"... it feels like I have something stuck in there."

"Just swallow it," Alpha grunted, so incredibly bluntly and dismissively like it were a suburban white mom filing her nails while her child confesses all that is impeding them in schooling. "Or cough it up." Simple as that was the entire tone. Get over it.

As for loneliness... the Orthoclase was too quick to answer, "I don't." Even if it did experience that, it was surrounded by the Sentinels, their Initiates - its hatchmates (it was careful not to apply that fond little s-word to them.) It was impossible to experience such a thing. Belatedly, it appended, "I don't like talking to people." Hypocrite.

Intrigued by the prospect of fruit and maybe getting a few more minutes of shut-eye, it stayed right where its fat butt had settled. By the time Vivilene returned, it'd already rolled onto its side again and was skimming the surface of another nap. Her little hooves hitting stone made it screw its eyes shut a few more times, and stretch out through another yawn like a horrifically-shaped but contented cat.

Tongue swiping over its teeth, it stared down with no small amount of confusion at the offerings. After Vivilene'd listed off their names and indicated, it sniped a quick observation, "these are not lessers." It leaned up on its forearms, stretching its nose out to sniff the fruit and finding that they weren't made of flesh and blood. Alpha had no objections about free food, but it gave the cervitaur a short look of what the fuck have you given me?

But, again - free food.

Another suspicious sniff of the mango (may as well go in order) and it fit its frontmost teeth around the middle of the fruit, green end inside its mouth. The fruit was a little soft under a light squeeze, and just about the size of a hand. Seeing no need to actually chew it - therefore negating the entire tasting experience - it tossed its head back to swallow.

The mango got about halfway down its throat before lodging uncomfortably. Alpha retched, standing up suddenly to brace for the purge: coughing out the entire, completely intact fruit (but it was now covered in neon saliva.)

It rolled pathetically across the ground, joining its cousins once again at the gathering.
@Vivilene

i need someone to look into my eyes and tell me

Vivilene was taken aback, somewhat. It should be noted that she hadn't received any ableist comments as of yet-- no one had told her to just get over it like the maybe-monster did. Her father had made it clear she didn't need to talk even if the rest of her family did, and aside from getting the vague impression that he expected her to, one day, she didn't feel any actual pressure to talk.

Swallow it? No, she could eat. She just couldn't talk. Cough it up? There was nothing to cough up. Apparently the gigantic monster had no idea what a simile was, but to be fair, if you were to pose the word to Vivilene she wouldn't know what it meant either.

But what would her braver, more direct siblings do? Asteri might have set it on fire but the last time Vivilene checked, she couldn't do that. Mostly for ethical reasons. Volta might have yelled back, but Vivilene didn't have vocal cords. Her dad would try to talk reason into it. Same issue. Hunter? Hunter would...

Click. The cervitaur stepped closer and leaned over. And she coughed. Right into the Orthoclase's face. It should be noted that Vivilene actually hadn't learned Proper Coughing Etiquette-- her tongue stuck out of her mouth. It should also be noted that nothing came out, nothing that could be considered lodged in her throat hard enough to disable speech, at least.

Point proven, she stepped back.

And then out rolled the mango. Slowly, the little hybrid stepped towards the neon-slime-covered-trash and gently kicked it away to rot elsewhere. "That one also had a rock in it," she monologued idly into Alpha's head, though she moved to pick up the peach, too. "I guess you won't like this one either?"

More for her, she supposed. She stuck the peach in between her teeth and, for a moment, stared at the papaya. Maybe it needed something bigger-- something it could sink its teeth into? She side-eyed the satchel for a moment, thinking, but soon shook her head, more to herself.

"You have to chew," she later advised, reaching down to nudge the little papaya closer to the gargantuan monster. "Take your time. Slowly. Or you'll puke it back up again. Do you like puking?"

"girl you know you gotta watch your health"



@Orthoclase-Alpha

Bold steps forwards and - what? The cervitaur strode up and coughed, tongue out, directly into its face. Alpha, with no standard for grossness, just blinked. Didn't even lift an arm to wipe off the baby spit. Probably didn't even feel it, what with all that chitin. Sure enough, though, nothing fell out of Vivilene's mouth. Maybe it just didn't work. Whatever.

It cleared its throat after the mango incident, grunting, "got stuck." The thing didn't even feel like a rock. Rocks were rough and coarse. Alpha didn't seem too terribly heartbroken about the loss of either food, rapidly losing interest in the tasting experience, anyways. It eyed her, though, as she picked up the peach and put it in her mouth, preparing to bite into it - and some... holy shit, some gears were churning in its head.

Fruit didn't move around like torn-apart chunks of other Lessers did. They didn't just squish down its throat without a problem. Maybe she was on to something with this whole... chewing thing.

