Book 2: Ember Regalia

You can never go home again.

That was the adage, wasn’t it?

Cas had never put it to the test. In her previous life, she left for college at an early age and never looked back. Independence had been intoxicating, and, life had been too demanding for her to schedule homecomings.

Mom had called that an excuse, and maybe that was true, but still: Cas never went back.

As a result, she’d never had to face the fact that things could change so much. She’d taken it for granted that, even if you did go back to your previous home, nothing remained of the memories that made it so.

Consequently, the changes to the cavern were quite harrowing for the young slime.

It had been the tail end of winter when Cas left the village. Spring was coming into full force, now. And, as the sun rolled over the horizon, Cas had to option but to accept that the cave was dead, and she’d killed it.

The slimes that were blocked from going into the Oasis had been leaking out into the cave. So, once Cas fixed the block and allowed the slimes to go back to the Oasis, they naturally stopped coming to the cave.

Slimes were a source of water in this desert, transporting it from underground caverns to the surface. Without them, the Cave no longer had a source of that life giving substance… and it showed.

It was hard to get used to. Every time she left the cave for any reason, Cas remembered it as being so ‘alive’, painted with slimy algae and verdant grasses. And only barren rock or mats of dried plant matter greeted her when she returned. There wasn’t even enough moisture to create dew anymore, a fact that Cas processed with a reproving posture. It was strange, the things one missed. The ant empire, her old enemy, was a shadow of its former self. Occasionally, roving bands of six or eight ants scavenged the surface for dried seeds, but otherwise the colony was a dormant hill of silence.

With the plants gone, the tapestry of insects that buzzed into the air come spring were missing, too.

Cas, therefore, was afforded little in the way of distraction. And with boredom setting in, she was soon forced into action.

The cave was quickly turned into a home-gym, otherwise known as a ‘cave’ by Cas’s more athletically inclined friends back on Earth, and Cas worked on her stats.

image [https://i.imgur.com/MlIxQFU.png]

Shape change had plateaued at level 14 months ago, and Alchemy wasn’t far behind. So, seeing no easy way to improve that trend, Cas focused on the lower leveled and also far cooler ‘Aura’ skill.

The training was fairly simplee. It consisted of going through the three steps: focusing herself, finding her center, holding her aura, and then trying to do something with it afterwards.

Of course, ‘doing’ something with aura was itself a five step program, and it was often the case that her efforts spluttered away before she could complete a simple motion. Still, she practiced and practiced and, as Sin had put it, kept ‘honing the blade’.

Eventually she got used to the process, and was left able to pay more attention to the subtler aspects of the art.

It turned out that shaping Aura was a surprisingly peaceful process. It required a level of tizzy introspection Cas had never found reason to develop during her human life. It was exciting and calming all at once, and it left her feeling a warm, giddy feeling.

But it was more than that, too.

If she had to put words to it, Cas would say: the feeling reminded her of Christmas eve – you know, that feeling when you’d drunk too much hot-chocolate and were waddled up in blankets, watching snowflakes drift outside and feeling absolutely certain that you could never fall asleep with so much sugar and caffeine in your system. Feeling like you could stay awake forever before happily passing out anyways.

Cas had never considered it when playing Siablo, but that key press to load your aura meter was something profound when done in reality. It was like a feeling beyond memories.

Still, even profundity could get boring after ten thousand tries, and Cas – lacking even the need for sleep as an excuse to pause in her practice – felt herself staining under the weight of endless repetitions. She felt herself cultivating hubris and an inflated sense of self importance, too.

For, one could imagine Sisyphus happy or sad, but even Sisyphus would – when thinking of Cas – picture her as bat-shit insane.

Well, whatever Sisyphus thought, Cas didn’t consider herself crazy. Sure, she talked to herself constantly, and sure she occasionally created false vocal chords for the sake of yelling at herself when she felt like she was ignoring herself, but… well…

“Have you ever done something for fourteen days straight?” Cas spoke to herself like she was correcting an annoying friend. “No, no, no,” Cas admonished, not happy with the imaginary answer. “I don’t mean fourteen days in a row. I mean fourteen days straight. Three hundred and thirty six hours without pause. Twenty thousand, one hundred, and sixty minutes of constant effort!”

