First of all, thank you Atanor from FA for drawing the little comic animation for this chapter. Its a clever way to it it on one page.

In this chapter of her origin story Gina finally gets her first chance to take on a few small sharks and consume them. Sounds like a dream to her until reality reveals itself in the shape of venomous barbs embedding themselves in her palette and tongue. But as usual, if one creature in a predator/prey struggle is over fifty times as heavy as the other, digestion finds a way.
Have fun readig and please do comment.


3. Sharking (verb)
During the night the two orcas mostly swam in wide circles near the surface as they more or less slept. Needing to breathe every few minutes with waves washing over their blowholes meant that their brains were never full asleep. Instead they rested one half at a time. And which ever one of Ginas’ was currently standing watch over her body, it was constantly swirling around what was going to happen, if things went to plan. She was going to prove to Martin she could hunt fast and work up a thick blubber padding in just a few days so he would take her shark hunting as soon as possible. As the moon rose and fell and her insides mulled over the assorted sea life inside of them, Gina already started to put on well needed weight. Once the sun rose she made sure Martin did not sleep longer than her, like the restless juvenile she was. But both orcas had empty forestomachs to contend with and they were at an island rich in bait fish and those larger ones which preyed on them.
After groaning over letting old bulls rest once in a while Martin got moving as well and proceeded to lead her from one good location to another, switching once they had depleted the fish so much they were no longer conveniently bunching up.
“Look, my flipper is fine again.” Gina cheered, demonstrating a sharp turn while in the middle of swallowing her fifteenth jack fish. Martin just nodded, busy feeding himself, but she could see it in his eyes or sense it in some way at least, that he was very relieved the injury he had inflicted on her was healed.
“Don’t overdo it, you are going to give yourself a belly ache.” he warned her once her flanks started to gently balloon outwards from how tightly her forestomach was packed with fish, some of which was still alive, some of which were a grimy mess of scales and guts sprinkled across the fresh ones.
“You said I need to put on weight before you take me sharking, so I am cramming this belly.” she said, busy chasing individual fish now that their fourth feeding spot started to run out.
“Even if your belly can take it, your tail might not. Don’t complain about being sore when we go deep diving.” he mentioned as he watched her swim after her prey, eventually losing it since her swollen gut was visibly impeding her.

The duo continued like this for another day. Gina even managed to convince Martin to take her on a night hunt and taught her how to chase prey items using only sonar. It was difficult, it was far less efficient than hunting during the day and he refused to participate. Gina was used to having a sizeable pod around for support, always trapping prey in a ring of bubbles or cutting off escapes. This was real work and her tail started to feel sore, but she was determined to keep her stomachs busy -all three of them- at all times.
At the start of the third day at the island, she had changed visibly. Her swimming muscles ached near constantly and her lungs were feeling the strain as well, but when Martin swam underneath her he had told her she looked round enough now. Gina was happy to receive such praise. Her efforts to put as many fish as possible through her hungry, growing digestive tract had lead to a few more inches of blubber on her sides.
“So we are going sharking today?” she asked excitedly. “We are ready to go and do this last lesson before starting our great journey?”
“Gina, sharking is not a word.” Martin chuckled as he watched her jump over him and land on his other side with a loud splash. She was so full of joy and energy now. Unrecognisable from the scared weakened thing he had saved from certain consumption. It was hard to say no to her.
“Sharking is a word now. We will be spending a year together and you said you’d teach me to eat them. So we need to hunt them often so I can practise. I just put it all in one word.”
“Alright, fine. Gina, let’s go sharking.”


