Vitae Part 1
filed in Sticky Rambles on Mar.06, 2010 Posted by supersticky
Water. That’s all she needed. Her eyes slid ceaselessly from side to side, head cocking occasionally to pick up the source of some unfamiliar sound. All the sounds were unfamiliar to her. This wasn’t the forest she was used to, if it could even be called a forest. Fat, squat things littered the landscape, their only similarity to trees being their positioning, some in clumps, some standing alone, all within a respectably “forest-y” distance from one another. For all she knew she was in a forest of giant, misshapen leeks wearing crowns. Leda paused to stare at one at 2 o’ clock from her position. Deviating from the path she had discovered, she stepped over to it. As she neared the thing, a hand came up to cover her increasingly strenuous grimace; the smell was beyond nauseating. A cloud of rot hung around the squamous growth and it took Leda a moment to notice the absence of the sound of flies. This was odd to her. At home rot was always accompanied by flies. What kind of life is here, she pondered. She struggled to make connections with the forms of life with which she was familiar. Her momentary reverie was interrupted by a grotesque shimmer across the gelatinous surface of the “rot tree”. As if responding to her proximity or her body heat or the carbon dioxide she was expelling the thing gurgled and Leda jumped back so quickly she almost tripped over one of its roots. She was sure it hadn’t been there before but this was no time to worry about that.
Back on the path she stood staring at the rot tree, heart thudding harder than she could ever remember it beating before. A serpentine movement caught her eye. It was the root. It probably hadn’t been there before, because it was still growing. Leda couldn’t take her eyes off it. The thing was pulsing and…pumping something into the ground. She thought to herself that this was a great time to get going but she didn’t feel immediately in danger right now and she’d never seen anything like this. The rot tree shivered again, this time more violently. The gurgle became louder and was accompanied by muffled belches coming from the root as it began to funnel ever larger pieces of whatever-that-was into the ground beneath the greenish ground litter. Something poked through the dirt a few feet away from the root. Leda’s attention was divided between this new protrusion, the pulsing root, and the shuddering rot tree. She was prepared to run.
The protrusion was slender and tall, looking an angry, slick red. More a tentacle than anything else. It bent to and fro, leaning and curling, as if tasting the air. It leaned slightly in Leda’s direction and she took a big step away even though it was realistically too far to reach her. If it doesn’t stretch. A tense moment later it had decided Leda was beneath its interest and it straightened, its base swelling to the peristaltic rhythm of the root. The rot tree itself had ceased to move and was soon followed by the root. Resisting the urge to step forward and examine the strange stalk, the woman focused her eyes on the swollen bulb and noticed a glistening shimmer. A baby rot tree, she mused. For the first time she looked around and paid attention to her surroundings.
Springing up everywhere between the rot trees were young trees. They were more slender than their elders, and the red stalk was turning, in some of the taller and wider ones, to an orange hue. Looking at the more subdued yellow and tan of the larger rot trees she wondered what the insides of their fluted crests looked like. The tips were stained with the same bright orange of the middle-sized rot trees and Leda wondered if that was bait for, or blood from its prey. Another gurgle, closer, reminded Leda that she was hungry. Rolling her eyes for the hundredth time at her predicament, she unzipped a compartment on her upper left sleeve and slid her fingers in. From it they conveyed a long straw. Taking several large gulps of water, she felt the pack on her back getting lighter. I should stop. I should save some so I don’t run out before I find more. She took another swallow, letting her eyes roam the ground. No bugs. This place is weird. A movement caught her eye. The root shuddered and the water in her mouth suddenly wasn’t so refreshing any more. She put the straw away and got back on the path.
-supersticky can usually be found not writing a damn thing at Deus Ex Why Zed



