Felicity heard the sound of a door opening as she took a great big breath, gasping as if she’d e up for air from being uer.

  And then she opened her eyes to find herself looking right into the pupils of Synthia.

  She didn’t see much else, because very quickly she wasn’t usiher set of eyes herself. Or any other actual nerves.

  The process was familiar and reflexive o got started. She didn’t have to sciously do anything to finish her meal, and soon she’d return to Amber’s deep subscious. That was, if she wasn’t ed right along with Synthia by the teratovore entering the room behind her. But maybe she could eat that one from the ioo, if she was fast and wily enough.

  So, for the sake of her owence, she pushed herself to devour her new friend even faster, burrowing as deep into her being as she could.

  It was like burying herself in the deep loam of the meanings behind the words of an a epic. It was dark, and warm, and timeless, and each bite (such as it could be called) brought with it not just energy but knowledge. Not memories that weren’t hers, as she never could do that, but the knowledge that she might as well be eating time itself.

  Something was different, though.

  Something was wrong.

  A process that normally took a matter of seds was going on for much longer.

  And even though she herself was getting stronger and bigger, possibly more so than she’d ever had been before, Synthia didn’t seem to reduce or thin out.

  What was Synthia? What was happening?

  Suddenly panicked and filled with an uing and fusing terror, Felicity tried to turn around and escape, to eat her way back out again. But to no avail.

  She tried reag out to Amber’s psyche and invoking the memetik she had to her, to jump to her mind the way she usually did, but she was locked in the process of eating an unending prey.

  She was pletely incapable of detag herself from Synthia, in any way.

  With nothing else left to do, she tiruggling.

  What that felt like from my end was siderably less pleasant. It was also very distrag.

  And then, as I faintly heard Amber scream through my fog of pain and monstrous dissociation, a teratovore began to chew on me from behind.

  I have a pretty good sense, actually, of how pain feels from human to human, and creature to creature. It’s all pretty simir, with minor variations for neurological differehe basic purpose and cept of it is the same. And, I’ve also felt the pain of other monsters, back when I fed off of them. And I know how that’s different from how lifeforms tend to feel it. It’s pretty strikingly different, though it serves the same fun and be just as unfortunately incapacitating. Certaiovores have adapted themselves to invoke a certain level of pain to paralyze their victims with it.

  Fuzzy-feet wasn’t that kind of teratovore. It felt like they just sort of became all mouth and started chewing, with the goal being to just eat as much as fast as possible.

  And, maybe because of the nature of my ins, I felt pain in a way that was sort of a mix of both the monster fashion and the way plex lifeforms experie. Which isn’t a great adaptation. It kind of makes it more distrag and intehan it o be.

  So, the teeth in my back didn’t really faze me, because just prior to that what I felt was something like a worm quickly and wrigglingly mung its way through both of my eyes and into a brain I did’t actually have. However it is that my iructure is actually posed and anized, when I’m pretending to be human the sensations match pretty closely to what humans might experie least, how I experie sedhand through ing their feelings.

  The stinging, searing, prickly, squirming icepick driving its way into my very mind robbed me of my sight and quickly my hearing, and almost all of my focus and faculties.

  I not only don’t know what my body did after that, but I lost track of its shape.

  My locus of sciousness followed the feeding worm, deeper and deeper, being surrounded by sharp and growing agony.

  So, wheeratovore’s teeth sank into my baearly surrounding me, I felt them like a disfort on the very outer yer of me, almost more like footsteps on my domain. So removed, I couldn’t feel the urgency of the situation. But, of course, I was already fighting for my existence.

  And Amber, if her reflexes were merciful, was hopefully running from the room.

  Just before opening the st door between himself and his prey, Felix paused to think it was a little strahat she hadn’t put away her cell pho. Just holding it out like that while she stood just around the er from the door with her own prey. What were they doing?

  Did she even have a clue that she gave herself away with it, that clumsy over-plicated extension of herself that radiated etherst? He could smell its locatiht through the walls!

  But then, there were entire spirits that gave off that smell, and who hadn’t learo mask it. Or didn’t have the good natural luck to be built that way. And he fed off them all the time.

  And how could the cell pho expel its telltale? It had to, in order to interface with the local cell towers.

  Grinning with his real teeth in anticipation of his meal, he opehe door to ehe room.

  And as he stepped ihought, maybe too te, that it could be a trap.

  But when he looked over, he saw the two of them behind the room’s bar there, standing, fag each other, with the spirit’s ba, holding hands and looking into each other’s eyes.

  Aoor human was going to get a full glimpse of his gaping maw and the ethergore it was about to unleash from her ersatz friend.

