I've chopped down a tree. Nothing out of the ordinary, and yet I'm faced with a choice every time there's a dead being - whether it be a plant or an animal - before me: do I eat the thing or let it degrade and turn into nutrients for future plants, which I will eat to get even more sustenance once they grow up.
Trees are made from wood, obviously. Fresh wood takes fifty to a hundred years to decompose, and there's no way I'll be staying on the island that long.
Then it's decided. I get to have a meal today.
I raised my right arm, focusing on the white plasteel blade encompassing it. It's easy to shapeshift plasteel because it's a malleable metal, but that is also its downside. Because of how easy it is to flex, striking an object that is too hard could bend your blade and end up doing minimal damage to the target, but I'm getting sidetracked.
While shaping half of the blade into a meter-long needle, I made sure to line the other half along my arm and up to the elbow. Many Vagabonds who fail to do so get ambushed with their feeding needles, which are a poor choice of weaponry both for defense and offense, as they could easily snap or bend because of their hollow structure, essential for the passage of nutrients.
Of course, a better option would be to only use one hand as a syringe and the other one as a weapon/shield, but only the older, more experienced individuals can control two blades independently.
Even less manage to morph their leg guards, but that's a can of worms I won't be opening up for a while.
I plunged my arms into the freshly cut log and felt the usual flow of energy travel up the needles and spread evenly across my body. Us Vagabonds can extract nutrients with a hundred percent efficiency, so nothing goes to waste.
Two seconds' worth of siphoning is all the tree had to offer. That equates to two weeks of sustenance. Not too shabby.
~~~
A loud metal screech echoed around the island at a frequency few can pick up. That's the call for a gathering.
One of the handier features of my body is the ears. They protrude from my head in a location similar to that of a squirrel - a creature humans like to tame -, but are a lot longer and sharper. There is no conventional ear canal, however, because I don't excrete any waste like earwax. Instead, the ear itself vibrates to different frequencies of sound, effectively turning into large external eardrums.
Oh, but the ears aren't nearly as vulnerable as said eardrums, because they are made from the same strange pale blue material as the rest of my body. It reminds me of silicon, but it's not transparent, nor is it as easy to damage.
By the time I made it to the sound source, most vagabonds have already gathered in a circle.
Being greeted with all kinds of looks, I did a sort of deep nod as an apology for being late.
Looks like I came last, huh.
We tend to have these meetings at night, as most creatures are asleep right now, allowing us to "communicate" without disturbance.
Normally the gathering area would light up from our eyes' glow, much like a miniature sun, however, that hasn't been the case for a while.
Hunger.
Every vagabond standing here has a dim shimmer in their eyes from the lack of nutrients. Everyone's posture and body gestures gave off this almost.. lifeless feeling.
One thing was clear for sure. Our pack was in need of a change.
A migration.