#teratovore

[monster-rinds]

Our book GREEN V. POOB was inexplicably banned with no explanation from ScribbleHub. So, now it's for sale on itchio (yeah, we know) so that you can support us, read it, and try to figure out why. Maybe you can tell us what happened:

GREEN V. POOB by the Inmara Fenumera

the sequel to TERATOVORE

[theinmara]

GREEN V. POOB

On Monday, January 5, we'll start releasing daily chapters of our new book over on scribblehub, and linking to them here.

It's a Thursday, and Poob has it for Salvador Green in the form of an HR chatbot.

Sal wants to transition gracefully at work. She already knows who she is. She's just got to jump through the typical hoops to let everyone else know.

The only problem is that her employers, Poob International, have replaced HR with an LLM. "AI".

And she lets herself get into an argument with it that follows her home and gets into her head, literally.

This opens up a whole new world to her, and exposes Sal to the future of Poob International, and its designs to begin streaming blood. And now it's just a question of whose blood it will be.

Meanwhile, Catherine, her brother's dog, wants to go for a longer walk.

---

For those who might protest that Poob was never meant to be an actual fictional corporation, that's in the plot here. That history is incorporated into the text. What happens in this story is that someone decided to capitalize on Tumblr culture and start a streaming service with that name. And this book is about how that ultimately comes to a violent, violent end.

In a way, though, it's also using Poob as a stand-in for other businesses, as intended.

It's also the sequel to TERATOVORE by @monster-rinds

[monster-rinds]

epub for TERATOVORE

If you'd like to read my book TERATOVORE, but don't want to grapple with the off putting Tumblr interface, or use an ad blocker on ScribbleHub, we now have an epub available for you, for free, from our Patreon. You don't even need to be a member to go and download it!

epub for TERATOVORE | the Inmara of the Ktletaccete

Get more from the Inmara of the Ktletaccete on Patreon

[monster-rinds]

Teratovore, by Synthia of the Inmara

If you've gone shopping in Gresham lately, you may have met Synthia (she/her). She "works" a counter at Hayward Groceries and loves to talk to people. She eats the excess emotions they radiate when experiencing such things as jokes, prices, tabloid headlines, declined credit cards, and holiday music. She's a monster.

She's been around a bit longer than humanity, and is quite experienced at surviving the inherent violence of the Earth. She's pretty good at pretending to be human. And other things.

Recently, however, she's met someone.

Felicity.

A monster who eats monsters. A teratovore.

And Felicity had an interesting proposal for her.

It almost worked, too.

You might find it easier to read over on Scribblehub, but all the chapters are here, now. ___

Table of Contents

prologue: About Gresham, Oregon

Not a woman

Not you

Not a trick

Not a chance

Not a hit

Not the world's greatest gangster movie

Not dead yet

Not your only friend

Not quite

Not forgotten

Not according to plan

uədo

Not a con

Not the key

open

Not a new pact

Fast friends

Happiness

Synthesis

Not par

Partnership

A drain

Call me a spade

I'm going digging

Not a good time

Paydirt

No lie, no face

No food for you

Nightmare city

Not fooling anyone

I'm feeling happy

Brief friends

All fired up

Complications

Indigestion

Probably hubris

Not a win

Demise

Not a nightmare

Teratovore

Scraps

Orientation

Feelings

Reasons

Teratodivergence

Doing surgery on a city

Pulling on a tendon

To see where it goes

Hold up

Important negotiations

Pulling the Chord

In the outlet by the lightswitch

Ring around the rosie

Cassiopeia's Boast

The punchline

And that's it! It's done.

[monster-rinds]

Chapter 38: Demise

I was so proud of my horn, because it was my actual mouth. If I had managed to stick it into an opponent, I could have sucked them dry and empty in seconds.

It was so perfect and funny for a unicorn.

But I never got to use it.

As soon as I set hoof on the floor of the barn, it turned into a bowl and then a funnel and I began to fall down into it, with the flying boars above me, circling.

I don’t think I could accurately describe how utterly terrifying this was while also using the names of what we looked like or what was happening. But I’ll try.

I noticed the warped space of the barn and slowly began to register what was happening, and then I saw the dark hairy bulks moving around me, making disturbing noises. Snorts, squeals, and the leathery creak and flap of flexing wings accompanied the sudden sensation of gravity seriously warping spacetime and causing my hooves to slide out from under me.

