TL-DR Dept. - Never Tell A Hermaphrodite To Go Fuck Itself

Four Or Five Guy© expramtraveller [SWELL TRADING CARD AT LEFT - Ed.] demonstrates why size does matter in this epic tale.

A FELLOW CREATURE
 
Worm lay still as he woke in his lair. The damp soil surrounding him was pressing in on him, and he may have felt snug, for he lay a few seconds basking in its envelopment, but it was to gather strength, before he stretched out, right to his final segment, and set out, as was his custom each and every morning after his slumber, on his slow trajectory upward, to attend to his needs and satisfy his craving.
Worm’s habitual activities were mostly unremarkable. They consisted chiefly in moving earth by way of eating his way through it. Worm inhabited a lump of earth that measured a little over a square meter and whose shape resembled that of gold nuggets or of asteroids orbiting in space. It was, in fact, so eerily similar to 25143 Itokawa that the latter could easily have been mistaken for its model. Worm was not aware of this. But Worm might have observed that, over the course of his eleven years of existence, and apart from the grit and the stray sucking stone, most of the matter contained in his lump must at one point have passed his gut. By this token, Worm had intimate knowledge of his habitat. But since Worm was born without a brain, he was incapable of making the observation. Which is not to say that he was devoid of sense or lived entirely on his instincts. For Worm had a long spinal nerve running the length of his body, which had reached an impressive thirteen centimeters by this late stage of his life, and numerous smaller nerves branched out from the central one and connected to his upper lip, more properly called his prostomium, the muscles of his skin, his bristles, and, most significantly, to his gut. To top it all off, Worm possessed a number of ganglia, some of them so sophisticated they were termed Brain Ganglia, others less evolved, but still quite impressive for a base creature such as Worm. Harnessed to its purposes, his nervous system, no matter how rudimentary it might appear to the uneducated eye, was capable of powerful computing and allowed Worm to make perfectly informed decisions automatically, with no conscious intellectual effort whatsoever.
Central to all this was Worm’s gut. For the inside of this organ was lined with innumerable receptors which registered the chemical make-up of all that passed through him. And it was probably due to the chemo-electrical interaction between his gut and his nervous system that Worm actually remembered his chemical impressions, to the point of supplying him with an accurate topography of his surroundings and an extensive system of warnings and encouragements intimately linked to the perceived chemicals and the adventures and misadventures associated with them. In other words, Worm’s sense of his world was acutely immediate. And it was thus that Worm knew how to avoid Glut, which was important, since Glut devoured large quantities of worm. Glut had a sphere around him within which it was unsafe for a worm to stray. But being both sight- and mindless, worms kept ending up within it, with fatal consequences in the vast majority of cases. Worm had made his acquaintance with Glut early in life, and it had cost him three of his tail segments. But Worm was lucky to have survived at all and his rear end had regenerated satisfactorily.

This is what made Worm unique and what caused his longevity, for no other worm had anything approaching his quick chemo-electricology, and it earned Worm the Capital, since his fellow worms lacked individuality and, excepting length, there was little to discern one from the other. Besides, with all of his experience based in chemicals, Worm was a highly sensitive creature, capable of emotions alien to other species, but emotions all the same, summoned up by the substances he perceived, much in the way scents may trigger emotions in certain of the higher species. Perhaps Worm’s unique constitution and abundant emotionality represented some freak evolutionary leap which had yet to prove advantageous to his species. But Worm did little to propagate his remarkable traits.
Worm was a strictly hermaphroditic creature, and note should be taken that use of the masculine does not imply bias or prejudice toward either of Worm’s sexes, whatever their shape and function. Hermaphrodism as such is an attractive proposition, since it allows for double orgasms, at least in theory. For the double orgasm is a rare occurrence even among the most experienced of worms. Still, if the female organ proves to be barren, there is yet a good chance of success at the masculine end of a worm. But he’d have to pick a partner for that. And Worm, perhaps on account of his being so different to them, was indifferent to his brethren and lived a solitary life. He had tried self-insemination during adolescence, but he never even came close to an orgasm, male or female, and nothing came of it, since reproduction of this kind proved biologically impossible in the first place, so Worm gave up on it altogether.
As with so many occurrences in life, the root of his problem lay in his youth. For in that carefree era, Worm used to cavort in the soft top layer that blanketed his lump. It was on one of these romps that an unexpected event caused him to be exposed to the searing white heat of the sun. It was a boy disturbing the mulch, mudding the shiny new soccer cleats he had been awarded for his seventh birthday. Worm was startled at first and he did not yet have the acumen at that tender age to retreat into the mulch forthwith, and this is how he came to discover the thrill of drying in. For as the slime on his skin dehydrated, his segments started to rub against one another unlubricated, and this made him experience an exhilarant tingle that carried itself across the length of his body in waves of sheer bliss. But it was bliss followed by a burning sensation like herpes, which made it less sheer than initially postulated. And Worm knew there and then that he had to burrow back under. Now, this occurrence alone would not have sufficed to hook Worm as irrevocably as it did, but his body started to produce quantities of vitamin D as soon as it was touched by the sun, and for a creature of keen chemical sensitivity such as Worm, this spelled disaster. In the early stages of his addiction, it sufficed for Worm to surface once every day after his slumber to have his instant in the sun, for it could never last more than an instant lest he dry out completely. But now in old age, he had to perform his peregrinations much more often than was healthy for him and they had started to exhaust him and kept him from pursuing his more typically lumbrical preoccupations.

