The capstone to 2021's Spooky Month season. The month has been long, and I didn't get everything I wanted done, but it was the most productive season I've ever had when it comes to writing. Thank you everyone for your support, your comments and your faves. I wouldn't have put out 10+ stories this month alone without the encouragement.

We still got two more months to go boyos, let's fucking do it.

Oh uh, the description for this story. There's not much to it. Just take one candy from the candy bowl and don't be a greedy dragon. :^)

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That's what the candy bowl said. In bold, broad, bright black letters. PLEASE TAKE ONE.

The intended nature of warnings is to take them at face value. It's the closest any person can get to directly firing a neuron into someone else's brain. Do this, go here, watch out – these statements are written to prevent something terrible from happening. Invested within is the implicit trust of being told what to do, and doing it, knowing that the range of outcomes present has already been judged for you, made in your best interest.

Believing signs at face value is not a sign of intelligence. Defying them without common sense however also is not a sign of intelligence.

Rest assured then, dear reader, that Rachel Manasarovar is not a form of intelligent life, because when she spotted a candy bowl at the witch Harmony's Halloween party with a sign that read 'PLEASE TAKE ONE' in bold, broad, bright black letters, her first instinct was to take two. To be a rebel, or something equally asinine.

“Tch, whatever,” the black astronomer said, spinning a Kitkat out of its wrapping. She was already hard-bitten about 'fun-sized' candy brands, as if anything about their pathetic portions was worth the branding price. What'd she have to worry about anyway, taking two?

She ripped open a pouch of M&M's with her teeth. They poured in. Then without a care, she bit into the twin Kitkat sticks and took away a gruesome chunk before grinding them between her teeth.

For a moment, Rachel was in bliss. The taste of ill-gotten chocolate was enough to isolate sound. So alternately crunchy, gooey, and rich with low percentage cacao that the world seemed inconsequential by comparison.

But then she swallowed. The room jumped from her perspective, as her neck traveled two feet. The candy wad refused to go down, so Rachel swallowed again, and beget a goosebump-fizzling array of scales, prickling to attention. From jawline to collarbone, and everything in between.

Rachel wobbled, a little light-headed. “H-hhuhh?”

She felt up her elongated neck with her hands. From the striped section in the middle, up to the farthest part she could reach, the tip of her chin. The texture was slick. Her fingertips brushed smooth, ticklish scalehide and dreds hanging without a shelf like her shoulders to sit on.

Rachel blinked, slowly comprehending what happened. “... huh.”

She looked at the candy bowl. She looked at Harmony's crowd. The extra height was going for seeing who could've spotted this, which at the moment seemed to be nobody. Not the patrons, not the donkey, not the MILFs, not the Pokemon familiars, not the bugs, not the dolls, not the office cow. Not even the host.

A devious thought went through Rachel's head. She cuddled the candy bowl protectively.

“You know...” she said, feeling a faint rasp in her voice stoked by dragonfire. “... rules are made to be broken.”

Why couldn't she have more? She was hungry, after all…

This neck was better for handling it too. The mouth might not have been bigger, but the cavernous tunnel running down to her gullet was several times wider than it used to be. She could even hear her voice echo through it.

This was decidedly worse than simple hunger. A normal craving for these little globules of corn syrup resolved itself quickly enough, but now? Peering into the bowl enticed her on a trip. The candy called to her. Her mouth watered. Instinctual greed wrapped itself around her faculties and made all the excuses in the word to keep defying social expectations. She tried, limply, to restrain her impulses.

But it was all in vain. Rachel had Starbursts in her eyes, and DOTS in her future.

“Gimme,” she said with an impish grin. She took a CRUNCH bar and tore it in half. Wrapper included.

There was an uncomfortable disconnect. Oops. Then she chewed. And chewed. And shivered, as the reflective packaging went down, and a tingling ran up her right hand – coincidentally, the one that fed the hapless bar to her mouth. Rachel squeezed it. Two fewer fingers came out. Around it, the skin bloated to a puffy, cartoonish girth. Purple scaled, pudgy, with tiny claws on the end.

