Chapter 2: The Doctor Visit
The groan of the Park House door was nothing compared to the noises they made trying to leave it. Mordecai had to turn sideways, sucking in a breath that did nothing to reduce the vast, soft barrel of his torso, just to squeeze through. Rigby simply got stuck, his gut lodging firmly in the frame.
“Dude, push me,” Rigby grunted, his face pressed against the wood.
“I am pushing!” Mordecai wheezed, leaning his full, considerable weight against his friend’s expansive backside. With a scrape of denim and a pop, Rigby tumbled out onto the porch, Mordecai stumbling after him. They stood for a moment, panting. The walk to the bus stop, once a lazy five-minute amble, now loomed like an expedition.Every step was a negotiation. Mordecai’s thighs, thick and granular with fat, rubbed together with a constant, humid whisper. His lower back ached with a deep, persistent throb, carrying the front-heavy weight of his belly. Rigby waddled, his legs bowed by the spherical mass of his gut, his breathing a wet, labored process. They sweat through their t-shirts before the bus arrived, the fabric damp and clinging to rolls of soft tissue.The bus seat was a tight, vinyl prison. Mordecai spilled over both sides of it.Rigby occupied his own, plus a significant portion of the aisle. They received stares—wide-eyed, unabashed stares from children, and looks of muted horror from adults. Mordecai caught his reflection in the dark window.A round, blue, puffy face looked back. He saw the impressive breadth of his shoulders, the sheer size of his head. He smiled weakly at himself.Margaret likes a man with presence.
The doctor’s office was a shock of cold, bright air.The sterile smell of antiseptic barely masked a deeper odor of dread and bleach. The receptionist, a thin woman with glasses, didn’t blink. “Names?”
“Mordecai and Rigby. Park Groundskeepers,” Mordecai said, trying to sound official, but his voice was tight from the strain of sitting.“The physician will see you shortly. Have a seat.”
The plastic chairs looked flimsy, like toys. They eyed them, then each other.With a synchronized sigh of resignation, they lowered themselves. The chairs shrieked in protest, bowing outward perilously, but held.
“This is gonna be great,” Rigby whispered, shifting his weight and eliciting another groan from the plastic.“Get a clean bill of health. Maybe a note for Benson.”
“Yeah. ‘Prescribed rest for optimal muscle development,’” Mordecai nodded, the motion causing his chin to press into the soft cushion of his throat.
The door to the examination room opened.“Mordecai? Rigby?” The doctor was a woman in her fifties, with sharp eyes and a no-nonsense posture.Her name tag read Dr. Wallace.Her expression didn’t change as she took them in.“Both of you. Come on.”
Getting up was harder than sitting down. They had to rock forward, using momentum to heave their bulk upright.Dr.Wallace watched, her pen tapping against her clipboard.
The examination room was small.The scale in the corner seemed to gleam under the harsh lights. The paper-covered table rustled as Dr.Wallace gestured to it. “Hop up.”
Mordecai went first.The step built into the table was an impossible hurdle. He tried to lift his leg, but his thickened thigh refused to clear the height. He grabbed the edge of the table, his fingers leaving immediate dents in the paper, and heaved. A sound escaped him—a pained, guttural grunt.The table shuddered and screeched as it took his weight. He sat perched on the edge, breathing heavily, his belly spilling onto his lap like a giant bowl of dough.Rigby stared at the step, then at his own swollen midsection. “Uh, can I get a ramp or something?”
“Just try,” Dr.Wallace said, her voice flat.
With a running start of two awkward, shuffling steps, Rigby launched himself. His belly made contact first, smacking against the table edge with a damp thud. He scrabbled, Mordecai grabbing his arm and pulling, and with a final, desperate kick, he flopped onto the table beside his friend. The entire structure sagged, letting out a long, metallic moan of distress.They sat side-by-side, their hips and soft sides pressed together, filling the table entirely.
Dr.Wallace didn’t comment.She picked up her stethoscope. “Rigby, lift your shirt.”
Rigby tugged the hem, but it was trapped under the shelf of his gut. He wrestled with it, finally yanking it up to reveal a pale, massively domed stomach, the skin taut and shiny. A deep, red crease from his waistband bisected it.The cold stethoscope probed. “Breathe deeply.”
Rigby inhaled, his gut expanding even further, pushing against Mordecai. A deep, internal gurgling echoed through the room.
“Again.”
The sound was wet, churning, like a distant plumbing disaster.She moved to Mordecai, repeating the process. His breath was shorter, shallower.The stethoscope picked up a rapid, thin heartbeat struggling under the pressure. Her lips pressed into a thin line.
