Aleph stared at the thing as it ricocheted off another branch of the ‘tree’. Sailing down to another chunk of the reefwall, seeming to trip over one of the preposterously large ‘tusks’ and then sail flipping end over end into another branch.

The inclusion of it’s emissions over radio translated into her own audible range was not helping.

Omega and Quarti had been claimed by the same morbid curiosity that held her. It was also what had prompted them to silence the Window’s narration attempting to explain how it was a majestic predator.

The thing was utterly ridiculous.

It flipped, flopped, bounced and occasionally bounded in quick jerky scrunching leaps with a coherent forward direction. It had a pair of pale fangs that were grotesquely out of scale with it. Making up almost half of the thing’s extended length. Not even mention of its actual size by the window had not helped. At twenty meters long the absurd hilarity of the thing was not improved.

It actually kinda made it worse. It didn't LOOK big enough with those proportions. It tumbled and bounced like it was weightless. The lack of any cues for size really did not help.

Then there was the noise.

That completely absurd noise.

The ‘noise’ it made over the radio frequencies, supposedly to "intimidate" prey, was to put it bluntly almost exactly like the sound of a long unending fart. The only thing it sounded more like than a fart, was a toddler trying, badly, to imitate a fart using their mouth.

For several long minutes they all three of them stared and listened to the thing before finally by mutual consensus they all burst into laughter. Aleph couldn't breath she laughed so hard, her tears were welling up and clouding her vision. The noise was just too much. She gasped and wheezed and finally managed to beg the window to ‘stop’.

Which finally brought the absurd sound to an end. Although none of them could manage to keep the giggles down for long. Every time Aleph managed to catch her breath and get a modicum of composure she would look over at Omega or the window and be reminded of the whole silly thing.

Every time Omega tried to calm them down Quarti would blow a raspberry and everything would collapse into laughter again.

Snorting, gasping and crying the three of them eventually ended up in an exhausted heap among the clouds, settling into quiet snickers and weak breathless giggles.

Squidgie spoke up from where Aleph had not been looking. It was honestly something she’d grown to accept. The Clerk child would just ‘be’ places out of nowhere. She’d stopped jumping months ago.

“Excuse me, I don’t think I understand miss Aleph. What is humorous about such a fierce and effective predator?”

[https://i.imgur.com/54quHxr.png]

That was too much, everyone started laughing again, Aleph grasped her sides and cried, she was pulling a muscle she was sure but it was just too much.

She felt bad for Squidgie, she tried to keep a serious face but it was too much. She could not do it. The image of the galumphing helplessly stumbling over itself squirmy thing with two incongruous spikes poking out of it was too much.

Omega tried to say something but Aleph laughing was keeping her from regaining the slight grasp of composure that had barely been obtained. Quarti however managed to speak as if she was comparatively in perfect control of herself.

Just the sound of a wide smile to her voice.

“It, it’s just so helpless! Nothing like it could ever hunt on terra, itsa tripping and toppling everywhere! It cannae barely move without flopping over itself!!”

Squidgie tilted its head at Quarti then turned to the window and it immediately began showing the absurd little klutzy tooth spiker again, although the audio was cut thankfully. Aleph still had to turn away and stare at the blue sky until she could manage to breath in a full lung worth of air.

The window apparently found that mention of it being 'helpless' offensive enough to override the mute command, since the voice started going on about how those tumblings were intentional and had something to do with it not being able to move its eyes.

She was however trying not to start snickering at the thing before with a sudden flash it lunged off of a tree branch.caught the point of one of its tusks in a crevice, ended up flipping into a sharp pivot with an especially loud raspberry buzz. Then in a moment that Aleph didn't even catch suddenly it was embedded in...

“That’s a MUMMY COW!”

It wasn't funny anymore. The thing had skewered one of the mummy cows to the side of a tree branch with its two tusks, embedded deep and through the side. Pinning the poor creature where it struggled and flailed. The other cows drifting along the branches simply drifting away.

Fluids were sizzling into diffuse clouds of steam around the wounds in sharp spurts before the paddle like foot swept forward to splay over the flesh of the animal then drag the flanks of it closer to its mouth. Dragging the skewered animal further up the tusks.

Some sort of what Aleph guessed was a tongue was coming out of the creature and stabbing into the poor soft hide of the mummy cow. Scrubbing and shredding off hunks of it into its mouth. Carefully licking up blobs of fluid before they could fizzle of into the vacuum.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Aleph shuddered and waved a dismissal at the window again before she lost her lunch.

