Notepad 1: The Encroacher
(The following is a collection of two chapters, plus change, of a series I gave up writing from lack of feedback. Have a blast.)
Prologue:
The stars are right
Sometimes, the reformation process went awry. It was already flawed enough, working only on those who died when completely encased in another's living flesh, but like a magnetic disk each resurrection left a faint glitch behind. Only the most devoted of meals, one who died tens of thousands of times, could ever notice how the flaws accumulate and build on each other. Knowledgeable mages, scientists and natural philosophers could see these tears in reality rip larger holes, but nothing horrendous ever got through; thousands of records were riddled with black censoring ink to preserve the secret. Every time a true threat attempted to break into the world, reality healed itself to block the intrusion. Thousands of years passed without a crisis, and every authority concluded that nothing could possibly overwhelm their plane's protective barriers.
As it turns out, each of those glitches left its own minute impression on reality, and it took all those millenia for those permanent cracks to finally shatter reality long enough for something to slip through.
It took its form carefully. Strange eons had passed in the void beyond reality, and it had grown tired of watching the tantalizing creatures scurry just out of reach. It had spent the time planning, knowing that its window of opportunity would last nanoseconds before it was locked out for another era. The creatures seemed helpless, relying on their civilization's bumbling mastery of magic and technology so primitive that it still involved matter. This would be a buffet, a fox in the henhouse, using the raw energy concentrated in these creatures' brains to fuel its change into something more powerful yet, something capable of devouring universes and reducing everything to a howling singularity...but to do that, it would need a mortal shell. Mortal shells need food. Food needs to be met by something similiar to itself, or it will be scared away.
Astronomers across the globe noted an incredible spike in energy emissions of every wavelength that night, reading off the scale of every instrument they could find, from seemingly random locations throughout the stellar system. Keen-eyed analysts noted the locations seemed to form the vertices of a tesseract, but they were brushed aside in confusion. A shame, because had that tesseract's center been calculated, authorities could have been scrambled to find the creature at the center of it and attack until only stray atoms remained.
No such effort was made. With the majestic tread of a latter-day Neal Armstrong, a lone tanuki stepped out behind a molecule in a particularly defenseless city's sleeping suburbs, licking her lips.
Part 1:
The First of Many
As the elevated train hissed to a stop, fuel cells bubbling, its lone passenger picked up his newspaper and waited for the doors to open. He glanced at the headlines- Starkweather-Moore Expedition Returns, Phlogiston Isolated, Djinn Peace Talks Continue- before flipping to the comics and stepping onto the platform, doors hissing shut behind his reptilian tail. His walk home was uneventful, passing unchallenged by the park and through the dark alleys pacified years ago by the epidemic of vigilante violence, though the next morning he was woken by detectives demanding to know if he saw anything unusual last night.
Rewind. Play, from a different perspective this time.
The tanuki, or the semi-corporeal entity that chose to represent itself as a tanuki, did not walk for some time after it appeared in that park. It had experienced gravity and three-dimensional reality before, but had never been bipedal. Describing the various flailings, bucklings, and pirouettes that occurred over the next hour or so would be very difficult, albeit amusing, but finally the creature had worked out the basic motor functions of each limb and gotten the hang of sensory feedback. Now was the time to take the next step: a ravening predator stumbling down a busy street would not be able to capture many meals, so it would have to learn the behaviors and features of this world very quickly. The best way to do that was to get the information secondhand.
It paused. There had been pure sensory data streaming into its brain for some time, and the neurons made an intuitive leap in formatting this input. It could now hear, and the source of the sound seemed to be approaching. It moved behind one of the park's trees, having noticed that they obscured visual senses, and waited for the source to come nearer. The information it craved was at hand.
Something seemed odd about the park tonight. The tabby couldn't shake the feeling of foreboding as he stepped into the rarely-patrolled grounds of the park, having heard faint scuffling motion not too long ago; his blue uniform and the badge pinned to it demanded he investigate. There was a slight displacement in one of the trees, branches skewed from the presence of someone or something in them, and a gloved paw moved to touch his holstered nightstick in case this was one of the violent criminals known mainly through rumor. "Come on out," he declared to the tree as he stepped around it, and found himself a yard away from a naked raccoon.
