The thing gives me the impression that it’s about to do something drastic, and then a tentacle thing shoots out, grabbing me around the waist and dragging me toward it. I lose my balance and my crutches. The only thing keeping me fromface planting is the grip of the tentacle thing around my waist. Romily jumps off the dryer and grabs my hand, pulling me against the thing dragging me toward it. He’s not strong enough, nor does he have the mass to fight against the inevitable pull of the tentacle. He slows it down, but it ends up dragging us both toward a maw that opens up full of baby tentacles.
This is bad.
I could use a baby flink teleport right about now, but I’m not going to call ababyinto a dangerous situation. That’s just wrong. It would be helpful, but I’m glad they left before we got into this situation. I wonder if my dragon would be helpful right now, but considering we’re in a basement, I think it would be better if I don’t chance shifting into a creature that might be bigger than the room I’m in. I don’t know how big my dragon is, but I’d be sad if I shifted and ended up accidentally killing Romily.
“Let go,” I tell Romily, because we’re getting too close to the writhing tentacle mass, and he doesn’t need to end up where I’m going if rescue doesn’t arrive in time.
Romily snorts and shakes his head.
My foot enters the tentacle mouth, and fear hits me all at once. I do not want to lose my other leg. I jerk it out of the mouth and kick at the tentacle holding me around the waist.
“No, no, no, no,” I whisper, panicking about losing my other limb.
Something inside me snaps, and then I’m not a person anymore. I’m also not a dragon. I’m…
I don’t know. I’m floating at the ceiling and perceiving the entire room in three hundred and sixty degrees. Romily lands on his butt, looking up at me with surprise etched in his face. The tentacle thing no longer looks like a tentacle monster thing. It’s just a person, staring up at me with rage on their face. Not like a human person, don’t get me wrong. They’re more like an alienperson, but identifiably a person with a ragey expression on a face too small for the giant head—you know, they look like one of those elongated head people, but with super spindly arms and four legs instead of two. Like I said, an alien person.
They screech at me and fling their hands toward me, but nothing happens. If I stay away from their hands, they can’t get me.
Darcy appears on an array with Fox and Bellamy, and Fox jumps off, swinging a massive sword toward the person and dragging their attention away from me (still up here, hovering at the ceiling with a three-sixty view of the room). They fling their arms out over and over, and Fox seems to be fighting something I can’t really see. I assume it’s the tentacles that had me before this whole hovering situation happened.
Bellamy and Darcy join Fox in fighting the imaginary tentacles, but they don’t seem to be making much headway. It’s weird watching them fight something that’s not there, and it occurs to me that they might run out of steam before figuring out the tentacles aren’t real. I mean, sure, they caught me up, so they have some substance, but they’re just a disguise for the spindly creature hiding behind them.
I think it might be ok to show them that it’s not real, and the thought moves me from the ceiling toward the fray. I dash straight toward the spindly guy’s head, hitting him in the cranium pretty hard. It knocks him off balance, and he topples to the floor, legs up. That’s the problem with having stick thin legs holding up a super heavy head.
Fox rushes past me to the overturned guy and decapitates him.
Darcy saunters past him, stabs the guy in the chest, and rips him open from sternum to tail with his fancy dagger.
The guy’s insides become his outsides, and Darcy reaches in, pulling the intestines out. There’s not that much viscera, but heempties the cavity one organ at a time. Fairly quickly, he pulls the heart out. It’s still pumping in his hand when he holds it up, finally turning to look at me.
“Oh Peach, you’re the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen in all yer gorgeous forms. Look at you. Ain’t no wonder so many people want you. Never seen one of your kind outside the swamp.”
“What is he?” Bellamy asks, pointing to Romily to indicate he’s speaking for him.
Darcy reaches out with his bloody hand (not the one holding the heart), and runs it over my whole self. I feel him everywhere all at once and a shiver of pure, unadulterated want shakes me from the inside out.
“Feu follet,” he answers, rubbing me everywhere again
I don’t even know what that is, but this feels like I am one stroke away from a full body orgasm.
Darcy proves that I am when he rubs me again and I explode outward. It’s better than an orgasm, different and the same all at once. It’s want, desire, pleasure, and completion. I become an entire universe of bliss for a split second and an eternity, and when my self pulls itself back together, I drop to the floor back in my human body.
I stare up at Darcy with a silly smile on my face. “We’re doing that again,” I inform him.
He arches a single eyebrow at me, offering me a hand. “Are we? Do we have to include the”—he makes a disturbing clicking sound—“or is it ok to skip the battle for your life?”
I take his hand and let him help me to my foot. I’m naked but my clothes are on the floor and they look intact. “We can skip the battle for my life. Is that clicking noise the thing that just tried to eat me?”
Darcy nods, holding up to me a shriveled heart the size of a ping pong ball. “Usually I eat them, but you can have it. It’sa permanent boost to your inherent magic. Eat enough of these and you’ll be able to shift on command.”
“Is that a person’s heart?” I ask to make sure the clicking noise thing is sapient like I thought it was.
Darcy looks at it and the corpse. “It’s a—” The clicking noise he makes sounds like that terrifying sound effect used for aliens in sci-fi horror TV shows.
“Can the terrifying clicking noise be classified as a person?”
He shrugs. “Yes, I think so. They’re an intelligence so foreign to this universe that I think it would be difficult to classify them as sentient and sapient, but I fall on the side of yes, they’re people.”
