-= The Rendering Pit=-
[[A PATREON series. This story was posted 12 months ago on Patreon, subscribe now to see this arc, AND THE NEXT for as little as 2.50]]
Table of Contents


As the students settle into their new lives, they find their roomie situation isn't particularly unpleasant, although one badger seems to relax into his role a little more than manners might allow! Humiliation, gas, wg themes present.

This chapter written by RabidBadger , illustrated by myself!

Buy THE COMPLETE Book One of The Rendering Pit HERE

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The scaled student sat on his bunk, where he’d spent most of his time since succeeding at the orientation test, at least when he wasn’t in class. He’d just returned from his set of them for the day, finding himself the first one back out of his dorm mates. The quiet time appealed to him, left him ample time to think through where he was now.

Most of that tied back to what sat folded on the bed next to him. The orange jumper, with the back-label reading ‘Rigel: 017269’ – the only thing he’d been allowed to take with him from the juvenile penal colony when he turned eighteen. Still, it was this place or proper incarceration.

Given the choice? The meals here were decent, the beds too, this place had a future, not really a hard call to make. He’d gotten to go listen to a Jay bird whose body was more mechanical than not and who had simple mixing apparatuses in her torso talk to him about advanced chemistry mechanics and how useful it was to have tools that were always with you. That had been an hour ago, and he was still set where he’d been at the end of the bed – the silence of the room only interrupted when he spoke to himself. A habit one picks up when there aren’t any other trustworthy people around to confide in.

“It is a good idea, but that sort of thing…”

Rigel looked down at his hands. Strong things, lean – but strung with wire was the term – except not literally. That was kind of the problem, maybe, if it was an actual problem. There were endless possibilities that opened up if you let someone replace parts of you with machines, but his body worked fine, and one way streets like that tended to be great reasons to hesitate and think it through.

“Maybe there’s some other way to achieve the same thing without that.”

The door to the dorms opened at that point, showing the vixen with the far end bed stumbling in looking, well, bloated was a decent starter word but it somehow felt inadequate. She was definitely stuffed to the gills again, waddling back in from dinner, her robe split at both sides above the hip into something that kind of looked like a fine dinner dress – or would if it weren’t obvious it was torn to get that way. But it wasn’t just the stuffing. Rigel felt that old itch rise again.

“Are you actually fatter than you were yesterday?”

The vixen let herself collapse onto the bed like a falling tree, immediately blushing – and starting to massage her taut belly. She’d been plush enough yesterday when they finished the test, then that evening he thought she looked a little riper – but it was late, and dark, and he’d had a busy day. Right now, though? If his eyes didn’t say enough, Genevieve’s reaction did the rest just fine.

“Shut up! It’s just… it’s temporary, okay? I uh, I got – I said something I shouldn’t have, and-“

Rigel raised two black scaled hands, trying to calm the fuzzy fox pillow of a girl down some.

It said plenty. There’d been rumors about this place, not many had signed up for communicating their sentences to enrollment, and there was an excellent chance this was an example of them being true. The itch flared up again.

“And ate the entire contents of the kitchen.”

Rigel winced a little, that urge to say whatever came to mind had gotten him in plenty of trouble before – and there was no good reason to go offending people.

“Sorry, sorry – that, I’m kind of bad at keeping what I-“

The vixen let out a long exhale, still kneading idly at her doughy middle.

“I basically did exactly that at lunch, yesterday too, and every day this week. Lunch Lady is making sure the rest of me matches my big fat mouth.”

That was worth a fresh wince, and a bit of dread with a glance back at the orange jumper again. The robe was much more comfortable, but if an ill-chosen word could lead to something like that happening at the hands of the non-teaching staff? Rigel’s worries compounded, and he shifted his gaze from the jumper to the tablet with his schedule and the rest of the school info on it. Four classes with three professors, plus the other staff – lots of people his forked tongue could get in trouble with.

