Here is the next chapter of Gina's origin. She and her mentor/protector Martin reach my imaginary version of the Azores, without humans, meaning without overfishing. Have fun reading about the two orcas getting well fed, well padded and running into the occasional violently reluctant meal.

Also I owe a lot of thanks to  DragonCZ,  Cravenex , Atanor and Dolphin Project and Ghostofyourdad from FA for helping me to get my self made drawings from something only a mother would keep to this vastly more presentable product.

5. Sea pancakes can give you piercings

Gina and Martin got on with their journey powered by “boring food” as she called it. Mackerel and squid was most of what they ate for another two days until Martin’s bigger melon picked up sonar reflections from the ground again. Gina was excited when he told her they were getting close. This meant another big milestone on their year long trip, bringing her closer to see her home waters and most importantly her own pod again. In the short term -if Martin did not exaggerate- these volcanic islands they were heading for were going to be another buffet. Unlike him she was a bit too slow for some of the pelagic fish and not skilled enough to get the drop on blue sharks that did not want to be found -yet-. As a result she had been losing a good deal of the blubber she had put on at their last coastal gorging spot, so she looked forward to seeing new creatures and learning how to eat them.
“So, what will be on the menu?”
“A lot of fish for one part. Big schools of jackfish, easily trapped against rock formations. Loads and loads of barracudas. Moray eels half as long as you are and easy to pick up stingrays.”
“I think I am tired of prey with stingers on them. I can still feel where the dogfish spine got my tongue.”
“Well, fine by me, then I will be the only one pooping glittery denticles and enjoying some shark-like flavour.”
She looked at him with a pouty kind of confusion.
“Stingrays are related to sharks, loosely. They have the same kind of skin, their meat tastes similar, but they can’t really bite you. But their stingers are actually really venomous and hurt a lot if they get you.”
“That does not sound like great food.”
Martin could almost see the “But if they are similar to sharks…” or “I do want to train my guts to process such creatures” forming in her mind, so he went on.
“Actually I think hunting stingrays will be beneficial to your shark hobby.”
“Quest.” she corrected him sternly.
With a chuckle Martin continued. “Anyway, remember how I rolled over the thresher shark and stunned it? Or how the dogfish I fed you went limp when I flipped it over?”
Gina nodded eagerly.
“Stingrays work the same way. If you trap them in a fluke vortex or turn them over before they can bite you, they will go limp. We could just hold on to one on either side and tear it in half for easier eating. Though I prefer to fold them up with my tongue and slurp them down. Preserves your teeth, you know?”
“Why would we need to fold or tear them? We have been swallowing large fish just fine. I saw you gulp down a shark almost my size. So why the trouble?”
“Oh right, you never saw them before. They look like big flat disks with a thin tail. We will rarely find one swimming unless we spook one. Mostly they think they can hide from us in the sand. While they are almost invisible, you can pick them up with your sonar easily. Locate. Grab. Flip. Lunch.”

As this consumption oriented anatomy lesson continued, the two orcas progressed towards the Azores at a good pace. Before the sun fell behind the horizon the first jagged tips of seamounts came into view, soon followed by a rocky ground that was barren in some places and covered in dark plants in others. As promised the fish density increased a thousandfold compared to the open ocean. Suddenly the trouble was not to find prey but to pick the ones most worthy of consumption. Still tired from the long journey, the duo played it safe and went for an isolated pillar of solid rock, which had been turned by nature’s good graces into a kind of aquatic buffet looking like a circular food chain. The rock was hardly visible at all because it was engulfed in a thick layer of sardines, which were being swarmed by hungry jacks which were in turn being hunted by barracudas. Now the two orcas were the new pinnacle of that hierarchy, much to the dismay of the jacks and barracudas. Using various skills Gina had learned from her own pod, she and Martin corralled the delicious fish into tight formations and difficult positions, allowing them hardly a chance to escape their hungry maws. With pride Gina realised that she was the one showing the old bull new tricks.
“This is so much easier with a partner.” he chirped between swallowing mouths full of fish.
“Were you just charging them previously?”
“You don’t get to be fancy about your hunt when you are alone. You are either faster than your prey or surprise it, or go hungry.”
Gina watched Martin swim above her, dragging several fish in his wake, tumbling in the vortex his passing fluke created. She moved in swiftly, grabbing them one by one, chittering gleefully as they lively struggling fish slipped down her gullet and landed on a bedding of their half digested brethren in her forestomach.
“It feels so good when they go down alive. Some are still tickling my stomach.” she giggled and then turned around to do him the same favour and incapacitate or distract prey for him to devour.
“Their motions don’t register for me past my tongue. But if you enjoy the feeling, you will love the eels. They are real squirmers.”
Gina looked forward to discovering and promptly digesting that species next. Her pod had been feeding on eels regularly but they were just small slimy tube shaped fish, downright boring. The ones Martin had described sounded like a belly filling challenge.

