Originally published October 31, 2017.
Contains: accelerated weight gain, sexual scenes involving sentient plants, entrapment. Not recommended for underage readers.
I didn’t have any ideas for Halloween-themed stories that I could post in time for Halloween this year, but I did want to write a horror-themed story of some kind to put up. I got the idea for this one after reading “‘Stay Out of The Pumpkin Patch’ or ‘Little Farm of Horrors’” by xenoxephyr. Admittedly, it’s a weird little story, in which a guy gets fattened up and eventually turned into a pumpkin by the sap the oozes from a pumpkin vine. But something about it appealed to me in a way I wanted to capture in a story of my own. As for what that something is, well, that requires some explanation.
sfbaydude02 once wrote a post on his blog theorizing that gaining is all about power, but he theorized that there are two sides that coin. One is the guys who enjoy gaining weight as a way to assert their power, by exerting control over their bodies. The other is guys who enjoy gaining weight as an expression of loss of power, of losing control over their appetite, their eating, and ultimately, their bodies. I’m very much turned on by the latter, by gaining as a consequence of losing control. Incidentally, that’s why I don’t write many stories about guys who gain weight intentionally.
But I’m also turned on by the loss of control generally. Even when I hook up with guys who aren’t in this community, I’ll often tell them to push me against the wall, pin me there with their bellies, and generally boss me around. Power play is a huge turn on for me because of that loss of control, by giving that control to another person. (Or at least pretending to; obviously I’m still in control and can say no at any time.)
But there’s another kind of loss of control that interests me even more: loss of control where no one is gaining (heh) that control. In a gaining story, it’s easy to make that kind of scenario happen: guy loses control of his appetite, and he’s surrounded by delicious food through no malicious intent of anyone else. So he eats it all and gets fat.
But occasionally, I like to imagine circumstances where control is ceded to a force that has no awareness of what it’s doing to cause the person to gain weight. Where the person loses control due to an outside force, but in a way that no one can really be blamed for. I think the closest I’ve come to that is Gertrude’s ghost in The Prize-Winning Pumpkin, but that was more unintentional encouraging than total lack of awareness.
For something like that… well, a pumpkin vine certainly fits the bill. And the truth is, I’ve fantasized before about the idea of a guy being fattened up by semi-sentient plants, because it fits that “loss of control to unaware force” mold. You can’t blame plants for doing what plants do, even when what they do is fatten a guy up. And that’s what they do in this story.
Synopsis: Bud is skeptical of the local legends that say the “turgid bog”–really an old swamp that has since dried up and become a dense forest–is haunted. Wanting to put those old rumors to rest, he enters the otherworldly forest to investigate for himself. There he finds a broken vine that seems to pour forth unlimited amounts of a sweet sap, which he happily partakes of. The more he drinks, the better he feels, and the less he thinks about leaving, or the fact that his clothes seem to be growing tighter as he drinks more…
The locals called it the turgid bog, although it hadn’t served as a wetland in several centuries. The dried swampland had turned into the floor of a forest, in which lived plenty of trees and… not much else. With its nitrate-rich soil, the bog grew enough trees to to prevent much light from getting in. Since that prevented much else from growing, and the trees weren’t a great source of nutrients, no animals bothered to move into the bog. There was no food for the herbivores, and thus no food for the carnivores, so neither had a reason to wander in.
At least, that was the ecologists’ explanation. Locals insisted the bog was haunted. Or cursed. Those backwoods folks could never keep their superstitions straight, Bud told himself with a chuckle as he looked into the turgid bog. It was surrounded by regular forests, devoid of trails because only the few ecologists around dared to tread that close to the “bog”. Separating the forest from the bog was a shallow gully that must have previously housed a moat-like ring of water around the bog. Bud worried about whether it would be safe to walk across, so he threw a heavy rock down into the middle. After it bounced off the compacted ground, he smiled and walked into the dip, before climbing up the short slope into the bog.
Looking inside, Bud could see just how dark it got with all the densely packed trees blocking out the light. The bog itself was only a few acres big, but the trees were packed closely enough that no trace of light from the other side made its way to Bud’s eyes. But with his flashlight in hand, he was sure he had nothing to fear. He could probably canvas the whole forest in a day, he thought. As small as it was, he told himself, there was no way it could hide anything sinister. The only reason the locals hadn’t confirmed that, he told himself, was because they were too superstitious to check for themselves.
