another month and if anything performed even worse than he had been, gathering only two more copper trophies to throw into the box in his closet. The reporters remained as chatty as ever when he appeared, but the tone increasingly was more of a modern side show attraction than anything else. Patrick did not lose his existing deals, but new sponsorships dried up almost completely and his manager was forced into making him appear at various local restaurants for meager fees. Meanwhile, the summer rematch with Ryang in the next annual Nathan's Hot Dog Challenge loomed ever closer. The last straw was when Patrick came in fifth at Wisconsin's big Swiss Cheese Eating Festival on national television. He called Lilith back that night and asked for more. She sent it overnight to him, free of charge.

Seeing as the drug took a month to begin its effects, there was barely enough time for it to kick in before the day of the rematch. Since it was uncertain if Patrick could rely on the drug to win for him, Patrick ate his pride and began to learn the hot dog eating technique Ryang had used to beat him last year. He practiced at it a lot, after which he drank syrup of ipecac. It left his throat raw, but kept his blood sugar low. Patrick was still having problems getting his sugar below one-hundred consistently. In addition to his continued lack of feeling in his hands, he noticed that cuts and scratches took forever to heal on his extremities leaving him wearing bandaids for weeks whenever he made a mistake in the kitchen.

Patrick told himself that he was not doing this just to get Lilith back. It was not even like they had ever been a thing really, even if she was a good fuck... a really good fuck, well, the best fuck he had ever had really... No, the pig told himself that he was going to take back his champion title for himself, even if he had to retire this year, or next. He was determined that he would go out in glory... no matter what the cost was, his pride, his health, his sense of self, nothing was going to stop him this time.

Even with the ipecac syrup, the rigorous "training" Patrick underwent as well as a number of other eating contests in between did not do so well for his diet. While managing to keep his diabetes in check and even continue to improve his heart health, Patrick's weight bounced back up to eight-hundred and thirty-five. And that was before the pig noticed the drug kick in just two days before the summer hot dog contest.

Patrick did not know exactly how he knew the drug had finally taken hold of him, in fact, he did not know for sure, but he just felt unusually... hungry that morning. He felt that he had to test whether or not it was working, and what better way to test than to practice his eating technique?

Patrick proceeded to wheel himself into his kitchen, his fat rolls and skin once again plump and taut with the recently regained pounds, and bring up a big pot onto the stove. He ripped open several packages of Nathan's which was what his fridge was half full of at the moment, and dumped them into the boiling water. Patiently, the fattened hog assembled a platter in a neat circular formation. He leaned back in his chair, set the platter on his wide belly and made sure that there were plenty of cups of water at his side. Then, a mental bell rung and he began tearing them apart. Just like Ryang, Patrick separated the bun and dog, breaking the dog with his hands and swallowing without chewing, and dunking the bun in water to enable him to swallow the soggy mess without resistance. He did this again and again, without variation, even as his fattened arms tired from the repeated motion.

Six minutes passed and he was doing good, thirty-two dogs down, halfway to sixty, Ryang's record. But just meeting his record was not enough, Ryang would surely be even better this year. Then came a beeping from under Patrick's tubby, tidal wave of a belly, an alarm from his insulin pump. The hog put a mental pause on his clock and lifted up the side of his heavy belly to check it. Somehow he had gone up over three hundred on his sugar. Well, that basically confirmed The pig's hunch that the drug was now active, but he continued to stare at the dogs remaining on the plate. He could just leave it be now. It did not really matter if he had a huge sugar spike during the contest, the drug would allow him to win easily and he could just stop taking it the next day and announce his retirement. It would come as no surprise given his performance lately, but his last victory over the person who stole his fifteenth year title would be legendary.

But would it be that easy? Sure the drug gave him basically unlimited capacity and hunger to drive himself, but the hot dog contest, more than any other had become highly technical due to the bun being so much easier to swallow when soaked in water. Patrick's gut instinct was that speed would trump sheer capacity, he had already learned that much from his month's long practice. And a single month was nothing. Ryang had probably been practicing this entire year. Knowing that, how could he settle to lean on the strength of the drug and not on his own?

The pig started the timer again in his head and continued breaking, soaking and swallowing, filling his belly. And as Ryang had pointed out over a year ago, The hog's fat saturated body left little room for his engorged organ to expand, both surrounding his abdominal wall and also filling the space between his organs. However, with the drug now in tow, the pig was making extra room appear by metabolizing those buns and dogs almost as fast as they arrived at the small cost of weighing down his already straining system with yet more yellow and white lard. Patrick finished the twelve minutes, measuring the time perfectly without using a clock, with half a dog left on the platter of the original sixty-four. The pig tossed the platter away and wheeled himself over to the bathroom to use the ipecac. However, as he began heaving, very little besides bile and a few small chunks amounting to perhaps two and a quarter dogs appeared. The pig rubbed his vast belly, feeling the fat brim at his thick fingers. More nausea, more bile came, but he was already quite empty, or rather, those dogs had found a more permanent resting place. Patrick groaned and oinked as he forced himself now out of his chair, letting his now tremendous rear end sag down the backs of his bloated and rippling thighs. The massive pig took a few heavy steps onto his industrial scale to see the damage. He read: "843.7 lbs." In other words, eight pounds from his practice run. And there came another alarm from his insulin pump. He reached down with effort and extracted it, seeing that his sugar was now over four-hundred. Patrick sighed heavily and waddled back to his chair. It went 'Wump!'as his buttocks settled into it. Did his ass somehow feel tighter between the handles than before? The pig rested his fat face in his hands for a little while, breathing steadily through his snout. Then his stomach growled, then redoubled the noise, becoming a din in Patrick's ears that he had not heard since he had quit at the start of the year. The pig wheeled his heavy chair back into the kitchen with fat, sagging arms and ripped open several more packs of Nathan's, throwing them all into the pot. He disabled the alarm on his insulin pump and leaned back in his chair, waiting for the dogs to cook. "Well, there's one upside to this, I guess." he muttered to himself, "Unlimited practice."

Patrick had to fast the day before the competition, but after he and his manager hid his wheelchair behind the stage, Patrick, groaning, forced himself up onto aching trotters weighting no less than eight-hundred and seventy-five pounds. Some practice indeed.

The pig had taken twice as much insulin as normal the day before, but this morning, his sugar was still well over one-hundred and eighty. Well, he was about to ruin it again, so he supposed it did not matter so much. Still, Patrick's stressed heart thudded in his neck as he rose and put on his camera face, waddling hard with the new weight on his knees. He was all but bursting out of his biggest clothes as well, showing a lot of belly fat between the bottom of his shirt and where it was literally spilling over the belt of his too-tight, one-hundred and two inch jeans. He knew that he looked terrible, but if he won, it would hardly matter. Everyone thought he was a greedy, piggish eating-machine anyways.

It was hard to keep his legs from trembling under the weight of his body, especially as he literally struggled to lift himself up the four steps to the stage. He almost was not strong enough and actually paused for twenty seconds, an infinity in camera time, at the last step, trying to force himself up but his leg was not cooperating. That last fifty pound sack of beans was breaking his camel's back, apparently. "Urgh!" grunted the fattened hog as he leaned forward, lifting and trying to catch his lower foot on the stage proper. He did, landing in a kind of crouch. But he was breathing heavily, or at least he was trying to, he was trying to breath, but just sort of hyperventilating, his 'iron gut' pressing into his diaphragm. Patrick felt the first hint of a dizzy spell come over him, but realized now what was happening. He forced his leg muscles to comply in straightening up until he was standing and could breathe again. He took several deep, gasping breaths, and the oxygen cleared away the dark haze surrounding his vision. Patrick lurched to his bench seat, never mind the attendants again loading the cinderblocks. The obese hog threw himself down on it, his legs all but folding under him. As his tremendous ass came down and struck the wood, there was an audible 'Crack!' as one of the cinderblocks broke. The thick wood under Patrick sagged a little and there was laughter from the audience as the pig settled himself for a long sit, adjusting the way his fattened belly rested on and between his thighs, all the while panting breathlessly. The pig barely heard the crowd.

