Letting Out Hot Air

Donald put a hand to his forehead as the person on the phone kept squawking at him. “Yes I get it. Yeah, I know. NO, I WON’T forget. I’m sure. I have it written down right here.” he gave a weary sigh as he stared at the directions in his hand. “Repeat it to you? YOU wrote it!” he complained.


It was a mildly cold, windy Autumn day in the region of Sinnoh. Pokemon were out and about and enjoying the rather nice day. A young man with jet black hair and brown eyes dressed in a simple hoodie and jeans, however, looked much less joyful to be out and about. Donald hated all these chores and busy work he had to do pretty much all the time, and today was no better.


There were times he wished he had become a trainer after all, if only so he could get away from the loud nonsense that was his family and current job. He could have been out exploring, away from the city, doing... something. Anything. That wasn’t... this useless crap.


“Okay, yeah, I’m hanging up. Yes, I’ll HURRY.” Donald put a bit more venom than he perhaps would have liked in that last word, but if the person on the line had said anything in response, he most certainly didn’t hear it as he hung up on them. Sure enough, seconds later, his cell rang again, but he decided not to answer it. Ten minutes of talking about nothing was far, far more than enough.


Donald rubbed between his eyes, grunting as he stuffed the directions in his pockets. He was so tired of this. Why did he have to go to a whole other town for this stupid errand? He didn’t even have any Pokemon or travel experience. This was all just a stressful waste of time. Time he could have spent... well, doing anything else.


Pokemon. He never really paid too much attention to the various colorful creatures that populate the world around him. It’s not like he hated Pokemon or didn’t have an interest when he was younger, it was just that... well, he was too busy to pay them any attention aside from the occasional wild pokemon that crossed his path, or seeing actual trainers with their Pokemon out in the city.


Donald belonged to a rather high up family, and his parents were very overbearing, raising him to take over the business and nothing else. Lots of long hours studying for classes and extracurriculars that he had very little honest interest in but couldn’t really say no to. Very little time for relaxation, let alone getting any real hobbies or fun interests.


And it just got worse as time went on. He got busier and busier, the work harder and harder. He thought things would finally look up when he finished university but within weeks of graduating his parents had already got him a position in the company and put him to work. The work was even more tedious and pointless. He was just a faceless mook in the business, doing all the hard nonsense just for a chance at a promotion. Nepotism could only get him so far. He had to ‘work’ to get to the top.


But he really didn’t want to. He just wanted, for once, a day to himself. The stress was really getting to him. Headaches, sleep issues, pains. He couldn’t take it anymore.


Donald groaned in frustration as he sat down on a bench, reaching into his pockets and checking the directions again. Floaroma Town. The town was much smaller years before but had been picking up a bit more traffic and expanding lately, although it was doing its best to maintain its natural flowery visage even with the expansions. Either way, the town’s expansion and growing population was noticeable enough that the higher ups at his company had begun to expand operations there, and they needed someone to act as delivery boy.


And of course it’d be Donald. It’s as if fate itself wanted to keep piling on work for him to do. A dead end office job would be infinitely better to all this.


Still, though. There was something about this Town that was... soothing. He could see why the flowers were so popular. If he had the time, he would like to explore the place a little, but he had a job to do. People to meet.


But then he stopped himself. Did he REALLY care? No, not really. For once, work could wait. He just REALLY needed to stop and smell the flowers, literally.


So he did. He took a walk around the peaceful town, uncaring about his troubles, his work, anything. This was his moment to have. There was a relaxing field of flowers just apart from the houses and any real seeing eyes. Donald took it all in. Maybe he could move out here... it’d certainly be better for his health.


Just then, however, something dripped onto Donald’s head, a cold wet feeling atop his brown mop of hair. The young man looked up, confused as it was perfectly sunny out, before his hand reached back and felt his hair. It was a thick substance that seemed to be dripping and spreading over his hair, painting his fingers as he ran them through it. Donald frowned, pulling his fingers away to look at the liquid.


It was purple and had a sheen to it. He rubbed it in his fingers, the liquid staining his digits and sticking between them. Paint? No. He stood up and cursed to himself, the man angrily darting his eyes around behind him for the prankster or assailant that tossed whatever this was at his head. There was no one in sight- he was alone here with not even a Pokemon stirring the flowers or bushes scattered around the natural park. He grumbled in annoyance as he tried to wipe the goo out of his hair, but only succeeded in spreading it around instead. “What the heck is this!?” the man grunted, cursing as he tugged his sticky hand out of his hair.


It was then that he stared at his hand in shock. The goo had spread completely over it, leaving no trace of skin behind. But what really made him confused what the state of his hand aside from that. His fingertips had turned yellow, and seemed... less detailed, flattening at the tips like they were a thin, deflated material. And to further this worrying sight, it seemed to be travelling up his hand. An examination of his other hand confirmed it was happening to it as well.


