The reindeer stared cold and furious at his captor, grunting through the inky gloss binding his lips and rocking even harder against the bed. “Such impatience and arrogance… oh, it makes you so bold, so brilliant, but it will not due stretched across the many moons I expect us to share, love.” Rica stretched her hoof over the railing, draping it across the bulges of Snowplow’s chest. “But set your mind at ease. All your red-hot anger will soon be red-hot passion.” She reached behind his head, turning it to face her directly. Her breaths were growing heavier, and Snowplow’s eyes widened as he noticed an indescribable blackness seeping out of her mouth with every labored breath. “Snowplow… I knew this day would come, that you would be delivered to me, from the day that we met… now, embrace it!” The llama puckered her lips, and threw her breasts and her belly over the railing and onto the bed, her face racing towards Snowplow’s. 
	None of the giants in that room - the llama, the reindeer, and the bariatric bed alike - were quite prepared for what came next. A sickening snap jolted Rica out of her obsessive trance; she had seconds to glance down at the side of the bed as she felt the railing crumpling beneath her flab. The entire bed shuddered beneath the quivering witch, who was frantically trying to reinforce her end of the bed with a lethargic tangle of shadows. It was too little, too late, however, as a crunch reverberated through the room. Rica’s line of sight was swamped by an incoming tide of gray, fuzzy blubber, and she barely had time to help before that tide bowled her to the ground, her eyes practically popping out of her head as she sputtered and wheezed beneath the jiggling boulder that was Snowplow. 
	“Ge….. goff….” Rica hacked out, groaning as hundreds upon hundreds of pounds of blubber smothered her into the ground. Her shadow flailed beside her, a tendril sluggishly reaching towards Snowplow’s rolling backside. “Goff…!” The tendril wriggled its way across the deer’s bulk, nestling itself in the yawning crater the small of his back had become, and shoved itself mightily against the blubbery anchor. For a few brief seconds Snowplow’s colossal frame began to lift off the llama, giving her precious time to greedily suck in some air. It was only seconds, though, and the blob hadn’t even cleared a foot of space before the tendril buckled and sent him crashing back down on top of her, body slamming every gasping breath clear out of her just as badly as before. An embarrassed belch rumbled out of the deer’s mouth, but a mocking giggle followed it afterwards. “It would appear, Shadow Witch, that you are unable to handle this delivery. Or perhaps I could say that it is you who is not ready to embrace meEEE!”
	Snowplow hollered as suddenly dozens upon dozens of tendrils suctioned themselves to his backside; to his extraordinary shock and surprise, he felt his body jolt violently up into the air, squirming atop the mass of inky appendages. “Idiot… idiot…” From somewhere beneath him, Rica was rasping out insults, her voice harsh and rattling and dripping with venom. Directly beneath him he felt the shadows converging; the wobbling deer had just enough wherewithal to feel his blubbery backside slipping into a shape not unlike a catcher’s mitt. “You big fat idiot! Who the hell do you think…” Snowplow’s buried muscles tensed, his body tilting as the obsidian mitt angled him out and away from the witch, tightening up and winding up for the pitch. “...you’re fucking with?!” In less than a second Snowplow was streaking through the air, a comet rippling with lard whistling across the room. His tonnage smashed into the wall, cracks spidering off from the impact crater his gut had made, and he shakily stumbled to his hooves, standing on uneasy, quivering legs. 
	“What the hell…?!” Rica’s shadows had stitched themselves into a bariatric crane, plucking her up onto her own shaking hooves, and as she stood there, her jaw went slack. Not more than a dozen feet away from her, Snowplow was bracing himself against the wall, his legs threatening to buckle beneath him, but still somehow standing on hooves no longer blanketed by blubber. That monumental gut had seemingly hitched itself up, and before the witch’s horrified eyes it was continuing to tug itself upward and out of existence, centimeters at a time. “No no no no no…!” She howled at the ambulatory goliath. “You can’t do that! You’re not supposed to do that!” Rica smacked her hooves together, her crane disassembling itself into a swarming mass of dark globs. “I didn’t say you could do that!” The globs shot out towards Snowplow, converging into a web as they zeroed in on him. 
	Seconds stood between Snowplow and immobilization. His bandolier, his quiver, his arrows, everything he relied on was in a trunk miles and minutes away from him. His heart pounding, the deer’s eyes darted from side to side until he spotted the enormous cheesecake platter he’d picked clean in what felt like another lifetime ago. “That will do!” His arm jerked out and snatched up the platter, and he pulled out out in front of the web, grunting as the impact shoved him back up against the wall, his knees nearly giving out beneath him. He heard Rica bellowing in front of him, and saw the web stretching out towards his fingers. “You are a nurse… so you have to tidy up this mess! This is your responsibility!” Snowplow yelled, flinging the platter at Rica’s nightmarish face. 