Once the two orcas had filled their guts with so many fish that the sardines were getting a break and the duo decided that the soreness of their muscles was worse than any residual appetite they might have had, they turned in for the night and rested. Like many cetaceans, they did not actually sleep, but instead rest one half of their brains at a time, swimming on auto pilot for the duration, mostly to just coast in the calm lee of a bigger rock formation while they recovered and their insides took care of the couple dozen fish they had eaten. Their scales and nutritious flesh were no match for the tough abrasive walls of their foreguts and with a little gastric juices from the main stomach spilling into the mix, the fish were literally stewed over the next few hours. By the time the orcas woke up again, all of the little creatures they had eaten were going to be nothing but slowly thickening paste meandering through their large winding intestines.


The next morning Martin woke up first. Apparently the journey had taken a lesser toll on the large and experienced bull and Gina was a bit lethargic by comparison.
“Come on girl, you are missing out on all the fun. I will go past some eel rocks on my way to the sand planes with the stingrays. But it's fine if you don’t want to come along.” he teased, waking her up successfully.

Suddenly wide awake and eager to repopulate the first half of her digestive tract, Gina took in a deep breath and followed Martin closely.
“Is there a trick to hunting big moray eels?”
“They mostly hide in holes or slither around rocks. Their eyesight is very poor but their sense of smell is incredible. Basically you always want to swim against the current when hunting them. They won’t notice you are there until you grab them. But if they have a chance to smell you, they will be in some unreachable hole before you know they are there. Then again, the big juicy ones do not always fit into the next best crack in a rock and then you get to slurp them out of there. Just be careful, some may be strong enough to bite through your skin still. They are very aggressive when threatened, so give them a good bite and a shake if they are feisty.”

This sounded a lot easier to her than the five or so steps needed for a successful shark hunt, which meant that those eels -whilst unable to contribute to her perceived destiny of eating all the dangerous sharks around her- would be an easy fuel source for her rapidly growing body. The orcas swam past tall jagged rock formations and while Martin navigated to his desired hunting spot, Gina took in the sights of the alien volcanic landscape as they drifted past groups of small to mid sized fish she would have been going crazy for just a few days ago. But as it was, her intestines still had fish paste to sift through and this made her a bit choosy, as orcas tended to be.
Fish like the ones Gina’s forestomach had pulped the other day were going into hiding as they passed through, while other more colourful ones remained undisturbed, certain of being too insignificant to gain a hungry orca’s interest. She realised that she was among the biggest baddest creatures any of these animals had or ever will see and it filled her with glee, making her slow exploration journey through the volcanic canyons all the more enjoyable as the sun filtered through over twenty meters of water with such ease it still warmed her back.

