Into the Dolphin's Maw

Into the Dolphin's Maw

It started out innocently enough. A day at the beach, some time to relax, and fun to be had. Then it got weird. Many of the human spectators got up from their beach chairs and turned to look at the rather small beach-goer. Sparky was just a seemingly average pikachu. A bit smaller than the rest of his peers at just 1 foot tall, he had come to do what the other beachgoers were already doing: taking in some sun, and later planning on a little swim. An eyebrow or two raised as he put down his beach towel and looked towards the water. He smiled, knowing that it would be the perfect day. Sunny without a cloud in sight, hot but not overwhelmingly so, and the surf seemed perfectly calm.

He laid on the beach towel, put on a spiffy-looking pair of shades, and began to rest, basking in the sun and its warmth. He dozed on and off, and nobody seemed to pay him much attention save for the occasional glance. Soon, he felt aptly baked, got up, took off the shades and looked around, noticing that thing were just a bit bigger than he remembered them being. His towel had grown to a fairly large size, as had his swim trunks. It took him a second, but he realized that it wasn\'t everything that grew, but him that had shrunk!

\"Doesn\'t look like anyone\'s here at the moment...\" he muttered to himself, but then he was taken aback as he realized something else: all the humans around him had shrunk down too. Many of them were already dashing away from the beach, only to be taken by various gulls. Sparky could hear the screams of the human buffet as each one was picked off by a seagull, the gulls sometimes taking more than one at a time. They moved quickly from person to person, gobbling hungrily and ending lives left and right.

The tiny \'chu panicked and quickly ran away, making his way to the only place not blocked off by the gluttonous gulls: the sea. None of them seemed to notice him yet, so he kept running. As he made his retreat towards the sea, something else was going on not too far away...

Somewhere near that same coastline, a dolphin had been pursuing a school of fish in hopes of taking a quick meal or two. Using a strategy taught by its mother early in life, the clever marine mammal was closing towards the shore in hopes of \'beaching\' itself to take the hapless fish into its mouth. It would then use the ebb and flow of the tide to take it back to sea, and otherwise it would just sort of flop back into the water. Now it prepared for the meeting of the shoreline, and it beached itself...

At that same moment, Sparky was headed for the shoreline. Fish began flopping out of the water, some narrowly missing him as they flopped around to avoid being caught. Now, Sparky was surrounded by a gigantic maw and an impressive set of conical teeth which could only belong to the friendly and playful dolphin. At his size, though, the dolphin didn\'t seem like a very innocent creature. It was hungry, it had been pursuing fish, and now, there was an easier target waiting inside its mouth. It snapped its jaw shut and began to struggle a bit; it had overshot the tide a bit, and now it had to struggle some to get back into the water. As the dolphin made its way back into the ocean, several seagulls now focused on the struggling fish, which they ate with much gusto.

Meanwhile, Sparky was quite intrigued at his new setting. The tongue quivered at his touch, taking in his flavor. He was moved to the bottom of the tongue, presumably for further tasting. His surroundings seemed to move a bit as the dolphin took to the water again. The tongue lapped and lied all over him, covering his entire body in the drool of the big marine mammal. Moments later, it flipped him back up onto the tongue, and began moving him to the back of the throat, which slowly took him into the gullet. The flesh rippled around him, and gradually it took all of him in and began pushing him towards the greedy stomach. He arrived just seconds later in a dark and slimy room. It was covered in fish scales, and had just that sort of scent about it. He didn\'t question his new position, nor did he opposed it. There wasn\'t much he could do now except become food for the big, \'friendly\' dolphin. Sleep seemed to dawn on him again, and in time, he would fall into an everlasting sleep.

The dolphin, having satisfied its appetite for a new type of fish (or what it had thought to be a fish, anyway), swam to rejoin its pod to help them find some fish. \'If all of the fish on land were as good as that one,\' it may have had running throught its mind, \'then I should probably lead my pod to more of those!\'