His nails disappeared into softening fingers, the digits shrinking, losing more detail and definition. Eventually his entire hand was a flat fold, thumbs merging with the thin, weightless limb as the entire ‘hand’ became yellow. At this point his fingers couldn’t even be called such, instead there were three triangular ‘points’ at the end of the flap.


Further up his arm around where his elbow should have been the yellow gave way to a light purple, a semi-circle concave into the yellow in a pattern.


“O-oh sweet Arceus! What is happening!?” Donald cried out, reaching upwards with his new flappy ‘arms’ as that cold wet feeling seemed to be spreading from his head. It encased his hair before oozing downwards, causing him to shiver as the goo showed no signs of stopping even when it went over his eyes, blinding him with purple coldness that he could do nothing to stop with his now useless for grabbing hands.


And the goop just kept going down, covering his nose and ears, robbing him of his hearing as the goop went into his nose. “O-oh sweet Arceus, HEL-” the man yelled before the purple went over his mouth, finally encompassing everything as it travelled over his chin and enclosed around his neck, engulfing his head entirely. The purple deformed, rounding outward as his features became less visible under the layer of growing blobby color, until there was just a big ball of it where his head should have been. And that ball was growing.


The man stumbled blindly, flat hands and increasingly flattening arms flailing and smacking against the purple sphere that his head had become. The sphere only seemed to grow, uncaring of his struggles as it expanded, sucking up his neck and shoulders in a featureless ball of unnaturally bouncy and purple material. “Mmmf! MMF MMF!!!” he cried, unable to even feel his head or neck anymore.


The sphere kept expanding and kept sucking up Donald’s body, growing to overtake his chest. The goop from it meeting the goop from his transformed arms. But instead of his arms getting sucked into the goop, they instead seemed to merge with the sphere’s surface and as if with no regard to the man’s bone structure began to move downward along with the sphere. The limbs moved down and of their own accord shifted more forward until they were hanging more from the front of Donald’s body as opposed to his sides.


Donald could feel his arms shifting, moving. By this point the human limbs were gone. They were entirely flat with no bone, muscle, or fat inside them, thin wrappings that he could barely move about, causing them to coil and flap and flutter as if they were paper.


Still, the man kept shouting and shouting. He wasn’t sure if anyone could hear him, but his heart was racing and he was in a panic. He was completely lost, vision nothing but purple and black.


The sphere kept growing, pushing outwards, absorbing his stomach as the arms flailed uselessly. The sphere seemed to be taking a more definitive shape now, though, as it reached his legs it began to taper and thin. However, this didn’t mean it was over.


Instead, Donald found his legs give out under him. He could only continue giving a muffled, blind yell as he expected to hit the grassy dirt underneath him... but the ground didn’t come. Instead, he seemed to be... floating?


He kicked his legs as much as he could, but couldn’t find the ground or any solid surface. Instead he was hanging in the air, the sphere floating him upwards, bloating with every yell and squirm as the man tired himself out, waving his arms wildly.


His legs grew weaker as his struggles began to slow. This didn’t mean he had calmed down, however. Instead this worried him even more, Donald wincing as his legs seemed to be getting sucked inward, disappearing into the purple sphere as its bottom half turned red and bloomed outward.


Donald could only wiggle his feet one more time before they were sucked into the bottom opening of the sphere with an almost comical ‘pop’. His entire body was gone, absorbed into the odd purple spherical... thing. He couldn’t feel anything, except for his new alien arms jutting outward from the front portion of the sphere and a cold breeze all over. At this point, were anyone to finally find the poor man, it would be difficult to even tell there was a person there at any point, as from the outside all they would see was an odd purple balloon drifting upwards. No matter how much the man ‘within’ flailed his arms, it simply looked like they were drifting in the wind.


But then the balloon began to stir. Donald felt a twitch in his back... or where his back would be? He couldn’t even tell, it was disorienting, he didn’t know where he was facing or where anything was, although in part it could have been his own stress getting to him.


On the surface, however, there was something happening ‘behind’ the balloon. Two growths began to push out, Donald giving an uncomfortable grunt as he seemed to feel it. Indeed, it was hard, if not impossible, to distinguish the man from the sphere he had disappeared into. Those growths continued pushing out until they took on a shape very familiar.


Thin and long, with several points at the end, the later half colored yellow while the rest was a light purple. These two new ‘arms’ grew from his back opposite the ones on his front. Donald could only twitch and go red within the balloon at the impossible feeling of this new set of limbs. They moved, they were his, but they were definitely not his legs.