“See how I am leading us against the currents?” Martin asked. “And see the large green shape moving between the sea grass over there? That’s a green moray. Wanna go grab it? I still have some blue sharks on my flanks I stole from you.” he said with a guilty chuckle. Letting others feed first, on prey he had spotted no less, was beyond unusual for Martin but he felt like it would make her disproportionately happy and that he really had been greedy on the way here. With this much food around, he could afford to be generous.
“You are leaving it to me?” Gina chirped eagerly and swam towards her prey before waiting for a reply. The current pushed back on her, washing any kind of smell that could have warned the eel down the narrow channel they had arrived through. She kept the undulating girthy tube of a fish in her sight and opened her maw in advance to scoop up her prey. However the eel felt or heard her approach and without even looking, the fish started wiggling its long body deceptively fast. Gina’s first approach ended with some sea weeds getting caught in her teeth but no eel. But she showed the fish how determined and aggressive she could be. She kicked her tail out fast, scraping her fluke along the scratchy rocks underneath her as she focussed on speed alone. The eel was sliding over the jagged rock surface, trying to find any kind of hiding spot, but none were sufficient. Gina realised she had an advantage, this was her time to shine and this eel was easily big enough to swallow one of the dogfish which had been her biggest prey so far. Thus she was about to claim a new personal record.
Another thing she had learned from her day of feasting on dogfish was how to hunt near hard surfaces. She knew there was not enough space between her prey and the rock to fit her lower jaw, so she turned sideways and grabbed the eel’s tail in the left of her jaws. Just like the small ones back home, this eel was soft, slimy and squishy. She remembered disliking the taste but now, just a day after a strenuous journey, the fatty meat her teeth sank into were just what she needed. But her celebratory chirp was interrupted as soon as it started. Once caught the eel had folded in on itself and proceeded to bite her. Its jaws opened exceedingly wide and its pointy teeth were plunged into her soft skin uncomfortably close to her eye. Martin said something in the background but she did not register it in her sudden distress. But instinct had her covered. She bit down harder until she felt one of the long fish’s vertebrae crack between her interlocking teeth and started to shake her head up and down violently. Water friction and the shaking itself soon dislodged the eel from her face and Gina was able to turn around victoriously and swim towards Martin, teasing her prey as she sucked it down into her gullet. Sadly though the eel, just like most fish, lacked the smarts of the sharks she had eaten, so there was no useless desperate pleading coming from her food this time. However the impotent struggles soon extending down her throat were plenty enjoyable on their own.

“Good girl.” Martin praised her as he watched Gina sucking the eel deeper. It slipped over her warm tongue with ease and while the fish was beyond slippery, her throat managed to create an under pressure which effortlessly transported the squirming fish deeper. It was over a third of Gina’s body length but far thinner. This led to the creature curling up inside her forestomach after she concluded devouring it.
“Oh this feels so good. I suddenly like the taste oddly enough. It is similar to those I know but I never liked them then.”
“Probably because your body tells you you need fat now.”
“Probab-Ohhhh~ it is squirming so much.” Gina gasped as the eel was slithering around her forestomach walls. However it was not just the tickling she was used to from other fish. This one was aiming at one of the valves exiting her forestomach.
“What is it doing? It tried to move deeper?” she gasped at the alien sensation as the valve to her main stomach got pried open.
Martin chuckled and pinged her belly with his sonar.
“Eels may try to escape back up your throat. This one picked the wrong hole and has no idea he is about to land in your belly’s acid factory.” he explained with amusement.
“It feels so good.” she almost moaned as the valve meant to transport ground up fish was being passed by a more than a meter long, still solid moray.


