Things are very different on the beach for the survivors of a sunken scientific transport vessel. Manna has wrecked abundant change on those stranded, particularly on their waistlines. The tigress plows forward into the ignorant fear of those willingly starving themselves and those simply too weak to resist the allure of Manna.

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For all of the tigress’s mistakes and mishaps so far on the island, she was right about one thing: the cow did not last long. The carcass, despite having obviously weighed more than a ton (2800 lbs in fact), was eaten so swiftly that new meat was exposed to the air (and thus flies) and then eaten before the maggots could spawn. By the time that the ground bourn insects like the swarming black ants found it, the carrion was little more than a pile of red stained bones and everyone in the meadow noticed the results.
In the four days it took the 29 remaining canines and one tiger to polish off the once massive cow, all except one had put on at least 50% of their original body weight, almost half, mostly the domestic dogs, had doubled it. Despite the half hearted threats of the Beta and the sincere pleading of the Lab, no one bothered to cut out their diet of Manna every morning the first two days. Only when the gains became more prominent, more disturbing, did the fear grow strong enough to breed a show of willpower here and there. But as the tigress had found, there was still a strong attraction to the dangerous little disks despite one’s personal wishes. Thus, on the fourth day, when the “real” food supply ran out, the camp was in more disarray than ever before as some struggled with the withdrawal of Manna in the morning and others simply didn’t care; often they went to the point of seeking out extra disks from their hesitant partners. Needless to say, it was becoming easier and easier to pick those particular members out.


The tigress yawned herself awake easier this morning than she had yet in the time she had spent on the island. Last night’s dream, so like the ones she had been having for the past five nights, had been especially pleasurable with her luscious male specter - she could no longer think of him as merely a figment of her imagination - paying his nightly visit. She couldn’t help but feel at ease as the vapors of her dream-world, so real in its own way to her now, still whirled around her head.
The handsome, and generously built, white tiger had come to her again the night after the disturbing first night; luckily Coyote had not since made a return visit to her nocturnal play land. He still thought of her as his dream no matter how she tried to explain to him, but he forgave her attempts at “dissembling” as he put it. The reason why was very simple, he just could not refuse her barely mobile dream-body. That night he caught for her a tender young buck from which he took only a few measured bite and she ate nearly the entirety at his gentle prodding. The next night it was a wild pig and then the next a swollen, pregnant goat and so on every night; and every night it seemed she woke up a bit bigger, a bit heavier and he grew ever more and more affectionate. Through the nights, the tigress came to believe that he was real, a survivor of the shipwreck and that he was communicating with her somehow through her dreams. Every night, though no longer pressuring him with the reality he refused to believe, she tried to weasel clues out of him that might lead her to where he lived on the island. She sighed as she remembered the long night she had just spent with him, so exquisite, and yet utterly unproductive.
She rolled over on the dry, smooth bark under her, feeling as the fat on her back squished and bunched the excess skin. She grinned and remembered that in this life she was coming ever closer to that form that she had learned to at least appreciate for its own form of beauty over the nights even if she didn’t quite feel the same way about thousands of extra pounds of flab the same way as he did… yet. Despite her reservations about extreme obesity, she had to admit that there was something to her own current level of less than subtle plumpness. She rather liked how the weight smoothed her edges, the feel of the skin rippling down her torso as she walked, the gentle waving of her growing wattle under her chin. Her belly had evolved from a quivering swell to a proud paunch that generously filled the cavity between her plumped thighs and swayed to and fro in a motion that she knew for a fact would overtake and redefine her style of walking if its growth were left unchecked. As her torso was best described as an enormous clotted barrel during the night, she was at first surprised how the bottom of her chest began to sag and sway much like her belly; together they formed a long, waving ribbon of striped flesh affixed to her undercarriage. She supposed that it had to have occurred at some point along the path whose ultimate destination she experienced every night, but by then, her chest had grown much wider as well, bumping into and knocking around below the knees on her forelegs. The formation of the thin, sagging ribbon was unexpected, but not nearly so unpleasant as she thought any movement towards that outrageously overburdened form the white tiger so adored must be.
