Summary:
Chuck digs into his first streamed feast and gets more than he bargained for.

The document has exclusive sketches (i won't be cleaning them up and posting them anywhere else) so I recommend downloading and reading that version instead of the copy-pasted version below!

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Chapter 6
Chuck stared bashfully at the image of himself reflected on the screen. His sweater looked tighter than he remembered, tighter than he had realized, tighter than his thick shoulders and billowed paunch could bear. His feathers were puffed out all over, lifting the fabric from his skin and making him look even bigger than he was. The fabric stretched so far past its limits that yellow feathers could be seen through gaps in the threads if one looked closely enough. Under his arms, the seams were starting to come undone.
When he’d bought the sweater a year ago, it had made him look so small beneath its ample fabric.
But it was just the feathers, wasn’t it? With all his feathers fluffed on end, of course he looked massive. It wasn’t his real size, or close to his real size, so he told himself.
It was embarrassing and unwanted, but it made people go wild on the laptop stream. The comments were mostly quite similar. Big, bigger. Thick, round. Cute, handsome.
Chuck didn’t feel so handsome, frantically trying to flatten his feathers for an audience of one hundred and rising. It shot to two hundred strangers in just a few minutes and kept growing and growing. All the symbols across the screen meant very little to Chuck, and he found it quite overwhelming to see so many messages flashing before him so rapidly that he hardly had time to read any of them.
Wilbur’s clammy paw weighed down on his arm. The dog looked him meaningfully in the eyes. “Ignore the numbers for now, okay? It’s just you and me.”
Dollar signs faded in and out in the corner of the screen, paired with notes. Chuck looked away quickly and nodded to Wilbur.
“I don’t know anything about this kind of thing, Wil,” the parrot whispered, short of breath. “You said the other day… One meal, right? We’re just having dinner.”
“Yeah…” Wilbur’s eyes drifted tellingly to the laptop, and his paws followed to grab it. “I’ll just put a hold on donations.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means dinner’s paid for.” Wilbur smiled and dragged the laptop nearer himself. “I don’t usually cut off donations, but it’s your first time and I don’t want you to get too overwhelmed.”
“Donations?”
“Well, yeah,” Wilbur turned the laptop around and smudged the screen with a finger as he tapped it. The screen looked different now, showing a long, scrolling list of green text. EnGORGEous donated $50: “Two steaks for the little guy”, read the first. There were donations in varying amounts from as little as fifty cents to as much as a shocking one hundred dollars. Some texts requested specific dishes, some requested drinks, others merely offered encouragement.
The highest donation, at $130, read, “One Doughball, and I’ll pitch another $200 at the end of the night.”
“Doughball?” Chuck asked. “I don’t think they serve doughballs. It’s not on the menu.”
Wilbur chuckled nervously, eyes flicking to something apparently interesting on the ceiling. “No, no… Uh… We’ll worry about that one later.”
“But another $200 just for a doughball?”
“It’s not what you think.” Wilbur licked his lips and massaged his chest. He respectfully waved to a passing waiter. “Anyways, I’m starving. Let’s order.”
Chuck frowned and folded his arms. He watched Wilbur read off orders from the laptop screen, and allowed his eyes to grow wider with each meal mentioned. It sounded like more than anyone could eat. Even too much for the pair of them.
Despite the voice at the back of his head insisting Wilbur would eat the bulk of it, having three-hundred pounds more to his frame, Chuck couldn’t help but wonder how much would go to himself. Even when he tried to focus on holding back his appetite, he knew he had no restraint. He barely retained consciousness when he started on a plate.
With Kyle he would always eat mountains before he realized he had been eating anything at all. It was almost a hypnotic state, lost to the psychedelics of flavor. And he was hungry, now. It was early, but lunch felt like forever ago.
Chuck smoothed down his feathers and looked down at his grumbling stomach. His work shirt wasn’t the only piece of clothing he’d be needing to replace.
“So, how long does it usually take for that much food to be prepared?” Chuck asked.
A cocktail the size of a dinner bowl was set before him and his jaw went slack. Wilbur answered, but the parrot hardly heard him over the sound of his heart thrumming in his ears.
Chuck inspected the drink as if it were an optical illusion. It was thick and creamy and a smooth layer of foam rose from the rim like a cappuccino, sprinkled with flakes of chocolate. Caramel sauce decorated the sides of the bottomless glass, locking the swirling, pale liquid behind sweet bars.
“Wilbur,” Chuck lifted his wide eyes to the dog, incredulous, “I’m a lightweight. I can’t drink all of this.”
Wilbur waved a paw dismissively, already licking a mustache of foam from his lips. “Don’t worry, the food will soak it up. Drink as much or as little as you want.”
Grimacing, Chuck pinched the straw and took a taste. It went down so easily that by the time plates started clunking down between him and Wilbur, he came out his trance to a quarter of the glass drained. He raised his wrist to his beak to muffle a series of hiccups, and dazedly clunked his elbows onto the table.

