Smoked

After a bit of hesitation, Alice started dragging the carcasses over the rubble until they were all lined up in front of her, eight corpses ready to be harvested for meat and other resources.

As she was dragging the ninth body, however, the girl was suddenly aware of the barely visible movement of the creature’s chest, her eyes widening and her hand immediately going to the knife, ready to plunge it into the monkey at the first sign of aggression it showed.

After a couple of seconds to calm down, however, she discovered that the animal in question, the previously uninjured male that had been defeated by her one-eyed opponent, was still out cold, its bloodied head and heavily swollen red face suggesting some kind of head trauma, soon confirmed by a quick analysis through her own magic, informing her that the cerebral cortex of the creature sported several hematomas and a good amount of general swelling.

She doubted the creature would last more than a few days in that condition.

Despite that, Alice made sure to extract her silken rope and tie down both arms and legs of the unconscious creature before going back to the actual carcasses.

“That one is for later,” she muttered, an idea already in her head as she moved towards her next task, one she knew she wouldn’t be enjoying.

Alice would need to tackle the messy work of dressing her catch, each and every one of them.

Over a number of hours, Alice silently gutted the monkeys, using her knife to cut through the fur in the neck and running the blade down until it reached the pelvis before plunging a hand into the bloody opening and—while trying to ignore her building nausea and the retching accompanying it—pulling out the bloody insides of the creatures, leaving only their livers intact while discarding the rest.

At the very least, she thought, I don’t need to squint while working at night, her own luminescence coupled with the strange, shining ellipsoid that illuminated the monkey’s nest providing enough lighting for her to work quickly and safely on the corpses.

By the time the first rays of the new sun started appearing over the edge of the crystal dome above her head, Alice was left standing in front of eight dressed carcasses and a still unconscious monkey.

A yawn escaped her lips as the girl used her Lumen to clean herself up from the multiple layers of dry blood that had coated her arms, clothes and legs, soon returning somewhat more presentable and decidedly less smelly than before.

As soon as that too was taken care of, the girl quickly left the destroyed house that had once housed the monkeys’ colony and moved into the leaf-covered streets, her eyes attentively scanning the ground for anything that looked dry enough for her needs, thankfully finding a veritable trove of twigs and small broken branches that she hoped would burn well enough in a fire, she knew she only had a small window of time before the meat started going bad and she would need to cook it quickly to increase its shelf life.

After collecting a few armful of the smaller kindling, the young woman proceeded to search the actual tree for larger, dead branches, trusting that such a large plant would at least have a few dead spots that would offer her enough fuel for her needs.

After around an hour of searching, however, she found herself tired, sweaty and very unhappy with her findings, which basically amounted to three small chunks of wood that she had literally stumbled upon, almost breaking a toe in the process.

It was certainly not going to be enough to cook all the meat she had available.

I wonder if…

Acting on a hunch, the biomancer placed her hand on the closest bough within reach and started gently poking the plant with her own magical energy, trying to connect with the complex system of roots, branches and leaves that was the wisteria in order to obtain more accurate information on the plant.

The moment she achieved that connection, however, Alice’s mind was flooded by a myriad of sensations, each and every one combining in a mosaic of feelings that she could barely process.

Alice could feel the warm touch of the sunlight on each of the countless leaves that basked in its radiance, she could sense the way the wisteria roots drank from some kind of huge reservoir of fluid many, many meters below and how its branches slowly constricted around their support, gradually crushing even the hardest stone.

Countless other sensations filled her mind, temporarily overwhelming her in such a way that, for a moment, she even forgot she wasn’t part of the plant.

She could feel the innumerable pests feasting on her flesh and the beings digging in it to reach them, she could feel her flowers sway in the wind and get constantly pollinated by the creatures harvesting their nectar.

She could feel the places where her tendrils had died and her body hadn’t let go, some places where her flesh had been shattered, frozen or burnt off.

She could feel everything and, in that maelstrom of feelings, her own body was but a fraction of a whole; largely insignificant in the end.

And then her magic ran dry.

