Turnaround - Part 5 (Patreon Commission for MephistonOwl)

TAGS: TAGS: Gators!, Weight Gain, Hyper Weight Gain, Building Destruction, Gorging/Feeding, Blob/Obese, Godlike/Ascension, Macro/Macro Blob

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Time was relative when aboard Woz, but for those who were still keeping track, it had been anything from five to seven months ever since they all left their old planet.

Precise measurements were somewhat difficult considering that they no longer had a planetary rotation to work with; plus, Woz’s effects on the local gravity wells were clear and present to anyone paying attention, making it even harder to tell how much “actual” time had passed for those living on him. Not that they cared, of course; for anyone to think about anything other than Woz himself would be seen as a downright waste of time at best.

It was paradise for all those who were uplifted along with the gator, who could surrender everything they were, everything they used to be, in order to pursue perfection in its most gluttonous form; why should they want for anything else, no matter how basic or seemingly unimportant? Why should they bother with recordkeeping, or worrying about the time, when they all had everything they could possibly want there at their beck and call?

It was a fool’s errand, a waste of the time they weren’t bothering to keep track of. As long as they had Woz there to syphon their power from, then they were happy; Woz himself was a bottomless font of energy anyway, so it wasn’t as if he was ever going to notice a few billion people ascending themselves through sheer proximity. If anything, the gator god only seemed to ever get bigger and more fantastically powerful as time went on, courtesy of the gas giant he was feeding on!

A gas giant that, as far as anyone could tell, was visibly shrinking by the day. It wasn’t supposed to; according to projections drawn up by the High Priest and their acolytes, Jupiter was meant to serve as a home and feast for their god for at least a couple years even with the fastest of gorging; that it was showing proverbial cracks already was worrying, given that Woz Himself seemed to be stirring in his half-slumber.

The gator god hadn’t communicated with the outside universe in some time since they left Earth, being far too busy consuming the titanic planet he was orbiting, one layer at a time. While his clergy claimed to be interpreting his will in his behalf, the truth was, there wasn’t much there to be interpreted at all; most of the time, Woz was stuck in a fugue state where he didn’t think of much beyond the vague notion of how much food he wanted to devour, nor did he consider any course of action beyond what he was doing already: float around Jupiter and eat it down to the very core.

But underneath the many layers that made up the gargantuan gator (both literal and… not so much), something else arose. One could call it a consciousness, or at least some form of cognizance, one that had been lost to him some time before he even reached the size of his country, let alone the dimensions he had then. He had willingly sacrificed his self to the gluttony of it all, to the ravenous consumption of anything and everything that ever got close enough to his mouth that he could suck it in; from there, it was just a case of letting instinct take over and lead him forward, while his active, conscious mind was stuck underneath so much flab that it couldn’t even move.

And for a while, this was perfectly fine. He still felt the pleasure from it all: every second he spent eating was a second he spent in rapturous ecstasy the likes of which simply couldn’t be explained with mere words. For months he was content with remaining as such, unwilling to move from his position, especially since he had people to do that for him: if he wanted anything, he could just think it, and somehow it just sort of happened, nevermind how he wasn’t issuing commands.

But there came a point where even the consumption of an entire planet became… insufficient. It was still pleasurable, perhaps even more so than it had been before, but the bigger he became, the more Woz came to understand that he could do so much more than what he was already doing; the bigger he turned out to be, the hungrier he was, leading to a downward-upward spiral that practically made it a certainty that he could never be sated.

A creature such as him needed a suitably large amount of sustenance in order to function, and while technically the mass syphoning and processing system was designed to perfectly meet his expectations, Woz wasn’t eating just to survive. If he had been, then there would’ve been no complaints, and indeed, Jupiter might’ve actually lasted as long as his High Priest thought it would. But Woz was Woz, and Woz didn’t want to only eat what he had to; he wanted to eat what he wanted to eat, and what he wanted to eat was more.

There was no value attached to it, no absolute number that let him spell out just how much food, exactly, he wanted dumped into his maw. There was no number because there couldn’t be one: the more he ate, the more he would demand, and this much his little ones had to know; surely, after spending so much time on his body, then they ought to be aware that his ravenous appetite not only knew no end, but could know no end, regardless of how hard he was spoiled. His High Priest especially should damned well know that, if no one else.

