I wonder where ‘Polly Want’ is going to end up. Maybe 7,000 words. It wasn’t in all that bad shape to begin with, tell truthful.
It was difficult for Blid to express why the videos Kuiz had sent him scared him so. It wasn’t the blood, although most Terran animals seemed to have quite a lot of it. The blood, in fact, made the videos feel like things from a bad stabber movie. He almost couldn’t take them seriously, even though Blid knew perfectly well that the footage was real.
Besides, simply videos of animal attacks themselves weren’t terrifying. Nasty, sure — but Predators on his own homeworld ate prey all the time, after all. When it was deathworld creature against deathworld creature, Blid had no standard of comparison. He couldn’t even get a good feel for the sizes of the creatures involved. When a [wolf] caught a [rabbit], how big was either, really?
But that all went out the window when it was a [bird] video. Any [bird] video. Even the one showing an adult putting worms into its spawns’ blindly-snapping mouths… that one woke up Blid, his lung burning, and him unsure whether he needed to call for an ambulance or a sanvac shuttle. In the end, he just settled for vomiting in the toilet and going back to fitful sleep.