Diplomatic Immunity
Round the corner from the train station, two blocks ahead, and here he is. Quiet and inconspicuous in zoris and the shorts-and-blue-Hawaiian look so common in his hometown, the scrawny lizard hustles from mass transit and onto the little avenue he's yearned to visit for over a week. One of the top predators in the district is celebrating her 30th birthday, the tip told him, and she's celebrating with an unqualified two-week-long binge. After paying the insurance for his last five failed interviews and subsequent resurrections, his agency told him to get either footage or a new job, and here he is fresh in town, not willing to let them down again.
He spends a completely non-creepy hour or two pacing around the length of the avenue, waiting for what he's come to see. It isn't until the sun burns angled in the afternoon sun that he finally succeeds- a charter bus, full of creatures come to pay her homage! Well, containing a few creatures, anyway. The lizard changes course to tag just behind them as they pile off, a motley crew of three creatures bearing some rather large, bulky luggage with them. It's just two duffel bags between the three, so he's pretty sure these aren't towels and extra toothbrushes they have. They're all too eager to notice what's in their midst, and gleefully pound up the front steps to meet their doom.
And oh, has she been waiting for them, he can tell. The lizard slings his camera just under his arm, hidden in his removed jacket, and starts recording just in time to see the leader vanish- a particularly plump tod, one of the 'naturists' that insists on wearing the bare minimum of swim trunks in public. She must want to impress them, the lizard thinks as he hustles closer, for the tod vanishes with remarkable speed. There's a vague glimpse of someone grey-furred in something yellow before the tod is pulled inside with a happy yip, his bags thudding on the ground. The door shuts for a moment to the befuddlement of all involved, the lizard barely acknowledged by the devoted pair left on the porch- a Komodo buck and a blue-and-yellow multi-tailed vixen. Time passes.
After several minutes of profoundly obvious panting and groaning, there's the familiar series of noises that signals someone being swallowed whole and alive. The lizard has studied up just for the occasion, in case he needs to comment on her technique in his article. His skull presses to the door along with those of the other two. Now how does that vocabulary go again...
She starts off with a few low-front unroundeds, the distinctive sounds of a throat stretching up to admit the latest victim. Then the crack of a jawbone unhinging, as opposed to the more mellow, magic-assisted snap or the greater tendonal arch of a purely magical devouring. The tod's weight produces a few pronounced fricatovals as her system adjusts, and then the main course itself. Of course it's mostly the velar glottals and epiglottals that provide the force to suck him down her gullet, but the lizard hears a few upper lulls, the sound of a body sliding in of its own accord, and even the coveted elite downthrust, greater that can only be described as a quasi-peristaltic pulse outrunning the meal and echoing back up the throat to meet the true peristaltic. Clearly this is a predator of the highest caliber. She gives voice to a distinctly feminine lesser visceral belch, one with a minimum of vibrato and a very tightly controlled timbre and dynamic arc.
When she finally opens the door, a mere second after they all straighten up, he feels like applauding. It's a wolf in a sun dress, that much he can tell despite the gloom past the door. His sensitive reptilian eyes can't adjust quickly enough to get more than a brief picture of her- gut hanging out with a good half of the tod's volume, the weight concentrating in the lower reaches of her stomach instead of the magic-enhanced spherical belly. The dress seems tailored to cling to it, as well as the modest, somewhat elongated swells of breasts hanging maternally low on her chest. He can care less really, but it makes a great detail for the mammalian readers. A plump, padded build, as would be expected from someone who's eaten a small passenger jet worth of prey in the past week alone. Body structure just this side of human, bright golden eyes, steel-grey fur...
She speaks with a voice much raspier than he expected. "Don't stare, dear. I'll be right with you." Her arms reach out to usher the Komodo and vixen- kitsune, he can never remember these things- inside, bags and all, and the door clicks shut in his face. She must not like public showings. Well, he won't get sassed no matter how masterfully she can tighten the lower pandora- that evocatively named stretch of stomach wall that can enhance lumpy bulges into clear contours of the prey- he's going to get this video. He takes the masterful step of moving around to the side and peering in a window.