Alas, that was not on Woz to decide. He could make it as obvious as possible, but it fell on his worshippers to decipher the belly gurgling, the occasional grunt or moan, the rumbling quakes travelling through his form whenever his stomach acted up. It was on them to know that their god was stirring in his sleep, that their god was dreaming of a better, fuller tomorrow, one where he wouldn’t be forced to feed on something as unworthy as Jupiter.

By all means, it was a good snack, but it wasn’t a meal. He’d been stripping layers off of it for months, but was this really everything there was to it? The damned thing was the biggest planet in the system, sure, but it was still just a planet; a gas giant, and the largest one around, but there was something else there that was far more worthy of his attention, a proper feast waiting to be slurped down with as much care as Woz put into anything else: the Sun.

At first, it was nothing but a vague notion, a half-formed idea pattern that could scarcely be called a thought. In the back of his head, it formed much like a seed, the tiniest shoots budding from it, slowly wrapping themselves around whatever remained of his brain. Insinuating itself into his perpetual dream, this idea of the Sun as being something to be eaten slowly solidified, becoming easier to identify and pluck out from amidst the wild stream of non-thoughts that normally raced across the forefront of Woz’s mind. Nothing but a vague notion at first, but then, a desire.

He’d already taken care of Earth, and him having his ass parked in Jupiter’s orbit had already caused his body to blob out and take up most of the space between Mars and Saturn; the biggest gas giant had ceased being that some time prior, with most of its mass having been consumed, leaving behind only the inner core and a few outer layers of gasses and liquids that Woz would be able to take care of in very little time if he wanted to. His very presence was enough to create gravitational disturbances in the orbits of all other planets; while he still went around the sun, the outer gas giants weren’t so sure anymore, with the telluric ones closest to the star were wracked by titanic earthquakes as a result of the gator’s mere presence.

As a result, it only made sense that he should graduate to eating what he should be eating: the very centre of the system itself. He was big enough to take up multiple orbits, after all; his digestive efficiency being such that he could extract more than what he actually consumed, it wasn’t that difficult for him to thoroughly outsize everything other than the Sun… and, as it seemed, his mind was very much stuck on that, and had been for a while.

From a malformed thought to a constant factor, it seemed to Woz that he was dreaming of eating the Sun on an almost regular basis. While the surrounding details were as nebulous as those of any other dream, the core idea of it was always the same: himself, with his jaw wide open, the star lowered into it so he could snap his mouth shut around it, gulping down the fusion engine in one massive, final gulp, plunging the former Solar System into darkness. With a movement of his throat, the star would then be sent down to his stomach for reprocessing, at which point… something would happen, he wasn’t sure.

He also wasn’t all that convinced that he could just eat the Sun like that. He was big, yes, but most of that was the rest of his body, not his head; more than likely, he’d need to slowly strip layers of the star away, much like he had with Jupiter, before he had the chance to finish the job. But he should be doing that, was the point; wasting any more time with a planet when he could be focusing on the Sun instead was the real sin.

By the time Woz awoke properly, Jupiter was all-but gone. With the outer layers stripped away entirely, the one thing left was its very core, revealed to have been transformed into something resembling a colossal diamond of all things. This baffled the few people who still had the ability to reasonably remember the first thing about astronomy, at least until the automated mass harvesting ships began experiencing gravitational anomalies coming from none other than Woz himself.

It was hard to tell when the subconscious influence ended and the active manipulation began, but Woz was no longer content with simply floating there and letting his little ones dump food into his mouth. It was fun, and he was interminably grateful for it, but if he was truly a god, then it was his responsibility to take charge and actually do something about his hunger himself, rather than wait for others to do it in his stead. Hence, the diamond: step one in his master plan to make sure that he would be big enough to just devour the Sun outright, because he was done waiting.

Everyone on him noticed when the immense gator began moving. While it was nowhere near the level of violent jerking that had taken place a few months prior after the first take-off, it was movement, and enough of it that even the most self-absorbed of gluttons had to look up and wonder what was happening. Their living worldship was once again mobile, and approaching the cosmic-sized diamond that shone brightly above their heads; not only that, but something was emerging from within the folds of neckfat where the mass processing plants were located: Woz’s muzzle.

