The Pump Gym

 A draft from a commission I wrote for https://twitter.com/Melssive about a year ago! It's a bit rough in places, but I like the overall tone and goofiness associated with a gym dedicated to literally 'pumping' you up.

Will entered the building lobby without any major expectations in mind, only the knowledge that he had come for an induction at one of the most unorthodox gyms in the city. Pump Gym, favourably reviewed, provided an intensive fifteen-day course that promised to 'lift your spirits' and help you achieve the body of your dreams. In Will's case the ideal form differed from the norm, and he felt a shiver go down his spine when he realised that he would have to explain that to his appointed trainer. A traditional gym routine was designed to tone your body up, or build muscle mass. Will definitely wanted to increase his size, but in another way entirely.

How exactly do you go about telling another human being that you want to be the globe on Atlas' shoulders, instead of wanting to resemble the chiselled titan himself? If there was an easy way, Will never found it. He hoped that adopting a workout routine and coming closer to his ideal self would inflate his confidence along with the rest of him. 

"Excuse me," Will timidly approached the desk, and made tentative eye contact with a sharply dressed man wearing an employee name card around his neck with a lanyard displaying the gym logo. He tapped a button to mute his headset before he looked back at the pot-bellied blonde Will and gave him a welcoming smile that reached his eyes, he had a pleasant tone of voice that was tempered with cool professionalism.

"Hi there, how can I help you?" The first thing that Will noticed about the man was his girth. His uniform was a sleek navy-blue blazer layered over a button-up that had the gym logo stitched into the breast pocket, which was a flexing round-bellied humanoid silhouette in blue, backed by a large bike pump. Just like the logo, the secretary was equally rounded out. He barely fit in the office chair. His love handles bulged over the swivel chair’s arms with a pressure that soft, pliable fat should not possess, and when he rotated to fully face Will there was a dull groaning sound; as if someone were pressing too much weight on a floorboard.

"I'm here for my first day, I mean, my induction." Will’s primary reason for being here was to improve his own body and become a bigger man, but he was also an admirer of large bodied men himself. The secretary had a handsome enough face, but what really wrecked Will’s ability to breathe steadily was the sheer -size- of him. Just by looking at his double chin, fat fingers, and protruding belly; he could have been easily anywhere in the region of four hundred pounds. Which made it odd that, despite straining its sides, he hadn’t caused his office chair to collapse under his weight. Maybe he only ‘looked’ fat?

"First time?"

"Ex-excuse me…?” Will was caught off guard, and he blinked at the question with a scarlet face.

The secretary must have found it endearing, or he wouldn’t have laughed the way he did. “At the gym, sir. Is this your first time visiting a Pump Gym?”

Mortified, Will answered with a shaky cadence. It was the best he could muster. “Y-yeah, first time at a gym, pump, uh pump the gym; Pump Gym!” He covered his face, and groaned deeply in embarrassment.

"It's alright, everyone gets the first-time jitters. What's your ID number? I'll punch it in so that we can let your trainer know you're here." The professional coolness of the secretary was calming, and it helped Will return to normal tempo. He hoped that his personal trainer was as pleasant as him.

“Um, it’s nine two four seven six.”

“Wait just a moment.”

The secretary turned, chair straining, to face his computer and with a quick set of keystrokes entered the number he had been given. With a surprised face, he returned to Will. “Well I have to say, you’re definitely in good hands. The trainer that you’ve been designated is one of our best, and incredibly popular among first time visitors.” Then, the secretary said under his breath “perhaps a bit too popular if you ask me…”

“What was that?”

“Oh nothing, just clearing my throat,” the secretary feigned a cough and offered Will a key card, suspended from a similar lanyard as his own but in a different colour. Will turned it over in his hands and boggled over the information written on its glossy surface.

