>>5363205You're not all-that-hungry, having filled your stomach to the brim after you raided the Miller-Ford Building, but it'd hardly do if you somehow got hungry midway through the extraction, and you got enough free time beforehand that you might as well eat.
'Better safe than sorry...' you think, resolving to feed yourself sometime before then.
The night after your conversation with John sees you in the middle of the Bay of Konigsburg, right where the body of water opens up into the ocean. Already, you can sense dozens-- if not hundreds-- of tiny heartbeats from schools of fish all around you that keep their distance, instinctively sensing the predator in the midst of them.
At one point in time (and for quite a while after the incident) the bay and its surrounding waters had nearly been barren, no doubt a result of the particle accelerator itself. Now, as any environment self-repairs in due time, those very same waters positively teem with life. However, you're not here for small game, because there's little joy in hunting easy prey.
It's more like a feeling of knowing in your gut, rather than a sight or sensation, when the bay transitions into the vast, cavernous ocean. Of course the bay itself is fairly deep, at least by normal-person standards, but the sheer depth of the ocean, with all of its endless caves and trenches, is something you've yet to fully comprehend for yourself. Sometimes, you wonder just how far down you could swim without your body or lungs giving way beneath the ocean's pressure, but, so far as you've been a mutant, you have yet to find that limit.
Traversing further into the open Atlantic waters, the smaller fish of the bay like shrimp and bluefish give way to the bluefin and striped bass that always seem to have a constant presence.
By now, your instinct is already thrumming in a low drumbeat, already knowing what you're about to do. Much like lightning, your first victim-- an unfortunate striped bass-- has no chance to react or escape, your own body running on autopilot. Claws sinking into the scaly flesh like a knife to a slab of melted butter, predatory zeal erupts in your chest from the irresistible smell of blood that paints the waters around you in a smoky sort of red.
Like a rock rolling at full-speed downhill, a single bite is all it takes for that zeal to become a roaring crescendo, the bass quickly becoming limp as your sharp teeth make quick work of it. Viscera falls from your mouth in chunks and ribbons once you're finished with that prey, the remainder of its corpse being lost to the sea. All the while, your mind buzzes for fOoDPrEYfOoD--
You might not have been hungry before, but, now drunk on the taste of blood and flesh, your mind, moreso than your body itself, cries for more.
>(1/?) 