Messing with Magic 2

Chapter 12

     Twilight landed next to a large tree in the Everfree Forrest. Once she landed Tom slithered off of her neck and moved toward the tree.

"This is it," he said quickly before moving toward the tree.

"Hey!" Twilight shouted grabbing Tom by his tail. "Do not leave me out here understand."

"It's not going to be open for much longer. If you stand there yelling at me neither of us is getting in. You're going to have to trust me." Twilight begrudgingly let the Raccni go and he slithered into a knot on one of the tree's roots. After a few seconds of waiting a loud click could be heard and part of the ground near the tree slid open revealing an entrance to the large network of tunnels used by the Racci. Twilight peered inside and could vaguely see Tom partway in to the tunnel a green light emanating from his tail. "Alright come on," Tom beckoned. Twilight stood at the entrance of the tunnel nervously. "You gonna stand there all day or come in here and get the anti-venom." Twilight nervously entered the tunnel and followed Tom down several different twists and turns, as they walked torches on the wall next to them lit up in a green flame leaving a nice visible trail back to the entrance. From the light of these torches Twilight could see all of the different branches of the tunnels and how they seemed to go on forever.

"Wow!" Twilight said amazed. "These tunnels must go on for miles."

"They actually go under most of the planet," Tom said proudly. "But typically we only use one section at a time we don't have the numbers we used to so we can't use the whole network."

"How long have you been here?" Twilight asked.

"Longer than any of us alive care to remember." Tom took a turn into a small chamber that was filled with several empty shells. Tom's tail lit up again and he pulled one of the shells on the top down with telekinesis magic. It was very similar in appearance to his first shell with only minor differences mainly shorter legs and actual wings on the back. Once it was on level ground Tom slithered inside it, a green glow shone from the inside and he suddenly gained control of it. Twilight looked embarrassed like she shouldn't have seen that. "This one should do fine for now," Tom said getting used to the shell. "Come on it's just a little further." Twilight followed behind Tom as he continued to lead the way. "Everyone else is probably already in stasis so there shouldn't be anyone around to stop us from grabbing as much of the stuff we need."

"So you go into stasis? For how long?" Twilight asked out of curiosity.

"5,000 years is the standard time between activity cycles," Tom stated. "This one will probably only be 1,000 though we didn't get anything before out cover was blown."

"What do you mean by get something? Are you a predatory species?"

"That's one way of putting it," Tom said plainly. "We feed off of life force itself. We don't actually eat anything. We steal the life force from our prey and use that to stay alive. We can stretch one year of life force for you into 100 for us, even longer while we're in hibernation."

"Interesting," Twilight said pondering. "Feeding off of pure life force, that's incredibly unique."

"It's an old planet," Tom commented. "We're an evolutionary hold out from a much different time. We weren't exactly the dominant species back then, it was some race called metroids I think, so we decided to stockpile our life force so that a couple thousand of us could ride it out so to speak, wait for a time when we could rise up as the dominant species."

"Something tells me that didn't work."

"It took too long that was the problem. It was 50,000 years before we could safely claim the dominant species role, but by then we were down to only 500 of us so we couldn't repopulate sustainably. Ever since then we've just been taking what we can each cycle enough to stay alive."