Starting Capacity: Not Tested

Tensile Limit: Not Tested

Initial Size: Category E

Those three options stood out as the most unusual, but everything else was standard. Height, age, blood type, emergency contacts and an unflattering front profile of his own face. Will disliked how thin it looked by comparison to how he would prefer to look, but he was by no means a slim man. He still had the first burgeoning of a double chin, and semi-plump facial cheeks to round out his features – but they weren’t as pronounced as he wanted them to be.

“Just go past this door, and keep heading down the corridor until you get to room E-5, your trainer will be waiting for you.”

Will used his newly acquired key-card to transition past the members only doorway, and walked the following corridors length to a myriad of bizarre sounds. He expected the grunting and the masculine exertions that normally came with gym territory, but there were some notes he did not recognise. Slowing down his pace by one of the doors marked B2, he heard what sounded like a tire hose from a gas station being turned to maximum output followed by a man shouting “too high!” When a loud bang then succeeded the hissing of the hose, Will nearly jumped out of his skin in fright. He presumed that it was someone who had fallen off a treadmill, and whoever it was must have been incredibly heavy to cause such a strident crashing noise.

Arriving at E-5, Will cleared his throat and straightened his back. He was determined to make a better impression on his personal trainer than the one he left on the secretary. Swiping his key-card, the door responded with a click and a green light that told him it was okay to enter. He pushed on the handle and entered a room so large and empty, that he was forced to consult his memory to make sure he had the right number in mind.

Seated on a bench with his back to Will was a man so round, that he looked more like a parade-balloon makers interpretation of a human than an actual flesh and blood person. He was sitting down, so it was hard to gauge his weight, but the way his powerfully spherical body creased and bowed out to the sides made Will think that he could quite possibly be wider than tall. His suspicions were confirmed when he suddenly erected to his full height and rotated to face him, like a space station changing its orbit.

“You must be the new recruit!”

Will was taken aback by the man, in every aspect. He was tall and broad shouldered, well over six foot and nearing maybe seven in total. His arms and legs were not rippled with the fashionable muscles of traditional weight lifters, but they were thick and meaty with the impression that they could crush a man in their embrace. His legs were even denser, and by rights they had to be, because they supported the biggest belly Will had ever seen – period. It protruded in every direction, and if not for the man’s plentiful barrelled chest, he would have looked like a great balloon with a set of limbs. The way he actually looked reminded Will of a cartoonists rendition of a fat man, where it was more pneumatic and zaftig than truly ‘fat.’ Secretly, Will hoped that their session would end up with him resembling even a fraction of this gut-behemoth by its end.

“What’s wrong, you never seen a pumper before?” The man showed his teeth in a wide smile, and Will was immediately enraptured by his soft Scots accent.

“A pumper?” Will choked, then cleared his throat. “What’s… that?”

“You signed up without even reading the FAQ huh, all it took was the blurb for the programme to get you hooked I bet. Well not that there’s anything wrong with that. Just means I’ve got to go over a few things before we get you pumpin’ and blowin’.” The man smirked and smacked his belly for emphasis, it didn’t wobble like cellulite, it thumped like a drum. 

“I just wanted to try the intense routine out, and y’know, see if it could uh… help me get the kind of body I want.” Will rubbed his left arm nervously. “But you see, the type of body that I want; isn’t what most people want.”

“Well let’s not throw out any judgements. I’m sure you’ve already noticed a bit of a running theme at the Pump Gym,” the man sat back down on the bench and flashed a disarming smile to try and ease Will’s anxiety. “A lot of us are pretty well rounded, the puns are free by the way, no extra cost.” He followed up with a wink, and his playful demeanour immediately had a relaxing effect. “Let’s start with the basics. What’s your name? I’m Seth Pnumis, professional pumper; and blimp.” He leant one hand on his knee, and extended the other for a shake.

“I’m Will,” he approached and shook his hand. It was soft, and had an almost bouncy quality to it. Will expected it to be hard-calloused with all the exercise a man would have to sweat through to achieve arms that herculean. Also, what did he mean by professional blimp?

“Okay then Will, go ahead and get changed, I’ll wait right here. Then the fun can start.”