“When did this rapid weight gain begin?”
“It’s not weight gain,” Mordecai corrected quickly, his voice a little too high. “It’s… bulk acquisition.We’re on a new supplement.Bulk Blast.”
Dr. Wallace’s pen stopped scratching. She looked from one to the other, her sharp eyes taking in the swollen faces, the strained clothing, the sheer, unsettling softness of their forms. “I need the container.”
Rigby fished the nearly-empty tub of ‘Volcanic Fury’ from his bag. She took it, scanned the ludicrous ingredients list, and sighed—a sound of profound professional weariness.
“Stand on the scale, please. One at a time.”
The scale was a large, industrial platform model.Mordecai shuffled towards it.He stepped on. The needle didn’t sweep; it surged. It flew past numbers that should have been impossible, quivering at a point so high it seemed to strain the mechanism.Dr.Wallace’s eyes narrowed as she recorded it. She didn’t say the number aloud.Rigby’s turn. The needle did the same frantic dance, landing slightly higher.He peered down, trying to see.“What’s it say? Is it, like, a lot? Muscle weighs more than fat, you know.”
“I am aware,” Dr.Wallace said, her voice now carrying a frosty edge. “I’m ordering blood work immediately. In the meantime, I am instructing you, in the strongest possible terms, to cease consuming this product.Now.”
The room went still. The humming of the fluorescent lights was suddenly very loud.“Cease?” Mordecai asked, as if the word were foreign.
“Stop.Do not drink another drop.What you are experiencing is not muscle hypertrophy. It is a rapid, pathological accumulation of adipose tissue triggered by a chemical in this… substance. It is placing enormous strain on your cardiovascular systems, your joints, your organs.Your livers are likely under severe stress. Your blood pressure, by the look of you, must be catastrophic.”
“But the guy on TV…” Rigby started.“Is a criminal,” Dr.Wallace finished. “This ‘Bulk Blast’ contains a compound similar to an outdated, banned veterinary medication used to fatten livestock. It hijacks your metabolism.It makes you store everything as fat.Rapidly. Dangerously.”
Mordecai looked down at his hands, resting on the vast, sloping hill of his stomach. He saw the dimples of cellulite on his thickened wrists. He thought of Margaret, of flexing on the beach.The image in his head was clear, heroic. The image in the reflective glass of the cabinet door was a swollen, blue, sick-looking bird.
Denial rose in his throat, thick and hot.“No.That’s not right.We feel the burn. It’s a deep, satisfying ache.That’s growth.”
“That is inflammation and physical distress,” Dr. Wallace said, her patience visibly fraying. “You need to start a supervised, very strict diet and exercise plan.Starting today.This is not cosmetic. This is a direct threat to your health.”
Rigby poked his own stomach. His finger disappeared into the softness, past the first knuckle, the second.He wiggled it.It felt… strange.Dense. He looked at Mordecai, a flicker of uncertainty in his eyes.
Then he looked back at the doctor, at her crisp lab coat, her clipboard of bad news. He didn’t see a medical professional.He saw a buzzkill. A naysayer from the old world of slow gains and hard work.The world that had never given him a second glance.
A slow, defiant grin spread across his round face. He leaned back, as much as the table and his own body would allow, and patted his giant belly.It jiggled profoundly. “You hear that, Mordecai? She says we’re fat.” He said it like it was a joke, a ridiculous impossibility.Mordecai’s own doubt crystallized into a familiar, stubborn resistance. He couldn’t be wrong.The supplement couldn’t be wrong.The dream was too bright. He nodded slowly, a conspiratorial gleam returning to his eyes.“Yeah. She just doesn’t get it.The new science.”
Dr.Wallace stared at them. She saw the wall go up—a wall of fear, pride, and willful ignorance, thicker than the fat layering their bodies.“This is not a matter of ‘getting it.’ This is medical fact. You are in danger.”
Rigby, emboldened by Mordecai’s solidarity, swung his legs.They dangled, not touching the floor. He drummed his fingers on his taut stomach.“We feel fine.Great, actually. Powerful.” To demonstrate, he tried to flex his arm.The soft flesh of his bicep shifted, but no definition appeared. He looked at it, then at the doctor. He rubbed his hand over the curve of his gut, a strange, fascinated gesture.“See? Solid.”
Mordecai, caught in the same bizarre defiance, mimicked the action. He cupped the heavy, doughy swell of his own belly, hefting it slightly in his hands.It was warm.It was undeniably massive. In his mind, mass equaled might. He rubbed his palm over the fabric of his shirt, feeling the huge, soft mound beneath.He looked at Dr.Wallace, a challenge in his puffy face. “It’s quality mass.”
