Chapter 6. Creatures

It took about 30 seconds for her to realize plan "Drag the snake somewhere safe" would not be working out.

It was too heavy. She could drag it, barely, but it'd take her forever to get anywhere and wouldn't be the safest thing to do with other animals that may want to attack her lurking around. She'd thought about slinging it around her body somehow, but it was too thick. She would basically be trapped struggling to move with this thing wrapped around her and be even more exposed.

So she decided to go with plan B, which was to just eat as much of it as she could and keep a patch of scaled skin as a souvenir. It wouldn't be as nice as having the whole thing but that was fine. This plan had a much lower chance of getting her ambushed.

She set into the snake and filled her belly. She managed to get a chunk of skin with an adept use of saliva to dissolve the parts around her desired patch and used her claws to tear the section off. She worked it on to her head and set off.

She moved further into the forest, being much more alert for danger than she had been, keeping eyes, ears and nose out for any would-be ambushers.

It had been getting steadily brighter, but she was caught off guard when she was suddenly blasted by a beam of ocular pain from the heavens.

What is that!?

There was a patch in the sky between the trees near the horizon that had suddenly become pain incarnate. It had been getting brighter for a while but now she suddenly couldn't look anywhere near it. In fact, as soon as it was visible it made everything hurt to look at.

Through squinted watery eyes she saw a darker spot nearby and darted over to it. The pain immediately abated, although looking at the brighter spots still hurt some. Daring a peek it looked like some of the tree branches and leaves were between her and that ferociously bright spot. It still hurt to look in that direction, light bleeding around the edges.

She should have expected this really. It had been going fine, she didn't realize it would get bright so suddenly. Looking around, there were a lot of shadows now. It was actually pretty amazing. She'd figured out shadows before with her crystal, finding out that you could put stuff in between it and the shine and it'd block it.

She'd had a lot of fun rendering herself and other things as flat shadows on the wall. This was like that writ large. This light was so bright it made everything have a shadow! That was really cool. She decided to move on regardless. This was tolerable and there were enough shadows that she could move around without too much trouble.

There was actually more shadow than bright spots, the forest canopy being thick enough that most areas were in the shade.

She patted her head with a paw.

Yup still up there.

Blue scale patch in place, she moved on.

As she walked around, she couldn't help but appreciate how different things were when the light was here. Not only did things look different, but everything sounded and smelled different too. It was even getting warmer! She figured it had to do with the giant ball of light. She could feel the heat coming off that thing whenever she poked a limb out of the shadows.

It just kept getting brighter. It seemed to be moving upwards and as it had the light was getting even more intense. She thought she was getting more resistant to it though. She still couldn't leave the shadows, but despite the increase in brightness, her eye pain wasn't increasing. She counted this as a win.

Another thing she'd noticed was that all sorts of animals were waking up. She saw quite a few kinds that she'd eaten in their burrows awake and about, and plenty that she'd never seen before.

Now, what are you up to?

She'd taken to darting from shadow to shadow, following around one creature with a large, bushy tail that she was particularly enamored with. It looked so fluffy and soft she really wanted to touch it. The squirrel darted about, nibbling on things or storing them in pouches on the sides of its mouth.

Cheeks. They're so stretchy!

They also looked really useful for carrying stuff. She rubbed a paw along her mouth to the side of her face and sighed. She didn't really have cheeks. Her mouth was so wide it very much intruded on the cheek area. Better for biting things she supposed, but having cheeks would have been cool. Not that she could have carried anything around in said cheeks even if she had them.

Stupid acid spit.

She refocused on the squirrel. She was content just watching it go about its business for now. Which was surprisingly something she'd needed to work at. She'd found herself getting ready to pounce forward to try to catch and eat it on a couple of occasions.

She wasn't even hungry! And watching it was fun, she didn't want to ruin that. She filed the impulse away as another thing she had to keep aware of.

So annoying.

She did, however, want to try catching it to feel that fluffy tail at some point.

She was pretty sure it'd seen her during an overridden pouncing attempt, but it seemed content to leave her be and continue with its business as long as she didn't get too close.

It was fascinating how different everything was in the day, without the swarm. Her experience with other creatures up to that point was coming upon them sleeping or seeing them running from or fighting the swarm.

She was enjoying this new perspective.

It has its own little life.

Interestingly, it seemed to be eating plant bits as its primary food source. She'd never actually seen an animal eat a plant for real before, what with all the aforementioned running and fighting. She had licked plants before but that didn't really count. None of them had tasted particularly good, and one particularly nasty specimen she was sure was the cause of many an hour of digestive distress.

She'd had to rinse herself in the stream many times to get rid of the smell. The less she thought about that the better. She was a lot more careful if she wanted to bring an interesting mushroom back now.