Gina copied everything Martin did as best she could, once they were roughly a kilometre away from shore. First they needed to breathe for a while to saturate their blood with oxygen, then they filled their lungs well and went under. It was going to be a long dive he said and they would have to reach below fifty meters to even have a chance to find the next prey of her training programme: The spiny dogfish.
“You will probably be wondering if it's actually a shark again, but as soon as you taste it you will know.” he explained.
“I don’t know how sharks taste. I never had one before. My pod only rarely takes those tiny cat sharks and when they said they were all rough and weird on the tongue I did not want any.”
“Well, there you go. The rough texture is your giveaway. Soon you will learn the tastes as well. They are pretty small, have flat heads and small fins. They will be hard to see, so rely on your sonar, like we practised last evening. But be careful. They earned their name. Each of the two dorsal fins has a venomous spine. They will try to ram it into your tongue or palate and while their venom..”
“We are starting with venomous sharks?”
“Or we can wait another year for the next thresher to pop up. I will show you how to consume dogfish safely, don’t worry.”
“How do I do that?”
“Remember what I told you about tonic immobility?”
“Flip and gulp?”
“Yes basically. With these you need to make absolutely sure you swallow them head first and use your tongue to straighten them out if needed. When threatened they curl up and then the spines go in any direction and they hurt.”

Martin continued to give her the details as they dived deeper. He repeated the most important aspects and eventually they reached a depth where Gina felt the water growing colder and the light turning more dim. All colours have vanished from her vision safe for blue and black. And still they were descending. On the first dive they were searching around. Martin taught her how to echolocate in all directions without moving too far apart or losing contact. Here she still got sonar feedback from the ground right below her as well as some animals. Fish here, some squid there. There was a bit of food to be had in an emergency but not what they were after yet. Martin took her deeper, following the slope of the ground towards even colder water and less light.
“Where are they? I can hardly see anything down here.” Gina complained.
“We should find some soon. I saw a fair bit of their preferred prey on the way down. Small crabs, squid, sea urchins. They form large groups and hunt along the bottom, so if the sonar from the ground suddenly gets a bit squishy, we likely found them.”
The two orcas pressed on. The minutes passed as they went against cold and currents.
“This is good for us. They could smell us coming if the current was at our back.”

Eventually though they had to go back up for air. All that precious depth they had bought with the energy extracted from last night’s fish, had to be wasted so they could take another breather. After a short stop they resumed their search from where they had turned around. It seemed as if there was nothing but increasingly dark water, rocks and sand, but Martin was confident they could find the venomous, tiny sharks she wanted to put in her maw. It sounded odd when she thought about it but this was important for her. A few burning stings were a fair price to pay for a full belly and the knowledge she needed to turn the next dangerous shark she met into a temporary belly bulge.
The deeper they went and the farther her blood oxygen sank, the more frequently Gina clicked her sonar. Martin on the other hand was just releasing one ping in this or that direction every now and then. Was he slacking off to make sure she finally found something, did he maybe spot something already? He seemed to be pointing in one direction predominantly now but he said nothing. Giny swam up to his side and pinged in the direction where he was going. And the ground suddenly got… fuzzy.
“Martin I think we found something. Right ahead. Some twenty meters below.”
“Good, I was wondering when you’d feel it too. It's too dark for sea grass here, so I think we found your sharks.”
Gina got all giddy when he called them her sharks. She scanners a wider area and found that fuzzy feedback to be returned by a wide area. This was it, she was finally going to sate her appetite on sharks.
“Let’s get them!” she chirped and tried to take off, but Martin blocked her way and nudged her up.
“We go get air first. It’s been nearly ten minutes again.”
“But they are right there! Let’s just take one or two and then go.” she complained.
“If we do that they scatter and we have to do the search all over again. I did not dive for half an hour for just one or two. We go up, get ready and then I will show you how to eat them. And then you can unleash your hungry vendetta on shark kind.”

With a very pouty “Fiiine.” Gina turned up, rushing towards the surface. She shook with badly tamed excitement as she breathed several times alongside her tutor. She was a little miffed he had made her turn around right in front of her prey, her belly still empty. But deep down she knew he was right. But when the time to dive back down came, she was basically driving Martin on to swim faster. Amused by her greedy excitement, he got compelled to waste probably the energy content of one of those sharks for the speed increase his eager student demanded.

