Scrape
The dark seal flexed beneath my mouth.
I pulled back.
Nothing broke through.
The surface settled into place again, leaving the same thin line across the stone.
I waited.
No movement.
Maybe the material had shifted after I weakened it. Fungal tissue could tighten as it dried. A trapped pocket of water could have moved. The ruins had already shaken several times.
There were explanations that did not involve something directly beneath my face.
I scraped the seal once.
Scrape
An answer came from the other side.
I stopped.
So did it.
'That is less reassuring.'
I moved away from the dark growth until wet moss covered the stone beneath me. My mouth still burned from the first sample. Small contractions continued through my gut, but they were weaker now.
The scratching did not follow.
Good.
Or meaningless.
I needed food, water, and information about the ability I had just chosen over three ways not to die. Running from every unknown material would make Omnivore a very painful decoration.
Control first.
I lowered my mouth to the moss and scraped ten times.
The new arrangement of my radula still felt wrong. The strokes were smoother than before, but not faster. Each one removed a thin layer. I swallowed, waited, and watched for anything obvious.
The hunger remained.
It became less sharp after a while, though I could not separate nutrition from the fact that my stomach was no longer empty.
No warmth. No System message. No obvious change.
Normal moss remained normal moss.
A collapsed fungal growth clung to the wall farther beneath the ledge. Its cap had split and folded against the stone, gray beneath the blue light. Moisture shone inside the tear.
I touched it with one lower tentacle.
Cool.
Soft.
No burning.
That was already better than most things I had tested.
I scraped a piece free.
The tissue came apart with less effort than the moss. It tasted bitter, then faintly sweet after I swallowed. Moisture spread through my mouth and eased some of the rawness left by the transformation.
I waited.
My gut tightened once.
Then relaxed.
The hunger eased more than it had after the moss. Mucus formed more easily beneath the front of my foot.
Useful.
Not proof of Omnivore.
A garden snail eating fungus was not exactly revolutionary. I did not know whether this body could have eaten it before the ability, whether the species was truly ordinary, or whether the dead growth was safe only because it was dead.
I ate one more small piece.
Same result.
Food, probably.
The word felt important.
I had found something that might keep me alive longer than the next few minutes. Not an emergency mouthful scraped from whatever surface happened to be near me. Something I could return to and test again.
I had chosen to change this body, and I still could not prove the change had done anything useful.
That bothered me more than it should have.
I pushed the thought aside and returned to the dark seal.
The scratching had stopped.
I chose a section several body lengths from the first sample and touched it.
Pain pricked the tip of my tentacle.
Same external reaction.
I positioned myself on clean moss and lowered only my mouth to the thinnest edge.
The first fragment I had swallowed proved only that a tiny piece could pass through me without killing me immediately. It had not proved that the material provided energy.
One scrape.
Two.
Three.
The material resisted more than the dead fungus. My radula caught, slipped, then found a rough line and removed a bitter fragment.
I swallowed.
Heat spread through my mouth again, but the tissue went down.
I repeated the test.
After ten strokes, I had removed less material than a single scrape of the soft fungus.
After twenty, my mouth hurt.
After thirty, the hunger had not changed at all.
Mucus had begun thinning beneath me from the time spent scraping. My mouth felt dry despite the damp stone, and one side of the radula kept catching at the wrong angle.
I had assumed digestion would make the material useful.
It did not.
The ability was the best explanation. I had no test from before the transformation, but the seal burned on the outside and passed through me without a worse reaction inside.
That was the change I had chosen.
It appeared to work.
That did not make the seal food.
Digestible was not the same as useful.
I had widened the list of things I could swallow. I had not made them valuable.
Still, the surface was thinner.
That mattered.
I scraped once more.
The sound came from behind it.
Scrape-scrape
Faster this time.
I froze.
The seal bulged outward.
A pale point pressed through the dark layer, withdrew, then struck again.
Crk
The seal split.
A narrow head pushed through.
I saw no eyes. The front of it opened into two curved plates that rasped against the torn fungus. Its skin was pale enough to catch the blue light, almost translucent around the edges.
Larva, worm, something else.
Not enough evidence.
Its mouthparts closed on the seal and removed a piece larger than everything I had eaten from it.