Rigel glanced down at the scales on his hand again, the way they would turn iridescent if they caught the light right, but were a shiny black otherwise. The reality that he wasn’t getting out of this unchanged began to coalesce in his gut like a heavy knot. A serious moment interrupted by the dorm doorway opening up once more, this time parting for the badger – who was still (for the time being) larger than the vixen. Time would tell how long that lasted.

The badger made straight for his bunk too, sprawling out face first on it and groaning a little as he pulled his pillow over his head.

“Why does everything still smell like blueberry waffles and cream cheese?”

Rigel’s gloomy worrying shattered under the sheer randomness of that one. He took a sniff of the air in the room, just to be sure.

“It… doesn’t?”

The badger grunted through his nose, which was sticking out from under the pillow.

“Great. That means I was in the suggestion pool, which… really ought to have worn off by now.”

Black scaled hands went to rub at the back of his neck, sliding under the frill hanging by it.

“Sounds like you two had rough times of it starting out.”

It was the vixen who answered him, slowly easing herself to a seated position on the bed, but leaning back with her gut out in front of her. If he didn’t know better he’d have said she looked pregnant.

“I guess. How about you?”

Rigel took another look over the glossy, blank surface of his tablet and the weathered orange of the jumper.

“Just some anxiety issues. No official problems yet. I’m pretty sure that’s just a matter of time, hence the anxiety.”

Neither of the others spoke up to challenge that. The badger did raise another point after some moments had passed in silence.

“Nobody minds if I study this relaxation induction thing, do they?”

There were murmurs from the other two, but not objections. Genevieve was breathing evenly enough she might be napping. Rigel just tilted his head a little and eyeballed the rotund badger’s tablet some.

Samuel pulled up the app from Prof. Reginald’s class, satisfied the lack of objection was enough. He rapidly (far too much so to have read it) thumbed through an introductory page or two. Up popped a simple, pale purple screen with a white text, soft curves, large letters.

Inhale slowly.

Picture your stress as a dark haze – gather it into your breath.

Exhale.

The badger exhaled heavily. Rigel less so, and as soon as he caught himself doing it he blinked harder and turned his head away. Gaze wandering back to his own tablet – tomorrow’s schedule was on there and that seemed like something he might want to get figured out before he was in the thick of it tomorrow. Forewarned, forearmed, all that.

He soon found himself doing so to the dulcet tones of the vixen snoozing and the badger mumbling incoherently.

The loud, rumbling trumpeted ‘frumpt’ sound that filled the dorm and roused them from their personal reveries. Genevieve and Rigel’s eyes snapped to the middle of the room while the rest of themselves remained still – Samuel’s eyes were zeroed wide as saucers on the wall in front of him. Samuel’s robe was busy billowing out like a parachute caught in a breeze meanwhile, only slowly floating back down over the badger’s comfortably large ass.

One of the others coughed lightly.

Samuel blinked slowly at first, then glanced down at his tablet. For a moment, Rigel saw the badger’s eyes go glassy, but the rotund roommate shook it off and shut them, obscuring the screen and taking a much less relaxed breath than his last several.

“Okay, uhm – that, I think I was maybe too relaxed there. Sorry about that.”

Genevieve was wearing a look that seemed torn between amusement and sympathy. Rigel amusement and wariness.

“Maybe don’t skip the warning and instructions next time?”

The badger’s eyes shut in a slow wince.

“That’s what I skimmed past? Jeez, I was just thinking I should go back and check that right before the uh- the-“

“Eruption?”

“That’s one word for it.”

Samuel tucked his head under his pillow at that point. Trying to ignore the two brief aftershocks that wormed their way loose of his posterior, and the fact that while he had felt them coming, all attempts to hold them back resulted in his body not responding at all. All that did happen was a light-headed and absent feeling coming over him that quickly faded.

Rigel raised a brow over that, a new thought coming to mind. Perhaps, just maybe, he should go forward with doing something to himself on purpose, if only to have some choice in the matter.