A tap-tap-tapping.
She rolled over.
A more insistent thrumming of a solid item on equally solid window glass echoed over the bedroom.
She grunted, pulling the covers in tighter.
A constant, ceaseless, cacophonic pounding filled the apartment block with an orchestra of bangs and booms, forcing Radiation-Chan out of bed in a flurry of blankets and pillows.
"Alright! I'm up! I'm up! I swear, if Dragoona locked herself out again, I'll-" She paused, standing in the middle of the room, dark hair falling upon her shoulders. "...let her in, I guess."
She opened the window.
No rain gushed in.
No lost birds flapped through.
And no dragon claws lugged their owner into the green skinned woman's bedroom.
Instead, a perfectly normal tree branch nudged in.
Except there were two of them. And they had no leaves. And they weren't tree branches at all and were in fact attached to a tense looking deer, who's antlered head rested on the open windowsill.
She stared. The deer stared back. She peeped around the sharp blockade of antlers to the street far below, and the hooves floating above it. The deer made a noise between a cough and a sneeze, bringing her back to reality. Remaking eye contact, the beast's wide head inclined to the pile of rubbery, nuclear activity containing clothing bundled up on the floor. Suddenly self conscious, she crossed her arms over deep-black underthings, eyeing the deer warily as her usual suit slipped on.
"Are we...going somewhere?" She asked, as the slap of latex-like gloves echoed off her sleeve.
The beast snuffed.
"...I'm talking to a moose." Pulling on her mask didn't make her feel better. "...and I took non-verbal cues from a moose. Okay."
With a lurch of it's wide, furred head, the deer freed itself from the window, standing... <i>hovering,</i> just outside. A quick toss of it's antlers heavily implied it wanted her to clamber out the window and onto it's shaggy back. An abrupt, masked headshake heavily implied she wanted to do no such thing. A long-suffering eye roll from an animal that shouldn't know how to perform said action heavily implied she was being ridiculous.
Radiation-Chan did not enjoy being judged by a floating reindeer. Frowning, she placed one knee on the windowsill, carefully gripping the sides, looking down at the steep descent to the alleyway far below.
She gulped.
The deer rolled it's eyes again.
Feeling oddly chastened, Radiation-Chan slowly and cautiously clambered over the drop, clinging to the deer-for-dear-life, snugly booted feet kicking wildly at empty air. Despite it's squirming passenger, the animal remained oddly placid, snuffling once when a flailing glove latched around it's left antler. Several butt wriggles later, and wide thighs were firmy hugging the equally soft sides of the more-than-slightly-manhandled-and-equally-perturbed beast.
A click of aeronautical hooves and a shriek from Radiation-chan later, and they were in the air, one holding on with all her strength, the other trying to ignore handfuls of it's fur being mercilessly tugged on. The apartment building rushed by in a blur of motion. A rush of sudden snow and gushing wind washed over her, sending chills running down her back despite the heavy suit. And then, the night was calm. No snow. No roaring gale. Just the sound of bells in her ears and the sleigh at her side.
She looked over.
A bearded man in red waved jauntily at her.
She fainted.
  ***
She was immensely uncomfortable. The garish wallpaper of the ceiling, dotted with candy canes, smiling children and shockingly bright greens and reds did not soothe her newly acquired headache. A cutting sensation in the back of her knees called her attention to her stocking-swallowed legs, draped unceremoniously over a bed-end. A miniature bed end. For the miniature bed her curvy-but-overall-average-sized-body utterly overflowed. She sat up and immediately banged her head on the festive-patterned ceiling.
A low groan escaped her as she gingerly picked herself up, clutching her forehead. Twisting her legs awkwardly around a bedside table furnished with a miniature mug of eggnog(which she sniffed experimentally) and a plate of equally undersized cookies (which she definitely did not taste test.) Leaving more than one crumb in her wake, she proceeded to de-organize a shoe shelf of pointy, bell-attached slippers in the process of getting to the crouch-demanding door, stumbling into a lamppost with no lightbulb other than a string of Christmas lights wrapped around it's base long before she made it to the knob.
And then it swung open, framing the red and green lit outline of a figure half her size.