My haunches hit the muddy ground first, and slid through it toward the center of the space. And since my reflex had been to rear up, I went nose over ass backward, legs flailing above me, and the back of my head smacked a rock that just happened to be there.

But these were just the physical sensations meant to disorient and distract me. They did no real harm other than lay me prone and draw me to the center of the slaughter box.

And the world around me expanded, making me very, very small, surrounded by a ballet of teratovores.

And then I reacted.

I didn’t really think. I didn’t have time to think. I knew I was already losing, caught in someone else’s domain. I just reached for the most successful form I’d ever taken, the black cloud of tiny compound eyeballs, but with that added addition of a proboscis for each one.

And I did my best to fill the ever growing space with myself, so there was no place to get away from me, and no way to box me in.

I grew so fast, injecting the domain with every quantum of myself from the Strands.

But it didn’t work.

I felt myself buffeted and churned by the wing beats of the boars as they circled me, braying and croaking, and I was pushed into myself by the whirlwind. And, of course, the ever warping scale and weight of the place outpaced me.

Something about it was extra disorienting, and it took me a few moments after realizing I couldn’t find purchase to figure it out.

I felt like I was in a kaleidoscope, tumbling, with images of myself overlapping, being chopped up by some fundamental force of the universe itself that I’d never encountered before. And it was only a matter of time before portions of myself were divided up and snorted into oblivion by these monsters.

There was no longer any light, only me and the intersecting prisms of reality.

Trying to make sense of it, I recalled what I’d seen as I’d fallen into the trap. Twelve winged boars circling in lockstep, flapping alternatively in a wave that rotated counter to their movement. Clockwise against counterclockwise. 

The shards of space I was now inhabiting were doing something very similar. The same kind of movement and dance.

I wasn’t caught in one domain! I was caught in twelve domains simultaneously!

This was very bad.

Obviously, I’d never experienced anything like this before, because if I had I wouldn’t have existed to experience it then. I would have been killed. I generally tried to stay out of shit like this, and had had a seven hundred and forty some million year track record of being very good at it.

To say I was humiliated by the experience would have understated the situation beyond description.

But I didn’t have time for pride. I had to escape, and for a few pulses of consciousness I worked at it mindlessly, scrabbling feebly and desperately at the bounds of all reality around me.

After a bit, though, I realized the monsters weren’t attacking me. They weren’t bothering to try to eat me. And I wondered if they hadn’t figured out how, yet. I knew that if they tried in the ways I’d been attacked before, I could turn it around on them. And maybe I had a reputation that scared them.

Which then gave me enough calmness to remember that I’d just eaten a carpedominator, and now knew how to adopt that adaptation.

Ah.

One little adaptation, without even a physical change. It was coming so easy to me now. Especially one that I had the memory of using before, even if it wasn’t my own memory. Such a shortcut.

A little self origami of waves in my own energy and I was able to lash out in twelve directions and corrupt all twelve domains to make them mine.

And that was my undoing.

I should have guessed what was going on. The way that Chord had fed me such a vulnerable carpedominator earlier, stroking my confidence while giving me a crucial skill. And the way these boars were so identical and so adept at coordinating not only their movements but the complex interplay of their domains, disguising them and letting me into them without my notice in the first place.

It was all spelled out before me, and I just hadn’t read it.

Because it wasn’t my wheelhouse.

I may have been able to eat other monsters, but in my heart and my sheer mass of experience and honed reflexes I was not a teratovore.

My size and my complexity didn’t save me.

Cackling with glee at turning the tide on my captors, I seized their domains and gripped them, bringing their dance to a halt.

But just as I took a moment to decide what to do next, they wheeled in synchronicity, lowered their heads, and charged, sinking their tusks, their own proboscides right into my very mind.

And I knew such pain.

And, unlike Felicity, they didn’t hold back.

It was over in less than a second.

Because, what happens when a carpedominator tries to take a domain? They make that domain a part of their own psyche and start to draw the owning emanant into their own being. It’s how they feed.

And, normally, I would have been able to use their domains against them, to keep them from making the distance to charge me.

Except, their own domains were now me. All they had needed to do was pierce the fabric of those domains.

And the real crux of it was that they were carpedominators, too. And when a carpedominator attacks the domain of another carpedominator, which I had no idea about, apparently it just becomes a force of wills.

