Kari, it turned out, was a girl of a thousand questions once unleashed.
She was also a girl who liked to play tag.
Cas didn't know the word for 'tag' in Nemorian, but the challenge of tapping someone, yelling something, and then running away was apparently universally understood, as Kari -- after a brief moment of bewilderment -- sprang after in chase.
The Oasis was empty still, and Cas found it to be quite the perfect playground for the game as she planted ran between the trees. Behind her, surprisingly nimble foot-falls heralded Kari's pursuit. Cas wasn't sure why she'd impulsively started the game. She just felt so alive, like she was bubbling with joy and just couldn't stand still for another instant. Ahead of her was a tangle of trees that leant against one another, and Kari, planting her foot hard into the dirt, sprang to a stop, uncoiling into a single bound that took her sideways into the jungle. There she immediately fell into a slide, bounded into a hop over a rotting trunk and stopped herself inches from running into Kari.
All the mirth of a jackal was expressed in the little girls smile, as she stood casually with one hand behind her back and the other held forward into a point, where the tip of her index finger bumped lightly against the slime's dirt streaked shawl. "Caught you!" she smiled.
----------------------------------------
Apparently, Kari knew all the shortcuts.
Cas sulked against a tree-trunk after her twelfth loss. Beside her Kari huffed in exertion, smiling despite the sweat on her features. Cas didn't really feel tired. Despite that, she remained kind of slow in comparison to the girl, and by now she was starting to see the futility of challenging her.
"Ok, ok, why don't we take a break," Cas acquiesced.
"Haha!" Kari laughed in victory, springing both hands up above her. "That was the most fun I've had since...!" she continued, still laughing, but softer now. Shaking her head, she switched the topic. "You're a lot more fun like this, you know. I don't know why you ever bothered staying as a Sakkari. Your Nemorian form is way better!"
"It's Human, actually," Cas corrected. "See?' she waved a hand through the space above her head, "no ears."
Kari cocked an eyebrow. "Huh, what kind of Nemorian is that?" To which Cas could only shake her head with laughter and say,
"Nevermind that! What's really important is-" like a coiled snake, Cas's hand struck out and touched the girl. "Tag!" Cas yelled, and turned, and sprinted.
Now was this sportsmanlike? No.
Unfair? Perhaps.
Effective? Cas thought so, as she rounded a bend and made for the tallest palm tree in the area. The tree was a single, tapering, trunk. No branches or foot-holds to speak of. And that was exactly what Cas was counting on as Kari gained on her. Sprinting forward, she leapt high into the air and placed a gentle palm on the woody trunk, willing her hand to stick.
In the adrenaline fueled intensity, Cas actually managed to read the message that popped up:
Shape Change at insufficient level to change Human Figure.
Well... in actuality, she only managed to make out the word 'Insufficient'. But that alone gave her a warning of things to come before her hand slipped off and she crashed face first into a root system.
Strangely enough, she saw the crash in perfect clarity. No daze, no blackout, not even a ringing in her ears, just the feel of her head cracking against a rock and the branch impaling through her side. It was in this state that she immediately sprang back up from the crash site, turning around to see Kari's wide eyed stare, first at her face before her eyes flickered down to the four-foot tree-branch that had impailed through her gut.
Of course, intellectually, the girl probably knew this was fine, but Cas -- looking down at herself -- felt she presented quite the special effects as red fluid dripped down her wounds and soaked through the branch and in an expanding circle through her clothes.
"Uhm," Cas thought of the best way to console the girl before settling on the most immediate thing. "Could you take the other end of this branch?"
----------------------------------------
In the end, taking the stains out of her clothes had taken more effort than healing -- which had been automatic.
Beside her, Kari held the now clean branch in her hands with some amazement. Cas broached the girl gently. "Are you ok?"
A little too enthusiastically, the girl looked back at her with wonder in her eyes. "That... was... amazing! I've never seen anything like it!"
Not that Cas wasn't thankful for it, but the responce did bring a question to mind. "You're not disturbed at all?" she asked.
Kari only shook her head. "I see a lot of dead bodies," she explained, gesturing back to the place the calf had been in explanation.
"What? They make you handle dead people, too?"
The surprise in Cas's voice afflicted the girl with uncharacteristic shyness as she nodded. "No one else wants to do it," she mumbled lightly. Looking aside, she pulled out a salted jerky and began chewing on it in what Cas was beginning to realize was a nervous habit of the girl's.
"And, did they make your sister do this, too? Back before she discovered her gift?"
Kari simply hugged her legs, resting her chin atop her knees. "They were happier when I was born. They said a girl like her was too dirty to touch the dead." Like everything else, this was told in a matter-of-fact manner, but Cas heard anger in the girl's hoarse voice.