The eel inside Gina’s forestomach was writhing around in a mix of its own body slime, fresh acids which were pumped in by her mainstomach as well as various harder to digest remains from the orca’s recent feeding. The moray used to be a cunning predator in its own right, but now, with a gravely injured tail and entirely encompassed by a massive orca’s digestive tract, it was panicking. Still, it possessed instinctual knowledge and first hand memories regarding successful escapes from situations like this. When it had been young, the eel had once been swallowed whole by a snapper and had managed to squeeze its slender but powerful body back up the predator’s oesophagus and out its gills. The fish tried to succeed like this once more, but with how badly mauled its tail was, it could only travel head first.
Searching blindly, by touch alone, inside the kreatin lined, churning walls of the forestomach was a taxing and punishing endeavour, but soon the eel found what it had been searching for. Its cone shaped head had slotted into a narrowing path where the flesh was softer and clearly shaped like a kind of upwards pointing funnel. The eel, motivated by its impending, mostly mechanical digestion, pushed forwards hard, pressing its injured tail into the tough forestomach walls in order to propel its head upwards. It managed to force open some kind of valve, thinking it had managed to reenter the throat. Thus encouraged, the fish wiggled and pushed harder, driving its entire head through the tight but widening valve entering an open space on the other side. The eel was expecting a tightly hugging chute it could slither upwards, not a chamber. The whole extent of its mistake became apparent when it slithered further, only to dunk its snout into a veritable pool of freshly generated digestive juices. The mix of powerful acids and digestion enhancing enzymes, heated up to the mammalian predator’s oppressively elevated body temperature was a nightmarish concoction which obliterated the eel’s fragile nostrils in an instant. It got an overwhelmingly strong impression of death and acidity before its sense of smell was replaced by a searing pain. Before it could react to this shocking discovery, the eel got its eyes covered by the flesh melting liquids as well. It tried to turn back now, but to its dismay, the orca’s body had decided to hasten its transition to this new, even more unpleasant stomach chamber. No matter what it did, the convulsing flesh all around it forced more of its serpentine body into this slightly tighter, slimy stomach chamber. The eel was forced to curl up, having to endure the splashing acids all over its body. Where the orca had bitten him or where its forestomach had scraped its skin, the acids had direct access to its flesh. The pain was so intense it ended up stunning the fish, reducing its desperate squirms to uncoordinated spasms as the heat and chemical reactions joined forces to essentially cook its exposed flesh in a way before dissolving it into a thick, rich paste. The more intact portions of its body fared better, but with how hot and concentrated the digestive fluids were, it was a matter of mere hours before its flesh would just slough off its bones in this hellish cauldron of a stomach. As the eel’s eyes whitened from the acid exposure and its ravaged gill filaments oozed from its gill holes as a bright red goop, the fish expired with a final spasm.


“I think I digested it to death.” Gina proclaimed proudly, as she watched Martin finish slurping down his second moray. The bull had been right and these waters were really full of easily consumable sealife.
“Possibly. Or it just ran out of oxygen. Our stomach juices are not breathable.” Martin replied as he felt eel two slide into his forestomach and onto the already obliterated remnants of its predecessor. He had played with the thought of sliding one or both of them into his mainstomach deliberately, a skill he had discovered by an accident similar to Gina’s, but he had too much prey scheduled for his blubber factory to throw a wrench into his digestive process like this. Especially now that the wide sandy planes between several volcanic islands came into view. He could not see them yet but he knew there were several tonnes worth of stingrays hidden in that sand and he planned to send a lot of them through his guts.
“How are you feeling, Gina? Is your belly well and up for more?”
“Oh yes. I think my forestomach is a bit upset it missed most of the fun, but I can definitely go for more food.”
“Perfect then. I am going to show you how to safely eat stingrays next. It's a bit technical again, but if you can master it, you will never go hungry again while you can find some of these. They can’t really escape an orca at all, but they can make you regret targeting them.”