The glass obscures most of what's going on, but this isn't any great harship, it'll just save work for the censors back home. Since vore is legally rated as violence, videos without the 'mosaic effect' are incredibly rare to obtain in public. He gets his camera adjusted for the interference and settles in to watch.
What he sees, as he scratches his crotch and glances for any approaching cars:
First off, it's a living room. White walls, one very cushy leather couch.
The first bag is unzipped and something flaps out, an owl so singularly obnoxious he can hear her screeches of protest through the window. (This one gets his attention- there is only one legally registered prey in the area, and if Fe' is in town, the wolf must be popular. He could've sworn she ran out of resurrection-credits for the month though.) The wolf deals with her in singularly effective fashion. Those nasty little legs are grabbed and held together, with the Komodo's help, and little pocket shears neatly snip away the troublesome claws. Rendered defenseless the bird has no recourse but to squawk and scream bloody murder at the top of her lungs, even as her wings are neatly stuffed into lupine jaws. With the muffled echoes of those beautiful lulls and frictovals, the owl slips down with a flurry of feathers and down drifting to the beige carpet, glittering with saliva. A few are even plastered to the wolf's jowls. Her throat undulates gloriously as it wraps tight around the owl, refusing to let an inch of her slide back out of its slimy grip, and the squawking avian head is soon the only thing left outside those hungry jaws. Less than three minutes after starting, the wolf woman tilts her head up in the final salute to her meal, whose lumpy silhouette vanishes to add an angry, fervent twitch to her dress-coated belly. Her tongue slathers across her chops, licking up the few soaked feathers left behind.
The second bag is unzipped. The Komodo takes out a slender human girl, the gloom barely letting the lizard outside identify her as Asian, her apparently weak form draped over his forearm. He offers her to the she-wolf with great ceremony, and she gives him an elaborate bow in return- her stomach making this a very time-consuming process-before taking the girl in her arms, Komodo cushioning her admittedly slim form. There's a muffled groan as the wolf's pink tongue laps across her face, slicking her down and sampling the more powerful taste of bare human skin.
The human girl pushes at lupine teeth, the scene oddly silent compared to the owl's relentless screaming and bitching. Heat billows around her form, gurgles sounding below, as lupine jaws neatly surround her skull. Dry as she is, the girl presents no real challenge to the experienced wolf, velvety tongue sweeping across all the skin it can reach, rivulets of drool slipping down toned limbs and chest. Of course there's no real chance, and like most prey, the girl tries to ignore this by kicking and fighting despite the powerful reptilian limbs that keep her legs and arms neatly pinned to her sides. The greedy wolf feeds anyway, her meal's head slipping irrevocably into tight flesh.
Those eyes had better be clenched shut, he hopes; human eyes are so much more sensitive to the acidic vapors that escape any but the most magical stomachs. The predator's throat visibly pulses around its cargo when she swallows, but with her throat stretched by a bigger meal already, she barely has to- just let the Komodo take care of matters and slide the girl in despite all her wriggling. More drool runs down her slender legs to drip on the carpet, and with her arms sinking elbow-deep with a single playful shove, all she can really do is curl her legs and bare toes.
From then on it's all too predictable, of course. The whole length of her body vanishes in with scarcely more than a cosmetic lump in the wolf's neck. (Has to be a Lesser Holding enchantment, he figures, or the new dimensional sideswipes. The tod's form is nice and clear, hanging nearly to her knees, but the others have barely swelled it at all.) The wolf gobbles her down until it's just those odd-looking human feet protruding from her jaws, with a bracelet slid down one ankle; she teases them quite thoroughly with her teeth and tongue, her stomach visibly jouncing with the ticklish prey's squirming, before finishing her off.
The Komodo kneels before her, almost reverent, and the kitsune crawls her color-swirled self to the hem of the lumpy sundress, ducking under it. That's when the lizard's camera blinks its low-memory light and he has to fumble in a new card, cursing himself out with the devoted hissing of someone trying to hide the sound they make without lowering their voice one iota. He glances up just for one moment as he finds the card and slots it in, seeing the wolf reclining on that couch with a draconic-looking tail slithering between her jaws, nine oddly-colored tails vanishing under the hem of that dress. Cursing more vehemently yet, he looks down again to tuck the used card in the right part of the press bag slung over his shoulder, looks up again to see the wolf tapping at the window. She's smiling at him, a knowing smirk, and jerks her thumb to the front door. Scales burnishing a lighter green right through his scale wax, the lizard hustles to the front door, almost losing a zori on his way. She opens the door, his eyes start to adjust, and then she hits the light switch.