When Will returned, he was dressed in a blue tank top, black shorts, and a pair of workout trainers. Seth sported a similar attire. A wide nearly skin-tight tank top, in hot pink; washed out pink gym shorts; and workout trainers in an even paler shade than that. With the combination of colour and rotundness Will was reminded of the biggest bubble-gum bubble he had ever seen, though he wagered Seth wouldn’t pop if you poked him too hard… he hoped.

“You said you had a few things to tell me?”

“Ah yeah, don’t worry about it.” Seth guided Will to an apparatus that looked like a normal leg press machine. An inclined seat, with a metal plate that the user would push hard on to raise the weights in the adjacent compartment and then bring his legs back to lower them again. The goal was to perform the motion as smoothly as possible, over a series of repetitions (or reps, as they referred to it) without letting the weights touch. Constant strain and hard work, that was the way to big legs; everybody wanted them; few people are willing to do leg day.

“First of all, y’know how we’re inflatable?”

Will blinked. There was a mental delay in processing the impossible phrase that Seth had just blurted out.

“You… didn’t know that.”

Will shook his head. A loss for words.

“… how do you think I got this round?” Seth put both hands on his gut to draw attention.

“I thought you were just like, a powerlifter who liked to eat.”

Seth guffawed at this. His stomach bounced.

“Come on, you’re pulling my leg. Sit down in the machine and we’ll start in a minute… but come on. Pump Gym? I told you I was a professional Pumper? You saw Mark at reception, right? He’s infamous for giving himself the ole sneaky top-up at his desk, you think he got INTO that chair looking like the Blimp of Wall Street?”

Will sat down and allowed Seth to manually adjust his posture in relation to the machine, secretly enjoying the large – apparently air-filled – man’s touch on his body. He noticed that there was a reeled up hose to his right, with an odd suction-cup like end to it. In fact, there were three hoses, but they looked far too small to blow up anything bigger than a toy-shop balloon.

“You haven’t asked me about what kind of body I’m going for.” Will started, and then raised his knees to his stomach and laid his feet properly on the metal plate. He had used one of these machines before, he wasn’t sure how this gym’s variation of it differed besides the inclusion of the hoses.

“By the way you keep staring at me as if I’m made of diamonds, I think I can guess.” Seth gave a warm chuckle and pressed the suction cupped ends of the hoses into Will’s lower legs, and the third under his tank top, into his belly button. “You want to get ‘big’ right?” There was that wink again.

“And doing leg presses will help with that?”

“Mm. Just trust me,” Seth adjusted the weighs and gave Will a thumbs up.

Will pressed hard on the plate, until his legs were almost fully extended. It was important to never straighten your knees until they locked on this machine, that was the most common way to injure yourself doing leg presses. What wasn’t common, however, was the feeling in his legs and lower body that reached all the way to his stomach. It was as if he had just stretched and been massaged at the same time, with a pleasant after-current flowing into his body. It spurred him on to do another rep, and then another, and then another. A pneumatic whine accompanied each repeated extension, and by the tenth or eleventh – he lost count – he had a pair of thunder-thighs that he didn’t remember using to walk into the building. 

“My body… it got…!”

“Pumped up.”

“This feels--… amazing.”

“Mhm, that’s usually how the first timers react. Now it’s important that you don’t overdo it, because the sensations can affect your psyche and create a temporary lapse in judgement because of the intense pleasure—”

Will may as well have forgotten Seth was even there. He kept slamming the plate, harder and harder. As his stomach grew from a pot belly to an exercise ball, his knees would bounce off of it whenever he tried to recoil them for another rep. With that makeshift spring in place, there was nothing stopping him from pumping his body repeatedly until his shorts squealed for mercy under duress from his comically distended thighs and hips. His love handles were just a pair of wide curves along a disproportionately bottom-heavy body, and his trainers were pulled taut to the laces by the sudden inflation of his now-rounded feet.

