I was quickly finding that not fucking sleeping could be kind of detrimental to your health when you become exhausted. I had assumed that sleep was something I was - at the very least - capable of when I had blacked out yesterday. I mean, everything sleeps. Except Things apparently.

I was sitting very still just inside the mouth of the cave the two headed wolves - which I had decided to call Hellhounds for lack of a pokedex. After the fighting had ended, I’d decided I was too fucking tired to keep moving, and fuck Thing Two and Nadeen if they thought otherwise. If that had been the end of it I would have been pretty happy with things as they stood, but Nadeen, apparently quite terrified of me in the moments after the battle, had patently refused to climb down into the ravine.

At first I thought she just didn’t want to jump down - hell, I definitely hadn’t wanted to - but as I moved around trying to find an easy way down for her, I realized it was more than that. Her eyes tracked me across the ravine with the twitchiness of a rat eyeing a cat. She could barely stand, and was clearly hungry, but absolutely refused to use the slightly less steep ramp of dirt the wolves must have used to enter and exit the ravine until I had moved about eight feet away from it. A distance I judged to be just a bit past the outer limit of my… Hydra… tongue… thing.

I was still working on a name for it. I really, really, didn’t want to admit that I had tentacles. There was just something so spectacularly wrong about the word, like H.P. Lovecraft was waiting somewhere nearby to study me. As a Thing, I may be a monster, but I was still pretty much human in shape. The differences in biology were something I could come to grips with if I viewed them through the skein of what I was used to. But this new tidbit of information about my much changed physiology didn’t follow that same pattern. It had always been obvious to me that there was something magical about the stomach of a Thing - after all, I had easily eaten twice my bodyweight in food without feeling appreciably full or uncomfortable - but ‘tentacle portal’ was not something I was having fun coming to terms with.

Did I even still have a proper stomach, or when I took a bite of succulent Hellhound meat, did the food travel down into the hollow my tentacles existed in for them to chew on. The whole thing gave me a headache.

Nadeen sat a good ten feet away in the depths of the cave, Thing Two standing dutifully between us like a child being forced to choose between its parents. She was hopelessly grinding two sticks against each other in an amateur attempt to start a fire. I would have gone to correct her, but any time I got too close to her now she flinched and shuffled away. Ungrateful Brat.

Sitting to the side were the scraps of wolf fur that had survived Thing Two’s post combat feeding frenzy, and a single haunch of wolf meat. It looked so small and insignificant that I almost gazed with pity at Nadeen for having only that to eat. Then I remembered that if I was human, that much food would last me a couple days before it went bad, and I was overtaken with despair and the frankly abhorrent amount of food a Thing seems to need to survive. I was beginning to understand why Big Thing hadn’t been too keen on a bunch of us surviving to adulthood. We must be like locusts - completely decimating local wildlife when our numbers were high, quickly resulting in a food shortage that killed us faster than any exterminator ever could.

I peered around the mouth of the cave and gave a cursory glance up and down the ravine. My shoulders hurt like hell from my wolf bites, easily the first true wound I’d suffered since getting here. I’d figured Things might have some kind of healing factor or something since Thing Two had gotten by covered in acid burns pretty well, but now I was starting to think he might have just been too stupid to let it slow him down.

Lifting my arms was a hassle, and I didn’t look forward to trying to climb out of this ravine anytime soon. There was a deep, ache in my core that I couldn’t explain as simple fatigue or a wound though. Like I had used something up and was now feeling its absence.

Thinking I had to figure this whole tenta-...Hydra Tongue thing out before I got into another fight, I trilled at Thing Two, who quickly ambled into place to watch the entrance in my stead, while I padded out into the night.

I slowly dragged my aching body further up the ravine, making sure I was well out of range of the cave before stopping. Then, I tried to call my Hydra Tongue.

Nothing happened.

Annoyed, I tried to remember the sensation when I had first felt them slithering out of my gullet. The sick, nauseating feeling like I was about to throw up. I focused on that feeling for a while, and still nothing happened. Getting more and more annoyed I opened my mouth and stuck a hand inside, trying to induce vomiting. Only, I didn’t really have a gag reflex.

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Withdrawing my hand and shutting my mouth I glanced up to the edge of the forest rimming the ravine. Pick a relatively large tree, I opened my mouth again and began pushing outward. Flexing the muscles in my stomach and straining to expel something. It was eerily similar to being constipated, and not for the first time I wished I had just gotten big punchy muscles when I had evolved instead of whatever the fuck this was.

Slowly, I began to feel a stirring in my gut, and then the frankly disturbing sensation of something crawling up out of me. Like a snail from its shell, the three eel headed tendrils of pure muscle pushed their way out my mouth, immediately orienting on the tree I was focusing on.

Then all fucking hell broke loose.

Instead of attacking the tree, or lifting me up and out of the ravine, or doing anything I had wanted to try now that I was in a relatively safe environment, the three heads of my Hydra Tongue glanced around, realized there was no food, unanimously turned three sets of baleful eyes on me, and then tried to fucking kill each other.

