Hey All,
Another Story featuring Kaimana. This is a very-nearly-finished draft, which will be posted to deviantart once the comments it receives here have been integrated (so please feel free to comment in a deviantart-critique style). Thanks to Jasconius for doing a pre-read through for me.
This is quite a vorish story, making two-in-a-row. I think that's because its quite easy to write a quite short vorish story, whereas an adventure requires quite some length to develop. Put it this way, I've two unfinished adventure stories set in Felarya in slow-progress modes, one of them started prior to this one (that's a mayfly-attention-span issue on my part - I had an idea for the other and started working on it).
Anyway, enjoy and comment,
Yours,
Ambrose,
Kaimana and the Hungry Naga
Kaimana studied the small, beached boat in annoyance. Though not as much annoyance she reserved for the naga curled sleepily around it, basking in the midday sun after her substantial meal.
Not that two humans and a neko would've been any more than a snack for Kaimana, but the kill-stealing naga was obviously juvenile. Not that that excused the dishonourable act of snaffling a hungry mermaid's lunch from right out in front of her.
On this napping naga, the snacks had made a noticeably distended bulge in the buff, tanned skin of her belly. The stomach of the lumen mermaid whose lunch they should've been would have absorbed them much more readily.
Kaimana had been forced to watch, hungrily, as that fleshy protrusion easily resisted the squirming escape attempts of its occupants. And listen in irritation to its shlorpes and gurgles as it digested them away. Indeed, it had now practically returned to its smooth emptied state, the only trace of the meal it had so recently devoured a well-fed glow rosy spread across the dozing naga's cheeks.
With maybe fifteen feet – certainly no more – from the dull green scales of her snake-hips to the blonde ringlets cascading from the top of her head, Kaimana rather thought the young naga should've been more respectful of a, if not fully grown, certainly much-larger great predator.
Admittedly, Kaimana estimated the naga had a further forty-plus feet of tail, which made her more or less three-fifths of Kaimana's [i]length[\i]. But only about one-ninth of the Lumen Mermaid's actual [i]size[\i].
“Excuse me,” Kaimana had said, quite politely, “but that's my lunch you're eating.” The naga had gulped in response, the small form of the human she'd been sucking down making a sizeable lump in her narrow throat. Then she'd studied the distance of smooth, flat sand between her and the deeper offshore water that confined Kaimana.
Proving she wasn't a complete idiot, at least.
“Catch as catch can,” the naga had replied at last. “And you obviously can't. My lunch now.”
Kaimana had had to agree with this, up to a point. She'd only had a slim hope that a crew so stupid as to get themselves stranded by low tide – and therefore drawing the attention of all the predatory things in the Topazial sea – wouldn't get themselves devoured before the tide came back in and she was able to eat them herself.
A hope that'd gone from slim to none when this juvenile, predatory naga had shown up.
“Okay,” she'd replied. “I hear that. But at least toss me the neko, won't you? They're my favourite.”
“What's in it for me?” The naga had said.
A reasonable question.
The naga transferred the surviving human to her mouth. She was the only female of the group, Kaimana had noticed wistfully. Girls did have a sweeter flavour, no matter what anybody said. The naga evidently agreed, lightly sucking on the struggling, screaming little thing's bare legs.
Kaimana licked her lips. The sight was making her very hungry.
“I'll... I'll give you a song,” she offered. The naga seemed struck by this. Or maybe it was the mild struggle of slurping the human's ample breasts between her lips. Whatever her tongue was adding to the struggle, it was doing it from inside her mouth. It literally couldn't fit out between the naga's lips and the human's ample tit-flesh.
It really was, Kaimana realised, a rather small naga. Two or three of its fingertips fitted across the screeching human's protruding head. Though they were easily still strong enough to push its victim inside its mouth and gulp it down.
A gulp which was both deep and audible. The naga stretched, the neko still trapped in its grip. The whole thing was giving Kaimana something of a perspective problem. Her eyes kept insisting that the neko was some great oversized specimen of its race, no matter that she knew it was the naga that was unusually juvenile and tiddly.
“Nah,” the naga answered, “if I want music, I can go terrify the Rosic Nekos. I don't need no fishy re-interpretations.”
