Blue had to cut her size down by half to even consider fitting into Emmett’s tent. Even then her head was scraping the top of the canvas, forcing her to kneel. Her commander seemed amused by that - but then, Emmett seemed amused by a lot of things these days.
During his time as a fixture of Blue’s belly, Emmett had treated everyone and everything with bitter scorn. He’d always been that way, of course, but his cruelty had grown with his poor temper, leading him to bitch about life even more than usual. Apparently being fixed to a monstrous amalgam of animal body parts had restored him to his good humour, and then some - though Blue was not happy to see the results of his happiness. If anything, she’d have been willing to keep him attached to her stomach to prevent the horrors she witnessed inside Emmett’s tent.
The tent appeared to be an animal in its own right, wearing its beige fabric shroud to cover the horrors within. Pulsing, meaty pillars raised the tent into the air, each protruding from a squishy blanket of purple-and-grey stitched flesh. It was pliable and oozing, Blue noticed, and squished with each of her heavy steps. The tent seemed to shudder beneath her, as much from its walking as from Blue’s weight, and she wondered if it was intelligent enough to know how much of a monstrosity it was. She wondered - and then decided not to investigate - how in the hell Emmett had created the thing.
But the tent itself was not the worst thing. Not by far.
Scuttling to the centre of his enclosure, Emmett gestured Blue towards a crooked glass enclosure that was jutting out of the tent’s flesh. She crept cautiously over to it, flinching at Emmett’s growing smile as she got closer. The enclosure appeared to be full of swirling yellow liquid, not quite clear enough to be water but too dense to be the oily slime Emmett usually used for his experiments.
“Look inside,” Emmett cooed. “Go on. I’ve, ah, I’ve been waiting so long, ah, heh heh, so long to show this off.”
Hunching over, glaring suspiciously at Emmett, Blue peered into the container. The liquid burbled audibly, sloshing with the motion of the tent -
- and then, abruptly, a face appeared at the glass, and two rolling eyes stared out at Blue. She yelped and jumped back, even though she knew she could flatten the thing with one pound of her foot at full height. The face mimicked her yelp, though it giggled a few seconds later, the phantom sound apparently not swallowed up by the liquid.
“A beauty, isn’t she?” Emmett caressed the glass with three hands, rubbing his cheek against it. “Mmmm, I love her. She is my new favourite toy. Ohh, I can’t wait to see what happens, ah, what will happen, when I shove one of her into that fucking hybrid’s wife. Ahhhhhh, the look on his face.”
Recovering herself, Blue took a closer look at the face in the container. It was attached to a dark, wispy body, and it whirled playfully through the liquid, seeming to merge and disappear into the ochre ooze. it took Blue a few moments to recognize the thing’s crazed features. “Isn’t that the girl you used to track their transport last year? I thought she was destroyed.”
Emmett frowned, his scorpion tail thrashing angrily. “Yes, yes, that was a part of her. Just a piece. The rest went with those stupid bounty hunters, I think. But, ah, you see, I kept a bit of her, stashed in my brain, just sewn onto the edge of my cerebral cortex. She was in you as much as she was in me.”
“Oh.” Blue’s eyes twitched. “That’s… fantastic. Thanks for telling me.”
Emmett waved away her irritation. Pushing the top of the container aside, he dipped one arm into the yellow liquid. The thing crawled onto his greyish skin, looping around his elbow and snuggling up to his bicep. Thick mucus dripped onto Emmett’s carpet of legs, but he didn’t seem to care.
Pausing to stroke the creature’s head for a moment, Emmett tapped his tail against the floor. It burbled sickly, then, as Emmett turned, a large, green pustule emerged from the flesh, bringing with it a wriggling form. Blue winced away, wanting to cover her eyes… but unable to divert herself from the sight of a sickly, malformed rabbit, apparently birthed from Emmett’s horrible tent. It flopped onto the flesh as the pustule popped, panting weakly.
“Ahh, yes, there we are.” Emmett reached down and plucked the rabbit from the floor. Cooing at the yellow creature clinging to his arm, he said one word: “Inhabit.”
The gleeful little-girl-thing slipped around Emmett’s chest and dove at the rabbit. Into the rabbit. At this point Blue did cover her eyes, but she couldn’t avoid the horrifying, squelching sound as the two creatures became one, the rabbit’s cries twisting into a cruel mockery of nature as they became a weird, warbling laugh. When Blue dared to look at the rabbit again, she found a much larger beast staring back, its yellowed features grim yet jolly.
“Now that is what I call a hybrid,” Emmett proclaimed proudly. “Your mission is to get me more test subjects. Proper test subjects. Maybe the one that reduced me to a gods-damned head. Yes, I think that would do quite nicely, don’t you?”
Blue nodded, remaining silent. She watched the rabbit hop away from Emmett, propelled on too-thick legs, its gleeful little girl eyes scanning for a meal. It eventually settled on the surface of the tent, and with enormous incisors it bit into the flesh, chomping down with relish.
That’s it, Blue thought, rubbing her arm. That’s it. I fucking quit.
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