“Show me, Show me!” she chirped when they got close enough to see shadowy silhouettes swimming over and between rocks, searching for small helpless critters to consume. Occasionally they heard a crunch or a slurp as a shelled or squishy snack was eaten by Gina’s breakfast.
She watched Martin head out towards the rocky field populated with little spiny dogfish. The flat nosed flexible looking sharks were hardly more than half a meter long in many cases, the biggest ones going just over a meter. Definitely an easy size for Gina’s gullet to handle after more than half a week of barracuda marathon feeding. In front of Martin these creatures looked absolutely tiny. But she observed Martin first. The venomous spines were something that gave her pause, now that she was so close to them. She saw Martin calmly swim over to the sharks. One spotted him, then another and they started to swim off. But he had his eyes on one that had its snout stuck under a rock. He then rolled over on his back, his massive dorsal fin nearly scraping the ground as he once more casually secured a shark in his jaws. The creature bent around, screeching in shock and trying its best to bite his head, a senseless endeavour with teeth far shorter than his skin was thick. But then Martin rolled back up and the shark just went limp almost as if dead.
“Did you kill it?” Gina asked, confused and almost disappointed. The two sharks she had watched him eat so far had gone down alive, one even lamenting its fate on the way down. She definitely preferred it that way.
“No, this is just how powerful tonic immobility is. It's like a switch to turn them limb for a few seconds. Once they feel the lack of oxygen they squirm again.”
Martin spat the shark out and Gina approached it hungrily, but he just nudged it with his rostrum, turning it so its head was pointing at him now and took it right back into his maw.
“Head first with these, always.” He held his prey by the head and swam up a bit so they had at least some light to work with.
“Look at the backs of the dorsal fins.”
Gina did as she was told, spotting some painful looking, thick spines with pointy tips. If those got embedded in her maw somewhere, their venom would go right into her flesh.
“Watch closely. Tongue underneath the shark. Try to cup it from the sides so you don't get your tongue stung. Then swallow very carefully.”
She watched the shadow of his tongue slide up the flanks of the dazed shark, holding it like a 90 degrees flipped second set of very soft jaws. Then he pulled back his tongue and the entire certainly spiny dogfish went into his maw. He kept it open again to allow her to watch how his tongue manipulated his prey and guided it to the back of his maw. His warm throat started to engulf it and once he had a grip on its head, the next swallow simply pulled in the entire animal with a gentle slurping noise.
“There we go, all gone, no sting. Don’t worry about your insides, your forestomach can handle worse. I once ate twenty of those in two days when I was your age and while I had a very badly stung maw afterwards, it did not really harm me.
Gina wanted to push past him and then go for one of her own before they all went into hiding but Martin wanted to go slower.
“Come with me, I will catch one for you.”
She wanted to protest his demand for her inaction, but the promise of being fed her first ever shark was making her go along with everything. She followed him like the shadow the dim light could not produce and watched him seek out another one of those dogfish. As he moved around, looking in between rocks, Gina heard a faint scream coming from within his belly, which triggered another warm sensation in hers and it was not just hunger.
“What? Where am I? Why? It hurts! Let me out.” the muffled voice piped from within the utterly uncaring bull’s digestive tract. Gina felt a pleasant shiver resonate up and down her spine and she went closer to press her head on Martin’s bulky flank where she knew his forestomach was.
“Oh you are where little sharks belong. Inside an orca’s forestomach. You were eaten so I could watch and learn how to eat your kind myself. Have fun getting ground into paste.” she teased the invisible voice in Martin’s belly, feeling mighty good for herself. Her mentor merely chuckled at her sassy attitude towards his food and went on with the hunting lesson.
“Here we go.” Martin said and rolled on his head again. He moved into a near vertical stance and then moved his maw around between some rocks. When he returned he had another squirming shark in his maw, longer, thicker and more massive than the one he had made disappear. As soon as he rolled around, this one went limb too. He approached Gina once more and this time released his catch.
“A nice pregnant female, just for you. I knew there’d be some around this time.”
“Will I count her as one or as…. “ she clicked her sonar at the stunned prey, wasting precious time. “Seven?”
“First you got to eat her. Go on. This is what you have been craving.”
Gina pushed the important question of the rules of her kill count to the back of her head and pushed forwards gently, maw agape. With a gentle slurp she engulfed the shark in her tongue as he had told her.
“If you keep contact with her snout, your tongue will mess up her electroreceptors too. That is probably what made your would be predator play along in the end.”
Gina tried it, but then felt the pointy spines on her tongue and stopped. Instead she tried to gently carry the shark’s snout to her throat like she had seen Martin do it, but it seemed she had been too slow. Right before her prey touched her throat entrance, she heard a little gasp inside her maw. Her prey squirmed and flipped around. She could only feel the commotion and not see the dogfish take on a defensive ring shape even though she was entirely engulfed in her predator’s maw. Gina just thought she was trying to flee, like any other prey would in that situation.
“Oh no, you stay!” she grunted and before Martin could stop her, she closed her maw firmly and pressed her tongue up to the roof of her maw, just like when she had been devouring those twenty something barracudas these past few days.
Gina realised her mistake when the first and then the second spine of that adult dogfish buried itself in the roof of her maw, thrust in by her own tongue. The pointy insertion itself was a painful sting but on top of that there was an added pressure of liquid being pumped into the wound cavity. She shuddered and winced in pain as the venom started to burn in her flesh. Of course this too had to be avenged and so she pressed her tongue backwards, pushing the curled up shark into her throat where it belonged. The spines broke off, leaving jagged stumps embedded in her soft flesh while around ten kilos of dogfish and her six unborn pups were sent down into her forestomach under painful complaints of her own.
“Serves you right, you cowardly nasty thing. Gosh that stuff burns.”
“You should not have been so aggressive. They are dead easy to recatch if one slips out. Next time you have one, swallow first and ask questions later. Is the pain very bad or can you still eat?”