There wasn't a single raccoon registered in the city, he remembered distantly, but here was one with wide brown eyes staring vacantly past him, glinting slightly in a nearby streetlight's sodium glare. Dark brown fur coating her body, hyena tan from the neckline up- the typical raccoon mask was there- wide ears swiveling towards him. Limbs more canine than procyonid. His eyes flicked down- plump breasts, he automatically saw, drooping just a bit with their own weight- fur delicate and fuzzy between her legs- bare plantigrade feet half hidden in the grass. Back up to her face- her black nosepad sniffling at the night air-
Her eyes focused on him, he blinked and grabbed his weapon, and she hurled herself at him. It was a clumsy attack, its impetus coming from loss of balance rather than a skillful lunge, but the surprised officer fell and cracked his head on the ground. That one moment of dazed helplessness was all the tanuki needed to strike.
Mages believe that the animating force behind life is a tight network of ethereal energies, woven together inside each creature. Natural philosophers claim that a complex system of bodily fluids, breath, and organs form the spark of life. Scientists point to the electrical jelly packed inside the skull. Whichever was the actual soul of a being, the tanuki was claiming it as her own, the officer wailing in animal panic as his muscles twitched erratically and froze up. His eyes unfocused and went dead. Her muzzle lowered to touch his, and his lungs deflated, something melting inside him with a low gurgle. Already she could feel raw information streaming into her form's brain, new concepts- shapes, language, speech, objects, ideals- flooding her with things never imagined in the howling vortex outside the world. Her body struggled to process this surge, neurons twisting inside her brain like a nest of snakes, and the energy burned off in this incredible rush was taking its toll. As the officer jerked mindlessly beneath her she became acutely aware of another concept: hunger.
The officer, his brain a smooth blob of tissue by now, couldn't put up any resistance. As much as she had observed the creatures in this dimension eating, the entire business with silverware and dishes seemed entirely too inefficient, compared to simply swallowing food in one intact lump. It was one of the first things she had in mind when creating this form. Jaw muscles stretched like elastic, bones coming apart from each other as easily as scissors opening, and her throat muscles gulped at nothing in preparation. It took her some time to learn the proper motions for easing her helpless prey into her mouth, but once his head was jammed solidly in her throat she only needed to perform one action, over and over. Her neck swelled with the bulges and contours of his form, as did her chest, then her stomach with its empty interior slowly filling with acids. Eyes closed, she gulped over and over, slowly packing him into her gullet to satisfy the pangs still shooting through her mind. It was late in the devouring when the streetlight's security camera, having struggled with a faulty circuit all night, finally switched on to film the officer's ankles sliding into her ravenous muzzle. When the mindless puppet finally slid inside her belly and expired, leaving a satisfying bulge large enough to support her breasts, she had no further interest in learning to walk. There was another new urge to struggle with, another cavity to be filled, and she was eager to experiment...
Part 2:
118 Cena Heights
It was hot in her apartment tonight, so hot she'd stripped down to bare scales and opened the window to let in the muted clamor of traffic and wild shouting, dropping her mobile phone on the floor to escape its battery's heat. Raptors weren't meant for cities in the summer. Even her mice, trapped in the steel cages that ranged over her bedroom floor, gave up digging at the walls in favor of sprawling limply on their scratched metal floors and panting.
The mice were what made her endure the gasping heat. Not that she liked them, of course. The turn of the century had found governments struggling for a more humane method of punishing their criminals, deciding on feeding them, whole and alive, to predators. It was a death penalty that wasn't permanent, involving only a few hours of pain and a day or two of nonexistence before the criminal returned, suitably meek and repentant. That left another problem: finding those who could swallow and digest another sentient creature without injuring themselves. It took years, but the various nation-states all found a designated predator for each major city, giving each one a very strict contract. That contract made it very clear: they had to practice weekly to keep their gullet muscles in good condition, using regulation mice. She was one of those predators, and unless she polished off these eleven mice tonight, she'd be out of a job so cushy it paid for her rooms in Cena Heights, the most expensive district in two continents.
