I Am A Carnivorous Plant

It's been about a week. I’m tired. I’m so tired.

I know it’s impossible for this body to sleep, at least not in the way that I think of sleep as being, but it’s just been so hard, you know? All week, I’ve barely gotten a wink of rest. There’s been absolutely no down time. Even photosynthesizing has been stressful! I’ve been so busy constantly making sure to keep my attention spread all around me, and endlessly running through and regaining all of my resources. It’s like I’ve been working out nonstop for a week, with barely any breaks in between! There’s always some kind of predator prowling around no matter what time of day it is or how warm or cold things are. Did you know they have big, dinosaur-like chickens covered in fluffy, feathery down that roam here? Or how about the mole-seals that surf through the snowy parts of the mountain? I thought it was just wolves or yetis in this area. After all, didn’t I only see those during the two days that I was here? I was prepared for just wolves and yetis! I plant my roots and all of a sudden all this variety appears, just to throw a wrench into things!

Yeah, I really think I hate it here now.

You don’t know what I’ve gone through…

The chickens were so fast, and they had claws like cassowaries do on both their feet and the stupid little raptor arms they had in front of their wings. They shredded my vines, dodged all my springs, and even managed to tear big holes through Lily who was hiding near me a number of times. If it wasn’t for the combined forces of our toxic gas and a few creatively grown obstacles, I’m sure I would have been gutted more often than I already was. Truly, it was a hellish experience dealing with their speed.

And then there were the big white jagged-looking seals with extra feet, digging and boring through the earth like moles. I had to track them, since they would burrow underground and hide when they realized I was there, and would attack and rip up large chunks of my roots with their many sharp teeth. I really don’t have very much I can do against ground attacks like that. I tried using my spring vines to pierce into the ground, but it just slowed them down temporarily and ended up only superficially wounding them. Luckily I’m able to grow my roots back pretty fast too, just like my tentacles, and they’re pretty spread out, so I had a bit of time to work on solving the problem, but when they started digging upwards like they were going to attack my main body from below, I had to really get brainstorming. And hey, it led me to a surprising discovery!

I ended up taking a risk, recalling Lily who wasn’t gonna be any help with this anyway, and desperately summoning the treant in a bit older of a form, remembering the thick tree roots that it had once tried stabbing me with while it was still alive. It looked much more like I remembered it; Still not fully in its hidden human form amidst all of its bark, but looking much less like some fat little log like it was. It was already as tall as me, and its bark had juuust started to break apart, giving it more movement and form, while still providing it with a shield. I say movement, although it still wasn’t very agile, just like how the original treant wasn’t, but it certainly had more versatility in its movements now.

Like for instance, did you know that the treant could dig?

I know I sure didn’t know, until it started doing it!

It unraveled its thick root-legs, wayyy thicker and with less branches than mine, and started sinking itself into the ground slowly, with more and more of its body being buried each second. And then, when the seals dug close to make another pass at me, its thick, jousting spear-like roots burst out at them, piercing precisely through their heads as they opened their mouths to attack. Honestly, it was shockingly deadly. Also, it made me realize that when I first met the treant and it suddenly appeared out of nowhere, it was probably actually just buried in the ground, sleeping there. How crazy, to think of a digging tree.

So yeah, in appreciation for him getting me out of that hairy situation, I decided to name the treant ‘Trig’, by combining the words ‘tree’ and ‘dig’. I know, it’s childish as hell. I’m not even gonna debate you on that. But he’s Trig now, so get used to it!!!

Anyways, back to the main point: With the chickens, seals, wolves and yetis coming after me almost constantly, I had a lot on my plate to deal with. Sure, I had the option of turning off Lily’s camellia flower and taking a little photosynthesizing break, but for some reason, every time I did, something new and troublesome would wander over. Honestly, mostly it was the yetis. For some reason, Lily’s flower mostly brought over the chickens and the seals, but the wolves and the yetis that naturally roamed this area showed up to pick fights with me no matter what. I guess it makes sense, I mean, it seems like this is their natural area, and the chickens and seals are being lured in from outside. And oddly enough, now that I think of it, I think Lily’s flower is running on herbivore mode? I don’t think I ever gave her permission to run it on the super intensive predator attracting mode, did I? She still brings me wolves and yetis sometimes, ones that don’t just naturally wander over, but those are probably just chasing her because they would have attacked her on sight anyways, and not because the flower is making them lose their minds. If anything, they certainly seem to be acting more rationally than the chickens and seals were, so I doubt the flower was affecting them.

So does that mean the chickens and seals are herbivores, or at least omnivores? I guess it makes sense, since the seals were really eager to nibble at my roots once they were no longer able to get to Lily. The chickens, though… Idunno, I guess they must be omnivores. I just don’t wanna believe that anything that covered in claws would be an herbivore, you know? Although they could maybe just be there for defense or like digging up roots or something… Who knows?

Well, all of that really doesn’t matter, it’s just mostly me griping about how hard this week has been on me. But hey, it’s not all bad! I mean, I think I’ve made a lot of progress! I mean, it’s obvious that I’ve learned a good bit about how to work with my little corpse summons, and hey, it even helped me give them proper names, but that’s not what I really mean. What I mean is that all this hard work that I’ve been putting in non-stop has actually been showing me rewards! In just this week alone, I’ve grown half a head taller! My body is growing bigger, just like I wanted, and oddly enough, I’m starting to grow little ptaches of bark around my abdomen, as if it’s trying to protect my digestive sack. I don’t know, maybe my seed got tired of my stomach getting pierced and decided I could use some extra protection around there. I mean, it’s literally only my stomach doing it; No other places on me are showing even a single sign of barkification.