While they would readily make fun of his weight behind his back, the reporters seemed to sense that he needed a moment in order to talk properly. Once he had recovered slightly or at least did not appear ready to keel over, a microphone was shoved under his snout. "Iron Gut, last year, this was the scene of the greatest upset of your career. In the last year, the world of competitive eating has moved away from overweight eaters, but you seem to have moved in the opposite direction. What do you think your odds are of winning today?"

Despite his exhaustion, Patrick reached out with a sagging arm, his forearm was also sagging on its own now, and grabbed the mike in a fist that was fatter than ever. "I am the world's fattest competitive eater and today's trophy belongs to people who enjoy food as much as I do! I'm going to take back my fifteenth year title today and prove what a real heavyweight can do! OINK!" Patrick squealed and snorted, "That's all I have to say."

The reporter looked dumbfounded, but behind him the crowd erupted into a frenzy, cheers and laughter both. Patrick dismissed all other questions and requests for interviews until the other competitors came up on stage, including Ryang, looking identically rail thin and lean as he was the previous year. The reporters then gravitated towards the young marten who talked at length about his year long preparation for today's event. Patrick just sat still, feeling his ass oozing over both sids of the bench and listened to his stomach growl. He was impatient for the bell to ring.

The fanfare lasted for another hour or so and then the clock was ticking down to the final minutes as the platters and hot dogs were brought around. "Have another one ready to go once I finish." Patrick said gruffly to a slight young hare who delivered his and passed her a fat palm loaded with five C-notes. She nodded quickly and went away. Then there was just the final wait.

Patrick's fat arm flew out to pluck a dog the moment the bell rang. He sheered the bun off and swallowed the dog without thinking, already grabbing the water. Patrick did not even bother to look around, he was completely focused on just the platter in front of him and on dismantling dog after dog, each exactly the same as before. He exchanged his empty cup of water for a full one, that and the diminishing number of dogs on the tray were the only changes for the next several minutes.

Patrick's arms, loaded down with fat that now hung a hand's breadth below the elbow and two inches in front of the elbow got tired first. He tried to pull the tray closer so that he did not have to reach as far, but found that the tray was already pressing against the gargantuan meat sac affixed to his front. He was getting tired reaching over the expanse of his own belly. His arms burned with the effort, but he kept at it. As he did, Patrick felt his heart thud quicker and harder in his overly fat neck. Soggy bits of bun fell onto the thick sheet of flesh falling away under the pig's chin and then wormed their way into its fatty folds, but Patrick could not have cared less. As he was close to finishing his tray, as promised, the young hare was already standing ready for the next one. Patrick felt the hot plate press into the flesh of his belly, but did not care about that either, even if it did burn him. All he cared about was following the technique, the mechanical motions that lead to him filling his belly as quickly as possible.

And if it was possible, Patrick could almost feel himself getting fatter minute by minute, perhaps it was in the way his flesh oozed down both sides of the bench under him, but even that no longer held any deterring factor for the enormous hog. Patrick's breath got heavier and his pulse got still louder in his head as his belly filled, but it was his arms, and even his jaw that had trouble keeping up if anything. Patrick already knew he could dump as much food as he liked into his bottomless bowls, as long as he was willing to accept a permanent stay for everything he was eating. His insulin pump, now on vibrate mode, shook an alarm buried deep in Patrick's fat, but he ignored that as well, and the next alarm too.

In the last minutes, Patrick still had not looked up at any of the scores, only the dogs in front of him. His arms were on fire, and it hurt to keep moving them and Patrick cursed himself for not thinking about strength training his arms earlier, but then, how could he also have expected to suddenly weigh nearly nine-hundred pounds the day of the contest? But for the life of him, he never did stop moving his arms, even as the muscles began to feel dead, his arms like lead weights. When the buzzer sounded, they fell to his sides limp as he panted and struggled for breath. His heart kept pounding. Patrick looked up at the flipped scorecards. "Ryang Shin Il: 69; Patrick 'Iron Gut:' 102."

Patrick felt dizzy with elation. It was not even close! Then all of a sudden, there were people around him. Someone wanted him to stand up, to speak. And the fattened hog did so with creaking joints and a broad smile on his fat face. He was still dizzy and elated, but mostly dizzy. He was saying words, but he was not sure what they were, nor was he sure what the people asking him questions were asking anymore either. His vision swam and his hands began to tremble. Why was his heart so loud in his ears? Then, just like that, 'Pop!' he was gone. He did not even remember hitting the floor.

---

When Patrick awoke, he found that he was still sitting at the contest table. He looked around, they were bringing out the hot dogs again, and there was Ryang still sitting three seats down, his skinny butt on the edge of his cheap folding seat. What was going on? the pig wondered. Had he imagined winning, and everything? The last minute or so was so fuzzy in his mind. But he had won right?

Well, it looked like the contest was about to start again and Patrick was just as hungry as before. He steeled himself mentally and waited for the bell to ring. And it did. Patrick began to plow through dogs once again.

If anything, he was even faster this time, more polished and with fewer wasted movements. He was acutely aware of his arms' limitations this time and paced himself better. This time, around the twelve minute mark, he was still really tired, but he could still move his arms with relative speed. By his count, he had improved his score to one-hundred and six hot dogs. Let Ryang beat that!

But the buzzer did not sound. Patrick kept eating, trying not to exhaust himself, but looked up in surprise as several more minutes past and there was still no buzzer. What was going on?

Patrick finally took a glance over at his competition down the table, but was amazed at what he was seeing. There was no practiced motion going on, no water dunking, and everyone was actually chewing, tasting their food! Even Ryang was sitting there, eating a hot dog like a regular person would! Albeit a rather hungry person. In the passing minutes, he seemed to have developed a pooch of a belly on his scrawny frame as well, but surely, he was far behind Patrick's count now.

This was quite strange, but he was sure that the time limit had long expired. Patrick lifted his head up. "Hey! I think someone should call time!"

Someone walked over from off stage, the contest announcer. He actually took a half seat on the table in front of Patrick and looked down at the fattened hog. "Something the matter?" he asked, looking down over his sunglasses, the man had dark brown eyes.

"Yeah," said Patrick, "I think the contest should have ended quite some time ago. Isn't anyone watching the clock?"

"Certainly." said the man, who shook out his sleeve to glance at a rather nice Rolex strapped around his wrist. "Mmm, nope, contest's still on. You better get back to eating or you'll be disqualified."

"Wait, what?" stammered the pig, but the man just slid down from the table.

"Look, big guy, you can walk away anytime you like, but as long as you're at this table, you better be stuffing that pretty fat face of yours, or I'll see you out myself." said the man as he started walking away again.

Patrick called to him repeatedly, but the announcer ignored him and, undoubtedly having gained significantly after devouring two contest's worth of hot dogs, the obese pig did not feel confident enough of his own feet to get up and waddle after him. The pig sat down with his elbows squishing the fat under them against the table and stared at the platter of hot dogs in front of him. Hot dogs had never looked so unappetizing in his entire life after eating so many of them.

Just as he thought that, the young hare from earlier appeared on the other side of the table. "Care to switch entree's, Mr. Iron Gut?" she asked demurely.

Patrick liked the sound of the girl's voice as she said that. He shifted his head enough to allow him to twirl one finger in the air. "Sure, kid. Why don't you bring me some pumpkin pie if you have any. Makes about as much goddamn sense as anything else right now."

"Sure thing!" she laughed and beamed at him, before walking off. A short time later, she returned with a tray heavy with four very big pumpkin pies, chased with copious amounts of whipped cream. Patrick began to drool despite himself.