	The cheesecake tray flew short of its mark, skewing to the side and smacking into the center of Rica’s chest. The witch gagged, her eyes crossing as the wind exploded out of her lungs for the third time in just as many minutes. In her dazed confusion she heard something rumbling towards her, the sound of tile cracking and the sensation of the earth quaking beneath her hooves, before a hoof pounded into her cheek with the force of a locomotive. White-hot pain ricocheted through Rica’s face as she stumbled backwards. “You want an embrace… I give you an embrace!” Snowplow roared, throwing his arms around her wobbling stomach, latching on tight as his hooves pounded forward. Rica opened her mouth to try and snap back at him, but only a strangled yelp choked its way out when her bulk plowed into the wall, crumpling into a breathless, dizzy heap on the floor. The hero panted, dripping with sweat, wiping his brow before settling his hooves on his love handles as his body shook and heaved. “Maybe Pick… was right about sumo…” he chuckled to himself. He reached down to pat his stomach, and quietly gasped as he felt the ripples of his fat coming up far shorter than before. His hooves rolled down his sides, and Snowplow permitted himself a tiny smile when he didn’t feel his underarms jiggling against his flanks.
	“Urgh… so you want a fight, fat ass…” Snowplow groaned, throwing his hooves off his flab and up in front of himself as Rica’s head tilted up to meet him, her muzzle elongating, widening itself into a scowling snout. The llama had dropped next to the hospital fridge, and now the deer watched as she threw a quivering hoof on top of the fridge, the hoof stretching itself into a thick, webbed paw. The pinafore dress, tattered and frayed from the fight, exploded into a cloud of white confetti, the matted fur beneath growing smooth and slick as it bulged outward with firm blubber. “Let me show you, my dear… stupid… Snowplow…” Beady, livid eyes glared up at him from above a snout puffing angrily at the deer, as the shadowy hippo struggled onto trunklike legs. “Why you don’t fuck with Rica…!” 
	Snowplow took a step backwards, his eyes widening as the fridge suddenly swung out to where the biggest bulge of his belly had been just seconds ago. “Oh deer…” He gulped, pivoting awkwardly around and waddling hurriedly away from the hippo, snarling behind him. His eyes were madly scanning the room now, the bottom of his sagging gut slapping against his knees with every panicked waddle forward. Snowplow’s heart was hammering hard enough to reverberate through his ears, but above the din of his own terror he heard something else from behind him. The deer chanced a look back, and his jaw dropped just a bit before picking itself back up into a satisfied grin. “So that is what it is…” His hoof went down to his gut, touching the bottom for the first time in a lifetime, while his eyes trailed their way towards Rica’s sloshing midsection. “One loses, one gains…” His eyes twinkled when he found his hoof suddenly grasping at the thin air his blubbery apron had occupied before.”My loss is her gain…!” 
	Even taking into account the tremendous amount of furious pounds of blubber the hippo-llama had voluntarily piled onto herself, there was no denying the increasingly obvious fact that her growth hadn’t stopped alongside her transformation. Right in front of Snowplow, Rica was growing wider by the second, her hips careening wildly from side to side over a half a dozen feet in either direction. The swollen ball that was the hippo’s stomach now swayed dangerously close to the floor, every tile-shattering step dragging it laboriously along mere inches above the ground. The legs straddling that gravid mound of a gut had blimped out with enough fat to put Snowplow’s entire waist to shame, huge, heavy rolls of lard jiggling and bouncing against the sides of her enormous overhang. The evidence was as abundant as Rica herself: she was as big as they got, and if she fell as hard as she could, there wouldn’t be any getting back up from that. 
	Snowplow spun himself back around, his gut jiggling against his thighs, and waddled his way towards the wreckage of the bed, snatching up the medical chart Jude had thrown onto his end table. Without bothering to aim, he tossed it in the apoplectic hippo’s general direction, wincing at the sound of the fridge smashing into it and shattering it into a million splinters. “You… idiot… you really think… that would work twice on… Rica…?!” The deer’s ears perked up, and he nodded to himself when all he picked up was the hippo gasping and wheezing for air, her body stopped cold in its oversized tracks. Snowplow bent down towards the bed frame, grunting and panting as his diminished but still considerable gut bunched up against him. His hooves wrapped around the bent and battered railing, and he leaned back, straining his rapidly-dwindling weight against it. He heard Rica take a wobbling step towards him, and gritted his teeth, throwing his rapidly-evaporating poundage into his efforts. “I am gonna crush you like the insect you are, Snowplow!” The railing snapped free, and Snowplow tumbled onto his hooves, his slight pot belly jiggling as he stared up at the huffing black blob barreling towards him like the world’s fattest quarterback, fridge in paws. 
	The hero dived down to the ground, railing in hand, sliding just beside the gelatinous battering ram. He threw the railing out in front of her paws, white-knuckling his grip and gritting his teeth. “Please work…!” Rica, almost literally blind with rage, jerked her head down towards Snowplow just after he threw himself to the floor, but her paws kept her stumbling forward, and stumbled right over the railing. Her eyes went wide as she realized what was happening, but before she could react she felt herself tripping forward, her humongous form tilting closer and closer to the floor with every step until gravity won out and brought her crashing onto the immobilizing medicine ball her stomach had become.
