Note: this is part of the We Am Venom! series.
On a balmy evening in San Francisco, Venom the symbiotic fluffy stands atop Old Saint Mary’s Cathedral.
It’s been a quiet evening for Tom the former house fluffy and his extraterrestrial friend so far.
The Klyntar speaks up in Tom’s mind.
“You feel it too, don’t you?”
Tom nods, replying out loud as usual.
“Yus. It am kwai-et, TUU kwai-et. It feew wike…”
“The calm before the storm. Carnage hasn’t shown himself in a while. He’s going to make his move soon, I can FEEL it. And I don’t think he’ll be coming for us ALONE.”
“But we am gunna be WED-EE fow him, cuz WE nu am gunna be awone ee-fuw.”
“It’s good to not be doing this with just the TWO of us anymore, Tom. We’ve come a long way since we met in Central Park, haven’t we?”
“Yuh, we am aww da way awn da udda side of da cun-twee.”
The Klyntar sighs in Tom’s mind.
“Not what I MEANT, buddy. What I meant was, when we met, you were just an abandoned house fluffy, and I had literally just arrived on this planet, and knew NOTHING about it. I’ll be honest: for a while, I thought that fluffies were baby humans.”
Venom watches the passersby down below. The evening service has just finished, and people are pouring out of the cathedral.
They see Venom up there, but they don’t mind the symbiotic fluffy’s presence.
If they did mind, the bells would be ringing right now.
“But fwuffies wook NUFFIN wike hoomins.”
Tom’s other replies in a defensive tone.
“What? It’s not unreasonable to assume that, Tom! They’re both vertebrates! And both mammalian. Same number of limbs, ears, eyes, noses and mouths. Some humans are born with tails, right? They both reproduce the same way, too, but humans do it slower, their mating rituals take a LOT longer. And if fluffies WERE baby humans, it wouldn’t have been the WEIRDEST life cycle I’ve ever seen. Newborn Pekka are pink, hairless and VERY wrinkly, an Arachnoid woman can lay anywhere from eight to eight HUNDRED eggs per clutch, the Iyataggians reproduced asexually by SPITTING out eggs, and Matango reproduce via spores. You take a gulp of fresh air on Shroob, it’ll be the LAST thing you ever do as a fluffy. Actually, the idea of a fluffy turning into a Matango is pretty funny.”
Venom takes off, swinging away on a black web.
thwip
“Wut about da, uh, Ai-yah-tag-eee-yuns? Yu yoosd da PAST tens dewe.”
thwip
“Hey, you know Iyatagg, right? He’s in the IntergalactiX. And he kicked Bellikose’s ass in the Intergalactic Tournament. Iyatagg’s entire race merged together into one being, he can’t UNDO it, and apparently he was rendered sterile by it. So if he dies before the NEXT Intergalactic Tournament, that’s IT for his race.”
thwip
“An da nex wun am in…”
thwip
“About five hundred years, by Earth’s calender. I can’t believe we missed the last one.”
thwip
The next web adheres to a flagpole, and Venom swings around it before letting go, slinging themselves higher into the air.
thwip
“Did yu wanna WOTCH, ow take pawt?”
thwip
“Ha! I’m not picky. But I wouldn’t wanna go up against Iyatagg. He’s got the combined magical power of his entire race, and the experience that COMES with it.”
Venom lands on one building’s side, running up to the roof, and leaping from rooftop to rooftop, still maintaining the conversation.
“Su dewe am magic awn udda pwanets tuu?”
They run and talk a lot. The adrenaline one’s body produces during such strenuous physical activity and death-defying athletics is mother’s milk to the Klyntar.
“Not many. The Tennebites have their OWN magic, but they hoard it to themselves. Racist BASTARDS. Earth’s the most magical planet I’ve been to. That’s why I came here, y’know.”
Venom has not yet had an opportunity to visit the B-side of the universe.
“Weawwy?”
“Oh yeah! I was just minding my own business, floating through the cold, dark vacuum of space, just vibing, and then, as I drifted closer to this star system, I started picking up all the magic from Earth, and I was like woah, what’s THAT? So I hitched a ride on a passing rock that happened to be going my way.”
“Huh. Yu knu, Tom wuz in da pawk tu fine nummies. An wen Tom saw dat wock, an Tom saw yu ooze-in owtta it, Tom fowt dat YU wuz nummies.”
“Haaaa! Yeah, I remember that! Still, that’s the moment things turned around for BOTH of us. I was just gonna stay with you until I found a better host, but now I know, Tom: there IS no better host than YOU.”
“Aw, fanks.”
Venom lands on a rooftop, and crawls down the wall into an alleyway, the symbiotic mass retracting into Tom’s body, revealing his usual appearance: red and blue, grey eyes, a collar with the ChaotiX logo on it.