"Thanks..." he said dully as they were placed in front of him. Patrick's belly was still mostly crammed with hot dogs, but as he had learned that did not really mean anything in terms of eating capacity. But it did mean that he was not really hungry either. But then again, these were really fucking good looking pies! Patrick took another glance back down the table. Everyone was still stuffing their faces. Well, who was Patrick to deny himself in a situation like this. He began stuffing his face, scooping out one cream covered slice at a time with his thick hands and actually enjoying everything he was putting into his mouth. As he did, he scanned the crowd in front of him. People were mostly just watching the stage, here and there separated into pairs or small groups and chatting with themselves while people came and went all the time among the other attractions and food stalls around them, pretty much like any other crowd... But when had the sky gotten so overcast? Patrick could have sworn that the day had been only partly cloudy, but now there was a fairly uniform grey cloud layer that covered the sky from horizon to horizon. It was actually pretty pleasant. Patrick did not care for direct sunlight as it usually made him sweat profusely at the drop of a hat.

The obese hog slowly made his way through the first pie, pushing the hot dogs down into his lower bowls as it landed on top within him. Patrick could feel his ass ooze ever so slightly more over the sides of the bench. He had just started into the second pie - pumpkin and cream, who could ask for more?! - when the pig got another warning from his insulin pump. Patrick reached deep under his belly fat to retrieve it, it was already a little harder to reach. "Jesus!" he breathed as he read that he was running over six-hundred. Patrick only felt a bit dry mouthed as a result, but he had not seen a spike this high since he had started on his pump, though Dr. Iglehart had told him that his blood work suggested that he had had spikes that high in the past.

Patrick raised a fattened arm - it actually felt heavier! - and waved over the announcer. "What is it, big guy?"

"Listen, I have to go. Has the competition been canceled or something? You told me to keep eating or go, but I can't stay here any longer."

The announcer eyed the fat pig up and down. "Any particular reason why not? Not that I'm keepin' you here or anything."

Patrick looked around, but no one seemed to be paying attention. The pig shoved the mic away from the announcer and pushed his snout as close as he could for his belly pressing against the table. "Look, I've got like... a medical emergency. If you're not going to call this thing yet, then I'm going to have to go."

The announcer just grinned at him. "A 'medical emergency,' is that it?" his smug smile was insufferable. But then he shrugged. "Alright. It's your decision big guy. Feel free to come back here whenever you want."

"All...right." said Patrick lamely. "I..." but the words died in his throat. Patrick pushed himself away from the table with effort, allowing his throbbing gut to expand to its full size. Patrick could feel that the lower dip of his paunch was now closer to his ankles and there was a tangibly increased amount of doughy flesh under his arms as well, pushing them further out, which meant he was even wider than before too. The fattened hog could not guess at how much he weighed now, but decided to just go for it, shoving himself upright onto his legs. And, oh boy, it was a lot more.

Patrick began to pant open mouthed almost immediately and a deep pain sank into his knees and the soles of his trotters. His lower back became a knot of tension that beckoned a strong back ache if he did not sit down again soon. Patrick waddled a few haphazard steps to the end of the stage, his paunch bouncing heavily between and ahead of his knees, his oversized belly jutting out much further than he was used to. Behind him, Patrick could feel his ass dragging halfway down the back of his thighs, which themselves seemed to have further developed the melting sacs along their inner and now outer sides. Patrick's cankles were dangerously close to flowing totally over his medically prescribed shoes and touching the ground as they jiggled like water balloons filled with fluid. The pig braced himself on the hand rail for support and eased himself down the steps. He thanked Christ that he was going down and not up. The pig kept his hands braced against a wall or some other sturdy stage structure most of the way back to his wheelchair, which he managed to squeeze his compacted ass into, though the side bars were really digging into his chunky thunder thighs now. Still, Patrick sighed a breath of relief, and watched his massive moobs move up and down as he caught his breath.

That is, until Patrick heard a low growling from behind him. The pig managed to cock his head just enough to see a four legged shape emerge from the shadows under the stage. It was a dog, and not the talking kind and it did not seem like the friendly kind either. It bent its head low, still growling.

Alarmed, Patrick reached for the wheels and started slowly moving away, but he went even slower than usual, the wheelchair was burdened with an unknown quantity of unneeded extra weight. "Shit!" cursed Patrick as he then heard fast footsteps behind him. The dog tugged on the back of the wheelchair, teeth close to the fabric currently supporting the obese pig's titanic ass. There was no one around to help, so Patrick decided to do the only thing he could do and try to wheel himself back around to the stage steps, but now he was playing tug of war with the dog, which, given the circumstances, proved to be an even match for the pig's strength in turning the wheels.

Laboriously Patrick gained a few precious feet as the dog chewed and bit at the metal and fabric. But apparently the dog was not satisfied with that. It let go, allowing the pig to wheel himself more of the way back to the steps. But then out of no where the dog charged and leapt and Patrick felt it catch his fattened forearm in its mouth. It shook, the dense meat filling its mouth and moving around Patrick's actual muscle and bone. The pig squealed in pain and alarm and tried beating on the dog's head to no avail. Patrick soon gave up trying to defend himself not just because it was not working, but because it was really, really hard to reach that far across the girth of his own body. Patrick's fat chest heaved as he pushed himself gruelingly closer to the stage steps. "Help!" he cried, "Somebody please, help! There's a dog!"

But there was no response, not even from anyone who seemed to be milling around beyond the stage, in the audience. The only people who Patrick saw look at him just glanced blankly and moved on as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening. "Fucking, fucker dog!" cursed the pig again, and seeing no other choice, hauled himself again out of the chair, holding himself up by the arm rail of the steps while the dog continued to tug and tear at his arm. Patrick gave it a weak kick, but his leg was so heavy he could not get it moving fast enough to do it any damage, and the dog just danced out of the way anyways. "Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck..." chanted the heavy pig as he struggled to pull himself back up the same steps he had descended a minute ago, now also dragging a wild dog. Blood dripped down his arm and from Patrick's finger tips as the dog tore him. The obese pig's legs at this point were almost not strong enough to get him up and he had to pause at every step, despite the attacking dog. "God damnit!" he weeped and tried to detach the dog again with a weak wave of his arm, but the dog's powerful jaws were like a vice and it did not seem interested in doing so much as slowly shear off a bite sized section of Patrick's arm.

Only when Patrick got both feet onto the stage proper did anyone finally listen to him. The announcer saw him and ran right over, delivering a swift kick to its midsection that sent it flying back and away with a yelp. "What the fuck was that?!" cried Patrick, clutching his arm. He had no way to tell how badly he was injured for the blood, but the puncture wounds looked like deep pits in his pink flesh.

"Looked like a dog to me." said the announcer nonchalantly.

"I could tell it was a fucking dog!" shouted Patrick, but he did not want to completely unload on the guy who had just saved him. He took a breath, then added, "I appreciate you getting rid of it, but didn't you heard me behind the stage?"

"Yeah, I and just about everyone else heard ya." said the man, crossing his arms.

"Then why didn't you come and help me sooner? And why are there wild dogs running around here in the first place, that's dangerous!"

The announcer just tipped his hat. "It wasn't my purview. Anyways. You're here now, so are you ready to take a seat?"

"I guess so." said Patrick, thinking about his aching legs and the knot in his lower back, slowly heating up.

Patrick waddled his fattened carcass back towards the table, but it did not look the same as before. It was much longer now, the stage itself was much longer and Patrick did not recognize anyone sitting at the table, which was now burdened with food of all kinds, not just hot dogs, and people sitting on both sides of the table. "Your seat was taken." the announcer said, sitting Patrick down on a wide stone bench over which his ass still spilled, "But fortunately we usually have an empty space available. Now eat up."

