This is the start of my new orca character's origin.
Gina accidentally started when several people expressed their interest in a random shark eating orca I used as part of a silly little vore chain my friend Atanor Atanor and I did as a joke. (se here: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/54351676/) She then turned into a massive project as two marine biologists and three artists ended up helping me create a character from scratch. I planned on writing a 7-10k story for her origin.... Her WIP is 15k already and I am only half through my todo list. Essentially it is one of the biggest aquatic training montages I suppose. Anyway, here is chapter one with some Art from Atanor Atanor

1. Lost and found
It was a dark, rainy day but Gina and her pod were still close to the surface, braving the tall waves and eagerly feeding on the fish that struggled with the conditions even more. At three meters length the young orca still had a lot to learn, even though her digestive tract had seen thousands of fish come and go over the years. Or parts of them at least. It seemed to pay off at first but as the hours went by and the stomachs filled up, the adults were more and more occupied keeping the calves together or lifting them up so they could breathe in spite of the waves which tended to be taller than the youngsters were long if the wind whipped them up hard enough.
In this commotion, as the worrisome winds grew into a full blown gale, Gina ended up struggling with the ever stronger currents and mercilessly beating waves. Sometime she tried to pull in air and then dive down like she had been told to but as her blowhole opened, a foamy swell of water washed over her, leaving her coughing and spewing up spray. She grew weaker, frightened of drowning. The young orca cow only knew one objective once the thundering storm and confusing swell prevented her from hearing her pod’s calls. She simply needed to survive, somehow.

It took several hours for the storm to pass but it felt to Gina as if it had been half her life. She kept circling around in the cold darkness. Equipped with enough blubber that used to be hundreds of Atlantic salmon and cod, she was well insulated, but the oppressive loneliness was enough to make her shiver as if she was about to freeze. None of her calls were returned. There was no one. Nothing but her, the calmed sea and the stars. She tried to rest, but neither half of her brain agreed to switch off to recover. She was kept running by anxiety alone, hoping the sun would rise soon and help her find a familiar shore to swim towards.
After another eternity of continuous swimming, instinctually heading towards a slight heat gradient she hoped would mean coast, the sun rose again and allowed Gina to spyhop and take a look. If she could she would have cried as she saw nothing but blue all around. Pale in the sky, steel grey everywhere else. Not even a thin line of rock on the horizon, even as she mustered her last strength and jumped entirely out of the water to look from up high. As she landed she realised the warmth she had felt might be from one of the open ocean currents her grandmother had told her about, which meant she was even further away than ever before in her life and had been moving away from home too. As the bubbles vanished, and she clicked her sonar hoping to find clues that way, she realised the splashing might have been a bad idea. A minute after landing she picked up a signature about her own size. She called out to it but got no reply. She later found that there was no echo of hollow lungs in the bounceback of her sonar either and in spite of her clearly cetacean noises, the signature approached. There was only one type of creature that would do that.

From the haze of the deep blue water, an oceanic whitetip shark emerged. She was roughly the same size as Gina and circled around her elegantly at a reasonably close distance.
“A lone orca out here? A young one too?” she asked in a cold, thoughtful voice. Her slitted amber eyes were calculating and frigid as they darted over Gina’s body as the shark clearly measured her up. But what for?
“Yes, I got separated from my pod by a storm. I need to find my way back.” Gina replied.
“Are they very far away?”
“I have not heard their voices in days.”
At that the shark came a bit closer, allowing Gina to see the tips of her serrated teeth. Even though she was girthier than that shark over all, she had the bigger, scarier jaws.
“Do you know the way back to the shore?”
“Sweetie, at this point you would have to tell me what continent you even started from.” the shark snickered, clearly amused by the whole situation. And slim though she was, the shark looked frightening and very hungry.
“I don’t know.” Gina replied. I typically just went along with my pod, always on the same route between two landmasses.”
“I have been to a dozen places that fit that description.” the shark chuckled back. “Tell you what. You go look for your pod and I will just stay right behind you.”

Gina then moved on, feeling uneasy with the large shark always shadowing her. But what could she do? One good bite from that one could leave her crippled, hundreds of miles away from home. The more time passed, the more Gina realised the shark was not being friendly. Whenever she came close to catching a fish, the oceanic whitetip shot past her like lightning and devoured whatever she had laboriously tracked and chased.
“Stop that, that was mine!” she complained, like she would within her pod.
Always the shark merely chuckled, moving back into the shadows below the inexperienced orca, biding her time, watching Gina grow weaker and slower. Even with a depleted layer of blubber, that orca was going to turn into a feast for days as soon as she ran out of steam. Eventually. Inevitably. The right time to show her hand and actively prey on the big cetacean was slowly approaching.

