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Ketlan breaks apart the bark that Amelius fletchette fire has rent and their own stinger, teeth, hands, claws, furious consumptive systems have broken into.
Listen to the keening of the thing that wanted to be a diety as death approaches.
It's instictive to know that a thing of virality and pathologic profusion is not safe for consumption. In trying to intake the mass of the Bulb's last ditch effort to escape the nanopurgatives, one would consume a thousand toxins, a million agonizing deaths. It is not safe. It could never be safe. This thing must be sanitized or whole new viral strains will spawn that will seek - like all its kind - to consume and expand and take and kill the world and all the life in it, to render it down into fascilimie copies of itself.
But this little core
This mewling, squalid thing, the nexus of all that the Bulb was, where it has concentrated itself to escape final purge from the relentless mechanical workers that scour the small realms for the slightest sense of such a thing as this creature was.
This core . . . Well . . .
It does look somewhat appetizing. Grotesquely enough. Wet, squishy, chewy possible, could be good with some salt and a few spices.
One could try to eat it.
The Bulb would fight back with all the relentless cunning it has, and the risk would be infection, mutation, horrendous twisting of ones own genome, but whether that storm and hold on to ones sense of self and surely there would also aught be power here? Fecundity? New growth potential?
Or squish it and walk away and leave the dying Bulb in its decaying kingdom to be murdered by the merciless march of science and the tools that the doctors ever wield to slice disease into ever smaller parts.
The choice ... well...
>One could eat this core - it requires a Health Test, and scant few remedies could possibly assist it. The viral load is enormous. The toxicity beyond even scales for comparison. But ride that wave and master that power, and perhaps one could something. Or die an agonizing death, as the final spiteful curse of a thing spawned from the breaking down of life itself.
>More than one creature could share this meal, and then the viral load for any individual would be smaller and the cataclysmic consequences lesser. But then the power gained ... smaller again, through shared by all.
>There may be a way to prepare this thing, make it more edible, but then one would need to transport the Bulbcore along, and though it is small and damaged, such things never die easy. It would be a malign influence, ever striving to subvert its captors and escape again. Still, if anyone would know, surely, the Woodsies Ones would have the cunning?
>Finally, perhaps . . . simply . . . walk . . . away. And then the Bulb will be *sanitized* when the time comes.