“Hah,” Kaimana replied disdainfully, splashing her anger at the naga. The droplets fell far, far short. “No you can't. Plenty of other great predators around there. Fully grown ones. The only way you're getting into a Rosic concert is as hors d' oeuvres!”
The naga considered this for a moment. “Go on then,” she tossed the clearly petrified neko from hand to hand like a small statuette. “I'm pretty full anyway,” she said. Indeed, she looked it. “Sing for your supper.”
And so Kaimana had sung. Fast, hard notes torn from her throat, notes of anger and tinged with her hard-edged hunger.
Quite despite herself, the naga had found that she was dancing, swaying to the mermaid's groove, tapping her tail to the beat.
And getting hungry again.
From the naga's perspective, the impromptu concert was over all too soon.
“Sorry,” she said, “you were good, but you've made me hungry again.” The neko had a brief moment of realisation that he wasn't about to be tossed into the mermaid's waiting jaws – before he was stuffed between the naga's instead.
He didn't even have time to scream.
After she'd gulped him, the naga looked out at the raging mermaid. “But really, what're you going to do about it anyway?” The naga sneered and stuck out her tongue.
'I'll eat you', Kaimana thought furiously. And snapped her lips shut on the words. She wouldn't speak in anger and repent at leisure. She wouldn't, she realised, be repenting at all.
I'm really going to eat her, Kaimana thought, somewhat to her own amazement. If the young naga hadn't been such a brat... but she had, and Kaimana licked her lips, sloshing forward in the water. She couldn't help herself. Now that she was thinking of it, the young naga looked undeniably tasty.
And was watching Kaimana cautiously.
“Hmph,” Kaimana huffed theatrically, flicking her tail and a disdainful splash of water in the naga's direction as she dove beneath the waves. But she didn't go far. She had no intention of actually abandoning her next meal.
This one was likely too large to get snaffled by anything but another naga, and they didn't usually eat their own. For whatever unfathomable reasons that might be.
A hundred-foot lumen mermaid didn't consider a fifteen-foot lumen mermaid a sister. She considered her lunch. Even if they really were related by blood.
------------------------------------------------------------
Whatever sub-par senses the naga was using, they obviously hadn't detected Kaimana. Either that, or she was such a deep sleeper she could doze right through entirely valid warnings of mortal danger.
Whatever had possessed her to fall asleep on her little sandbank? How did she think her last – ever – meal's boat had gotten up there, anyway? Beauty, not brains, where clearly this little naga's strong-suit.
And she really was, Kaimana thought, rather beautiful. The green scales she'd previously thought dull gleamed like emeralds under the bright mid-afternoon sun. Her snakeskin would surely make a fine leather jacket or similar, if only the mermaid had any use for clothes. Sleep had tousled the naga's golden hair around a face softened by a small, self-satisfied smile.
One undoubtedly caused by the fullness of her belly.
Kaimana had been watching the naga's three victims squirming and writhing inside its buff-tanned flesh for some hours now. Whilst the tide swept in and turned the napping naga's sandy resting place back into an island. The naga had been more than a mile from the waters of the Jewel River Estuary, distance a reliable safeguard against the mermaid whose dinner she'd stolen.
No more.
Kaimana saw no reason to prolong the matter. It touched upon her honour, which made the result inevitable whatever protests the young naga might choose to make.
Besides, she was ravenously hungry.
The naga stirred as Kaimana's shadow passed over her, but it was the mermaid's grip closing about her waist, at the delicate interface between woman and snake, skin and scale, that jerked her from her sleep and pleasant digestive dreams.
Sayen woke to the first act of a devouring nightmare. Her first sight was of Kaimana's gaping maw, which she was rapidly approaching. She screamed, much more loudly than a human would've been able to, and writhed in Kaimana's grip.
She'd always thought it funny when humans or nekos fought her this way. It was invariably useless – they went into her belly whatever they did – and yet here she was doing the exact same thing!
On the other hand, she thought as she reached out and grabbed the mermaid's great lips, pushing and locking her arms back against them, she'd heard mermaids didn't have dislocating jaws. So maybe this one would find her an impossible meal. Or maybe a friendly, fully grown giant naga would arrive and save her.