But as Bud walked deeper into the bog, even he couldn’t deny there was something uncanny about the place. Not just because of the darkness; Bud had walked through the woods at night plenty of times, and the dim light that shone through the trees was an improvement over that. No, it wasn’t the sights, but the sounds, specifically the lack thereof. As Bud moved farther away from the bog’s edge, he realized that all the chirps and squeaks of woodland critters that he could hear were coming from behind him. They were all originating from the woods around the bog, with none in the bog itself. He told himself he should have expected that, knowing that animals tended to avoid the bog. But something about experiencing that silence for real, in a part of the world that was usually alive with song, did have him walking a little more slowly than usual.
Bud also found himself walking more slowly because of the tangle of roots beneath him. Shining his flashlight on the ground, he could see that it was more root that dirt. The mangled knobs, with bark hardened from exposure, made for a treacherous surface to traverse. The deeper he delved into the woods, the more he found himself looking down to avoid tripping.
When he could spare the time to look up, he saw the trees around him turning more thin and twisted as he delved deeper into the woods. Occasionally he stopped to look around–not wanting to do so while walking and risk falling–and tried to make sense of how the trees could have grown like that. He wondered, was lack of light really enough to cause trees to develop such unearthly shapes? The bark had a wavy pattern to it, more akin to muscle cells than the blocky pattern of tree bark. It made made Bud feel like he was somewhere where he shouldn’t be. But he pressed on, determined to not be spooked by unsubstantiated superstitions like those town folk.
It seemed only one other kind of plant was capable growing that deep in the bog: some kind of vine that wrapped its way around the tree trunks to make its way up to the trees’ canopies, where it grew most of its leaves. They seemed to be greener the higher up Bud looked, starting out a dark greenish brown like the tree trunks themselves, before the parts that reached the sun erupted into a vibrant green color. On the outskirts of the bog, Bud only noticed a few of them scantily adorning the trees. As he approached where he assumed the middle was, the trunks around him were covered in tangles of those vines.
It was all so unsettling that Bud nearly jumped when he felt something wet land on his exposed arm. Looking down, he saw that it was clear, and had landed in a patch the size of a bottle cap. Looking up, he saw the vines extending across the branches above him, before noticing one in particular that had been cut. Its open end hung down from the branches, before the rest trailed back to the tree it was attached too. Looking closer, Bud could see another drop forming on the broken end.
Bud used his free hand to wipe away the sap, and nearly flicked it away to the ground, before he paused and looked at it. It wasn’t as viscous as most plant sap he’d encountered, wiping off more like soda than sap. As he rubbed it between his fingers, he sniffed it out of curiosity, and found it smelled rather sweet. That much was to be expected.zzz
Still curious, Bud lifted his fingers to his face and gave the sap a quick lick. In spite of how much he’d already handled it, it still tasted even sweeter than it smelled. It tasted vaguely of how grass smelled after a fresh trim, and how mud smelled after being walked through. But the sweetness overpowered all the other tastes. If that was how it tasted off of his hand, Bud wondered, how would it taste fresh out the vine?
It was silly. Bud knew it was silly. For all he knew, that sap could have been sweet by accident, and filled with some kind of poison to ward off any animals who might eat it. Then again, Bud wondered, whom did the vines need to ward of growing in the bog? It was probably fine, Bud reasoned. In fact, he thought, it would probably be fine if he took another sip.
Reaching up, Bud grabbed the part of the vine that was attached to the tree and pulled on it, snaking the vine out of the branches until the end fell in his hands. The sudden motion made the drop of sap that had been collecting fall off, but another one soon took its place, expanding from a tiny drop to a veritable pool on the end of the vine. The vine itself was thicker than Bud’s thumb, allowing for quite a bit of sap to pool up at the end. Once a sizable bubble of it had accumulated, he licked it off.
Straight from the vine, the sap tasted even better. Not only was there more of it, providing an even more satisfying taste, but the grass and dirt flavors were more subdued. Perhaps, Bud conjectured, it was because the sap hadn’t rubbed over his dirty body before he tasted it. Or maybe his mouth was just acclimating to the taste. Whatever the reason, that drop had Bud itching for more. He was ready to cut down more vines to get it if he had to. But before he did, he tried sucking on the end of the vine in his hands, just to see what would happen.
Against all of his understanding of biology and science in general, the vine yielded a steady stream of the sap as quickly and Bud could suck it out. He nearly pulled the vine out in surprise, before he tasted what a mouthful of the syrupy fluid was like. Immediately, he swallowed the sugary mixture and sucked on the vine again, finding it yielded just as much sap as before. Soon Bud was sucking the sap down in a constant stream, stopping only to swallow as the vine provided more and more of the sweet mixture.
It didn’t make any sense to Bud. The vine shouldn’t have been able to carry the sap to his mouth that quickly, let alone make it so fast. And yet, as he kept gulping it down, it just kept coming, each mouthful just as delicious as the last. And the more he drank, the less he cared about how the vine made so much sap, or whether he should have really been drinking that much of it.