The announcer started walking away. "B-but is another competition starting or something? When will I know when to stop?" asked Patrick after him.

The announcer just raised his left arm over his head without turning and tapped the gold Rolex. "I'll let you know when you can stop, now get to pigging out or I really will toss you off this stage myself!"

Patrick slumped in his seat, again his expansive belly was pressing into the table at a distance ahead of him. He reached under his titanic gut with effort and retrieved his insulin pump to check his sugar. It was still over six-hundred. Patrick swallowed, he was still not sure how serious that man was about throwing him off stage, but Patrick knew that with that dog still on the loose, he was more vulnerable than the average person. Hell, he would have to get back to his wheelchair just to stand a chance of getting back to the van where his manager was waiting for him and who knew how messed up it was from the dog attack. Patrick tried to put out all of the weird concerns and ideas from his mind and calm himself. After all, he had come here to do one thing and that one thing was sitting right in front of him. Who knew, perhaps things would just resolve themselves in a little while. Patrick tucked in and enjoyed himself for a long time.

Soon after he started eating, the young hare returned, and offered to bandage the pig's arm for him, "But only if you keep eating." she said. The pig shrugged and held it out for her as he kept stuffing his face full of sweet gelatin with cream cheese and walnuts mixed in. After it was sprayed and bandaged, Patrick thought that his arm actually felt fantastic, in fact, it barely hurt at all as he tested it out on a platter of cheesy bacon fries, emptying the entire platter even as someone at his side reached for the last morsel.

Patrick had gotten a lot more massive before he even bothered to take stock of the other people at the table. In fact, given the way that his lower belly now rested on the floor between his feet which themselves were so chubby that his lower calf fat now oozed onto the ground alongside the soles of his trotters, he did not fancy trying to walk any distance, or even trying to stand up on his own. At this point, Patrick was pretty much certain that he was going to need some serious assistance just transferring into an extra wide, heavy duty wheel chair. Patrick tried to console himself by thinking that he might now get into Guinness as the world's fattest living man, or hell, fattest person ever if he downed a few more entree's and at this point, why the hell not, right? He thought that, until he took another look at the person sitting next to him.

The person might have been an otter once, but was definitely more closely related to a whale at this point in their life. The sheer largeness of them made their gender indeterminate as heavy breasts sagged down near the waist, or whatever this person had instead of a waist. Their belly was not just resting on the ground, but completely covering their feet and filling a lot of the space under the table. The table itself looked like it was bisecting upper and lower halves of the enormous fuzzy tummy, that or the person had been here so long the fat had grown around the table. Their ass sagged off of what presumably had to be a stone bench underneath them somewhere under the layers of brown-furred fat. A thick tail that was more like an immovable trunk grew out from behind the fellow. On top of the table, the belly flowed outward far more than the person could obviously reach, so it was necessary for the people refilling the table to lay the platters down onto the slowly expanding centerpiece of otter flesh, and these are what the person seated next to Patrick was eating from, slowly, but steadily. The pig had not noticed it before, but the person to his side was emitting awful sounding rasping and gargling noises with each labored breath he or she made.

Patrick gingerly reached out a hand to the multi-ton person, they were not far away. In fact if Patrick were much fatter himself, their flesh would start touching around the love handles. He gently tapped the exposed arm flesh which sagged also nearly down to the waist, saying, "Hey." No response.

He tried again more firmly, still no response. Patrick had to push his arm deep enough into the otter's soft flab to actually feel the outline of the underlying muscles before he got a response. The person turned their head as much towards him as they could with their head mostly wreathed in thick, overlaying rolls of blubber that even obscured their ears on their head. The face looked like it was almost lost in a sea of fat surrounding it. The person moved and reacted slowly, eyes unfocused so Patrick could not even tell if they were looking at him. He or she continued to wheeze horridly.

"Hey... um, how are you doing?" tried the pig, flailing.

The person seemed to need several deep, gurgling breaths to even work up to responding, which they finally did as, "Just... f-f-fine... I... guess..." this seemed to take a lot out of them, they paused a long while, licking their chops, then added, "No... heart... attacks... since... last... night..." they paused to wheeze some more, "Pretty... good..."

Then the otter or whatever it was turned back to the plate of nachos hanging out on its left breast and resumed scooping them one by one into its salivating maw.

Patrick looked to his other side and saw a similar sized monstrosity also eating doggedly and likewise difficult to speak to. In fact, as Patrick looked around the table, although he could not see most of their bodies, most of the faces he saw were more like his partners' than his own.

Just then, Patrick received a tap on his shoulder, "Hey, bub, are you done eating or what?" asked the announcer.

"Im... er, not done yet..." said the fattened hog, seeing as he could not imagine leaving his seat, even at his relatively puny size.

"Thought so." said the announcer with a chuckle and picked up an apple from the table. He rudely shoved it into Patrick's mouth before walking away again. The pig bit down and chewed begrudgingly.

The insulin pump the pig wore had long since become unrecoverable under the mass of belly fat, but Patrick no longer needed it to tell that his sugar was out of control. His thirst skyrocketed, so he drank stiff beer and wine to quench it, which were the only drinks available for some reason. But later on, he began feeling woozy with the sugar high, and light headed. His vision swam, but he continued to pile food into his gullet because every time he stopped for more than a few minutes, he would get another tap on the shoulder from the announcer. At one time, he got a closer look at the Rolex the man wore. The watch had no hands on it! And that was just about the last thing Patrick ever saw clearly again.

Patrick's vision continued to swim, the colors bleeding into each other and the table becoming a blurry riot of colors that made it hard to distinguish one plate from another. Eventually, this got tiresome and Patrick tried blinking his eyes clear, and rubbing them. But his vision did not improve, no matter how he blinked or rubbed or slapped at his fattened cheeks, trying to clear his head.

He worked at this so long he got another tap from the hateful announcer. When Patrick turned to him, turned as much as he could anymore, that is, the weight was still piling on, he could barely make out the man's outline from the background colors. "What's the matter?" he asked, "Time's wasting."

"I can't see..." Patrick mewled. What was this place? What was going on? Why had he not asked these questions sooner?

"Hmmm" grunted the man, and Patrick felt a hand on his face before he had been able to detect it, turning his snout back towards the table. "It's probably the diabetes. Half the people here go blind at some point or another. Just reach out and feel for stuff, you'll find something eventually." he patted the fat pig's head like a dog. "Ata boy."

"Blind?" muttered Patrick under his breath, even as he reached out and somehow located a bowl of hard boiled eggs at his fingertips. He pulled it closer.

Patrick the pig grew steadily fatter. He thought that at some point he ought to get sleepy, but it never happened. As the pig's body expanded, his ass slipped further and further down the side of the stone bench he was sitting on and his paunch pressed down more heavily on his trotters over time. His belly pressed hard into the table, but rather than let it grow out onto the table, Patrick took the time to sit himself sideways to the entree's and eat one handed. That feat took pretty much all of Patrick's remaining strength to accomplish and his ass hung off the sides of the narrow part of the bench now, but his belly could at least flow out ahead of him. Almost immediately, it came into contact with the otter's own slowly growing bulk. The pig continued to eat with just his right hand and although he could not look for food anymore, he never failed to put his fingers onto, or more often, into something or other, even if it turned out to be something less than appetizing, like a bowl of anchovies or even a plate of nothing but different kinds of mustard on crackers. With his free hand, Patrick felt along his own body, keeping track of his current size since he could no longer even see how big he was, except in the most general way. When he looked down, all he saw was a wave of pink, his clothes having split long ago and were discarded.

Patrick also gradually lost the last traces of sensation from his fingers and hands. But Patrick was unable to tell this was happening until it literally it became easier to hear if he was holding something by the rattling of the plate against the table than to feel it in his hand. It was not long after that, however, that the pig slowly developed a deep throbbing pain in his right hand.