I was huge, but I was outnumbered twelve to one. And I hadn’t known what was coming. I barely even saw it happen, and I had less than a second of awareness to make sense of it when it did. And that time was spent in the deepest agony I had ever known.

The boars grew very fat, very fast.

---

“The livestock ate her,” came the next message, remarkably quick on the heels of the last one. “She’s gone.”

He’d hardly had time to visualize the different ways his trap could play out after that. Synthia had been so wily that he’d expected her to best his livestock, but not unscathed. Sewer Teeth should have had time to use the drain carefully placed and concealed beneath where she had been held, in order to deliver the coup de grace itself.

But obviously he’d overestimated her.

What a wonderful relief.

The city was his again.

It was a little bit of a shame, though. Without Sewer Teeth eating the last bite of her, all her memories were gone forever. The livestock hadn’t been configured to do that. He couldn’t risk them getting that smart.

Such a treasure, destroyed.

Oh, well.

---

Greg may have been speeding.

He may have, in fact, been speeding through a school zone.

Normally he never even came close to doing that. He’d learned how to drive from his dad, who had been the most careful driver anyone had ever known. And he’d inherited his dad’s rock solid nerves, and used them on the road every moment he was behind the wheel.

But, lately, life had gone beyond even his family’s legendary endurance. Synthia’s nightmare storm of last night had shaken him so deeply that now the wheel of his truck itself shook him whenever he gripped it.

And in his panicked desperation to get to Cassy, he’d forgotten to compensate for that.

And now he was waiting for a police officer to finish running his plates before coming up to tell him the bad news that had the worst timing ever. It would be a big ticket. The first in his life. When he had no income.

And he didn’t think he could contest this one.

The school zone light was visibly flashing on the sign across the street.

He’d made a legitimate mistake.

He texted Ayden to let him know he was being detained.

---

Ayden pushed his phone toward Charlie again, with sleep ridden and pained eyes, asking, “Could you drive me there? I think we need to hurry.”

---

Milk was pleased with itself.

It had learned a neat trick from a tiny organism a long, long time ago, and now it was going to use that trick.

It was its favorite trick, even though it so rarely had had the opportunity to use it.

After it had snagged the very last morsel of Synthia from underneath Chord’s livestock, it had used the property’s overdone network of sewer-like piping to find a safe place to message the master of this trap with an update, using the memories it had acquired from eating Sewer Teeth to spoof its identity.

Chord had praised it. The ruse had worked.

And fooling Chord wasn’t even its trick.

Then it left entirely for more familiar territory where it could address what it had done and make new plans.

Having originally manifested as a physics eater had given Milk so many delightful options for being sneaky. It loved being sneaky.

---

When it was all over, Chord returned to his property to survey the aftermath and to set up his domain again.

He traveled there as a very small worm riding a mount that looked something like a hawk. He could change his size at will, but he couldn’t truly change his own shape. Despite the fact that he could sculpt and reconfigure other emanants, he still hadn’t figured out that trick for himself.

What he did to others was invasive and altered an emanant at a deep and fundamental level. It often changed their memories. And he couldn’t adapt that to himself without changing the way he thought and behaved, and he couldn’t allow that.

All that he could safely do was change his apparent size.

Which was fine. He was so very content as he was.

But what he found when he approached his ranch threatened that contentment and gave him disquiet.

Sewer Teeth was missing, and so were his livestock.

Bremerton, the dog, was still there, napping on the porch. And so were Bremerton's keepers, Chordate jr. and Kate Montgomery, the current humans who legally owned the property for him.

And when he confronted them in their living room about what had happened, they reported that Sewer Teeth had not spoken to them since he, Chord, had set the trap and left the farm. And when they had seen the unicorn attack the barn and allow the livestock to escape, they had been powerless to stop it.

They did tell him that the livestock looked bigger than before and had flown off in a flock toward Mount Hood.

This was all he ever expected of them, so he thanked them and went about reestablishing his domain in the attic.

The livestock could be tracked down or replaced.

The absence of Sewer Teeth was more worrisome, but flying into a panic or rage about it would only put him at a disadvantage.

He needed to think, and he needed more intelligence.

He could do the former just fine, and he had servants and agents all over the county for the latter.

So, once he was settled, he sent out commands and instructed his remaining forces to fill the vacuum in Gresham before the common thralls and peasantry could return.