She groaned with bitter determination and even in the shady light the hunger in her green eyes was plenty visible. “I am not letting them do this to me and then only eat one. Full of pups or not. They don’t count anyway.” she determined and then moved on before Martin stopped her again.
“I want to see you do it right one time before I let you go there and ruin your maw. These might stay in for days and are really uncomfortable when you try to eat.”
He then went on, running down another one. Gina realised why Martin insisted on getting air first. These sharks were spreading out and hiding while they were busy eating one of them and after each snack they had to look around again. Should they leave for air now, the sharks might spread out so much they don’t find them again on the first try. Marin soon returned with a new one. This one had small protrusions under its belly, so this one was a male, but that did not matter to Gina, nor did it to her belly. She just wanted its body in her foregut and reduce him to fuel for her body. Her mentor presented her with an easily grabbed flipped shark again and this time she wasted no time. Sharp pain shot through her when her second prey’s hard skin ground along the spines of her first one that were firmly embedded in her flesh still. But on her second try, with more focus, she managed to slip the slender snout of her prey into her gullet.
“Good. Now swallow. Be gentle.”
It did not look gentle when Martin had just sucked in his shark in one motion, but she had learned the hard way to listen to his advise. Her throat suckled on the shark. Some water came through its maw, probably pulled in through the gills which were still in her maw. Gina was repeating that little baby gulp in quick succession, careful to not let the spines press into her tongue. Bit by bit the shark disappeared into her throat. A faint mumbling came from right inside her.
“What? I.. where…” the shark was coming to again but before any movement was felt by Gina, her throat had successfully claimed its second dogfish.
“I did it! I swallowed it whole and alive. No pain at all this time. Can I go hunt them myself now?” she celebrated, her prey doomed to listen to her cheers as he was dumped into her forestomach.
“Yes, I think you are ready to learn by doing. But I keep an eye on you. And do not forget to go up when your air runs out.”