The orthoclase settled down - a little closer to the fruit offerings, now - and leaned slightly to the side as it stretched an arm out. Fitting its thumbs around the remaining papaya, it drew back. Lifting the berry up, appraising it, Alpha made a few grabs at it, unsure of how... to tackle actually biting a piece of it off. Whole mouth seemed ineffective, side teeth was hard to get traction. It settled for putting about half of the thing in its mouth, teeth sinking into the skin and... not quite finding any other place to go.

Like it was just pulling a deer's shoulder off (or something equally as macabre) it pulled its arm down at the same time of its jaws closing. The result was, at least, the removal of the skin. Alpha grimaced best as it could, chewing through that chunk of skin and immediate flesh and swallowing. So far, not so good; but, the inside was a different color entirely. Fruit were much more like Lessers than it'd originally supposed.

A little more deftly, it twisted the papaya around in its hand and wedged its frontmost teeth under the skin, gnawing it off and letting the pieces of it flutter off onto the ground. It wasn't dainty by any means, simply getting the job of making a decent enough hole to bite through done.

With all that work completed, it was time: the moment of truth.

Alpha glanced down at the cervitaur for a moment, belatedly considering poison? before just plunging its teeth into the froot. They went right through the softer flesh, then into the more familiar - but cool - stringiness of the deeper interior. Fangs clicking together, it pulled back. Small black rocks tumbled out the center of the papaya.

Now, whether or not the monster liked something as mundane as fruit was entirely dependent on the mouthfeel. If it had a sense of taste, it was dulled so harshly and attuned to only the more savory taste of meat - a bit like a cat. The strange mix of textures a papaya had was oddly just unique enough to necessitate a few moments of extremely loud, open-mouthed chewing (no lips, either!) Swiping its tongue over the mash in its mouth, it swallowed.

Acidic eyes fixed on the rest of the fruit, hand turning it this way, that way. "Hm," Alpha considered... and set to peeling the rest of the skin off and putting the rest of the foot-long berry into its dumb mouth.

It likes it.
@Vivilene

i need someone to look into my eyes and tell me

The hybrid watched for a moment, offering the slightest of bleats in acknowledgement to the peach getting stuck, as the monster ripped into the papaya as if it were a thing to do.

She might have been afraid if the absolute absurdity of the situation hadn't hit her right then and there. She, a little three-foot gemling, was watching something more than triple her size eat fruit, while she herself sat a few feet away from a glowing spit-covered mango.

Moonlit eyes glanced over the cursed object for a moment. The spit must be poisonous. She shouldn't touch it.

Vivilene at least managed to make a fair observation out of Alpha's journey through papayas, however-- Alpha would need something larger to bite into, something it can really rip through and chew at. It seemed to like the papaya, at least, it might like...

... Hm.

Once again, the little centuar pushed herself up and went springing away into Eridanus, hoof-beats muffled by moss. This time, however, she was only gone a few minutes. When she returned, she was moving slower-- in front of her she rolled a large, oval-shaped fruit.

If it were tipped to its long side facing the ceiling, it might have been about as tall as Vivilene was. As it was now, rolling merrily along it's way, it came up to her waist. It was dapped with rippling, darker green stripes. She placed it in front of Alpha, and then stepped back.

"This is a watermelon," she announced into Alpha's head. "I think you'll like it. The skin is thick and hard. You might have to bash it."

A brief pause. "Have fun."

"girl you know you gotta watch your health"



@Orthoclase-Alpha

While Vivilene was gone acquiring more froot, Alpha'd finished off the rest of the papaya, and pursued the mango and peach with much more care than it had before. The pits from either were lying on the moss, a few conspicuous chips in them, but otherwise mostly intact. There was a lot of juice dripping from the beast's jaws, and it was busy sopping that all up with its tongue and grooming itself like a damn oversized cat.

It paused mid-lick hearing those little hooves approaching again. Acidic eyes flashed their whites with how quick it turned to look at this brand-new offering: green, striped, huge.

A contented(?) rumble(?) thundered out of its throat as it rocked up to inspect the massive fruit. It was just about as big as the cervitaur, who was talking again and named it a watermelon. Alpha picked up a heavy forearm, setting it on top of the berry and giving it a few experimental rolls. Heavy, but definitely not full of water sloshing around.

Without further adieu, the kaiju's head lurched down, jaws barely fitting around the watermelon's girth. Giving it a harsh chomp, juice sprayed absolutely everywhere as skin plowed through the grainy-sweet flesh. Finding the rind to be just as annoyingly inedible as the papaya's, it spat it out and spun the fruit in place. There was a hole in the fruit now, and maybe bashing was a good way to go about it.

Holding it in place with one hand and smashing another fist into the fruit's hide, Alpha sent yet another spray of watermelon juice and flesh everywhere. Vivilene, moving back was a very wise decision.

