Warmup Story: Penn’s ‘Possum

Alkali scuffled through the papers on Penn’s desk, muttering to himself. There had to be some sort of clue here… anything would do. There was no way he’d been able to make that opossum get larger without help from someone else after all. Penn was just a silly little otter. Dangerous in the hands of his hyena bodyguard, Bother, but certainly not this dangerous.

A few days ago, Higgs the opossum was a mere 12, perhaps 13 feet tall. Bodybuilder sized and definitely enough to hunch over with ceilings, but that was all. Today though he’d somehow expanded in the blink of an eye to practically 50 feet tall. It was all over in a flash as the white furred marsupial burst through his house’s ceiling and instantly shredded his yellow hazmat suit. Higgs seemed just as surprised as anyone else to see it happen too.

So with Higgs totally in the dark about his growth, Alkali concluded only one other person could’ve caused the growth. Whenever hyenas, opossums, or gryphons grew it was a good bet that Penn was involved somehow. The little blue monstrosity seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of growth related items from parts unknown. Today though his room was remarkably clean, nothing devious or immediately out of place. Thank goodness for Bother letting him into the house to look around. He might have been a big and derpy ‘yena, but he was remarkably pleasant to talk to. Way nicer than Penn at least.

The roo was just about to give up when he noticed a stack of neatly organized papers on top of a dresser. Scrawled at the top of the first sheet was something that immediately caught his eye: “Penn’s Character Sheets.” What, was the otter into Dungeons and Dragons now or something? That’d be mighty entertaining. Even if he couldn’t figure out how Higgs grew, looking these character sheets over could be good for a laugh. Probably some sort of Mary Sue character for Penn, an overpowered magic otter with fire breath and lazer eyes or something else equally ridiculous.

To Alkali’s surprise it didn’t describe any fantasy character at all. Scrawled in pencil under ‘character name’ was Higgs. That was an odd coincidence. Reading further the details kept piling up. Opossum, beefy, scientist… there were too many things in common here with the real life Higgs. The roo started shuffling through the rest of the sheets, finding a whole menagerie of character sheets each for people Penn knew. Bother, Kass, Eterni, they were all here. But most interesting of all was the height stat on Higgs’s sheet.

“Fifty feet tall. Just like in real life,” Alkali muttered. He could even see the erased out old value beneath the 50. It looked like a 12. Well there was no doubt about it now. Something weird was going on with these character sheets. Was Penn playing around with these people as if they were characters? Strange that he’d update the sheet right after Higgs’s growth spurt though. A pencil sat next to the stack of papers. Experimentally, he picked it up and started writing in on an empty character sheet.

“Can’t believe he didn’t make one for me. I’ll fix that quick enough. Alkali. Kangaroo. Six feet tall. Uhm, what else,” he said, starting to fill it in. Once finished he looked over his handiwork with a smile. But it was too boring. Completely accurate sure but if Penn was using this for table top roleplay there probably wasn’t anything wrong with changing his stats around just a bit. At the very least he could make his character stronger, so he could play a warrior class or something.

Alkali started to feel strange immediately as he reallocated points to his Strength stat. His arms bulged cartoonishly and the sleeves around his arms tore and stretched. His jeans didn’t fare much better as the seams popped quickly. The roo shook his head in surprise, looking himself over. That was bizzare. His body proportions had suddenly shifted from lightly pudgy to downright beefy. Flexing an arm, his sleeves rolled back over the bicep. They sure seemed real too. How could-

The character sheets. No way. He looked down at his Strength stat again. It was only a change of one number, bumping it up from 2 to 3. Could it have bulked him up? Excited now, the roo erased his height value and wrote ‘seven feet tall’ instead. Dizziness came over the roo instantly and the character sheet glowed a light green. Shaking his head again, he looked down to see his clothes threadbare against his grey and white fur. His shoes had burst apart, no longer the correct size. And looking around the room revealed that everything was just a bit shorter around him. Well that settled it. These character sheets could change people in real life too. Though he didn’t even notice the change thanks to whatever dizziness had affected him at the time. Well that was no fun. How could he enjoy changing himself if he’d just sorta black out each time?

He looked back at the stack of character sheets and a devious smile spread on his lips. Well if he couldn’t enjoy it, maybe he could enjoy other people growing instead.

