---

If you were to go to Africa and encounter a wild lion, Laara is exactly the lioness you want to meet. She is friendly and can be very helpful in dangerous situations, as you can read in the story attached below. 😉😏

---

Textless version can be found HERE

Original story is HERE

---

This great story was written by my friend  Fischie. Originally it was just going to be a mini-story of one or two paragraphs, but Fischie has gone all out and created what can easily be considered a short story, which I'm very grateful for and I like it a lot. If you happen to not know him yet, be sure to check out his other stories. 😋

---

---

A voracious paragon of tourism

After recovering from your seemingly endless air travel and discovering that the local mosquitoes did not care much for the allegedly protective spray you brought with you, it was finally time to start your vacation. You had travelled all the way to Africa in order to snap some fotos of exotic animals and incredible landscapes you had only ever seen on television. Sweat and sunscreen ran down your face as you walked out of your hotel for only a couple of minutes, but you did not get far before one of the locals approached you. He spoke surprisingly good English and had a large collection of sunbleached laminated pictures of lions and elephants with him, offering you a guided tour to see these animals in their natural habitat. You paid a small fee for the tour and followed him on foot. Usually these tours were carried out with jeeps, but your guide was able to disperse all doubt with good enough explanations.
“The engine noise scares away the animals and they avoid the smell of Diesel.”
“I used to guide large groups, but now nobody wants to walk anymore, everyone got fat and lazy.” You could not argue with that, given who you saw on the plane here.

After a short while you left the town and entered the wilderness. Thank goodness you had proper hiking boots on because there was nothing but bumpy grass and scorching hot stones under your feet now. Already you saw some exotic birds sitting in dried up looking trees that speckled the vastness of the savannah in front of you. Off in the distance you spotted some dark silhouettes, wondering if those are buffalos or some other big herd animal. Not the lion you had hoped to snap but still a great start to the expedition.

“Alright, this is far enough. Now hand over your wallet and don’t make a fuss.” said your “guide”. You turn around and see a sinister face pointed at yours and a long knife aimed at your gut. Furthermore you and your mugger are both certain he can run faster than you.
“I knew a solo tour was too good to be true.” you sigh at your own stupidity.
“No refunds for hindsight. I take the money with or without your blood on it.” the man growls impatiently.
You swallow, reach around for your wallet and in that moment you just see an orange flash taking the mugger down with a soft but massive impact. You look down into the now terrified eyes of your assailant as he makes some impotent gargling noises and feeble attempts at resistance as a fully grown lioness casually drags him into the nearby shrubs by his neck, out of your sight. Your heart pounds and your knees shake. You have just been saved from one deadly predator by another it seemed. You put your wallet back where it belongs and look down at the weapon the man had dropped, wondering if you should pick it up. You had come here to see the lions but feeling the air draft from one tackling down a fellow human was a bit much. You decide to just not move at all when you start hearing the swallowing noises though.

Just a few meters away from you, the muffled complaints of your mugger are silenced and replaced with wet squelching noises. You can clearly hear something wet and slimy moving against something else. There are fast paced, loud gulps almost like in the old cartoons you watched as a kid when someone got eaten in one bite by a big shark or a crocodile. You are sure someone is getting eaten here as well but he is probably not going to walk back out of that stomach like the cartoon figures usually did.