She yawned again, wider this time and felt her chin brush up with the skin bunching and folding on her neck. She knew intellectually that she was closing in on double her recommended weight (she was a whopping 940 lbs now, but her changes didn’t even seem that significant compared to what some greedy dogs were experiencing), but she just couldn’t seem to muster the reserves to care in the way she might have before. She had certainly changed since coming to the island, and the disquieting part was that she still wasn’t sure that it was for better or worse.
At any rate, as the great feline bored of her introspection, there was a new feast of Manna waiting all around her, still more bountiful every day, and her growing abdomen only served to amplify its noisy assertions of its desires. And the tigress obeyed, partly because she was too weak to fight the urge, a fact about herself she had now accepted - though bitterly - but mostly because she was sure, deep down in her gut, that she was coming closer to finding out where the one other tiger on this godless island might be. That fact that he might not be interested in her if she wasn’t up to his “standards” filled her with dread, even more than the dread of knowing what those standards were; and so she ate and ate happily. She scoffed at the idea of making herself as large as she was at night, hardly able to walk without assistance, but that was far and away from just a big tummy and wider chest and neck… well at least that’s what the tigress told herself.
With the morning faux hunger fading quickly after she had given into it and well over 140 disks nestled inside her cavernous stomach - it was hard not to notice her own growth in capacity, she had taken more than 60 lbs of rather dry red meat off the last of the nearly fully devoured remains of the cow the previous day - she headed into the meadow; she knew it was going to be a lively day, a vague but potent fear had hung over the camp for the last two days and now that was only going to be brought to a head now that the handsome, plump cow was nothing more than an ant covered pile of bones in the jungle now.
At first things seemed much as they were yesterday, tense, but under control. It was even easier to differentiate the different responses to the current crises simply by looking at the assembly. Naturally, the obvious solution presented by the scientifically minded canines of the survivors, many elected to just not eat any more of the Manna which continued to arrive nightly and in ever increasing quantities; but this was easier said than done. While virtually everyone recognized that gaining weight at this unnatural pace was almost certainly not healthy and more than a little frightening, many simply could not help themselves when the morning pangs came around. These individuals formed the fattened lumps, looking at this point like a small colony of seals washed far ashore, spread out around the meadow. To a one, these were domestic dogs, mostly retrievers like the Lab but various shepherds and a hound or two also have become like their pinniped cousins, saturated in blubber and moving rather lethargically around when they weren’t lazing about in the sun. The tigress despised them. Despite having gained more actual weight in terms of real pounds than anyone else in the little conclave, the tigress recognized that she had a purpose in letting herself go; these others simply couldn’t keep their paws off of the stuff. Or at least, that was her position.
The ones who were at least maintaining some sort of restraint grouped together in clusters around the clearing as they sought the support of the group to overcome temptation. They tossed looks of distain towards the fatter canines slugging their way around them as they scooped up what hadn’t been eaten despite the fact that many in the group weren’t all that much thinner than those with weaker wills. Of course, they were only too happy to let them remove temptation for them. There were more of them now that abstained from the Manna, mostly those who simply couldn’t stand how fat they were becoming. ‘Sooner or later all of them will at least try to cut back.’ Thought the tigress as she analyzed the situation, ‘It all just depends on the point at which they just can’t stand to look at themselves anymore.’ However, the idea that some of them simply couldn’t stop no matter how obese they became was not something that entered into her mind.
The great feline angled, if not to hide herself today, to skim through the least dense parts of the meadow as she looked for her rotund little puppet. On the way, her eye could not resist, no matter how hard she tried, falling on the one individual who remained unchanged since arriving on the island: the crazy striped dog who had spouted nonsense at her now five days past when she was 1/3 less heavy. She remained borderline emaciated as she rocked herself in the sand, staring into space. They say she hadn’t eaten a thing since landing ashore and would only take water. She freaked out when a Manna disk so much as landed near her and the most curious part of all was that they said that she alone never woke with the fattening white disks scattered around her. The moment that the tigress’s eye fell on her, the tailless dog’s head flipped around and flashed her a wide, empty gaze. The tigress shuddered and the fat rippled around her shoulders in response. She wished she had killed and eaten her that day even more potently.