Long, powerful jaws, sprouting from within the immense fat cave they had sunken into, reaching out for the bright crystalline lattice that looked to be just a stone’s throw away from the gator god. Woz’s dominion over gravity ensuring that not only was he being “propelled” closer to his snack, but said snack was repositioned so it could more easily slide into him once he came close enough to it. He no longer needed any of the harvester drone ships; he could just as easily command the universe to bend the knee and give him what he wanted… though, not in solids.

At least not in ones as big as that diamond. No, he needed something more, needed not only to provide to reality itself that he was there to stay, that he was its new lord and hungry master, but something to help make that snack even more filling; not necessarily as much as a meal, but more than it would be if he didn’t give it a boost. He’d thought long and (not especially) hard on it before coming to the conclusion that, if a burp had gotten him that far, then a burp would unlock the path forward.

It was a means of impressing his power upon things. By opening his mouth and belching, releasing months of pent-up gas in one gargantuan pressure wave, he could very easily turn that diamond and turn it into dust, brightly shining shavings thinner than sawdust, projected outwards at a fraction of the speed of light by the magnitude of a burp that no one could hear. They all saw it though: Woz opening his mouth, his entire body rumbling, followed by starlight around his mouth distorting and the diamond core of Jupiter being atomised in an instant.

Not that it remained as such for long. Woz wasn’t about to waste a perfectly food planetary core, even if it was reduced to little more than tiny, imperceptible pieces a fraction of an atomic radius. Thus, after opening his mouth the first time to destroy the diamond, he opened it again and sucked the resulting debris back in, almost immediately growing so much that he had to physically halt his expansion before he slammed into Mars and Saturn proper.

The belch had done more than just destroy his snack for easier consumption: it had imbued it with part of his power, given it more than it already had, thus allowing its comparatively smaller mass to be turned into far, far more after Woz consumed it. A ratio that could only be properly described with a small tower of exponentials, all of it redirected into more fat for his body to be padded with… and more hunger for him to lose his mind to.

As the energised shards were transformed into gator pudge, so too did Woz’s stomach grow to accommodate for his massively increased gut; and, in doing so, his ravenous need for consumption skyrocketed, enough that he barely had time to notice how his physical self had already taken out a significant chunk of the asteroid belt and was within miles of shattering the two closest planets to him. Thankfully, he didn’t need to worry too much about that last one; after all, he was intending to eat them anyway.

No more games. He had mastered gravity precisely so he could drag the rest of the system closer to him, just so he could blow the planets into bits with his burping and then reabsorb them, growing so immense and fat in the process that he could do the same to the damned Sun. He wasn’t going to leave it at half-measures: if he tore Jupiter’s core to shreds, then he could do the same to Mars in its entirety, and if he did that, then he could use the red planet’s size boost to help him get rid of Saturn.

An orgy of consumption, was what it was. Much like back on Earth, Woz once again risked completely losing himself to the gluttony of it, no longer ruled by rational thought, but the base instincts of desire and hunger. He knew what he had to do, and knew this would let him reach his goal; that was all he had, and all he really needed, seeing as until the Sun’s turn came along, the process was remarkably simple: pull a planet to his mouth, burp, then suck up the imbued shreds of rock and wisps of gas. Let it all “settle” on him, creating so much more gator that it strained the stability of local reality, then rinse and repeat.

Should anyone be looking from a vantage point, a hypothetical bird’s eye view of the Solar System, they would be witness to a spectacle unlike any other. Woz was already perfectly visible: one didn’t take up the space between Mars and Saturn without being one hell of a landmark in the great void beyond. But navigation through the system would be made even easier once the gator pulled every other substellar body towards him, down to the smallest comet and asteroid: in a matter of minutes, if it orbited the Sun, then it was turned into more food for Woz, in the constant cycle of destruction and reabsorption that left him increasingly bigger.

He was a divinity asserting his right, sweeping up his proverbial backyard into his growing gut, until nothing remained of the Solar System but the one object that gave it its name. Every planet, rocky or gaseous, every pebble, every chunk of ice that had once orbited the Sun, all of it had been dragged in, atomised, and then consumed; meanwhile, Woz himself had gone from “merely” taking up multiple orbits to, much like his wilder dreams, rivalling the Sun itself for size.

It was part of the plan, or, at least, whatever passed for a plan in that brain of his. He didn’t much think about things as he did just wonder how good it would be if they happened, then took steps towards that direction. He hadn’t sat down and carefully orchestrated every step of his progression; he just ate, and this just happened to make him big enough that now he could consume the Sun and be done with it.

