The slide by the sea 4

By Strega

"Whacha doing," said the smaller seal lion. "Lyin' around digesting somebody?"

"Go away," grunted the larger one sleepily. A suspiciously lumpy bulge in his long body suggested the smaller one was correct.  It was just about the size of the humans who from time to time found themselves stretched out in his lengthy stomach. Blubber rounded the contours but even so the bulge was clearly that of a partially digested man.

"And what's this?" The smaller one considered the smooth muddy ramp running through a crease in the rocks. The little island in the bay, an offshoot of the breakwater, was all huge boulders but this strip of mud had sprouted since last he was here.

"Some otter thing," the bigger sea lion grunted.  He scratched his belly with a foreflipper.  A gurgle made it through thick fat as his meal shifted in his stomach. The flesh was largely dissolved and the man's bones were beginning to crumble as his digestive juices ate into them. In another few hours it would be a smooth swell of bulge with no clue at all that a human was making his way through the sea lion's digestive tract.  "He likes to slide down it.  Pushed a bunch of mud up into the rocks and made it yesterday.  Now go away. You'll scare off the humans."

The smaller sea lion huffed indignantly.  "I've only eaten a few.  And all the same way you do."

Finally the larger one opened his eyes.  "Not the way we do.  The same place, but you don't look to see if anyone is watching.  If just one human sees you eat and gets away -"

"Bah," grumbled the smaller one.  "I eat one from a slide right where you do, you get mad.  I sit under a pier and swallow one who dives into my mouth after seeing you do it, you get mad too.  I'm just doing what you do."

"Go do it somewhere else," grunted the bigger one.  "There's only food for so many predators here. You're one too many.  Eat too many humans and they start looking for where their friends are going when they disappear."

Out of the corner of his eye the big sea lion saw the slightest of motions among the waves, down where the mud slide ended in the water. A glimpse of ink-dark eyes and wet fur.  "And don't use the slide.  The otter hates it when someone else uses it."
"You don't own the sea," complained the smaller one.  He looked at the muddy slide, a much easier route back to the water than hauling himself over the boulders. "Or this slide." Without another word he flopped into the muddy groove and accelerated toward the water.

There's 'Don't do this' and then there's 'I'm egging you on to do something by telling you not to.' This was the latter and the big sea lion watched with great interest as the smaller rocketed headfirst down the slide.

It was great fun, the slide.  The younger sea lion grinned as he built up momentum. He was going much too fast to stop when a furry muzzle erupted from the water. There was a glimpse of long whiskers, ivory fangs and just at the last moment, of a purple gullet expanding in front of his nose.  There was a heavy, wet thump and everything went dark.

"Told you," grunted the bigger sea lion, though the smaller could not hear him now. The momentum of the slide had driven the smaller one right down the big otter's throat.  More than half of him had disappeared in an instant and a thick column of body tipped with rear flippers twitched from a maw as the otter lifted his head.  Webbed forepaws scrabbled for a grip on the rocks as the otter tilted his nose up and swallowed.

"That's impressive," the larger sea lion muttered.  "Wasn't sure you could do it." The otter heaved his head up off the rocks, a vast bulge moving through his neckfur as he gulped. The sea lion was a long, smoothly streamlined torpedo, perfect for sliding through the water and, unfortunately for him, also the perfect shape to fit neatly down a throat.   The thick column of the sea lion's body slid out of sight into the waiting maw and though the tips of the smaller sea lion's flippers lingered outside for a moment they eventually disappeared into the corners of the otter's mouth.  The otter's muzzle bobbed as he swallowed heavily and it was over. Where there had been two marine mammals now there was just one.

In the slimy chute of gullet the smaller sea lion blinked in confusion.  It took him a moment to realize what had happened and in that moment a great rolling contraction of the otter's swallowing muscles rolled over him, gripping him and sending him sliding deeper. Though he was as large as the otter his head was already in its belly and the powerful throat muscles sent his neck and forebody sliding in after. A thick layer of lubricating mucus on the walls of the gullet eased his slide and before he could even consider struggle he slid heavily into the otter's long stomach. 

Most of him did, anyway. He was as long as the otter if you discounted the water-weasel's tail and even a stomach stretched by frequent meals of entire humans couldn't accommodate all of a six-hundred-pound sea lion.  He lay stretched out like a massive sausage in the tightly stretched gut, foreflippers trapped against his sides by the slimy stomach wall, but his back end of his body and all of his hind flippers were still in the otter's throat.  He could feel the squeeze where the sphincter that separated throat from stomach wrapped around his lower body. He'd even felt the scrape of fangs as the jaws closed around his back flippers. The tips of those still lay in the otter's gullet not far from those fangs but here he was, swallowed alive and entirely inside the furry beast.