In the warm yellowish glow of the room's incandescents, he can see the beast that had just polished off an entire cadre, volunteers or not, and the full meaning of 'typographical error' thumps him between the eyes. 30th birthday? The wolf has to be in her late fifties if she's a day old. Her fur glistens not with rough, steely grey, but the distinguished silver of age, and those fiery golden eyes are more polished amber on a closer look. Most of the constants remain from before, but she's not the hungry seductress he had come to see. She's... old.
The wolf brushes at her dress where it billows over her gut, which she's carefully tucked and adjusted, to show off the lumpy mound under her stomach and the smaller, tighter knot of kitsune just above her thighs. She licking her nosepad with a delicate pink tongue lightly spotted purple. "Evening, young man. May I help you?" She rests a hand on her stomach, rubbing it in slight circles.
"You've got to be kidding me," says the lizard, his voice dead flat. It isn't steely coolness, just a frozen dismay. "This just doesn't work on any level." There was a reason why he had gotten devoured the last five interviews, you see. He manages to squeeze past her through the specially widened door frame; she turns to face him on bare footpaws.
"Oh?" She folds both hands over her middle now, head canted for politeness' sake. Something kicks under her dress.
"I mean..." He waves a hand at her form, the mask showing a few hairlines. Protests slip from his muzzle as soon as they form, his brain trying to chug through and calculate just what makes her so unappealing, picking out individual reasons. "You're old. That's just a divide-by-zero right off. You've already got a big lump, so you turn off the 'bottomless' fans, you aren't being mean enough or nice enough-"
"And yet they line up," she can't help noting.
He won't be deterred so easily. "They're just wrong!" He levels a finger at the road leading up to her house, where he knows scores of devoted prey have made their pilgrimage in her honor. His voice inches its way up, point by point. "I'm not trying to pass judgement, I mean, but I just can't dig. Out of all the preds to hit the top twenty, and I'm dealing with-"
She intervenes before the room's windows are sacrificed to his little tirade. A soft paw rests on his shoulder, the digits softer and plumper than human fingers. "And all I have to say that is, young man, you are insulting my guests by the dozen." Her grey-furred muzzle flickers with the first lines of disapproval. "Worse yet, you insult me."
The lizard knows this was coming. He forces a deep breath, his slender chest puffing out, and settles on the deliciously overstuffed couch, slinging his press bag on the coffee table with a hollow thunk of knocked-aside plastic. "I'm sorry, but as one of the last figures of reason left in the industry-" He watches his hostess as she adjusts the curtains with a measured jerkiness, just enough to convey her irritation- the wolf is just too refined to raise her voce, he figures. The red fabric gives the room a particularly rosy glow as sunset washes through the glass. He throws something out there, hoping to throw her off the scent. "You know one of the conservatives was snuffed in broad daylight? Foreign, of course, but he was 'disappeared' in the middle of a courtroom appearance. And, well, I can't stand for that, Lord only knows if he survived anything that abrupt..."
Her ears remain perked through the whole event. Once the curtains are fussed into place the wolf turns and walks to the couch, bare footpaws swishing over the carpet. "I extend my sympathies, but I cannot stand for this idea that I'm not worth a second glance just because of my looks. As you'll know, I'm licensed-" She points her muzzle at the framed certificate on the wall, an intricate mass of weight ratings, quotas, and legal-immunity cards in six languages."-and that is one of the first ten serial numbers issued. I have been devouring for longer than you've been alive. What's more, I have listened to you insult my fans and insult me, and while I may be a bit creaky, I would have no difficulty in forcing you out of my home if need be. Being a member of the press, you are guaranteed safe passage, under all ordinary circumstances..."
The wolf pauses to fix him with a particularly cold glance. "But you knocked over my lemonade when you put your bag on the table."
The lizard turns to look at the stain on the carpet, her hungry jaws leap forward, and he's good as gone.