By this point, the pig was at least a ton, and probably more like a ton and a half. His breath came labored from his mouth and he was experiencing regular chest pain, but he still did not sound as bad as either of his partners. But he could not figure out why it was that his hand was hurting him so much. It was the kind of deep bone pain that one gets from being too cold for a long time. Patrick thought that he was perhaps leaving his hand in a bowl of ice cream, but none ever materialized for his mouth to taste or his nose to smell. In fact, he kept finding more and more unappealing trays like baked grasshoppers or live octopus. When Patrick's nose detected a strong scent of blood, he thought that he had stumbled across a plate of blood sausage. He chomped down, and there was definitely a spurt, but a hard, keratin-like center that did not belong in any sausage... Well, in any sausage that was not also a finger, as things turned out.

Patrick screamed in terror as he held his right hand up to his eyes and saw a red stubby shape instead of pink. He tried flexing his fingers, but could not even tell if they were moving, could not tell if any were missing even. And he kept on screaming, even when the announcer came and tried to calm him down. "My hand!" the pig squealed, "My fucking hand!" He held it out in front of him, but the announcer only slapped it away, Patrick still felt nothing from the broken extremity.

"Look here, small fry." I don't care if your belly's split open and your guts are lying all over the place. This table's reserved for dinner guests only and your time's up. Eat, or I'm sending you packing."

"I can't fucking keep eating, what the hell's wrong with you." screamed Patrick, but inside he was wondering if the slim man were even capable of budging him an inch at this point.

But apparently he was. "Cya!" he said briskly and planted his boot in the seat of Patrick's colossal rear end, right over his curling pink tail. Rather than his foot sinking in, suddenly, Patrick found himself flying through the air.

Where he landed did not resemble the fair grounds in the slightest. In fact it was more like a swamp, which was fortunate in that it broke the extremely rotund pig's fall. Patrick spent a while smarting from the impact, he could still largely feel from the elbows and knees in towards his core body. He could feel after landing that he was mostly floating in water with what felt like a lot of vegetable matter floating in it, while his feet and lower legs had already sunk into a soft, clay like substance. The very next thing he noticed was the horrendous stench which was like a rank cesspool. Immediately, the fattened hog wanted to vomit into the water, but as was per the case, he had nothing to come up but bile.

Still being blind, Patrick could not make anything out of his surroundings. He could make no headway and mostly just sat in the stinking water, slowly feeling around him with his good hand, but unable to tell anything about his environment except when he hit something solid and his elbow took the force of the impact. It was almost better to feel around with his massive paunch, which floated quite well in the water ahead of him while he slowly walked in the clay that sucked at his heavy feet. It was fortunate that the water was there at all, or he would have been perfectly immobile, but then that also made leaving the rancid water an impossible prospect. The pig tried to hold his head as high out of the water as he could, but that required standing and pacing around in the sucking mud. Patrick quickly discovered it was much easier to move around by leaning forward low in the water and pushing himself gently forward with his fattened feet with his belly pretty much rubbing against the soft swamp bottom.

Patrick continued his blind exploration for a while, feeling abject and hopeless about his situation. His hand, which he could only imagine was partly or mostly stripped of skin and meat, possibly even missing digits throbbed in the filthy water. The water level changed slightly in different places and Patrick had to backtrack in areas where the water was too shallow to allow his mammoth fattened form to easily move. Sometimes he just stopped and wept and sobbed at random.

At one point, feeling breathless for all the exertion which was taking a huge toll on his body, even if he did not have to support his weight, the pig wallowed into shallow water, planting his massive gut into the mud and propping his head above water. The swamp was lukewarm and Patrick wanted to try to sleep, even though he had not felt the need for it earlier. Resting at least helped with the chest pain that he was feeling very frequently now. But stopping and sleeping was perhaps what allowed the snake to find him.

Its coils were already on him by the time he came to full awareness again. The blinded pig could not even tell what the thing looked like, but with arms pinned at his sides and his body consisting primarily of a skin sac wrapping a massive collection of porcine lard, there was pretty much nothing that Patrick could do in the situation. At the very least, it did not seem to work so well when he felt it constricting him, the fat having a substantial amount of push back against the incoming force. But the fact that he had not stopped breathing did not seem to bother the snake, or whatever it was that felt like a snake from pulling Patrick in head first into its expanding maw. Patrick could at least tell that happened for sure, because all of the colors suddenly changed to black, as his thick head was shoved into the dripping jaws.

Patrick continued to wriggle, but wriggle was all that his fattened body was capable of and that did not stop the jaws with their hundreds of needle like teeth from drawing his fat lump of a body down its gargantuan throat. Powerful muscles closed around the pig's head and shoulders and there was suddenly no more air to breath. Patrick's laboring heart did not last long enough for him to enjoy the entire experience of being eaten and digested. It just suddenly gave out from the stress of it all, and black gave way to deeper black.

When Patrick woke up, he was sitting at the same place where all of this craziness had started, the table at the fair grounds. The bell rung, but instead of eating, the pig bolted straight up, finding to his shock that he was back down to a 'measly' eight-hundred pound figure. "Hey, where you going champ?" said the same announcer as before. Patrick ignored him and lumbered off the stage.

Patrick, with effort pried a beam loose from the stage as he approached his wheelchair. There was the dog again. "Shoo! Get out of here!" shouted the heavyset hog as he waved the metal bar at the dog. It retreated and Patrick got into his wheelchair, wheeling himself back to his van with all of the vigor he could muster.

He finally made it, and there, his manager was leaning against the side, ready for him. "How'd it go?" he asked Patrick.

"Never mind that." said the pig. "Just... Just take me home for now."

The other man put up a brief protest, but Patrick was resolute. "Alright, get in the back. I'll get her started."

The obese pig pushed himself over to the side of the van and pulled open the side, expecting to see the hydraulic equipment needed to load him onboard. However, instead of that, Patrick saw three black, growling dogs, all of which threw themselves onto the defenseless pig, throwing him to the ground whereupon they proceeded to tear off big chunks of his fatty meat and hide, swallow them and go back for more. All three of them were looking rotund themselves from Patrick's abundant flesh before it all suddenly stopped.

Patrick remained screaming and writhing on the ground in pain until he suddenly was not anymore. He looked around himself, but saw only a nondescript grey room with no doors or windows. He felt himself with his hands, but the wounds were not there anymore, though he still weighted around eight-hundred and seventy-five pounds.

The sole occupant of the room was a stockily built male goat dressed in an expensive looking black suit. He gestured with a hand for Patrick to join him on the wide stone bench. With effort, the pig picked himself up and planted his wide rear end on the bench, filling the remaining space. Patrick said nothing. Where on earth was he to begin? he felt like at some point he had fallen down the rabbit hole into some hellish version of Wonderland.

The unknown goat man ended up speaking first. "It seems we made a slight miscalculation. Your time with us here is nearly at an end, I fear."

"Us?" asked the fattened pig, feeling his temper rise, "Here?" he snorted. "Do you have any idea what kind of crazy bullshit has just happened to me?"

The goat turned to him, his set of horns rising impressively over his strong face. "I know exactly what kind of bullshit you are talking about. It was more than you were expecting wasn't it? Don't worry, it all seems rather mundane in time, believe me."

"More than..." stammered the pig, grinding his enormous ass into the stone under him. He wanted to punch something or to scream, but this guy finally seemed to be giving him some answers. He tried to calm down. "Look, I've just been through the most intense pain I've ever experienced and nothing at all has made any sense ever since... since..."

"Since when?" asked the goat in the suit. He reached down and placed a warm hand on Patrick's love handle, which was right next to the man's thigh.

"Since... I don't know, the contest? Did I win at least?"

