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Tuki and the seal By Strega

"That's a big seal," Tuki chittered, and Igla and Ner nodded by bobbing their bodies. The three dolphins were far enough from the torpedo-shaped creature to see it only as a dim shape, but their echolocation told them its size and shape to the centimeter.

"I think it's one of the spotted ones," Igla chittered. "The ones that eat penguins."

"I ate a penguin once," said Ner, the largest of the three, and the closest thing to a fat dolphin you were likely to encounter. "Its feathers tickled when I swallowed it."

"Of course you did," chittered Igla, who had long since ceased to be surprised at what Ner would eat. Fish, bird, mammal or reptile, if he could get his beak around he'd try to swallow it. It was funny enough to see him swallow a shark two-thirds his own length but they had laughed until it hurt the time a small sea turtle got stuck halfway down his throat. Eventually he'd gotten the odd-shaped bulge swallowed and his stomach had dealt with it. Still, he'd never since tried to eat a turtle anywhere near that size. They were the wrong shape to fit easily down a throat, unlike most everything else in the sea.

"I'm going to go saw hello," Tuki said, and swam off without waiting for the others to answer.

"He's not very smart," Ner chittered, and Igla nodded. They watched with some interest as the distant shape of their companion approached the seal.

"Hi!", Tuki chittered brightly when he was close enough to be heard. The seal was a big, streamlined thing, longer and heavier than himself and dark spots speckled across its lighter underside.

"Hello there," it growled back, having just risen to the surface for a breath of air. Like himself it could stay submerged for a long time, but it still needed to breathe. It turned effortlessly in the water to face him and Tuki shied away. The big seal seemed to have no sense of personal space and had he not moved they would have collided.

"I'm Tuki. I haven't seen a seal like you before."

"We spotted seals live around the ice," it growled, not objecting when he swam alongside. "I don't usually come this far into the warm. There are enormous sharks here I wouldn't want to meet."

"Oh yes," Tuki chittered. "They do eat seals. Even very big ones, if they catch them by surprise. So why did you come here?"

"To explore," it growled. "And to get away from those weird surface creatures with false fins and tanks on their backs. There is a plague of them down south right now."

"Oh, those," Tuki said. As he grew more comfortable around the big seal he allowed it to come closer. Swift and nimble as it was in the sea it could of course not compete with a dolphin. "There aren't many of them around here. My friend Ner, who eats everything, says he'd like to swallow one, but that thing on their back would get in the way."

"It does scrape on the way down,", the seal said with a laugh. "And then all this air comes out and you get bloated until you burp it up."

Tuki laughed too. "What happens to the thing on their back?"

"Not just that thing," the seal growled. "They have fake fins and even a second skin they wear atop their own to stay warm. None of that digests. After my stomach is done with them I cough all that back up...if all goes well. One time one of the fins went all the way through me. I didn't enjoy that at all."

The dry way he related that and the distaste in his voice made Tuki burst out laughing, which is why he didn't see how intently the seal was watching him, or see it pull slightly as they swam and double back to meet him head-on. He only vaguely noticed the shape approaching and swerved to one side only to have it smoothly mirror his motion. He finally blinked back aware just as the pink maw snapped open in front of his beak, and it was already too late by then.

They collided with with a thump, the leopard seal's maw sliding over and around his broad skull, his beak pushing deep into the waiting gullet. There was a dull pop as the seal's snakey jaws unhinged and by the time their mutual momentum was exhausted he was past the blowhole in its jaws, a third of has body already swallowed.

The seal grunted through a full throat and thrust itself forward with a flutter of its strong flippers. Tuki was thrashing his own flukes, desperately trying to extract himself, and the force of the dolphin's movements made the seal's body wriggle in sympathy. It was already well started on its meal, though, and the seal swallowed powerfully. Gullet muscles gripped down on the panicked dolphin, pushing him remorselessly deeper. It had taken just a moment's inattention to get him halfway down a leopard seal's throat and as far as the seal was concerned there was no reason not to finish the job.

"Oh look," Igla said from a ways away, "Tuki's being eaten.". It was just a dim shape by eye but he'd seen enough things swallowed whole to know what was happening as the two shapes merged.

"Sure enough," said Ner. He and his companion each sent out a chirp and examined the result. The sonar confirmed what they'd seen so dimly: Tuki was half swallowed and disappearing fast. It certainly wasn't the first time they'd seen that happen to a dolphin but the culprit was usually a big shark or orca. They'd never seen a dolphin turn into a bulge in a seal before.