The doctor took a step back, not out of fear, but out of a need for professional distance from the sheer, unsettling spectacle.“Put your shirts down. Get off my table.The phlebotomist will be in shortly for blood draws. I strongly suggest you comply.”
But they weren’t listening.They were comparing. Rigby grabbed a handful of his own side, a roll of lard that spilled over the paper. “Dude, feel this. It’s like, crazy dense.”
Mordecai reached over, squeezing the proffered roll.It yielded like cold clay.“Whoa.Yeah. That’s some serious… marbling.”
In that moment, the medical reality, the scale, the doctor’s warnings, all evaporated.They were pioneers admiring their strange, new landscape. Rigby, with a grotesque curiosity, lifted his shirt again and pressed his forearm against his own exposed stomach, smushing the soft flesh.He laughed, a breathless, wheezing sound.“Check it out. It’s like memory foam!”
Dr.Wallace closed her eyes for a brief second. When she opened them, they were hard.“Get. Down.”
The force in her voice finally broke through the weird euphoria.They stopped, their hands still on their bodies. The air in the room changed, becoming charged and brittle.Clumsily, they began to maneuver. Getting down was worse than getting up. They had to slide, roll, and ultimately fall off the table with twin heavy thuds that shook the floor. They stood before her, two enormous, bloated young men, breathing heavily, their clothes disheveled.
The phlebotomist, a nervous-looking young man, knocked and entered with his tray.He stopped short, his eyes widening at the sheer volume of his patients.
Dr.Wallace held Mordecai’s gaze, then Rigby’s. “The tests will confirm what I’ve told you,” she said, her voice low and final. “You can lie to yourselves, but your blood won’t lie to me.You have a choice. Start dealing with this now, or face very severe consequences. Permanent ones.”
She turned and left, the door clicking shut with a sound of absolute finality.
The phlebotomist approached cautiously, tourniquet in hand. “Who, uh, who’s first?”
Mordecai and Rigby looked at each other, the ghost of their shared defiance still hanging between them, but thinner now, frayed by the cold light and the scared look in the phlebotomist’s eyes.The phantom ache in their joints felt sharper. The weight they carried felt less like potential and more like a sentence.
Rigby shrugged, the movement causing a ripple across his shoulders and chest. “Me, I guess.” He rolled up a sleeve that was already tight, exposing a thick, dimpled arm where a vein was buried deep beneath the fat.“Make it quick. We got… stuff to do.”
As the needle went in, Mordecai looked away, out the small window.He saw a bird flying, light and free. He thought of Margaret again, but this time, the image of her smile wavered, blurred at the edges by a new, cold feeling seeping into his gut—a feeling that had nothing to do with Bulk Blast. It was the first, faint whisper of doubt, and it was far more unpleasant than any cramp.
The phlebotomist’s hands trembled as he pressed the cotton ball to Rigby’s dimpled arm. The vein had been deep, reluctant. “All done,” the young man said, his voice too cheerful for the sterile, weighted room.
Mordecai watched the small vial of dark blood, a stark contrast to the clinical white of the tray. His own arm felt heavy, lifeless, just waiting for its turn. That whisper in his gut wasn’t fading; it was thickening, congealing into a cold lump that had nothing to do with Bulk Blast. He replayed the doctor’s words: permanent consequences.The phrase felt like a physical object lodged behind his ribs.
“Your turn, big guy,” the phlebotomist said, gesturing to Mordecai. The tourniquet bit into the soft, blue flesh of his bicep, a tight, alien pressure.He looked away, focusing on a crack in the ceiling tile. The needle slid in, a sharp, intimate violation. He felt the pull as the vial filled, a slow syphoning.It felt like she was taking proof of something he didn’t want proven.
They spilled back out into the waiting room, their movements sluggish, charged with a new silence. The plastic chairs seemed to mock them.They didn’t sit.
“Well that sucked,” Rigby muttered, rubbing the tiny bandage on his arm. He avoided Mordecai’s eyes, instead focusing on adjusting his shirt over the monumental curve of his stomach. The fabric was stretched so thin across his middle it had lost its pattern.
“She doesn’t know,” Mordecai said, but the words sounded hollow, even to him. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, painting everything in a sickly, shadowless glare. He could feel his own heartbeat in his neck, a fast, frantic tap against the soft cushion of fat under his jaw.“She’s just, like, old-school. Doesn’t understand nano-molecular catalysts.”
