Hello, it’s me, Mellily the corpse plant!

I’ve been trying to practice introducing myself for when I finally make it to the Water Spirit’s territory. Now that I have a name, you damn better well think I’m going to tell it to everyone I ever meet! I’m proud of the name I finally got after all this effort! And besides, maybe if I can give a proper enough greeting to the water-whatevers that I’m going to have to meet with, then maybe they’ll think I’m a perfectly reasonable and well put together plant, instead of an insane psychopath who wants to eat the corpses of their kind! Well, I mean, it’s true, I totally do want to eat their corpses, but at least I’m not insane or a psycho, right? Honest! I’m just your ordinary magical carnivorous plant, looking to eat some magical water-based rocks! Nothing strange about that!

 

Yeah, definitely gonna need to firm up my approach. If I let any of that slip to them then they’re totally gonna say no and try to kill me. Maybe those elven Elders were right; My personality might just get a lil’ bit in my way here.

 

~~~

 

I had to travel a loooong time to make it to the Water territory in the south. As it turns out, I actually really missed making my way through the forests hunting and moving as I pleased! Being able to rocket through the forest by flinging myself long distances with my tentacles was both useful and fun, and being able to stop and photosynthesize whenever I found a nice spot was super great! I could take as long as I wanted to eat whatever tasty looking prey I managed to find, and if I saw a place that looked particularly beautiful I could stand there and soak its prettiness in for as long as I liked. I even managed to grow a few inches taller for the first time in a looong time! Truly, being independent was completely the best!

 

…But yeah, I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I missed Til being there with me.

 

Every time I saw something new, I turned to ask Til about it, and remembered that he wasn’t able to come with me. All the cool and pretty landscapes I saw, I had to see alone, and as it turns out, eating by myself and standing there for hours by myself photosynthesizing is actually… kinda really lonely. I guess getting used to spending time with someone else can really make you feel like this afterwards, huh? I was perfectly fine before…

 

Man, this is really upsetting!

Darn you, mom, for making me such a social creature!

If I were a normal corpse plant then I wouldn’t have to experience such emotions!

 

…Well okay, from what I’ve been told, if I were your typical corpse plant then I would have already long ago killed Til after tasting his blood, so I guess I shouldn’t be so mad at mom, huh? You win this round, mom… Although I guess mom also gets negative points for setting me up with this whole heavy ‘prophecy’ deal too, since that’s also totally her fault. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy this personality I’m told I got from her, but it’s still all kind of a dick move in the end, right? Right now I could be happily mindlessly taking care of a plot of land and eating every single thing that comes into it! A simple, classic, corpse plant life! But noooo, I have to feel ‘lonely’ and convince water-monsters that it’s totally chill for me to eat their dead family and friends! Well I never signed up for this, mom! I never signed up for this!

 

…

 

Aaaanyways, tantrums and whining aside, the trip was going pretty smoothly. At first I had to do a bit of backtracking through the places where I walked with Til, which made me just feel upset all over again that he couldn’t come along with me, but I actually made way better time since I could fling myself all over the place as fast as I pleased. And, when you combine how fast I am with how I don’t actually need to stop to sleep, I managed to make the same trip that took Til and I a handful of weeks in only four short days. I’m a speed machine I tell you! A master at traversal! I’m an all terrain vehicle with ten tendril drive! I’m-! I’m…

 

Well, I’m hoping I don’t get lost, you know?

 

It’s been about like what, three weeks now? I’ve stopped a bunch to photosynthesize, and I found out this super cool (and let’s be honest, obvious) life-hack where I can spend time photosynthesizing while I wait for the mushrooms I’ve put on my prey to finish absorbing, and then I can eat the mushrooms and gain an insane amount of magic, and if I do that in conjunction with getting a bunch of just regular good old fashion nutrients from straight up eating some of my prey, it turns out that my photosynthesizing gets even more effective! Basically I’m doing the optimal strats now~! I’ve got a ton, a ton, a ton of nutrients and magic to work with right now, and I’ve been spending a bunch of it every day working on growing myself and learning how to grow trees and flowers and stuff better! Honestly, if I tried to retrace my steps back to Til’s place it wouldn’t even be that hard right now, because I’ve pretty much left a breadcrumb trail of exotic plants and trees that either shouldn’t exist where they are or possibly don’t even exist in this world!

 

But yeah, that’s only if I were going backwards. Forwards is another story entirely!

 

Til tried to tell me some landmarks and things that I was gonna wanna look out for, and how to tell your position based on the moon or the sun or the stars or whatever, aaaaand- Yeah, I totally suck at all of that! I can kinda vaguely tell which direction I’m going in based off of the sun’s position and thaaaaat’s about it! And for all that he’s all elven and educated sounding or whatever, Til absolutely sucks at describing directions in a way that I can understand! It’d be so useful if he would just say ‘if you see this type of tree you’ve gone too far’, but absolutely none of it was like that! It was all ‘The sun will be at exactly this angle to you at this time and the mountains to your left will be at exactly this angle for this many minutes’ and other stuff like that! Really, just a ton of angles and time keeping for some reason! What, does he think I own a protractor or something?! Okay Til, lemme just break out my cellphone, I’ll use this sun measuring app while I stare at the clock! Sheesh!!!

 

So yup, as you can tell, I’m a little lost. Chireelia told me before I left that it wouldn’t be so bad even if I forgot Til’s directions, just so long as I made sure to mostly keep going south, but I’m still pretty worried, you know? Like, I don’t wanna somehow veer so far off course that I end up somewhere near the Fire or Wind Spirit’s territories and end up getting jumped or killed or anything. And I don’t know nearly enough about how the moon moves around this world to try and guess my path off of that thing at night, so who even knows which direction I’m going then? I’m pretty certain that I’ve been mostly going south this whole time, but like… You know? You know?!

 

I’d laugh and make a joke that I’m the only plant who’s ever gotten lost before, but right now I’m a lil’ too worried to properly laugh at it…

 

~~~

 

Hmmm, yup, now I know I’ve gone off course! How do I know, you ask? Well it’s quite easy! You see, before I left I asked Til and the Elders if I was going to run into any other corpse plants during this little expedition to the south, and they said that so long as I strictly stayed southward, I shouldn’t run into any of them! But gueeeesss what! I guess I didn’t stay strictly south, because I’m totally in another corpse plant’s territory right now!