Squidgie hummed a bit then reached over into her leather satchel and pulled out another piece of paper.

“Ah, I see... You didn't understand. That makes sense. May I intrude a bit Miss Aleph? I have some drawings I wanted you to see.”

Aleph shuddered then tried to give her young ‘ward’ her full attention with a sharp nod and a wiping away of her tears.

Squidgie held up the image.

”Is this pretty?”

Aleph really tried not to make a face but she really could not help it. Maybe part of it was going from seeing something as hilarious to seeing it as vicious and awful in a eye blink. But she couldn't.

The picture was kind of disgusting.

“That... That’s me?”

Squidgie looked at it then back at her.

“As a template yes... I extrapolated to try and push it towards a stronger expression for health and beauty...”

Quarti leaned over Aleph’s shoulder to see, which made her cringe a bit but she tried to compose herself.

Of course quarti couldn't wait.

“Woah, whots with pic o Aleph a chonka unit?! Absolute vastly tracts of her eh? Loada heaps! Loik five to twenty times her in that eh? Thicc as a mountain!”

Aleph glared at Quarti then looked at Squidgie with a bit of a weak smile.

“Yeah... No, that’s kinda... the opposite of beautiful. Sorry... You made me... really... really REALLY fat...”

She looked down the heaping blobs that had been made of her cheeks in the illustration, honestly the way that Squidgie had apparently taken great efforts to make it unmistakable her while also distorting every single bit of flesh it could to increase the volume of her was.

Impressively disturbing.

Quarti of course had her own opinions.

“Eh, Not worsed-fetish-fuk-luvs! Dead Choirs all ovahtime full of thickalicious plumper lovers! Inspire lovelies pretties every few years pretty much just most! Def props perfect eye of skeevy gazers loveliest be to them. Just missed wide as chubi-leph from her usual favorings jah sprat?”

Aleph frowned at quarti and shook her head.

Squidgie however just seemed confused.

“You find being rich and full of reserves able to weather terrible misfortune is not... Beautiful? Having long years full of plenty and happiness with no trials to strain or wound you? I was certain I got that one right. Apologies Miss aleph”

Aleph looked at the drawing again pausing to consider. If she looked at the eyes and the creases around it she realized they were furrowed into the lines of a smile. Deep soft lines in the rolls of flesh. This was not just a picture of her being fat.

It was a picture of her having been fat and happy for... She was not even sure how long it would take her face to look like that? Years? Decades? It was hard to guess because she didn't look worn, her skin was still fresh seeming despite the corpulence.

She considered the drawing, practically a photo with the way that Squidgie put details into it.

“Okay, I see sort of what you were going for there Squidgie. I guess the concept is beautiful in the abstract, just not visually? Uh, the first thing this made me think was that I must have just been strapped down doing nothing stuffing my face... If I was this big I don’t think I could have even moved!”

Squidgie got that thoughtful manner to her eye, slightly fluttering around chasing thoughts that no one else could see.

Quarti chimed in herself.

“Is a look of some of the queen mother types! Once was all the rage ta show how yon didnae have ta do nothing. Then turned ta a look of greed and offal, then went back ta the plumpest is the pretty. And then again come right back round again ta being thought all awful up in tha mountains. So is fine lil von squidge squeek! Wrong bit of a century Aleph be... catch her in makadama protectorial era? She be crying wit joy ta see herself loik such”

Squidgie considered Aleph carefully, the eye rolling over each leg, then her face, back down to her arms and finally setting back onto her face again.

“It is the fashion to consider beauty is part of a body that can move ? That can stand on her own? That lives with fewer reserves? To show how clever and capable she needs not a margin?”

Aleph had a brief image of squidgie bringing her a picture of herself emaciated down to sinew and bone and gave a shudder.

“Uh, in moderation, don’t go too far the other way either or its really awful as well! Um I mean if you want to make something that reads as beauty you still need to be healthy. And Uh I guess a little curve is pretty nice. If... um”

Aleph looked off with a hard stare and a flush and tried to stop thinking about which feature she personally would prefer.

Squidgie chirped gently to get her attention.

“I see, then I think I might need to explain something to you both Miss Aleph, Miss Quarti”

Quarti leaned over with a smile.

“Oh Wot ya itching good?”

Squidgie fidgeted with their little hands up and down their sides in pairs of fiddling fingers.

“It’s a misunderstanding on my part, I had assumed you were all being incredibly humble on purpose”

Aleph blushed a bit, Squidgie always assumed the nicest things about them.

“But I have come to realize you simply don’t realize what you are ‘owed’”