“Totally.” Rigby nodded, too quickly. “Did you see her scale?Probably broken. From, like, normal people.” He patted his belly, the gesture less confident this time.His hand sank in slightly, stopped by the dense core. “We’re just ahead of the curve. Our bodies are… innovating.”
They pushed through the heavy glass doors, the outside air hitting them like a wall. It was just park air, grass and distant traffic, but it smelled different after the antiseptic tomb. They stood on the concrete steps, two vast silhouettes blocking the sun.The bus ride home was a blurred tableau of discomfort. Every lurch of the vehicle translated into a deep, rolling sway of their bodies. Mordecai caught his reflection in the window again and couldn’t find the blue jay he knew. He saw a bulbous stranger with small, pinched eyes.He closed his own.
Back in the park house, the silence amplified. The empty Bulk Blast tub sat on the coffee table like an accusation.The living room, once a place of sprawling leisure, now felt cramped, oppressive. Their bodies demanded space the room couldn’t give.Rigby flopped onto the couch. The frame let out a sound like a dying animal, a final, metallic creak before settling into a permanent slump.He didn’t seem to notice.He grabbed a controller, firing up a game. Blaring sounds and pixelated explosions filled the void.
Mordecai remained standing, a feat that itself was becoming arduous.His knees protested.His lower back was a tight, hot knot. He stared at the television screen but saw the doctor’s face, her unblinking eyes.Pathological accumulation.Adipose tissue.Severe consequences. The clinical terms swirled, attaching themselves to the ache in his joints, the shallow burn in his lungs when he walked.
“You okay, dude?” Rigby asked, not looking away from the screen. His character died in a burst of digital gore.“Yeah. Just… thinking.”
“Don’t.” Rigby’s command was sharp, brittle. “Thinking’s what losers do before they quit.”
Mordecai walked to the fridge, his gait a wide, rolling waddle.He opened it. The cold light illuminated rows of energy drinks, leftover pizza, a wilting head of lettuce. And there, on the top shelf, was one last, unopened tub of Bulk Blast. ‘Arctic Blast.’ The powder was a vicious, artificial blue.His hand hovered. The doctor’s warning was a clear, cold voice in his memory.The lump of doubt in his gut pulsed. He thought of Margaret, but her smile was getting harder to picture. It was being overwritten by the imagined look on her face if she saw him now—not admiration, but something else.Concern. Pity.Revulsion.He heard the couch groan as Rigby heaved himself up. His friend appeared beside him, a round, warm presence smelling of sweat and Cheez Dodger Dust. Rigby looked at the tub, then at Mordecai’s face.He saw the hesitation.
“Forget that lady,” Rigby said, his voice low, intense. He reached past Mordecai and grabbed the tub.The plastic cracked in his grip. “She’s just trying to scare us back to being weak. Back to being nobody.”
“What if… what if she’s right?” The question left Mordecai’s mouth before he could stop it. It hung in the cold air from the fridge.Rigby stared at him. For a second, Mordecai saw the same flicker of fear, the same deep, unspoken understanding of the monstrous changes they were undergoing.Then Rigby’s face hardened into a mask of defiant bravado.
“Right about what?” Rigby scooped the powder into two glasses with a violent clatter. “That we’re changing?Yeah, we are.We’re becoming something else. Something bigger.” He didn’t measure.He dumped in twice, three times the recommended dose. The purple dust formed small dunes in the glasses.“You wanna stop? You wanna go back to being the guy who needs help lifting a sack of mulch for Margaret?”
The name was a weapon. It pierced Mordecai’s doubt, pinning it. He saw himself, lanky and ineffective, fumbling with park equipment while Margaret watched. He saw the other version, the massive, imposing figure from his dreams, casting a huge shadow. The dream was still more real than the aching body in front of the fridge.“No,” Mordecai whispered.
“Then we don’t stop.” Rigby’s eyes were bright, feverish.“We push through. The ache, the weird feelings, that’s just the old us dying. The weak us.” He filled the glasses with water from the tap, stirring the vile mixture with a dirty finger. It swirled, thick and clumping.“This is the price. This is what it takes to not be ignored anymore.”
He handed a glass to Mordecai.It was cold. The weight of it in Mordecai’s hand felt immense, final.He looked at the thick, purplish slurry. He thought of the blood vial, the doctor’s scales, the popping seam of his shirt.
He thought of Margaret, and the dream snapped back into focus, pristine and powerful.
Rigby raised his glass.“To not being nobody.”
Mordecai clinked his against it. The sound was dull, a death knell.
They drank.