Cas paused to take a deep breath into her air bellows, focusing her aura, leveling it – feeling just enough christmas cheer before striking it out to cover her tendril. Just another repetition of the same eight steps, of the exact same ineffable emotion whenever she touched her aura just right.

“So!” she yelled, moving her tendril back, “if we spent that much time doing the same thing over and over again. Why aren’t we getting it right!” she spoke her rage and focused on her holiday spirit as she swung the whip-like tendril forward.

This time, however, when she attempted to move her tendrill… it didn’t move. Rather, it twitched through space, moving out of her sight for a moment before stopping suddenly where it had struck the stone floor.

Cas moved her eye to watch her tendril. It felt… warm from the impact. That had been surprising. In her slime form, as she was now, it was a struggle to move in any way other than sluggishly. Whip like movements like that were… new.

Another new thing was the announcement that popped up on her status sheet.

[Aura Mastery Unlocked: Level 1]

Progress went a lot quicker after that. It turned out Cas could learn a lot quicker if she paid attention to her successes.

Cas had done that, and she was making amazing progress. Turns out yelling at yourself when you make the same mistake twice helps a lot.

Well, Cas thought it helped, anyway.

Still, the efficacy of schizophrenic pedagogical methods aside, Cas was almost too eager to set aside her training when her old friend Fox arrived.

Of course, Fox wasn’t a fox. Just like the eight legged ‘ants’ in the cave weren’t actually ants. The creatures of this world were only vaguely similar to those of earth, though they were similar enough to warrant borrowed names, for the sake of mental categorization.

No, Fox was, in reality – a zanzibat: a low level mob enemy from Siablo III, as well as Cas’s first hint that she’d been transported to the world which – through inter universal psychic disturbances – inspired the game back on earth.

Still, as Cas looked into the distance and heard the wingbeats and saw the creature taking flight, she thought it was an apt enough name.

The frame of the creature was almost fox like. Oversized shoulders seemed to float around an undersized, earless head. It had large, bright eyes that darted back and forth, traversing the darkness with ease. A sudden, deft twist of its bat wings changed its trajectory; flapping with a leathery sound, it careened down through the air.

It landed like a passenger jet, hind legs first. And, as soon as those rear paws landed, the bat-wings folded up like umbrellas against its forelegs, transitioning it to a running gait which – from a distance – left it looking exactly like some sort of fox. Well… it looked like a fox if you ignored the missing tail, and the lack of ears, and the snake-like neck.

Ok, there was a chance that Fox looked nothing like a fox, but Cas – like all biologists – was happy to name it whatever she felt like.

“Fox!” she yelled out, creating makeshift vocal chords and air-bellows inside herself to facilitate the greeting. Shape changing into a four legged form, Cas jogged out of the cave running over to the landing site.

Fox was happy enough to greet her, apparently not forgetting her ability to make food, though – in its excitable dances around her was a smart hesitation to come into contact with her acidic skin.

“Oh, come on boy!” Cas let out a disappointed sound. “I promise I didn’t make any acid inside of me this time.”

The Fox only whimpered with a hurt and suspicious expression, turning its nose up and trotting past her into the cave.

“Humph!” Cas turned her eye to follow it. “Well, who needs you! Besides, you deserved those burns for trying to eat me!”

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Despite Fox’s apparent lack of interest in their storied friendship. Cas was eager to celebrate its arrival.

She was happy for many reasons, but most of all she was feeling relieved. She hadn’t been certain the fox would return to the cave this year, considering everything inside it was dead.

Apparently, the fox valued the space more for the shelter than anything else the life inside might have provided.

As to the matter of food, the fox procured most of it on the outside, for the fox-bat was a carnivore, and it ate with a hunger more voracious than all the insects in the cave could have provided.

In the morning time and during dusk, when some signal invisible to Cas seemed right, the fox would twitch its nostrils, sticking its tongue out to taste the air and flutter thickly lashed eyes open. Then it would get up, conduct an unceremonious downward dog-stretch, then run out into the desert and take to wing.

Cas followed it on her own wings.

She surprised herself with how quickly she’d been able to change into her flight figure. Almost unconsciously, the exertion of change prompted her to call upon her aura, and the normally slow and gradual changes exploded into being.

