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"That sounded like a distress call," whistled the young bull to the matron.

"Ignore it," said the wise old whale cow. "It is none of our business." This was good advice. It was good advice that was ignored.

The whale pod had a dozen members ranging from the oldest, the matron cow, to a couple of calves not even a year old. Fairly far down the hierarchy was the young bull. He was well versed in the arts of filter feeding and the upward lunge with maw wide agape, both techniques to fill his jaws with thousands of krill or finger-sized fish.

What he had not learned yet was caution. Whales only left a pod when it grew large enough for several to break off and form a new one. Only on the rarest of occasions did one set out alone.

"I will have a look," he whistled. Full of youth and vigor but sorely lacking in wisdom, he left the pod and swam toward the distant call.

Shortly after leaving the pod he spotted several small shapes ahead through the returns of his echolocation. One turned toward him and he perceived a dolphin.

"What is going on up ahead," the young bull whistled.

"Oh," chirped the dolphin. "We are just watching two orcas hunt a whale like you. It is much bigger than they are but they will wear it down eventually."

While he had never been a target for orcas, he'd heard stories from the older whales. A full-grown whale is a challenging target for the huge black and white dolphins. Typically orcas were more interested in whale calves but a solitary adult whale might be tired out and finally killed by repeated attacks. This was one reason you encountered so few solitary whales.

"And you are just watching?" The young bull whistled.

"It is none of our business," chirped the dolphin, and another dolphin who had drawn near nodded by bobbing in the water.

"But it is fun to watch," chirped the second one, and the young bull turned away with a snort of disgust. With a ping of his sonar he confirmed the story. One large shape, a whale at least his size, and two orcas in the twenty-foot range.

The other whale was about his length, fifty feet or so, but much broader in the beam. It must have a massive belt of blubber to loom so large.

"Go away," whistled one of the orcas as he drew near. "Or we will hunt you too."

"You go away," the young bull whistled back. "There are two of us now."

The young bull swept toward his fatter kin, passing between it and the nearer orca. Up until now the fat whale seemed unaware of his presence, distracted by the life and death struggle with the predators. A tiny eye watched him sweep by and the fat whale turned away from him.

The young bull at once sensed the plan. He turned away as well. Between the two of them they would describe a circle in the water, so that if either was approached by the orcas the other would soon be there to help. The orcas found even one whale challenging, and two was just too much to contend with.

They turned in opposite directions and the orcas backed off a few body lengths. If they attacked one whale, the second would come at them nose first. Collision was a real threat to the orcas and they would be well advised to stay clear.

The young bull and the fat whale swept past one another, continuing the circle. The orcas backed off but hadn't left. Now they crept in closer. Their best chance for an attack was to strike from behind and the young bull increased his pace. As he turned in his circling he sensed the fat whale had as well.

They came at each other head-on with the orcas close behind and the young bull knew he had to pass as close as possible to his kin. At the last minute each would swerve aside and hopefully startle or even collide with an orca.

The trick was to swerve in opposite directions at the last moment. Judging the fat whale's body language the young bull turned aside. Young whales played this game as calves and with age and experience an error was almost unheard-of.

It was thus a surprise when the fat whale swerved in the same direction and they came at each other head-on. It was too late to turn and the around bull's eyes widened as he realized they were about to slam into each other.

There was simply no way to stop in time and the young bulls's momentum carried him toward a brutal collision. That was bad and it turned out something even worse was in the offing. In the moment before they collided the fat whale's huge jaws opened and the young bull's momentum carried him in.

What should have happened is a bruising collision and the probably breakage of the fat whale's lower jaw, an injury that would doom it to death by starvation. What happened instead was a scrape of baleen across the young bull's face and then a wet thump as he swam nose-first into the fat whale's gullet.

Their mutual momentum slammed them into each other and wet flesh expanded over the young bull's snout, past his eyes and just kept slithering by. When his momentum was finally spent he blinked into the darkness, wrapped in flesh all the way past his foreflippers. The collision had driven half his body into the fat whale's maw and the strangely disjointed jaws wrapped around him, pinning his forward fins to his sides.

