I Am A Carnivorous Plant

So the good news is: Once I made it to the lake I was able to use my fast inner tendrils to catch some fish and a few frogs! The bad news is: I can’t catch enough food to heal me! My body is so highly demanding right now that the meager little fish and frogs aren’t enough to do anything more than slightly abate my hunger! At least I didn’t feel like I was being killed by how hungry I was anymore, but I was still too completely broken to try and catch anything bigger than what I already had.

 

I knew this stupid high maintenance body would screw me over one of these days!

 

Seems that unless I get a big payoff after wrecking myself like this, it’s almost impossible to recover afterwards. I mean, my stomach acid is horrifically low, so even digesting something in the first place is very very slow compared to what it used to be, and by the time I’ve finished digesting even one small fish, I’m already on the verge of starving again! I need to increase my digestive acid, but I’m so wrecked that there’s no way that I can! And even if I did catch something that could give me a bunch of nutrients so that I could heal myself, my digestive acid is too low to effectively eat it! It’s all one big stupid catch 22 type of deal, I swear!

 

Okay, I’m saying it’s impossible, but what I actually mean is that it’s totally possible, but horrendously slow. It’s been about a week of me standing here by the side of the lake, soaking up all the water and sun that I can, and eating every single edible thing that wanders nearby me in this lake, and I still don’t have enough nutrients built up to heal myself! I’ve managed to increase my stomach acid a tiny bit over time just through my body’s natural healing, but after it gets to a certain amount, my torn up body actually starts leaking little droplets of it, and I end up burning myself a bit while it comes out, which makes the wound stay open longer. So yeah, I’m just forced to perpetually hurt myself and run low on digestive acid until I figure out some kind of way to heal myself. I mean, I am healing slowly over time, but it’s going even more painfully slow because of how I keep leaking everywhere. Given enough time I’m sure I would return to normal, but… who knows how long that would take?

 

Man, if only I knew how to eat with saplings like that treant did, then this hole in my stomach thing wouldn’t even be a problem!

 

For the record, the back of my body and the top of my ‘head’ are all mostly fine; It’s my sides and my front that are the most messed up, since they were what was facing my attackers. You’d think the top half of my face (and also my flowers) would have taken on a bit of the damage, but my tentacles took most of the brunt from the sub-treants, and since my mouth was open while I fought the main treant, my upper head and flowers were pointed towards my back, safely out of the way.

 

At least whenever I looked at my completely messed up and tattered body, I could still see my flowers all happily resting up there, nice and only slightly-mussed, so there’s that.

I think that fact helped me the most, psychologically.

Otherwise, this hopeless feeling ‘waiting for myself to get better’ thing would have been unbearable.

 

But still… The fact that my recovery was going so horrendously slow like this was very… grating.

 

~~~

 

One afternoon, while I was busy blankly watching the lake, desperately hoping for even just a single little morsel of meat to wander over my way, I heard a sudden sound of snapping twigs off in the distance to the left of me. As I turned and looked that way, a tall, buff looking man wandered through the gaps in the trees. His eyes were unfocused, and his arms were wrapped around a big wound at his stomach, like he was doing his best to keep whatever of his blood inside of him as he could. I guess he couldn’t see me very well, since he kept his eyes focused right on the lake the entire time, and as soon as he made it to the water’s edge, he fell face first towards it. Luckily for him, only his hair and his forehead got submerged, so he managed to not drown himself like I totally thought he was going to.

 

Let me be honest: As soon as I saw him show up, I totally thought I’d gotten lucky and some super nutritious prey had shown up. I mean, despite how in pain he looked, the guy looked suuuper hot, and I was sure he’d be mega tasty! Really, I felt like I’d finally hit the jackpot; Finally I wouldn’t be stuck here doing this boring shit anymore!

 

But then, when I saw his ears, I didn’t feel like eating him anymore.

Maybe it was because he was an elf, like I’d wanted to see all this time?

He looked a bit too burly and muscle-y for an elf, though.

Not that I have anything against that, mind you, in fact he’s actually quite to my taste!

…It’s really weird that I don’t want to eat him, though.

In fact, I find the idea really gross actually.

 

I wriggled my roots closer to him to get a better look at him, and moved him back from the lake with great difficulty. I didn’t move him far, mind you, just enough that I didn’t have to worry about him suddenly sliding in and drowning himself; My tentacles were still quite a mess, so doing any further than that would be pretty time-consuming. He groaned a lot while I moved him, which made sense since I was basically just sliding him against the dirt while I did it. A bunch of his blood leaked out into the dirt because of it, too, which only gave him all the more right to make those sounds. But I didn’t feel bad about my choice, oh no. I couldn’t feel bad about it; I was too happy!

 

This elf’s blood was absolutely amazing!

 

Why did I feel so grossed out by the thought of eating him when his blood was this great? It makes no sense! It can’t just be because he’s so crazy hot, since I’ve met plenty of good-looking people so far and haven’t batted a single non-existent eyelash at the thought of eating them. If even the ugly meals looked appetizing, then there’s no way a top tier professionally crafted meal would look gross! Is it because he’s an elf…?

 

I sat there and soaked up the blood he was leaking with my roots for a little while. I could feel it giving me a nice bump of magical energy, although it wouldn’t be enough for me to fully heal myself. I had enough in me to maybe heal up a few of my tentacles, or try and finally fix up the hole in my stomach that kept leaking, but either choice wouldn’t have been enough to truly fix my situation. If I fix the tentacles, then the rest of me is still too screwed up to even eat what I caught, and if I fix my stomach, then my tentacles are still too broken to catch anything worthwhile. And with how much blood this man lost, he wasn’t likely to keep bleeding for very much longer since he was quite close to dying, so I couldn’t just keep waiting and hope for more nutrition to fix all my problems…

 

I had to make a decision quickly, so I decided to gamble.

Elves are supposed to love nature, right?

This elf wouldn’t just leave a pretty plant like me here to suffer, would he?

 

My pristine frond of lillies of the valley dripped two small shining drops on him, wringing out most of the nutrients that I gained from his rich blood. I laid his slowly healing body up from the ground and propped him against a nearby tree with a bit of a struggle, hoping that the open air would help his wound to heal. His face didn’t look as strained as it did when he first came here, so I’m hoping that means that the meager amount of magic I used on him was enough.

 

…Let’s hope that I made the right choice.

 