Gina followed him closely, first up for fresh air, then down to the sand to feed.
“Are we bottom feeders now?” she asked jokingly while doing her best to copy whatever Martin was doing.
“Technically yes. But once you have a big heavy ray getting folded by your forestomach, you won’t mind that.” He then started scanning the sand with his sonar, noisily enough for Gina to copy him with ease.
“What are we looking for? It's all just fuzzy echoes from soft sand and some stones.”
“You need to look for something soft. An area too big for a sandworm or crab burrow or something like that. Things from half to twice the width of your head. Thats what we want to find. And heeere we go. Found one.”
Martin turned to the left, forcing Gina to evade his bulk and swim back to his side. He hovered a meter or so above a gentle mound in the ground. The sand was not rippled by sway like everywhere else, but smooth. When Gina focussed her sonar on that spot, she got the familiar sand reflection but then something else, as if there was sand, then water, then sand again.
“That is a stingray?”
“Under the sand, yes. If you look really closely you can see little holes where its eyes and breathing holes are.”
Gina swam around the buried ray, searching for the things Martin explained to her. She had to admit that Martin’s next prey had excellent camouflage. She would not even have bothered looking at this general area if he had not taught her to.
“Anyway, ready for the next lesson?”
“How to eat them?”
“Exactly. Remember these are basically super flat sharks. So the same tricks work on rays too.” Martin had expected to gain Gina’s interest when he described his meal like this, but it seemed he had underestimated just how much fire and hunger he could ignite in her eyes by telling her he was about to consume a distant cousin of sharks in general.
“Yes, but how do you avoid the stinger?”
“Same as you avoid a shark’s jaws. You strike close to it and then flip your prey.”
Martin rose a bit higher and then pointed his maw down. Once it became obvious to the eel that his huge maw was coming for it, the flat creature burst from its hideout spewing sand everywhere in a big dusty cloud. “Use your sonar if things get a bit cloudy.” Martin called out and the next thing that Gina saw was that his head emerged with the ray firmly gripped by his teeth. Gin could see how the animal tried to jab a sinister looking barb into Martin’s head. The weapon hung from a slim, tough looking tail at an angle but could not reach the bull.
“Then twist.” he continued his lesson, rolling onto his back, sending the ray into tonic immobility and thus safe to consume. However, that did not make the prey’s body shape less awkward to swallow.
To Gina’s surprise Matin did not hurry to gulp down his catch. Instead he released the ray, which sluggishly tried to righten itself while Martin did the same, only a lot quicker. He then grabbed it sideways in his maw, using head shakes and his tongue to line it up so its front was looking towards his throat now. He made it look easy since he was experienced and massive, but Gina, who was only twice as wise as that ray, expected to run into some issues with such a big one.
“How am I supposed to fit those?” she asked.
“Same as me. Use your tongue, fold them up.”
With some amazement Gina stared into Martin’s open maw as he slipped his tongue under the flipped ray and pulled it in. The whole thing fit onto his tongue and when he curled it, the ray got folded up into a kind of tube which was conveniently similar in shape to the throat it was soon ushered into. From there it was just one single gulp and the ray was gone, its dangerous, barbed tail sliding impotently off the back of Martin’s tongue and into his eel filled foregut.
“There, just like that. We can search them together and I take the big ones and you the smaller ones. That way we can both fill up without getting stung. If you have trouble with one, call out to me. In a pinch we can easily tear them in half, they will obviously stop stinging when they are dead. Just never ever try eating them tail first. Dead or not that stinger will cut into your throat.”
“And having that stinger in your belly is not a problem?” she asked, swimming to his side and searching for the vanished ray inside his stomachs with her sonar, where she found it between the reflections of various misaligned eel bones.
“They luckily digest nicely, just like the barbs from the three dozen dogfish we ate.”
“Ok, so I scan for seemingly hollow spaces, look for dark spots from eyes or vents, I locate the tail, grab them there, flip them, swallow them head first, repeat until full?”
“Exactly.”

It turned out that this was one more of those things where Martin made it look and sound so easy. When she searched for delicious rays under the sand, she found out that between strange plants and unexpected tiny caverns, nature found ways to present her sonar with hollow signatures. But after a few minutes filled with exploration and disappointment, Gina managed to find an actual stingray. It looked to be about the same diameter as her face but according to Martin it was among the mid sized ones in this area.
“Come on, hunt it. Your belly will get bored with that one eel soon.” Martin encouraged her.
With new resolve, Gina approached the heap of sand where she knew food was hiding. As she got closer she managed to spot a few holes in the piled up sand. There were eyes, there were larger sinkholes where the animal pulled in water to breathe. And then there was just a massive plume of sand utterly clouding her vision and getting sediment into her approaching maw.
“Get back here and let me eat you!” Gina cried after the disappearing figure once she exited the sand cloud, but the stingray refused to comply.
“How did it even notice me? I was dead silent.”
“Well you circled around it and they do have eyes.”

At least she got better at separating the sonar signatures from caverns, sinkholes, plants and actual food. A few times she managed to actually catch something but her tongue felt the mundane slick surface of a flatfish instead of the exciting rough texture of an elasmobranch. “Food is food” she mumbled whenever her flexible tongue wrapped up a horrified fish and shoved it into her gullet. What she really wanted now was to turn an elusive shark or their abundant stingray relatives into blubber and scratchy poop. But before the eating came the foraging.