"What is happening," the young bull muttered. The unexpectedly yielding depths of the fat whale's maw had absorbed the impact and he wasn't injured, though he puzzled over how the only slightly larger whale had yawned wide enough for this to happen.

A seabird, but nothing much larger, can fit down the gullet of a baleen whale and the upward lunge through a mass of panicked little fish occasionally took in a few of them as the birds sought their own fishy meals. The digestive system of a baleen whale is meant to quickly process and pass a multitude of tiny prey, not anything as large as a seagull. There is simply not time for a whole seagull to dissolve in the stomach before it is carried on by the remains of easier to digest small fry.

This is small consolation for the seabirds who end up as part of whale bowel movements but if they weren't so focused on their own hunt they wouldn't end up in a whale's stomach to start with. Anything larger than such a bird, such as the occasional sea lion or even a human who found itself in a whale's maw, was much too large for the average baleen whale to swallow and was spat out.

So it was that the young whale bull was puzzled as to how this all happened. The impact should have crippled the fat whale and bruised him badly. Instead they both lived and the young bull flicked his tail flukes to backwater his way out of the fleshy trap.

By all rights the fat whale should happily disgorge him. Instead, to the young bull's astonishment he felt the other whale's tongue bunch up against his body. Before he could pull himself out with his tail flukes the fat whale swallowed.

A great contraction moved through the flesh surrounding the young bull, the huge fleshy tongue pressed against his underside, and to his horror the young bull found himself sliding deeper. He was nearly as large as the fat whale yet powerful throat muscles rolled over him, coating him with a thick layer of lubricating slime and easing him deeper into the other whale's body.

Foot after foot of his body slipped into the other whale's maw, scraping past the baleen and sinking into the waiting gullet. With a side to side wriggle of its jaws the fat whale worked them over his midsection, then came another straining gulp that sent even more of him down its gullet.

A fleshy valve expanded to allow his snout into the fat whale's forestomach. A baleen whale's gut can hold a lot of food at one time but nothing even as large as a salmon was meant to make it down the narrow throat. Now the snout of an almost equally large whale slid in and then through yet another sphincter into the fat whale's main stomach.

The young bull only understood his internal anatomy from the operator's standpoint but he knew all of this was terribly wrong. More of his snout slipped into the fat whale's main stomach, far more of him than should reasonably fit based on his own eating habits, and the fat whale gulped massively a second and third time.

Swallowing muscles that should by all rights never grip anything larger than a seagull rolled over him, squeezing him deeper, and when the slide stopped only his flukes were left in the cool seawater. The rest of him was down the fat whale's throat. Swollen by a meal almost as large as itself was and by all rights fatally stretched around the young bull, the fat whale swam casually onward.

"What is happening?" Whistled the young bull, and tried to squirm his way free. All that accomplished was to make the fat whale twitch in the water. He was in the fat whale's stomachs past his eyes and most of the rest of him was wrapped in gullet. A quarter of his entire body was in the main stomach and that is where digestion takes place.

Stomach acids stung the young bull's skin and bit at his eyes. The acid was spread in a thin layer over his hide and digesting something his size would take days or more. Even if the fat whale digested his head, that would just make room for his middle to slide into its main stomach, and when that was gone it still left his lower body and tail flukes. He was a deeply impossible meal that the fat whale would need at least a full week to move through its bowels. More like two weeks.

And yet the fat whale swam on, broaching to suck in a breath through its blowhole. Forcing the young bull down its throat took some work and it needed a moment to recover.

It seemed perfectly content to let its stomach work on an impossibly large meal. The acid sting was genuinely painful now, especially at the young bull's eyes and where it entered his mouth.

The young bull had a full breath of air and could survive without another one for at least half an hour. He thrashed his flukes again, once more just causing the fat whale to twitch, and realized his fate was entirely up to the other whale. He couldn't get out on his own. Either the fat whale would cough him up, or it would succumb to its effort to take such a huge meal and he would suffocate inside it as it died.