Within less than a minute you hear twigs snapping and the lioness emerges from the shrubs, utterly distended by her swollen stomach. Her swaying midsection was tightly stretched around the mugger who was still visibly alive in there and fighting the digestive organ he occupied.
“Leave that there.” she said nodding at the knife, before taking a dramatic pause, probably to enjoy the shock on your face.
“You speak?” Just asking the question to a lioness makes you feel stupid, but then again you can hardly decide which was stranger, the lioness talking or her having just eaten a man whole and alive in mere seconds. You decide that it was both exceedingly unusual.
“I do. You are what you eat, as they say.” she replies sagely. “Not that I am a big maneater by choice. You tourists in particular taste horrible and have so many strange chemicals in your bodies. But someone has to protect you from predators of your own kind.” she explains and sways her hips a little to make her churning belly swing. It was so strange to get that kind of speech from a feral of a protected species.
“Why did you eat him then? If we are bad food.”
“Well, locals have a lot less sunscreen on them.” she chuckles. “But more seriously, everytime someone from here stabs someone from wherever you come from, no people from your place come here for a year or two. Then the people here go hungry because they have no money, then they start shooting us to sell our corpses. So a few of us animals simply figured out that we can just eat your problem before it becomes our problem.”
“Are you not afraid that people will come to catch a talking lioness?”
“I am. That is why we eat the bad ones and only leave the good humans. I trust you will keep my secret. I know he will, once I poop him out.”
You shudder as you realise what is going on inside her body. That man you foolishly trusted was being digested alive. He was her food for the next few days and once there will be no more nutrients left to gain from his melted remains, there was only one thing left for her to do with him.

“Standing like this is hard. He was a big one. Would you like to move into the shade and chat some?” she asked and turned towards a nearby tree looking back at you with a smirk and big inviting eyes as muffled screams and deep rumbles emerge from her bloated stomach which barely clears the ground.

Eventually her stare breaks your stupor and your feet start working again. You move over to her and walk by her side. One time her belly sways and brushes your leg and it makes you shiver, but oddly enough not in a bad or frightened way. It was exhilarating in a strange way exactly because you are walking next to a sentient being in the middle of digesting a fellow human. It helped that the guy really deserved it.

You sit down against the bark of the tree and the lioness walks in a circle a few times, just like a house cat, to find the perfect spot and orientation to lay down in. Of course she makes it so she can rest her head on one of your knees and keep her busy stomach in plain view and within reach.
“Before you start rubbing my belly, please stow away your camera. If your curiosity gets the better of you we will have to gurgle you as well.”
“We?”
“If you see one lion you can bet there are a few more that can see or hear you. As you can tell by my gut, humans are laughably bad at detecting danger.”

You do as you are told. From what you can hear, being inside a lion stomach is very unpleasant. Then you reach forwards and start touching her belly. Once more you shiver. It feels… good. Great even. Her fur was a little dusty but you can tell it is silky smooth when clean. She was very warm to the touch, like everything else here. You can feel her muscles working under your fingers, some to keep her posture, some contract as she moves a leg or readjusts her head but most interestingly, you can feel her stomach churning and clenching while hearing the flesh melting juices flow around the mugger.
“This is oddly relaxing.” you say and get a little chuckle from her in return.
“I can smell that you like rubbing my belly. Your fear is almost gone and you find it oddly attractive to feel my stomach working down one of your kind, don’t you?”
“How can you tell?” you ask with a sudden blush coming on.
“It is more common than you would expect. If you want I can move my head so you can kneel up and use both hands.”

You linger a bit longer like this, until the muffled calls and softened struggles inside her belly cease. You only take her up on her offer once your assailant succumbs to her stomach and now she lays on her side, her belly fully exposed to your kneading hands, letting you guide the decomposing prey through her digestive tract.
“Could I meet you again?” you ask eventually as you feel liquefied mugger flowing through winding guts under your fingers. The belly bulge was a lot smaller, rounder and softer now.
“Maybe. I really should not befriend humans. But you are good with your hands. Maybe if you accidentally lured another bad man near me? Otherwise I would be breaking the rules. Our pride decided we can’t have pet tourists.”
“Could you at least tell me your name?”
“Oh sure. You can call me Laara. But you should be going, it is getting dark soon. I will have one of my sons escort you to the town. You would not believe how many criminals are out once the sun goes down.”
“They are the mainstay of your diet at this point, right?” you ask, sounding more hopeful and excited than you intended to. Laara replied with a short little burp and a wide grin, probably wanting you to figure this out over the next two weeks of your stay.


The End