The Rapture

The ophidian continued forward lazily over this particular district of the forest. Here and there large chunks of building lay about like headstones of a strange and distant age, illuminated by the ghostly light of the moon and the fickle flash of the fireflies. It wasn't that bad, Iskra thought as she crawled over a mossy rock, being this close to the earth. Somehow she'd always thought snakes disliked their lot, but if this was all they had ever experienced...

The cool grass brushed up against her scaled belly as she descended upon the ruin where the interesting smell came from. Specifically, she knew it to be a human, but it had a lift in it not unlike the scent of a bird. This bird aspect interested her, as birds tasted quite good.

Rotted, wooden beams criss-crossed her path like the arms of an ancient guardian, but she continued forward. Whatever emitted the smell became closer... warmer. The boards failed to creak.

Soon the monster came upon the sleeping form of a woman, and she found herself sorely disappointed. Her amber eyes narrowed in the darkness, casting a weak, sulfurous glow. It wasn't a bird, and she hadn't been a maneater for some months. Though she was loathe to break her clean record, she was hungry. Besides, humans died. That's just what they did. Consumption would just speed the process already underway in this person. "Ah, give me one reason I shouldn't eat you..." she said aloud, not sure if the woman would be awakened by her voice and not really caring either.

[ EXP: 303 ]

The half-serpent refused to allow the nervous woman off of the bed. "Oh, you don't have to move. Don't worry; I don't know who it belongs to," she continued casually, a quick flick of her surprisingly muscular tail aiming to keep the woman on the slightly elevated mattress. "I meant that literally, I mean... I am pretty hungry, and you're the only thing that's not grass or trees or rocks for quite a distance."

She folded her arms, continuing on as though discussing the night weather outside. "You have kind of a spiritual smell about you. Are you a kami by any chance? If so, I guess I have to make a decision." One hand rose to support her chin as she looked the woman up and down. "You look like you'd make a good mother. Ah, but if I made you carry my child, then I wouldn't get to eat you."

Her snowy brows furrowed, and she continued to regard the kami as though she were some sort of draft animal for a cart. "Are you good with babies? You don't have any of your own, right? I'd want you to have plenty of time to look after mine."

[ EXP: 208 || +1 TEXP (1st post) ]

"..."

The monstrous woman became still at the word "Jack".

Of course, Jack was a semi-common name, but having been acquainted with mystic beasts, who almost always have names that are unique, She'd never had to learn the concept of other Jacks.

"Jack said that you are his?" she said, her horned head tilting slightly to the side with the thought.

For a moment, she simply let those words rest in the air. If Jack had this kami, then how many others did he have? And why would he deprive her of that one kami he had flipped out over?

Well, there wasn't any way of knowing except perhaps to explain herself to this angel before her.

And so, Iskra climbed up onto the bed. However, in the process, her body broke down. The woman half specifically became invisible in the ambient darkness, and when its eyes reopened, they were blue and white. Her form had shifted, though it maintained a sort of scaliness about it. Specifically, she now appeared as some white, spotted beast. Her head, shoulders, and body appeared to be that of a hyena, though with decidedly draconian scales and spikes in areas. Her tail was long, like a cat's, and her body was covered in spots like a snow leopard's. Even then, she was very large for any of those animals she appeared to be a hybrid of. That, and she was a bit larger than your average tiger.

During the process of the shifting, she'd become male as well, though this wasn't visible due to his lying-down posture.

"Do you want to hear a story?" he asked the woman mildly, continuing on regardless of the answer. "Your Jack kidnapped one of your kind before. An angel... looked sort of like you, actually. Dragged her away from her kind and safety and everything she knew to experiment on her. He wanted the blood of a creature that was half as my kind and half as your kind, so for him I placed my seed in her. It was his intention afterwards to keep the woman and kill the child and extract its blood." The beast's expression darkened. "So I fought him and won. I didn't wish for him to kill what would have been my offspring. Anyways, it's important for you to know that I'm his leader, so I'm basically entitled to you if you belong to him." He yawned. "However, you should have told me sooner. This means I can't eat you, which is a real pain. Leaves one option, I guess." He stood up. The mattress creaked ominously. The monster's gender was now obvious. "You ready?"

[ EXP: 485 ]

The woman's begging initially appeared to only gladden the beast more as he licked the woman's face and pressed his much larger body up against hers, pinning her to the mattress, though her clothes saved her from any bodily contact.

Right before the monster would have cleanly ripped the interfering threads off of her body, however, he remembered how hungry he was and stopped.

For a moment, he looked at the woman, the gears in his head turning.

