An Odd Rampage

Prisoner 46192 rubbed his eyes, dazed by the sudden light and noise. An alarm blared loudly, and the glaring white light that always filled his cell was gone, replaced by a flashing red light. He pulled himself up off the floor, confused and bewildered. He had been here... how long was it now... Six weeks? Six months? Six years? Six centuries? But he had never heard or seen anything like this this. There were no alarms when prisoners tried to escape.

The prisoner stumbled to the cell door, bending to look through the small window to the hallway. The hallway, bathed in bursts of red light, was filled with guards. And not guards in dress uniforms, but in full body armor and carrying heavy weapons, the sort more suited to killing tanks than escapees. Judging by this disorganized panic, this was no drill.

Could he see anything out the cell's outside window? It was little more than a narrow slit a little above his head, but through it he could see a little of the outside world. Try as he could, the way it was angled the prisoner couldn't see anything but the dim light of the dawn sky.

He could hear just fine, though. Mixed in with the blaring alarm he heard men yelling - the words garbled by walls and distance, but the anger and panic came through. Over all of that rang out ragged volleys of loud, heavy booms - mortars? howitzers? Automatic weapon fire opened up, not as loud but pounding nonstop like a jackhammer. The prisoner could feel the whole building shake in bursts, as if some something heavy was being dropped over and over outside the prison walls. As the shaking grew worse, he heard the sound of metal crunching and bending.

Then the roof came off.

It took the prisoner's eyes a few seconds to adjust to the natural light and figure out what he was looking at. A huge human figure towered over him, stories and stories tall. It was arrayed in loose clothing of blue and gold. It - no, she, that was definitely a woman's face and figure, though monstrous in scale - she knelt beside the building. The weapon fire hadn't let up and a lot of bullets and shells seemed to be flying at her and hitting her - for nothing, it seemed. Even shells large enough to crush a man seemed to cause her no more annoyance than a bug bite.

The giant figure didn't seem to care much about the guards shooting at her. Rather, her gaze was focused on the prison itself. She moved her great hands over the prison. The palm of just one hand was larger than the prisoner's entire cell, and just moving over him blotted out his whole view of the sky for a few seconds. The sheer size of it was terrible, and he was able to breathe again when he once again saw sky.

That didn't last. Without warning a giant finger thrust itself into his tiny roofless cell. The finger alone was taller than the whole building and the prisoner standing up was only as tall as the fingernail. Too awestruck to move, he could do nothing when the finger inched toward him and a thumb grabbed him from behind. He was pinched between the two - held snug but not crushed - as the great hand lifted him up.

The prisoner's heart beat fast for the few seconds he was held aloft. The hand that held him wasted no time in setting him on the palm of the opposite hand. The palm was quite large enough to hold him and the dozen other prisoners that sat in the cupped palm. Not wanting to look down and think what would happen to him if he fell, he instead followed the gaze of the other prisoners in looking straight out.
He looked out and saw the face of the giantess level with him. The size was frightening, but it was a pretty face, with olive skin and blue eyes. The face seemed to grow the more he looked at it, but that was because he was being moved toward it. More specifically, toward the open mouth. The palm moved toward the face and shaped itself flush with the lower lip. The palm and the head both tilted upward, and all the prisoners all started slipping downward into the open mouth. Prisoner 46192 tried grabbed at the the air, but nothing could keep him from falling downward and landing on the hot, wet tongue. He looked up and saw the light of the sky vanish again as the lips closed.

As he fell backward into the throat, he knew there were worse things than being eaten by this woman. The worst he could imagine was her leaving him in the prison.

