“Golly, that was a long night,” Aisha said. “It feels like we’ve been asleep for years.”
“Or twenty days,” Adam yawned, crawling out of the soft fabric of Aisha’s skirt.
It was dawn in the Enchanted Forest, with streams of red light just beginning to filter through the punched holes in the trees. Aisha and Siarra lay with their heads against opposite sides of a giant oak trunk with Malkav and Grandpa only a few feet away, each using a dry leaf for a blanket. One by one, they all woke up, stretching their sore bones from their first night on the cold and rough earth.
“That was indeed a long slumber,” Grandpa moaned. “It’s almost like somebody forgot to wake us up.”
“I don’t care,” Adam said. “I had a wonderful night.” He winked at Aisha.
She blushed, tugging on the strands of her short skirt as she rose. “Yes, well… We’re awake now. We should continue our quest to find Terragolem.”
“What about breakfast?” Malkav asked. “I’m starving.”
“Well, you are a pig,” Siarra muttered, but not so any of them could hear her.
“No time,” Aisha said.
“Why?”
“Because TERRAGOLEM IS RIGHT BEHIND US!”
They all turned and screamed as a snapping pair of turtle jaws tore into the trunk of the giant oak tree, ripping it apart. Splinters of wood rained down. Terragolem, the forty-foot long tortoise with a shell drilled in spikes and plate armor, held the trunk between his teeth as he shook his long head back and forth and hurled it deep into the forest. Then his jaws came down again, snapping together just inches away from the cowering heroes.
“Bloody hell!” Malkav screamed. “It’s like somebody is trying to make up for lost time by compressing an entire storyline into a single scene! Run! Run, people! Little guys and hot Priests first!”
But Grandpa held his ground. “Demon turtle! YOU SHALL NOT PASS!” He raised his magic cane and aimed it at the roaring spawn of the forest, who was drenched in sodden moss and whose sharp fangs made him the ugliest of mutant (but not ninja) turtles.
Siarra jumped to her feet, spun around, and blasted Terragolem’s jaw with a blazing fireball from her staff. He reared his head back, howling at the sky, and lifted his wrinkled leg. She blasted him again.
“He’s immune to fire!” Aisha screamed.
Siarra continued to blast him, but it was true. All her shots were reflected and turned to ash in midair. “That’s impossible! He’s an earth element!”
“But his hard shell gives him high fire resistance!”
“But I’m not even hitting his shell!”
“Would you girls do [i]something[/i]!?” Malkav yelled from the ground.
Siarra glared down at him. “Us!? And what are you doing!? Why don’t you go nip at his ankles with your big bad dagger! …Then again, I’ve seen your dagger and it’s not so big.”
“Ha, ha!” Adam laughed, pointing at Malkav. “She called your dagger small.”
“It is not…” Malkav stuck out his lip, turning his dagger over in his hand.
Terragolem sighed. “Are you kids done? I’m trying to eat you all.”
“You can talk?” Aisha said.
The great turtle nodded his long head. “Yes, I’m more evolved than my reptilian ancestors.”
“Did you know he could talk?” Aisha asked Siarra.
She shook her head in response.
Grandpa rubbed his long beard and walked around Terragolem. “I don’t know. He might be lying… How do we know you can really talk?”
“Uh…” Terragolem blinked.
“Speechless, just like I thought!”
“…Look, old man,” the turtle sighed, “I am a turtle, I can talk, and I’m going to eat you all.”
“That’s an awfully mean thing to do,” Aisha said.
“Mean!?” Terragolem snapped, literally. “You’re the one who interrupted my breakfast of delicious tree logs by screaming at the top of your lungs and hurling flaming balls of fire at me.”
“Yeah, uh, my bad,” Siarra said.
“Remember, only you can prevent forest fires!”
“Listen to the mutant turtle of death,” Malkav said. “Freakin’ pyro…”
“Oh, shut up, both of you.”
Adam blinked. “Uh, guys… This thing is going to eat us. Shouldn’t we do something?”
“I’m up for running in circles with our skirts held high and screaming like little schoolgirls,” Malkav said.
“I do that every Halloween,” Grandpa said.
Malkav and Adam stepped away from him.
“Okay, so I’m not eating the old man,” Terragolem said, almost to himself. “But you girls do look simply scrumptious!”
“But…but why do you want to eat us?” Aisha asked with a frown. “We didn’t mean to ruin your breakfast.”
“You were planning on killing me! I heard you talking in your sleep.”
“We just want your Scarab of the Earth…”
“Oh, this?” Terragolem reached into his shell and pulled out a shiny green trinket hanging from a necklace. It glittered in the morning sun.
“Yeah!”
“You want it?”
“I do!”
“You want it, huh? Huh, huh, huh?”
“Yeah!” they all cheered.
Terragolem opened his mouth and threw the trinket inside, biting down on it and swallowing. “Too bad, suckers! Hahahaha—ack! ACK! ACK!” He coughed, the trinket caught in his throat, and stumbled through the forest, knocking over whole trees as he turned blue.
“This is pathetic,” Malkav sighed.
“Heeeeeelp meeeeeee…” Terragolem gagged.
“How?” Aisha said.
“What do you mean ‘how’!?” Siarra hissed, grabbing Aisha’s arm. “Let the bastard die. He was going to kill us!”
“I can’t let an innocent creature die, no matter what his intentions are…” She stepped over to the choking turtle, whose head had caved into the forest floor and his breaths were becoming hacking wheezes. “Terragolem, how can I help you?”
“Crawl into my mouth and unlodge this thing from my throat…” he gasped, opening his door-size jaws. His wide tongue stuck out like a red carpet, admitting entrance through the cavern of his sharp fangs.
“Yeah, that’s not a trap at all,” Siarra muttered.
Aisha stared at the great mouth and closed her eyes as she slowly crawled in…
Giantess World