"You did win! You ought to be proud of yourself." said the man, grinning as he reached behind Patrick to give him a good slap on the back, which turned out to be mostly the rear side of his left man boob. "One-hundred and two hot dogs in twelve minutes. That is going to be a lasting world record, I think, even for the Koreans." he finished with a wink at Patrick. The pig noticed that the goat kept his hand on his back, feeling the contours of his many, very big fat rolls.

The pig honestly did not mind the overly familiar contact. He knew he was not gay, but anything other than pain and abuse at this point was refreshing. "So I did win." he started. "...And then what?"

The goat chuckled softly, "Well, the short answer is, then you were here. It was not all bad, I trust. How was the food? Did you have sex with anyone?"

The pig twiddled his fingers uncomfortably. "Well, the food was excellent, when it was food, that is." said Patrick nervously, "But I did not exactly find a partner in-between being forced to eat, weighing two tons and being eaten or chased by various things."

"Well, that's too bad." said the goat man, "I'm free right now, but I'm afraid our time is very short." he said this as nonchalantly as if he were talking about the weather. "Mostly, I wanted you be be aware that you have a choice when you get back."

"Back to where exactly? And where is here, exactly?" pressed Patrick. "I would not mind knowing who exactly you are either."

The goat waved his hand at Patrick's questions. "My associate will debrief you on these things once you arrive home. But while I have you here, I just wanted to say this to you personally: You devoted your entire life to a singular purpose and though you had some doubts, with just the right nudge, you pushed through with your hopes and dreams and you actualized who you are at your very core. You are a champion and we need people like you here. I can promise you that you have not seen the least of what we have to offer you if you choose to come back to us. Pain yes," he said and pinched Patrick's flab hard enough to make him squeal a little, "But also pleasure..."

The goat made a move, suddenly standing and reaching his free hand deep under Patrick's sagging paunch, gliding effortlessly though the tight folds to arrive at his cock. The way the goat was standing, his arm seemed impossibly long in order to reach, but seemingly at a touch, the hog was instantly harder than he ever remembered being and he was moaning at the slightest tough to the throbbing shaft. The goat man leaned forward over all of Patrick's belly fat and kissed him full on the lips, inserting his hot tongue. He was not a woman, but in the moment, Patrick wanted nothing else besides this stranger as he made him explode under the heavy ocean of belly fat covering all the action in cramped, moist darkness.

And then he pulled his arm back, and all the sensation ended. The man licked some of the hog's spooge off the ends of his clawed fingers. and grinned at him. "Sensation, really, is what we are all about."

"Wha... what the fuck was that?" asked Patrick, wondering at his own sexuality, but more importantly who was this person in front of him, able to manipulate him so? More questions were loaded on the tip of the pig's tongue, but a sudden heaviness overcame him, greater than that which was due to his own flesh. He felt almost as though he were being pulled in towards himself.

"Ah, I'm afraid our time has run out, Pat." said the man in the black suit. "I hope you will consider my words, but once you understand the alternative, I think you'll realize that you're far better suited for life here than anywhere else." Patrick felt like he was falling, his vision was narrowing into a long tube. But he still heard the mysterious man's voice calling to him. "My friend, I hope we get a chance to see each other again! I'll make you hate sex after what I do to you!" And just like that, Patrick was gone once again.

---

Blearily, the bloated hog awoke to find himself lying in a hospital bed. He felt weak and it was hard to even move his head or his arms enough to find the bed's attached remote. But he did and he managed to lift up his head with the bed's hydraulics. Looking around, Patrick noticed that his vision was poor, but was still a far cry better from being blind. If he had to guess, he would have said he had gone from about '20/25' vision to around '20/100.' or at least he felt that his sight was less than half as good as it used to be. Tapping his fingers against each other and his still bloated sides, the pig also noticed that most, but not all, of the feeling was missing from them, and he assumed his toes as well.

Groaning, Patrick moved his head slowly to pan the room, he had a massive headache. But his heart nearly leapt into his throat as he suddenly saw a familiar face sitting in the chair to his far right, at least he thought it was familiar, most of the definition was gone now, but he recognized the dark black fur and the shade of green of the eyes. The beeping that was in time with his still rapid heart rate kicked up a notch and then slowed to his normal fast rhythm as he struggled to say with dry lips and mouth, "L-Lilith?"

"Well, hello Morning Star." said the cat who reached out to stroke the massive pig gut next to her, filling the bed. She held a cup of water to his lips and Patrick drank deeply. Before he could say another word, however, a nurse was coming into the room and Lilith was saying, "He's awake." Then all of a sudden there was a commotion as the nurse called more people into the room over the intercom. A doctor came and thankfully, it was not Dr. Iglehart. In rather short order the bloated pig's vitals were taken and he was put through a systematic psychological and neurological screening, the kind where he was asked to identify shapes, count backwards and drop blocks into the correctly shaped holes. In the course of this business, Patrick gathered what had happened in those final moments after he had won the Nathan's hot dog eating challenge as well as set a high new world record.

It turned out that he had had a heart attack pretty much the moment the contest had ended, probably triggered by the act of standing up to top off twelve minutes of strenuous exertion from his body. He had been hauled off stage with extreme effort from a large group of people and there had been further complications involved in getting him to a hospital, apparently the fire department was involved. When he finally arrived at the hospital, pretty much everyone assumed he was dead, but they cut him under the massive left breast and inserted surgical electrical paddles past the deep feet of fat coating his rib cage and zapped his heart back into action at least long enough to perform a quadruple bypass that took twelve surgeons sixteen hours to complete. He probably should have recovered shortly after that, but when he had been brought in, his blood sugar had been so high they actually could not even measure it, so it was at least over one-thousand. So Patrick had lapsed into a diabetic coma after the life-saving surgery and here he had lain for six whole months, or so the doctor told him. "Your lady friend has been at your side the entire time." he said with a grin before leaving with the other nurses.

Patrick just sat in silence for a long while, trying to absorb what he had just been told had happened and how close he had apparently come to death. His whole reality had been permanently altered, he could tell that much right away. He pretty much assumed he was going to have to retire from the gurgitating scene after this...

"What're you thinking, Pork Roll?" said Lilith, placing her paw on his thick man-breast.

He looked up at her. "I'm thinking that I remember everything about what just happened." he narrowed his thick brow, "And I'm not talking about the end of the contest."

"Oh?" said Lilith innocently, "Did you have a nice dream?"

Patrick pushed the button that caused the bed to push him into a sitting position, he was still so weak, he could barely lift his weighted down arms, little wonder at that, having been asleep for half a year. "No, it was not particularly nice..." grunted the pig, "Nor do I think it was a dream, at least it was not like any dream I've ever had." he snorted in her direction, pointing at her with his snout, "And I think you know more than you're letting on." finished Patrick remembering the goat having mentioned an "associate."

The black cat lifted her arms in a helpless shrug. "You got me." After that, she leaned close against the rail of the bed and over the massive dome of belly fat the pig wore, stroking the top of it with one hand and purring.

"What was that place?" Patrick demanded, and then added, "He told me you'd tell me."

The last part caused the cat to twitch one ear and stop stroking. She looked across at him, still leaning her body on his broad form. "How about you use that noodle for one second and tell me what you think it was."

The pig swallowed hard. "...Was it Hell?" His voice was quiet, shaky.

The cat smirked. "It's a bit more complicated than most people have been led to believe, but it was the afterlife, at least, one of the possible options."

"So it was Hell!" said the pig more vehemently, but the cat pressed a finger to his lips, hushing him.