As she scrambled beneath the lights and half a dozen shoes, the creature's arns shot to it's mouth, a clear gasp escaping it.
Radiation Chan flinched as he narched towards her, shoes jingling; minature in height and delightful in forest green wardrobe. Without a single glance towards her, he walked right on by, stepping over the overturned shelf to delicately, cautiously, retrieve the cookie-filled dish. Radiation-chan sat up guilty, ankle still tangled in festice illumination.
"I-"
"Did you...eat...some?' His voice was a high pitched squeak. It was difficult to tell whether it was his normal pitch or just simply shocked into a shriek.
"Well-"
"And left <i>three whole cookies?"</i>
"Um-"
"Shameful! How truly mortifying. Never, in my entire lifetime, has someone failed to savor every bite of elven bakery! This recipe shall be burned. Come, in accordance to Elf Law and my own moral standings, I will see to it that both justice and a proper pastry are served."
Radiation-chan blinked. Ge'd spoken so quickly, and with such ferocity, she'd hardly picked up any of that.
"No, really the cookie was fine, I-"
But, in a whirlwind of bells and pointy ears, she was seized around her gloved wrist and dragged out of the room, ducking beneath the doorframe and a line of lights trailing from her foot. The room she was dragged into was wide, impossibly wide. A table dominated the chamber, stretching onwards in both directions for what seemed like miles. More of the short, rosy-cheeked..."things," that she couldn't quite seem to call elves, roamed about the room. Milling about at the table with plates piled high, manning rows of a dozen ovens, mixing and stirring various creamy bowls, all in a state of a somehow peaceful chaos.
"EVERYONE!" The one clenching her wrist like an iron chain roared. "ELF LAW NUMBER 1930H-0H!"
The chatter dropped as if he'd fired a gun into their midst. The expression on any of their faces was as if the bullet had pierced each of them individually. Radiation-chan squirmed, oven-wrought sweat rolling in the tight-fit suit.
"Are you sure you don't mean 1830H-0H?" Asked one, raising a finger warily.
In response, the plate of cookies was thrust forward. A gasp rose from the crowd, and those closest scuttled backwards rapidly.
"I'm, um, sorry?" Radiation-chan tried, wincing as far too many little heads swiveled to analyze her.
"No." One spoke up, shaking their head. In a slightly disturbing unision, the elves surrounding him began frowning and head-shaking in turn. "No, No, No, No, No, No, No. No. Your disappointment was so vast you couldn't eat three of our cookies, so we must make it up to you, three hundred fold."
"That's really not nece-" She paused. "You. You don't mean three hundred cookies, do you?"
The elves blinked at her.
"Of course not!" Laughter erupted around the hall, Radiation-Chan's green cheeks turning pink beneath her mask, breathing a sigh of relief all the same.
"Well, in that case-"
"There'll be at least fifty or so cakes thrown in there. A good forty pies, several handfuls of gumdrops, a proper log of mint bark, and-"
She turned to escape, tripping over the flashing decoration-turned-trap from earlier and slapping face first into a plate of the aforementioned gumdrops.
'So excited already! Don't worry, we'll get you settled."
A chair, strangely un-tiny, soon found itself shoved into the back of her knees, prompting a sudden descent of her rump and a muffled yelp. The hurricane of movement resumed like it never stopped, Radiation Chan caught deep in the eye. A shiver coursed through her as puddings and pies and pastries seemed to matierialize before her, freshness practically visible. In the same vein, an elf popped into existence at her side, smiling jovially.
"Too hungry to eat? Don't worry, I feed the reindeer every Tuesday!" Without a care in the world, he scuttled upwards, crawling onto the chair-arm, reaching closer and closer to her mask...
"No thank you." She practically had to swat him away. More than one head turned her way, eyes wide and intrusive. "I, um-"
She paused. It was one thing telling someone one on one that your skin essentially emitted death rays, but...a crowd of happy little "elves" was another.
But they were waiting for an answer.
She fidgeted in her seat.
Her gloved hands wrung themselves.
Her strained cough somehow echoed amidst the ruckus of elf activities.
"I'm, um. My skin's a bit, well..."
"What?"
"Radioactive?"
