Acid Bath

Vanim had spent weeks on his own, attempting to track down the origin of the oviraptors. It had been a long, dizzying trail, full of looping tracks and odd plants and scattering of loose feathers and quills. Frankly, Vanim was ready to call the whole thing a wash and get back to his daughters. He’d never been much of a traveler, and the constant movement, worried that any delay would cause the investigation to turn stale, was wearing on him.

Until he found… Well, at first he wasn’t really sure what it was.

He was exploring an urban area, an environment he’d never spent much time in before. That was unnerving enough, and if he weren’t desperate for a breakthrough, he probably would have passed on investigating the uncannily well-lit basement. But then he realized it was leading down. Very, very far down.

There was a chance that this had nothing to do with the oviraptors. It was just a strange, human-built basement that no dinosaur was ever meant to traverse. But it was best to leave no stone unturned in an investigation, wasn’t it?

So Vanim ventured down, down, his path lit by old lightbulbs that somehow still had power in them. It eventually led him underwater. Not in the water, but rather in a long, glass tunnel that went across the sea floor. Vanim looked around at the ocean arcing around him, the sea creatures swimming past him without a second glance. He’d visited the ocean before, but never swam in it, let alone dived underneath it… Or walked underneath it, as it were. The experience was deeply surreal.

Admittedly, he’d never given much thought to what the world looked like underwater. But he didn’t think he would have been able to paint an accurate picture even if he tried. Coral bloomed as bright as flowers and in as many shapes: some circular and wrinkly, some shooting upwards like tree saplings, some fanning out in a dozen different directions. All around him swam undersea creatures. Some were familiar, like the scuttling crabs and stalking sharks. But some he’d never even heard of before. A strange many-armed beast wrestled with a clam shell. Small fish clung to the bellies of their larger fellows. Fleshy pink stars clung to rocks and to the glass tunnel itself.

There was a whole world in the waters beneath his home, and he’d never thought of it at all! Vanim wondered what other things he’d missed in his incuriousity.

The tunnel seemed to stretch on forever, and Vanim began to think that it must lead all the way to the other side of the world. But, gradually, the path began to dip, taking him on a gentle descent. It had to lead to something, something important.

Eventually, the ground evened out again. The tunnel opened up wide, into yet another world that Vanim could have never dreamed of. All around him, plants grew to towering heights, taller than he imagined was possible. Tree trunks were wide enough that he could have climbed up them, if he knew how. Vines and cables hung from the branches. And every free space on the ground was taken up by ferns or fungi. To think that it all existed under their feet!

If this was where the oviraptors were coming from, it made sense that they’d have all of those seedlings with them, so Vanim knew that he’d made it to the right place. He had enough information to return. He prepared to hear back up the tunnel, his footfalls silent as he walked over leaves of unfamiliar plants.

When suddenly, something clasped around his ankle. Vanim barely caught a glimpse of the vine before his foot was swept out from under him, and raised high into the air. Vanim was staring down into a giant vat of lime-green liquid, made of fleshy, shifting walls… The maw of a hungry plant. And he was caught up in one of its arms.

Vanim kicked frantically, trying to loosen the plant’s grip on him, but it was already too late. He was over the vat, and the vine let him go, sending him plunging into digestive juices. The walls moved to close around him, letting scant light in through the semi-translucent barrier.

Not that he cared about the darkness. Even as he struggled to hold his breath, the “stomach” acid was eating away at his skin, sending blooms of pain all over his submerged body.

He heard a muffled shout from beyond the plant’s jaws. “The heart! Bite its heart!”

A heart? Vanim didn’t know plants had hearts. But he’d never knew they had dinosaur-eating stomachs, either.

He strained to move in the acidic bath, trying to figure out just where a plant’s heart would be. But as he squinted through the burning in his eyes, he saw, down at the bottom of the vat, a sizable lump, about as big as his head. That had to be it.

With frantic strokes of his legs, Vanim pushed himself deeper into the acid, his skin protesting in pain. But he kept going. He opened his jaws wide, making his insides hurt as bad as his outsides, and bit down as hard as he could into the soft, mossy flesh.

There was an awful screech as his teeth sank in. The stomach’s walls fell down around him, blinding him with light and letting the acid wash away into the surrounding grass. Vanim hacked up globs of acid, stinging just as badly sending it back up as it did to swallow it in the first place.

“You alright?”

When Vanim was able to breathe properly, he looked up. It was the same voice that had told him the plant’s weak spot, and it belonged to a kind of dinosaur he’d never seen before. The closest match he could think of was a dacen, only much smaller and… rounder. Rounder face, rounder spikes, rounder body. And this one was wearing some sort of helmet on its head, shining silver in the artificial sunlight.

“I… I think I’m okay now. Thank you.”

The stranger snorted. “If you’re talking, you’re doing a lot better than most that end up in the jaws of those things. If you can walk, that’s even better.”

Vanim looked himself over. Much of his skin was raw and exposed, and he was bleeding in a few places. His whole body stung like he’d been swarmed by hundreds of wasps. But he was conscious and able to think about all of those things, so all things considered, he wasn’t doing too bad. With a grunt of effort, Vanim managed to get to his feet.

“Good, good.” The stranger was giving him a once-over, too, and sniffing the remains of the carnivorous plant. “Listen, if you don’t want to trek all the way back to the surface today, you can wait by the entrance to the tunnels. I’ll let the others know not to give you a hard time.” He looked up at Vanim, and, despite being much smaller than he was, the stranger exuded authority. “But you should go back to where you came from as soon as you’re able.”

“What is this place?” Vanim risked asking a question. There was too much he didn’t know, and even all the hostility he’d faced couldn’t subdue his curiosity now.

The stranger had a curious glint in his eye. “Atlantis.”