Friend's lungs burned, but finally, it felt K'cil fall limp in its jaws. It released and watched his corpse slouch over onto the ground as it stood still for a moment, mouth open and panting.

Then, it's body shifted.

It wouldn't be long before other skrunglers came by to feed, so it had to be quick. Its form shifted and then melted, the cells of its body destabilizing as it slumped down into pearlescent ooze. It wrapped itself around K'cil's body, taking it inside the layers of slime and began to digest.

In theory, he was not so different from the skrunglers.

Bones. Blood. Meat. Skin. A different formation, and the fur and teeth were much different-- as was the tongue for that matter, but fundamentally, the same. The new information was soaked up by the mimic quickly as K'cil's body visibly broke down in the transparent fluid.

Hair stripped away to skin, then to muscle, then to bone, then to organs. Then, he was just a gemstone that was unceremoniously spat out by the slime. It seemed unable, or perhaps just flat unwilling, to digest that.

And then... guts. The slime shifted again, its rind turning scarlet as it shifted again. It formed a heart first, and then veins and arteries and a brain. Lungs to oxygenate new blood. A stomach and intestines, kidneys and a liver to cleanse it all with. The bones were next, and they were the trickiest. Most of them were vastly different from a skrungler, and there were more than two hundred it had to make.

A ribcage, first. Marrow to supply stem cells for later. A skull, a spine, slowly forming over the mess of innards that the slime had generated. Delicate bones for legs and claws. Then, flesh. Muscle. Fat. Skin. Brown, white-striped fur and spines sticking out of its back.

K'cil fell, and something akin to K'cil got back up.

He blinked his eyes in the light and rasped his tongue out of his snout, testing the new sensations, and then walked away.