“I think that’s enough, we don’t want you looking like some bad hourglass shaped fanart of some cartoon, do we?” Seth disconnected the pumping apparatus and showed Will over to another machine. This one was effectively an enormous gas cylinder, encased in stainless steel beams with a handle-bar suspended from an overhanging extension.

“I think I got this one.” Will grabbed the bar without even hesitating. His newly inflated legs gave him a boost in height, meaning he didn’t even need to adjust the measurements. “Hook me up, I want to see how far I can stretch.” Confidence exuded from Will, but it felt unusual, like it was borrowed. Something had changed in him, and he wasn’t quite sure what it was; but he wanted to experience more of it.

“Okay, but just be careful. Like I said… inflating can really alter your thought process, and you might overstep your boundaries.” Seth dutifully attached the suction cups to Will’s biceps and belly-button.

Will ignored him, and started PUMPING. He went for broke, until rivulets of sweat ran from his forehead in exertion. He immediately felt, and saw a difference in his arms. He watched, keenly, as they went from pudgy and unimpressive to strong, sweat-slick trunks, that he felt like he could crush girders with. “Ah, this is great! Look Seth, I bet I can pump even bigger than you!” Will wanted to let out a bellowing laugh, but stopped. The change in his confidence was notable, even to himself; but he felt no inclination to stop. He just… kept… pumping…

“Mm,” Seth seemed unimpressed. “Well, you can’t save them all from their first time I guess.”

“What’d you say little man?” Will’s body stretched, widened, and heightened. Long emissions of deep, thunderous stretching noises, came from his inflating figure. He ballooned with every pull of the bar, far surpassing the size of his trainer, and even encroaching on the maximum width of the apparatus’ metal frame. He felt his inhibitions come loose, pulled taut by the rubber band of his size-lust until it finally snapped. His only thoughts turned to outgrowing Seth, the apparatus, the building… the city… the country… planet… bigger, bigger, bigger!

His tank top never stood a chance. It burst and sent nylon scraps fluttering to the four walls. His shorts followed, and his boxers clung for dear life. It seemed that the threat of nudity no longer embarrassed the formerly meek Will, who was now bulging out of the apparatus like a freakishly large balloon trapped in a drawer; with all the similar teetering and oscillation it underwent before meeting its ultimate fate.

“Do you see me Seth!?”

“Mhm.”

“Do you see how fat I am!?”

“Well technically it’s just air.”

“Who cares! Do you see how much of a fucking balloon I am!?” Two small explosions followed, as Will’s feet finally became round and puffy enough to burst out of their confining trainers. He couldn’t turn to see Seth’s face, but he imagined it to be awash with horror and admiration. There had never been a balloon bigger than this before!

“You might want to deflate a little, you know, for your own good.” Seth yawned. “You’re going through pump euphoria after all; so I suppose you’re not even listening.” He said, indifferent.

Will couldn’t operate the machine any more, so he decided to use the simplest method to inflate. He opened up his mouth, and inhaled. Air rushed into his torturously stretched body, it had begun to turn hot pink with all the perspiration and heat it generated. Will seemed completely obvious to the fact that he looked like a living bomb, and continued to suck in oxygen with gluttonous speed and volume.

Seth stood back and plugged his ears. “Ah well, you’ll probably apologize once you pop.”

Will suddenly came to his senses. What was he doing!? He had never inflated before! He couldn’t stretch this far, probably, at least not without training!

It was at that moment he realised he had lost control of his body.

He couldn’t stop himself from taking one more breath.

He couldn’t stop how good it felt.

He couldn’t stop himself from going… BANG!

A rush of steam erupted from the balloon formerly known as Will, sending large tarp sized scraps of pale tan rubber and white boxer fabric across the gym room floor. Seth gave out a large exasperated sigh and shrugged his shoulders. “Oh well, least he’ll know for the next time.”

When the din of Will’s eruption cleared, the apparatus had sustained no damage. Nothing in the room was different, bar his absence. After all, it was only a balloon going pop. It happened all the time at the Pump Gym.