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It was around lunch-time. The red yoshi and the blue-robed shy guy were climbing the steep natural steps along the circumference of a bright green mountain about four-hundred feet high. With each step five feet high, the yoshi Cameron and the shy guy Bit had to leap up to grasp every next step; this, they’d had no problem with on the way to their picnic at the top of the mountain in the past; but, today, as they were going up the edge of the slice in the mountain’s middle, Cameron stopped and considered a step on the slice’s opposite side. They’d need to jump the bottomless trench to grab that step. But Cameron loved a challenge.

Bit turned to the stanced yoshi, and his picnic basket dropped with his mouth behind the shy guy mask. “What’s going on?”

Cameron snatched the basket with her mouth, then sprang over the trench. She wiggled from the step three-hundred-fifty feet above ground, then with a high-pitched, cartoony warble, pulled herself up. She turned and jumped up and down, and spitting the basket next to her, called to Bit, “Come on! There’s a slope here that goes right to the top of the mountain! It’ll save us some time.”

Bit pushed his foot over the nothingness, then gulped. He had tested the waters, and they did not feel so inviting.

Cam watched, the shy guy large in her big round eyes. She smiled, reared her head over the edge then said, “C’mon, no worries. I’ll catch ya.”

Bit hesitated, but then did a preparatory backwards step, and a swimmer’s stretch. He dashed forward with what waddling speed he could, then hopped up.

A little cry slipped out of the mountain’s slice. Bit’s robed hand slid over flat vertical rock; sent pebbles up like sparks. The other paddled forward as it fell — but that one a friendly set of jaws caught. Another little cry went up, along with Bit, this one not of fear or even of pain, but of relief.

The yoshi hauled him ashore, and he held himself against the ledge of the next step, panting and panting. His heart was firing off quicker than a brigade of Bullet Bills.

Worried, Cameron lowered her head (she was 5’6” to his 3’2”) and licked his masked face. “There, there, buddy. You know I wouldn’t ever let you go. You’re safe. You’re okay.”

But Bit still couldn’t stop heaving, and found himself holding the hand she’d bitten. The impression of her warm jaws remained on his hand and wrist underneath, and the gooey saliva atop the sleeve comforted the shy guy. All this reminded him of a bittersweet moment: one he sometimes cherished, one he sometimes repressed.

Back when they were kids . . .

Bit sees a red yoshi hatchling, asleep on a big polka dotted mushroom. Bit watches her belly flutter — gasps with the pure fascination of a child. In his robe too big for him because they haven’t a size any smaller, he tiptoes towards the yoshi. He pokes the belly: soft as a marshmallow, bouncy like a mushroom — a smaller one than the one he’s on now. A cute hiss comes from the yoshi — a fidget, too — but this one stays high in the dream-clouds above the lakitu. What tension built on her face expels itself with a snort, accompanied by the tail-wiggle of a duck.

Bit holds his breath for what seems like long enough to complete an underwater level. Then, he lifts one shiny blue shoe over the yoshi. He eases himself onto the yoshi’s shell. Swift as a Mario kart, the yoshi blinks her bright blue eyes awake. Her reaction is innocent: bestial instinct. Her snout whips out, knocking off Bit’s mask, and she snaps at his face.

* * *

“Bit . . . Bit, buddy! Don’t faint on me now.” Cameron inhaled, her belly swelling like a ball. She prepared to offer C.P.R., but Bit woke and said:

“Wait!” He waved his hands dismissively.

Cameron sighed, laying a paw on his shoulder. “Thought you’d scared yourself blue — course, you’re always blue, but I mean behind the mask.”

The mask. Bit was deep in thought. He pulled the mask off, revealing two lantern-like eyes and a small, curious mouth. Aside from these, he’d a featureless face — with the exception of two horseshoe tattoos. Upon closer look, they were scars of teeth — infant yoshi teeth, at that. He rubbed the marks, and a spark of nostalgia took him twelve years into the past.

“When we were little,” Bit trailed.

Cameron’s face went solemn, but she gave a sprinkle of smile. Sadness with just the right happy.

“Yep . . .” She trailed off, and was silent for a while, but tried again. “When we were kids.”

Reminiscing like this, on a tiny ledge three-hundred-fifty feet over the land, was quite silly, it occurred to her.

She suddenly harrumphed. “You tried to ride me.”

The unmasked shy guy blinked nervously, smiling, scratching behind his hood.

“You tried to ride me!”

“Well, you bit me,” Bit muttered.

“I just bit you again,” she pointed out.