"I wonder if we should help him," Ner chittered, and Igla shrugged.

Wrapped in the muscle and blubber of what he'd thought was a friendly stranger, Tuki chirped and wriggled, but the seal's throat had him in too tight a grip for him to pull himself out. Fangs scraped hiss tough skin as the seal inched its jaws over him, working its jaws forward on one side and then the other. His beak and skull had already emerged into the seal's lengthy stomach and with another gulp he slipped deeper, little but his flukes left in the cool ocean. Suffocating pressure and heat squeezed against him from all sides as the seal prepared to swallow the last of him.

"I just wanted to be friends," the dolphin whined, and thrashed as best he could. He was reduced to a lengthy bulge in the bigger seal's body, his flukes beginning to fold as they slid into the toothy jaws.

"Please," he begged, but the seal couldn't hear him or ignored him if it did. Its jaws clamped firmly shut, the tips of his flukes poking out on each side, and its thick body arched and straightened as it gulped. With a last great contraction of its swallowing muscles Tuki slid down its throat and the seal swam on, its body bulging oddly in ways it hadn't a minute before.

There was no question of him fitting entirely into even this long a stomach. Almost half of him was stretched out in the gullet after he came to rest, which couldn't be very comfortable for the seal. Slick stomach pressed in against him from his beak to past his fins, though, and between his hide and the folds of flesh was a churning mass of digestive juices. Tuki squeaked and squirmed as the first tingles began, turning quickly to a spreading, burning pain where his hide was thinnest. He might not be entirely swallowed but the seal had already begun to digest him. The acids would consume his foreparts, making room for the rest as nature took its course.

The pressure around him worsened as the seal dragged itself up out of the water. There had been a few rocks protruding from the waves near them when they talked and the seal apparently thought them a good place to rest after its meal and, not incidentally, to avoid his friends if they decided to try to rescue him. Eleven hundred pounds of seal pressed down, no longer buoyed by seawater, and Tuki whimpered as the last dregs of awareness were crushed out of him. It squeezed the air out of his lungs too, and the seal let out a long belch as it settled down atop its newly bulgy belly.

"Excuse me," came a chittering voice a minute or so later, and the leopard seal rolled over so the bulge was on one side and it could peer down from the rocks. A dolphin larger than the one he had just eaten looked back at him.

"Might I get you to cough my friend back up," the dolphin said. "We'll catch you something else to eat."

"I could," the seal said reasonably, "But it wouldn't do much good. I could feel the life go out of him as I climbed up on the rocks. He's not much use as as a dolphin any more." As opposed to as food, he did not need to add.

"Oh, all right then," said the dolphin with no sign of sorrow. It showed no sign of fear either, well aware that even if he slid off the rock he'd never catch it with another dolphin weighing him down. That was too bad; he'd love to see if he could slide a second meal in alongside the first. The two together would weigh as much as he would. Not that he wasn't full now, but it would be a challenge, and if he didn't liked challenges he'd stick to penguins instead of swallowing dolphins.

"I'll tell my friends not to trust you, naturally," the dolphin said.

"Well of course," the seal growled. "This one shouldn't have trusted me either, but he wasn't very smart, was he?"

"No he wasn't," the dolphin chittered. It disappeared silently into the water and the seal lay down his head, content to laze in the sun and sleep off his meal. It wasn't the first too-trusting dolphin he'd dispatched neatly down his gullet. With any luck it wouldn't be the last.

"So, no Tuki?" Igla asked, and Ner shrugged.

"Seal food," the larger dolphin chittered. "It was going to happen sooner or later. He just wasn't very smart."

"No he wasn't," Igla chittered, unconsciously echoing his friend, and the two swam off into the chilly waters in search of their own meals. These things happened in the ocean if you weren't careful, after all. It would be easy to hate the seal, but rather two-faced considering that time not so long ago that they had met a rather smaller seal and engaged in a bit of play with it.

It too had trusted too much and they'd watched with much amusement as Ner had met it head-on with beak wide open. It had taken minutes of work and a push or two from his friends to convert the seal into a bulge in the big dolphin's midsection.

Tuki should have remembered that and hadn't; it was simply safest here in the ocean to assume that every creature you met was going to try to eat you.