She had entirely forgotten that she needed to breathe and that it would take a minute to safely surface from this depth. She tried to ignore the burning pain radiating from her two venom stings and act as if her so long awaited shark prey was not blessing her ears with futile lamentations from within her belly. Yes, she would need to surface soon, but she had two or three minutes remaining down here and Martin had given her his approval to hunt on her own. With an excited, greed foreboding squee she rushed towards the rocky formations over which the tiny sharks tried to flee or blend in and hide. She snapped at a few of them, often resulting in nothing but her rostrum learning more than she wanted about how hard these rocks were.
“Stay calm, focus. Take your time and pursue one prey. One successful attempt is better than ten failed ones.” Martin instructed her as he was casually slurping up these little sharks left right and center. They did not seem to run from him as efficiently as they did for her. Or maybe he was just good at picking his targets and thus made it look easy? With her lungs slowly aching under the lack of oxygen, Gina focussed one more time. She swam over a few scrambling dogfish, gained some altitude over the commotion and like this she soon found an individual covering an open sandbank.
“You are mine!” she proclaimed, rushing at the slender creature barely a fourth of her length. In her mind that shark was already joining its brethren, curled up as a pleasantly satiating weight in her midsection. Just before she opened her maw, she recalled how to induce tonic immobility. She certainly did not want another sting. She turned around at high speed, rolled onto her back and grazed the floor with her dorsal fin. Sand was being spewed everywhere as she honed in on her prey with fast clicks of her sonar once it was out of view. She opened her maw wide and then felt the rewarding gentle slap of her prey’s soft but rough skinned caudal fin against her palette. She closed her maw hungrily and turned around, leaving behind a huge plume of sand and debris, having gained a few scrape marks along her fin and her third shark of the day secured in her grip. And just as quickly as when Martin did it, the prey went limp in her maw. Proudly she swam up, aiming to consume her prey on the way up towards the surface.
“I got one Martin! Today I start replacing all my old blubber with sharked one.” she proclaimed and in her eagerness forgot which direction the spines on her prey were pointing. She opened her maw, sucked the stunned shark in deeper and pushed upwards with her tongue, but as she was consuming her dogfish tail first the spines immediately hooked on her tongue and dug into her flesh, teaching her that it was even more sensitive to the painful venom than her palette.
“Ouch! Not again.” she cried, releasing the shark and spitting it back out to prevent the spines from getting stuck in her tongue. Gina pressed her tongue up, luckily feeling only the edges of the old spines on her maw. Her tongue had been stabbed and injected with venom which caused a sense of fiery pain and numbness to bloom out. That meant she was still good to resume her hunt and her dogfish was now twenty meters away from any cover or hideout.
“You are going into my belly.” she barked at the little shark which turned around and frantically tried to regain its bearings.
“What? No! Leave me alone.” it cried and headed towards the floor. But that was when Gina remembered another trick Martin showed her and rushed down underneath the shark, flicking her fluke and creating a strong turbulence which gripped the tiny shark and threw it around. Gina turned around sharply and rushed up at her prey, this time more carefully to not get her tongue stung a second time. She had to turn sideways to grab the shark in the correct posture. Its back on her tongue and its rough skinned belly sliding along her palette, stinging as it rubbed along the stick spines of its recently consumed conspecific.
“What.. where am I?” the shark sighed, thoroughly confused. These words were making Gina’s heart flutter. Would all sharks line her up for great teasy one liners?
“Right where you belong, on my menu.” Then she pushed her tongue up and slid the gently squirming shark backwards, committing its forfeit life to her uncaring throat. It promptly took hold of the fresh food and eagerly dumped it into Gina’s forestomach, on top of the two others, which were already suffocating in the grinding chamber. The rough deeply grooved walls folded their fins and slender tails like highly unhealthy origami, utterly unimpressed by their remaining venom spines. After feeling the fresh weight being added to her hungry belly, gaining that wonderful sensation of her forestomach expanding to accommodate more prey, Gina hurried upwards. Her lungs were telling her quite clearly that they were no longer asking her to surface, it was a stern order she received from them and sure enough she breached through the surface, blowing out a jet of spray mid air before entering the ocean again, her industrious belly first. After a loud splash Gina poked her head out of the water, breathing a few times, giving her body a chance to freshen up the oxygen reserves in her blood.
“You three have no idea how good you feel once your pesky barbs are beyond my maw.” she giggled, listening to the faint churning and desperate pleas which made it through her soon to be expanded blubber. As she rested, she pondered how much space she had left in there. She had consumed slightly over twenty kilos of dogfish now. Already her foregut had to expand to fit them all, but she was far from that stuffed state she had been after her barracuda feast.
Finally it was time to turn and dive down again. She was swimming a little faster, knowing roughly where to go, licking over the spines in her palette, feeling the thorns pinch her flesh while her digestive tract made sure their owner regretted meeting her.
“Martin, I am coming back for more.” Gina called out, getting a few clicks back from the feeding bull, so she could meet up with him at whatever location he had chased their prey to already. As she reached the spot she had caught her first ever shark at, she saw nothing but clouds of sand and debris. If each of them was a spot where Martin ate a dogfish he was really going for it and she wished she could hold her breath as long as he did. Eventually she caught up with him, finding in the middle of another tonic immobility flip. She moved up and scanned his belly with her sonar. The result made her shudder. She saw over a dozen dogfish in there and while she gawked in awe, his newest catch arrived. His forestomach was packed tighter than the schools of herring she used to feed on back home and the screams of the sharks it had not killed already were so intermixed it was impossible to understand any of them. It was amazing.
“Leave some for me please.”
“Oh don’t worry, I was just… keeping them in check until you returned. Keep feeding, I go up for air now.”
He basically handed her over that huge group of little sharks who had no idea how far they should be fleeing to get out of their near insatiable maws reach. It was basically her duty now to keep hunting, devouring and chasing them until Martin was back. Following his example she occasionally moved ahead of the hopeless sharks. This deep down the water was cold and by now their muscles were sore. Problems the much larger, warmblooded orcas did not have to fight with. They only needed an ungodly amount of calories to get by and it just so happened this school of spiny dogfish had those in spades and was unable to escape predation. Within a minute of catching up with the dogfish she caught another one and this time her technique was flawless. She managed to grab the slow moving shark by its head right away, enjoying its feeble cry of despair before she rolled over and rendered it catatonic. Then she worked her jaws and tongue in perfect unison, only getting the slightly abrasive sensation of the shark skin and a gentle prickly feeling from the spines without any injury this time. Before she knew it, the creature had entered her throat. Five more kilos of meat to help her grow into an apex predator that could give white sharks nightmares eventually. With her next one Gina got a bit greedy. The chance to strike was there, but she had no time to roll on her back. Instead she just went for it, took the shark sideways into her maw, gently so its spine could not pump more venom into her still aching flesh. Then she rolled on her back, spat it out, rolled again and turned.
“Hello there cutie. If you want me to eat you alive, just float there…. Thank you sharky.” she giggled to herself and swam forwards, engulfing six and a half more kilos of outmatched seafood, feeling a tightness spread in her belly after gulping down her fifth shark.
“If you hunted as well as you teased them, you’d probably be my size already.” Martin joked from behind her. “How is it going?”
“I just ate two more while you were gone.”
“Aren’t you full yet?”
“...No!”
“Go on then, me neither.”
“What count are you on?”
“I do not count the small ones. Just shy of twenty I would say.”
Gina shuddered. There was this warmth on her belly again, far below her three busy stomachs.
“Can you watch me please? I want one more. A big one!”