 

For the record, I’m not an idiot, okay? Maybe I didn’t realize that I was walking into this territory with my own two root-legs at first, I’ll admit that. But you can’t really blame me for that; I mean it just looks like a big area where there’s suddenly just a lot of really floral bushes! There’s nothing wrong with me if I don’t immediately make the connection between that and the treant’s big ass creepy forest, right??? I mean, there aren’t even any weird and spooky corpses lying around the place here like the last one, just lots and lots of these bushes…

 

Maybe if there weren’t so many bushes in the way, I wouldn’t have moved into the treetops. And if I hadn’t moved into the treetops, then maybe the interesting looking corpse plant down the way would have noticed me first. I guess since it’s the type to walk on the ground with four legs, it doesn’t look upwards as much as I do. Or maybe I’m just the weird one for liking to climb up trees so often? But I like eggs, and I can sneak up on prey way better like that! There’s nothing that says that plants only have to be on the ground! Besides, this is a fantasy world! A fantasy world!!! I can move however the heck I well darn please!

 

Hey, this isn’t about me anyways! This is about that weird little bush-dog-thing I’m looking at!

We should be scrutinizing that thing instead!!!

 

…So anyways yeah it’s a bush-dog, or maybe I should say a bush-wolf. It’s body's about the size of a large wolf’s and looks like it’s made up of branches and roots, and it has a big bush growing from its back with plenty of pretty (No, that's just me being nice, they're actually kind of more on the basic side) flowers. In a way, I can kind of see it being a kind of mix between me and that treant, although, ya know, as a dog and all. Can’t see a single tentacle on it though, but at least it looks like it has an openable mouth, even if its mouth is still just made up of roots and branches.

 

I watched it for a little while from the treetops, just out of curiosity. With the treant I wasn’t able to actually observe it before I made it angry, but now that I have another 100% legitimate corpse plant in front of me… Is it so wrong to want to see how a normal member of my kind is supposed to act? I know I’m supposed to be hurrying along to the Water territory and all, but I don’t think it would hurt anything if I spent a bit of time studying up on what it is that I decided to become, right? I mean, even the girliest of girls still looks up tutorials online, so how is this any different? Think of it as me job-shadowing another corpse plant to learn the role better! Perfectly normal!

 

So long as I make sure I stay out of its sight, this should be a walk in the park!

 

~~~

 

Yup, I was right, as I always am; This was definitely a walk in the park for me. Well no, I’m lying a little bit actually; It’s physically super easy, but it’s not completely mentally easy, you know? Despite my oddities, I’m still a corpse plant, and as has been established, I guess us corpse plants can’t really stand each other. From what Til tells me, I don’t actually hate the others of my kind as much as the others do. I guess maybe they feel the bad feelings more because they’re the ones getting their territories invaded? For me it’s just like I’m looking at something gross that I can’t stand, or smelling a god-awful smell maybe? Or maybe it’s like passing by someone who was once an asshole to me that I still hold a grudge against. I can totally stay here and be good because I have an ulterior motive, but if I didn’t then maybe I wouldn’t be able to put up with this for as long as I have. I bet this is how people who study icky stuff for a living feel like.

 

Seems the bushes that are all over the bush-dogs territory are actually duplicates of its own bush that it has growing on its back. If anything wanders in, they eventually end up brushing against one of those bushes and somehow get stuck in them, leading to the bush-dog running over to the spot in a mad-dash and immediately chomping at whatever prey it just discovered. Turns out its mouth is full of a bunch of sharp, jagged, chainsaw-like teeth, that even wriggle back and forth just to rip up its prey even better! Seeing the effect they had on the things that it bites… Yup, seems like it’s super effective! Wouldn’t wanna be what ends up in there, no sirree.

 

Oh, and I also found out how it eats, too! Logic would have dictated that it would eat through its super rippy mouth, but nooo, it’s something crazy different! The thing actually does have tentacles, contrary to my belief, but they’re all hidden away inside of its bush! And when it’s time to eat, it brings out its two tentacles to lift the shredded bits of whatever it just killed up, and then its bush opens up into a pit! This thing has two mouths, one for killing and one for eating! How useful!!!!

 

So yeah I’ve been having loads of fun just discovering these new things about this brother or sister or whatever of mine for like the past three days. It hasn’t noticed me even once, since I guess without the help of its scattered bushes, its eyesight (or whatever you wanna call what we have) isn’t that super great. Really, I’m like one of those zoologists on a safari! I never knew it was so fun to just observe nature like this! I’d probably make an even more efficient zoologist than the others too, since I come with my own natural camouflage!

 

Hmmm, but you know what?

I’d like to ask the more experienced zoologists just one teensy little question…

…What are you supposed to do when the creature you’re watching suddenly tries to eat a little kid?

 

_____