Despite his major losses, one benefit of all of this was that he'd have a stronger grip on the county seat, and he could now build a stronger foundation for his long term goals.

The hardest part would be replacing Fate Vine. Overlords with its talents weren’t exactly rare, but very few were ever as cooperative as it had been.

At least he no longer had any local enemies to worry about, besides maybe a rogue Sewer Teeth.

Hm.

Had Sewer Teeth lied to him? Had it successfully consumed Synthia and gained the adaptations she’d collected?

Did Sewer Teeth now think it could rival him?

That would prove amusing.

Still, it would be a good idea to start laying the groundwork to trap it now.

He sent out messages to his Portland contacts to start the politicking necessary for an idea he had.

---

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[monster-rinds]

Chapter 2: Not you

“This you?” they asked, gesturing at the wooded lot, as if we’d been walking together as companions.

“No, I’m right in front of you,” I said, sticking to my new dry affect of the afternoon. It seemed like a good way to deflect or stonewall them.

“You should invite me in to see your place,” they said, ignoring my reply, as if they were referring to an apartment building or something. Then they said, “I brought wine.”

“Merlot does pair well with tampons, I’m told,” I lied.

“Oh, those were just a conversation piece.”

“Effective. We’re having one.”

“True. Though we could both be more comfortable while doing so.”

“I’d be more comfortable if I knew your name. Since you know mine,” I said.

“I rather think I don’t, actually,” they replied.

Ah. There we go. Now my hunch was answered. They at least knew I was faking my identity at work. Which probably meant that they were a private investigator, a government official, or something else.

They were still smiling, and totally relaxed, all looking like a soccer mom with a queer flare in their fuchsia plaid shacket, dark burgundy hair, navy Capri leggings, and immaculate makeup. But none of that meant anything.

I sighed, and admitted, “Names are kind of meaningless actually. They hold no power. So I don’t have one.” I have many.

They silently laughed once, smirking and nodding their head forward a little, lips pursed. “Same,” they said, then flashed that winning grin. “But, let’s call me Felicity.”

I tilted my head to the side and nodded, then gestured at the woods, “After you, Felicity.”

They bounced a little as they stepped forward and turned to enter the wooded lot. And I followed somewhat listlessly.

But I asked, as we left the view of the street, following a pathway between nettles and brambles, “What gave me away?”

And over their shoulder, without looking, Felicity replied, “Oh, nothing in particular. I just have a really good sense for these things. Don’t really want to give away my secrets either, though.”

“Ah, yes. Neither do I,” I said. “But I do want to be more careful.”

“Oh, understood! Um,” they looked around as if entering the foyer of a fancy building. “Your facade could use a little work. You don’t stick to a single affectation very well. Watching you from customer to customer, you reflected each one back so fluidly. And it was more than just your voice or stance, you know. And then when I threw you off balance, you reverted to what I think is your natural state.”

“Well, shit.”

They entered my clearing and turned to face me, swinging their bag jauntily and letting it fall back to the side of their leg. Still grinning. “No, but it was subtle! If I hadn’t been looking for something like you, I wouldn’t have noticed! You really shouldn’t worry.”

The fact that they’d managed to walk to my clearing told me almost everything I needed to know, though. A typical human wouldn’t have been able to do that. They would have continued right on through, following the path to the park behind my lot. To detect and reach my clearing required skills and senses that your average private detective or government official just does not have. But also, to choose to enter my clearing also implied things.

I tensed up.

A human was something I could deal with. Bamboozle. Manipulate.

A not-human most likely meant I was prey.

“Oh, relax,” Felicity said.

I did not relax.

“I really do just want to share my wine, and maybe my crackers and cheese, and talk,” they said. “Then I’ll go, and maybe I’ll see you around the store again sometime. Maybe I can show you my place.”

I think I frowned, and asked, “Do the wine and crackers do anything for you?”

They shrugged, “Not really. But they’re fun anyway. A kind of social ritual.”

“I don’t have any furniture,” I pointed out.

“I’ll conjure some.”

“In my home?”

“If you’ll let me.”

“I’m not sure I should,” I said.

“Well, OK, I did sniff you out and stalk you, so I do owe you something you can trust,” Felicity admitted. “But we are in your home, your domain, where you have power over me.”

“There are those that can turn your domain against you, if they enter it,” I stated.

“True. But if I was one of those, I think you’d already be food,” they countered. “But, please, take some time to investigate me. I’ll leave if you tell me to. I will be disappointed, but it’s only right and fair.”