"Well, if I do this now, then you can always get me food later and I won't have to worry about you escaping," he began speculatively. "Then again, I guess I'm too hungry to do this anyways... wait a minute." The monster frowned angrily. "Are you implying that you're better than me at hunting? I've looked everywhere all night and there's not a mouthful of meat to be found anywhere." He growled, his remaining hair rising in undulating waves before something else occurred to him. "Then again, humans are good at making food out of nothing. Kami might have the same ability."

He stood up and trotted two steps back, allowing the angel to sit up if she wanted to. "I don't really care about the composition of your blood, just the composition of your heart. Your kind are generally good and would be kind to an infant. That's all I want, really. If you were part demon, that's good. That means Jack won't be interested in killing our child, but that's not important right now."

He tilted his head to the side. "Tell me, kami, where are you going to find me meat?"

The beast looked expectantly on.

[ EXP: 310 ]

The monster smiled, seeming satisfied by this explanation of things, though he wasn't entirely convinced that it would work. It was worth a try.

"Ah, great. So we'll find some food quickly, and I'll have energy so we can make a lot of cute babies." He sat back and grinned, a cat-smile that looked almost out-of-place on his fearsome visage.

He began to walk past the woman towards the door. For a moment, he stopped, standing in front of it. "I guess common sense should tell you that a fate worse than death awaits you if you're trying to trick me."

The beast's form began to dissolve once more, much as it had the last time, blending into the ambient darkness of the room. When the darkness cleared, the glint of metal armor became visible. Now instead of some sort of monster, a broad-shouldered man stood. His back was to the angel, leaving his waist-length ponytail visible until he turned briefly to face her, his skin as smooth and milky as the moonlight outside. Indeed, the irises of his eyes were a strangely light hue of blue, like the moon often is when it's visible before nightfall. "Understand, friend?"

[ EXP: 225 ]

The answer came instantly. "We'd just try again until you did."

This also seemed like common sense to the man, though he supposed she did have a bit of a point. After all, he'd have to decide how much time he was willing to invest in making sure that the kami was actually carrying his child. These things could siphon off quite a few weeks.

"You can call me Iskra, and I eat about..." he tilted his head back, trying to think. "I can get full off of a decent-sized goat if I eat the bones too."

He withdrew a bladed chain from the side of his armor and began swinging it idly. Unfortunately, the angel mentioning mating took his mind back to it. "Ah, I hope we can find some meat soon. I want to get you done while it's still night time. Then again, I wasn't planning on doing much other than sleeping tomorrow. But you kami have human customs, don't you?" The man paused to open the door for the lady. "This is normal for you, then. The woman gets taken out to dinner and the man takes her back to his bedroom afterwards and fills her with his offspring. Human ways... are so backwards." He shook his head. "Your kind should be more like us. Hyenas have a much more complicated courtship. Then again, if I want to have a lot of offspring, it'd be better to just have a fast, human-style one."

[ EXP: 261 || +1 TEXP (5th post) ]

"Oh, you don't have to worry about learning the ways of my people," Iskra continued on in a somewhat defeated tone. "I ate them all. Besides, there are physical differences. Your females seem to be missing a pen--"

A bleating interrupted his sentence halfway through.

He blinked and looked down. The plaintive bleating continued.

It was a goat. A charming little goat. Cute, helpless, and apparently tame.

"Ah, are you lost?" The man asked the little creature. It bleated helplessly in reply. He picked it up easily and examined it, squeezing its haunches and belly. "Got quite a bit of meat on you. A good find, definitely."

Gently, he shoved Seraphina back into the hut. "Back on the bed. Looks like we won't be needing to do any hunting." The sheep bleated again. "We're pretty lucky, huh?"

[ EXP: 160 ]

Iskra placed the goat on the floor, and it pranced over to the bed like a little lamb, putting its front hooves up on the bed and looking up at her, its golden eyes full of nothing but unadulterated trust.

M-m-m-m-maaaah~

The sight of humans plainly gladdened the little creature, and it rubbed its head affectionately up against the angel, bleating his happiness all the while, its little stub of a tail up in the air.

The man tilted his head to the side for a moment. "Ah, I thought slaughtering was a part of how you cooked things. Honestly, you're going to have to do it." He scratched his head, his expression almost apologetic as he explained. "Hyenas don't really kill stuff before they... we eat them. We just eat them the way they are. Tastes better that way. I don't really know many humane ways to kill stuff, and I don't care to learn. If I'm going to have a cooked meal, I'd prefer it prepared from start to finish. Besides, it'd be less painful for the goat if you did it, I think, since you're nice and all."

The goat hopped up on the bed and curled up next to the angel, resting against her in perfect security, glad to have a place to rest in contrast to the frightening night outside.