"What?"
"...nuclear."
"What?"
"...It, uh makes you melt if you touch it."
"Hm. Like the cesspool."
"The. The what?"
But he was already gone, hopped off the chair and onto the floor, sprinting into a cluster of near-identical elves and loudly discussing the matter.
In the time it took them to scamper off, the food continued to rise before Radiation-chan's eyes, a stack of cookies soon edging past her nose.
A sound like a pillow falling off a stepstool caught her attention, and looking back revealed a squad of elves, mummified in reindeer-patterned blankets. A lot of blankets. A lot. She looked them over doubtfully.
"I don't think that's..."
"Don't worry! Hazmat suits only block so many rays! If this weren't enough, we'd all be dead by now." One informed her cheerfully.
"Chernobyl gets presents too." Explained another.
She couldn't help herself. It seemed safe, and she hated the thought of making them all work so hard for nothing...and, before she knew it, her fingers had pulled her mask up over her face, letying wavy dark hair flow free.
"She looks just like a christmas tree!" One elf observed. Loudly.
"Theodore! What a rude way to speak to our guest!" Another scolded.
"It's no big deal, I-"
"You've completely ignored her luminosity! She is a Christmas light, clearly!"
Theodore hung his head in shame.
As the one-sided debate over what green holiday item she resembled more came to a close, each elf eye steadily turned to her, watching expectany. The blanket clad rounder ones stood by her chair like knights, forks and spoons for shield and sword.
She cleared her throat
"What if I'm not hungry?"
The elves looked to each other in confusion. At least ninety of them shrugged.
"Nevermind," She sighed.
She picked up a spoon.
Plunged it into a yellow-hued pudding.
And took the first of many, many, many bites.
  * * *
Elves watched in awe, standing a respectable diatance away from the source of constant chewing and swallowing. The sweating, armored ones continued to suffee. Once she swallowed the fork and nearly nipped the oven mitt straight off one's hand, they'd decided she could feed herself. However, as none of the unshielded elves could get near her, they were in charge of swapping out empty plates with the endless stream of full ones.
A stack of empty pie tins that continued to rise reflected this. So too did the cake pans. And the pudding bowls. And the number of elves taking breaks to keep pace. And the steadily growing, stretching shape bulging beneath acidic lime rubber.
Stopping didn't occur to her. The food was no longer an inconvenience, or a trial. It was a responsibility. An obligation. The guilt of failing to meet such hard work went against Radiation-chan's very nature.
And so her chest swelled with pride-
-and so her belly simply swelled.
The suot was made to contain radiation. Divergence outward from a single point, and her stomach was certainly diverging. The suit became near skin tight around her bloated middle, etching into every detail. Supple flesh took up all of her midriff, rolling out onto her lap almost like liquid, floundering in it's swollen form even over her knees.
Taut rubber onboundless flesh gleamed in the extravagantly lit chamber. She'd shift, and her midriff shifted with her. A brief stretch to the left, and her belly teetered and swayed in it's prison. In response, two impossibly outsized hands would squish into it's surface, heaving it back into lap in a vaguely stable position, jelly-like in it's motion.
She inhaled deeply, briefly and minimally lessening the presence of her stomach, only for her to exhale and allow flesh to re-stretch the suit outwards in a surging current of tummy. The constriction didn't slow her down for a second. A tray of brownies were her next victims, first downing one, then three bites of two at a time, then finally losing either patience or self-control or both and taking the entire tray, tilting it to her lips, and swallowing down her prey.
The appreciative gurgle of her stomach, once again, did nothing to slow her pace. The crumbless tray was blindly passed off to an elf, and seconds afterwards she repeated the process with a tray of sugar cookies.
And two trays of chocolate chip.
And several small villages of gingerbread men.
And another batch of brownies.
A tentatively placed mug of eggnog is downed in seconds, then quickly replaced with a jug bigger than her head. Each thick, gulping guzzle sent her stomach surging out further and further, ovaloid shape mushed against the table's edge, overflowing over both top and bottom as the table forced a wobbling fold in her gut. But, just as everything else, the competition for territorry between squishy and solid mass went ignored.
