NOVEL NEXT Chapter Twenty Six
I didn’t necessarily give up on my whole mine search thing that I was doing, but to say it was still my number one objective wouldn’t be true. Sure, I totally wanted another of those super nutritious rock candies that I found, but that was proving wayyyy too hard, what with how few actual still-worked-in mines that I was finding, and how spooky the prospect if fire was. At this point I was just slowly making my way in various directions, trying half-heartedly to find anything interesting while I spent my time eating and growing. Heck, who knows, maybe I could have found some other interesting alternative to the blue rocks! It's a fantasy world, anything is possible!
But yeah, it’s been about 2 and a half weeks, and I’m getting very very bored.
I managed to grow a bit more, both upwards and um… maybe a little bit outwards. I’m taller by a few fingers more, which admittedly isn’t very much. Could be that I’m close to the size of a 14 or 15 year old, but I can’t really be sure. I think it’s around there, but it's not like I have wild teenagers roaming around that I could compare myself to. And um… How do I say this? Perhaps it would be best to say that my plant body ‘fleshed out’? So far I guess I’ve been shaped like an awkward teenager, but now my faux breasts have grown just a tad bit bigger to accommodate the vine-mouth grabbers inside of me getting a bit larger too. And, as the line of my mouth has grown a teensy bit more downwards, the rest of me has gotten a little bit wider and curvier too, so that my stomach has more room for digestive acid and food. I’m not full on 'fertility goddess' sized, and I wouldn’t say that I’m fat, either. I’m just uh… a little more round. Let’s say I’m almost chubby. 'Thicc' I think the kids called it back when I was a human. Let’s hope it just stays at that.
Oh, and the fronds that made up my 'hair' grew more. It’s made it to a little further down than my shoulders. Whatever.
Now that my mouth has gotten so big, when I open it to release my poison while I sunbathe, I look like something out of a horror movie. Kinda like someone sliced a woman apart in a bunch of different directions and then stuck them on a vine-y bush, maybe. Or maybe if you put it another way, I look like a very macabre pitcher plant.
I’m sure I’d horrify any human I came across looking like that.
Hah, what am I saying, I already scare them normally anyways!
~~~
Welp, my boredom made me notice something that I think I wouldn’t normally have!
There’s something really weird going on in this part of the forest!
I guess I wandered back towards a patch of the redwood? But these trees don’t look like redwood trees, they just look… really big. Not all of them are crazy big, mind you, in fact I’m sure these trees are only half as big as the redwoods I remember passing through. But, on average, these things are pretty large for sure.
That’s not the weird thing I noticed, though; I promise it’s much much weirder. No, the weird thing was the corpses I was finding! I kept coming across a good handful of corpses (animal, monster, and even humanoid), that had small saplings growing on top of them. The roots had grown both weaved around and directly digging through the body, making it obvious that it was meant to stay stuck on there nice and good. Honestly, if the sapling didn’t have a small sparse almost-bush growing on top of it, I would have thought it was some kind of alien-type thing instead of plant based, just because of how bizarre it looked.
All the corpses had been nibbled on a little bit by tiny things here and there, but the fact that no big predators had come along to snatch them up and eat around (or also devour) the plant, was very very odd. I tried, and you could pick up the corpses just fine; There wasn’t anything tethering them to the ground. Why hadn’t anything carried any of them away?
The first one I saw I thought was just weird and moved on, you know? I mean, the corpses themselves looked old and weirdly gray, and I figured I could find decent enough prey around here that I wouldn’t need to bother with un-fresh corpses like when I was a little baby plant. It’s not like I was super hungry yet at the time anyways, maybe only just a little bit peckish, if anything. But after wandering around for a while and not finding anything decent to try and eat… I’d seen over 10 of the things, so why not give one of them a try?
It was really hard to get rid of the sapling that was woven around it, so I ended up just breaking pieces of the corpse off to toss into my mouth. The one I’d chosen still had its arms relatively intact, so I started by taking one of those off, folding it, and plopping it into my waiting stomach. It sizzled down quickly, just like most other meaty things do… Except maybe it dissolved too
quickly? And I barely felt like I really ate anything at all, you know? At first I chalked it up to me just being ravenous for some reason, probably because I really do need to get a lot of nutrition to really fill myself up these days, and I figured that since the corpse was a bit old, that probably also lessened what I was getting from it. But after eating a few more chunks, I realized…
For some reason this corpse was barely giving me even a smidgeon of nutrition!
To be sure that I was right, I tried some samplings from a few more of the sapling-corpses that I’d seen along the way, and oddly enough they were all like that! There was barely any nutrition to be had! I might as well have been digesting air! Did they dissolve so quickly because they were hollow inside or something?!
I was sure it must have been those sapling’s doing… But that also wouldn’t make sense, because they were way too small and crappy looking to possibly have absorbed the amount of nutrition that they’d sucked from these bodies, or at least that’s what I thought when I compared them with how I grew as a baby. Maybe I just had a better conversion rate for nutrients? It’s true that I’ve been growing faster through magical means…
I’m certain that these plants aren’t what I am, though, so I could be comparing a pig’s growth rate to a horse’s, for all I know. They didn’t look right at all, especially not with the way the roots grew in, and I don’t see a spot for a digestive sac anywhere… Although I suppose mine didn’t really develop until a little before I set off on my journey. But no, I’m certain that these things aren’t like me… Even if they’re disturbingly close.