Fruit properly opened up, the orthoclase shoved its fat head into the watermelon, loudly shaving off bits of it like it were sno-cone. It was a little harder to keep in its mouth, what with its penchant to just disintegrate, but Alpha was clearly thriving trying to clean this half of shell out. Reasonably, it shouldn't have been able to finish even a quarter of the two-hundred pound fruit, but it sure packed it away.

Pausing to take a damn breath after the first half of watermelon, it started to feel a little... nauseous - likely from the mass quantities of fruit it was suddenly shoving down into its crop unused to anything but rodents and cave deer. Not that it knew that; Alpha grimaced slightly, licking up a bead of saliva, and took a brief leave from gorging itself on fruit like a feral little animal.

It went so far as to break off a chunk of melon and hold it out to Vivilene. "No waste," it grunted, like it wasn't about to just keep going down on this watermelon until it threw up.
@Vivilene

i need someone to look into my eyes and tell me

Vivilene paid no mind to the fact that Alpha had managed to devour the other two fruits (or that it had tried to take a bite out of the pits) as she moved backwards. As soon as its jaws went into the rind, however, she realised she wasn't out of the splash zone entirely.

A spray of scarlet flesh and juice went flying over her legs and she skidded back even further with a bleat. It seemed to be enjoying it, at least-- it bashed and it ate, and it ate, and... caves, was it ever going to stop?

She watched Alpha choke back more and more fruit, more fruit than Vivilene had likely ever eaten in her life, and more fruit than her entire family had ever eaten combined. Even when she thought it was done, it went back for more. What was this thing? How could it contain so much fruit?

Mystifying, was the way it went raking through the watermelon like some kind of fucked up vacuum cleaner sucking up the wastes of humanity. Chunk after chunk was consumed while Vivilene sat there, staring with round eyes, her mouth a little agape. "Wow," she murmured, lips barely moving.

... murmured.

Murmured? No--

A purple hand flew for her own mouth to cover it, afraid of what else might spill out. It seemed, however, that just as easily as her throat had opened it had closed right back up again. Her mouth was dry, gullet full of cotton. There was panic; familiar, bitingly cold panic, but there was something new boiling in her little chest, too.

Anger.

Why did that happen and why now? Why couldn't she do it again? Why was she like this-- what unknown forces had decided that it would be funny to make her not normal? Why only now, even, was it starting to bother her?

Perhaps the realisation that she was capable of actually speaking was what was scaring her the most; but there was also the inherent fear that her voice was meant to be something hidden and secreted away, never to be heard by even her closest relatives. Where this idea had come from, Vivilene could not tell you-- but it infuriated her that this fruit-mongering monster had heard it before her father did, before her sisters did, before her brother did.

No waste, said the monster, and Vivilene blinked down with watery eyes.

Her hand shook violently when it went to take the chunk of melon off from the monster, and she sat aside to hold it, at a distance more reasonable to avoid being splashed on by more melon. But, she wasn't hungry-- how could she possibly eat at a time like this?

Maybe there really was something stuck in her throat because the mere thought of swallowing was sickening to her. She wanted to do literally anything else to it; throw it, scream at it, cry and cry and cry and tug at her own hair until she exhausted herself enough to fall asleep. And then a new, more frightening thought came into her mind.

Stop overreacting.

There was something terrifying about this one. The implication that she was faking how she felt-- the anger, the anxiety, had it somehow not been real this whole time? Despite the fact that she'd never been able to speak before-- and in this exact moment, she still couldn't --had she been capable of it the whole time, and was pretending? To what end? Attention? Pity? She didn't know and she was afraid to find out.

But she was even more afraid to speak; she was afraid to do anything, other than to sit there, smile, and eat her fruit as if everything was perfectly fine, as if she were a normal little hybrid, eating normal fruit, with her normal friend, like a normal child.

So, that's what she did.



"girl you know you gotta watch your health"



@Orthoclase-Alpha

alpha throws up in this post and it's pretty gross
"Wow" she'd sounded off, but it was too busy mowing through bit after bit of watermelon to realize that it hadn't been through its head, directly spoken.

Only when it was lying there, gut uncomfortably distended, with an offering of watermelon did it actually look at Vivilene, eyes narrowing down at the shaking hand. It let go easily, but didn't go back to trying to cram more down its gullet - both from the roiling pain in its gut and the sheer confusion at that little piece of body language.

Alpha wasn't known for being the most keen socially, but it was attuned to cues of anger, fear, distress - it knew all of those too well for its own good, from its own unhindered fidgeting and the careful restraint it tried to show to its Overseer. The cervitaur hadn't been too... afraid before, not to the point of shaking violently and looking like she was biting her feelings into that melon. Masters, she was practically cuddling up to it for warmth.