They writhed and darted at one another, each one unable to get a firm tearing grasp on the other with the third taking advantage. And I felt, every. Single. Bite. I hadn’t until that point been aware that I could ‘feel’ the Hydra Tongues, but the sharp stinging sensation of something biting me repeatedly quickly proved to me that I could. Worse, the more they moved the more I could feel that hideous ache in more core growing, the pain of it somehow worse than my body parts trying to eat eachother alive.

As though sensing my plight, the Hydra Tongues seemed to come to a mutual agreement, then zipped back down my throat. A single one snapped its fanged jaw at me as it went, a clear warning not joke with it again about meal time. As soon as they were gone, I sank to my knees in exhaustion. I felt wrong. Empty somehow, like all the light in the world was gone and would never come back. I barely managed to crawl back into the cave before falling over at Thing Two’s feet, shaking violently as though I were naked in a blizzard.

My vision roved desperately over the the cave, searching for something I didn’t quite understand, until my eyes fell on Nadeen. Then the emptiness was filled with something else. Something primal, and furious. And it was only the fact that I could barely move that stopped me from trying to eat her whole in that moment. Nadeen too had stopped her futile attempts at starting a fire to stare at my writhing form. And when our gazes met, she slowly reached down to her belt and drew her short sword, a pale, shaky hand gently placing it in her lap as though waiting. Fear was in her eyes, but there was also defiance. A fiery refusal to simply accept death.

Finally, my will reasserted itself over the all consuming need to feed, and I tore my eyes from her, curling up into the fetal position on the ground. Dimly I could hear her return to fire, one hand quickly rubbing one stick against another stick held in place between her knees. But I didn’t hear the rasp of the shortsword going back into its scabbard. And I didn’t hear her cry, as she had been for much of the day.

She had resolved herself, and I really hoped it was to survive, and not to kill me.

I sort of drifted off then, my body slowly easing as the wracking spasms of pain dulled and then stopped. It wasn’t quite sleep, because I was still dimly aware of my surroundings for the entirety of the night, but I wasn’t quite awake either. It was like that fuzzy moment between dreams and wakefulness, when your not quite sure if your still asleep anymore.

By the time the spell was broken, I felt better, if not necessarily good. The painful ache was gone, and I had enough of my wits about me to think straight again. It was early morning, and Nadeen, who had fallen asleep well before getting her fire started, snored blissfully next to her uncooked haunch of Hellhound meat.

Making a gurgling sigh I ambled over and picked up the two sticks she had been rubbing together. The bark was scoured from them where she had been scraping them together all night, and I gently placed one in the center of the loose collection of twigs that was probably meant to feed the fire once it got started. Then I placed the tip of the other in a groove at the first sticks center, and began spinning it between my palms at a steady but quick pace.

I had no idea if it would work of course. But I had to assume I’d seen at least one more wilderness survival video than anyone else in this world had, so - maybe it’d work?

Nothing happened for a good long while, and Thing Two stomped over to loom over my should a few minutes after I started, but eventually a thin line of smoke began to rise from the twig, followed by the first burning embers of flame. Doing my best to coax the rest of the twigs to burning I quickly had mediocre fire burning.

I considered waking Nadeen for a moment, but frankly the kid was basically on death’s door. I would have probably given up and died a while ago if I was in her position, at least, I would have when I was a kid. So, reasoning she still hadn’t actually eaten anything - refusing to eat raw meat - I snatched up the haunch of wolf and quickly began roasting it inexpertly over the fire. It looked horrible. We didn’t exactly have a skinning knife, so I’d basically just used my teeth pull the skin and fur off while leaving as much of the meat as possible on the bone. What resulted was a pitted and pockmarked hunk of meat that looked like a dog had been gnawing on it, liberally spersed with bits of dirt and rocks from its time laying on the floor of a cave.

I mean, I’d still eat it. Beggars can’t be choosers afterall.

Once the meat had started to really cook, I found it didn’t seem so edible to me anymore though. Like it had lost something fundamental in the heat that made it little better than tree bark for consumption. Nadeen though, wiggled her nose once without opening her eyes, then rolled over, sending a single leg sprawling over me like I was just another pillow.

“Mm. Bastok, make sure you use mothers spices. Were not barbarians.” she muttered before wrinkling her brow and wiggling her foot where it lay sprawled across me. Then her eyes snapped open, and she all but jumped across the cavern away from me, terror fresh in her eyes. Her stump arm drew down towards the handle of her shortsword, and she seemed confused when it merely bumped into the cool metal uselessly. Then she seemed to fully wake up, and the hopelessness of her situation settled over her all over again, like a thick cloak blocking her other emotions.

She glanced glassy eyed down at the haunch of meat cooking in my hand, and seemed to have to force herself to slide forward to sit down next to me. The mere act of sitting near me seemed cause her great distress, and so, disgusted, I handed her the probably cooked hunk of meat, then got up and walked away.

“...Thanks.” Nadeen whispered behind me between shuddering breaths, and I turned to see her holding back tears when she took her first rough bite of the meat. Her face screwed up in disgust at the taste, and she looked as though she was going to vomit, but a look of dogged determination overtook her, and she continued on, eating one small dainty bite at a time like a child trying to force its way through broccoli.

Rolling my eyes, I turned away, feeling much better about myself.