Days passed and Gina grew increasingly anxious of the shark who followed her ever closer. Furthermore the predator stopped replying to her at all, seemingly ignoring her, just biding her time as Gina grew more tired and stressed out. Eventually the orca decided she needed to lose the shark, escape from her somehow. She had seen her jaws slice a big fish in half without any effort at all, so she decided to not fight her with how weak she felt right now. Instead she swam faster, trying to get away. To her dismay the shark matched her speed. Panic set in and the frightened young orca screamed for help in desperation, going as fast as she could but each time she looked the shark was right there. Gina demanded everything it got from her body because she did not want to find out the hard way if the oceanic whitetip was just trying to tire her out still, or already looking to get a crippling bite in on her fluke.


Not far away, Martin was drearily continuing on his voyage to an island group he needed to reach for his yearly migration cycle. As a very big loner of a bull, he needed to switch hunting grounds every now and then whenever he used up all the abundant prey he could catch without the help of a pod. Sadly for him, these were typically separated by hundreds if not thousands of miles of open ocean. The occasional sick dolphin or a sleeping blue shark here and there kept him alive on these strenuous expeditions, but it was always a daunting task which required a very prudent use of his body’s resources and thorough preparation. Preparation meant to become the embodiment of voracious greed for long enough to pad his body with enough blubber to go a week without food if need be.
When he suddenly hears a terrified call in an unfamiliar dialect of orcid speech, he paused. Was he hearing things now? Then he heard it again. There was clearly a distressed orca nearby. Someone from so far away he did not know their call sign or some of the meanings of their squeaks and chirps. But the voice clearly feared for its life and pointed out a predator. Another loner, like him. Lost? Abandoned? Martin turned around, his several tons of swimming muscles warming up quickly as his blood started flowing and his tail undulated, moving his over two meters broad fluke rapidly as if he was on a hunt.
“Come towards me, I will protect you.” he called out and focussed on his swimming. His ten meters long body allowed him to cut through the water far easier than smaller creatures, such as the ones he saw in the reflections of his sonar pings. He had no clue what an adolescent orca was doing here, on their own and he was not sure if he could chase off the attacker in time.
Luckily for the cetacean half of the encounter the smaller orca had enough strength left to rush towards him and the massive signature following the young female turned out to be an oceanic whitetip shark, the sonar reflection greatly exaggerated by the -former- predator’s long pectoral fins. Martin’s three empty stomachs suggested a course of action and the rushing bull wholeheartedly agreed. If he was not able to devour that cheeky pelagic shark by himself, he would have someone closeby to help him tear it up at least. Locked entirely on several times its weight in meat and blubber, the shark failed to see him approach from the lower front. He would have to get dangerously close to ramming his fellow orca to make the attack, but it was necessary to not endanger himself and to avoid giving the shark a chance to show just how much damage its serrated teeth could inflict on a fluke in the seconds Martin would take to turn at these speeds.
He opened his great maw, closed his eyes for protection and waited for the impact. The crash was thoroughly painful. First rough pectoral fins slapped the edges of his maw and then the shark’s firm snout impacted his palette, his prey’s rough skin sheering off a good deal of skin as it skipped off the roof of his maw and momentum carried it right down towards his throat. Usually Martin loved it when food moved so “cooperatively” but this shark acted as much like a dangerous missile threatening to break something internally as it became his fastest calorie intake ever. The pain of his breached throat entrance and the resounding hit of his long dorsal fin on the orca he tried to save reached his brain at the same time. He fretted over two questions. Did he just hurt rather than protect? And was he going to die from food induced damages in a humiliating fashion?
His questions were put on the backburner as he felt his prey thrash and kick. His decades of shark eating experience kicked in and without even thinking, he turned on his back and swallowed hard. The shark was put into tonic immobility and on top of that the clenching throat muscles overloaded its electroreceptors, stunning the creature entirely. The lean muscular tail which had nearly brought death bringing teeth in contact with that poor young cow was now harmlessly swaying from his maw, moved more by the water than the muscles Martin fully intended to introduce to all of his digestive organs rather swiftly.


