I Am A Carnivorous Plant

Sad to say, but I actually tried digging for an hour to find more of that blue rock I saw, and came back with nothing but regular rocks, dirt, and disappointment. I even used the pickaxes I’d found along the way, one in each tentacle, and still I didn’t find anything. Eventually (when it seemed like my inexperienced mining was about to cause the place to collapse), I just decided to cut my losses and leave, although I wasn’t very happy about it. Maybe I’m just not cut out for digging, you know?

 

…But you know who is cut out for it?

Miners!

 

So yeah, now I have a new goal in mind with my wandering! I’ll find another village of (hopefully) human miners, and see if they’ve dug up any of those blue rocks. Oh yeah, and I should also figure out what it even is in the first place! And once I finally manage to locate some, I have a super special secret weapon I’ve been developing to help convince them to give me some! Heh heh heh…

 

Too often I find myself evilly rubbing my tentacles together, and I should probably really work on that.

Or maybe I can just grow up to be evil so it fits!

 

Oh, okay, yeah, and in other interesting news: I didn’t notice at first, but I guess I can’t really see dirt? I mean, I can see it, I’m not blind, but like… It doesn’t have a color? It’s the same thing as the water, it’s just kind of translucent. No, that’s not a good analogy, ‘cuz I can see through the colorless water, but I can’t see through the colorless dirt. But it’s not white or black or anything like people imagine the absence of color. Maybe gray? I don’t know, my vision is totally weird. I give up! But it’s certainly crazy that I never figured out this fact until now.

 

~~~

 

After I’d finished cleaning up the orc village and admiring my work, I went back to see my capybaras one last time. It was time to say goodbye, since I had bigger fish to fry. It was sad, really, because I super liked the little (huge) guys, and I was going to miss the peaceful time I got to spend with them at their lake. Maybe one day I would come back to see them again and make sure they were thriving, but I know that there’s no way a ravenous plant like me could live here forever. No matter how much I love them, they’re still made of food, and I eat so very very much. Once I decimated the animal population around them… What other food options would I have left but the capybaras?

 

If I wanted to keep them truly safe, then I needed to keep them safe from even me.

 

I gave each of the capybaras a sweet hug, wrapping them in my tentacles and making up names for them as I told them I’d miss them. I mean it, by the way, that I told them I’d miss them. I may not have a mouth, a throat, lungs, or even vocal chords, but what I do have is magic, and a surprisingly adaptable body. And with the whole orc town situation, it was a perfect opportunity to convince my plant body to grow something that I’d been desperately missing.

 

The space in the top part of my ‘head’ had been filled with just useless plant-fiber anyways, so it was the perfect spot for a little something extra to grow! Now, nestled in there in its own little space, I had grown a special little flower: Something called ‘Hooker’s lips’! It’s not something that really looks like a flower, more like… Well, like exactly what it’s named! Personally, I think it looks like a leaf decided to make itself look like a pair of very sexy lips. Anyways, yeah, I grew a small one of those inside of my top ‘head’ cavity, and now I can finally talk!

 

Does it sound muffled, and a little bit wrong? Yes!

 

It kind of sounds like I’m using a voice changer, you know? Like a not natural voice. Like, maybe I sound like someone put on the ‘sound like a woman’ voice changer, but it was a little broken and buzzy… and they were doing it through a door. That’s my voice!

 

Maybe I can work on it a little bit and make it sound better one day.

At least I don’t sound like some text to speech robot, though!

 

Oh yeah, and also it apparently runs by magic, which makes sense since of course a flower in my head wouldn’t naturally talk. The good news is, even though I can definitely feel the flow of magic every time I use it to speak, it doesn’t actually seem like it’s costing me very much nutrients-wise, and I can still use other magic while I do it, so it’s fine.

 

Hey, right, also, I should tell you: I did a teensy bit more growing in other areas too! For instance, my ‘hair’ grew a little bit longer, my tentacles grew a little bit stronger, and my roots are a little bit thicker! Also, I’m not really sure how, but the line (opening) that runs from the bottom half of my face and down my neck got longer? It now extends a short way down my chest, letting me open my mouth a bit larger, which is quite useful for eating bigger prey. If I open up that wide, though, then my little valve I grew to keep my stomach acid moves out of the way and becomes useless, and I have to be careful not to spill any of it out.

 

One time, while I was eating orc bits, I ate too big of a piece since I could fit bigger stuff in now, and it made a big splash and some of my digestive acid came out and burned me a little bit, so I’ve learned to be careful with that.

 

I still haven’t grown any taller than last time, but that’s not so bad. I’m sure with time I’ll grow taller, since I still don’t seem to be my ‘adult’ form just yet. It’s a dilemma, because I really do like being able to sneak around like a sneaky little spider, but also the idea of being a giant towering kaiju-like monster roaming the forest is also equally cool. I’ll just have to see which one nature decides for me, I guess!

 

I’m crossing my tentacles that whatever I end up looking like, I’ll at least still be pretty or cool!

 

