Chapter 2

Omsk sat, doing his homework, using the primitive pen and paper as his instructors required. He was annoyed that he had to write down his thought processes in order to prove he didn’t use his digital processor to solve these various riddles and problems set before him by his instructor. His softside was going numb, so he shifted his body weight to one side, allowing blood flow to return to the underside of his skiis.

‘I’ve been sitting here too long, ‘ he decided, and scooted over to his school project for the year – a terrarium of his own design which he and his father put together over the past summer. He’d chosen a predatory vine from the planet Noral – a difficult plant to keep alive away from its natural, insect-filled habitat – simply because he enjoyed a challenge, which was basically, keeping it alive inside a reducing chamber.

To solve the problem of the vine slowly starving, he’d had his father install a device that could attract compatible life forms and simply insert them into his reduction chamber/terrarium – at a proper size the predatory vine could handle, of course, the proper size being something the vine could digest without too much difficulty. The ‘feeder’, as Omsk thought of the device, simply searched the galaxy for life forms of a compatible chemical composition and inserted them, usually in a reduced size, into the terrarium.

The three insects that had appeared yesterday were still trapped inside and, he frowned as he noticed, none of them had been eaten yet. Apparently, his vine hadn’t noticed the presence of fresh food or, his frown increased as the thought occurred to him, these little creatures were very good at avoiding digestion.

He shrugged his blue-speckled shoulders, not really caring one way or the other. If the mechanism that triggered the ‘feeder’ detected a depletion in the overall mass of the vine, it would provide more food and water for it to consume. When he first transplanted it, setting up his terrarium, the ‘feeder’ collected lots of insects from all over the galaxy and transported them here. The leftover calcium deposits created a small hill in the center of the terrarium, where the cannibalistic vine shuttled its poop. It was starting to pile up, again, and Omsk grimaced at the thought of having to clean it out with shovel and vacuum.

“You eat too much,” he told the plant. It didn’t reply, being only a dumb weed left over from another insignificant, conquered world.

Something moved on the pile of poop, and Omsk squinted forward. ‘Damn! Those three bugs have crawled up on top of the poop! The vine can’t reach them there... ‘

Sighing, he pulled the lid off to a faint sound of hissing air and reached in with his tweezers. Picking up the first bug, he dropped it over a lush, dark green part of the plant. He smiled as it disappeared, twisting and tumbling into the ravenously reaching vines.

‘One down, ‘ he thought, grinning to himself. ‘Two to ... Uh, oh. Where are they? Oh, shit! Dad’s gonna kill me if those things get loose on the station!’

He was right to worry, as there was a popular story told in school of alien insects getting loose and taking over the ecology of an entire world. He thought it was simply an urban legend told to make kids more careful when handling alien life forms, but he really didn’t know...

Quickly putting the lid back on his terrarium (the vine would quickly increase in size if it got out of the localized reducing field), he scanned the room, his eyes seeking out places where a tiny insect could hide. He was so intent on seeking out dark hiding places that he nearly missed the two pale forms nearly the size of himself that materialized across the room from him. They had arms like he did, but their lower halves were made up of two separate appendages upon which they were delicately balanced instead of the efficient coil of his own species.

When he did notice them, he realized what had happened. ‘The vine isn’t the only thing that increases in size when it gets out... ‘

He slid back on his tail, raising up until he was taller than the two escapees. Behind him on a shelf was a hand-held transporter. He reached for it, intending to return the two escaped creatures (he didn’t think of them as insects now – they were much too large) to the terrarium.

As he pointed the device at them, the two creatures disappeared, then reappeared, one on each side of him. Grabbing his arms, they teleported again, all three disappearing from the room.

If anyone had been there to witness it, they would have discovered three creatures on top of the white calcium deposits that made up the little mountain in the center of the terrarium. After a moment, a fourth creature appeared; wet, bedraggled, and seeming much weaker than the others.

Talina felt something moving. It seemed far away, high in the sky. She was sensitive to pressure changes and could often tell when rain was coming, even if she was inside and couldn’t see the sky or smell the air. This pressure change was much more abrupt than an approaching cold front, nearly popping her ears with its suddenness.

She sat up.

‘Oh, good! Making it easy for me!’ she felt someone say in her mind.

Then she was being squished by a three-pronged clamp that dug painfully into her body and was raised dizzily into the air, high above her sleeping mother and sister. She screamed.

Suddenly released, Talina tumbled through the air, too dizzy, too terrified to concentrate on someplace safe where she might teleport. She landed, surprisingly unhurt, in soft foliage and quickly sank down until she was surrounded by...

‘Oh, God! This is the plant that tried to EAT me!’

She gasped as vines quickly whipped around her legs and torso and began to squeeze. The prickly vines also found her arms and head. In seconds, she could no longer see anything. The stickers scraped against her skin and she could feel the narcotics taking effect, numbing her pain-wracked body, driving her down toward unconsciousness.

Her legs were wrapped by two different roots and the plant was trying to pull her in two different directions, both digestive centers eager to be fed. Talina could feel her hips starting to dislocate. But the worst part was that ‘one of those prickly vines is trying to get up inside me!’

She kept biting off and spitting out the one that kept trying to get into her mouth, but she couldn’t do anything about the one between her legs, and that one was making progress. She could feel it exploring down there, the stickers scratching her pussy walls as it undulated ever deeper.

Talina had joined her mother a couple of times to explore what was so exciting about Worship Services, so she wasn’t a virgin and she knew a lot about sex and men and that knobby little thing that lived between their legs. While she found that she enjoyed sex, she wasn’t addicted to it like her mother was and mentioned it to her after her third orgy.

“Give it a couple hundred years,” her mother had mumbled as she lay on the hard stone floor covered in the juices of twenty men. “You’ll get there...”

The vine intruding up between her legs felt a lot like sex, and Talina was surprised that she was actually getting aroused. The danger to her life, the pain of having her pussy violated and scratched and torn up like that had a lot to do with it, she suspected.

‘Sex and pain, ‘ she thought. ‘It all goes together for us. The pain seems to make it better!’ But personally, she believed this was a really bad time to be discovering things like this...

She was just getting to the mental state where she was ready to stop fighting and writhing, ready to let the plant do its worst, then suddenly it was retreating, pulling out of her, tearing her pussy walls with its thorns in its haste. An acidic burning accompanied the vine’s withdrawal, and Talina guessed what must have happened. The plant had found her central core; that acidic part of her artificially designed body intended to dissolve any weapon used against a member of her species. Talina, as any member of her species, could consume just about anything, whether it was eaten or shoved directly into her body, and her central core could digest and make use of it.

She smirked to herself as the plant seemed to lay her down on the soft, muddy ground and withdrew its vines from around her body. It obviously recognized that she was higher on the food chain than it was, and it could actually come to harm if it tried to consume her.