Chapter three

Shivering, I echolocate around, watching the humans busy themselves trying to help their wounded and flocking around my estranged terror’s bodies. I smirk as I see V’kra, lying on his side, bellowing in pain.

Fat old fool, I think, bitterness stinging my pallet.

How long have I waited to see this? To see the overweight, overpampered container of blubber suffering? So many tides, so many seasons passed, hoping to see this, to be able to echolocate every pained contour and drink it in, having my revenge at what that snake did to me.

And I enjoy it, this dark feeling of pleasure inside of my chest. I haven’t felt happy for so long, I almost do not recognize the…!

ARGH!

I jerk, almost sinking, pain lacerating through my chest, spreading through my body like the growing tendrils of seaweed. I pant, I growl, I choke, my chest burning and stinging. I can’t use my echolocation, my touch-sense is out of my reach.

Pain, throbbing pain, pulsating in my chest, as big as my happiness.

Stop! I scream. He’s dying and I’m watching. I am without a terror, all alone in a foreign place that cannot possibly exist in a form that cannot possibly function.

I remind myself of my pain, my misery. I suppress my joy, any amount of happiness I have felt in the past few breaths. I force it down, away, out of sight and out of mind, focusing on business at hand.

Just like always.

I heard a story when I was a pup about an old one who went senile and swam onto the dryground, so far that no one could pull him back in, and his terror watched as his weight, not supported by the water, crushed his insides until he died.

This is what is happening to V’kra. I can see it, his brittle old bones cracking and his insides smushing under the weight of his humungous girth.

All of this I see through another barrier. I bring my flipper up to feel it and bump it with my nose, licking it with my prehensile tongue and backing away, wrinkling my noise.

S’ka’rak are everywhere, now that the water has washed away into the emptiness, lying on their sides and bellowing. The humans are swarming them, using containers of water to keep their gills wet and their bodies warm.

I go unnoticed, undetected by their echolocation or touch-sense. I am wedged in between the barrier that blocks echolocation and the barrier that doesn’t, covered by a mass of ribbon-like stuff that is too thin and soft to be seaweed and too long to be moss, waiting for my chance to escape.

No one notices me, they are too busy cleaning up the water, of all things to do at a time like this, and trying to keep the terror of S’ka’rak from crushing to death.

I wait until one of the humans passes by, and then push my way through the opening he makes in the barrier, my the two longest of the split parts of my fingers gracing the walls.

“W’kk’d!” V’kra shouts.

“Hello, old one,” I answer coldly, shivering and wrapping the soggy material around my body.

“Help me!” he begs.

“Why?” I ask, turning around and echolocating the area, watching for a human to see me, standing fearlessly in front of a dying S’ka’rak with my tail curling around my twin hind-flippers. “You fed with the others, stuffed yourself to bursting, and now you lay here, crushing in the emptiness. Can you not Metamorph, old one?”

“Not fast enough! Wait for me, wait for me to change enough for you to help me into the shadows, nephew!”

I growl, rage and hunger filling inside my belly, my fists balling, “Spare me. You abandoned familial ties years ago, you know that.”

Humans are approaching with more containers. Unsteady on my twin-tails, I struggle to hide again, slipping around the building and hoping they still do not notice me, even while V’kra screams my name over and over, begging me to come and help him.

Automatically, the split ends of my flipper curl inward and the teeth and the end dig into my flesh. Even if I wanted to help V’kra now, I could not. Going back there and attempting to combat the humans would only allow myself to be captured, and it might be best if they did not know that we can Metamorph.

I echolocate the area, looking for any sighs of life. There is none, just heavy, square barriers that appear hollow, but the echolocation is too interrupted to accurately gauge what is inside. The barriers, the museum and another, are fairly close together, and there are some containers with their strange contents spilling onto the dryground. Some of the containers I can see through, others block my echolocation.

I lean against the barrier, my dorsal ridge pressing into the hard, rough surface most unpleasantly, trying to think. The barrier tells me that it is a wall, unlike the ones I know from the Bubble, and many of them forming a hollow structure is a “building”. It is an artificial construction and hasn’t been there for very long.

Strange. These creatures seem unable to make due with how things are normally.