"Geeze," Cas could only say. It felt strange. The villagers had been so kind to her, yet. "I mean... it wasn't all of the villager's, right?"
Kari only sent a disappointed glance her way, and Cas immediately felt like wringing her own neck. Of course that wasn't the right thing to ask! Why had she even tried to ask that, to diminish the girl's experience? Just so she could save her own perception of the people she relied upon?
Cas let out a pained sigh. "Sorry... that was unfair, huh?"
Kari only answered after a long silence. "It wasn't all the villagers. My mother's friends... some of them would take us in whenever my mom got angry at us, and the elder got us jobs as corpse handlers. Sometimes they don't have enough food, though, so we went hungry. My sister gets fed regularly now, and she shares with me whenever I don't have enough. Everyone's been afraid that there's going to be a bad harvest because of the Oasis, so they've been hoarding food. Sometimes I had to survive by drying the meat of the animals I had to throw away..."
Again, strangely, Cas noticed that in all the girl's descriptions of her life, she never once uttered the words, 'illegal, or 'bad', or 'wrong', or 'unfair', or 'shouldn't', or 'deserve'. These were all words Cas had learned well enough in middle school to write eulogies about them. It was so profoundly sad that such a child lived in a reality where those concepts didn't come to acknowledge the wrong that had been done to her. Cas wanted to fix all of that! Cas wanted to take that girl and hold her tight and tell her everyone was wrong to do what they did, that she didn't deserve it, and that Cas didn't think of her like that at all!
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
Cas knew of the hollowness of words, however. She also knew that forcing Kari to hear the spoiled opinions of someone who'd grown up with a happy, safe image of childhood would be more of a comfort to Cas herself than any actual help to the girl. She wanted to cry out and speak her emotions but she wanted to do it in a way the girl could understand, and she knew that wouldn't happen by uttering some simple words. Instead, she decided to wait, and pause, and think as she searched her mind for any appropriate, true statement of solidarity. She searched her mind for something that could express her opinion without preaching it.
Eventually, Cas just sighed and said: "Honestly, Kari. If that were me, I would've run away a long time ago," burying her sadness with a laugh.
Cas often made mistakes and substituted simpler words when her vocabulary reached her limit. This was the first time in a long time that her words drew a puzzled expression, however, as Kari tilted her her head at her and said: "run away? What is that?"
Cas had essentially made up the word, putting together the words for 'run' and 'not here' in the language. Still, she found it difficult to explain otherwise. Struggling, she attempted, "It means... to go somewhere else. It means to go far away so that the people you know can no longer find you."
An even more curious expression, one half-filled with mirth. "To die?" Kari asked, "I'm not in that much despair that I'd eat a blade," she laughed.
"No, no," Cas attempted her own laugh, though she failed at it. "I mean to go far away while you're still alive. To go somewhere else."
Kari stopped her laugh. It was the most curious expression yet on her face as she asked the polite, but obvious, question: "where would I go to?"
----------------------------------------
Cas attempted to sleep that night. She wanted a break from the emotions assaulting her.
The brief respite she'd experienced after eating the Calf seemed out of reach, however. No... not out of reach, but Cas had the sense that 'sleeping' wouldn't do much for her other than leave her to deal with her problems in the morning. Not getting tired apparently also meant that you missed out on the joys of napping. But seriously, how could she have missed the obvious. All this time, she'd been working on the Oasis as if it were a favor to the villagers when -- news flash -- she also lived here and had nowhere to go. And, even if she did have somewhere to go, like that depressing ass cave, she couldn't exactly let Kari die of starvation and sickness, either.
Kari...
An image of the always smiling girl flashed through her mind. She... couldn't be distracted by the girl's troubles at the moment. She had to fix the Oasis first, and then she could use whatever clout that achievement got her to improve the girl's life. People were already acting nicer to her because of their relationship!
Right, so she just had to focus on fixing the Oasis and that was that.
The moon was visible outside her window. It cast a silvery light that glinted off the polished vases and sacks of food that she'd been gifted.
It appeared midnight had come to pass. Outside, she could hear the last of many idle conversations dying as neighbors exchanged goodbyes and went to sleep. There had been many questions about Cas's new color... well, not direct questions, but more than enough unusual glances and mentions of her looking different. It seemed that taboo against asking direct questions ran deeply. And Cas was more than happy to abuse it. Still, she wasn't keen on inviting too many more non-questions by revealing her human form, so she waited for another hour, until the moon slid across to hide behind the other edge of her window sill, and she was sure that everyone in the village had gone to sleep.
Flexing that intention which seemed more primed than ever inside of her, she opened her character sheet, whereupon she was greeted with the familiar ping of unread emails.
