I Am A Carnivorous Plant

I watched mom rampage for three whole days, through two more towns and a small handful of Pack members. It was hard to tell, but I think there was some kind of a horse, a bear, a swan, and a… bull? Really hard to tell what I’m looking at when this fantasy world does what it does and shoves a bunch of messed up looking animals my way all the time. All I can do is guess what I'm looking at and hope that I'm guessing right. Well, not that it really matters.

 

And while she was busy killing everything, I noticed that… um… that mom has a very different skill set than I do somehow? Idunno, maybe it’s just because she ate a bunch of cores and got stronger, but… She can do a lot of things that I don’t think I was ever able to do. Or maybe I was always able to do them, and I just didn’t know about it?

 

Well, even if I did know I could do them, maybe I wouldn’t have wanted to do it anyways.

Some of these abilities are just… too cruel, and that’s coming from me.

 

Everyone, including just regular old humans like she once was, became mom's targets, and she never seemed to blink an eye no matter how gruesome of a death she caused. She never used herself to attack, like I liked to do, and her tentacles stayed perfectly in the shape of arms the entire time. Well, maybe she never attacked with her tentacles because she never really needed to; She had plenty of other options in her arsenal to deal with all of the people she found instead.

 

Of course, her being me, she was able to summon up Trig, Shui, and even the new vine plant she'd killed, to control the environment around her. Trig and the vine plant could easily encircle whatever town mom came to with trees and vines, making a fence that the townsfolk wouldn’t be able to escape. And with the perimeter secured, Shui and his mob of bush babies could run wild as much as they liked, streaking through the place and killing off whoever they could find. But this was all very normal, very standard; Even I could do stuff like this! No, it wasn’t her tactics that stood out to me. It was her abilities that made all the difference.

 

You know that fun little thing that both I and Shui can do? The neat little trick where I open my mouth when my roots are buried, and let out a big cloud of toxic mist in the area? It’s been a while since I’ve had any good enough reason to use it, but oh boy what fun memories of it I have!

 

Yeah, what mom has is nothing near as tame as that.

 

She still has to root herself to do it, but mom’s breath attack is, uh… much more forceful. In fact, it’s so forceful that you can actually see it happening! I don’t have anything that lets me breathe in this body, and yet somehow mom is able to take a deep breath in, and then expel a blastwave of spores from her mouth! Green gas, along with small yellowy motes that drift inside of it, blast out from her mouth like a firehose, rocketing along in whatever direction she’s facing like a wave, and everything that it blows past begins to melt! It's actually super terrifying to see, even for me!

 

Mhmm, I’m 1000% sure that my breath was never potent enough to melt anything!

Either my body really leveled up, or mom is just super amazing in it!

 

She also has plenty of other horrifying attacks, like these fluffy dandelion-looking flowers that she grows whose lil’ white fluffs liked to go for people’s noses or open mouths and choke them to death, or these variants on the vines I liked to grow that had mouths and teeth like a huge venus fly trap, to name a few. She could even temporarily infect people into losing their minds and attacking each other with her camellia flower, which was crazy to see.

 

Really, there were bunches of things she could do that looked like next level versions of the crap I used to do. Honestly, it makes me wonder if I could have just been doing those things too this whole time, you know? Well… I don’t know, some of them look kinda fun, but a bunch of them look a bit too cruel for me… And maybe a little too gruesome, too. They’d be great to have in a pinch of course, but after seeing her use such crazy strong attacks on harmless people who were just trying to live their lives… It’s not very fun. Not at all. Really removes the appeal.

 

Even watching her use them against the strong Pack members who came to stop her murdering spree wasn’t very fun either.

It was all much too one-sided, pitting her and my minions against them.

…I tried to look away for a lot of it.

Yeah… I really tried.