Alice fell gasping on her butt, landing in the mass of leaves that covered the ground wherever she went, her brain already lamenting the massive headache caused by the lack of magic in her reservoir.

She shivered, her skin still feeling like bark and her blood like lymph for a few long seconds even after the connection had been broken.

“Damn… that was trippy,” she chuckled uneasily as she stood back up, her body already working to replenish her depleted magical reserves as she silently walked towards the closest places with dead branches, soon finding them and breaking them off with a few strikes of her mace, trying to ignore the residual sensation of the wisteria.

She would have to pay attention not to get caught up like that in the future.

Better to keep it simple.

By the time she was back in the ruined house, her stomach was loudly lamenting its emptiness, even her magically-enhanced metabolism having reached its limit after the numerous requests it had fulfilled.

After briefly making sure that the lone survivor was still alive, Alice proceeded to sit down and start a fire like she had done two nights before, soon finding herself standing in front of a small crackling fire, which she slowly fed with wood until it had a large amount of coals in its center and the flames had mostly died out.

In the meanwhile, Alice proceeded to skin the first of the animals and laid its hide to dry out in the sun, realizing soon after that she hadn’t thought of a good way to cook such a large amount of meat before it went bad.

After ineffectually searching the rubble piles for a thin and large slab of stone to use as a cooking surface, while also carrying around a child-sized monkey carcass, Alice’s eyes finally landed on the round containers that had once housed the poor animals captured alive by the sadistic primates, a smile appearing on her lips as a plan took shape in her mind.

With a huff, she dropped the carcass back onto its splayed skin and quickly moved towards the closest of the rounded metal ‘bins’ which, after bending on her knees in a squatting position, she attempted to lift up, only managing to fall back down on her butt when the object didn’t budge from its spot.

“Damn. That’s fricking heavy!” she exclaimed, moving around the metallic item and inspecting it more carefully.

After a bit of thinking, the girl took a slightly different approach by pushing one of the sides with one of her shoulders until, after a few tries, the object finally toppled over and started loudly rolling towards the center of the bowl where her fire lay, barely avoiding rolling over the shining object that she had left laying a few meters away.

Over the cacophony of metal against stone, Alice still managed to hear a weak and startled hiss echo from the inside of the rolling bin, her eyes widening and a guilty expression appearing on her face when she realized what she had done.

“I’m an absolute idiot.” She muttered as she ran towards the noise, reaching the container just in time to see a very thin and clearly ill green snake slowly slither out of the open cavity, stopping as soon as it was out onto the barely warm rocks.

The reptile was probably around fifty centimeters long and no wider than her index finger, with a sharp snout and large purple eyes with slitted pupils that stood out from its somewhat dull green scales, a tiny, forked tongue appearing every few seconds from its mouth, tasting the air around.

“Oh fudge. I’m super sorry little guy,” she said as she got close enough to take a better look, a grimace appearing on her face when she really saw how thin its body was, some of its scales even missing and a long and barely healed wound still visible near its tail.

Repressing the hesitation in her mind, the girl moved even closer and gently extended a hand forward, noticing the way the animal tried and failed to gather the strength to attack or move away, a weak, menacing hiss escaping its mouth.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” she said with a gentle voice as her fingers wrapped around the thin body of the creature and lifted it up, a very small tendril of her magic poking through her fingertips as she delved into it, her food temporarily forgotten as she started gently inspecting the weak snake, finding it malnourished and dehydrated on top of all the other issues.

After sending a small wave of magic towards the most obvious wounds to make sure they would heal correctly, Alice’s consciousness moved back to her own body and she quickly focused her enhanced sense of smell on the weak but distinct scent of water, soon finding a small and dirty puddle between the rocks, just under a slowly dripping crack in the wall.

A triumphant look on her face, she immediately used her Lumen to clear the water of any biological contaminant before cupping her hands and taking a long sip of the fresh fluid, enjoying the refreshing feeling for a few seconds before letting the snake drink too, smiling when the green noodle slowly siphoned the water from her palms.