Rachel stared, in awe of her claw. The same tingling went through her other hand. She squeezed, and suddenly – there was another claw, just as thick, and just as good at handling candy wrappers.

She grew a wicked grin. “This is... -uuuurrrp- cool~...”

Silvery plastic and wrapping paper burned up in the burp. It tasted like arrogance.

Rachel looked surreptitiously over her shoulder, leveling her neck to hide its length, shoving her claws into the bowl to deflect suspicion. No sign of being spotted yet. She wagered she looked weird, but not monstrously so.

That would come later. She craved it.

She dived in. These claws, while less dexterous overall, were better insofar as they were shovels rather than fine manipulators. Capable of dredging up a lot of candy at once and holding it for her discretion.

And a lot of candy, Rachel gained. The level of the bowl visibly dropped as she scooped up a haul, jawbreakers and tiny morsels dripping off the sides.

One more glance for comfort, and then? Rachel ate them.

It started at two at a time. That's how it always starts in a frenzy like this. Two at the time. Crunching dryly through cardboard and sinewy paper, through Kiss foil and the waxiest of wax paper. Rachel did not care – or actually, she did, but not the right way. The more she chewed, the less raw candy appealed. There was something rich and wrong about eating it all at once that filled her with glee.

As she swallowed, the mass multiplied. It hit her stomach like a lead weight, and a short groan signaled growth. It sagged over the lip of her sweatpants. Scaled stripes poked out, over a round and rapacious belly.

Blush filled her cheeks as quickly as greed gnawed at her inhibitions. “More.”

Two became three. Then three turned into four, after she realized she could stuff more in her cheeks. Four became five, and five became another scoop into the bowl, this time not nearly as subtle.

Her body deformed between bites. Fat packed into her upper arms, while muscle definition evaporated. At the same time, her legs wobbled, shrinking in proportion to an increasing swell in the gut.

“Mmmmghhhmmmfhhmrmrm-”

On a whim, Rachel shoved a claw's worth of goodies into her mouth. It managed to stick. Some fell out, but not enough to seriously impact her enjoyment. Muffled, mumbling and groaning with delight, she threw her head up high and chewed through packed cheeks full of lolipops and tootsie rolls and butterscotch, all with their stems and packaging included.

It rippled down her throat when she was done with it. Almost immediately, her tee shirt creaked in warning, stretching along the sleeves and the crook of the shoulder blades. It pressed in on her breasts, until they were pressed out of existence. Her belly grew bigger by comparison.

It was quickly becoming the biggest part of her body.

Rachel's circumstances evolved rapidly, the more obsessed she became with finishing off this bowl. She loitered over it openly, taking turns between bites gripping her round center of mass and feeling the rest of herself bloat in turn. Fangs soon developed. Better for breaking through the skin of her candy treats. Her sweats stretched as far as they could, accommodating the middle, but the rapid filling of ass cheeks with doughy fat stretched them to the breaking point. Folding along her curvature until it was tight on her hide. So tight it left nothing to the imagination, not even the scaly crack.

All it took was a mouthful to shred it in a dull rip. Her tailbone supplied the final straw – snapping the waistband in twain with ridiculous growth. Rachel paused to look, and grinned at the stumpy, dumpy tail wiggling its way out.

She hardly noticed the attention she was grabbing. Or the fact that the crotch ripped open, revealing nothing at all but the sweep of scales across a featureless taint.

“Yesshhh... heehhhh, yessshhh...!” she bellowed, swallowing as much as she could as fast as she could. Subtly didn't matter. Nothing mattered.

Her frame wobbled between bursts of growth. Whether it was her shoes coming apart with holes perforated through the front, or her shirt fissuring down the back and letting her scaly hide come free, or her pants giving up the ghost after an exhaustive campaign trying to keep her modest. The weight soon became too much. She dropped clumsily onto her grundle, stubby legs splayed. A spasm shot up her belly, briefly reminding her that yes, she was enormous, but that was far from enough to stop her.

There was one more bout of growing to be had. It pushing Rachel farther into the ceiling, rendering the rest of the world of confused and slightly alarmed onlookers as specks compared to her magnificent, gluttonous radiance. She stood so high over them, so wide, so much heavier she could crush them by rolling over and sitting on them. Numbers couldn't articulate how heavy Rachel was – largely because she'd forgotten how to count in the candy blitz.