“And now my hand’s all slobbery.”

“And now you’re here, because me biting you saved you.”

Bit’s eyes floated off to the colorful, popsicle-shaped hills in far-off lands. He seemed to enter his introvert La-La-Land. Cameron wondered whether she’d have to pull him out, but then heard him reply.

“Maybe you should save me again.”

Cam mustn’t have heard correct. “I’m sorry?” The encryption of the statement got her to laugh.

Bit set the mask down on the picnic basket, then smiled. He bore into her a very serious, very time-slowing gaze, and for a second Cam’s own nostalgia flooded back — why?

“Maybe this time you should eat me.”

Cam produced a chirp both of surprise. A scenario flashed through her mind quick as a coin from a breaking box. She wondered, was he joking? An awkward chuckle was quickly replaced by a mask of her own: one of transparency.

“You would get to ride me from the inside, if I did,” she joked.

Bit’s cheeks burned red. He wiped his sleeve over his face, as if to wipe off the color or, at the very least, hide it.

“I’ve been practicing magic, Cameron.” The shy guy started tapping his hands together anxiously. “I’ve gotten pretty proficient in a spell that protects against acids . . . and there’s another one that’d help oxygen circulate in from the outside.”

Cam was taken aback. “You don’t mean to say?”

“I don’t want to say it, but if you want me to say it . . .”

No, Cam told herself, realizing. Don’t make him say it. It’s clear he’s talking about that and nothing else. We have our way of doubting ourselves in the most simple of scenarios when they’re unknown or they’re risky to us. The yoshi smiled, and nosed the shy guy. “Bit, let’s get to the top of the mountain. The breeze is picking up, and I’m starved.” She fetched the basket with the mask in it with her mouth, then hopped and clambered onto the next step. Little Bit cried out a little and shadowed her, step by step, and the steep stairs caused for him some difficulty; but what was on his mind wasn’t that, but that she’d brushed off his lead-in.

She didn’t answer . . . said she was hungry, but she went for the basket first thing. Bit’s eyes sulked, and his climbing rhythm lost its motivated regularity. Yes, she jokes about the bite time from time . . . but jokes. You made her really uncomfortable, Bit.

Bit pulled himself onto the overlook with a somersault. The red yoshi set the picnic basket on a breezing flat then ambled over to the edge of the sixty-square-foot mountaintop. The pink hills, sweeping mushroom forests, and acres of unpopulated kingdom below were beautiful.

Cam hadn’t known what to think of Bit’s suggestions, not before; but looking over the kingdom, she reflected on pieces of the puzzle with her relationship (as a friend) with Bit . . . and, with this new revelation, they were starting to fit.

How Bit always slept under her belly on cold nights and sleepless nights. How Bit always volunteered to brush her teeth (“It’s a good habit, even for dinos,” he’d told her). How Bit would lean his ear to her belly if he ever caught her lying on her back, and she’d ask what are you doing, and he’d answer, “Seeing if you got enough to eat,” and she’d chuckle and say, well, we ate all the berries, and he’d gape a little with his small mouth then sweep the ground with his shoe and say he supposed so.

Thinking Cameron had turned to the vista to avoid Bit’s gaze, Bit felt a great guilt. He stepped to her side; rubbed his robed hand on her shoulder.

“Sorry.”

Silence answered.

“Cameron?”

Bit stepped closer, and the yoshi turned his way. The shy guy saw a smidgen of smile under her twinkling eyes.

“You can make it up to me with lunch.” The yoshi licked her lips. The gestured bore all the innocence of a first-time vore.

Bit let out a little meep; his legs put him into the prey role without being assigned, moving backward as the yoshi came forward slow. His mind registered his friend with a half-pretend/half-real mindframe. For him, and for the yoshi, it wasn’t experience that perfected this moment: it was the thrill of the unrehearsed, the chill of firsts.

Wood thunked against Bit’s back — Bit having backed into a maple — and his legs collapsed beneath him. His friend Cameron loomed over him and opened her maw. The moist warmth of her honey-apple-spice tea breath masked his maskless face. The long yoshi tongue rolled out, and a slurp you could’ve heard from the step they leaped to earlier sashayed through the air.

Her friend’s heartbeat thrummed in the soles of her shoes. Cam hummed. “Oh, come. You know you like it.” She slurped him again. Saliva flecked his robe with the spattering of a paintball. This Cam did for Bit — though, she had to admit, the blueberry tinge to his lightly salted flavor wasn’t half bad. She sampled again, and again, her snout rolling over him. Her performance became more convicted as her mouth stretched over his head.