Martin was amazed by how well his lessons were working. She had seen her take down that last one and she did not seem like a beginner at all. For a juvenile her age these sharks were tricky and often painful to eat. He himself had six new spines embedded in his maw now, but at his size and with his body being so familiar with dogfish venom, he hardly paid any attention to the slight burning in his maw. Instead he went down to help Gina find another big bellied shark to devour “for him”. It took a while, being picky like this. Occasionally he pointed out individuals which Gina repeatedly declined. He did not let them go to waste in those cases, proving to her that a dogfish could travel the distance from his tongue to his stomachs in under five seconds. His decades of experience were apparent and proudly shown off.
“Look at this one, they don’t get bigger than this.” he said, nodding at an individual swimming in tight circles under a rocky outcrop. Her swollen belly was visible and whether it was from unborn pups or a lavish meal, Gina wanted that animal inside her body.
“How do we get it out?”
“I will flush her out, you just need to be fast in your attack. Wait close to the rock.
Gina did as she was told. The injuries in her maw reminded her that it was a good idea to listen to him. Then the massive bull swam by, pointing directly at the rock. Was he going to obliterate it with a ramming attack? But no, at the last moment Martin sharply turned away and once more the wild currents and turbulences caused by his fluke simply flushed the shark out of her hideout. Nearly eleven kilos of prey were just tossed about in the residual vortex. With voracious greed Gina rushed at the shark, not wanting this trophy of a meal to escape her. She clamped her jaws around the tumbling prey and once more got remembered by sharp stings why that was suboptimal. But she managed to soften her tongue and not press on the shark too hard, so the spines stayed on her prey. This time her victim was on her tongue belly down, but she had no idea this was the case. She felt her squirm and writhe, trying to get her spines to bear on Gina’s insides. She just thought this shark was for some reason not getting into that handy trance like the others. She slowly worked her prey to her throat, trying to push her in gently but decidedly.
“Did you get her?”
“Yes and she got me too.”
“Show her who owns the oceans then.”
His encouraging words made her swallow. Her prey had coiled up into a defensive ring shape and was just repeating a continuous “No, please no” as if that was going to help. Her tune only changed when Gina’s injured tongue exacted its vengeance and stuffed the shark so hard against the entrance to her throat that the prey’s spine snapped and her broken body assumed a far more swallowable shape. A pained groan grew silent as Gina topped off her churning forestomach.
“Ahhh, six down. What a feast. I think I am done now. Should we move back up?”
“You did well, but I still need some time with your new friends.”
“Sharks are not my friends!”
“That was sarcasm Gina.” he said and looked at her puzzled face.
“I will explain it to you when I am done here. What I meant is that I will remove a few more sharkies from the ocean for you and for my belly. Since we are already here.”

