A few minutes later, you and Nate - still in your tight bathing suits - are standing on a corner, each holding a bunch of balloons.
"A few simple rules," says the balloon seller, preparing to leave you, "you have to give away all the balloons by the end of the day. Each one has to go to a different person. You can't ditch, hide, pop, deflate, or throw out any of them. And lastly, your victim has to be 18-plus; for some reason, it's fine to erotically enslave adults into balloons, but involving anyone 17 and under is immoral." He shrugs. "Got it?"
"Um, yeah," says Nate, a little nervously.
"Good," says the balloon seller. "I'll be back in a bit to check on you. Don't disappoint me." He eyes Nate suspiciously. "Or else...you know."
Nate gasps as his nose suddenly starts to inflate with a soft hissing sound - the nostrils turning up at the end, his skin turning shiny and smooth. His nose pushes out from his face, further and further...he crosses his eyes, watching it grow. It's a big, cartoony, balloon pig snout attatched to his face.
"SNORT!" Nate tries to talk, but grunts and squeals keep coming out. "SQUEEEEEeeee-help!" Nate rubs his new snout, and it squeaks familiarly, just like the other balloon appendages you used to have. "SNORT-Nooooo-OINK! No...we-SQUEEEE-we won't let you doOOOOOINK! - down!"
"Yay," say the balloon seller. He slaps Nate's cheek, and Nate's balloony pig nose abruptly pops, leaving him back with his regular human one.
"Thank yooooOINK," says Nate, a little startled to hear himself still making pig noises. "Are ... are we going to be SQUEEEEee-stuck here forever doing thisSNORT?"
"Not if you push enough of my balloons," says the seller. "Do your job well, and I'll send you home, completely back to normal and human. Of course, I get to decide how many balloons is enough. Until then, I like to keep my employees with a reminder of what awaits them if their performance is poor. See you round, Pig-Nate and Monkey-Chris." He walks off.
"Monkey?" You say, confused. Nate turns around to look at you, then starts to laugh.
"Dude!" He exclaims, "check out your ears!"
You put a hand up to your ear - sure enough, like a balloon monkey, it's huge and round and inflated, sticking way out from your head. Your ears must be as big as your palms, jutting straight out. "I've gotta look ridiculous," you mutter. You can hear the squeaky noise of your hand rubbing your smooth, latex ear quite loudly.
"At leEEEEEEEEast your can still t-OINK!-talk," says Nate. "Man, this sucks. Oink."
"Come on, let's get it over with," you tell him. There's a crowd of college-looking guys some ways off, you could probably sell to them.
"I hate thisSNORT," says Nate, as you both start to walk. "I don't wa-OINK-want to get other p-EEEEEEEEEE-people stuck like us SNORT."
A short, thin college-age guy walks past you in the other direction. He's wearing baggy board shorts and a tight tank-top. His head turns to look at your balloons.
"Hey, can I have one?" he asks.
"Are you SNORTsure?" Nate asks. The guy blinks in surprise.
You elbow him. "He's, uh, got a sort throat," you say, "sure, here." You reach out with one of your balloons, a white bunny. The string loops itself around the guys wrist, tying itself tight.
The guy doesn't seem to notice the string's behavior - he's been staring at your huge, bizarre ears. "Thanks!" he says, and hurries off to find his friends.
"If you don't want to sell them, fine, but don't stop me from getting off this island," you tell Nate.
Nate sighs. "There he goOOOOINK! ... Goes," says Nate. You both watch as your customer joins up with a group of other guys. As they talk, the bunny balloon just sort of fades away, unnoticed, until it's completely vanished.
"Oh, SNORT," says Nick. "I mean, fuck."
Since your customer's back is toward you, you both can see a little white nub emerge from the top of his shorts. It slowly inflates, betting bigger and bigger, pushing up his tank top. Soon, it's about the size of an average person's head - a big, silly-looking, balloony white bunny tail, poofing out of the base of his spine.
"That was pretty fast," you say. "Come on, let's sell more!"
But Nate is still watching the latest victim of the balloons. The guy's friends quickly notice what's going on, and all crowd around the confused customer's ass to examine it. One guy squeezes the tail, and your customer cranes his neck trying to see what's happened to him. His eyes widen in surprise as he realizes what's attached to him, and at the same time, his ears just barely start to elongate.
"Okay SQUEEEEEEAL! ...I've seen enough," says Nate.