Gina was tumbling even more than after her ill advised breach. Bubbles were clouding her vision, the hope inspiring calls she heard before were gone but she had seen a dark shadow rush past her. There had been a violent slap on her left flipper which still ached when she turned around. Relying mostly on her right one turn her half ton body, she was just in time to take in a life changing view. She felt as if lightning had shot through her nerves. The burning ache in her tail was gone, the pain in her injured flipper just some memory as she saw the largest bull she had ever encountered drifting in front of her. His dorsal fin was nearly as long as her body and all she could see of the shark which had nearly turned her into a streamlined buffet was its rear half calmly sliding into her saviour’s body. She was still shocked that this thing had found her. That it had dared to chase her despite being lighter than her. She still remembered the fierceness of the oceanic whitetip, the look of its fully weaponised body, how its pectoral fins had angled down and its caudal fin had turned blurry from the speed of its beating. Every gram of that creature had been optimised to roam the blue wastes and consume every creature it encountered, including Gina. And now she was drawn to it, slowly swimming towards that shark instead of fleeing from it. Why? Because it had been rendered helpless, reduced to prey itself. The revelation that something that would fuel her nightmares could be food was shocking and exhilarating at the same time. With captivated fascination she swam past the bull and watched him feed in this unusual position, using her eyes to engrave every flex of the shark’s seemingly disabled body as it quickly disappeared. Helped by her sonar she could observe it following a deep, elastic gullet inside her fellow orca, one maybe even capable of engulfing her, if she wanted. It took her until she saw his maw close, his lumbering body turn right side up and to hear the shark’s rough skin slip over the competitively hard surface of his forestomach until she believed the danger had passed. Well, more than that. It had been vanquished. Consumed.
“I want to be like you when I grow up.” she chirped, before shuddering and remembering her manners. “I mean. Thank you. You saved my life there. My name is Gina. I was lost in a storm and… You are bleeding!”

“Is it bad?” Martin asked, slowly getting his bearings and counting his various aches while his belly laboured to accommodate a shark longer than his body was wide. With the vertical alignment of his forestomach, accommodating one of the largest creatures he had ever consumed whole, was a challenge on his own. He opened up his maw, hoping to hear that he was not going to bleed out. What he had not expected was the young cow freezing up again.
“I am not going to eat you, just tell me how big my injury is.” he rumbled. What he did not know was how the presentation of his empty maw sent another jolt of excitement through his new acquaintance. She was looking head on into a maw wide enough to fit half her body without touching anything. Mere seconds ago it had housed a shark willing and capable of ripping and cutting her well beyond recognition in under a minute. And now it was empty. The maw was just a pink chute centered around the folded flesh of a tightly closed off throat. The exact one which had given her pursuer its due and dumped it in this great bull’s forestomach to be ground into indistinguishable elasmobranch stew.
“Sorry.” she said, shaking to wake her brain back up. “There seems to be a lot of skin missing from the roof of your maw. It is bleeding quite a bit. I hope it is not too painful.
“Smaller sharks than this one have done far worse to me.” he hummed, a lot more relaxed now and licking over the wounded roof of his maw. “My name is Martin and I hope you are well too. I see you are still in one piece. I did not hit you too hard, right?” he asked, swimming around her protectively, checking on the young cow even though they had just met.
“My left flipper hurts a lot, but I can still move it.” Gina said, demonstrating the function of her battered limb with pain written on her face.
“Alright, tell me if you need help getting to the surface for air. I suppose you are hopelessly lost given how strange your dialect sounds.”
She nodded, sticking close to him, seeking protection behind his massive body as if she was a scared little calf again. At the same time she could not help but letting her eyes and mind wander over his midsection. That vast round, slightly expanded belly was holding the still living shark that chased her here.
“Will you bring me back to my pod?” she asked hopefully. She knew that was asking a lot but then again he had thrown himself at deadly jaws half a meter wide for her, consuming them and their owner.
“Eventually. I am afraid I would have to figure out where to go and then get you there. You look pretty thin for your size. Were you lost for a long time?”
“I don’t really know. There was a storm and then I… it felt like I was swimming forever.” she said, feeling her empty stomachs voice their painful demands to be fed, now that she was safe again.
Martin hummed and asked her many more questions. Was the water warmer than in her home? What did she usually eat, did she see land frequently and more. Once he got his answers he knew that her pod was living pretty far away and in a way he was unfamiliar with. More or less localised fish eaters who occupied and remained in a limited territory in a mid sized group. He on the other hand roamed the oceans alone, making stops on his endless migrations to deplete this reef full of large fish or that seal populated rock before moving on to the next prey hotspot in a never ending cycle.
“I can bring you back to your pod, but I cannot turn around here. I need to stay on my travel route in order to survive. It is the only way I know how and making a huge detour to deliver you requires preparation. I would need to pack on blubber for that, in case I can’t hunt well on the way to and from your home. Do you understand that?”
Gina listened carefully, only distracting herself occasionally by listening to the hard sounding grinding noises coming from Martin’s belly or pinging his guts with her sonar, clearly seeing the shark being folded in unnatural ways without much resistance. Why was it not fighting back? It could not have drowned this fast.
“Gina?”
“Oh sorry. Yes, I do. I need to follow you around for some time.”
“For one year.” he added, bracing for her despair.
The young orca was taking a while to process that. At her age, one year sounded like an eternity. He could have said a decade and the difference would not have mattered much to her.
“So long?!”
“It is the only way I can guarantee our safety. I will take care of you until then, unless you find a pod you want to join on the way.”
She shook her head. “I want home. I want my own pod back.” she lamented and slowly came to terms with her fate.
“You will keep me safe until you can deliver me home?”
“Yes. If you just stay near me, nothing will attack you again. All you need to do is follow me and my instructions. I am not great at raising young ones. I have lived as an outcast for decades now.”
“You were thrown out of your pod? Why?”
“Because I kept doing this.” he replied shortly, rubbing his shark filled belly with his flippers.
“But, that was amazing! You just ate the whole thing. It's never going to hurt anyone ever again.”
“Not unless its denticles scrape on the way out?”
“The what?”
“Sharks have tiny teeth on their skin. It's what makes them tough. And they pass through for the most part. Anyway, my elders did not like that I ate my prey whole. They insisted on sharing larger sharks and rays we caught. Everybody helped in the hunt so everybody should get a piece of the prey. As a result those same skin teeth had worn some of my podmates’ teeth down to the gums. All of the old ones had just a few teeth left and were in constant pain whenever they fed. That scared me. I made my decision, they made theirs. I did not fit in so I had to leave.”
Gina pondered his words for a while.
“Can you teach me that?”
“How to piss off your family so much they want you gone? I don’t think I should.”
“No. This.” she replied, swimming closer and nudging his taut belly with her head, massaging it, feeling the firmness of its cramped stomach compartments, the slow contractions of the grinding forestomach.
“If I am to live with you for a good portion of my life until I can return home, I want to learn to live like you do. Next time a…. Next time one of these wants to bite me, I want to eat it myself. I want to eat them all!” she exclaimed with growing excitement. It was clear that her near miss with a very violent death had left a deep mark on her and watching him had delivered her something she had lacked before. A goal and a purpose.
Martin saw her resolve and it reminded him of his younger self. He had been all alone back then having to figure all of this out at the peril of his own life. Now there were just two options he could choose between and those were abandoning that ill prepared hungry girl or to take charge of her, gain the company he so frequently craved and make sure he would return her to her own pod healthy and equipped with the skills to survive in the unforgiving open ocean on her own. As she gently rubbed against his full belly he realised how much he missed such touches. Even though they were just the innocent curious rubs of a juvenile, it did fill a void in him. He was being appreciated for the first time in months and likely would continue to do so for far longer than usual. Encounters with other orcas hardly lasted more than three days and ended once he was done liberally distributing his genetic information among every receptive cow at his disposal. A ten meter long bull that could boast of having once devoured a white shark close to Gina’s current wright was a curious novelty, a very desirable breeding partner but nothing any matriarch would ever accept as a new podmate.
“Martin?”
“Yes.”
“Yes what?”
“Yes I will take you with me and teach you.”
Her eyes gleamed expectantly and he knew he should add a little more.
“By the time you see your pod again you will know how to make sharks behave on their way through your digestive tract.”
That sent her dancing around her as much as her injured flipper allowed and sure enough she decided to be the best little student the big bull ever had. She had no idea she was the first one.