She carefully slid the lid off their cages, thoughtfully regarding the rows of prison-like cells. "Hello, boys..." The mice cringed as her hand swooped over them like a bird of prey, but any fight had been bred out of them generations ago. One of their fattest was soon plucked from his cage with a quiet squeal. She tossed him from hand to hand, snout muscles curling back in the best grin her species could make, ignoring his shrill squeaks as she gave him a final high toss and opened her jaws. He didn't land in her throat- she was too practiced to risk choking like that- but his struggling little body fell between her teeth with nothing more than a gash to one leg, collapsing on her narrow reptilian tongue. Her maw was already slick with drool, offering no traction no matter how frantically his declawed feet scrabbled, and a casual tip of her head sealed his fate. The doomed mouse slid along her tongue for a second before falling, wedged between the front and back sides of her throat, where he could almost have climbed out- if she hadn't swallowed. He squeaked a last time as the sticky walls of muscle pulled him down, and he rode the wave of peristalsis all the way down to her belly.
The other mice cowered as the raptor belched, patting her chest with a grin. Her first victim spasmed as he fought to stay afloat, fur sloughing off in the acid. "There." A moment's pause to enjoy the faint splashing in her gut, then she picked another helpless mouse from the cage and lifted him on high. Scaled fingers clenched around him, squeezing him into senselessness, and popped him into the waiting maw. Her toothy jaws closed tightly enough to block all light. It was in complete darkness that the mouse twitched in protest, unable to fight away the slimy tongue that washed over his clean fur and saturated it with oily saliva. The fleshy chamber vibrated around him with a soft purr of approval as she shoved him into the soft tissue beneath her tongue, squeezing his flavor out like a wine press. Mouse legs kicked and beat at the flesh around him, but he couldn't stop her from prying him out and tossing him to the brink of her throat, nor could he do anything to resist the grip of her throat as it carried him deep inside her, another helpless meal...
As the two mice settled into the depths of her stomach, the raptoress noticed a familiar sensation, one that most other raptors could only get from the right combination of pheromones. Luckily for her she'd learned to reach arousal through different methods, and the live meal inside her, doomed to fuel her in the devouring of the other mice, was such a method. The next mouse she picked up wasn't lifted to snout level; her grip tightened to make sure he wouldn't get away, then her hand went between her legs as a fierce grin appeared on her face. Her victim whined at the pressure, but just like the others, he was helpless to stop her from pressing his rotund form against the velvet opening before him. It parted to let him through, his head trapped in a slick tube of muscle, her pulse hammering in his ears as her arousal grew. There was a frantic scrambling of legs as he tried to escape, but she simply slid him into the feverishly hot canal with a soft groan of relief, his tail slipping into her sex as if it were a mouth gulping him down. The velvety walls quivered around him, squeezing the trapped mouse on all sides, and the raptoress couldn't keep her hands steady as she reached into the cages again.
The fourth mouse slid down as easily as the rest, pawing futilely at the powerful rings of muscle surrounding it, its slimy coating easing the way straight down to her ravenous stomach where the other two mice thrashed and struggled in vain. She closed her eyes and waited for the familiar twinge inside herself, the valve to her stomach opening to let another victim inside, dooming it to a certain death in her stomach.
The phone rang. "Damn it." She groped around the floor for a few seconds, teeth gritted at the obnoxious buzzing, and picked it up with fingers damp with her own juices. A synthesized voice announced that it was a pre-recorded recording before politely informing her that a death warrant had been issued against an unidentified predator for the crime of assaulting a public safety officer and her services would be needed when the criminal had been apprehended.
Events were already taking place that would make sure the raptor had plenty of free time before she would have to come in to work. As she dropped the phone with a frustrated groan, a surveillance camera was scanning its street in the next district over, oblivious to the fact that its blind spot hid a tanuki gulping down a set of blue-clad kicking legs, then settling on the ground with a soft urp. Her victim had been eaten before, and braced herself for the pain of reformation that would inevitably follow as the acids bored into her body...
Nothing followed. The tanuki's stomach was unique, out of the billions on the planet, thanks to her extradimensional heritage: whatever escaped the stomachs of other predators to allow reincarnation, hers blocked it. Anyone lost in her belly was dead forever. The thought made her smile as she rubbed her bloated gut and felt the officer's soul dissolve inside her, broken down to strengthen her own. This was what she'd come here for.
Part 3:
The One That Got Away
(Teaser)
The dragonet mewed in terror, weak arms completely unable to stop her from wresting his beloved dog away. It whined pitifully and tried to flop away, its efforts met by the tanuki's bored yawn, a yawn that jumped forward. Seconds later the dog was vanishing into her throat in a series of smooth, easy gulps. His eyes turned pink, then red with the tears oozing from them, until he clenched them shut to hide the obscene swaying of her belly, his family already melting alive inside.