"It's best if you keep this between us. You don't want to go and over complicate things." Patrick let himself be silenced, for now at least, and she went on. "Pat, if you're going to understand what's out there waiting for you, you need to throw out everything you think you already know about how things work. Hell is not a place you go because you failed to fall down and lick the boots of a guy who died thousands of years ago, and nobody, not even the other place calls it "Hell." It's proper name is "Sheol" or even Hades, if you like. And it once was that everyone in the world who died came to live there. But then a group of... well, call them 'angels' for lack of a better word, decided that Sheol was not good enough for them anymore and decided to make a better place, a "Paradise" for perfect beings beyond the needs or wants of the flesh. And believe me, very few people measured up to their standards."

In the course of speaking, the slender cat had hopped over the bed rail and was now sitting on the far right side of the pig's expansive belly, her cute little ass braced against the bed rail which Patrick's pudge also pressed against under her. "Well, jeez, what's wrong with perfection? They should be perfectly happy also, right?"

The cat snorted derisively, "Yup, that's what they'd like you to think, alright. She raised a paw to her cheek, her elbow under her digging into Patrick's meat in a way that the pig found arousing despite himself. "I think they realized that pure reason and perfection were not bringing very many new souls in so at some point they started letting people in who simply desire perfection and are willing to forsake bodily pleasures which they still abhor." The cat rolled slightly, planting her hands and knees on Patrick's wide body, and looking straight at him, "But believe me, the price they want for entry is not one you want to pay. It is literally the only way you can truly die."

"W-what price is that?" the fat pig mumbled. e was seeing something in Lilith's flashing eyes that did not seem entirely... mortal.

"Everything." the cat said, "Everything that falls outside the bounds of what they deem acceptable: thoughts, memories, your personality. They take every part of you that does not fit in with what they like and they rip it out." Patrick felt the cat's claws dig into his soft flab. She relaxed. "There usually isn't much left after that, so they take a cookie cutter personality and mind and sort of stick the pieces back together." The cat shrugged, "Sure, whatever comes out the other end will probably say its happy forever and ever, but then it's not really you, is it?"

"Why on earth would they do something like that?" said the pig, but he was not entirely sure he grasped the concept of having his mind itself taken apart and put back together.

The cat shrugged again, "They want souls, don't ask me why. Maybe they're just jealous that there are so many more people in Sheol than their paradise. We don't solicit people the way they do."

The pig grunted and tapped his fattened chest. "I think you solicited me!"

The cat brushed her whiskers, "Are you sure? I'm pretty sure I recall that it was you who reached out first. I'm just an enabler at heart."

"Well, you sure as fuck nearly enabled me into a coffin!" he said, but after all this matter of fact afterlife talk, it sounded weak, even to the pig himself.

She laid down on her belly on top of Patrick's massive form and traced her fingers along the swell of his breasts. "I just offered the tools, you chose what to do with them." she looked up at him, "Did I ever once force you to do something you didn't already want to do?"

Patrick frowned and looked away from her. His arms were still weighed down at his sides, the pig was like a full sized mattress of warm flesh for the slender cat. "I wanted to have sex with you, but you held it back until I got back on the drug."

She reached forward and patted the pig on his fat jowl, "Aw, poor piggy didn't get laid when he wanted?" she said in kissy face, but abruptly, her claws were out and digging into the underside of Patrick's spare tire second chin. "Grow up, Pat. That's a lie and you know it." she released him, but the pig felt just a few drops of blood oozing into his lower neck fold. "There is and always has been more pussy besides me on the market."

"I..." started the pig, but stopped. He knew it was true, all of it. He even knew going into that last contest that he was damaging himself, but he had not cared. Winning and his own glory and legacy had been all that had mattered. As Lilith would have put it, pussy was just a bonus incentive.

The cat smirked at his capitulation. "Besides, everything has turned out pretty good, all things considered. People are going to remember you forever, and not just because you collapsed on stage. You're already going down as the greatest glutton who has ever lived." she fingered his pudge under her body. "You might've fallen back down to just eight-hundred pounds during your coma, but that's nothing a few cheeseburgers won't fix..."

"Are you serious?!" Patrick squealed under his breath. "A fifth of the muscle in my heart died and my pancreas is barely working anymore." he took a deep breath and heard his heart rate notch up on the monitor behind him, but he went on, "I'm more than half blind and lost ninety percent of the feeling in my hands and feet. Oh, and my legs have atrophied so much I don't see how I'm going to get out of this bed without losing several hundred more pounds." The pig huffed and oinked several times, trying to relax so his heart rate would go back down. "I'd hardly call that 'pretty good.'"

"Well..." said Lilith, huffing herself and rolling her livid green eyes. "If you want to tally up all the stuff that doesn't really matter. But you weren't concerned with any of that before you won were you? Why does it matter now?" She eyed him with a predatory glint in her eyes and crawled forward over his chest, bringing her face to his ear. "You already got everything you set out to get and I get that you're worried about your quality of life from here on out." she ran the back of her paw down his puffy, sagging cheek. "But I can make sure that none of that bothers you in the slightest. I'll be your personal slave..." she breathed lustily and moved farther up Patrick's body until her small breasts were being pressed into the pig's snout. He got hard in a hurry underneath the heavy belly, one part that had not seemed to atrophy in the slightest.

Patrick luxuriated in the perfumed musk of the cat's fur, he tried to lift his arms to embrace her, but had to stop halfway as the muscles in them quivered like gelatin. Still he fingered her lithe sides with his fingers where his arms sat on top of his own broad stomach to either side of her. Eventually she crouched back down and Patrick was able to look at her and think with something other than his cock. "You want me... to come with you?"

"That's the gist of it, big boy." she said, still crouching on his wide chest and belly.

"Hmmm..." he grumbled, torn despite being almost sure that this was a terrible idea. "You get off on all my health stuff don't you." he said, and her eyes glittered, "I think living with you would be the worst thing possible for my health."

"Health, schmealth." she said waving her paw and sticking her tongue out at him. "What, do you expect to be taking jogs in Central Park next year? Or even in a few years?" She bent her elbows out, clamoring close to his skin like a predator ready to pounce, her tail high. She spoke then in barely above a whisper. "How much longer do you plan on living with the damage already done to your body? I guarantee you that fifteen years is very optimistic." She prodded his fat with a finger, "And that's if you somehow drop most of this." She raised herself back up and rested on her elbow planted on a thick cushion of breast fat. "And why would you want to go on that long anyways? Especially now that you know this isn't the end. Your career is behind you now, Pat. There's no more glory for you to be had. Why don't you just try to enjoy what life has left to give?"

Patrick shuddered as Lilith basically confirmed his worst fears. But strangely, he did not immediately reject her offer. What she said was essentially true. Patrick did not see himself returning to the limelight, and even if he did somehow get well enough to compete again against people half his age, how could he ever live up to what he had already accomplished? Quiet retirement and living off of proceeds and royalty checks was all that awaited him, that and a constant, endless battle with his waistline and now his damaged heart and other organs. He would be in and out of doctor's offices for the rest of his life, trying to squeeze additional months out of his life by eating kale and brown rice. The fattened pig groaned. Maybe it was not as bad as that, but not by much and the thought that that might become his new lifestyle also went against who Patrick was at his core. "How... How long do you expect me to last with you?" asked the pig at length.

The cat purred greedily, reaching into the cleavage between his pillow top breasts with her free paw. "At least a year, Pat. Maybe as much as three, depending on how long that..." she moaned softly, "Mmm, sugary pancreas of yours holds out." Purring, she added, "Do you have any idea what your cum tastes like when your sugar is over one-thousand? It's like fucking candy." The cat bit her lip and rubbed her face into the pig's fattened neck, causing him to be painfully aroused again.

But Patrick was still contemplating what she said. A year, possibly three, if what she was saying was true. Just one year of life, or at least normalcy, before eternity swept him away. He nudged the top of her head with his snout because his arms were like lead blocks. When she looked up, he asked, "Why should I trust you? Your boss, whoever he is, seemed to have a hard on for me coming back there."