Or, not quite. He was big, yes, but not yet so big that he could chomp down on the star in one go; and, frankly, if he had gone that far, it would be a waste for him not to go the full way and grow that extra bit to make sure he could snack on that ball of plasma like it was meant to be: slowly, delectably, one step at a time, until there was nothing left of it but the void it used to occupy.

Just the thought of it alone was enough to cause Woz’s entire body to rumble as if it was famished, as if his stomach wasn’t stuffed to the nines with multiple planets’ worth of mass being quickly reconfigured into additional fat. Just the thought of it was enough to make Woz quiver, his knees noticeably weak even under the cover of all that gator pudge. He wasn’t meant to devour the Sun, no one was; no one person, no one entity was supposed to have that level of destructive power… but he did.

He did, and he was going to use it. Now that his physical form was so immense that he could compete with the star for size, there was no reason not to fully throw himself into the maddened debauchery of stellar consumption; now that he was prepared for it, no reason not to make good use of said preparation to, at long last, do what had to be done. He was ready for it, he wanted it to happen, and no one remained that could stop him.

So, he moved closer. With his newfound mastery of gravity, it was easy enough for the gator god to move his titanic self closer to the star, inching towards it one little push at a time. Granted, every “push” encompassed several thousand miles, if not more, but what were distances and scales for a divine creature like himself? He wanted to get closer to the Sun, so he did: he could then watch as the stellar engine grew closer and closer still, its size and magnificence taking up his entire field of view, widening until it was all he could see.

The heat would’ve been an issue, were he not already perfectly insulated to it; Woz was a furnace of his own, so anything the Sun could throw at him was about as effective as shining a flashlight on a burning building. On the other hand, it did give him a perfect indicator of when he was close enough to begin the consumption proper; while the gator could see the star, he had yet to reach a point where he could just open his mouth and begin drinking from it.

Drinking, because he’d earned one after such a hearty meal. Sure, the Sun wasn’t made of liquid, but that hardly mattered to him; if he wanted to take the coronal ejections caused by his own presence disrupting the surface of the Sun and turn them into a delicious fountain of almost literal fire, he could. It was the sort of thing a god could do, and he was a god, so it stood to reason that he could do it, no more questions needed.

Simply by being there, he pulled on the star’s mass, forcing incalculable amounts of plasma to erupt from its innards to try and rejoin with their true lord and master. Arcs of the stuff, protruding from the burning surface, wide enough that Earth could fit within them multiple times, just waiting for Woz to force them into his mouth: by breaking the semicircle near one of its contact points with the Sun itself, he could bring the resulting “straw” into his mouth, then use it as a means of syphoning as much mass as he could before the coronal ejection destabilised and collapsed… but that was fine, because he could just cause another!

And even if he had to wait until a ring formed properly, he was still bathing in the Sun’s glow, and this meant he was being bombarded by solar wind, which, as far as he cared, was as good of a snack as anything else; an entrée, in fact, for the full course, preparing him for the heartiest, most filling meal of his entire existence. All he had to do was open his mouth and warp local spacetime so all solar wind, all of the particlesparticle emitted by the star he loomed over, were redirected into his mouth, along with all the additional energy he could supply.

It was an investment. By pumping his own power into the Sun’s shine, he ensured that, when it was dumped into him and reprocessed into more mass, he could thoroughly break thermodynamics and get more than what he actually consumed. Did it risk damaging the fabric of reality to an excessive degree? Maybe, but he was a god, and that was just the sort of thing that gods did whenever they were bored. Or hungry. Or both, in his case.

Besides, it made him bigger, and this meant he could get ready to devour whatever was left of the local star after he was finally done with it. No more waiting around for months in order to strip away enough layers, no more having to rely on mass reprocessing facilities when he could just eat whatever he wanted directly, and certainly no more having to expect others to feed him when he could just gorge himself. He had the Sun: it was right there, it was his for the taking, and he was turning every single coronal mass ejection into a glorified straw with which to suck that damned thing dry.

After a while, he needn’t even use his mouth to absorb the solar wind. There was nothing forcing him to in the first place either; it was just gluttony driving him to use the most classical outlet for his hunger, gluttony making him open his jaws so that the endless amounts of mass could be dumped directly into the most efficient outlet. But he was a god; he was a god and he was there, basking in the light of a star that was his to take and do whatever he wanted with: what was stopping him from merely absorbing all that light and turning it into more him?

