Ben Biggerer- Part 1

Ben Bigger is named president of the Belobog Construction Company for a time, but heavy is the bear that wears the crown- and he can't seem to calculate a way to bring his weight down. Enjoy!

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"...Wait, what? You want me to be President?"

Ben Bigger, the chief accountant for Belobog Heavy Industries, stared down at Koleda— the fiery young woman, her mane of red hair bouncing as she furiously moved around her office, grabbing things and throwing them into a bag.

"Doi, Ben. Look, who else am I going to leave in charge, Grace?" She huffed, looking around the office. "Have you seen my back-up charger for the low-grade demolitions?"

"I, uh— You keep that in your office?"

"Where do you want me to keep it, in the break room?" Koleda snapped before spotting an ominous looking black box with a big, red button. "Ah! There it is." She turned to face the bear thiren. "Look Ben, you're the only one of the lugheads around here that I trust with, you know, actually keeping my family's business afloat."

"I…" Ben spread his thick hands, the tall, burly, brown-furred beast at a loss. "I-I mean, I can try."

Koleda hefted up her sledgehammer, and pressed it against Ben's chest. "Look, Bigger— I'm going after my Dad. I have the first promising lead in ages that he might be somewhere, dropped off somewhere by an errant Hollow— I am going to bring him home. But it might take… a year."

"A year?" Ben blustered.

"You've been doing all the number work here for, what, a decade? A year'll go by like that." Koleda snapped her fingers. "Go on—" she gestured to the large chair behind her desk. "Take a seat, keep the throne warm for me and all that."

The brown bear's brow furrowed as he gently pulled out the chair and sat down. "Huh." He tapped his claws against the desktop. "It's… roomier than I thought it would be." Koleda smirked. "I always thought it was just right." She winked at Ben. "Try not to burn the place down while I'm gone— I want Belobog to be in the best shape of its life when I bring dad home."

Ben puffed his cheeks, blowing air out. "You don't ask much, do you?"

"Never settle for less than I want." Koleda's smirk grew toothy, and she gave Ben a mocking salute. "Good luck."

His first day as Acting President, and Ben was already fit to have a conniption. He ran a tight ship as Chief Accountant, but he couldn't do much when Koleda was hiding accounts from him. He could hardly blame her for spending a fortune to find her father Khors, but he had thought she would have informed him as Belobog's money man about the small mountain of debt eating away at Belobog's already narrow profit margin.

"Ugh… Koleda, if you were here and weren't armed to the teeth, I'd wring your little—"

"Lunch time!"

Ben looked up from the pile of papers he had spread across the desk as Anton, Belobog's Onsite Manager, carried in a large bag of take-out.

Ben frowned. "Anton—? What— what is this?"

"Oh, well," the tall and well-muscled man swept back his black hair with his other hand, then set the large bag down on the desk. "Koleda forgot to cancel her usual order— paid through the week— and because it was for the President, and that's you until further notice… Bon appetite."

Ben sighed, shuffling the papers on the desk around as he pulled the bag closer. "Well, I hate seeing good food wasted…" he muttered, but his eyes slowly grew larger as he pulled one, two, three full meal boxes and two smaller boxes filled with rice and vegetables; the three main boxes were all filled with various types of meat, still sizzling. "What the—?" He looked up to Anton. "This is enough food to feed half a team— this can't be what Koleda eats every day! She's a hundred pounds soaking wet!"

"What can I say, boss man? She has an insane metabolism. If you don't want all of it, you can leave it in the breakroom, I guess?" Anton shrugged. He nodded to the desk. "I know she makes, like, tacos out of it— there should be a packet of tortillas and hot sauce in her drawer, there."

"What the—?" Ben opened a drawer, shaking his head. "She keeps this stuff on another demolition charge…"

"You know her, likes to live dangerously."

The bear shook his head as he pulled out a tortilla and began loading it with beef and rice. As he took a bite, however, he felt a pang of heat strike his tongue like a thunderbolt. "Agh! Agh! It'sh hot!"

Anton's brow bounced. "Oh, yeah, she likes it spicy— shit, uhm, you need water, or…?"

Ben gagged, shaking his head. "Milk!" he croaked.