He’s gotten good at changing identities without being spotted. The true identity of Bellikose, the other Klyntar host in the ChaotiX, is public knowledge: Sarul Blao, of Zurae.
But Venom’s true identity is still a secret to most outside the ChaotiX, and they’d like to keep it that way.
As far as most people know, Tom is just one of Calvin’s many informants.
Tom waddles out of the alleyway, his other continuing to communicate in his mind as he goes.
“But we’re gonna need to stay on guard, if Carnage is going to make his move. Maybe we should swing by our Foundation room, ask Cal if there’s been any new developments.”
“Mebbeh watew. Wite nao, Tom wanna git sum nummies.”
“Yeah, no complaints here. So, what’s for dinner tonight, Tom? Or WHO? How about that all-night curry place we went to last week? They’ve always got a free meal for a couple of ChaotiX members.”
“Dey onwy fink we am wun Kay-oh-tiks mem-buw, foh.”
“Semantics, buddy. So is that yes or no on the curry? I don’t know about you, but I could MURDER a curry.”
As part of Tom and his symbiotic other’s ongoing attempts to conquer the Klyntar’s psychosomatic weakness to fire, the duo has been eating a lot of spicy food lately.
Now, as has been discussed back during Venom’s talk with their fellow ChaotiX members in that sushi restaurant, most fluffies don’t like spicy food, and can’t handle a lot of spice.
But Venom can digest all kinds of things that would completely wreck the average fluffy’s digestive system and bowels.
Compared to swallowing an abuser whole, a bowl of curry isn’t that much of a challenge, and Venom is slowly working their way up, building a tolerance for the spice.
They’re nowhere near chowing down on raw Carolina Reapers yet, but they can currently manage a bowl of vindaloo or a plate of jalapeno poppers, if someone has a bowl of milk at the ready.
Preferably chocolate milk. To the Klyntar, chocolate is a prized delicacy, just as good as brains, and chocolate only really started being a thing beyond Earth a few years ago.
Thanks to their human DNA, fluffies can digest lactose just fine, even once they’re weaned. Remember that milk bandits are a plague upon the feral fluffy population. Venom’s had to have a polite chat with a few milk bandits, convincing them to change their ways.
Victor, being Victor, has made a party trick out of eating raw Carolina Reapers.
He has a pepper guy.
He sometimes shocks people even more by putting a generous dollop of Mad Dog 357 Plutonium No. 9, the hottest hot sauce in the world, on those peppers.
He also has a hot sauce guy.
If Victor doesn’t have a guy for something, he has a guy guy.
Anyway, not even fucking Pierre can tell you why Victor’s party trick doesn’t make the scarred immortal hallucinate and start talking to coyotes, or literally burst into flames, and Pierre once attempted to calculate where that diabolical combination of peppers and hot sauce ranks on the Scoville scale.
The result he got was “ERROR”, and his cybernetics were getting a bit overheated by the attempt.
Pierre wisely chose not to try again.
Meanwhile, beneath the streets of San Francisco, Carnage, the other symbiotic fluffy, leads his horrific herd through the sewers.
They’re all identical to him, having been transformed by Carnage tricking or forcing them to ingest pieces of his other’s biomass.
“Awmos dewe. Nex dawk time, we make ouw moov, an den EV-WEE-WUN in dis sitty am gunna knu… dat CAWNAGE WUWES.”
Carnage takes a moment to laugh maliciously.
“We am gunna make awwa dem SCWEAM Cawnage namesie!”
In this case, “we” is referring to the herd, not the union of host and Klyntar.
When Woody, the fluffy half of Carnage, first bonded with his other, his psychotic mind overwhelmed the newborn Klyntar’s mind. They are, for all intents and purposes, one and the same, whether they are currently physically bonded or not. The other, spawned from Venom’s Klyntar, is simply an extension of its host now. No “we”. Only “I”.
So to speak, you know how fluffies struggle with singular first-person pronouns.
Even though it’s just one letter…
When Woody was temporarily dead, his head having been bitten off by Venom after being separated from his other, his Klyntar half escaped.
And when the red Klyntar reunited with its fluffy half’s corpse, Carnage was reborn.
In a manner of speaking…
You see, there was a price to be paid for that “miraculous recovery”.
Woody had been dead and buried for quite a while, and was headless.
And while Klyntar have a knack for keeping their hosts alive in harsh conditions, there was only so much that could be done for Woody, without somehow retrieving his half-digested head from Venom’s bowels.
So, uh… if you were to take a look under all of that red slime now…
You really wouldn’t like what you see.
Or maybe you would.
This is FluffyCommunity, after all.
As the twisted parody of a herd enters a particularly pungent part of the sewers, Carnage sniffs.
“Smewws wike cuwwy.”