Donald couldn’t speak anymore. He couldn’t even breathe anymore. If he were able to, he would have been screaming and hyperventilating. Instead his ‘skin’ felt odd and tingly. Lines formed along the surface of the balloon-like sphere, travelling from atop it down to the opening underneath. The lower portion of the sphere tinted towards a lighter shade of purple, matching that of his upper ‘arms’, ending in a semi-circle pattern along the previously formed lines.


On the ‘front’ of the balloon, not that there was a distinguishable one to begin with, a large, blocky yellow X formed. It was just above where the light purple turned into the primary purple, placed directly along the widest portion of the spherical shape.


“...Fwoooooooooooo!” Donald suddenly let out a large breath he wasn’t aware he had been holding as a small slit of a mouth appeared in the X’s center. No lips or teeth or even a tongue was within the ‘mouth’, just an empty black. Donald blinked as he realized that he could suddenly breathe freely again... before he went wide-eyed as he realized that he could suddenly also SEE again. Upon the balloon’s surface were two red dots, one each place above the X in the rows where his front arms were. These dots were Donald’s new eyes, entirely featureless.


Donald looked down, seeing, instead of his body or his hands, two thin limbs moving in the wind and an incredible distance between him and the ground. He could see all of Floaroma Town from where he was, but what he was more concerned about was why. “Bliiiim! Drif!” he called out, before what he had apparently said stuck in his mind. That cry... Drifblim!? And these arms... he was a Drifblim!?


The more he thought about it the more he wanted to deny it, yet there was no mistaking it. The Blimp Pokemon put his hands to his ‘face’, feeling the stretchy material that was his skin. He was flustered and confused, and the more he pushed at the blimp the more his body seemed to give, a bloated feeling in his... belly? Head? He couldn’t even tell. ‘Oh Arceus! Someone get me down!’ he wished. He was so high up, but he had no idea how to lower himself or even control where he was going. The more he thought about it, the more the wind seemed to be pulling him away from Town.


And he felt so bloated. Like he would explode any second, his head was spinning-no, he was spinning! He was a Pokemon, some kind of... balloon ghost! And he couldn’t talk normally or get down or even control his body! “Bliiim...” his mind was reeling. What should he do!? What could he do!?


Unbeknownst to him, the Pokemon that Donald had become was actually bloating, growing rounder and bigger as he continued to freak out.  “Drifblim...” he grunted, holding his inflating body as much as his flat four arms could as if it would stop what was happening.


The Drifblim shut his eyes, expecting a pop of some kind. Was this how it’d end? Being turned into a Pokemon and then blowing himself up? He couldn’t take it anymore. He just wanted to relax. He just wanted to get rid of all this stress and get away from it all. He didn’t want this!


He shut his dot red eyes tighter, the bloating feeling getting too much to bear. He was at his limit. This was it...


But instead of a pop or an explosion, there was an odd whistle. The bloated feeling was disappearing quickly as the whistle grew louder. He chanced opening an eye to see that he was slowly descending as the gassy wheeze continued.


He felt something odd in his underside. A rush of air was escaping him. The gas that had been filling the Drifblim up was now escaping him, but what was especially odd was how good it felt. All that pent up stress was just leaving him as hot air.


Literally hot air. Whooshing out of him in a gust of gas, his whole body shrinking and deflating to a more manageable and calm state. Oh, he still felt bloated, but it was an odd good kind of bloaty feeling.


‘Whoa... I feel... great...’ the Drifblim thought to himself, relaxing as he floated in the breeze. Upon his head a white mass of puff like a cloud. ‘Haha... wow, this is kinda nice!’ Donald gave a spin in the air, observing the land beneath him. Floaroma Town was quite a distance away. The people he was supposed to meet were probably wondering where he was at this point. Not to mention his boss probably trying to call him.


Actually, where was his phone? And his clothes? They just sorta went into this new body along with him didn’t they? He liked that shirt though... Not that he could even wear it again if he wanted to.


Oh well, it was a small loss. He didn’t really care about his phone either. No, now he was content. ‘Donald’ was otherwise missing as far as they knew. Now, this Drifblim was happy to be here in the moment, floating along with the breeze. Donald was happy to leave all that nonsense behind him. Oh, sure, he did not expect his wish to leave his more stressful life behind to actually have been granted, especially not out of the blue and in such a... disturbing and questionable manner, but he wasn’t complaining.


As the breeze carried him over the area, he simply relaxed and let it happen. He noticed several other balls of purple in the distance. Other Drifblims, maybe? He wondered if this happened to anyone else. Maybe he could find some fellow floaters to relax with.


But that was, maybe, for another time. For now, Donald would be taking a very long awaited for break.