More People
You continue eating as the creature speaks, asking questions when appropriate; the whole conversation only takes a quarter-hour or so. When you're finished, you and your food-bearer exit the hut, and the village's speaker guides you to the next mark-victim. This one has four tentacles sprouting from her sides, and her arms and legs hang bonelessly down. A half-hour of chatting and chewing later, you aren't properly hungry any more, but it would be wise to 'top off' your 'fuel tank' anyway, so you do not dismiss your food-bearers. Oh, and you also learn that her condition, like the half-fish's, started a few weeks after the wells began to flow.
The next one is quite different. He has fur, for one thing; great swatches of sleek, oiled fur. And his arms and legs are of drastically different lengths, so that it's difficult for him to move around very quickly. In the twenty minutes or so it takes you to extract his story in between bites of delicious meat, you discover that this man had been a miner, and his first patch of fur sprouted last year, while he was digging a shaft through a very damp vein of ore. His condition progressed more rapidly than those of the first two people you interrogated, with a final 'growth spurt' last month which left him in his current state just after a cave-in that trapped him in an underground river for four full days before he was rescued.
Written by Catprog & Cubist on 21 October 2010