The cat smirked, "Oh, he has a hard on for everything." But she added more seriously, "And I might report to him once and awhile, but I'm not his dog. While I'm on Earth, I'm more of a... freelance agent, if you like. He doesn't have to know about anything we do here." She bent over him and licked the pig's flat snout, reaching out to grab at meat to either side of Patrick's head, shoulders that were four times as wide as herself. "And I really like to draw things out." she said, making the hog feel the points of her claws again. Then she relaxed, she truly was a wild animal, and that was driving Patrick crazy with lust, even if he had no way of acting on it. "Life..." she mused, "Has so much more meaning here than in Sheol. It's because you only have one to give. Believe me, I will not squander our time together, Pat. I want to keep you to myself as long as possible."

But Pat still recalled being eaten alive by wild dogs. "And what if I chose the other option?"

The cat sighed and looked away from him. "Well, then we wouldn't really have anything in common anymore would we? I guess you would stay here, do what your doctors told you to do until they send you home, not that even dropping five hundred pounds would necessarily get you in, and I don't know why you would, Pat. You're a glutton at heart and it's what's made your life mean something, but that's the first thing they would rip out of you. You would not even recognize yourself on the other side." The cat rolled her eyes, "And then there's option C."

"What's that?" asked the pig.

"Choose not to choose." said the cat lightly. "You stay here, but that's the real hell, if you ask me. You can't see without eyes, Pat, or hear without ears. If you don't go to Sheol or the other place, you'll be blind, deaf and immediately and permanently disoriented. Souls have gone mad wandering around here aimlessly, and if you're lucky you'll stumble across a conception at just the right moment to slip in and get a body again, but you'll probably come back as a rat or something even more horrid."

"Hmmm..." grumbled the pig in thought. Nothing sounded fantastic. It was almost preferable to believe that Lilith was just an insane person and was making this all up, but he could not really believe that either. Despite knowing for a fact that death was not the end, a powerful urge made him want to cling to life, no matter what.

She touched his face. "Pat, I'm not trying to kill you. I'm not even here to make you want to go someplace you don't want, no matter what you might be thinking. I'm only here for you..." The lean cat straightened up easily on top of the pig under her knees, and then smoothed her hands up over her small breasts. Patrick caught a whiff of her wet cunt even through her clothes and his cock pulsed hard within its fatty tomb. "Ugh, you're like drugs to me, don't you know, Pat?" She bent back down embracing his girth with her slender arms, he was a futon under her, her toes dangling off the edge of his long paunch. "You're at a sweet spot where your body's under so much stress it can barely keep up, but you're also not dying either. Every little thing hurts you more than it should, a pin prick on your finger won't heal, it'll just sink into a black hole in your flesh, sagging open and raw, your body defenseless." she moaned again, gathering more of the pig's fat in her arms. "Pat, I can feel your thick blood moving through your stiff, fat coated veins. Your huge body needs so much, but your heart is already damaged and weak." The cat shivered in pleasure and began unconsciously grinding her hips against the dome of his fat gut under her. She looked up at him, still grinding herself slowly against him, "I know what's going on inside of that bacon slathered body of yours better than any of these doctors, believe me." She cocked her neck back in a long sigh. "You're already at the edge, Pat, just let me keep you here." she began to rub his chest again, "You will not believe how long I can make this last."

Despite how horny the cat was making him feel, Patrick tried to keep his cool for at least a little while longer. "You sound like a sadist."

The cat purred, "Who isn't these days?"

"If I came home with you, wouldn't you just be tormenting me all the time?" asked the pig, his thick neck wobbling under his chin.

The cat smirked, "Is it torment when you eat an entire pie?" The feline ran a finger up the underside of the pig's fat neck, then touched his flat snout, "I might tease you every now and again, but all I really want to do is give you what you already crave."

She was teasing him already whether she was aware of it or not. All Patrick wanted to do was reach up and throw his big arms around her and swallow her with his body. "Would I have to gain more weight?" he asked, and in the asking basically confirmed his decision, they were just talking terms now.

And the black cat was already on the same page with him. Her tone was slightly more serious, as she said, "You don't have to..." she sounded perturbed at the very thought, "But I don't see how you'll be able to resist putting a few pounds on..." she licked her chops, "I'm a fantastic chef."

"I'll bet..." said the pig, who assumed that a sophisticated woman like Lilith probably had many talents he was not aware of. And as if on cue they both heard a low grumbling from underneath where the cat was resting. The pig had not yet eaten since waking up, then remembered that he had actually not eaten, at least properly eaten, in the past six months.

The feline giggled and her tail wavered in the air over her head. "It sounds like you're ready for a big breakfast, big guy."

"I think I am at that..." said Patrick, but he still did not want to rush into this. This was the rest of his life they were talking about, even though they were apparently not talking about all that long of a time span... "But what if I wanted to, like get back down to six-hundred pounds. You're making everything sound peachy, but I need to at least be able to move my arms again, and I'd rather not be stuck in bed for the rest of my life."

She bent over and took his right arm by the wrist and elbow, fingers slipping into the deep fat creases, lifting it with startling ease over the pig's head, and then flexing it in ways he was too weak to accomplish on his own. "I'll do your physical therapy, if you don't want to just be a fattened meat sac." she said with a wink, "And I'd very much like to see you waddling your fat ass around the house, not that there is anything wrong with living in a bed, especially if you're filling it." she chuckled and squeezed his flab, but added firmly, "But no weight loss. This is the absolute smallest I want to see you as."

"Fair enough." said the fattened hog. He had already lived long enough at over eight-hundred pounds to grow used to the idea of continuing to be at least this big.

But the cat seemed to have an idea and she waggled her eyebrows at him as her tail lashed behind her. "But I'll tell you what, Pat. If you're willing to get up to twelve-hundred pounds for me, when you're back in Sheol, I'll be your slave for four-hundred more years." She purred. "One. For. Each. Pound. You. Gain." She punctuated her sentence with sharp jabs to his thick man-tit.

Patrick laughed, but more at the realization that they really were talking about forever. "Are you serious?"

She leaned over him, her eyes flashing, "Devilishly serious." She straightened up, again pushing her knees into the pig's belly with her weight, "I can't join you immediately when you go, though..." she pinched up some skin and fur from her lean forearm, "This body of mine still has another sixty years or so until it runs its course. But after that, I'm all yours."

The pig was silent for a little while, mostly staring at where the cat was sitting on him, making an indent with her body in the loose pink skin stretching out all around her. "What are you, really?" he asked, "Are you really a... a person?"

She cocked an eyebrow at him and twitched an ear. She leaned forward again, cupping his fat cheek, "Oh, Patrick. Just because I wasn't born a cat doesn't mean I'm not a person." and she kissed him, making the pig feel warm in his own skin, even as the heart monitor kicked up another notch in its pace.

And they just sat there like that for a long while. Patrick thought he could really get used to Lilith lying on him like this. Finally, the pig spoke. "What was that favor you wanted from me, back when you first gave me that drug?"

The black cat lifted her head and gave him another wink. "That you'd come home with me."

Patrick laughed once, tossing the cat on his belly, "I thought it was my choice."

She tapped his puffy cheek. "It is your choice, silly. It was just a favor after all, and I'm only asking."

Somehow, the pig found the strength to lean forward slightly. "Then yes, I'll come with you."

The cat leaned down against his face and then they were kissing savagely, her tongue rough and scraping the skin of his own tongue and cheeks, but the pig loved it. There were no more words, but the pig knew that his fate was sealed, as good as if he had signed in blood. He would give his body, his flesh to this demoness, or whatever she was really, and in return, she would give him everything she had to give. But really, it was a bargain in the pig's opinion, a real no brainer. The pig did not know if this was really love or not, but it felt too damn good not to be worth something, and maybe that was the whole point of it all, feeling good. Patrick the "Iron Gut" had not felt this optimistic in years.