How to escape from a Tayan's maw?
So, there is a great beast called the Tayan. It burrows itself into the ground, and eats all creatures unfortunate enough to fall in. The Tayan's throat has muscles that push food down into its stomach, like a human throat. Larger victims are sent to the main stomach, where they are digested over the course of 36 hours, during which they experience unimaginable agonizing pain.
In the secondary stomach, victims are saved for later consumption. They are injected with a potent neurotoxin, that paralyzes them, and they wait until it's their turn to get digested. My main character has just fallen into this stomach, but luckily he was wearing clothing that kept him from receiving the neurotoxin.
He needs to escape for my story to continue, but I can't think of a way how. How could my character possibly escape?
-The Tayan is an Animal, but it can also photosynthesize.
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/121747. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
1 answer
I'm adding to Separatrix answer:
Escape to the ground
I'd rather be in a tunnel than inside some giant internal organ digesting me, so a solution could be opening a way through the Tayan tissues to the underground. What happens then?
Cutting through the internal organs to the outer skin should be possible, since most creatures aren't equipped for resisting slashing attacks from the inside. It could be that the Tayan is, given the fact that it swallows a great deal of live prey, but it also has to rely on his toxins. The secondary stomach can be thick and hard, then, but can't be adamant. Other tissues have no excuses for being knife-proof (though cutting and separating large, fat areas of meat, muscle and tendril is certainly a feat). The outer skin is hard, but probably softer from the inside.
I imagine the ground around the Tayan outer skin is not entirely made up of solid rock (the Tayran must have dug through the ground in the first place to get there, so at least a bit of the ground around its body must be made of debris or something).
If it's soft enough for the hero to dig, he can happily start crawling his way back up, gently pushing all the earth inside the already unhappy Tayan (that will probably deal with major infection issues, if it doesn't die for internal damage).
The main challenges of this solution are:
- Cutting though several layers of beast tissue, without having a clear direction of where the nearest ground wall will be (as opposed as knowing, innately, where "up" is);
- Surviving the walk in the Tayan internal organs, facing a whole deal of fluids, possibility of being drowned in blood (or burned, depending on the Tayan's internal body temperature) or breaking into the main stomach and its acids;
- Being able to dig up a great deal to the surface or the nearest cave;
- Dealing with a general lack of air;
At least points 2 and 4 are common to the more usual "get thrown up" and "kill the thing from inside" solutions. The main advantages of this idea:
- not having to exit through the Tayan maw, which can be generally dangerous by the presence of teeth, saliva and whatsoever;
- travelling at a nicer slope than a mean vertical line along the throat walls. Climbing up always have the possibility of falling back down.
Is this possible? You mention the Tayan being "dug up deep underground". But in any case, the secondary stomach has to be somewhere near the esophagus. Of course, depending on the Tayan, the esophagus could be long kilometers ... but I can argue that my solution isn't inherently worse than the climbing-back-up trope.
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