Chapter 11

It was warm and comfortable and Miranda didn't want to open her eyes. But something smelled delicious, roasted and delectable, and she wanted to taste whatever smelled so good with her tongue.

"And, that would be you," a snarky female voice said from somewhere close by.

Slowly inhaling to fill her lungs (and expand her chest to display her boobs now that she knew her sister was watching), Miranda smiled and stretched her arms out beside her, letting her sister get a really nice view of... 'Ewww! What is all this sticky stuff! Crap! It's all over me!'

"And, that would be you, again, darling," Murielle chortled. "You don't have any skin on, you sweet, partially digested little slug."

Miranda opened her eyes, or at least, she tried to. No eyelids responded, and no welcoming light flooded her senses. Frightened, she sat up quickly and slapped her hands against her face, trying to feel what was wrong with her.

"There's nothing really wrong with you, sweetie," Murielle's too-cheerful voice chirped, again answering Miranda's unasked question. It was obvious that Murielle was mind-linked with her. "Usually, you flare back to life, then you wake up. This time, you woke up before you flared."

"Flaarrr..." Miranda grunted, trying to use her half-digested vocal chords. The instant the sound came out of her throat, her hands flew to protect her neck, the sensation of touch still unnervingly absent from her fingers. "Whaa..." she croaked, then switched to mental telepathy: 'What happened? Am I dead? I feel like I'm drenched in ... Blood! This is Blood! MY Blood!' She wrapped her arms around herself, trembling, not understanding what had happened to her.

"You got yourself eaten by a snake," Murielle reminded her. "You remember that?" When her sister's trembling, skinless head managed a shaky nod, she continued; "You evidently cooked that sucker and blew your way out of it, but for some reason, you didn't regenerate. You're still in your 'digested in a snake's stomach' form. Looks rather delicious, by the way; especially since my food generally comes in your size."

'You wouldn't eat me, ' Miranda protested as she clambered up, half-rolling onto her knees, which was hard to do when she couldn't see and most of her sensation of touch was absent. She still had a sense of balance, though. 'You wouldn't have anyone to carp at.'

"You want me to help?" Murielle asked, feeling the intent in her sister's mind to flare back to something that looked more human, and to replace the gooey mess oozing out of her eye sockets with fresh eyeballs so she could see again.

Miranda shook her head, noticing that, this time, she could feel something as she moved, though what she felt wasn't exactly pleasant. Mostly it was blood and half-digested bits dripping off her elbows and chest onto her thighs. She spread her arms, barely able to hold the weight of them steady and arched her back, raising her face to the unseen sky.

An instant later, she was surrounded in soft, blue flame. A minute later, she was whole again; flesh and blood, with the blood on the inside, this time.

"That's better," Miranda sighed, grateful that her vocal chords weren't half-digested anymore.

"Good thing, too," Murielle noted. "That stomach acid was still digesting you. If you hadn't woken up, you'd've turned into a puddle of goo."

"That's what I like about you," Miranda observed, looking sarcastically thoughtful. "You're always there to point out my failings." Then she noticed the lump of what looked like a large pig, with tusks like a saber-tooth tiger except that there were four tusks, two uppers and two lowers. "Is that lunch?"

"Well, if you want it," Murielle replied, really trying but failing to keep the sarcasm out of her voice. "It isn't cooked, yet, so we could have snake. I didn't know you were going to cook something while I was out hunting."

Miranda ignored her too-cute sister, knelt next to the boar and teleported its skin away to begin a pile of discarded pig parts beside her. The boar's head, feet and tail softly plopped down on the skin a few seconds later, followed with the boar's stomach and intestines.

"Huh," Murielle grunted. "Looks like you just a short while ago. Smells like you, too."

Still ignoring her, Miranda mentally surrounded herself with a plot of dirt directly beneath the boar, testing down until she found bare rock. She teleported, causing a hole to form and swallow the boar. Dead, skinned and cleaned, it plopped down into the hole.

"You hate it so much you're gonna bury it?" Murielle asked, a laugh of shocked surprise in her voice.

"Don't be silly," Miranda replied over her shoulder. "I'm gonna cook it. Remember that trip to Hawaii when we were kids? Those natives roasting a pig underground?"

"Um, yeah, kind of," Murielle replied. "What I remember is that you got really sick after eating about three platefuls of shredded pig meat and barfed all over the table where hula girls were trying to dance."

"Uh, I forgot that part," Miranda sighed, letting her shoulders slump in disappointment. "I guess I could just leave it down there and bury it." She looked up at her sister who was perched comfortably on a large outcrop of rocks. "You want some snake?"

"Or," Murielle suggested, "you could add some snake meat to your little barbecue pit and we can have both. After all, I didn't catch that damned pig for you to put it in the ground and forget about it."

"Okay," Miranda agreed, then looked over at the snake. A large section disappeared, then plopped down on top of the boar. "See any rocks laying around..." she started to ask, then saw some nearby. She grinned to herself as she thought of using the huge rock her sister was sitting on.

Instead, she chose a large boulder sticking up out of the ground and stared at it, then concentrated harder, slowly allowing her eyes to close. After a minute or so, the boulder cracked loudly, then fell into several smaller pieces. One by one, the pieces disappeared only to reappear in the hole to cover the boar and snake parts.

"You want the honors?" Miranda asked, indicating the barbecue pit.

"Sure, why not?" Murielle grunted. She got up and walked over to see exactly what she was 'honored' to do. "Oh," was all she said, then she created a fireball and lowered it down so that the heat could be absorbed by the rocks that covered their meal.

"Don't forget the underside," Miranda unnecessarily reminded her sister.

Transferring her gaze but not decreasing the power, Murielle glanced toward her sister, her eyes still on the ground. A searing beam of heat scorched its way from the pit, following Miranda's gaze to Murielle's feet and back again.

"I-i-i-i-yi-yi-yi!" Miranda yelped, dancing around, trying to get her feet off the scorched dirt.

"La Cucu-ach-a, la cucu-ach-a," Murielle sang, laughing and clapping her hand in time to her music and Miranda's prancing.

Miranda teleported off the hot dirt and over to the other side of the barbecue pit to glare at her laughing sister. After a few seconds, Murielle stopped laughing and asked, "What?" in response to her twin's furious, silent glare.

"Your hair's on fire," Miranda smirked, then turned away, unwilling to give herself the satisfaction of watching Murielle try to put out her hair, which actually wasn't on fire.

Murielle didn't understand why her sister was in such a sour mood, but she wasn't ready to give up on her, yet. Mira was typically moody and depressed these days, especially after being abandoned by those jerks they both had considered family. She'd even managed to kill off her body, then fled to safe harbor inside a Praetor. It had taken months to convince Mira to come back into the real world and during all that time, Murielle hadn't really convinced herself that maybe her twin wasn't right to want to give up, lay down and die. Especially today, after having searched for hours, she finally located her twin inside a friggin' reptile, being happily digested as its lunch.