But, it wasn't about to ask about that; instead, it was going to continue gulping down the buckets of saliva collecting in its mouth and the limb-weakening shivers crawling up and down it's legs. Neon-tipped quills practically drooped for a moment, and its eyes went glassy. Feeling something rise in its throat, Alpha swallowed harshly, made a soft "mnpgh" sort of noise, and turned away into the alcove.

Beneath those beautiful, flourishing green boughs of mosses and leaves, the orthoclase absolutely spewed. It'd get done with a particular bout, cough a few times, and then start up again.

This went on for several minutes.

Just a bit teary-eyed and licking at its chops, Alpha kicked out its back feet, making a piss-poor attempt at covering the copious amounts of watermelon vomit now in the back of its sleeping hole with moss. It stalked forwards, biting down the residual tang of sickly-sweet bile and made a point to breath out of its mouth to avoid smelling it. Acidic eyes glanced at the remnants of intact watermelon, and it was a solid fifty feet down the tunnel afterwards.

All that said and done, the orthoclase said bluntly, "why did you shake?" With no elaboration whatsoever, looking absolutely bedraggled from that violent puke sesh.
@Vivilene

puke mention


i need someone to look into my eyes and tell me

Vivilene was trying desperately not to cry into her slab of watermelon when she heard the Froot-monster make a strange noise-- something she hadn't exactly heard before. Her gaze lifted to look after it as it turned away and then began retching up a hundred and fifty pounds of watermelon.

Pity rose up within her, washing away the anxiety and the frustration for just a moment. She'd contributed to this and it was horrific to listen to-- she had to help, in some way.

The little cervitaur rose up to all fours again and started to quietly pace over next to the kaiju. Her hand extended out to touch it's foreleg-- but right when she had almost touched it, it started to growl. While it was puking.

She withdrew immediately and retreated back to her spot, frowning, staring down at the melon in her hands again. She waited until the noises stopped before she looked back again, and then lifted her gaze to watch Alpha punt the rind down the tunnel.

Vivilene thought about how that might be her if she annoyed it.

Vivilene tried not to think about it.

Quietly, she bit into the melon again, glancing up at the orthoclase. She didn't like the question-- she didn't want to answer it, but she didn't want to make the fruit-monster angry. She shuffled on the spot, casting, the gemstone glittering against her stomach.

"I was just thinking of something," she murmured into Alpha's head. "It's not very important."

Time to move right along before it can think too much into that one. "You should drink something to clear your mouth," she went on a little too quickly. "And lie down. You might feel better afterwards? The white stuff is sort of watery."

She nodded, gently, towards the snow.



"girl you know you gotta watch your health"



@Orthoclase-Alpha

puke mention... TWO!

Don't touch me, said the growl, and the message was heard loud and clear. It leveled the cervitaur with a quiet narrowing of eyes for good measure, and promptly got rid of the rest of the watermelon and miscellaneous other fruit in its stomach.

The relief was near-instantaneous; Alpha managed to close its mouth, quit heaving like it was trying to vacuum up air like it had the watermelon. Finally, that obnoxiously harsh breathing can stop.

"It's not very important," she chimed, and the orthoclase narrowed its eyes but didn't find the interest to press in light of being given basic advice for being sick. It swung its head back towards the alcove, briefly mourning its loss by way of watermelon puke. The thought of eating something made it recoil, a sort of tucking of its chin into its neck - but it considered: snow was basically just water. It'd melt and it was all over the place.

"That spot is ruined," it grumbled dryly, licking at its chops before starting to snuffle around in the powdery white. Alpha gave it a few cursory sniffs, some meek licks - making sure it was water - and started shaving off pieces of it and racing against time before it melted. Such was the same of not having lips to suck water up with.

After all that was done, it made another approach. It paused mid-stride, staring at Vivilene's satchel, seriously considering demanding another round of fruit offerings, but decided against it as its stomach rolled uncomfortably. No. Lying down and finally getting that all-important long sleep session in was important. Alpha set its foot down, grumbling, "show me Eridanus."

... no pleases.
@Vivilene

puke mention ... THREE!

i need someone to look into my eyes and tell me

Vivilene side-eyed the puddle of acidic watermelon. She couldn't exactly disagree-- the smell was beginning to hit her from here and it was getting increasingly more difficult to try to consume the melon, but at least it was distracting her from the rising anxiety.

She rose when Alpha moved away to start horking down some snow, moving to take her satchel off the ground and sling it back around her shoulder. She didn't really need pleases-- she had no concept of manners, really --she turned around in silence and started plodding back towards Eridanus.

Slower, this time, because Vivilene had no idea how fast a kaiju could move post-vomiting its guts out.

"girl you know you gotta watch your health"



@Orthoclase-Alpha exit vivilene