Level XP cap reached: 4 -> 6!
Maximum Health Updated! 40 -> 200!
Hardening Level Updated! 3 -> 12!
Shape Change Level Updated! 8 -> 10!
New Skill: Human Figure!
And then, on a separate pop up:
Core Attribute Update:
* Constitution: 84 -> 124
* Charisma: 4 → 8
Closing past all those, Cas decided to take an overview of her character sheet.
image [https://i.imgur.com/bhSqJDF.png]
image [https://i.imgur.com/pk4SDQS.png]
Entity: Cas
Classification: AquaMorph Slime
Level: 6
XP: 317 / 3200
Abilities:
* Shape Change: Level 10
* Absorption: Level 14
* Acid Immunity: Level 8
* Partial Hardening: Level 12
Skills
Human Figure *LVL 60 Special Feat*
Create Voicebox
Create Stilts
Vital Stats:
* Health: 200/200
* Size: Medium
* Armor: 4
Core Attributes:
* Constitution: 124
* Strength: 2
* Wisdom: 12
* Intelligence: 33
* Charisma: 8
* Magic Affinity: 5
This was... actually quite different from the game she remembered playing Siablo III. For one, she leveled up because she ate an already dead calf. Granted, she didn't level up much, but it seemed that leveling up in the real world required a bit more than the satisfaction of a job well done.
More curiously, her charisma had increased. Could it just be because she got larger? Were larger slimes more endearing? Maybe it was just accounting for the fact that she was more noticeable now?
Going into the excell interface, she modified the spider graph to no longer include Constitution. Being a slime, her constitution had grown large enough that it was starting to overshadow every other stat... and that did not make for a very readable graph.
She wondered what the new graph might show once she took human form.
Intending deeply, she once again let that phantom body take hold of her, the second eye coming into existence and -- now that she wasn't paying such close attention -- Cas was surprised to discover that the entire process concluded over the course of a single breath. It was like a roll of hot energy that molded her into shape and quickly set her there. Her character sheet, hovering in existence before her, glimmered like the dashboard of a crashing airplane, sending colorless updates in rapid fire.
Armor Rating Increased! 4 → 16
Movement added!
Core Attribute Updates:
* Constitution: 124 → 160
* Strength: 2 → 12
* Wisdom: 12 → 25
* Intelligence: 33 → 48
* Charisma: 8 → 20
image [https://i.imgur.com/SpncvP7.png]
image [https://i.imgur.com/r5E2oGo.png]
Entity: Cas
Classification: AquaMorph Slime
Level: 6
XP: 317 / 3200
Abilities:
* Shape Change: Level 10
* Absorption: Level 14
* Acid Immunity: Level 8
* Partial Hardening: Level 12
Skills
Human Figure
Create Voicebox
Create Stilts
Vital Stats:
* Health: 200 / 200
* Size: Medium
* Armor: 4 -> 16
* Movement: 10
Core Attributes:
* Constitution: 124 -> 160
* Strength: 2 -> 12
* Wisdom: 12 -> 25
* Intelligence: 33 -> 48
* Charisma: 8 -> 20
* Magic Affinity: 5
Cas moved her body with ready familiarity, bringing a curious finger up to couch her chin.
The physical stats made enough sense. Armor because she had thicker skin, and she could dodge better. Strength was obvious, having muscles and a skeletal system was helpful for that.
Constitution was strange, though. She'd thought that was dependent solely on mass, but perhaps there was something about her human body that was more resilient?
Her mental stats, however, made no damn sense. Charisma she could understand, but why did wisdom go up? Why did intelligence!? Cas tested herself to see if she felt smarter. 'What was 23 times 24?' she asked herself, and then immediately began scribbling the digits into the sand... oh.
Hmm, taking a step back from herself, she went back and paid more attention to the layout of her character sheet.
As far as she could discern, her sheet was just this world's way of presenting information in a way she could understand. The language it used was arbritrary, the number system it used was just a convention, and Cas wondered whether the stats it chose to present weren't just another convention, too.
After all, there were a thousand different facets of the mind, and they interplayed in a hundred-thousand different ways, and her character sheet trimmed down all that complexity into three whole numbers. Naturally, this was bound to give strange results.
In the end, Cas decided it was probably best not to pay too much attention to the numbers, and focused on the more practical matter of that earlier message that had hounded her. Focusing, she looked at her hands, tried to turn the palms, and just the palms, into the sticky, slime material she was best known for.
Shape Change at insufficient level to change Human Figure.
Her failure was attested to by the message. Cas was not one to let failure dissuade her, however, and she had a long, sleepless night ahead of her to see if she couldn't cheese this.