For the more Bud drank, the more he found himself falling into a stupor of the sap’s making. A feeling between food coma and drunkenness had him less and less concerned with silly questions like the how the vine poured forth so much sap. All he cared about was that he could seemingly drink as much of the stuff as he pleased. Of course, he knew that at some point, he should head back. But he told himself he could stop drinking the sap and leave at any time, and at first, he believed it. But the more he drank, the less the idea of leaving crossed his mind.
Not much crossed Bud’s mind as he gulped down more and more of the sap. The pure bliss of drinking down more of the intoxicating liquid made him feel like a warm peachy glow was radiating over all of him. It was a glow bright enough to outshine any other feeling or concern he might have, like whether he would ever leave the bog, or the fact that his belt was getting a bit too tight.
At least, for a while; soon the sensation of tightness around his waist was so unbearable that Bud had to pay attention, at least long enough to undo his belt buckle. As he did, he felt his arms brush against his soft, protruding abdomen, not giving much thought to the fact that his stomach hadn’t been that big before. Nor did the fact that he could feel the warmth of the bare skin of his now-girthy belly against his arms cause him any alarm. It was all still warmth, a sensation he enjoyed feeling quite strongly as he guzzled down more and more of the sap.
Once Bud had finally undone his belt and his pants’ top button, he felt like there was nothing stopping him from truly enjoying the experience of swallowing all that sap. Except, perhaps, the fact that he was still standing up. He wanted to sit, and the knobby, uneven forest floor that he’d had to keep his eyes on to avoid tripping wasn’t going to stop him. With the vine still in his mouth, he put his back on the tree, and slid down into a sitting position. The vine came right down with him, and kept dispensing more of the delicious liquid as Bud leaned back and enjoyed it, finally without a care in the world. The ground below him even felt smooth, like the roots had moved out of the way for him. He was too dazed by how much he’d drunk to tell himself how silly that conclusion was.
As he’d slid down the tree, Bud’s shirt had risen up as well, pulled up by the friction with the tree bark. Now his turgid belly hung out in front of him, pushing his shirt up and the sides of his pants aside as it pushed the zipper down. Leaning back against the tree with his legs splayed out, his arms limp at his sides, and his head hanging down with the vine still in his mouth, he payed no mind to his new centerpiece. It didn’t distress him at all that there was now a belly the size of a full garbage bag jutting out from his torso where previously there’d only been an average amount of pudge. He didn’t ponder how he’d stand up with a gut far bigger than any he’d had before, let alone walk out of the bog. He was just happy to sit back and keep drinking.
That was, until the vine fell out of his mouth.
The end of the vine landed on top of his stomach, where some of the sap spilled out onto his globular belly before it stopped flowing. Opening his eyes only slightly, Bud looked up at the vine in front of him, knowing he’d start coming down from his state of bliss if he didn’t get it back in his mouth. But he was too tired to even raise an arm to grab it and put it in his mouth. Instead, he let his neck go limp and his head head hang down again, his eyes slowly closing as he started drifting off to sleep.
Until he felt the vine back in his mouth, pouring forth the sweet mixture.
Just enough time had passed for Bud to have the presence of mind to realize that vines don’t just crawl back into small spaces in the span of a few seconds. He opened his heavy eyes long enough to look around and see if there was anyone else there who could have put it back in. He didn’t see anyone, nor had he heard any footsteps. It seemed the vine had just made its way back into his mouth on its own, and was now pumping the sap again. It was then that Bud realized the vine had started pouring the sap before he started sucking it out. Was the vine aware of its surroundings and intentionally filling him up?
Nah, Bud told himself as the peachy, fuzzy feeling came over him yet again, even stronger than before. That was silly, he thought as he let himself slide down the tree even more, approaching a lying down position. With his head propped up by the tree, it was in the perfect position for him to drink down more of the sap.
As Bud kept drinking, his clothes kept getting tighter, ripping at the seams as his body blew out to bigger and bigger proportions. By the time his belly was the size of a beanbag chair, he’d ripped out of his pants entirely, blowing out the seams until only the cuffs remained intact, holding the two flaps of cloth onto him. His shirt had bunched up around his chest, but even that was growing hefty enough to rip the sides. The two lobes of his chest were now themselves as big as small beer guts, the kind Bud might’ve had if he’d left the forest to go to the bar instead.
With as much bliss as the sap was bringing Bud, he didn’t noticed the few vines that started to untangle themselves from around the trees and tug at his clothes. They undid the laces of his shoes and pulled those off, as well as his socks, before discarding what remained of his pants and his shirt. Even his underwear, which had passed the limits of its stretchiness, was carried away. Soon he was lying totally naked on the forest floor, feeling the soft, warm dirt underneath his flabby body. There was something freeing about it, being exposed but knowing he wouldn’t get caught. After all, no one else but him would ever go that deep into the bog.
