On my home planet, there were these things called herbivores. They were so prevalent that we learned about them in this other thing called school, which was mandatory state sponsored education.
Herberviors looked like this :
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As you can see in this pixel perfect rendition of a herbivore, they don’t have anything menacing about them other than their size. No crystal armor, half a meter long venomous spikes, or lightsabers. If you happen to be from my home planet, you should be very thankful for this.
Also, there's a mathematical equation that balances the number of herbivores and the number of carnivores. There are ten grams of herbivore for every gram of carnivore. This is true no matter where you go.
So, logically, I should be seeing a lot more of these harmless “herbivores”, not tyrannosaurus rexes, which happened to be exactly what I was looking at.
Now you might say, “How do you know it’s a tyrannosaurus rex? I thought you said it was pitch black out?”
Pitch black, except for the death-plume of fire coming out of its mouth.
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Pitch black, except for the death-plumes of fire coming out from its friends’ mouths.
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Pixel perfect.
The first thing I saw was one of them blow a steady stream of fire into the vines I had gotten my berry seeds from. A bunch of tiny creatures scurried out from underneath the vines. In that brief period of light, I saw the t-rex’s teeth. It had a total of four sharp teeth, all the rest were molars designed to grind plants to paste.
Imagine my surprise when I found that my childhood nightmare, the t-rex, had appeared in this world as fire-breathing herbivores. Actually, I wasn’t that surprised. I didn’t have time for surprise.
Before the vines could catch on fire, the reptile blew a second stream of breath, extinguishing the leftover fire.
Everything went black once more. A series of loud snapping noises assaulted my ears as they crunched into the vines.
At least its target wasn’t me. I don’t know how I would get out of this situation if they were carnivores. They weren’t trying to eat me, but they loved eating vines. I was sitting in a house made of vines. I saw the first embers of a breath of fire. “Oh hell no.” I rolled over and a thick shell closed over me.
I couldn’t just stay in this shell. It would be too late if I waited until the t-rex started eating Protect. I let the nine Distracts roll out.
I still couldn’t open up Protect without risking getting attacked. I needed another distraction, one even better than the Distracts. Thankfully, I had already set one up.
My phone hung down from a vine high above the herd. The goo coated vine tapped on the play button.
“BROOOOOOOO!” a resounding roar came from above, followed by incoherent japanese chatter. I jumped out of Protect and ran towards the nearest tree. A vine lifted me up onto one of the lower hanging branches.