Moving back to her temporary cooking spot, she proceeded to thoroughly clean the entire surface of the metal bin with her Lumen and then placed it upright and over the coals, smoke soon starting to billow out of the rounded opening on its top thanks to the numerous holes that peppered its bottom, most of them clearly caused by the rust that covered the entire structure even after her scrupulous clean up.

“Oh well, can’t really ask too much,” she said as she started cutting the carcass into long strips of meat, tossing the bones directly onto the coals and then placing the rest into the rounded opening so that the strips could be enveloped in the hot, billowing smoke that was streaming out and get slowly cooked while curing at the same time.

As soon as the inside of her makeshift smoker was full of meat, Alice started placing an even larger amount on the rapidly warming outside surface, slightly drooling as she stared at the slowly browning strips of meat, glistening droplets of fat slowly running down the metal surface and fizzing as they came in contact with the smoldering coals.

While that went on, Alice took a small chunk of raw liver from the small pile she had created and tried to feed it to the snake who, after a few attempts, suddenly went for the chunk, missing completely and instead latching onto her fingers.

“Ah, fuck!” she exclaimed as she instinctively tried to shake it off, her panic growing when she felt the venom quickly spreading into her blood through the fangs of the reptile.

It took her far too long to notice that her body was quickly breaking down the toxins but, when she did, Alice finally managed to calm down as her magic took care of the small but deep wounds on her fingertips while she attempted once again to feed the small creature coiled around her fingers, this time making sure to dangle the meat as far from her digit as she could.

“You really are cute,” she cooed as she watched the creature gulp down the chunk of bloody meat and then gently wrap around her wrist like the world’s scaliest bracelet, soon closing its beautiful purple eyes.

As soon as the snake finished eating, she moved it to a rock nearby and left it there to bask in the sun as she started removing the first batch of cooked meat from the scalding surface of the makeshift barbecue oven, barely blowing on the hot food before stuffing her mouth full of delicious monkey bacon.

“Oh damn, that’s like eating pork,” she said between appreciative moans, her full attention soon taken by the meal.

Only when she couldn’t fit any more food into her stomach did she go back to working on her supplies, adding more wood to the dwindling pile of coals, checking on the smoked meat that was still cooking inside the bin and slowly butchering and starting to cook another carcass on the outside while stifling yawn after yawn, her food coma coupled with the previous night’s strain almost managing to make her fall asleep on the spot.

She knew, however, that she couldn’t allow herself to rest in that place, not knowing whether the remaining members of the colony would come back for revenge and, on top of that, lacking a good and defensible position.

I’ll need to go back to the birds’ buildings; they should give me a decent alarm while I sleep, even if I’ll have to carry with me as much smoked meat as possible for the improvement on my body.

She forced herself to stay awake as she placed strip of meat after strip of meat on the surface and waited for the first batch of smoked food.

The lull in her work, however, only meant a relapse in sleepiness and she was soon forced to stand up and start pacing around to keep herself awake, her attention soon moving back to the tied monkey beside her and the various objects that had been collected by its troop.

Ignoring the unconscious creature for the time being, the girl started scouring the rubble for the various shining objects that had been scattered around during the fight, picking them up and placing them on the strange chaise longue she had been resting upon until that moment.

When she was done, Alice started carefully inspecting her small bounty, immediately focusing on the shining ellipsoid that had been illuminating her work for the entire night, carefully picking up the strange object and closely inspecting it for some kind of opening or previously hidden detail.

The object seemed to be made of some kind of glass or crystal and was clearly too polished not to be manmade; its incredibly smooth surface not showing a single crack or line under the thin layer of dust and dirt covering it, even after being used by a bunch of monkeys in what was basically a stone quarry.

After briefly cleaning it with her Lumen, Alice scoured its surface for anything that could stand out, searching for a button to push, a safe word to use and, at one point, even trying to clap to turn it off and on like those light systems in the nineties.

Despite all her attempts, however, the object remained annoyingly unresponsive and she finally let her curiosity get the best of her.