Puffing Cam’s cheeks out, Bit had enough red in his face to dye his robe purple. After years of hinting at vore to Cam, and fantasizing over seeing the interior of a belly — finally! The uvula warbled and grew. Giddy, the shy guy hugged yoshi’s cheeks, trying to pull his arms back to propel his hands into her mouth. It didn’t work, but by and by the yoshi suckled over the shy guy’s shoulders and swallowed them. Bit’s breaths bounced excitedly through the tight, quivering, fleshy space. For a while he trained his eyes on the gullet beyond, but he noticed Cam hadn’t yet swallowed; her cheeks expanded, Bit’s upper- and lower-body bulging from them like two big jawbreakers. Why she was hoarding him in her mouth, Bit wasn’t sure, yet, too overcome by the tongue lapping him and the roof of the mouth mashing, massaging him, to wonder.

Her teeth came next. But they didn’t hurt; they lightly nibbled at the shy guy’s robes, proceeding to chew, as if he were a taffy; and the shy guy he began to feel gooey, dribbly; and his vision grew blurry, misty with the heat of the oral chamber. And Bit he fell into a state of bliss, drawing his robed hands along the tender tongue, absorbing his surroundings as he melted.

Why he was melting — he wasn’t sure. He knew Cam couldn’t have planned it; was this, perhaps, an effect of the protective magic he’d casted as of earlier?

The shy guy stopped wondering as his mind grew hazy. He fell into a deep slumber, content with all of the bodily sensations sealed in his now-static conscious.

Chewing on the gooey shy guy gently, Cam smacked her tongue against her mouth-roof. A dark-blue wad gummed between that and her tongue, like a chewed stick of gum. Though the yoshi didn’t know, either, that the spell Bit researched was a transfiguration spell, she could sense his approval. Everything was going to be okay.

Her eyelids lazed a little. All the divine, fruity flavor soaking into her mouth . . . she’d take this over a couple of picnic sandwiches any day. Ehem. You’re comparing your friend to food here, a voice said to her pointedly. But she smiled, shook her head. Last time I checked, chewing gum wasn’t food. Leaning her head back, she let her eyes grow heavy and her lungs expand. Then, she blew a blueberry bubble. As her cheeks deflated, the bubble grew — and grew — and grew. It measured about the size of Bit! Inhaling the bubble back into her maw, Cam straightened her neck; took a satisfied gulp. Her eyes squeezed shut, and out pushed a slow sigh from her lips. She traced the ovular bulge of the shy guy down her orca-white throat. Down went the shy guy into a distending belly. She angled her legs to allow the bulge room to breathe, and the plump ovular shape plopped against the ground: it’d the body-heat of an egg, wobbling, warbling, her belly softly gurgling. Cam reached to rub her gut —

“Oh!”

— but rolling her paws upward along its surface was a tip of gravity enough to knock her onto her butt. In response, the tummy groaned. Inside, the shy guy materialized from what was previously an impressive bubble. He felt dizzy and discombobulated. Though, the sensations that’d stuck with him during the time of his transformation still resonated, and were just now wearing off, giving away to the feeling of the slick wet flesh of the belly. When Bit opened his eyes and looked around, half of him couldn’t believe it, and half of him loved it. The shy guy bounced a couple of times — the equivalent of pinching yourself, to be sure — and the belly jiggled just as he imagined it would; stomach fluids sloshed, lapping at his robe harmlessly. The magic had worked — and Bit could feel oxygen flowing in consistently: as per the spell, every time Cameron breathed, she took an extra sum of oxygen in for Bit, keeping the belly air fresh and breathable. Bit wondered how Cam was holdin’ up outside. The ripple of the slanted roof of belly flesh, followed by a content throat-melody put an end to his wondering. Outside, the yoshi lay circulating her paws over her big white tummy, punched out like a smooth round button. A sigh coasted out of her lips, and then Cam let out a soft, dignified burp. Belly walls briefly hugged tight on the shy guy, who shivered and flushed in the face.

Enough time passed for the sun to start its climb down from its zenith. “You know, Bit? You’re not half-bad for a meal.” She winked.

“You mean it, Cam? You’re not just saying, you know, to make me happy?”

Cam thought about this. Of course she’d been trying to make Bit happy . . . but this did satisfy her, too, she realized.

“Honestly?” She pressed her nose to her belly. “We should take this new route to the top of the mountain for our picnic tomorrow.”

Bit squeaked, “T-tomorrow?”