it's stress relief. really.
She can’t seem to face up to the facts. She’s tense and nervous and she can’t relax.
Clouds, dark and thick, hang in the sky, as if the very sun itself is being shielded from the coming birth of The Spawn.
The very pregnant mother waddles like a fat frog from room to room, and our heroine discretely watches from underneath a curtain of red fringe. She is starving, but the food here is tainted; and thirsty, but the water is poisoned. Her gray cloak is damp with that annoyingly misty type of rain that flies all over in the slightest breeze and gets everything wet even if you have a hood up. Swollen pink splotches mar her face, the result of a too-close encounter in which The Beast breathed on her skin.
The Beast settles heavily into a chair and exhales poisonous fumes into the atmosphere. Somewhere, a family of four drops dead.
“What is taking so long?” Asks Flannery, our heroine. “It’s been nine months to the day. It should be due!”
Then it hits her.
...
A pretzel rolling off her desk.
Also, the realization that nine months is only the gestation period for a human baby, and the thing being nursed in that womb is the farthest thing from human ever to be carried on two legs.
On her work station, the ends of Flan's bamboo leaves are browning and curling under the impending darkness. It won’t be long before the air here is unsafe to breathe, when even the carpeting will roll and shift like quicksand, and all will be under The Beast’s thrall.
Our heroine takes a long swallow of the Blessed Elixir, which clears her thoughts of evil and refreshes her hope and determination. She returns to strategizing. And PowerPoint.