Preferably by devouring this pernicious mer!
“Hey, stop!” She shouted. “Aren't we both predators!? This isn't right!”
“You stole my dinner. You're replacing my dinner,” the mermaid answered. “Seems perfectly honourable to me.”
Clearly, there was no hope there. But at least it'd closed the mermaid's mouth for a moment.
Unfortunately, it'd also distracted Sayen from the mermaid's tongue snaking – and she should know – out and curling around her wrist. Before wrenching it free of its tenuous grip on the mermaid's lips and into the fearsomely warm wetness of her mouth.
Sayen's other hand was suddenly the only thing keeping her on the outside of the mer. And it wasn't enough, not against the push of a pair of arms almost as thick across as she was. Not when the mermaid's tongue was pulling her in too.
“I'll give them back! Throw them up for you!” She offered desperately. “Catch you ten-times as many!” She practically screamed as she felt the mermaid's lips press against the top of her blonde-haired head. The greatest, softest, dampest kiss she'd ever received in what she was already thinking of as her too-short life.
The mermaid paused. Sayen stopped struggling against her. Every second the mermaid thought gave Sayen another second. Sayen could do a lot with a second.
She could use it to live longer in.
She wanted to have a lot more of them, and not just in a mermaid's stomach.The mermaid's mouth moved as she thought. Felt against Sayen's head, it was thoroughly unpleasant. Especially since the mer was drooling onto her.
“A hundred times as many!” She offered frantically. She'd do anything, say anything to get the mermaid to say yes and release her. She could, after all, always try and wriggle out of it later. With a far greater certainty than her recent, futile attempts to writhe out of the mermaid's truly ferocious grip.
“I couldn't trust a meal-stealer like you to keep your end of the bargain,” the mermaid said eventually. It was Sayen's cue to resume struggling and screaming with all her might. “Hmph,” the mermaid protested this faithless breakdown of negotiations. “Besides, I'm hungry now,” she observed.
With a deafening – from Sayen's perspective – pop, the mermaid's lips slid over her head, engulfing her to the neck in the slimy darkness of her mouth and putting a permanent end to hopes of a diplomatic solution. The mermaid's tongue released her wrist – there was nothing she could do with it now, she realised in horror, because there was nothing in the mermaid's mouth that wasn't too slippery to provide a good handhold.
The mermaid's tongue explored Sayen's face. Taste-testing me, she realised. A pleased hum reverberated from the mermaid's throat – oh God, only feet away – and it was a crystal-clear commentary on her flavour.
This mermaid thought she was delicious.
Indeed, that long tongue, wet and rough, scraped down Sayen's neck, between her bare breasts and under her stomach, where it spared a teasing pat for the naga's last meal, soon to have the rare experience of being digested by two stomachs at once.
Not that any digestion isn't unique, from the viewpoint of the individual being digested.
As Sayen was about to discover for herself.
Sayen was frantic. Her tail, the only thing she had left, was coiled tightly around and between mermaid's fingers. It was her last light of hope, that even the much larger predator wouldn't be able to unwrap it from her hand. Therefore rendering Sayen inedible.
It wasn't more than a faint glimmer, she realised as her head slipped off the back of the mermaid's tongue and her face dangled down the long undulating tunnel of its throat.
And it wasn't working.
The mermaid was simply turning her hand this way and that, peeling Sayen off and feeding her into her mouth foot by foot, forcing Sayen to coil her tail in it. Or be forced down into the mermaid's throat.
From the disturbing, cute little sounds echoing out of the mermaid's throat, which Sayen feared she was about to occupy, the mermaid was enjoying this puzzle and looking forward to its increasingly inevitable denouement.
And, from the sucking and licking gradually working its way down to the tip of her tail, as more and more of her was fed into the mermaid's mouth, her snake-half was just as enjoyably flavourful as her human belly, breasts and face.
With horrible anticipation the moment built as the pressure of her tail, and the pull of gravity, gradually overcame what little friction Sayen had been able to muster from the slippery walls of the mermaid's maw and her tongue. A delighted squeak told her that the mermaid, too, knew they were at the tipping point. Then the giant predator followed up with a little flick of its tongue that sent her sliding, screaming futilely, into the grip of the mermaid's oesophagus.
