You wipe your eyes --- you were not crying, just… misty-eyed --- and you swallow your frustration before turning down the left path. You reach the rock wall and turn right, intending to reach the arch this way.
You walk for a few seconds before coming to a stop. Up ahead, a plant towers over the small cobbled path… a tall plant with several hanging, bell-shaped pods. The pods are large… maybe two feet wide by two feet high. You hesitate, looking it over… however you see one of them is facing you, and the inside looks like just a regular, if large, flower, with male and female plant organs and no visible “tentacle” thingies or hungry-looking holes. Reassured, you resuming walking, and though you give it a wide berth, you go right by.
Unfortunately, you were wrong…
Guided by the vibrations of your footsteps, one of the plant’s stems makes a sudden lunge. You yelp and throw yourself away… but you aren’t fast enough. Suddenly the bell-shape drops over your upper body, and the rim of it closes up like someone had drawn a string through it; you find yourself being lifted off the ground, the thing pinning your arms at your waist. Your feet kick frantically and your hands try helplessly to clutch at something, but there’s simply nothing to damage or grab.
You hang there for a bit, struggling… but after a couple of minutes you realize nothing else seems to be happening. Gasping, trying to stay calm, you realize that before long you’re going to run out of air… you try to control your breathing and you give short, controlled attempts to force the sphincter apart with your arms. No go…
And then, suddenly, cold liquid splashes onto you, in a steady, powerful stream. Choking, you angle your face away and try to catch your breath, and you struggle a bit… and then, in increasing panic, you struggle a lot more as you realize the liquid is rising along the trapped section of your body, climbing your belly, then your breasts…
From outside, your legs are seen to kick desperately for a while. Your hands clutch frantically for a way to open the pod now filled with digestive fluids. In your utter panic, your bladder releases, and you don’t even notice, let alone care. Before very many minutes have passed the clutching hands are reduced to quivering, and the legs are reduced to spastic jerks; then, finally, the limbs go utterly still.
Eventually, the BellGulper will have digested enough of your upper body for your lower body to drop to the ground. It will then leisurely bend another stem down to pick that half up, thus avoiding wasting any of this nourishing meal.
What a waste of a nice body, anyway, though…