I snorted and stomped around them in a circle, examining them much more closely than before. I used the same senses I needed to reach my clearing, which were all I had beyond the typical sets simulated by any nervous system. I’m pretty good at detecting my own kind just fine, but Felicity wasn’t that. Their physical camouflage was more complete than mine, allowing them to rely less on misdirection. But there should have been some sort of clue to their nature.

And there was. Just not where I was looking.

I’m pretty sure that when they said that I had slipped and shown them my true self, they’d actually sensed the very fabric of my being. I wasn’t about to get the same courtesy here. But you don’t get to be as old as I am without learning how to spot danger or suss out potential allies, even with inferior senses.

We’re monsters.

Some people call us a variety of other things, like spirits, yokai, demons, rakshasa, ogres, fae, ogbanje, etc. Some of these terms are very specific, others broad. Some are accurate sometimes. All of them have cultural contexts that are not quite universal and may describe something else, actually. 

It’s also really hard to figure out which terms were inspired by some of us, and which of us were created by the terms themselves. We happen. And we happen for a number of reasons. And some of those reasons are primordial and some are linguistic, and a whole universe of other mechanisms.

In the here and now, I like to use the word “monsters”. I’m really just a fan of the whole concept, the range of what monsters are in popular culture and mythology combined, including things like Sesame Street and various cartoons. It feels like an accurate assessment of what you can expect from us.

But call us what you want.

Those of us who speak tend to use a mix of Greek and Latin words to categorize ourselves. We inherited the idea from human science, but I don’t think we’re very scientific about it. The point isn’t to understand our ecosystem of monsters better, nor to create factions and draw lines of allegiances. We just needed words to quickly describe a given situation between any of our kind.

For instance, I’m an affectivore. I’ve seen that term used in human pop culture, too, in several different places. But it’s not super common outside of a handful of fandoms. It means that I feed on emotion.

But it’s not like I suck the emotion out of a person or other being. There are some monsters that do that. I’m more like the plankton of monsters. I feed off of radiant emotion.

Any being that experiences emotion creates an excess of it that just radiates from their presence. It affects the world and other beings around them, and generally shapes reality a little, just like sunlight does. So, I just have to position myself within that radiance and I soak up what hits me. Pretty harmless, really.

Some affectivores go out of their way to create strong emotions in order to feed off of them. They’ll disguise themselves as things like printers, traffic lights, and other appliances that malfunction just enough to be very irritating, but not enough to be replaced. Others operate as serial killers, marriage officiants, judges, household pets, natural disasters, and any other number of deeply impactful things. And depending on where they’ve set themselves up, they can get quite a bit of nourishment that way.

I don’t do that. I usually disguise myself as human, because that gives me a chance at the more complex interactions that I personally crave. And then I go where there are a lot of people. I don’t really need to do anything to provoke emotion, either. When there are enough people, there is always emotion, a gale wind of it. People carry it around with themselves everywhere, and then when they interact with each other it amplifies.

A grocery store checkout stand is a pretty subdued place for emotion compared to some of the venues I’ve frequented. But it provides a constant supply, and it has a predictable routine that creates a stability I find nice. I know I’m going to get a decent meal every day, and I also know I’m not in one of those places where affectivores like me are expected to be. It’s just a little off the beaten path, so there’s less likely to be any sort of a feeding frenzy there. Which I’ll get to in a bit.

Oh, and another consideration is that the kinds of emotions I consume do affect me. One reason I don’t hang out at bars, for instance, is that emotions that radiate from drunk people get me drunk. And I’d honestly rather not be drunk. It lowers my chances of survival.

Now, I can eat all sorts of emotions. To me, they are like different flavors of energy drink. But some affectivores are more specialized.

We sometimes use different words for them.

An epialivore, for instance, feeds off nightmares.

More specifically, epialivores typically enter a being’s dreams, turn them into nightmares, and feed off the emotions that happen because of them. Though, humans are pretty damn good at giving themselves nightmares, so most epialivores can just set up shop in there and soak up the trauma without a lot of work. Epialivores are extremely numerous. If you’re human, you’re probably carrying around a handful of them.

They’re also hard to get at because they’ve adapted to their preferred environment and are basically imaginary. Someone like me can’t just reach in and grab an epialivore to get its attention or something. I have to do something like convince its host that there is an epialivore in their head and can they please tell that monster to come forward, take control of their body and talk to me? And a lot of humans are resistant to that sort of thing.