Or, and this was an increasingly worrying possibility, it was such a freak of nature that it could and would digest him. Not wishing to add to its already thick layer of blubber or to exit from its body as a series of bowel movements, the young bull struggled. His flukes thrashed where they protruded from its jaws. They would be the last bit of him to slip into its maw as the fat whale digested him.

"Why?" He whistled as the acid stung his eyes and gradually began to eat into his skin. "I was trying to help you!"

"You did," the fat whale whistled. His own call had communicated itself through its flesh and its own whistle made its way to the swallowed bull the same way. "I was hungry."

Trapped in the caustic hell of the main stomach, the young bull put two and two together. The orcas weren't attacking the fat whale even though it was so gorged as to be nearly helpless. All it could do was swim slowly along as it digested him, yet it showed no sign of alarm or of being attacked. The only answer was that the fat whale and the orcas knew each other and were working together. The whole thing, including the distress call he heard, was a trap.

He was right. The next indication of this was an arch of the fat whale's body, followed, by a slow, rhythmic thrusting. The fat whale was too massive to jackhammer its penis into a lover. It was fucking someone, though, and there was only one likely candidate. The fat whale was fucking one of the orcas.

"Jerk," the young bull whistled. It was increasingly obvious he would only get out of the fat whale's guts after a trip through its bowels. He heard the fat whale's distress call from his pod but his own would be absorbed by the thick layer of blubber around him. Even if it was somehow heard, he was the only one in the pod willing to respond. His pod would go on with its life, unaware of his fate as food for a fellow whale.

He thrashed his flukes one last time and then gave up. The heat and tightness of the fat whale's innards were just too much, too unlike the cool seawater that was his natural environment. As the stomach squeezed and kneaded his flesh, pressing its acid into every crevice of his hide, let out the long-held breath that kept him alive.

The two orcas bobbed in the water and giggled as Ronas the whale let out a long bubbling belch. A whale had once more fallen for their trap and now was just a massive bulge in their lover. This might well be the largest thing he'd swallowed yet, larger even than the last two whales they lured in or the whale shark before that. Once he even swallowed a longboat full of humans, while his attendant orcas and dolphins ate the ones that escaped the boat.

He regurgitated the boat once its fleshy cargo dissolved. There would be no such problem with the young bull. The broad flukes hanging from his jaws would follow the rest down his throat. He simply needed time to digest his massive meal, and he had all the time he needed.

Ronas humped the water, shuddered, and let out a long underwater groan. Below him the dolphin who directed the young bull in their direction bulged in the middle as the massive whale cock in its gullet fed it a great gush of cetacean semen.

The dolphin disgorged the tip of Ronas's fleshy cock, the entirety of which was larger than its whole body, burped, and swam over to the orcas. It was less streamlined than usual due to twenty gallons of glutenous whale cum in its stomach.

"Biggest one yet?" It whistled, admiring the flukes hanging from the predatory whale's jaws.

"I think so," whistled one of the she-orcas.

"My turn," whistled the smaller of the two orcas, and turned over in the water as she slipped beneath the bulging whale.

"Do you ever feel sorry for them," the dolphin chirped. It watched the long bulge in Ronas's body bend as the fat whale began to thrust.

"He should have known better than to venture out alone," the larger orca whistled. "That's a lesson you learn early on, here in the sea."

"But the learning of it sometimes gets you digested," the dolphin chirped.

"Sure enough," said the she-orca, and admired the bulge in the humping whale as she waited for her turn beneath his belly.

Solitary whales sometimes left their pods to find a new one, due to an excess of population or the simple urge to wander. Ronas, ejected from his birth pod, had built a new, strangely mixed one. Most of its members were there as his lovers or were simply amused by his antics.

Other whales, like the young bull stretched out in his body cavity, were welcome to join too. It was just that their tenure tended to last only as long as it took Ronas to digest them.