---

Penn woke up screaming.

This wasn't an unusual occurrence of course, Penn spent most of his waking hours (and a few of the sleeping ones) shrieking himself hoarse. This was just his way of getting up in the morning. Greeting the day with blood curdling otter screams

Today though he actually had a reason to be screaming. The mustelid was aroused from his sleep by an encroaching wall of white fur. He’d fallen asleep between Higg's fluffy opossum pecs last night so white fur was part of the deal already. But something felt different now. There was more fur, and it felt softer too. Rather than the hard, warm bed of muscles he’d gone to sleep on now it felt more like… fat. That definitely wasn’t right.

Penn rolled over off his back and tried to get a bearing on his surroundings. Lots of white fur in just about every direction, so that was still correct. And the pecs were still here too. But they looked larger than he remembered, broader somehow. And just below the shelf of pecs sat something else that didn’t belong. A rounded gut, absolutely enormous and pressing up against his back. Penn headbutted the wall of white flab to prove to himself it was actually there and he wasn’t just sleeping. It wobbled and swayed, squishing against the blue otter’s head.

“OUTRAGEOUS!!” he yelled. “Fluff monster! You will wake up and explain this!” The mountain of white fur shifted, rumbling a bit. A head appeared over the horizon of opossum beef and fat, looking down at the little blue otter. Higgs yawned, then smiled down at his passenger. Then he looked a bit further and his smiled dropped. That was a lot of extra weight on his frame. The opossum placed a hand on his house-sized gut, pressing lightly into it. It squished gently between his fingers, rolling to the sides as it repositioned itself over his torso. The science opossum looked down at Penn with a quirked eyebrow.

“How dare you blame this on me, ME! The sweet and virtuous Penn! You did it! You went out and ate something you weren’t supposed to didn’t you?” Penn peeped furiously. Higgs shook his head no. “Well if you didn’t do it then what happened?!” This was quite the brainteaser. All they knew was he went to sleep buff and woke up with a gut that would make Penn’s badger friends blush. There had to be some reason.

Then Penn realized. The character sheets. Something must be going on. “Hairbeast! Take me to my fortress of darkness NOW!” the otter commanded.

The fortress of absolute darkness (a small two story house in a rural suburb) shook down to its foundations as the hulking opossum approached. The otter leapt off his perch on Higgs’s shoulder, flipping through the air to land on the ground perfectly just as his otter MASTERY allowed him (or in reality, jumped three feet to the ground off Higgs’s hand). He tore through the house toward his bedroom, only to find it was already occupied by a kangaroo. A very large kangaroo.

“What are you doing here?” he screamed at Alkali. “AND WHY ARE YOU HUGE, YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED TO BE ENORMOUS!”

Alkali looked down at Penn, standing down at the foot of his bed. The roo was sprawled across the entire thing, easily ten feet tall and built like a titan. “Oh shoot, you’re here already? Was hoping I could get another few minutes toying around with these before you came to spoil my fun,” Alkali replied, holding a stack of character sheets in his hand. With a stroke of his pencil he finished adding another trait to his sheet, expanding to 15 feet tall with an explosive burst. Penn was pushed backward by Alkali’s foot as it grew, and a stream of curses followed from the otter.

“GIVE THOSE BACK, THEY’RE NOT YOURS!” Penn cried. With furious battlepeeps, the otter scrambled up the roo’s body toward his hands. Alkali couldn’t quite keep up with his movements, swatting around but unable to connect with the blue bolt of fur. He was still squirming when he realized all the character sheets were gone.

Penn laid them out on the floor, grabbing another pencil to start writing. “You’ve ruined them! So many things to fix! AUGH!” he yelled. Higgs’s sheet was the first to remedy, for sure. Whoever heard of a fat opossum? Ridiculous! The strength modifier was all wrong. Penn changed the 10 to a 20. That would absolutely solve it.

Higgs sat outside, trying to peek in through the windows to figure out just what was happening. He didn’t understand why Penn needed to get back here so quickly. Wasn’t getting rid of his weight more important right now? Sure it felt kinda nice to give himself belly rubs, but it was throwing his center of balance off so horribly. And how could he perform experiments with all the extra space in front of him taken up?

