"Do we need to go over the plan again?" Special Agent Jeanie Jeans of the Strange Creatures Affairs Team at the FBI asked, her right hand on her hip, her left pointing directly at the Pouch. "There's a lot riding on this," she said.
"Um, yeah, why don't you..." the Pouch said, struggling to pay attention. It wasn't easy concentrating at this moment, while he sat in an uncomfortable chair one of the FBI's state of the art crime labs. The chair wasn't the distraction, he'd sat in worse, it was the small team of lab techs methodically filling up each of his pouches with very specific amounts of a white powder that caught the light oddly, sparkling like nothing else he'd seen as it disappeared into each pouch. As part of this process, they'd done a full survey of the exact capacity of every part of him, data they'd already emailed to an account he hoped he had the password written down for back at his apartment. They'd found pouches he didn't even know he had. The process was a little invasive, but, by pretending that his discomfort was physical rather than emotional, he managed to get himself of an injection of something that they wouldn't name that really, really relaxed him. They let him queue up a playlist and zone out, so as far as he was concerned, he was floating in outer space the whole time. They'd given him a much smaller dose this time. Instead of dissociating entirely, however, he was mainly distracted by the lovely lab techs and their very dedicated, very matter of fact filling up of himself. They had done a number of tests to confirm that the strange, slightly glittery powder wasn't reactive with the sentient leather that he was hewn from, which was another reason he was on a light dose of the mystery injection, so that he could react quickly in the case of an unexpected reaction.
"Okay, we're going to drop you a few blocks ahead of the thing once we've calculated it's exact path. All you have to do is engage. We're 98% sure the creature will do its part," said Jeannie Jeans.
"Oh yeah, one question, how do you all plan to get me out of this thing? I get the whole one gulp ingestion of myself and then the pouch opening part..."
"Don't worry about that part, actually. We'll be administering a time release agent that will cause an involuntary pouch opening event," said Jeannie. "In some of our simulations, you lost consciousness and so were unable to release your payload until much farther into the digestion process."
"Digestion, I thought you said I'd be fine in there!?!" the Pouch said.
"You will be fine, it's a very, very slow process. Our simulations indicate that it might take as long as a month for you to be fully consumed. With the current plan in place, the approximately thirty minutes you'll be spending in the belly of the beast should do little more than soften your living leather to an amount that may not be noticeable to you at all, but may well be apparently to others."
This comment of others and touching made the Pouch think of Mary Sew and an imagined scenario, she stroking gently his face pouch, saying, are you using some sort of new moisturizer to which he would say __
"Go time!" Jeannie Jeans yelled, shattering the Pouch's hazy imaginings. The mysterious powder that now filled all of his pouches, except his head pouch which was stuffed with a small oxygen tank in case the unnamed powder was not quite as fast acting as anticipated, must not have been very dense, or he could have been under the influence still of the equally mysterious injection because he didn't have any trouble getting up out of the uncomfortable chair. Once more they put the hood on him while leading him out, the rest of the labs and the very location of the facility were, if not top secret, much higher up the secret hierarchy than a point where anyone at the FBI felt comfortable sharing with a low-level "street" supe like the Pouch.
A short... van? It felt like a van but a van with really good shocks, or maybe it was hovering? After a little ride in an official vehicle, they pulled the hood and the sunlight pounded down on the Pouch with the vengeance of a jilted lover. He'd been staying out late and sleeping in, well most of the day. Spending the last few days possibly underground in the secret lab complex that he only saw 1.5 rooms of didn't help. It's also possible that all the stuff they'd been giving him, while dulling practically all of his senses, had somehow amplified his light sensitivity. It did look like his neighborhood, maybe out on the edge, near the old canal. Did they say something about the canal? Oh yeah, this thing was going to crawl out of the canal. Why didn't they do something about it while it was still in the damn canal? The Pouch was finding that maybe his memory was impacted by the vast variety of chemicals he'd been in contact recently. Oh well, oh shit, here it comes! A gaping maw rose up just in site at the end of the block, dripping with the fetid skunky waters of the canal. The Pouch remembered the one time, still new to the neighborhood, when he'd tossed in a coin, as though it was a wishing well, only to see the coin sit atop the strange water source and slowly dissolve instead of sinking.