…Would have been really cool of my seed to maybe be considerate and cover up these plant-tits it gave me, but I guess we can’t go having that, now can we?

Well, at least I have Shui now, so if it really bothers me, I can always just make myself some clothes. Although, if I’m being honest, I doubt there’s any clothing besides a cape that would work for me, since anything that would wrap around my torso would inhibit me from fully opening my mouth. Idunno, maybe if I were any good at tailoring, I could design some kind of sexy catsuit that was open in the middle, you know, like some kind of cheesy villainess in a cartoon might wear, or an overly sexy super hero. Dunno how I’d keep it from slipping off of me though, or how I’d even sew it in the first place, really…

Yeah, I’m sorry, I’m just really trying to distract myself right now.

It’s wonderful and amazing that I’m bigger and better now, but I guess I’m getting some growing pains because of it. Or maybe it’s just accumulated fatigue. My roots have been buried in this super-magical mountain dirt nonstop for a week, right? And with all of the constant fighting, they’ve had to absorb craaaazy amounts of magic, and also braced me through a lot of hits as well. They’re stiff, bruised, and frankly, overworked. It’s like I’ve been trying to make foie gras out of them from how much I’ve been forcing them to chug. And it’s amazing, because just like how eating a bunch of stuff through my stomach made my stomach (and body) slowly grow and adjust to eating more nutrients, it seems like I’m also becoming used to storing more and more magic inside of myself. It’s like I’m making my seed fat or something, although for some reason I can’t really tell if that’s the case.

But yeah, more and more magic is funneling in through my roots as I become able to handle and store more of it. But my roots aren’t able to handle so much of it coming all the time, you know? I actually have to periodically heal my roots, just because the magic is slowly overloading and tearing them apart the more concentrated it becomes. I guess my delicate little roots just weren’t made for taking in raw, unfiltered magic like this. Truly, my stomach that’s eaten so many of my magic filled mushrooms must be strong, since I’ve eaten a ton over the past few days and suffered zero tummy aches.

I’m not looking a gift horse in the mouth at all for the record; I know how good all of this is for me! I’ve even made so much progress that I can have two of the slightly aged up corpse summons with me at once without too big of a strain on my resources, which is a massive improvement. They’re still not big enough to fight off any of the creatures here alone (besides Trig and the seals, of course), but with two of them helping, it’s heaps easier to fight the monsters than it used to be!

So now it’s time I make a little choice. I could stay here, doing my best to keep getting bigger and stronger, or I could move along and continue looking for those Ice Guardians. The impatient side of me feels like I’ve burnt too much time here, even though it’s clear to see how effective all this time focused on my growth has been. And there’s the fact that my roots feel like they’re about to burst open from overwork. But still, there’s the other, more rational side of me, that says I should stay here longer and get even stronger before I go, the pain in my roots be damned. I mean, I can already use two of my little corpse summons at about 2/3rds power, but what if I could summon all three at once? Or hey, what if I was able to at least summon one of them at full power? Because you know what? I’m actually still not able to sustainably do that! I’m sure if there were two of me running around, or if I had a fully grown Shui or Trig around to help me, then we’d probably be unstoppable, right? Or at least pretty damn menacing! So really, it seems like the right choice to aim for that before I go on, right?

Look, let me put it another way.

If this were a video game, maybe I’m around level 40, about to enter the level 50 zone.

Could I complete the zone if I was very skilled, even if my level is behind? Probably yes, although it would probably be a very unpleasant struggle. But would it be much more manageable if I spent more time grinding in the zone I belonged in first? Yes! Yes, one thousand times yes!

So of course you may be asking yourself ‘Hey, then isn’t the choice obvious, Mellily? Why don’t you just stick around and get better first?’

Well I’ll tell you exactly why!

Because I don’t wanna risk pissing off that Spirit and its snake!

Let’s be real, I’ve been eating through the monsters in this place wayyyy too much! If I give it another day, I’ll probably have picked this place clean with the help of Lily’s enticing little flower. Now, it’s not such a huge deal, ‘cuz I’m sure I haven’t completely decimated the creature population on this mountain. But they’re getting miiiiighty thin, you know? And it’s starting to scare me that I may have overeaten a bit by accident. The giant snake did warn me not to screw over any of its wildlife, even though I guess they did go out of their way to specify the sea-life. I just don’t feel comfortable taking the chance that I might make the Spirit and snake angry with me because I killed off too much of a certain thing.

So yeah, this mountain is pretty damn big, and I could totally change locations a bit and go looking for more of the things I’ve been hunting, all for the sake of me getting a little stronger. Orrrr I could move up the mountain, take the chance that I find something even stronger to start terrorizing or maybe finally find the Ice Guardians! Both options are risky, in their own way.

For now, since I know exactly how menacing the giant snake is, I’m thinking of testing myself out against whatever is higher up in this mountain. I’m not an idiot, so I’m gonna try to only fight one as a test first, and if it seems like it’s going to absolutely obliterate me, then I plan to fling myself off the mountain down to safety. Sure, it’s a shit plan, but it’s the best thing I’ve got right now, you know? I promise I didn’t just decide to do this because I didn’t want my roots to keep hurting!

And hey, whatever wanders into me and ends up eaten while I head up isn’t my fault, alright?

You hear that, Water Spirit?

It’s not my fault!