 

~~~

 

On the fourth day of mom’s reign of terror, she came deeper into the Wind territory, to a town that was bigger than all of the previous ones she’d demolished to the ground. Unlike the others, it had a big stone wall, towers, guards, and a much more bustling look to it. Honestly, it was probably more correct to call it a city than a town at this point, or at least compared to every other town that I've seen so far. There was even a short line of people being checked over by the guards right at the town's gate, which meant this place must have been a bit more picky with who they let in.

 

Mom didn’t bulldoze into this one like she had all the others. No, for some reason, this town seemed to be special for her, although I didn’t have the foggiest clue as to why. There’s absolutely no way that she was just stopping to look at the place because she was scared of its walls or any kind of challenge it presented, you know? Yup, I was suuuuper curious about it. But all I could do was keep watching her in absolute silence, just like I’ve been doing for the past few days.

 

And watching certainly paid off, because then she did something incredible, something that I don’t think I would have ever been able to do in a million years!

 

There was a lake nearby, big enough that it could probably fit about twenty lesser-sized yachts in it, easy. Or, well, I say that, but I don’t actually remember seeing a yacht before in my memories, so I’m just gonna believe that what I’m saying is right! And after staring at this large, glistening lake from a distance for a while like it was calling out to her, mom made her way closer to it, and gazed into the calm, mirror-like waters. I can only guess that she was looking at her reflection in the exact same way that I was. Maybe she even felt the same way about it that I did, too.

 

My poor body looked absolutely hideous now!!!

 

I’d always been so proud of how cute and beautiful I was growing, but for some reason now that mom had taken over, my body had grown completely ugly! The flowers on my head were barely cared for, and looked like they were rotting and withering away. The petals that made up my faux skin looked porous, thick, and somehow overgrown, which was barely even noticeable anyways now, because the bark that had begun growing on my waist and neck had expanded unevenly up across my breasts and face, looking like I had some kind of illness. In a way, it kind of reminded me of how some rotting veggies and fruits would get those brown divot lines along their outsides, you know? The more I looked at it, the more that my body looked like it had become sick or something with some kind of rotting disease! It was 100% the look of some kind of nightmare creature, the kind that would touch you and cause you to immediately decompose or turn into an ugly tree stump or something!

 

…Ya know, maybe this is just me being biased, but like… is this one of those ‘A reflection of what’s on the inside’ sort of things or what? I mean, you can’t deny that my body only came to look this gross and malformed after mom took it over, right? I absolutely refuse to ever accept that that’s what I would have grown into naturally! If it were me behind the wheel, I would have never let all this rampaging get in the way of me maintaining my beautiful growth!

 

Well anyways yeah, I’m guessing mom felt the same way that I did, because after angrily slapping at the water with one of her hands, she began a slow godzilla-like descent into the lake, letting it hide away her ugliness. Mom had actually grown my body pretty damn big what with all the cores from the Pack that she’d eaten, along with, you know, the tens of thousands of helpless people that she also guzzled down. I’d say my body must be about the size of a four story house by now or something, or maybe even bigger than that. She’s certainly at least big enough that she could march through the streets of a city and scarily peek around a few of the buildings in that stereotypical kaiju sort of way! So yeah, you can imagine how hard it was for her to submerge her whole body into the water. She really had to crunch herself into a little ball, for sure. Still, crunched as she was, she was still able to insert her roots into the the lake’s soil, running her roots deeeeeep deep deep into the ground.

 

At first I was like ‘Okay what is this, some kind of ‘sad plant hours’ sort of thing’? Like, I was legitimately confused why she even did this at all, besides maybe just to vent out her feelings or something. Heck, I mean she did just see how ugly she made me, so I figured this was just a crying in the bathtub sort of move. But then a massive amount of energy began to radiate through my body, so super crazy huge that even I, who’d only just barely felt a tingle inside of me every time I watched mom use any magic, could feel it rampaging through me. I got a little scared, thinking that perhaps mom was trying to kill us both for whatever stupid reason by overloading my body, but then after a few minutes I could feel the magic, the energy, condensing and folding in on itself, again and again and again.

 

And as the sensation grew more and more intense, so too did the pain.

 

By the time I was able to get over how much it hurt and come back to my senses again, mom was already swimming her way back to the shoreline, and when she finally dragged herself up and out of the water, the reflection of her that I could see looking back was completely insane!!! A much smaller, much prettier, much more believable facade of a human peered up from the mirror of the water. The ashen silver-y hair and round, beautiful face that I remembered seeing while I was growing on mom's corpse was there, perfectly made. And the beautiful lush green eyes, reminiscent of the same kind that the elves I’d met also had, immediately caught my attention, signaling that mom belonged to the Forest.

 

…You know, because she’d been dead and everything, I’d never really gotten to see what mom’s eyes had looked like. Was the fact that I’d only ever seen mom with her eyes closed before maybe part of why my plant-body had grown up with them closed too? If she’d died with her eyes open, then would I also have had such pretty green eyes on me…?

 

Okay no, I’m missing the point here! The point is, I’m absolutely crazy jealous right now!!! How the heck was mom able to make herself look so human like this?! Was it just because she was suddenly so freaking powerful? Ohhh, maybe it’s like how that giant snake was still able to turn itself into a human too? Do super crazy powerful things just come equipped with a ‘turn into a human’ ability?! Or maybe it’s some kind of perk for being a Spirit’s right hand man or something?!

 

Dammit, she made my body look so damn freaking pretty, and I don’t even get to be the one driving it!!!

 

…Ah, but I have to admit, even with how pretty and human she looks, I kinda do miss seeing my lovely head-flowers. Honestly, that head kinda looks empty without them. I don’t think it would look too crazy strange if I just… made like a flower crown or something that looked like them to wear, right? Right?

 

Oh, but first maybe I’d have to worry about getting some clothes to wear! It’s fine to be an immodest plant monster, but when you look so human like mom does right now, it really makes you a bit more conscious of your nudity, now doesn’t it? Ah yup, mom must be thinking the same thing, considering how she suddenly covered herself with her arms!

 

Mom! I know you can’t hear me right now, but go find us some clothing already! Stop flashing our naked body all over the place! Put something on right this instant young lady!

 

No, don’t go towards the town like that!

What are you doing?!

_____

AN: The new cover picture is finally out~! Buuuut it's stretched a little weird because of how it forced the pic to fit the cover dimensions, so I'm gonna have to fiddle with that. Also had to clip it a bit in the chest area, even though I made sure to cover her up this time lol. But if you wanna see the pic in all it's glory, as well as a lil concept sketch of her face opening up slightly, just go here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/110855668