A lightheadedness struck the opossum all at once. His eyes lidded slightly as his body pulsed. With each throb his muscles seemed to expand all over. Sitting crosslegged became increasingly difficult as his leg muscles thickened, rubbing against each other and struggling to stay bent. Pecs expanded under the opossum’s muzzle, widening and thickening outward to become a proper shelf of muscle. The gut remained firmly in place though, resting against the top of his beefed up legs. Once the growth spurt was finished he placed a hand against his forehead. What the heck was that? His arm muscles groaned and stretched with each rub to his temples.

Inside the house things weren’t going very well. Penn and Alkali were in the middle of a fight to control the pencil and paper. Each time they stole it back to try and fix the character sheet, they only had it for seconds before losing it again. The room was a mess with broken furniture thanks to the roo, and Penn’s bite marks covered Alkali’s hands.

The character sheet was starting to suffer for it too. Alkali added a 20 to the Weight column. Penn retaliated with another 0 on the Strength stat. Alkali fired back with two zeroes in weight again. And back and forth it went, spilling over into the Height statistic, and once increasing the Hyper statistic when Alkali was feeling particularly cheeky.

Finally, Penn was able to knock the pencil out of Alkali’s palm. “ENOUGH!” he squeaked. Now he had the character sheet, while the roo was forced to start looking across the floor for something to write with. That gave the otter plenty of time to start erasing some of these things and get Higgs back to normal. Maybe he’d leave the height alone though. And the Strength too. Big and beefy opossum, much larger than usual, just the way it was supposed to be.

With a heavy kick to the otter’s head, Penn flew off impacting the wall. Alkali picked up the crumbled and damaged paper triumphantly. “There. Finally… now I can just-” he started, before he received a super sweet flying otterkick against the side of his head too. Briefly dazed, he could feel Penn trying to take the character sheet back. But Alkali wasn’t going to let that happen. He clamped his hand down harder and pulled backward, resisting the otter’s movement.

SSSHHHRIP

Instantly, the two furs stopped fighting. They looked to their hands and found a piece of paper, battered and bruised, ripped clean down the middle. Alkali looked down at Penn, and the otter returned his stare.

Alkali shuffled his paws awkwardly, looking around. “Uhh. That’s… not good right?”

“Not really, no,” Penn answered, surprisingly lucid rather than ragefilled. “Haven’t had this happen before. Think it means the changes can’t be reversed until we make a new one.”

“Oh, well that’s good! Let’s just get a new sheet out.”

Penn nodded sagely and went back to his stack of DnD papers, searching through them. He had to stand on his tiptoes to reach all the way up to the dresser. “I know I had an extra left here. Thank goodness I kept that last one.”

The roo’s face instantly turned grim. “Uhh. Last one? As in, you only had one empty character sheet?”

“Yeah, the witch that I punched and stole these from didn’t have that many in the first place. Gimme some help looking for it.”

Alkali looked down at the floor, and at his character sheet sitting there. “Oh. That might be a problem. I kinda used the last one. On myself.”

Suddenly, as if he remembered just who he was, Penn turned around with pure malice in his eyes. “YOU WHAT! WELL NOW WHAT ARE WE SUPPOSED TO DO? THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT!” he screamed.

“My fault?” Alkali answered, raising his voice. “This is your fault! If you hadn’t messed with Higgs in the first place none of this would’ve happened.”

“HOW WAS I SUPPOSED TO KNOW SOME SMELLY KANGAROO WOULD COME AND TRY TO CHANGE MY MAGIC CHARACTER SHEETS? AND THEN YOU RIPPED IT! NOW WE CAN’T GET HIM BACK TO NORMAL!”

“SMELLY? Now listen here you little squeaky toy-”

Outside the house, Higgs was positively quaking. Something had gone majorly wrong with his body, and he couldn’t control it. Growing out of control now, all parts of him starting to rub up against each other, the ground was trembling with the increasing mass of the opossum. He couldn’t tell how tall he was anymore. Five hundred feet maybe? There was no good measurement to use against himself out in the suburbs like this. And that was to say nothing for all his body parts making it harder for him to move, and see. Between his muscles, belly, and bulge below, Higgs was absolutely ripped and huge from head to toe. He had no way of knowing this, but his body was still struggling to catch up with all the changes the duo inside the house had made. There was plenty more growth to be had.

Higgs sighed. If only Penn would just come outside and try to fix this…