The sagging ribbon of flesh that stretched from breast to groin slithered like a snaky remora as she strode to where the Lab still reposed with his ill-gotten bitch. While the Alpha had been true to his word to attempt to dissuade the others from indulging in the delicious white disks, it was obvious that he wasn’t keeping true to the ideal himself. He belly, while sagging only little more than previously, had filled out into a massive barrel, far greater than his pregnant spouse’s. The soft pink skin almost seemed to be bursting at the seems, emphasizing the tiny, undeveloped nipples before developing a shallow cleft right before entering his thighs. The soft meats almost seemed to cry out to her teeth; he wouldn’t have lasted a minute if he had been left alone with her mother. And yet, his smooth talking, coupled with the threats of the other Betas had convinced the entire hunting population of the remaining wolves to stick with a pure meat diet and that was all that really counted. After the few, still unexplained gains when the cow had first been ripped open, those who had subsisted only on what could be stripped from the bones of the large bovine had not experienced any unnatural gains. They were clinging together with their betas closer to the jungle and while that fostered a dangerous gathering of strength away from the Lab, she couldn’t entirely blame him for not seeking their company when his weight made him more exquisitely vulnerable than he had ever been in his life.
The Alpha female, who seemed content to simply let things run their course, looked up at the tigress before the lab. She was, under her grey coat, bulging quite a bit more than was proper for her condition, but she was no hog either. She looked at the massive tigress with only mild interest, her brown eyes held no real concern either for her or for the pretender still using her belly as a pillow. She said nothing and the tigress didn’t expect her to; the tigress knew she would probably be the same way if she were expecting and felt an odd twinge in her chest at the thought.
She smirked as she walked forward and kicked the Golden Lab - softly for her - in his great soft gut. The Lab huffed the breath and curled around his bulging middle pathetically because his limbs seemed so small in comparison to the enormous round gut. His eyes flew open and he whimpered when he looked up into the tigress’s large, burning eyes. The tigress thought she heard the wolf beside him snickering softly.
“What, what? What is it?” He cried trying to get laboriously to his thick haunches. She stopped him easily with just an outstretched paw.
“What are you doing here sleeping, you lump? You should be with your Betas discussing where we’re going to get more food.” Said the tigress as she allowed him to rise. She sat, feeling a slight thrill as her own soft paunch met the ground just before she had finished lowering her thighs.
The lab splayed out his legs to accommodate his burgeoning assets and spoke quickly, head low, “Sorry. Let’s go.” He knew better than to complain about her method of waking him now. He could tell that she, despite her softening appearance, was serious this morning.
She didn’t waste any further words on him, though her mind was racing. Of course, the lack of food was, in fact, a real issue - and one that she could identify with readily. She had gotten used to eating until she filled her own expanding stomach every afternoon in addition to the small, but important snack of Manna every morning - but she had no doubt that it would be readily solved by another hunting party; either there would be more cows to be found to the south, or perhaps they could catch an equine unawares in the jungle. No, what occupied the tigress’s thoughts were the white tiger’s stunning blue eyes, the feel of his paws rubbing down her lumpy shoulders, the tender rasp of his tongue… ‘He just has to be somewhere on the island.’ She thought, refusing to consider that he might have landed somewhere else, or even - probably - didn’t exist at all. ‘The question is where and what’s the best way to go looking for him?’
The tigress stalked up to the gathered wolves brooding apart from the others near the jungle. Many of the expressions were strained from resisting the tantalizing allure of the Manna for so long. Unlike with the domestic dogs, there was almost no chatter of any kind. They sat - and suffered - in silence. Looking to her fattened partner, she realized that, despite any official position he had, the Lab utterly lacked the ability to control these hungry bright-eyed wolves. She wondered if his usefulness was going to come to an end as swiftly as his waistline had.
She decided to address the pack herself, the three Betas looked at her with hard eyes from the sidelines. Two stood back from the larger one in the middle, her old hunting partner. She wondered if they had formed their own hierarchy; if they had, one or two of them might have to have an “accident” during the coming hunting trip. “I know all of you are hungry, most are scared as well.” She spoke loudly, lifting her head and displaying her still lethal fangs. “This is a strange island, but we’re stuck here, so you all better get used to it.” She snarled and her claws extended into the turf under her; her increased size seemed more intimidating now than pacifying. “The others don’t know what it means to resist, to be strong, but you, all of you are hunters. It’s high time we got out there and did something!”
There weren’t cheers, but many rose and all had the grim determined of those ready to hunt, track and kill. The tigress paced into the jungle towards the mountain before the Betas could react, most followed.