Once she was at the surface, Gina gave her lungs some rest. She floated at the surface, enjoying how high in the water her freshly increased blubber held her while she teased her prey for a little while. She did find out that these sharks took around five minutes to pass out in her forestomach and that they were having a horrible time in there until then. Good. But they were so busy with despair or being stunned by the electric fields of the muscles surrounding them, or the occasional acid spill from her main stomach making their electroreceptors go haywire, that they only made incoherent sounds of terror and agony. Not bad but she had hoped to have at least her freshest one talk back.
A while later Martin surfaced as well and greeted her with a friendly nudge to her belly.
“I got five more, before you ask.”
“I have six in total and you just took five more just like that?”
“Yep. Not everyone can be a swimming extinction event like me. But you will get there, I promise.”
“Thank you.” she churred, swimming alongside him and pressing her belly against his. Hers was pretty tightly packed underneath her blubber and they both heard and felt one another’s forestomachs working hard on taking apart the ingested sharks.
“How bad were you stung?”
“Me? I was stung six times and have two spines stuck in my maw. They come back out, right?”
“Hm, not great, not terrible. But yes they come back out. And the venom loses its effect as your body gets used to it.”
“Really? That is good because it hurt a lot.”
“If it still hurt me that much I would not have done this.” he said and opened his maw, letting her look inside. His palette was basically showing a line of embedded dogfish spines leading from the entrance of his maw to his throat.
“What happened to your clever strategies?”
“I am what, twenty times your weight? The same dose of venom that makes you go mad with pain quickly turns into a mere tingle for me. So I went for speed to get more prey in here.” he explained, patting his belly with his flippers.

For the rest of the morning the two orcas rested, pressing their bellies and one flipper each together in a prolonged kind of feral aquatic hug. From the outside the duo was a picturesque materialisation of adorableness, but on the inside their guts were tearing apart a several dozen unlucky spiny dogfish. Gina’s stomachs were still so small they needed to utterly obliterate a dogfish to make it fit into her main stomach. The creatine lined walls of her first stomach worked hard to achieve just that. Tough shark skin was stripped off long dead bodies and the snaps of bones made it through her blubber if they listened carefully. Martin was built differently and much larger. His clenching forestomach occasionally slid whole dogfish through a tight valve into his mainstomach entirely by accident as it was working on folding, crushing and tearing its contents to make digestion easier for the succeeding stomach chambers. But in both cases, the result was a well fed orca with a maw full of uncomfortable reminders why schooling fish were so much more popular among oceanic predators.

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