It was in this condition that Worm started the upward trek upon which he was observed to commence this morning. And it wasn’t long before he sensed that his energy was fast depleting, and knowing from experience that it was going to be a long and tortuous haul before he would finally surface, and no matter how urgent his craving, Worm decided to take the long route past the stray sucking stone, whose smooth coolness had proven to have an invigorating effect on him on previous occasions. It had dropped from the pocket of a greatcoat many years ago and had lodged itself here some twenty inches underground. Worm’s route had the added benefit of giving Glut a wide berth. But Glut had not been a factor in Worm’s deliberations, for Worm knew exactly where Glut was situated and he could have steered much closer to his lair, since Glut’s was a fixed abode and Glut himself a perfectly stationary presence, never noticeably stirring more than a microinch. And yet one had to avoid straying into his sphere. This was strange and contradictory. Glut remained a deeply troubling entity and much about him was mysterious and unknown, such as for instance his method of hunting. He might have possessed a fast prehensile ejector, an organ that drew worm matter in, some form of animal magnetism perhaps. And yet even more baffling than this, Glut never grew, the huge amounts of worm he ingested notwithstanding.
As Worm approached the stray sucking stone, he had no idea of the seemingly endless permutations the object had suffered at the hands of its master, in its day and age, years before Worm was born, making the rounds of the pockets of his trousers and greatcoat, and being sucked in between. For Worm, the stone was just an item to wriggle along and curl his body all over, which he did once he arrived. This soon had the desired effect, and Worm, fully restored, left the stone to its own devices, stuck as it was in its lodge, and took off.
Feeling greatly rejuvenated, Worm’s further progress was brisk, and before long he felt the soil warming, from which he inferred he was about to surface. But he sensed that all was perhaps not as it should be as soon as he poked his prostomium through the mulch. Worm was unaware of it, but he had woken from his slumber much later than he used to, and to make matters worse, the longer route upward had added to his delay. It was about an hour after noon and high summer, a time-slot he had always managed to avoid, even now in old age, when his need impelled him to surface much more often. But Worm being an addict, he couldn’t help himself and he carried on regardless.

What happened next, was a surprise to Worm. For although the white heat was much more searing than any of the doses he had exposed himself to over his long years of enslavement, and there was no denying the danger to him, it also produced a powerful flash, one that kept repeating itself time and again and that sent spasms of lust through his body. And Worm started to squirm and contort in ways that had previously proved impossible to achieve, until his reproductive openings met, and Worm, before his mind’s eye, for Worm had no eyesight, saw sparks and fireballs and great gooey masses of exploding matter, and this was how Worm accomplished the elusive double orgasm.
Worm was lucky enough in his convulsions to end up in a shady spot under a discarded Beatles White Album cover. It still held the two platters, but they were warped, and Worm, oblivious of the vitriol that had been poured on the album lately, couldn’t have cared less, for it was the shade that was important to him. But hardly had he embarked on his slumber, when he woke with a start, for a burning sensation like herpes gripped him, and it was as if the searing white heat had transferred itself to his gut and from there had started to radiate outward. Worm had great capacity for suffering, and whatever the nature of his emotions, it was clear he was suffering. So he frantically started to burrow, but his efforts were vain, for there was damage already at his 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 8th, 13th, 21st, 34th, 55th, 89th and 144th segment, which hindered the smoothness of movement required for such an operation. And Worm was in such pains that he coiled up tightly, and forcing his inner loops upward forming a cone, Worm started to glow, and he remained aglow for a while, until the glow receded into the heart of his cone, and Worm had finally carbonized. And the careful observer might have perceived a little could rising over Worm’s cone and hover there for an instant before his charred remains fell apart.