People stared across the restaurant at particular table as the dishes around a particular customer clinked and clattered, a small mountain of ceramics and glass almost licked clean of barbecue sauce, chocolate sauce, ice cream, fat, grease or whatever was related to the particular food that was held in that particular dish.
The customer herself was fairly well known and acting far out of her normal behavior for the last few years. Celes Victoria's father had been security on the planet until a band of pirates with a grudge killed him and his wife.
Celes herself had been shot and almost died, and had lain there and watching as the pirates raped her mother's corpse.
What followed was the orphanage and two years of a growing violent temper until they had to turn her out into the street to protect the other children. If it hadn't been for Chief Cho reining her in, getting the market job and eventually security training, then she might have turned into something of a monster.
Instead, recently, she'd acquired the reputation of being quite helpful and harmless. Aside from a few people at the orphanage, almost nobody remembered that, at the age of eleven, she'd once put three kids in the hospital with various broken bones.
Now, she was devouring everything in front of her like a glutton. Stains unnoticed were splattered over her normally pristine clothing and skin showing the left overs of the candy, meat and other high calorie, high protein foods that had already gone down her throat.
Vague memories of the girl's troubled childhood started to bubble up amongst the people watching.
Finally, after two hours of a display that would have probably disgusted even the hybrids that she'd had such a life-changing encounter with, she stood up from the table, stomach visibly distended.
She stumbled away from the table and laid a sticky few paper credits on the cashier's table and walked out into the night with a short burp.
"What the hell am I doing?" she wondered out loud.
The question had come more than once or twice during her gorging, but she was too focused on easing her incredible hunger, even past the point where her stomach hurt, to notice.
Now she was having another urge. She wanted somewhere dark, secluded and lonely. She needed to do...something.
Passing by a wall, she leaned against it, clutching her stomach as a pang worked through her in compliant against the gross over eating. The rough sprint toward hybrid maturity didn't agree with what her body would prefer.
Had she been a full SIL splice, it would have been different. But in exchange for long-term survival of both species and individual, the Nerimian hybrids weren't built for the sprint. They could do it, but it was needlessly painful.
It should have been several weeks of increased eating and building up of calories before coming to this point. Not this disoriented, feverish gorging that made thinking difficult. Unfortunately, her changing metabolism reacted to the hormones in her system and triggered the latter.
Celes pulled away from the wall, leaving a sticky organic residue that had nothing in relation to the food she had just devoured, and might provoke some paranoid responses in anybody that had ever been in a Xenomorph hive.
Slowly, she staggered into the edges of town, toward an old abandoned processing center that had shut down quite a while ago. Nobody was there, which was exactly what she wanted right now.
Once inside the building, she dizzily pulled at her clothes, shucking off the jacket first. The pants slipped off almost tripping her up as she continued to walk forward. The under shirt was torn into strips of fabric behind her.
Already, her stomach was less distended than it had been, having passed much of her meal on down the digestive process. But, under her clothes, she was covered in a whitish sort of fluid that seemed to be seeping over her, flowing out of her pores and over her skin.
When her bra and panties were finally discarded, uselessly destroyed by her efforts to be free, she found a corner of corrugated steel and leaned against it, blackened fingernails spiking into the material. And she started to climb up into the darkened shadow of the debris strown and bewebbed building.
Backing herself against the corner, she started to come out of her daze as the whitish substance was thickening around her and sticking against the wall, leaving her trapped against the side. Looking about insanely, she started to cry out when it covered over her face and stuck to the rest of the goo.
There was some thrashing under the surface of the hardening cocoon for a few seconds until the natural sedatives of the substance calmed Celes down and sent her into a stasis, letting her mind drift into calming dreams.
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(Posted Tue, 16 Feb 2010 20:54)
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