"If you want, I could just eat him like I'd normally do and we can get right to the childmaking, if you'd prefer. We're very fast eaters, my kind..."

[ EXP: 273 ]

Iskra's brow furrowed at this unusual development. She... wanted to protect... food?

Then again, the wild spirit had to recall the difference between himself and the kamikonjou. The kamikonjou usually took the form of herbivorous creatures, or at the very least "killed things before they ate them" like Lethe did.

It wasn't necessarily out of any moral obligation that Iskra agreed to not eat the little beast, but out of a kind of confusion. There were so many concepts at play here that he had difficulty with.

"I guess you can have that one. I do need meat, though. I guess I'll just eat the next thing we f--"

M-m-m-m-aaaaaah!

A higher-pitched cluster of bleating interrupted the black-haired one once again, but oddly enough, it wasn't from the goat snuggling the woman on the bed.

Iskra turned around, somewhat puzzled.

Through the door cavorted and tumbled many miniature versions of the goat already in the room. They were diverse in color, but uniform in their level of cuteness.

They ran joyfully to their mother, who bleated back to them as they climbed the bed and snuggled against her side.

Iskra smiled on the scene warmly.

"Ah, a solution. What great luck." His form began to dissolve again and reform into the beast from earlier.

[ EXP: 254 ]

By the time the man finished turning into a beast, he developed a bit of a listening problem. Specifically, it wasn't until he'd seized one of the tender young goats between his bonecrushing jaws and brutally dragged it away from the litter. It cried out. Its mother and brothers and sisters cried out.

He held the struggling little thing beneath a heavy paw as the angel began to speak. He seemed to be regarding her words for a minute, but the moment she finished speaking, the beast tenderly fixed his jaws about the crying infant creature's leg and yanked upwards with a smooth movement.

The leg came off, and with it a section of the little goat's newly-form pelvis, and with it a length of warm intestine. The bleat turned into an outright shriek. The mother goat got up and attempted to butt the beast. He turned his shoulder to the protective mother and enjoyed audibly enjoying his snack with so many loud crunches and the sound of ripping flesh. The acrid smells of blood and waste filled the air, and they were overwhelming. The child goat fell dumb, though it continued to draw ragged breaths, its eyes open in shock.

"Better come get your goat," the beast said through a mouthful of veal. "But I see that you don't understand. You tell me what I cannot do. When I've got energy, I'll have to display my dominance somehow. It's my way."

[ EXP: 270 ]

Iskra rolled his eyes. By now a lot more of the little goat had gone missing: another leg, an arm, and the larger portion of his abdomen. The kid lost the ability to cry out, but it still stared and shifted in short, pained jerks, never quite dying. "How greedy are you?" the beast began, his irritation plain in his tone. "There you've got a large goat and two smaller ones you aren't even using, but you cry over my small bit of meat. Are you in charge of me that you should have more than I do? Are goat lives more important than my own that they should live in happiness while I should suffer and perish?" The mother goat cried out helplessly, struggling against Seraphina's protective grip. "Is the life of a tame creature worth more than that of a freeborn one? You seemed ready enough to end some guiltless wild creature's life earlier for my sustenance. This is backwards. A wild animal never asked anything from anyone. A tame animal spends its entire life taking, taking, taking from others. Its death is when it gives, and that's not much. Everything has to die, after all. A tame creature only has death as its purpose."

The half-goat moved weakly against his white chest, now stained a deep red with the infant goat's warm life fluids. Iskra paused for a moment, thinking again.

"Then again, your kind have that injustice built into them. They favor the cute and the weak. If it had been a family of baby serpents I had attempted to eat or if I had fed on an infant worm demon, I doubt you would have shed so many tears. I suppose it's not really something you can help."

He took the baby goat's ear into his teeth and, after walking carefully past Seraphina on the floor, picked up its dripping, wriggling form, placing it gently on the bed. He turned and smacked the mother goat unconscious before gently pulled the crying angel back onto the mattress, laying atop her and pawing the half-goat to a spot within her reach. Tenderly, he licked her tears and spoke into her ear in soft tones. "You aren't much different from an infant yourself. Quiet now. Heal the little thing and get some rest. I've eaten enough for now. We've got a busy morning. Ssssh..."

The tongue came out again and he gently licked her neck. "We can make offspring tomorrow instead as long as you rest tonight. Don't cry anymore. Sleep..."

The hidden implication was that if she didn't rest soon, they'd commence to making offspring, but the angel seemed distressed enough without him driving the point home.

[ EXP: 500 || +1 TEXP (1st post) ]

-end-