Snuggles The Symbiote

"...And then in the middle of the intervention, she just pulls out a plastic container with a piece of her homemade lasagna in it and eats it while looking us each in the eye one by one," I finished.

"Yes, that sounds like my Ashley," Yuri said with a laugh. "One time, when she was six, she decided she didn't want to take a bath that night. She had absolutely no body strength whatsoever... Until she grabbed the door frame."

"Seriously?"

"Yes," Yuri confirmed. "I think she'd conserved an entire day's worth of energy just for that. I had to jab a pressure point under her armpit to get her to let go."

"...Could you teach me how to do that? I'm pretty sure that I'm supposed to have gotten CQC training at some point, but it never ended up happening..."

"Yes, I will absolutely teach you skills I have as a combination of cartoonishly hellish training my abusive mother put me through and a few years experience in illegal cage fights I participated in as an unhealthy mechanism for coping with a bad breakup." The woman deadpanned.

And, well, didn't that make me feel like shit. "Uh, sorry."

My apology was met by an explosion of laughter. "I'm kidding, I got over that ages ago, I'll teach you... But not right now, ignoring the fact that we're stranded in the jungle and that you're clearly exhausted—"

"I am not!" I protested.

"I'm a mom, I know when a young lady is lying about being exhausted. We just spent what I estimate to be five hours building a rudimentary shelter after you've been up an entire day from what you've told me, not to mention your general body language. Unless you also have a supersoldier treatment that makes it so that you don't need to sleep and you're just faking being tired, you're exhausted."

In addition to four 'beds' in the cave made from large leaves and tall grass, we'd assembled three walls, a simple door, and a knee-high fence that we could both jump over with minimal difficulty out of logs, branches, and vines around the entrance o the cave, essentially making a rudimentary fort. I doubt it would hold against anything big, but it gave us a bit of peace of mind.

"Damn your logic," I grumbled. "Look, I can't sleep. Not right now, not when Ashley and Miss Militia are still out there in God knows what condition... And when the sun hasn't moved since we got here."

"Yeah, being in Antarctica sucks," Ashley's mother admitted. "But... come on, you can' go looking when you're tired. Since I apparently don't need to sleep or even feel tired despite having been awake for well over twenty-four hours at this point, I'll keep watch while you try and get some rest. Maybe try to come to terms with the fact that this immortality thing is a bigger deal than I thought," she shrugged. "I'll wake you if something happens."

"Also, there's a really ornery looking therapod stalking around the edge of my field of awareness and... Look, I've never tried to sleep when there's a dangerous predator in walking distance, but I can't imagine that it's easy." I really didn't want to wake up to my face being eaten.

"Describe it to me, I might remember something from Ashley's dinosaur phase." Yuri shuddered and I decided that I didn't want to know the details of Ashley's dinosaur phase... Assuming that she ever left it. She seemed very interested in riding a triceratops when she first told me about the Savage Lands.

"Uh, looks about big enough that a small person could ride it. Looks like it has a thick skull, lots of bumps and horns, and... Honestly, there's something really familiar about the head but I can't quite..." The head kind of looked like, like a dragon, and then it clicked for me. "Oh my god, it's a Dracorex jacobsbellia."

"Oh God no, don't tell me that you went through a dinosaur phase." Yuri had an expression on her face akin to one that one might see on a shell-shocked veteran.

"No, it's just... Dragon King of Jacob's Bell, its skull is kind of shaped like a dragon so they named it after the dragons in the Maggie Holt series. There's a specimen at the children's museum in Indianapolis" Yuri blinked. "Childrens' fantasy novels?"

"So, I know that you're from a different universe... We don't have those here. It's just... I have no frame of reference for these books, so I can't..." So, this is what Ashley felt like. "Anyway, if it's that size then I can probably take it if it comes this way and gets past our walls, just—"

There was a loud roar and it was not in the distance. The bugs under my control could sense vibrations coming this way and I let them move as something very large came charging through the area. The Dracorex dashed away in response to the commotion, and I braced myself because something too large for my bugs to get a clear look at it was heading right for us.

"Yuri, there's something big heading right for—"

I was cut off by something large stomping in front of our shelter and then stopping. Now that it wasn't moving, my bugs could make out that it was a very large theropod and... Crap.