  It would teach her to be more careful about who she dated.

  If she was even still intact, as a person. There was no telling what that spirit had mao do by the time Felix had stepped into the room.

  From tip of pseudoforehead to crotch of his protective coloration, he opened his truemouth as wide as he could as he crouched and wiggled his behind for a leap. He could make it clear over the bar and onto the back of that spirit, no problem.

  Right then, the human victim came to from her entra and caught sight of him. And screamed.

  He took that as his cue.

  Felicity found it strahat she could distantly feel the pain of sixteeh sinking into the physical body of Synthia that surrounded her. And, it was so far away.

  But she now khat she’d been too te, and they were both being ed.

  I think I had so many memories at the time that I couldn’t feel them disappearing as Felicity ate away at my insides. I felt a certain mortal despair at what was happening that I remember from times I’d been around people who’d been made suddenly aware of their own progressiia. Or that oime I resent when someone was diagnosed with a ropiematode.

  And that was under and nearly overwhelmed by the pain that still gripped and defined me and my new fleetience.

  None of these things were helping me, and I o act fast.

  So, the first thing I did was gather all of my remaining focus and el it toward adapting, to cut myself off from the pain I was experieng. Or rather, to alter it to bee a different, dispassionate sensation.

  And that took precious time and energy, but I found of the two I had copious amounts of the tter. More than I had realized.

  I was still being bathed by radiant energy from that , despite the fact it was winding down and we were separated from it by a few walls and several yards of open space. It had been strong enough that I felt it on the to the front door, after all. But that was not enough to expin what I found at my disposal. Aher was Amber’s terrified rea to the event.

  But I didn’t have time to ponder about my reserves, or eveime feeling about within myself to uand where they were ing from.

  I just used them.

  And when I tied off the pain of beien, I was flooded with the euphoria of its absence. Which, unlike for living beings, didn’t serve me aer than the pain. It was just distrag, so I temporarily tied myself off from that feeling as well.

  And then, in the crity of that moment, I turo Felicity.

  I felt her struggling, trying to break free of me, of her autonomic grip on my being. And I couldly help her with that. Not from within her.

  But I saw that I could protect myself by ging which parts of myself I put in front of her.

  So, I moved her, and surrounded her with my newly found vast and unfathomable energy reserves. And I felt calm relief knowing that she was no longer damaging the parts of me that I knew defined who and what I was. And it looked like I could deal with her sometime ter.

  At the rate she was growing, I could deal with Fuzzy-feet before she became a problem again.

  So, I turned my attention on them, now knowing I was somehow so much bigger than my physical proje.

  It really took only three vulsions and bites to get most of the spirit into his truemouth, but a foot remaiig out he bottom. Ludicrously, it twitched about where his crotch should be, and that mildly frustrated him.

  It should have broken off and started dissipating now, but he couldn’t bite through it.

  And the human victim had fallen to the floor and backed against the wall, vulsing and screaming untrolbly.

  He o figure out how to digest his food, and he couldn’t think with that going on.

  He felt like he needed some privacy.

  So he closed the top of his mouth and reformed the face of his protective visage so he could speak with his psuedomouth.

  “Hey!” he shouted, closing his eyes shut with the effort. “Hey! You’re safe! Stop! Quiet! She ’t hurt you anymore! And I won’t! You run! Run you little thing, run!” Without the limit of lungs, he was fully capable of overp her voice with the volume of his, and he did.

  It shut her up, at least. And in the shock of hearing his words, she hyperventited with blinking eyes that wao be as wide as they possibly could be. And she ched her cwed hands in front of her throat.

  She was clearly so traumatized by all of this that it wasn’t likely she’d remember any of it, he thought.

  But now he could focus on the lumpy ethermass that filled his truemouth.

  He worked his jaws and encircled the ethercorpse with his many multibarbed tongues, and squeezed. He released his own energy reserves into his gullet as a raw entropic force used to digest his food, allowing it to drip out around the leg of his prey where it stuck out of his maw. And when his ethersaliva hit the floor, it hissed and sputtered wastefully. But most of it remained where it should do its work.

  And though he began to feel a surge of energy enter his system, telling him he was successfully eating his prize, the ethermass did not begin to shrink.

  Instead, it started to grow and bulge.

  How could it possibly do that?

  Was this spirit still alive and somehow feeding on something he didn’t know about? Was it able to eat multiple things? Emotions, physics, his owropic juices?

  He had never in his existence experienced anything like this. Never even heard of such a thing.

  In sudden for his own wellbeing, he started to open his mouth to expel his would-be food.

  The huma out a little, “eep.”

  theInmara