After more practice and gumming the grinding walls of her forestomach with unlucky flatfish, she learned how to even separate those from the rays which just kept hiding from or escaping her. Now she had a nice specimen right below. Smaller than her first find, a mere juvenile. The contest between the inexperienced huntress and her similarly afflicted prey was on. She remembered Martin’s lessons, pretended to be passing over the hiding elasmobranch, only to suddenly tilt downwards. She was pointing right at the ray now and then rotated like a very hungry 600 kilo ballerina, swiftly securing the supposedly nasty tail of the stingray in her jaws. Gina’s hasty approach led to her ramming herself into the soft sand, being stopped rather uncomfortably, but with her struggling prey firmly secured.
“Let go!” cried the ray, not knowing this only added to her sense of success. Only very advanced fish ever talked. She still remembered muffling the begging of the dogfish she devoured as they passed through her gullet. How Martin’s pocket shark flooded gut had been basically a concert of ignored pleas. This was the final proof she had something better than mere fish in her jaws.
Both the squirms amusing pleas ceased when Gina dug her head out of the sand and turned horizontal again before doing another pirouette during which she let go of the ray, flipping it on its back and inducing tonic immobility.
“Today this cutie, tomorrow a whole lot of sharks.”
“More like in a month.”
“Don’t ruin this.” she snarled at her giggling mentor before opening her jaws wide and victoriously scooping up the stingray, headfirst just as she had been instructed. Similar to the boring flatfish and even more so to the dogfish, Gina picked up the distinct taste of a bottom feeding predator. By now she could tell by taste if her food used to crack up crabs and mussels or chase down fish in the water column. This meal would be nothing to write home about if it was not for the lovely scrapy texture that reminded her of a shark. More specifically one in her maw, destined to be reshaped to fat on her flanks. The best kind! After experimenting with her tongue a little, Gina found a way to more or less fold the stunned animal into a kind of roll and usheting it into her eagerly awaiting throat. Now the rough skin of her prey was really helping her to pull it down, allowing her convulsing throat to get a real grip on it. However as the ray peacefully slipped deeper inside, she felt its folded stinger on her tongue. The thing was long, sharp, jagged and already tasted menacing. As the stingray lost its life to her digestive tract, she lost her last shred of doubt that Martin was right about these barbs being a hundred times worse than those on the tiny dogfish.
“Good girl. How was it?”
“It could taste better but I really think passing some of them through my guts will prepare them for big sharks, like the one you ate on the way here.”
“That they will. If you need me, I will be over there harassing those beautiful fish swarms.”
“We have fish swarms at home.”
“I have no home, you silly goober.”


Animated by her fresh success and his praise, but mostly by the sensation of her forestomach emptying its predigested contents into her main stomach for chemical digestion, Gina pressed on to consume more stingrays. For the next few days they became the mainstay of her diet, at least when she was not busy helping Martin to reduce a literal vortex of jackfish into a scattered mess of floating scales, fleeing fish and six busy orca stomachs. To her great amusement, the denticles on the stingrays managed to live up to her expectations as well and they firmly scratched her on their way out before glittering in the bright equatorial sunlight. But her luck had to run out eventually, especially with all the success weighing down on her already youth impaired judgement.
“Ohhh look at that one, this one is even bigger than the one you took yesterday.”
“I think we will have to share it.” Martin said, smiling inwardly given the range at which Gina had pinpointed a hidden stingray. “This one is half as wide as you are long.”
“Sure, but I will flip it.”
“Go right ahead.”

Gina swooped down on the unsuspecting stingray. Her method had been refined over the recent days and while she was not able to just casually feed on almost anything like Martin at least seemed to, she had a presentable success rate and new layers of blubber to prove it. She dove deeper, trying to pin the massive ray against the sand. It truly was wider than her, at least two meters and there was no way to get it down whole. Martin probably would struggle to do so if he tried. Convenient stingrays were very easy to just tear in half between two hungry orcas and tended to spill their juicy fatty innards for easy picking. It seemed to go exactly like most times as she silently descended on the ray, letting her sonar guide her right to the elasmobranch’s dangerous tail. This one’s was thick enough to make a visible mound under the resting sand and a sting from this one was going to be exceedingly painful if not crippling to her. Gina opened her maw wide, ready to suddenly close it when the ray suddenly sprang to life and undulated its soft wings in wild panic.
“Oh no, you won’t!” she shrieked and kicked her tail to grab something, anything. That ray’s flesh was orca property now!
“Let it go!” Martin cried from above, rushing in to help her.