The creature had been feeding from the other side.
My scraping had brought us to the same place.
It had not been answering me.
It had been eating.
The head pushed farther through.
I moved back.
The creature bit again. The opening widened around it, revealing a thick body behind the head. No visible legs. Short hooked structures along its underside caught the fungal layer and pulled.
It was not enormous.
That was the good news.
It crossed the distance I had retreated while I was still deciding whether the good news mattered.
I turned.
The ledge behind me opened toward the dry slope I had climbed. Reaching it required passing the hole.
The creature blocked that route.
Its mouthparts struck the stone where my head had been.
Tak
I pulled inward and moved along the back wall.
It did not lunge after me. It lowered its head and scraped another mouthful from the seal.
Not hunting.
Probably.
Then its body pushed through farther and forced the torn layer outward. The edge struck my shell.
I slid sideways.
The creature followed the remaining seal across the wall, eating in the same direction I was moving.
It was not hunting me.
It was eating toward me.
The difference did not help.
A pale strip crossed the stone ahead.
I had noticed it while testing the dead fungus but assumed it was another growth. Now the angle changed as I approached.
Two straight stone edges ran beneath it.
A slit.
Narrower than my shell and filled with soft fungal tissue.
The ruins had a gap inside them.
The feeder rasped behind me.
I touched the pale plug.
No pain.
Soft.
Wet.
I scraped.
The tissue came away easily, but the slit beneath it remained too narrow.
I scraped again.
And again.
My mouth began throbbing almost immediately. The transformation had changed the structure. It had not repaired the damage it caused.
Behind me, the feeder tore another section of dark seal free.
The vibration travelled through the wall.
I removed a strip from the plug.
Not enough.
I tried scraping the center faster.
The loose tissue folded inward and blocked my mouth.
Wrong.
I shifted to one edge and worked along the line where fungus met stone. The plug was thin there. Each scrape separated more of it from the wall.
The feeder's pale head entered the edge of my vision.
Too close.
I kept scraping.
The tissue peeled away from the upper edge and sagged.
A dark opening appeared behind it.
Still narrow.
I pressed my head through.
The sides touched both lower tentacles. The space beyond smelled damp, though with Sense at negative three, that could have meant water, fungus, or stone that had once been wet.
My foot followed.
Mucus spread thinly along the rim.
The shell did not.
I pushed.
The rim caught the widest curve and stopped me.
Behind me, mouthparts struck the fungus.
Tak
The remaining plug shook.
I flattened my body and pulled forward.
The shell shifted sideways instead of following.
'Come on.'
Another contraction.
Pain ran through my foot. My mouth scraped the stone. The shell pressed harder against the rim.
I had entered at the wrong angle.
I could not reverse quickly enough.
The creature tore through the last layer behind me.
Something hard scraped the edge of my shell.
I pulled into it by instinct.
That made the shell wider against the slit.
Worse.
'Out.'
My body refused for half a second.
'Out.'
I extended again, pressed the front of my foot against the floor beyond the slit, and twisted.
The shell rotated.
Its edge dragged across stone with a vibration that made the whole spiral ache.
Then it slipped through.
I fell forward into darkness and landed hard enough for my tentacles to retract.
The feeder struck the opening behind me. Its pale head entered, mouthparts opening and closing against the remaining fungus, but the angle forced its body sideways. The thicker section behind its head jammed against the outer wall.
It kept scraping.
I did not wait to see whether that would remain true.
I crawled deeper until the blue light behind me became a thin line.
The floor beneath me was damp and almost flat.
Too flat.
I extended both lower tentacles.
Stone wall on the left.
Stone wall on the right.
Parallel.
Shallow grooves crossed the floor at intervals, worn beneath the fungal film. The nearest was curved from age or damage, but the next two repeated at almost the same spacing.
The slit behind me did not widen naturally into a cavity. The floor continued at the same width, while the walls ran forward beyond what little blue light reached inside.
Cool air moved against my face from somewhere ahead.
Drainage. Ventilation. A conduit for something that had not been water.
Three possibilities.
No evidence.
Behind me, the feeder rasped against the opening again.
I moved farther into the dark.
I had not squeezed into a natural crack.
It was a channel.