Not all though.

But, anyway, there are a whole lot of different affectivores and other types of monsters. There are monsters that feed off of physics, or various physical phenomena. Enthalpiphages are a fascinating subject that I’m not going to get into here, for instance. There are just so many.

Now, we don’t have the reverence for ancient linguistics that human scientists have, and have mixed our Greek and Latin in some cases.

In one in particular, it’s at least partly because that mix invokes an appropriate sense of wrongness. And, of all the variations, it sounds the darkest and most threatening.

Teratovores.

Monsters that eat other monsters.

There are numerous monsters that have adapted themselves to eating other monsters such as myself. Which is why I do a lot of hiding, actually.

In fact, the largest reason that monsters hide from everyone is because of other monsters. We’re not really scared of humans. Those of us who are still around are fairly impervious to most things humans can try to do to us. And we know we can adapt. Even if humanity broadly accepted that there were monsters and developed a science to study us and learn how to eradicate us, we know we can survive it. We’ve done it before.

But, if I were to make a disturbance among my local population of humans, it would draw attention from other monsters. And my own personal ability to adapt to the enormous variety of teratovores and their interest in consuming me would be put severely and imminently to the test. It’s way easier to study my adversaries and adapt to them if I have time to do it, and certainly if there are fewer of them present to focus on. A feeding frenzy is the worst time to do so.

And most teratovores hide because it helps them catch their prey.

But, sometimes they are also prey.

Anyway, I obviously suspected that Felicity was a teratovore, so I was looking for signs that they were adapted to catching and consuming other monsters.

And I could immediately see that they were not a carpedominator, the type of teratovore that claims your own domain before eating you, by the way spacetime was normal around them. Circling them confirmed that, with no telltale ripples in the background as it parallaxed around them while I walked.

A carpedominator can control just how much that happens, but as far as I know they can’t hide it completely. Which is why, as Felicity had said, if they were one they would have pounced by now.

Carpedominator? Are we even using Latin correctly here?

Don’t care.

More important things to do.

Unfortunately, my clearing doesn’t get much direct sunlight. So I used my claim over it to change that, so that briefly Felicity cast a shadow.

It was a normal shadow.

Their skin was typical of a human’s.

They had the requisite number of fingers, and I assumed toes. There was nothing I could reasonably do about clues that were hidden.

Their hair wasn’t doing anything unusual besides having the appearance and fragrance of being dyed.

Their clothing had the detail of stitches and woven fabric.

The irises of their eyes had a complex texture and a typical gradient from center to rim. Their retinas didn’t reflect light.

Their moles were made of melanin.

They rotated in space relative to me at the same rate as their surroundings as I walked around them.

After three circuits, I couldn’t find a single tell.

For all physical intents and purposes they weren’t a monster. They were human to me.

I relaxed a little and looked them right above the eyes. Not a good idea to make actual eye contact, typically, no matter how confident I was.

“You’re an epialivore in possession of your host,” I said.

Their smirk changed shape to become another smirk, and they replied, “Not quite.”

I frowned.

“I definitely eat other emanants,” Felicity said. “Just not you.”

Ooh. emanant is a cool word for what we are.

I narrowed my eyes, though.

Words aren’t very reassuring.

It would take time and care to build trust, even if I currently seemed to have the upper hand.

“What are your pronouns?” I asked.

---

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[monster-rinds]

This Saturday, my webserial TERATOVORE starts on Scribblehub. But, it's being released ahead of schedule on my system's Patreon (of course), and you can start reading there right now (if you subscribe):

Get more from the Inmara of the Ktletaccete on Patreon

creating Several ongoing series of fiction and an autobiography

[monster-rinds]

Chapter 15: open

Felicity heard the sound of a door opening as she took a great big breath, gasping as if she’d come up for air from being underwater.

And then she opened her eyes to find herself looking right into the pupils of Synthia.

She didn’t see much else, because very quickly she wasn’t using either set of eyes herself. Or any other actual nerves.

The process was familiar and reflexive once it got started. She didn’t have to consciously do anything to finish her meal, and soon she’d return to Amber’s deep subconscious. That was, if she wasn’t consumed right along with Synthia by the teratovore entering the room behind her. But maybe she could eat that one from the inside too, if she was fast and wily enough.