But she was reasonably sure that one more bite would make her presence all the more comman-

She paused.

Her claws clicked around the bowl.

All the more commanding?

Wait.

Wait, was that it?

Was that everything?

Rachel's tail thumped. She just ate a whole bowl of Halloween candy on her own.

… not all of it. Disappointment turned to gold. Her stubby mitts collided with a flat, plastic-wrapped disk that'd been sitting at the bottom, trying to skirt away inconspicuously.

As the dragon with a girl's head fished it out, scrabbling several times to keep it in hand, the party host took notice. “Excuse me?! Helloooo!”

Rachel froze. Her eyes turned from her treat – a sugar cookie styled like a Jack-o-Lantern – to the person demanding her attention.

The feral witch Harmony, present in bare feet, long brim hat, primal smile and twigs in her messy red hair.

“I wouldn't eat the rest of that if I were thee, dragon,” said Harmony.

Rachel blinked. She pointed at claw at her face. “Me?”

“Yes, you,” the witch confirmed. She crossed her arms. “Put it down. Your greed won't avail you now.”

Rachel couldn't help but sneer at that. “My greed, huh?” Her tail thwapped at the hardwood. The party bounced, all except for the witch.

“You don't know what might happen to you,” Harmony warned. “I can certainly see how it's impacted YOU so far, my rotund friend, but for all my halloween friends, you have done quite the naughty thing, taking everyone else's candy. If you finish it all...”

That sounded more like a threat to her than an apology to everyone else, so Rachel handled it with as much smugness as she could manage.

“Oh yeah?” she jeered. “What's gonna happen? ooUURRRP. Am I gonna blow up?”

She undid the packaging with her claws, stressing the last handful of words. There was a tense pause. Was Harmony going to stop her, the crowd wondered together. Was she in charge? What about this dragon? What else was she planning? The beast was already scraping the ceiling? How much worse could it get? How much bigger could she get?

They stared each other down, the host and the dragon. Harmony’s face betrayed no feeling. Rachel felt a pang of regret, an urging from inside telling her to stop while she had it good – but it fell on deaf ears. She didn't listen. Instead, she opened her trap, and gobbled the cookie down. Crunch crunch, gobble gulp. All in one go.

“Mmmmh! Hah! Nothing happened to me! Take that you... increasingly.. big... wwwwhhat's going on, wait stop, I didn't mean it- HELP!”

The dragon dwindled. She did not lose her human face, but she did shrink and shrink, and shrink some more, until she was barely any bigger than the sum total of the candy she'd just consumed. She had been reduced.

By the time Harmony came to stand over her, Rachel was barely bigger than a basketball, all scales except the face, incredibly round. The witch knelt, and pinched Rachel by her stubby tail. The ball of dragon with a girlish, chocolate face blushed helplessly, and squeaked. She was incoherent.

Harmony fired off a bolt of witch magic into the bowl to refresh its contents. It was soon overflowing again. The sign, which had been knocked to the side, was righted, and put into a prominent spot.

Needless to say, fewer people tried their luck after that.

It was open and shut for the witch, who pattered proudly back to the front porch. She had a captive in hand, and a party to run. As long as no one else disobeyed the sign, it would be a happy night for all. And well, even if someone else did, it might still be a happy night.

Her eyes beamed with the sort of mischievous flourish that only has power on autumn nights, where ghosts come out to play. Dangling helplessly by the tail, Rachel bounced, utterly chastened.

Harmony might turn her back. It was a possibility.

But at present, the freckled witch was thinking about all the ways she can make the most out of her squishy, candy-drunk dragon.

Forgive me, I misspoke.

She was thinking about you.

A flare entered her green eyes, and her lips turned up into an appreciative smile. “I hope you found these tails - eheh - most enjoyable, and these stories of wit, whimsy and despair most delectable. If any of the stories presented do offend, then worry not, for with these words, I make amends:

“Tis all a product of the sleeper’s mind, a dreamer’s dream through which to unwind.”



Happy Halloween, readers. See you next year.