“It’s good, right?” Wilbur asked, pointing to the drink.
“Yeah,” Chuck smiled. “Right.”
Wilbur regarded him with a raised eyebrow. “Tipsy already? You weren’t kidding.”
They both thanked the two waiters who had filled out their table. The hinged leaves of the extendable set-up were both folded out to make enough room for everything. Wilbur started to say something about limits and not passing them, but Chuck was already wrapping his feathers around a towering burger, and the drone of the world was soon lost.
The buffet food was good, but this food was spectacular. There was nothing less than perfection to every bite. Wilbur spoke some, suggested slowing down, but Chuck was obsessed. The flavors, the textures. There was no time for speaking. There was too much to taste, too much that he refused to let go to waste.
Eventually, his feathers had nothing left to grab and he became aware of the painful tension swelling under his beak. His taut purple sweater rode up nearer his breast, exposing one very full, very round, very large yellow paunch.
As much as he desired to hide it from the scrutiny of the restaurant and the laptop camera, he suddenly felt very incapable of movement. Leaning as far back in his chair as he could fit, pushed away from the table, Chuck gave his belly all the room it needed to cause him the least pain. His breaths were shallow, his heart pounding hard, his eyes wandering the table to assess the damage he’d done.

There were more plates stacked to one side than he remembered there being placed down, and every single one was picked clean. Wilbur was a mess, covered in crumbs and sauce. The waiters had cleared and set the table more than once while he’d been preoccupied and he had hardly registered each new wave. It all flowed seamlessly.
Wilbur wiggled his grubby fingers at him, bemused. “Hey buddy. I think we lost you there for a while. You okay?”
Chuck groaned and closed his eyes. The cocktail was the only edible thing left to swallow, almost untouched, despite the state of everything else.
“Chuuuuck,” Wilbur called softly.
“I’m done, Wil,” Chuck moaned. “I want to lie down.”
“You ate like a champ.”
“Ugh.”
Wilbur pushed around his bulging love handles and spilling belly to dig into his pocket. He grunted quietly as he fished around. His whole body shook with the motion of pulling something out. It was an old vintage Altoids tin.
The golden retriever opened the tin and plucked up a ball of what looked to be chocolate chip cookie dough. “I opened donations again after you ploughed through the first course. A lot of people piled onto the Doughball request. Like, seriously, a lot.”
Chuck opened one eye. “They want me to eat that little thing?”
“Six hundred dollars.”
“Ugh.” Chuck spread his legs apart to make sitting up slightly less painful. He gripped the back of his chair as he scooted forward, just close enough to reach Wilbur’s offering. The parrot took a queasy look at the simple snack and wanted to vomit. There was too much inside of him already. “This is the last thing I’m going to eat. For days. Okay? We’re done.”
Wilbur started shaking his head, waving his paws frantically. “Now, wait a minute, Chuck, I haven’t explained—”
Chuck chewed and swallowed.
“Oh, oh boy.” Wilbur pressed his paw over his muzzle. “That was a Doughball.”
Chuck tilted his head quizzically and opened his beak to speak. But in the next moment, he felt as if he were falling down an elevator shaft. Or parachuting, with a ripped chute. Gravity became the most brutal fist he’d ever experienced, and he fell back with such shock at the force of it that he toppled his chair to the floor.
He scrambled to get up, dizzy, disoriented, as heavy as lead. He wanted to vomit even more now, but this time it was because he was starving. Ravenous. Unsatiable, as if he had not eaten for weeks. He couldn’t find his balance, staggering until he caught grips of the table and there he swayed and swayed. Wilbur’s warmth wrapped around him and he could hear his cousin’s panicked whispers screaming through his swimming head.
“Charlie! Chuck! CHARLIE, are you okay? Are you okay? Should I call an ambulance? Say something?”
Wilbur was talking too fast. Chuck couldn’t form a single word before the retriever’s blabber derailed his train of thought, over and over. The parrot took deep breaths and stared at his hands on the table. He reached down to feel his belly, and it was soft and plump and pillowy. There was no hardness. It was empty. And yet, even so empty, it squeezed out of his sweater and spilled over his painfully tight jeans.

Chuck reached to unbutton the pants and felt instant relief as his paunch spilled free.
“Charlie, speak to me, speak to me, speak to me.”
“Don’t call me Charlie.” Chuck muttered. He stepped back from the table, finding his balance at last, and stayed there for a moment to ponder himself.
“How do you feel?” Wilbur asked.
“Starving,” the bird replied uneasily. He reached down to heft the bulge of his belly into his arms. “…Fat.” He poked himself miserably. “How am I going to explain this to Kyle?”
“Well, I tried to…”
“Yeah, I know.” Chuck sat down. It was weird to feel his stomach so prominently weighted between his thighs. It dangled towards the floor, weighing Chuck forward as he scooted his chair in again. “One more course. Whatever that was…”
“The Doughball,” Wilbur interrupted eagerly, settling again in his own place, “is the best invention ever made for food connoisseurs and gainers alike. I’m telling you, dude, it’s a game changer. They invented them here at this restaurant, before it took off.”
Chuck rubbed his doughy tummy to try and quiet its demands. “And? What did it do to me? Is it permanent?”
Wilbur’s lips drew back and he nodded, brows creasing sympathetically. “I tried to tell you. It does some wild, science-y, enzyme-speeding reaction thing that straight up digests everything in your system. Most efficient food-to-fat conversion ratio on the planet, in seconds. Neat, huh?”
Chuck stood abruptly, hands on the table. “Not neat!”
“Sorry.” Wilbur looked away guiltily. One finger raised to the laptop. “At least your next meal is paid for.”
The parrot fell back into his chair and scooped up his drink. The sweet alcohol was rich enough to calm the pain of starvation while Wilbur took care of the next order. On an empty stomach, it took very little before Chuck was dazed and unperturbed by the generous servings that were presented. Ravenous, uninhibited, and egged on by stream watchers, Chuck dove into the next round headfirst.