Gina was more agile than last week, more confident and experienced. She knew how these animals tried to escape capture and at least this big and strong one had a lot of area she could snag on her teeth and pin.
“I got it! I just need to flip it and then its lunch!” she chirped victoriously, trying to twist around and induce tonic immobility on the ray to make it easy prey. However her supposed snack was not eager at all to be torn apart and subsequently consumed. It put up stiff resistance and thrashed its well armed tail around like a whip while also resisting Gina’s attempts to turn it. The stingray was not vastly outclassed so turning it over was going to be a tricky endeavour. Gina tried again, succeeding on turning sideways at least but she was essentially wrapping her head in the ray’s wing, leaving it horizontal for long enough to whip its tail at her one more time.

Martin was rushing in now, having a better overview of how bad the situation was. He had seen the serrated dagger of the huge stingray’s tail barb blink in the sunlight and feared it was easily long enough to get through Gina’s blubber and pump its venom right into her muscle tissue or worse. His fears were compounded when he saw the tail swinging savagely at her and he could hear the barb cutting into her flesh right before she shrieked out. The barb had fully penetrated through her dorsal fin. From his position the bull could not see the puff of venom dispersing impotently into the ocean. He just saw his protegee and companion getting stabbed and Gina reacting by stopping her attempts at overturning the ray and just thrashing instead.
Martin arrived a moment later, scooping up the ray’s other wing and biting down hard, hearing the denticles scraping at his teeth and cutting into his gums where the flexible wing scraped over them.
“Pull!” he shouted at her and tugged the ray away from her.

Gina felt a lot better now that she could feel Martin besides her. She could not see well, covered in the writhing mess of flapping stingray but the massive bull created enough of a pressure wave to tell her where to go.
“Take this you nasty critter!” she hissed as she heard that soothing sound of tearing flesh right in between them, where the stingray’s girthiest part popped open and various entrails just plopped out like goods from an overturned shopping basket but loosely connected to the perished animal’s inside.
“Think you can poke holes into me.” she groaned and vigorously devoured the part she had torn off before going right for the juiciest insides of the now motionless ray.
“Gina, he actually did poke a hole into you.” Martin said with concern, swimming around her as she eagerly worked on hollowing out the dead stingray, forcing his liver, spiral valve and stomach down her gullet with gusto, as if to prove a point.
“Can’t be that bad.” she chirped, her mood improving as she felt her adversary’s entrails piling up in her ever needy forestomach which was all too eager to pulp them within minutes.

Martin was surprised, he had expected her to be writhing in agony now, like he had several decades ago after making a similar mistake. Then he noticed the sharp tip of the stingray barb poking out the far side of her dorsal fin, lodged into her flesh securely but with the venom clearly wasted in the water due to overpenetrating the slender fin.
“Gina, you must be the luckiest orca in the whole ocean. That barb went all the way through and none of the venom got into your body.”
“It still really hurts though.” She commented, focussing on tearing some bright, squishy thing from their kill that she did not even know what it was.
“It sure does like it would. Not sure I can get it out. I always got hit by them in the skin and the barbs just fell out eventually. No idea what happens with this now.”
“Does it at least look good?”
“That is what you are concerned with now?”
“Well, I am safe, my forestomach is bursting with juicy ray bits and I need to know if I am still pretty.” she giggled and swam alongside him, rubbing her noticeably taut belly on his flank.
“Well it is certainly unique.” Martin said diplomatically.
“I can work with unique. It will probably pale against all the shark bite scars I will collect before I can join my pod again.”
“Probably.” chuckled Martin and got to work making Gina’s leftovers disappear. After all, he too had to eat.

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