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Gulp. Gulp. Gulp. The giantess swallowed mouthful after mouthful of the tiny people she plucked out of the prison. Or rather, the ruins of the building that had been a prison a few minutes ago before she made a wreck of it. Some of the prisoners were struggling and trying to escape from her. Some even struggled all the way down her throat. Even so, she was determined to get every one of them inside her.
She hadn't come to pick a fight with the guards here, but kneeling and taking hits from artillery at short range wasn't fun. Just because she could live through being hit by armor piercing or high explosive shells didn't mean that she wanted to. About an arms' length away from her she spotted a line of APCs with mounted weapons. Turning one eye toward them, it took only one good sweep of her arm to smack them away. In a few seconds the line was nothing but twisted, smoking scrap metal and she was back to sending tiny people down her gullet.

Finally, she came to the last handful of prisoners in the Red Star Republic Prison. Holding them in her cupped hand, she stood to her full height. Mouth wide open, she felt the dozen-odd people slide onto her tongue, then down her throat. With the last gulp, she rubbed her stomach, happy to have completed her mission.

Well, her primary mission. She was still being shot at and needed to deal with that. This prison was already a smoking ruin, and taking time to wipe out everyone and everything here would give the Red Star Military plenty of time to bring in reinforcements. Spotting a radio transmitter and a small building at its base, she grabbed hold of the mast, wrenching and snapping it like a thin branch. She speared it straight down through the roof of the building, backing away as it exploded in a shower of electrical sparks. That seemed to ignite something else, and as all the guards scrambled to deal with the new chaos the giantess simply walked away, every single former prisoner now safely in belly.

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Deep inside the giant woman's stomach, Prisoner 46192 stood up. He had fallen for a few minutes before he landed somewhere squishy, humid, and moist. Some standing liquid in the area covered his feet and ankles. The whole area around him was lit with a strange, green glow, and looking in every direction he saw other prisoners - hundreds, probably, all arrayed indentically to him except for the number.

It wasn't just prisoners, though. People in other color, other clothing styles milled about among them and approached people. One particular woman walked up to Prisoner 46192. "What is your name?" she asked.

"Prisoner of the State 46192," he repeated automatically, as had been drilled into him.

She shook her head. "No." With one hand the stranger with no uniform grabbed the sewn-on number patch on the prisoner's uniform. She ripped it off with surprisingly little effort, tossed it over his shoulder, then poked him in the chest. "No, who are you?"

Who WAS he? It had been so long since he was called anything but 46192. That time seemed like a lifetime ago, before the Red Star Enforcers had taken him away. But in this damp, half-lit place, all the time in that prison seemed like another life too.

Yes, there was a time before he was 46192, despite all the prison did to "correct" away his memories of a time before that two meter by three meter cell. He had a wife, then. And a home. A job. Even a name instead of a number, even if he hadn't said it in a long, long time.

"My name is Watt Underwood."

The woman nodded at him. "Welcome, Watt." It felt strange to be called by that name again. Almost like it belonged to someone else. "Are you okay?"

Watt tried to process that. "Okay? Just a minute ago I was..."

The woman yawned. "Eaten? Yeah, you got swallowed by Vorra. We all were."

"Vorra?"

"Yeah, that giant woman that ate you. Now that you're in Vorra's belly, you're free to do whatever you like. We're free from the reach of the Red Star Republic in here."

Watt shook his head. "But we're inside her stomach," he protested, stressing the last word. "Stuff in a stomach gets digested."

"Not Vorra's." She shrugged. "Or people don't, at least. Trust me; I've been in here for quite a while."

"If you've been here for a while, do you know how many people are here... inside?"

The woman took a few seconds counting on her fingers, then shook her head. "Beats me. I'm always running into people who didn't come down the throat with me that I've never seen before. It's hard to get any idea of numbers because of how big Vorra's belly is."

Watt looked out into the darkness, past the other new arrivals and beyond where the green light illuminated. "Do you think my wife might be in here somewhere?"

The woman pointed off into the distance. "I've never met a woman who went by the name Underwood, but that doesn't mean she isn't here. You're free to look. Or free to do whatever you want now that the Red Star isn't giving you orders."

Watt nodded and began walking off. "I think I'll do just that."

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