"Do your thing!" someone shouted really close to him, patting his shoulder, and then shoving him pretty hard in the direction of the canal and its emerging monstrosity. The Pouch stumbled a few steps, maybe something was wearing off, he started to feel heavy, like really heavy, like heavy enough to maybe crack the crust of the Earth and fall into the mantle, or even lower. "Hurry up!" the same voice in his ear pouch again, this time with a harder shove. The Pouch took a deep breath and tried to focus his mind. The world was wanting to start spinning but he was wanting it to not do that, and was winning at the moment, for the most part, everything had settled at a forty-five degree angle but he was leaning into it and compensating and making steady progress. The horrible monster thing was still pulling itself up and out of the canal. The Pouch couldn't tell why it was taking so long, why time wasn't moving like it used to do, but he hunkered down and pushed himself, not quite running, but doing a bit more than walking.
Once he got close to the shifting abomination, he understood what was taking it so long to emerge from the canal. It wasn't emerging from the canal at all, it was forming from the very canal itself, the fetid waters slowly congealing into a solid form. Not bound by the usual laws of creature body composition, the result was even more horrible, flabby and oily, speckled with incongruous bits of what jetsam cast into the canal over its long existence. On top of all the physical malformation, the thing looked pissed and ready to take it out on the surrounding city that had fed into its sorry state. Clearly this was some sort of environmental cautionary tale playing out before him, but the state of his mind was struggling to keep anything straight, though it did realize the presence of the road beneath his head pouches after a large and milky pseudopod of gelatinous material rose out of the canal and smashed him flat.
It was hard to get a good read on how conscious the Pouch was just then as the pseudopod drew back, the Pouch more or less encased in its disgusting mass. It then drew him up high, over the thing's mouth, which looked a lot like when you gently blow a hole in the head on a beer, more of a gap than a fully formed mouth, though there were what looked to be something like eyes forming on the thing's "face", and those eye-like masses glistened with a sick sort of glee while dangling the Pouch above its shifting maw for a moment, seeming to relish the imminent ingestion of the neighborhood's sad sack defender.
The Pouch woke up in this state, dangling above a really far drop. He couldn't be sure then if the timed release drug they'd given him kicked in right at that moment or if it was the sheer terror that ripped through his partially addled mind that sprung all of his pouches open at once, pouring the odd powder down in a stream, all of it going right down that twisting pathway of a seeming digestive tract. Then it wasn't clear if the thing dropped him on purpose or lost the coherence necessary to maintain the extension of its form, but the Pouch found himself falling and blacked out before hitting the mass beneath him, the mass that had quickly changed into a massive bubbling churn, the escaping gas making what some might have interpreted as a death wail, though others might have defined it as simply the sound of gas escaping a rapid chemical process.
The Pouch woke up again, feeling a bit groggy, and not aware for maybe a whole minute that he was floating on his back, all of his pouches closed and holding in air to keep him buoyant. The sky above was a lovely blue with only a few clouds spread about, as if they were put there to complete the composition. Just then, some kid did a cannonball way to close to him and the splash broke his revery and he paddled out to the side and crawled out. The Pouch could hardly believe what he was seeing. The canal shimmered in the sunlight, clear down to the bottom. The neighborhood kids were wasting no time enjoying their new swimming spot. The Pouch looked around and caught sight of a massive glob of something sitting on the back of one ton truck, workers spreading a tarp over its mass while he watched.
Special Agent Jeannie Jeans walked up and patted him on the shoulder and said, "Good work, Mr. Pouch. I never doubted you."
"So, what was all that powder?" the Pouch asked.
"That's top secret," Jeannie Jeans said.
"What about all those drugs you gave me?" he asked.
"Also, top secret, but I managed to swipe you some," she said, slyly stuffing a small brown paper sack into one of his thigh patches.
"Isn't that against the rules?" the Pouch asked.
"I don't care, I'm retiring. Well, I'm retiring once I sell all the property around the canal that I picked up on the cheap last year." With that the Special Agent walked away, half dancing, singing a Jimmy Buffet song to herself.
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