~~~

 

The elf finally started to wake up right about when the sun rose up for the next day. His bloodied hand ran through his cool looking dirty-blonde hair, and his green eyes blinked drowsily. I can’t blame him for being a bit out of it while waking up, I mean, I’m pretty sure humanoids don’t do so well when they’ve lost a lot of blood. I didn’t give him very much healing, so I’m sure he’s still not in a very good state just yet. Hopefully it’s enough that he recognizes me as his savior, though.

 

When his groggy eyes finally made it to me, I lightly waved my tentacle at him, determined to make a good first impression.

Luckily, the plant inside my head that let me talk was still perfectly intact.

 

=Hello, did you sleep well?=

 

His eyes woke up a bit more at my words, but he still looked a bit confused about what was going on. I could see him looking me over a bit harder, but he was also scanning over the area around me like he wasn’t sure what he should be looking at. Or maybe he looked like he was uncomfortable with resting his eyes anywhere on me? I thought about it for a while longer and realized that since I had been readying myself for sunbathing when he woke up, my mouth was open and my upper ‘head’ was pulled back. Don’t worry, I was making sure not to let my poison mist spray out, since I didn’t want to hurt the elf! But yeah, I’m sure I must have looked very grotesque right now, so I closed my head up and tried to look as normal as I could, although with how tattered and torn up I am right now, I doubt it really did much to help.

 

=Sorry about that, I’m not doing my best right now. And are you okay?=

 

I guess my question reminded him of his injury, because his hand quickly went up to check it, and apparently it still really stung to move or touch. I watched him rip off his shirt with just one of his hands, which, wow was that a powerful sight to watch, and then he ripped it into a bandage with a practiced hand and wrapped his wound up tight with it. I stared at his pecs above the bandage for longer than I’m proud to admit, but when he looked back up at me warily, I pretended to not be a pervert and kept talking.

 

=I did my best to heal you up, but since I’m broken like this right now I couldn’t really do very well. Do you think you’re able to get up and walk?=

 

The elf got up with a bit of a struggle, but once he was fully standing up he seemed to be able to move without too much pain. Ya know, it was easier to tell just how beefy he was now that he wasn’t crouched on the ground anymore. Are all of the elves this stacked…? Ah well, whatever, I suppose it doesn’t matter, no matter how much it suits my tastes visually.

 

Anyways yeah, he brushed himself off a bit and gave me a slightly painful looking bow with a fist held to his chest. Honestly it made me feel like I was a princess; It just had that fantasy-like of a vibe to me.

 

“My thanks be to you, oh great L’Lan’e’frea.”

 

Okay, let me be totally real with you here: I’m sure that’s what he said, but it sure as hell didn’t sound like that. Just like how the humans I’ve met so far have had a weird thick accent, this elf also has an odd way of pronouncing words that I can only vaguely understand after giving it a lot of thought. Personally, I think it sounds really archaic, like we’re in some kind of really hard to understand period drama, which I guess suits his words to a T. But yeah, that last word is totally a mystery to me, probably some kind of elvish or something. That must be what it is, right? I’m not just being like racist or something for thinking that, am I? Right? I’d feel terrible if I was actually being rude in my mind to him right now, considering he’s the first person to ever reply to my words.

 

As I wiggled my tentacles nervously in thought about what it could mean, the elf rummaged in a pocket of his pants and tossed something my way. I caught it out of the air and held it up to my non-existent eyes to look at it, and realized immediately what it was: This was a hand-sized chunk of semi-fresh meat! Obviously I gobbled it up as soon as I realized what it was, and my stomach was all the more thankful for it.

 

This elf really knows how to give his thanks!

Well… If that’s the case…

 

=If you really want to thank me… Could you give me some more meat?=

 

Plants have no shame! I saved your life, so give me some more help, you elf!

_____

AN: Got a shot and my body's not too happy about it, so I'm gonna chill for a week. I'll start posting again after that!