Between his long cylindrical body and the stretched fleshy walls of the stomach was a thin sheen of fluid.  Hot and caustic, it squeezed into every crevice of his body.  He was in a stomach, after all.  Given enough time it would digest him, starting with his head and thick neck, then his blubbery body, and eventually room would be made for his lower parts to slide into the belly as well. It wasn't a long trip through the guts of  an otter, whose digestive system is best described as 'short and simple'. He'd gone as far through it as he cared to, though.

"All right," the sea lion said.  The inward pressing belly only allowed him to open his jaws a crack and his words were muffled by the fleshy walls and the dense fur on the other side of them, but he was sure the otter heard him.  "I'm sorry I used your slide and bothered you.  Now let me go and I won't bother you any more."

He waited.  There was a heavy drum of pulse moving through the surrounding flesh, and the low gurgle as the film of fluid around him shifted.  The sea lion wriggled to make sure the otter was listening, but though he wasn't so much inside it as wearing an otter-fur suit it held him still. The long tube of otter stretched around him squeezed his short limbs into immobility, the stomach trapping his foreflippers and the throat his hind ones. All he could really do was bend his long body, and his otter-fur coat bent easily with him.

"This isn't funny any more," he said.  “Hello? Mr. otter?" The thin layer of digestive juice coating his hide was beginning to sting.  "Hello?"

The only answer he received was the pressure of webbed paws pushing against him through the fur and a long, long belch as the air that went down with the otter's meal departed the stomach.

"I was talking to him," the big sea lion mocked good-naturedly.  "I think I kind of liked him."

"Don't you start," the otter grumbled.  He was sprawled out half in the surf by the rocks, his swollen body supported by the water. Slowly and with great effort he dragged himself onto the flat muddy area at the bottom of the slide.

The otter was stretched around a sea lion as large as he was, and the vague movements of his still living meal forced him to twitch occasionally.  A muffled voice made it through his pelt as the increasingly worried sea lion wondered aloud exactly when his friend the sea otter would spit him back up.

Another long belch bubbled up past the otter's whiskers.  "I should have let you do this.  You're bigger than I am."

Bit by bit the inner movements stilled as the sea lion ran out of air. By the time real fear set in it was much too late for him to save himself.  The otter burped a last time as the breath left his meal's lungs, then lay down his head with a groan. He was utterly stuffed, his long body cavity and throat crammed full of meat. Though he relied on a rapid metabolism and fur for protection against the cold ocean rather than the sea lion's thick blubber and needed to burn more calories to keep himself going, it would still be a week or more before he was hungry again. It would take him days just to digest and pass the bulky sea lion, then more days to burn off the resulting fat.

"And it was your idea," the otter complained, though of course his friend was just joking.  " 'We need to do something about that idiot'," you said.  " 'He's going to spoil everything'.  He's not a problem any more, is he?"

"Neither is a certain dolphin," said the sea lion who wasn't wearing an otter-fur coat.

"I only complained about that once," the gorged otter grumbled.  "I know why you ate her."

There was a last twitch inside him and the smaller sea lion was still. It was the biggest thing he'd ever swallowed but an otter is a metabolic furnace. Already his gut gurgled and churned as it began to dismantle a meal as large as himself. It would not be a quick process but the swallowed sea lion wouldn't get back out of the otter the same way he got in. 

It was impossible to get comfortable and the otter slid back into the shallows. Here at least the water supported most of his weight, which was twice its usual thanks to a belly full of sea lion.

"My goodness," chittered a voice behind him. "What happened to you?"

The otter's ears went up at the sound.  With a flip of a webbed paw he rolled over in the water and found himself a body length from a dolphin. A female one, he was sure from the voice. She even looked familiar, though maybe that was just all dolphins looking the same to an otter.

"Ate too much," he said.  He felt his swollen body with his forepaws.  He could feel the shape of the sea lion. Here was the head, here were the ears - one difference between a seal and sea lion is the latter have external ears. Here was the neck, here the shoulder joints, all still solid, undigested thus far. Even the flesh, though that would soon change. It would dissolve first, the bones following in their own time.

He looked up and discovered the dolphin was gone.  "Oh well," he muttered, then jumped as something underwater prodded the bulge.  It was the dolphin, also feeling the long lump with her beak.  His eyes widened as her beak explored his lower body and only his full belly kept blood from rushing to his loins.

A moment later she resurfaced. "A whole sea lion," she chittered.  "No wonder you're uncomfortable.  Serves you right for being greedy!"

The otter grinned.  "I know. Normally I eat smaller things."

She looked him over, perhaps wondering if 'smaller things' included dolphins.  She was bigger than the previous female though, about his size.

"You are cute, otter," she chittered. "But too full to play. Maybe I'll come back in a few days and we can go for a swim."

"I'd like that," purred the otter, and watched her swim away. He waited until she was well out of sight before looking up onto the rocky island.

"You better not eat this one," he yelled, and the big sea lion smiled.