The jug clattered into an empty pie tin with a hollow thunk. A not-quite-content smile played on Radiation-chan's lips. She stretched lazily, allowing the stomach flesh that outsized her lap, only refraining from drooping to the side due to how utterly packed with desserts it was, to shift and blub as it wished. Yet, unlike her apparent appetite, the suit was far from bottomless. As the doughy lump of tummy warbled in place, bigger than two, nearly three of the elves, it showed weakness in the form of a loud, abrupt, Radiation-Chan eye-widening rip.
She was up like a shot, jutting form of her body dangling like a soft, ungainly diving board.
"I'm full now! Just decided! Yes!" Her arms held her distended middle in as many places as possible, desperate and ineffective at trying to cover as much stomach surface as possible. As she could barely even reach her navel, this wasn't going well. Her hands unintentionally kneaded and stroked her girth in their desperate search, extra flesh moving to and fro, occasionally forced into pillowy puffs of blubber, pushing up and around past the confines of her arms.
"I really-grunt-should stop now-urf-thank you very much-" She backed away from her elven audience, occasionally stumbling from the gravity-shifting weight.
"You're leaving? Already?" One complained. Others nodded along. "Elf culture says three hundred fold, and you're only like...thirty, tops."
Elves crowded around her knees, bemoaning her departure, shoving eclairs and flan into her ankles, taking advantage of the blind spot beneath the blockade of her gullet.
"Wait, no, stop, really-"
"Elf culture says death is a better alternative to baking failure."
Radiation Chan considered this, shoving away a particularly motivated elf bearing a can of whipped cream.
"Well...in my culture, uh...revealing your stomach means...um...you can never eat elf food again." She attempted, already wincing.
A chorus of gasps arose. A wailng sob seemed to echo from nowhere in particular.
"I'll be going then!"
She picked her way through shell shocked looking elves, fairly rigid, most tearing up. They didn't even look up when her tummy unintentionally slapped against them. She'd made her way to a new, promising looking door that seemed to face the street. Her hand wrapped around the knob, cold soaking through her glove like it wasn't even there.
"Then," said an elf with such finality and purpose that even Radiation-chan turned to look, "Your final elf meal will be so good you'll never want another."
They roared like an army marching into battle, and with cake balls exploding overhead like cannonfire, Radiation-Chan lurched outside the hall and into the cold, slamming the door behind her.
Immediately she'd collected a small hill of snow, piled up on the surface of her belly. A few hip shakes sent it scattering to the white-covered floor, only for more to immediately replace it. She sighed, then jumped as the reindeer head appeared out of nowhere and licked the entire snow mound off her in one fell swoop. She blinked at the suddenly vaguely wet extension of herself, wobbling gently from the assault/assistance.
The reindeer in question was attached to another to it's right, and six more in dual rows behind them, all tethered with reigns leading back to a bright, red sleigh. The man in the sleigh, with his uncomfortably accurate fluffy beard and rosy cheeks, waved her over. She hesitated.
"The elves will stack up to reach the knob eventually, and then even I can't stop them." He informed her, cheerfully.
She quickly waddled past the deer and climbed into the sleigh, being sure to keep her distance from the red suited man seated beside her. He inclined his head at her, smiling. She didn't respond, having found being kidnapped by Santa Claus and tantalized by elves tended to catch your tongue.
"The elves are more overzealous than you'd think." He informed her. "Don't feel ashamed, it happens to the best of us."
He glanced down at his own waistline sadly before flicking his wrists, sending the reigns swaying and the reindeer galloping forward. Radiation-chan kept her stomach firmly tucked in her lap, arms holding herself steady. Afflicying Santa Claus with radiation poisoning seemed like a bad idea. Also it gave an embarassingky violent jiggle everytime the sleigh hit a bump.
"Can I go home now?" She asked, hiccuping from a particularly hefty bounce.
""Of course!" He boomed, slightly too energetically. "But first, I..."
Radiation-chan sighed as Santa trailed off, pensive.
"Well, you know Dasher and Dancer, and Prancer and Vixen, Comet and Cupid-"
"Yes." She replied sharply. "Very well."
