If Celia wasn’t practically starving right now, she might’ve been more concerned about her waning self control when it came to anything even tangentially related to food. Even if said food was a barely edible mesh of flesh, metal, and every sharp thing you could probably imagine. It went down the hatch all the same. Albeit slower this time. Endless rows of teeth working together to slowly grind her meal down. The bitter, downright metallic, taste doing little to dissuade her alien tongue. Both facets of her mouth working in harmony to ensure her meal found its way down her throat.
Which, unsurprisingly, took a good while. Almost a whole two hours in fact. Each minute spent in a mix of filling bliss and working pain. Until, at long last, she had managed to swallow her very prickly meal and actually managed to keep it down.
After that, she took an extended nap. Waking only when her stomach had finished its work in digesting her prey. Eyes opening to familiar invasion of a screen stretching from one side of her vision all the way to the other. Leaving very little room to see anything beyond it. Not that she was interested in that. No, Celia’s gaze was fixed on something… new.
Modification(s) gained: My flesh My steel
Lesser Milestone acquired: Incorrigible Glutton
Milestone Reward: Gluttonous Fusion
selecting Modifications for Fusion…
Modification Subsumed: Null tongue!
Modification Subsumed: My flesh My steel!
Commencing Fusion!!!
Celia’s tongue combusted into pain before she could even finish reading the screen. The sensation so deep, so pervasive, that it brought her tumbling to the ground. Hands reaching for her mouth in a vain attempt to find some sort of relief. Instead, she was racked with another volley of purest agony. As if every part of her mouth was being torn asunder. Every cell bursting in union, flooding the space between with red.
She choked on it. Coughing and spitting as she tried to gain a hold of herself. Only for what little progress she made to be undone when something else started happening. The inside of her mouth rearranging itself. Every inch of every part, from tongue to roof to uvula becoming harder, sharper, edged with something that yearned to cut and taste. Spears of steel like growth worming their way through teeth and tongue before her transformation finally came to a stop.
Fusion complete: Mutation gained: This maw for Mine
Modifications complete!
Designation: Newspawn hybrid (Beyondling)
Classification: (lesser) Feastling
Slots open: 4
1: locked, 2: This maw for Mine, 3: These teeth unending, 4: Tremor sense, 5: Lash
Modifications available: none
Insight(s): The color of shadow
Celia tasted it. Felt hunger and cold bitter iron dripping from her tongue. Her entire mouth a screaming demand. The need to cut and chew and eat.
She almost submitted to it. Almost gave into the rage like hunger gnawing at her mind and begging her to be a monster. A hunger she could drown in if she let her focus slip for even the briefest of moments. Gave her a need to ground herself.
The feel of her fingers on scaled skin. Grass crunching beneath her feet. Twilight shadows dancing in her eyes. Forests scents flicking past her nose, teasing her with their variety. Normal things that a person enjoyed. That Celia enjoyed.
The monster enjoyed them too. Perhaps even more viscerally than Celia did. Tasting their flavors deeper and with far more joy. A primal sort of instinct that drank deep from the joys of life.
Celia thought of her body then. Of her shape. Of her hips, curving at the turn of her shoulders. Wide, defiant, and heavy. Silhouette framing her rounded backside like a pair of ominous moons. A drooping sag to them that lead down into a pair of thighs almost as thick as her waist used to be. Squishing, brushing just a little where they were at their biggest.
It was definitively human. And Celia grabbed onto that. Reminded herself that a monster wouldn’t look like this. Couldn’t look like this. Wouldn’t have her mild potbelly or a pair of breasts that had some honest heft to them.
She was human, even if only in shape.
And once she had that settled, rage and hunger temporarily subdued, she started analyzing what her new "Mutation" actually was. Which, from just a casual inspection, seemed to be some sort of mixture between the blade cats sword like body and her Null tongue. Both forming together to turn her entire mouth into some sort of biological bear trap.
Thankfully it didn’t seem to get rid of her tongue’s ability to stretch or grow teeth. Both of which still felt incredibly odd, to say the least.
Really the most concerning part was how her mouth seemed to literally taste like sharpness. With a very strong tint of hunger, and not in an abstract way. She could literally, literally taste the two concepts as if they were a physical thing. Which mainly just reminded her of her dads kitchen and how he would always cook with his favorite knife. It didn’t matter if any amount of cutting was involved in the cooking process or not. He would always, without fail, find a way to include his knife.
It was a memory Celia hadn’t thought about in years. One that she kept close as she climbed back up into what she had now dubbed as her tree. Finding what looked like a good perch to take a nap on till the sun had gone it’s round and true darkness fell on the land again.
Things were never that easy, though.
No more proof needed than the vision that took her as soon as she closed her eyes.
She saw a portal leading back home beneath the sea.