A speed write I finished back in march. Friend gave me a species, and 'boiler room,' and I came up with this. It's short-ish, but hopefully it jazzes some of ya!

Thumbnail by Glaz!

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Abraham grabbed the brim of his sports cap, and fanned his face with the hopes it would spare him from the humid discomfort of the stadium corridor. He walked with his employer, ignoring his rantings about the football players being to blame for damaging his precious equipment. He was a hunchbacked rat with beady eyes, and small circular glasses that magnified his stare when he looked at you. The job had gotten off to a bad start when Abraham burst into raucous laughter the first time he saw those enlarged black eyes on a tiny face, and when they fixed on him with the rat’s squeaky nasal-tone it set him over the edge. Since then they walked the stadiums length in awkward silence, until the heat grew so unbearable that he had to say something.

“Ugh, sweatin’ like a pig in ‘ere. No wonder ya need it fixed, could boil the players alive.”

His employer looked at him with disgust, and turned his pointed nostrils up. As if he had just caught wind of an awful smell and had no choice but to physically articulate his enmity. “Yes. I did notice the perspiration, perhaps a boorish boar such as yourself should invest more thoroughly in the wonders of deodorant. We sell it by the kiosk at the reception desk…”

Abraham snorted. He always snorted when he felt wronged. He looked the sweater vest wearing rodent dead in his ridiculous bifocals, and revved up another billowing snort through his nostrils. “Look pal! I aint a boar, all right? You see any big tusks outta my face? Nah!” He released, his exhalations echoing through the halls. “Y’better take a different tune by the time I get yer boiler fixed, or yer gonna have a little something extra in my invoice fer harassment.”

They arrived at the boiler room, where the heat reached its volcanic peak. With temperatures high and tempers rising the rodent bristled and prepared his retort; but Abraham took the ring of keys he had been provided with by the stadium, and barged his way through the boiler room door. His fat fingers jammed the keys in from the other side, and he made sure it was shut tight. Ensuring he wouldn’t be on the receiving end of any mousy rebuttals.

“Sheesh. Some folks are just fulla hot air.” Abraham said just a touch louder than he had to. It was a trick to see if his incensed friend was still listening from the other side of the door, but if he was, then he made no answer.

He made himself comfortable on a rickety looking crate near the boiler. It was in a bad way. He never knew metal could distend so dangerously that it could resemble an overstuffed balloon. The metal was aglow with heat, casting a menacing red-orange hue over Abraham’s tight fitted boiler suit. It hugged his porcine body, all two hundred and sixty pounds of mechanically minded pork stuffed in a grey and orange heatproof uniform. He brushed his thick brown head-hair aside, turning his neck to get a look at the dial.

It was dusty. No one had checked on this wailing metal monstrosity in years, and suddenly it came as no surprise how the Smokesville sports stadium had turned into such a hellish heat-sink. He shifted his weight carelessly over the crate, making the wood bow under him. Leaning closer, he took a thick cloth from a pocket and rubbed it over the dusty gauge glass. The crate buckled again. Abrahram narrowed his eyes, and searched for the pressure needle. The crate splintered without him noticing. The needle was far past red, and touching the words VENT NOW in bold.

The crate finally collapsed, but Abraham caught himself. Stupidly he touched the boiler, and scalded his sausage fingers. The searing gave him a sudden shock, and he tumbled against the wall. Then tripped ungracefully as a piglet falling into his trough. He felt another spike of heat somewhere down below, but the crashing descent he’d just been put through had left him out of breath and balance. It took a few seconds to realize the source of the incredible heat penetrating his body was coming from behind. Literally, behind. His behind.

He tried to properly stand up, but his legs wouldn’t cooperate. A deep pitched whine preceded a building pressure in his lower body. He felt his butt cheeks expand to the size of beachballs and beyond, by the time he began squealing for help his entire body had taken on a more convex shape and his uniform began to strain. Every wrinkle in his boilersuit was ironed out in an instant as his stomach billowed out, and his chest accumulated a lion’s share of the pressure in his breasts. He was becoming more and more like a ridiculously sweaty balloon by the second!

“H-help! Hey mousey! You there… wheeeeeeeeee!” He squealed louder. No one responded! Panic set in, and he tried to remove himself from the pipe in a mad forward scramble of pulls and thrusts. It refused to budge. The pressure in his inflated body had powerfully squeezed his ass against the metal and locked him into his fate. The boiler continued to vent pressure into Abraham.

Minutes passed like hours. Abraham stretched, oh god, he stretched. Slowly… it was like the relief of popping your back, or unknotting a taut cloister of muscle on your body, mixed with the pinprick tingle of flushing heat across your skin. He wanted it to stop, and snorted, and puffed as loud as he could. Still nothing. His bodily creaking was a thunderstorm in a closed space, no one could hear over him!