And then, from high in the air, a familiar voice called out. "Hello!? Is anyone in there? I can see the smoke from your fire. You speak modern English in there, right?"

Ashley.

Yuri and I looked at each other, and then got up and, carefully, exited the fort.

Ashley was riding a massive predatory dinosaur.

"Mommy! Taylor! Good!" She said cheerfully. "I don't have to find you now."

I blinked and looked at the large theropod she was riding. "Ashley? Why are you riding a T-rex?"

"I'm not," Ashley replied simply. "I'm riding a Giganotosaurus carolinii. You can tell becuase it's slightly bigger, has a more rounded skull, and proportionally larger arms with three fingers per hand. They're both Tetanuran—stiff tailed—theropods but otherwise, G. carolinii and T. Rex are only distantly related."

I heard Yuri mutter "oh god, not again," but Ashley didn't seem to catch it.

"Okay, then why are you riding a G-carolinii?"

"Becuase I couldn't find a triceratops," Ashley replied as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. "I found some pachysauruses but I didn't think that the stygimoloch could support my weight and the Dracorex hogwartsia I found was really ornery."

I blinked again. "I'm sorry, Dracorex whatsia?"

"...Dragon King of Hogwarts? Its skull is shaped kind of like a dragon, so they named it after the dragons in the Harry Potter series." And I was back on the other side of the cultural divide. "Childrens' fantasy novels? There's a specimen at the Children's Museum in Indianapolis."

It had honestly not occurred to me that differences in pop culture would mean that some species would have different names in different universes until now.

Ashley floated off from her perch and slapped the creature on its haunch, which prompted the massive super-predator to turn around and wander off back into the jungle. Ashley floated down to the ground, and I found myself compelled to ask: "So how did you convince that thing to let you ride it?"

Ashley shrugged. "How did you beat up the evil clone of Squirrel Girl?"

"I don't think those are comparable situations at all," I said, hesitantly... And then noticed Yuri starring at me slack-jawed. "I mean, come on, that's not... All I did was punch her while she was... Okay, fine, point taken... Ashley, what are you wearing?"

Now that I could get a good look at her, Ashley was wearing what appeared to be a leather tank top cut to show off her belly and a knee-length skirt that I would have assumed was an animal pelt if it wasn't for the fact that it was a seamless leopard fur pattern in Mister Snuggle's colors. Bare feet, bare shins, bare arms.

"Jungle Princess outfit," Ashley said with a smile. "Standard uniform for a Savage Lands adventure. Honestly, I'm surprised you're not wearing a fur bikini or something like that."

"Why would I be wearing a fur bikini?" I said, suddenly feeling very self-conscious. I... I'd put on some muscle and lost whatever excess fat I'd still had, but I still wasn't anything to...

"Because we're in the Savage Lands," Ashley said as if it explained everything. "That's just what you do when you're in the Savage Lands."

"Where would I even get a fur bikini?"

"I don't know, the stories never explain that part," Ashley admitted. "Is Bitchy McFlagscarf here?"

"Ashley, don't call her that."

"No," Yuri corrected, "I don't know her but based on what I saw that's fair. And no, she's not here."

"So we have to rescue her before she gets eaten by a pack of raptors," Ashley observed. "Or before Sauron finds her and turns her into a dinosaur."

I wasn't even going to ask. "Yeah, but... Your mom makes a good point, we need to like, get an idea of the area and search methodically or we're just gonna get lost in the jungle and—"

I was interrupted by a yawn. Damn it.

"Well, I think I can recognize her scent, we can probably start searching for her in the... Later morning? After you get some sleep."

Damn it, "I can't sleep right now, with everything going on and—"

"Would it help if I cuddled you?" Ashley interrupted. "Hugs make it easier to go to sleep."

"I'm not getting out of this, am I."

"Nope! In therapy, doc's been saying that if you want to help other people you have to help yourself first. If you're tired you need to get some rest or..."

And then Ashley just sort of pushed me back into the fort and made me tell her which of the beds in the cave was mine, and forced me to lay down.

I guess resting my eyes for a little bit couldn't hurt.