I shiver, my teeth chattering. There is a feeling like current, but coming through the air. Because it is air, it does not register on my touch-sense and does not affect the wall behind me, but it is similar to a current, so I don’t bother moving. I do, however, notice that this air-current does not push me along with it.

Strange.

I would hold out my flipper to feel it, but I am cold. The water running from the soggy mass on my melon seems to be making it worse. At least, the drops falling down my back make me shiver even harder.

Suddenly realizing what useful tools these split-fins are, I grab the soggy mass hanging from my melon and wrap it around my body. It helps shield me from the current, but I will have to find shelter somewhere, and apparently this body does not like being wet.

It is a strange body, tiny and disproportioned. The fins are long and bend in too many places, split in five sections that move too much. The teeth are dull, the awkward way of walking across dryground is slow, tedious, and dizzying.

Humans do not appear to have tails, or bony protrusions on the melon, but no Metamorph is foolproof. I haven’t lost my dorsal ridge or, mercifully, my echolocation and touch-sense.

Still, there is this question of the muscles on my face that I didn’t have before. They do not operate my mouth, nose, or echolocation, but they are there. I can bring my flippers up to my face and feel things beneath the layer of skin, one on each side of my misshapen nose, and a thick line of fur above and a thin one below.

I don’t bother to test them. The last thing I need right now is to be distracted by something as trivial as the messed-up biology of a twisted, misshapen species such as this.

I lift one of my lower fins off the dryground, my hearts jumping as I nearly fall into the wall, and place it back down. What can you tell me, dryground?

Walking. That is the motion using two “legs” to move. Stepping is with one “leg”, weight is balanced on that one “leg” and then the other is brought in front of it and weight is put on that “leg”.

Definitely an unsteady way of moving. This species is probably so messed-up because they spend all of their time trying not to sink.

But it is how they move and I cannot swim through dryground. I place one of my fins against the wall and push off, using it to steady myself and to search for anything useful.

Echolocation tells me that the ground is still, yet it feels like it moves, rolling under my feet and threatening to tip me at any moment. I try to “step” only on what is level, but it is not an exact process.

Step.

Step.

Step.

Left “foot”, the split fin at right a right angle to my “leg”.

Right “foot”.

Left “foot”.

Right “foot”.

My right foot skips along the ground. I pitch forward, landing hard on my pectoral fins, grunting in pain as the soft skin tears. The skin over the middle joint of my leg tears, too, and I feel blood trickling out.

I raise my upper body off the ground and hold my fins in front of my melon, echolocating them, looking for major damage. I can see the places where the density in the skin is different, and where my echolocation very nearly, but not quite, passes effortlessly through the blood, showing me the shape of my fins, with the split ends held out perfectly straight, like stiff-branched seaweed, and the tears at the base.

A very fragile body, torn already by the rough surface of dryground. It would not stand up to waterstalker at all.

Perfect. Exiled, taken away from the safe waters of the Bubble, and left to fend for myself, terrorless, in the form of a fragile, weak-bodied thing with barely enough meat to be prey.

At least I still have teeth. I half expected to lose them to the Metamorphosis. The long, thin, sharp teeth at the end of my fins might be worth something, too. And the bony protrusions on my melon.

At least I am not entirely defenseless. I should be faster and stronger than those slow-moving creatures that passed the edge of the barrier at the museum, anyway. I doubt any of them were faster than a mushroom-slug!

I push against the dry ground, trying to force my legs and tail under me and trying to get back to a “standing” position, with my legs underneath me and my body vertical. It is easier this time. At least I am already partially off the ground, the last time I had to find out for myself that one cannot swim through dryground.

I flair my gillslits and hold my breath, pushing hard against the dryground with my fins and feet, forcing myself to stand, but reeling backward and almost falling again.

I feel dizzy, like I rammed the barrier too hard. The dryground moving beneath me is making me feel sick. I swallow the bile rising into the back of my throat, feeling it burn as it leaks out of my blowhole, and blowing it clear.

The air-current rises again, slicing through my small, frail body. I shiver, my teeth chattering. I need to find someplace warm, away from the current, and soon.

A/N:

So, whatcha think of W’kk’d? Wicked, isn’t he?

So, y'all noticed anything interesting about how he perceives the world?