"AndDonnerandBlitzen." He coughed into a sentence. "But, Rad-chan with your skin so bright-"
"I'm sorry but I am NOT guiding a sl-"
"-won't you help me dispose of a toxic waste cesspool dropped off by the united states military tonight?"
"Oh." She considered this. "A...cesspool?"
"Yes. The candy cane trees have turned a shade of metallic pea-green and the snowmen have started to mutate."
Another crack of the reigns sent the sleigh steadily rising into the air, Radiation-chan removing one hand from her abdomen to grip the door tightly. From the food to the cold to the wind in her hair; it was getting increasingly difficult to pretend this was all a dream.
The "cesspool" came into view a little while later, interrupting the landscape. It'd been the sparkly, cheery elf villages, then endless white snow stretching on endlessly. Just white, white, more white, and then green.
So, so much green.
She'd been imagining a backalley cluster of broken tanks and spilled nuclear waste of uranium or whatever her veins shared with the chemicial, but this was a lake. An uninterrupted, almost serene in it's solid shade, glowing lake of pure, blaring green. The elf outfits weren't garish. This was. She swallowed thickly, setting the bulge of her stomach over the sleigh's side.
"It will be a thankless task." Santa lamented, gazing solemnly into the distance. "Of course, we at the North Pole will be eternally grateful for your duty, but you must never tell anyone of the events that transpire. I understand if you do not accept the task, as the largest reward I can offer is the knowledge that you saved Chris-"
SPLASH.
Santa wildly looked around. The sleigh remained empty, as it had been for the past minute. A certain reindeer rolled it's eyes.
  * * *
She'd sunk like a particularly motivated stone, turning her world flourescent green. The weight of her dessert bloated burden continuously dragged her lower, but she cared little. Her dark flowed in lime-colored liquid like reverse colored seaweed. She didn't inhale, or swallow, or breathe, she simply closed her eyes, gingerly peeled off her gloves, kicked off her boots, and absorbed.
Not taking or stealing. Merely using her body instinctively to inform the thoughtless, brainless contents surrounding her that, "Hey, party's in here."
And the contents listened.
The tiny tearing noise, from what now felt like ages ago, located right between the unreachable gap of belly and thigh, ripples in her ocean. And then it widens. A combination of gut and thigh as green as the poison lakewater swelling outwards, tearing apart her precious suit like paper. She is uneven. One half of her outgoing and outgrowing, free of garment and mingling with the waste it continuosly invites inside, thigh slowly stretching a tear down her leg as it fills, final scrap of cuff holding tight as more and more of her ever-plumping hip surges through, green surrounding and consuming more and more of the now mere spot of rubber, until finally, it surrendered. Not with a pop or a final tear, but simply tiredly breaking apart; bubbled, divided flesh reuniting in it's absence. Ironically, as her gut and hips continued to force her outfit out in balloon-y, forceful shapes, her side took a more leisurely approach, settling for pooling and puddling into a folded love handle as the liquid flowed in.
Her other side was the opposite, picture perfect. The suit remained strong, the expanding flab within revealed only by solid, undiverting bulges of body, a solid half-sphere of gut and tight curve of engorged thigh-shape as her other half flowed as freely as the liquid she gorged upon.
Her chest swelled upon the table of her billowing gut, abandoning standard size protocol to blossom into blobby spheres of green, one detailed and compressed in ever-tightening rubber, the other dough-like and full, girthier than it's trspped sister.
With her stomach pressing into her thighs, (more a testament to the thickness of her legs than the heft of her belly) and rapidly lenthening beyond her reach, Radiation-chan acted quickly. She stretched her arms, undeniably thickened and the beginnings of donut-esqe rolls of blubber appearing, around the great, jutting form of her gullet. Slightly plump fingers slapped about, looking for scraps of suit, each tiny impact sending a warbling jiggle through her entire body. Hooking swollen digits between giving--gut and taut garment, she pulled with all the strength her flab-coated biceps possessed.