I spent a long time observing the saplings, trying to reason out in my mind what was happening. Eventually I decided to try and completely strip one of the corpses from a sapling, even though I knew it was going to be a really tedious process. I wasn’t wrong; It totally sucked to do. But before I even finished doing it, I managed to scrape the sapling I'd been carefully avoiding this whole time because of its spooky appearance, and made a sprig of it fall off. And do you know what happened? The thing freaking screamed! It screamed! Like what the hell?! What is this thing, a mandrake? It didn’t even have a mouth, and it certainly didn’t look crazy magical or like it could talk, so where the hell was the noise even coming from?! I tried to listen to it from all different angles, but I really couldn’t tell!
And then there was a loud thumping sound in the distance.
Thumping isn’t really accurate, I suppose, it’s more that there was a stomping noise, headed this way. I climbed up a tree, hoping that whatever was making all that sound wouldn’t be the type of thing to look up, and watched the scene, hoping to find out what exactly it was that was coming. If it was a big monster lured in by the noise, then maybe I could kill it and eat that for dinner! And if it was whatever was making all these saplings… Well I’d know what to look out for next time I found something similar.
The stomping sound grew louder and louder, and oddly enough I could see some of the nearby trees shift around a bit, as if they had uprooted themselves and moved out of the way. And the thing they were making way for… It really looked like a treant. It was tall, maybe a little shorter than the size of your average one story house, and it moved like it was terribly heavy.
So let me explain to you… You’ve seen people who dress themselves up like Transformers, right? Well, this treant looked like a humanoid made out of thick tree roots was wearing the outsides of a tree, so that it could fold in on itself to look like a perfectly regular tree. I’m sure I’m not explaining it well, but honestly, I was a bit confused about what I was looking at too, so that’s the best I can describe it. Root-man wearing a tree-shell, for sure.
And what’s even more
interesting…I could tell just from looking at him for a while... that he was the same thing as whatever I was.
I was just 100% sure of it somehow.
It's amazing that I finally found another one of my kind after all of this wandering around, for sure, but...
…Why do I feel weird about it?
While I marveled at how crazy different we both looked from each other, the treant slowly marched himself over and observed the sapling. He reached over with a big clawed root-hand and took hold of the battered sapling, easily extricating it from the leftover chunks of meat it had been lacing through. And only a short moment later, strangely though it was, his hand started to slowly absorb it. I was confused as hell about what was happening at first. I mean, if he’s the same thing as me like I was so positive about, then how was he able to do that? I’m pretty sure if I planted one of my flowers or vines into the ground and tried to do the same thing, then it totally wouldn’t work. I can’t eat them, either, since I’m certain that digesting plants would do nothing for me… But then, as I studied his treant-like figure for a longer time, I realized something that’s very important.
This treant doesn’t have a mouth like me.
Where the mouth should have been was just completely flat and smooth, and any other places that a mouth could possibly be located, even on his root-hands, didn’t have any way to be a mouth either. I’m sure he should still be carnivorous like me… Was he using the saplings to eat those bodies? Is that why they didn’t have any nutrients left in them?
…Was that an option this whole time?
No, but I always had a mouth, didn’t I? I’ve always directly eaten my food! Even from day one, I- Oh, but actually, when I first came off my mom, I struggled for a little bit, didn’t I? Didn’t my mouth only open after I thought that I should have had one? And my tentacles only came out when I needed something like hands to help me…
Oh. Oh is that what happened? I thought that I just naturally grew like this because this was just what I was, but now that I’ve been thinking about it, almost all of the growth I’ve done has been because it was something that I wanted. I needed a way to access my digestive sac, so I made a mouth. I needed hands, so I made tentacles. I wished to be able to do the magical things I could do, and my seed simply let me once I found the right words or grew the right flowers. And I even grew a neat little plant that let me talk, just because I really wanted to (although that one I was completely conscious of my involvement in). My sweet little seed accommodated my wishes every step of the way.
…Does that mean that I could have become like this treant if I’d wanted to? I mean, apparently I could have chosen completely different eating options, and the tree aesthetic is certainly interesting, although I think I prefer my flowery body. The way he eats with saplings is quite interesting, and maybe I’d like to give it a try sometime. And he certainly seems like his outer tree-like shell would be good for camouflaging…
…Hey!
Why the hell does his body look so much more functional compared to mine?!
How come he didn’t end up looking like some kind of sexy plant?! Look at me over here, I have literal plant breasts! You think I wanted this, seed?! I never once asked to look like this! It’s not like I have anything against looking like a human, but I’m a plant for god’s sake! We might both have the same base-model of looking humanoid, but his body is much more wiggly and less like it’s trying to fool someone than mine for sure! If my seed thinks that this ‘human’ look of mine is any kind of camouflage like his ‘tree’ one is, then my seed must be absolutely stupid!