"Right, right, gotcha," Anton rushed down the hall and came back with a gallon jug. He passed it to the burly bear, whose eyes were already watery and bloodshot— then watched with a touch of shock as Ben guzzled down the entire gallon in one go.

"...Crap. You okay, boss?"

Ben huffed and puffed, waving off Anton's concern. "Yeah— yeah. Hoo." He shook his head. "Well, that woke me up…" He glanced down at the meat. "Actually— it's not bad, either. We got more milk to wash it down? I need something that's going to keep me… energized."

Anton scratched the top of his head. "I'll, uh… See what I can do about that, boss."

Ben adapted to the heat of Koleda's lunch order fast enough; it helped to keep him focused on the tangled mess of finances the construction company found itself in, but the food did go quickly. Ben was a bear roughly the size and mass of a large refrigerator, after all— his appetite could handle a meal this size, and the gallons of milk he guzzled down to keep his mouth from burning up— without too much trouble.

But being President, with the rest of the staff bringing him whatever he wanted without question, Ben did indulge… one or two small vices. Lunch, after all, didn't cover breakfast or dinner, which he often might neglect otherwise, with how much work was ahead of him. And when he was eating out, on the company's dime, he might have gotten his favorites more often than not, just to keep him motivated through the hard work. Breakfast featured an increasing amount of honeycakes— with a few saved for the huge lunches he was getting used to. Dinner, well— it was hard to find a lot of black caviar on the cheap, but what he could get a hold of, he spread across toast, rationing it as best he could while distracting the rest of his palette with large cuts of meat.

Being stuck in a small, dark room must have triggered something from his bear nature— a hibernation instinct that must have been roused by sitting on his increasingly fatter ass all day. His large meals only grew in relativity to his paperwork— and eventually, all that food had to go somewhere. The bear was used to sporting a thick middle, and so a few extra pounds on an already hefty frame didn't bother him much. But even when he was down in accounting, doing the odd job with his huge piledriver was more than enough to burn off some calories; and until he unravelled the gordian knot of Belobog's finances, he was all but chained to his desk. 

His fashionable clothes, his custom-made T-shirts and white jacket, began to grow taut— more and more, his gut stuffed with meat and honey demanded more room, filling his lap, spilling over the top of his desk in larger and larger amounts, like the world's slowest but inevitable landslide. His shirts began to ride up, revealing more brown fur and thick bands of honey-fed fat, the sleeves of his jacket more restrictive as hefty brawn was supplemented by a layer of blubber— his pants filling out to the utmost, with his rounded rear and hefty, chunky thighs threatening to split the fabric. Suddenly, that roomy CEO chair wasn't feeling so roomy anymore.

At last, however, he reached a breakthrough and called a meeting. As the highest ranking company officers left, he was joined by Anton and Grace Howard— if they noticed, or had any opinion, on the shocking weight gain the bear had undergone, neither one of them showed it or offered a single comment.

"Alright, sorry about running a bit late, lunch was a little behind— hrrph— schedule," Ben belched softly, wiping his mouth from a drop of hot sauce. He trundled into the room, looming large like a brown mountain over his two co-workers. His wide, globular gut sloshed heavily as he took a few waddling steps, keg-thick thighs rolling off against one another. His jacket clung to his pillowy chest, sleeves filled to bursting with his thickened, flabby arms, the lower reaches barely able to reach his thick love handles. As he spoke, his round cheeks and extra chins warbled.

"Now— I've had to do a lot of work," the obscenely obese bear rumbled. "But I think I've finally found it. It'll mean a bit of belt-tightening in your departments—"

Grace stifled a laugh, which caused Anton and Ben to whip their heads in her direction. "Oh, sorry— sorry! I…" She looked between the two. "Was that… not supposed to be a joke?"

Ben's mouth curled. "Let's… move on. Anyways, there'll be some cuts, but if we can find it in some of our extemporary projects, then we can get back into the black without cutting back anyone's pay— and honestly, we should have enough to treat the crew to… I don't know, pizza parties are too cliche, but I'm thinking some kind of celebratory dinner to keep morale up, something actually nice."

"You expecting there to be a lot of black caviar on the menu, Ben?" Anton asked without skipping a beat.

The blubbery bear looked up from his datapad, glowering at both of them. "Alright, look, I've put on a few… hundred pounds, but if you have a point to make, I suggest you make it to my face instead of a bunch of snide comments muttered under your breath."