Sayen plunged, uncoiling out of the mermaid's mouth as its rippling throat drew her down into its stomach. She could feel those waves, pulling and squishing her along all her length, then her face burst into the foetid air of the mermaid's gut.
She fell, and got a face-full of syrupy digestive juices for her landing-pad.
It burned her eyes and mucous membranes, a terrifying clue as to its efficiency at its macabre purpose.
Strangely, as her sixty-foot tip-to-tail length was longer than the distance between the mermaid's lips and her belly, Sayen could still feel her tail thrashing about in the cool mid-afternoon ocean breeze.
Then the mermaid took it in a tight grip. Oh, Mhorn, Sayen prayed. Please let her pull me out:
I'll laugh.
I'll smile.
I'll agree it was a great joke.
The mermaid didn't. So Sayen upped the ante:
I'll be nice to other predators.
I'll be nicer to my prey.
I'll go vegetarian.
Just. Pull. Me. Out.
Then she wondered if, perhaps, naga though she be, the goddess of the feast mightn't have been the right deity to appeal to in this case. If perhaps that luck-goddess the humans and nekos worshipped might perhaps have been a better choice. Although she'd certainly never helped any of the prey Sayen had gotten her greedy little hands on.
Perhaps fortunately, although not for Sayen, her unlikely promises to deities of dubious reliability were not to be tested, as the mermaid only gripped her tail so as to prevent the eye-endangering flailing of its tip.
Then she slurped the last of the young naga down like a particularly thick and delicious udon-noodle.
-------------------------------------------------
Kaimana sighed and let out a delighted little belch. Who knew nagas were so delicious? Nekos were her favourite – and didn't she technically have one in her belly now, courtesy of the naga last meal? Even though she didn't get to taste it? Not that that mattered, because nekos had only [i]been[\i] her favourite.
And for regular meals in polite predatory company they were likely to remain so.
But in private, she rather thought that small or young – and not-so-small and not-so-young - great predators were going to be her new indulgence, right up to the limit of her ability to swallow and her stomach to restrain.
Which was more impressive than even she'd suspected, she admitted, considering the coiled bulges that writhed and beat against the surface of her full belly, much more strongly and pleasurably than any neko or human had ever been able to do so.
And naturally, as she continued to grow, it would only grow more commodious.
That was... something to look forward to.
It also led to a rather troubling train of thought. Leviathans. Krakens. She'd be no more than a mouthful for either. And she gulped mouthfuls of nekos and humans by the tribe. Maybe the reason you never heard of a leviathan devouring her school of lesser mermaids – mermaid's of a size with Kaimana herself – was because there were never any survivors...
Kiamana shivered, even as she enjoyed the naga's squirming in her belly.
And fully-grown nagas... they could do that thing with their jaws, and though she'd surely be more than a mouthful for them... more like a month's meal, even at her present size...
Kaimana had no desire, at all, for her last view to be the gaping, dark tunnel of someone's throat, nor her last experience to be flopping about in someone's stomach like a trout in a bucket.
It almost made her feel guilty.
Almost.
But then, the juvenile naga had been very rude, she reminded herself. And it felt just fantastic to have it writhing and coiling about in her digestive juices, pressing and squeezing her belly like the best massage she'd ever had.
A pleased smile gracing her lips, Kaimana lay back against the sandbank, and allowed the afternoon sun and gentle breeze to seduce her into light and peaceful sleep. She dreamt of delectable meals, whilst even asleep her tuned senses searched for both predators and prey, wielding her new realisation that in the most delicious cases the two were one and the same.
The growl and gurgle of her stomach digesting the unlucky being within, who'd never imagined in her darkest nightmare – unlike the remains of the three within her own belly – that she'd end up like this, was an austere contrast to the sweet dreams and blameless comportment of the slumbering mermaid.
But - even if you're a great predator - that's Felarya for you.
The End,
Ambrose,
Subject: Kaimana and the Hungry Naga 
Sun May 30, 2010 8:07 am