So, for the sake of her own existence, she pushed herself to devour her new friend even faster, burrowing as deep into her being as she could.

It was like burying herself in the deep loam of the meanings behind the words of an ancient epic. It was dark, and warm, and timeless, and each bite (such as it could be called) brought with it not just energy but knowledge. Not memories that weren’t hers, as she never could do that, but the knowledge that she might as well be eating time itself.

Something was different, though.

Something was wrong.

A process that normally took a matter of seconds was going on for much longer.

And even though she herself was getting stronger and bigger, possibly more so than she’d ever had been before, Synthia didn’t seem to reduce or thin out.

What was Synthia? What was happening?

Suddenly panicked and filled with an unrelenting and confusing terror, Felicity tried to turn around and escape, to eat her way back out again. But to no avail.

She tried reaching out to Amber’s psyche and invoking the memetic link she had to her, to jump to her mind the way she usually did, but she was locked in the process of eating an unending prey.

She was completely incapable of detaching herself from Synthia, in any way.

With nothing else left to do, she continued struggling.

---

What that felt like from my end was considerably less pleasant. It was also very distracting.

And then, as I faintly heard Amber scream through my fog of pain and monstrous dissociation, a teratovore began to chew on me from behind.

I have a pretty good sense, actually, of how pain feels from human to human, and creature to creature. It’s all pretty similar, with minor variations for neurological differences. The basic purpose and concept of it is the same. And, I’ve also felt the pain of other monsters, back when I fed off of them. And I know how that’s different from how lifeforms tend to feel it. It’s pretty strikingly different, though it serves the same function and can be just as unfortunately incapacitating. Certain teratovores have adapted themselves to invoke a certain level of pain to paralyze their victims with it.

Fuzzy-feet wasn’t that kind of teratovore. It felt like they just sort of became all mouth and started chewing, with the goal being to just eat as much as fast as possible.

And, maybe because of the nature of my origins, I felt pain in a way that was sort of a mix of both the monster fashion and the way complex lifeforms experience it. Which isn’t a great adaptation. It kind of makes it more distracting and intense than it needs to be.

So, the teeth in my back didn’t really faze me, because just prior to that what I felt was something like worm quickly and wrigglingly munching its way through both of my eyes and into a brain I did’t actually have. However it is that my inner structure is actually composed and organized, when I’m pretending to be human the sensations match pretty closely to what humans might experience. At least, how I experience it secondhand through consuming their feelings.

The stinging, searing, prickly, squirming icepick driving its way into my very mind robbed me of my sight and quickly my hearing, and almost all of my focus and faculties.

I not only don’t know what my body did after that, but I lost track of its shape.

My locus of consciousness followed the feeding worm, deeper and deeper, becoming surrounded by sharp and growing agony.

So, when the teratovore’s teeth sank into my back, nearly surrounding me, I felt them like a discomfort on the very outer layer of me, almost more like footsteps on my domain. So removed, I couldn’t feel the urgency of the situation. But, of course, I was already fighting for my existence.

And Amber, if her reflexes were merciful, was hopefully running from the room.

---

Just before opening the last door between himself and his prey, Felix paused to think it was a little strange that she hadn’t put away her cell phone yet. Just holding it out like that while she stood just around the corner from the door with her own prey. What were they doing?

Did she even have a clue that she gave herself away with it, that clumsy over-complicated extension of herself that radiated etherscent? He could smell its location right through the walls!

But then, there were entire spirits that gave off that smell, and who hadn’t learned to mask it. Or didn’t have the good natural luck to be built that way. And he fed off them all the time.

And how could the cell phone not expel its telltale? It had to, in order to interface with the local cell towers.

Grinning with his real teeth in anticipation of his meal, he opened the door to enter the room.

And as he stepped in he thought, maybe too late, that it could be a trap.

But when he looked over, he saw the two of them behind the room’s bar there, standing, facing each other, with the spirit’s back to him, holding hands and looking into each other’s eyes.

Aw, a poor human was going to get a full glimpse of his gaping maw and the ethergore it was about to unleash from her ersatz friend.

It would teach her to be more careful about who she dated.

If she was even still intact, as a person. There was no telling what that spirit had managed to do by the time Felix had stepped into the room.

From tip of pseudoforehead to crotch of his protective coloration, he opened his truemouth as wide as he could as he crouched and wiggled his behind for a leap. He could make it clear over the bar and onto the back of that spirit, no problem.