By then, most of the little ones on his physical form had become so tiny compared to him that they barely even registered anymore; they were there, yes, but… were they? They were as much there as bacteria would be if he were still people-sized, and even his High Priest and their acolytes were more akin to tiny ticks than anything more meaningful. They existed, but they had stopped being important, not when he had an entire star to consume… thus, if they felt the tiniest bit warmer, that was hardly his problem.

There was a whole star’s worth of shine to absorb, and that meant growing to encompass it. He could just as easily bend spacetime to ensure he received every last photon, but wasn’t it better if he didn’t need to do it? If he could just be so immense, so gargantuan, so ridiculously massive that his entire body itself physically surrounded the sun from all directions? It’d take some readjustments and, worst of all, minor acrobatics in order to properly bend himself like that, but it was worth it; once the “circle” was complete and not a single hint of light escaped from within the cocoon of empty space, then Woz knew he’d made the right choice.

It was hot, so hot that he began properly sweating for the first time in months; not just from the constant digestion, not just from having to take all that light and turn it into more of himself, but proper sweating from the sheer heat of it all. But that was but proof that what he was doing was right: that he could just keep going, and, if he were to hold on just enough that the Sun was sapped of just a little bit more of its powers, then he would feel it cool down.

Then, and only then, did he know that he could move in for the kill. Once the eternal shine grew dim, once the unthinkable heat became cold, once the gravitational pull of the star became so weak that Woz himself could barely feel it anymore, then he knew. From within the many folds of his godlike self, his maw emerged yet again, practically forming from nothing as the gator navigated on instinct and divine intuition alone. None would see his eyes: just the jaws, terrifyingly colossal as they were, opening to encompass the diminished Sun, opening wide to welcome the star into them, teeth glinting in the light.

For those on Woz, they saw the inside of his maw, practically glistening with enough saliva to drown multiple worlds. They saw the personification of endless, pure hunger, the living embodiment of the need and desire to eat and nothing else. They saw their god, straining to open his mouth wide enough to fit the entire star in there, groaning loudly enough that they swore it could be heard, even through the vacuum of space. And, for a fleeting moment, they saw his eyes, open wide, looking directly at his prize with a bright glare that could never be mirrored once again.

Only for the jaw to slam shut, and with it, the hopes of ever seeing the Sun ever again.

***

Several light-years away, an observation station in Proxima Centauri began beeping. Built beyond the last planet in the system, floating by its lonesome in the furthest reaches of the system, it had a single purpose: detect, decode, and potentially translate any signal received from the wider universe, in the hopes of finding alien life. Or, at least, intelligent alien life.

Equipped with some of the best sensor equipment that poorly allocated government funding could buy, most of the station’s listening arrays had done very little but pick up on the CMB and occasionally spit out something that was most likely just an asteroid whizzing by. There were rumours among the staff (all six of them on rotation) that the constant signals emitted by one particular planet were actually those of an advanced, industrialised civilisation, but given none of their scouts reported first contact yet, this was seen as a long shot at best.

Until, that is, the instruments lit up and did their best to split the eardrums of the one poor bastard in charge of the station that year, who had to get up from his bunk bed to actually take a look at what was happening. Trying to make sense of what the arrays were picking up was the worst part: out of nowhere, it went from basically silent to sudden shouting, every damned screen, monitor, and print-out producing some form of signal that the onboard AI was unable to make sense of.

It took several manual overrides and a deliberate shifting of processing power away from non-vital station functions for the damned machines to produce something resembling a coherent message. Flashing on the screen for just long enough to petrify the signals operator, the closest the system AI could come to a “translation” of the signal was actually quite simple, if of dubious honesty:

WE COME TO FEAST. PREPARE.

With this, multiple data points indicating some sort of immensely massive object was travelling from the Sol system in the direction of Proxima Centauri; perhaps their scouts should’ve been more diligent, because clearly something was there, and clearly it had plans for its closest neighbour. Figuring out what the object was turned out to be impossible; the machinery kept telling the operator that it was biological in nature, but that was absurd! They would’ve noticed if aof a civilisation reached the level of advancement needed to make FTL bioships… maybe.

Still, better to be safe. Run a calculation on how long it would take, with current data, for the object to reach the outer edge of the system. Then run the calculations again, because clearly the result couldn’t be correct.

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