Bud maintained that peachy-keen optimism, brought about by the sap-induced stupor, as the vines wrapped themselves around his hefty arms and tree-trunk legs instead. They wrapped themselves loosely, like a hug from a friend, leaving Bud perfect content for them to grasp his limbs. Soon they held him in place, but as much as he enjoyed being filled by the sap, he wasn’t going anywhere anyway.
As long as Bud was still growing, the vines had to hold him loosely, as his limbs continued to expand. His arms were now as girthy as his legs, muscular from years of walking, had been before he’d ventured into the woods. His legs had fleshed out so much that before he’d started drinking the sap, he would have been able to stand in one leg of a pair of pants that would fit him comfortably now.
Of course, the rest of him was growing to match: his double chin and grown into a thick ring of fat that wrapped around his face like the vines around his limbs. His chest was now hefty enough to sag to either side of him. And his belly had grown so big that it was spilling over his sides, spreading out for more room like his splayed legs. If he could have pushed his belly to one side, it would have taken him a long time to stop jiggling.
Soon more vines joined the cause of keeping Bud in place, while some with leaves on them hung down around Bud’s head. They didn’t seem to be capable of dispensing sap, but as long as Bud had the main vine in his mouth, he didn’t mind. Some of those vines ventured a bit farther up his legs and toward his pelvis. There they wrapped around his exposed member, which was a good deal shorter now that it had been swallowed by the fat pad around it. As they touched it, Bud felt his warm, peachy feeling flicker with other sensations, more intense, more pleasurable. The sensation of being filled from one side as he was squeezed on the other made for a feeling that somehow topped even that of just being filled with the sap. He moaned as the vine in his mouth, still pouring in sap, muffled his noises.
Of course, all these sensations were causing Bud to breath more heavily. Being encased in a massive mound of fat only made it more difficult to catch his breath during such an intense experience. The leafy vines hanging around his face vibrated as he breathed out intensely, seemingly enjoying the biggest burst of carbon dioxide they’d gotten since the animals abandoned the bog centuries ago. But Bud didn’t care much about the scientific reason for what was happening. All he cared about was that he was still being pumped full of sap, something was making the experience even more intense than usual, and he was too heavy to writhe in place from the pleasure like he would have otherwise.
In fact, when Bud finally let his pleasure loose on the forest floor, he didn’t lurch forward the way he would have otherwise. His massive belly, along with the vines holding him down, kept him pinned in place. All he could do was moan more loudly and exhale even more deeply, causing the leaves around him to dance. By the time he was done, the vines around his pelvis finally receded, leaving him to catch his breath, much to the enjoyment of the leafy vines.
But Bud never really caught his breath. With a mammoth belly in front of him, blocking his view of anything except the vine that hung down from the trees and into his mouth, he was past that point. Even just lying down, swallowing all the sap as it poured into his mouth, was more effort than he could exert without breathing heavily.
Which wasn’t all that surprising given how fat he’d grown. Though he was too blissful and too exhausted to give it any thought, his body had grown out to sizes he only saw in tabloids and reality TV shows. His girthy legs were wider around than many people’s waists, while his arms hung at his sides like the useless sacks of fat they were now. And his belly, his titanic, planetary belly, had somehow grown out past even his massive legs, even his hefty chest, to a point that defied easy size comparison. It was closer in size to the belly of a cow or a hippo than a man, looking like a massive sack of sand that had been dumped on top of him, rather than something he’d grown himself. It was an immense sea of fat that ensured that even without the vines, Bud wasn’t going anywhere.
Indeed, with the vines having drawn out a different kind of seed, Bud let his head fall back as he gave in to the combined tiredness of food coma, post-orgasm exhaustion, and the mere effort it took to be a man as massive as he was. The vine seemed to sense his intention, ceasing the flow of sap just before he became too tired to swallow. After taking his last gulp, Bud let his head clean forward, before he fell asleep.
Bud awoke the next morning dazed and confused, not sure where he was or where his clothes had gone or why he couldn’t move. His groggy mind could barely make sense of sights he took in with his half-open eyes, especially the unfamiliar massive mound of flesh in front of him. Adding on to the confusion was a stream of liquid he felt pouring into his mouth. But it was so sweet that he stopped asking questions and started gulping it down. The stream turned into a steady flow as he swallowed mouthful after mouthful of the delicious mixture. As a peachy warmth came over his body, he leaned his head back and let his eyelids droop, just happy to be where he was as he drank more and more.
The Plot Thickens 