With bated breath, she tried to poke at it with a tendril of her powers, the magical warmth dissipating as soon as it reached the clearly unliving surface.

With an annoyed huff, she finally pushed the object to the side and stood up once again, promising herself that if she found another one she would attempt to smash it and look inside.

Until then, however, you’re going to be my torch if I need you, I’ll just need to cover it in mud to hide the glow when I don’t.

The main mystery temporarily postponed; Alice’s attention turned to the other shining objects that had been the alpha’s hoard.

Carefully inspecting one object at a time, the girl went through the small collection composed of a few strangely intact jewels, a smattering of heavily rusted blades and a large amount of thin, silvery wire that had been turned into small, uneven balls of various sizes, their surface somewhat pitted by time and elements but otherwise still reflective. She didn’t have the slightest clue of what they would be used for.

“I just wonder why these ones didn’t crumble like everything else,” she muttered to herself before growing bored and leaving the objects on the chaise longue to instead amble toward the tied body of the monkey.

The time had finally come.

Kneeling beside its barely moving chest, Alice placed a hand on its arm, her invasion of the ape’s system much more violent than the previous one on the snake as she proceeded to ignore the rest of the body to inspect the muscles of the creature.

The biomancer immediately confirmed that the monkey’s system was similar but inherently different than her human one, with comparatively larger and less numerous muscles that surely allowed a higher degree of power at the cost of fine movements.

The muscles’ structure itself, instead, was pretty much identical to that of all the mammals she had inspected—herself included— and Alice moved along the large bundles of fibers that would twitch at the same time whenever it was needed, nothing like the corded muscles of Maath.

The main difference, however, she found in the composition of the myocytes themselves.

In the past, when she had been moving through her own body, Alice had spent a good amount of time in her muscles and, after a bit of prodding and investigating with her Biomagical Instincts, she had noticed that each and every one of the fleshy bundles was composed of two main kinds of fibers, some that twitched very fast and others that instead took a bit more time to contract after they received their signals.

Most of her muscles, she had discovered, were made of the slow-twitch fibers, their response somewhat slow and weak compared to the faster ones but able to exert force without expending a lot of energy.

The muscles she was observing now, however, were the exact opposite, their twitch speed far faster than most of her own, the power they exerted much higher and their energetic expenditures equally massive.

A few minutes later, a small triumphant smile was plastered on Alice’s lips as her consciousness slowly moved away from the muscle she now knew like the back of her hands.

I think I just found the final piece of the puzzle.

The monkey, however, had served its purpose and the young woman found herself searching for a way to kill it in a humane way.

In the end, after a few moments of debate, she quickly moved to its brain and, after finding the areas controlling the heart and respiratory system, she simply shut them down with a focused Terminus, a small shiver running down the spine as she felt the life escape from its body, her own consciousness forcibly removed from the corpse the second the creature died.

“Did the Rocktopus feel that way too when it died?” she asked herself with unease as she quickly moved away from the corpse and towards the smoldering barbecue, trying to ignore the goosebumps that had covered her skin.

An incredibly tired Alice kept cooking the meat until she had enough to completely fill the empty space in her rucksack after adding the ellipsoid, the jewels and the small balls of wire she had found in the rubble.

As soon as the bag was full to the brim with food, the girl hoisted the sack on her back, willfully ignoring the strange warmth, smell and consistency of the silk as it pushed against her back, her knees slightly buckling under the weight.

“Oh damn, that’s heavy,” she said with a huff as she slowly moved out of the house and into the streets, her goal the cluster of houses many meters above her head, her body moving without prompting while her fried mind wandered in many strange directions.

She knew only one thing, the next day, she would change her body once again and after that, she would get to the ground level and escape the dome.

She was sure everything was going to be all right.

As she stifled another yawn with her hand, Alice didn’t even notice the thin green snake that was coiled around her wrist, its tongue briefly tasting her skin before the tiny reptile lowered its head once again, enjoying the warmth of that strange new branch it had found.

It knew, somehow, that everything was going to be all right.

*****

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