"How? We can hardly see your face with your gut several feet in front of it." Anton replied.

"Alright, look here, Ivanov! I may have packed on the pounds in some… weird hibernation-induced frenzy, but I am doing the work to keep this company afloat, and if you think that's outweighed by a few…. short-sighted meal options, well—"

Ben had moved to sink his titanic bulk into a chair, but as soon as he did, the hundreds of pounds of ursine blubber snapped it like a twig— Ben hit the ground with a heavy thump that made the floor shake.

"Oh my God, Ben!" Anton shot up, rushing to his side. "We were just teasing, I promise— are you alright?" He grunted under the effort of grabbing on to one huge, flabby arm to try and get him upright.

"Easy there, Bigger, we got you," Grace said, digging into the folds of back fat to push him up right.

"Ugh, I'm fine, I'm fine! I'm fat, not an invalid!" Ben snarled, waving his thick, clawed hand. As he sat up, his belly spilled in heavy loads over his lap, and pressed against the meeting table, slowly pushing it back. He huffed, realizing that he could only see more of his own belly instead of the desk. "Alright, so… maybe I have let this go too far…" He rumbled, running a thick hand over the crest of his gut.

"It's not… so bad, Bigger," Anton offered lamely. 

Grace snapped her fingers. "Actually— you know what you need, Bigger? You need to get back in the field— A Hollow just opened up near one of our properties, and as our leader right now, it'd do the men good to see you. Why not get the old pile driver, I can get some of my new toys out there, and you can get a taste for fieldwork again." "Go out to the Hollow and do what, Howard? Plug it up?" Ben growled.

"You know, she's actually got a point… Why don't you go? You've been pinned in that office for months, and look what happened," Anton offered. "We can handle things, now that you've given us a blueprint. We're not the math nerd you are, but we can read a graph, Ben."

The bear drummed his claws against his own gut, sending small ripples across the soft, pliable flesh. "Ugh… you may have a point… Gah, I guess pack me a meal to go, then."

"A to-go meal, Ben?" Anton asked pointedly.

Ben huffed. "A small one. What, you want me to starve myself?"

The bear had to find a truck big enough to haul him out to the hollow site. Anton and Grace weren't wrong; it felt good to be out in a room that hadn't felt like it was shrinking the more he sat in it— and the more he ate in it. The Belobog crew were happy, very happy, to see him— even if he heard more "wrecking ball" jokes than he thought was really necessary. As he slowly lumbered towards the huge abyss that was the Hollow, Ben couldn't help but feel small for the first time since he became President— the Hollow was the size of a city block, at least, a yawning black hole that was tearing right through reality— the Belobog crew had constructed a metal walkway that jutted out into it, preparing a few of Grace's robots to drop in to start exploration. Ben had his piledriver slung over his broad shoulder— his strength, at least, hadn't abandoned him.

"Sir, it's good to see, uh… all of you out in the field again," the site foreman said.

Ben thinned his lips, glancing down at him. "Yes. It's… good to be back. I want to survey the Hollow— is that walkway up to standard?"

"Oh, well of course, uhm…" The foreman cleared his throat. "It's… regulated for a thousand pounds with the robots docked."

Ben looked down. "Yeah, and?"

The foreman held up his hands. "Just… so you know, sir."

The bear rolled his eyes— he had weighed himself at the start of the week, he was nine hundred and twenty. How could he have possibly put on more than eighty pounds in less than a week? He moved on to the metal walkway, looking down at the Hollow. His huge, round flanks were pressed up against the railing, and he could feel the metal walkway tremble with each heavy step— it was teetering a fair bit, but he trusted Belobog construction. If they said it held a thousand pounds, then he trusted that… but as he stared into the Hollow, and the metal groaned under his weight, it occurred to Ben— how much did his pile driver weigh again?

He couldn't think of the answer before the metal snapped— he heard the crewmen shout, he felt the rush as the solid metal underneath him gave way, and then he fell into the Hollow, swallowed up by the huge, gaping tear in reality.

Ben had no idea how long it took him to fall, nor how he managed to survive the fall— he was laying on top of his gut, his feet barely scraping against the ground. Before he could orient himself and get a proper bearing of his surroundings, his nose twitched— something around here smelled delicious.