It ripped off like wrapping paper, relinquishing to her the gift of freedom, flinging the doors open and tearing the walls down and ripping the roof off of the goo-holding container she'd become, allowing it to flow within with reckless abandon. Her belly surged forward into a wrecking ball, and then more, much more. Were a wrecking ball to smash into her, her soft, sludge-bloated form would absorb the impact as it sunk deep within, then launch it back with ease. With no destruction equipment to stand in it's ever-widening path however, she simply grew, grew until her belly was larger than her once-slender body a dozen times over, forced to balloon in front of her as it met the dual resistantance of impossibly wide, jiggly hips from below and head-dwarfing lime-green globs of boobflesh from above.
They were filled to spine-bending proportions, easily outsizing two of the chubbiest elves, each, together stretching from one forearm to abother and steadily blocking more and more of her vision. The surface they covered of her massive gullet was respectable, but negligible.
Slowly but surely, the ooze began to disappear, now below her chin and packed in a slimy-blanket as it melted into her internally churning body. She waddled forward in determination, cheeks puffy and thighs shaking in zero trepidation and pure overabundance, only able to hold her immensity due to their own corpulence. Finally, as big as her apartment room and witb no waste remaining outside her body, she plopped to the ground, only half-intentionally. The sheer boulder of her behind slamming into the ground with a sizable tremble of both flesh and earth, sending the contents of her body rollicking, gurgles drifting further upward until-
"bWAAAAAARP-"
-hot air escaped her lips, just enough to send her chubby arms flailing as she drifyed backwards, back mirroing her rump in impact, belly now a miniature mountain towering above her. Now that she was on the ground, the sun slowly rising and the night's excitement rushing over her, her eyelids felt as heavy as the mound of tummy wobbling atop her. Her last vision was of 8 brown birds, a fatter, blocky, red one tailing behind them...
  ***
A tap-tap-tapping.
She rolled over with great difficulty, belly slapping against the floorboards.
A more insistent thrumming of a solid item on equally solid window glass echoed over the bedroom.
She grunted, reaching for covers that weren't there, instead settling for hugging her own warm, squishy form.
A constant, ceaseless, cacophonic pounding filled the apartment block with an orchestra of bangs and booms, forcing Radiation-Chan out of bed in a flurry of jiggly flesh and hefty thighs.
"Alright! I'm up! I'm up! I swear, if Dragoona locked herself out again, I'll-" She paused, standing in the middle of the room, hindquarters jutting out a solid foot and then some behind her. "...was that a dream...?"
A glance downwards at her breasts, larger than her own head and overflowing her bra, belly poking blatantly forward beneath them, seemed to suggest otherwise. But nothing was at the window aside from a stray tree branch, caught in the sill, and the sight of herself, cheeks slightly chubby. She pawed at them briefly, watching her fingers poke easily into them.
"What drugs and how much of them did I eat last...?"
Something else in the reflection caught her eye. A dark green, humanoid shape flopped over her door. She turned.
The new suit hung limp, rubber shiny and new all the same. It folded and wrinkled, particular in the belly, waist, and...pectoral regions. She gave herself a quick once over, discovering, from her wide, doorway-jamming shelf of a rear end and anchor reminiscent pumpkins-for--a-chest thar only prevented her from stooping forward by the cushion of blubbery tummy flesh they sat upon and the far heavier and far chubbier thighs blossoming out around her. Even with how big she'd gotten, the new clothes seemed like they'd practically droop off her when she eventually wore them.
A tag attached to the suit's expansive, drooping fold in the chest caught her eye, and shoving bodily and clothing-related gripes aside, she plucked it off.
 
"Dear Radiation-Chan,
 
You've done the North Pole a great service. The snowball fights have resumed, the abominable snowmen have returned, and the gumdrops are no longer envenomated. This is the least I can do to repay your efforts. Merry Christmas my dear!
 
P.S. -The elves have requested I inform you that they placed your leftovers beneath your bed."
 
She set the letter aside and looked up. No wonder she was on the floor, her bed was buried and invisible beneath box after box after box after box of suddenly irresitable smells. Her tongue snuck out as her round, traitorous belly growled loudly. She took one, hesitant step forward, then her willpower surrendered. Letting out a little yip of jubilation, she plunged into the pile and proceeded to go about making her new suit as skin-tight as possible, Christmas cheer filling her soul almost as much as elven treats filled her belly.