Abraham eventually lost the ability to cry for help in its entirety, his cheeks – the face, this time – puffed up into two hot-pink basketball like frames to his chubby snout. He could still breathe, and occasionally whistled out a redolence of language, but for the most part he was too much of a balloon and not enough of a pig to get the attention of anyone outside!

His ears twitched with the sound of tearing. At first he feared the worst. That his delicately taut hide broiling with air was going to blow apart with a terminal bang, but the reality was more embarrassing than terrifying. He tried to crane his neck, puffy double-chins mimicking pumped up tires in his way, to little avail. He could only listen to the tearing of fabric, as his overstuffed pork body tore through the patched segments of his boilersuit. Like cookie dough burgeoning in an oven, his shiny pig-skin bulged through torn-open holes in the uniform and with a loud BOOF, exploded into tatters. A not-so-subtle reminder of what could happen to Abraham himself.

He hoped the conclusion to his botched boiler-job was far away now, or better yet that it would never come, but another malady was added to his frantic brain the moment he swelled so far that he could feel humid brickwork on the edges of his gut and thighs. Dust came from the ceiling, the room shook, violently, dangerously, explosively… ! Abraham closed his eyes, steam jettisoning from his ears and nostrils in overload. This was it, he said to himself. He was gonna blow, he really was. The kaboom was coming, goodbye pig-boy hello bacon-bits…

CRACK-CRACK-CRACK-BANG!

Except he didn’t explode?

He was afloat now. The sudden destruction of the boiler room tore the foundation of the stadium, and he felt himself buoyantly floating toward open air. He felt the metal rod wedge firmly in his backside, but at least he wasn’t still filling. He had a moment to breathe, though he didn’t breathe too deeply. He was wary of overtaxing his body. Abraham felt like an enormous soap bubble, ready to pop… he just hoped he had enough stretch and snap left to clear the makeshift skylight his room destruction had earned him.

“I aint getting my bonus,” he inaudibly snorted to himself.

Squeezing through the tunnel, snagging on a few pieces of loose mortar, almost detonating from the tight fit, and holding himself together by sheer willpower, Abraham exhaled in beautiful relief at the caress of cold wind on his gigantic steamy balloon body. Gently bobbing into the air above the Astroturf, he now had a good idea of how large he had become. Without the four walls squishing him into a cuboid, he approximated at least thirty feet around.

Part of him was almost impressed he had stretched so far. If this caught on, maybe he could start a betting ring on how big folks like him could get? The playfulness made him laugh, and when he didn’t hear his own laughing – instead receiving the sound of thunderous groaning – he panicked. He was still stretching! His guess was off! In a moment of pneumatic horror, Abraham realized the reason he hadn’t burst.

The room was compressing him.

Suddenly a wide-open space in the cool afternoon sky didn’t inspire hope, but fear. He squealed, and his body responded with the deeper bass squealing of taxed rubber. His skin felt so refreshed, but tortured in a unison of abstract stress and pleasure. He closed his eyes, groaning loudly to himself. His body reaching a staggering fourty… fourty five… fifty feet around – and not an inch further. He was packed solid, and the whistling of steam from before returned from his nose and ears.

His breasts, two large pillowy ridges on his mountainous parade balloon body, joined the whistling. Superheated air continued to leak in pinprick form wherever it could, vainly venting the pressure of a pig-turned-boiler flying over the sports field. Like a mascot balloon, overinflated by its team for celebrations.

Another pinprick leaked from his navel.

He squealed, eyes shut. He focused, really focused… Hold… Together… Almost…

His curly tail wound tight like a spring. And he grunted, fat cheeks the only way to locate his head in a divot atop his overloaded blimpish figure.

"Gotta… Hold…"

His sausage fingers went ping one by one, stiffening into absolute pressure-lock, the final extremity that could withstand more pressure. Like a countdown, all ten fingers went ping, ping, ping…
The sixth went ping.

Abraham’s body shook like a bottle of soda, shaken and primed to blow.

The fifth and fourth went ping, ping.

He felt air rush out of the corners of his mouth.

The third and second went, PING! PING!

Abraham tried to coil his fat hands, and felt a moment of total, unrestrained, sedative bliss as the shaking finally stopped. “Aaaaah…”

And then the final went ping… !

Bang! Words failed to describe the awesomeness of the detonation. For a few minutes, Smokesville stadium was graced by a majestic pink pig balloon. Then in seconds, nothing but heated pink scraps, rained down. A craterous formation, smoking with the impact, was all that remained of the spectacle. And finally through the massive hole the blimp emerged, the boiler could be heard finally cooling off.