	Snowplow rolled onto his back, looking down over his own body, and gasped in delight. Every last ounce of fat had been picked clean from his body; he poked and prodded himself and beamed as the taut, lean muscle that defined him responded to his experimental touch. With a grunt, he sprung up to his hooves, yanking his tentlike bed sheet off the mess of his former bed and wrapping it around himself until he felt sufficiently decent. He strolled over towards Rica, whose limbs were splayed out comically atop the dizzying sprawl of her stomach, each of those limbs easily twice as wide around and heavy as Snowplow himself. “You wanted me, Shadow Witch, and now you have me,” he said to the dazed blob, prodding one of her sagging flanks. “Every fat, heavy pound of me. Hopefully you enjoy it more than I did.” 
	Rica weakly moaned, but Snowplow didn’t react. The deer cinched up the sheets lashed around his waist and walked out, leaving the helpless hippo beached atop the crater her body had pummeled into the floor. She lied there for a moment, her shadows slithering down into the crater, trying in vain to heave her tonnage up off the floor, but after dozens of wasted efforts to lift her beached body up, she banished the shadows with a heavy sigh. “This is that lard-brained pig’s fault…” she muttered bitterly to herself. “I ought to give him several… hundred… pieces of my mind…” She closed her eyes, letting the darkness envelop her body, her muzzle narrowing back down to her familiar snout, her paws knotting themselves back into hooves, fur sprouting up across the wreckage of her blubbery body. “He will regret making Rica the llama into Rica the hippo…” She cackled to herself, thrusting her lower hooves towards the ground. “He… what…?!” She thrust again, the devilish glee ebbing from her face as she felt her plump leg sliding up against the underside of her mountainous stomach, her hoof kicking at the air just above the ground. “What the fuck…?!” Her eyes blinked open and she found herself staring at a llama gut practically identical to the hippopotamus belly she had straddled seconds ago, the only muted difference being the mat of fur stretched thin across its expanse. “No, no, no no no no no…!” 
	“Yes, yes, yes yes yes yes yes…!” Her blood ran cold, and she flailed uselessly in her crater, panting as her mass quaked beneath her. Footsteps echoed through the ruined bariatric ward, hooves clattering against the rubble of her fateful showdown with Snowplow. They were slow, methodical, each hoof coming down harder than necessary against the cracked tile. She was absolutely certain that she knew exactly which loathsome figure was making its way to her.
“S-snowplow?” It was more the desperate hope of a hopeless witch; she heard the mocking trill of that lunkheaded voice, she recognized the sloshing of that piggish gut. She very badly hoped that the beady eyes and the fat face glinting down at her belonged to anyone but the bastard responsible for her dire circumstances. An unflattering blend of fear and loathing contorted her own pudgy face as the hog squatted down in front of her, his hoof condescendingly wrapping around her jowls. “Y-you…!” 
An oily fist reared up beside the anchored blob, rocketing towards Dead Weight, but he didn’t even flinch as he caught it in his free hoof, grinning mockingly down at the weighty witch. “Sorry, Miss Broo-Jah, but you gettin’ a bit too chunky to handle me.” His grip around the fist tightened, and Rica watched in horror as that fist suddenly bloated outward. “And you’re only gonna get, uh… chunkier, if you keep bein’ a li’l pill…” Dead Weight released the fist and pointed down at Rica’s own corporeal arm, and her eyes nearly popped out of their sockets as she saw that arm blimping out with another layer of heavy flab, pressing down thickly into her stomach. “Well, I guess there isn’t exactly anything little about you now, is there?” 
Another shadowy fist flew out towards Dead Weight, but stopped just shy of his outstretched hoof. Rica was glaring up at the pig with sheer, unbridled hatred, baring her teeth and hissing furiously through them. “I am going to kill you, Dead Weight,” she muttered, eliciting a cruel chuckle from the rogue porker. “I am going to strip you down and tie you up and throw you into a vat of oil and turn you into the fattest, greasiest ham dinner in the world, you pigheaded… pig!” She spat at the hog, quaking with murderous indignation. 
“Tasty as I probably am, can’t say I much approve of that.” Dead Weight patted Rica’s fat cheek, and shoved himself back up to his hooves, waddling over towards a distant corner of the ward and bending over to pick up his nurse’s hat off the ground. He plopped it down on his head, fussing with it until it sat askance on his curly mop. “Gotta say, think I’m gonna make a pretty good nurse for you, though… don’t get too fussy with me, and I might even help you drop a pound every other year or so.” He waddled back to the blob, drumming his hooves against her billowing buttocks, tattooing out an uncomfortably deliberate pattern. “Just, uh, shake and lay prostrate if you agree to those terms. You oughta know what that looks like, yeah?” Rica seethed, turning over method after method of flaying every ounce of fat from Dead Weight’s big bones, frying him in his own wretched grease, stuffing herself on reams of ham, guzzling down cheap garbage drinks, glutting herself on rich, decadent cakes. She blanched, screaming inwardly as her thoughts turned to delicious, fattening foods and utterly shameless gorging, her cavernous stomach rumbling beneath her. “Well, Miss Broo-Jah, sounds like you worked yourself up an appetite. Let’s get the ball rolling, yeah?” And in spite of the seething fury coursing through her blood, Rica’s mouth watered.