Right then, the human victim came to from her entrancement and caught sight of him. And screamed.

He took that as his cue.

---

Felicity found it strange that she could distantly feel the pain of sixteen teeth sinking into the physical body of Synthia that surrounded her. And, it was so far away.

But she now knew that she’d been too late, and they were both being consumed.

---

I think I had so many memories at the time that I couldn’t feel them disappearing as Felicity ate away at my insides. I felt a certain mortal despair at what was happening that I remember from times I’d been around people who’d been made suddenly aware of their own progressing dementia. Or that one time I was present when someone was diagnosed with a neurotropic nematode.

And that was under and nearly overwhelmed by the pain that still gripped and defined me and my new fleeting existence.

None of these things were helping me, and I needed to act fast.

So, the first thing I did was gather all of my remaining focus and channel it toward adapting, to cut myself off from the pain I was experiencing. Or rather, to alter it to become a different, dispassionate sensation.

And that took precious time and energy, but I found of the two I had copious amounts of the latter. More than I had realized.

I was still being bathed by radiant energy from that con, despite the fact it was winding down and we were separated from it by a few walls and several yards of open space. It had been strong enough that I felt it on the way up to the front door, after all. But that was not enough to explain what I found at my disposal. And neither was Amber’s terrified reaction to the event.

But I didn’t have time to ponder about my reserves, or even spend time feeling about within myself to understand where they were coming from.

I just used them.

And when I tied off the pain of being eaten, I was flooded with the euphoria of its absence. Which, unlike for living beings, didn’t serve me any better than the pain. It was just distracting, so I temporarily tied myself off from that feeling as well.

And then, in the clarity of that moment, I turned to Felicity.

I felt her struggling, trying to break free of me, of her autonomic grip on my being. And I couldn’t exactly help her with that. Not from within her.

But I saw that I could protect myself by changing which parts of myself I put in front of her.

So, I moved her, and surrounded her with my newly found vast and unfathomable energy reserves. And I felt calm relief knowing that she was no longer damaging the parts of me that I knew defined who and what I was. And it looked like I could deal with her sometime later.

At the rate she was growing, I could deal with Fuzzy-feet before she became a problem again.

So, I turned my attention on them, now knowing I was somehow so much bigger than my physical projection.

---

It really took only three convulsions and bites to get most of the spirit into his truemouth, but a foot remained sticking out near the bottom. Ludicrously, it twitched about where his crotch should be, and that mildly frustrated him.

It should have broken off and started dissipating now, but he couldn’t bite through it.

And the human victim had fallen to the floor and backed against the wall, convulsing and screaming uncontrollably.

He needed to figure out how to digest his food, and he couldn’t think with that going on.

He felt like he needed some privacy.

So he closed the top of his mouth and reformed the face of his protective visage so he could speak with his psuedomouth.

“Hey!” he shouted, closing his eyes shut with the effort. “Hey! You’re safe! Stop! Quiet! She can’t hurt you anymore! And I won’t! You can run! Run you little thing, run!” Without the limit of lungs, he was fully capable of overpowering her voice with the volume of his, and he did.

It shut her up, at least. And in the shock of hearing his words, she hyperventilated with blinking eyes that wanted to be as wide as they possibly could be. And she clenched her clawed hands in front of her throat.

She was clearly so traumatized by all of this that it wasn’t likely she’d remember any of it, he thought.

But now he could focus on the lumpy ethermass that filled his truemouth.

He worked his jaws and encircled the ethercorpse with his many multibarbed tongues, and squeezed. He released his own energy reserves into his gullet as a raw entropic force used to digest his food, allowing it to drip out around the leg of his prey where it stuck out of his maw. And when his ethersaliva hit the floor, it hissed and sputtered wastefully. But most of it remained where it should do its work.

And though he began to feel a surge of energy enter his system, telling him he was successfully eating his prize, the ethermass did not begin to shrink.

Instead, it started to grow and bulge.

How could it possibly do that?

Was this spirit still alive and somehow feeding on something he didn’t know about? Was it able to eat multiple things? Emotions, physics, his own entropic juices?

He had never in his existence experienced anything like this. Never even heard of such a thing.

In sudden concern for his own wellbeing, he started to open his mouth to expel his would-be food.

The human let out a little, “eep.”

---

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