~~~

 

Alright, so after I finished saying goodbye to the capybaras, I started on my mission of finding human mining towns. I flung myself wildly through the forest for many days, sometimes snatching up whatever tasty animals or monsters wandered nearby as I went. There were wolves and deer, who I was way too fast for them to get away from so long as I was flinging myself from tree to tree, and even the occasional big cat or bear, who I definitely had to stop and take my time on, but were markedly easier to handle now. I came across a few goblins, but now that I knew I would have to take the time to wash them, I really only went for them if I was very hungry. And since I wasn’t focusing on growing, I didn’t really race through my nutrients very fast, so very few goblins ended up in my tummy at all!

 

Luckily I didn’t come across any more orcs, or I would have had to spend a little too long absolutely annihilating them for my liking, since I’m busy looking for more of those stones. But I did come across a bunch of gigantic spiders in one of the caves I decided to check out just in case, which was quite the surprise! Their webs were a hassle, since I don’t really have very effective ways to remove them from myself, and eating the webs was a whole other debacle entirely.

 

However, the spiders themselves were a breeze!

 

They were the size of your average child, but I didn’t find any real issue with killing and eating them, since I had become used to fighting all those bears and overly resilient cats. Heck, if I was able to take down those crocodiles/alligators all that time ago, then you better believe that spider carapace was a breeze for me now! It was a bit more of a problem cracking the pieces apart so that they would fit inside my mouth, but since I could do that and kill them at the same time, it made the whole process very simple! Also, apparently their venom has no effect on me, since I don’t have any blood in my body! Still felt interestingly tingly, though, and I had to heal up the puncture wounds every time… And also I felt kind of like a psycho every time I pulled off their legs…

 

Yeah, I can certainly eat the spiders, but maybe I don’t really like it!

 

Anyways, so sometimes I would find a village of humans, and I would try and find things out from them. Like, I’d find a lone lumberjack in the woods, or maybe someone who was foraging, or even a hunter, and I’d say “Hey, do you know where I could find some blue rocks?”, or “Do you know what the blue stones with the symbols are called?”, or something like that. And do you know what happened every time? They’d follow the sound of my unnatural sounding voice, they’d catch a glimpse of me, and eventually they would notice that I totally didn’t look right! Almost every single time, they ran away from me! I even made sure to make my roots look like legs, and my tentacles look like hands, but they still figured out I was a monster very easily! It got to the point that I even picked off a few of the runners I particularly didn't like the reaction of, but let's not delve into that dark episode right now, okay?

 

Really, I don’t know how my plant body expected to fool anyone ever, if it’s going like this.

I mean, the wrinkles in my ‘skin’ are all gone now, but I still don’t look very convincing.

…Maybe if I give it enough time it’ll figure itself out.

 

Oh, and there was one of the times where the hunter I’d tried talking to threw his lantern at me and caught me on fire. Didn’t even get to eat the guy in revenge, either, since he booked it away while I was trying to figure out how to get the flames off of myself. Turns out 'stop drop and roll' doesn’t work so crazy well when you’re a plant, surrounded by other plants, inside of a forest. I’m lucky there was a little pond nearby that I’d seen earlier, or maybe that would have been the end of your favorite little plant! Fire is definitely my weakness.

 

Yeah, I didn’t try talking to people anymore after that.

 

The thought that ‘humans have fire’ was pretty strong for me over the next little while, so I completely avoided any human settlements, although I did get a little bold once I finally found a decently sized mining quarry. It was surrounded by dozens of guards, and I could see a big town off into the distance, complete with big walls and a castle-y looking thing, and everything! I was sure it must have been the kind of mine owned by whatever bigshot who owned the nearby town. Maybe a noble? You think they have nobles here? I mean, they’re developed enough to have a town like that, so it’s not so farfetched to think they’re at the level of kingdoms and dukedoms and stuff like that.

 

But yeah, I wanted to get into that mine and see what they had, so I for sure tried to sneak past their guards, but it turns out they weren’t as crappy as I thought they’d be, and they quickly noticed me. At first I thought that maybe I could take out a few of the guards, since, ya know, I really want some of that rock candy. Wasn’t sure that they even had any here, but you know, if. It was definitely all worth it if they did have any of it, even just one of them. Definitely.

 

But then some of the guards began chanting, and I think I could make out the word ‘fire’ in there in a few of them…

 

Yeah, I totally just ran away.

Humans can be really scary!

_____

AN: Happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate it!

I'm really looking forward to the next chapter ;P