“Alright, first we need to make a little detour and get you fed. I was in the middle of going from one hotspot to another but you can’t make such a long trip without getting a good meal first.”
“But why? This will make the whole journey take longer, won’t it?”
“Yes it will. But I know I have enough blubber to survive ten days without food. I know I can dive hundreds of meters deep to go after squid if all else fails and I know that I have more speed and stamina than the most common sharks and large fish on our route.”
Gina pouted but even though her inexperienced brain told her this should just be a quick run of her learning to eat sharks, hurry Martin along and get back to her pod as a proper apex predator. But then her empty stomachs growled, her previously aching muscles now freezing a little from lack of activity and protecting blubber. Her mind was restless, eager, hungry, but her body was weakened, injured, exhausted and also hungry.
“Fiiine, we will go back a little and get more food.” she sighed, as if she actually had a say in the matter. In truth, Martin was her interim pod now. She would go where he went because that was where food and safety were. “At least I will. You just ate a shark my length.” she added more brightly.
“I sure did.” Martin chirped, proudly showing off his round belly where only her sonar was able to tell her that its insides were thoroughly occupied. “However these slender oceanic sharks are not very heavy or nutritious for their size. I will have to eat again today to maintain my blubber. And usually on my migrations this just won’t happen. That is why we need to gorge on a nice spot, get a bit chubby and then head out. It will take us two weeks to get there at my usual pace.” he explained with a concerned look. Though it was heartwarming to watch Gina’s eyes light up at the mention of gorging. She must be truly famished

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