Her body smashed down as if struck by a great hammer. Aerodynamic curves and the rounded edges molded themselves as if stamped onto her figure by some industrial press. The inside of her body crisscrossed with vulture bone, the supporting scaffolding appearing suddenly like breaking glass.

All of this happened in the space of a second, and in the space of one stride of her ‘lizard’ form, she had transitioned into the flapping glide of ‘Killer of Omens’.

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

image [https://i.imgur.com/SSFlrlv.png]

image [https://i.imgur.com/mlugirc.png]

The status sheet was different than usual, however.

Movement should have been 65, not 68. Not to mention, Charisma was two points higher than usual… In fact, paying closer attention, Cas realized that all of her stats had gone up just a little bit.

A cursory glance at the glowing, blue, ‘Aura’ cell told her enough to deduce the culprit.

The realization was quickly accompanied by a change in her character sheet.

image [https://i.imgur.com/nRWMPUg.png]

And even the radar graph changed, neon colors surprising her with a dark-mode. Turns out aura really did make everything better.

image [https://i.imgur.com/QO6Z2fA.png]

The new coloring was nice. Apparently Aura was a hell of a performance enhancing drug, and it seemed to multiply her powers to tell by how the chart was branching out at the edges.

Her status sheet was strange like that. It never told her anything she didn’t already know, but it was a master of organizing everything she did, down to the precise numbers.

Still, those stat increases went unused. Her flight was more of a documentary glide. A stark contrast to the sharp turns and sudden dives that characterized the fox’s hunting pattern.

For three months, Cas followed behind the fox every time it flew.

It was a welcome break from aura practice, and it gave her useful information otherwise.

Besides, Cas had always been a fan of nature documentaries. Her free-floating crystal rotated in her body to track the creature like a dolly cam, giving her a precise view of every kill and bloodied mouse that it swallowed whole. And, much as Cas detested Moneyball and the analytizisation of sport, she couldn’t help but be seduced by the arithmetic functions that had awakened in her character sheet.

[New Feature Unlocked: Charts and figures]

Oddly enough, this ability appeared just after her ‘aura’ skill had reached level one. No, unfortunately, she couldn’t use it to multiply her stats by a thousand, but it did help her conduct mental arithmetic in the notes section.

Testing it out had revealed all the usual functions you might expect from any excel sheet. The basic ones, anyway.

And Cas, according to her resume anyway, was extremely proficient in excel.

That came in handy when tracking the fox’s weight.

image [https://i.imgur.com/3IZYInH.png]

This naturally drew the question: how did Cas manage to weigh a fox?

Well, it was simple. You see, her character sheet wasn’t extremely useful. It did, however, give her information about herself. Namely, it gave her exact figures for her weight.

image [https://i.imgur.com/4ZQEoCg.png]

And how did this translate into getting the fox’s weight?

Well, Cas was ashamed to admit she had to use physics to get that answer. Ughhh!

You see, it was a simple matter of hydraulics. It was a rule that in any closed system of fluid, if you had two regions of different areas, then a pressure at the smaller area was multiplied when transferred to the larger system.

image [https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/WindTunnel/Activities/pascalsprinciple2.GIF]

And, Cas, being a slime, was the essence of a hydraulic system. More importantly – with shape change at level 15 – she could modify her shape and surface area on the fly.

So, splitting off a part of herself, Cas created a slime cushion and hid it underneath the Fox’s nest.

The final result -- when fully expanded into working condition -- looked more like two jankey waterbeds than anything professional, but they worked to measure relative pressure nonetheless. The fox sat on one side, and Cas placed herself on the smaller bed, adjusting the areas until the pressure felt roughly equivalent.

image [https://i.imgur.com/2pTJRba.png]

Comparing the final sizes of the water beds allowed her to estimate that the fox was roughly four times heavier than her.

The final calculation was subject to her ability to measure areas, but that wasn’t the important part, either.

The important part was that Cas had made a working hydraulic scale, in a cave, with a-

“Fox of graphs!”

Cas chanted quite unnecessarily, pulling up the final result of her calculations on her status sheet.

image [https://i.imgur.com/J6lrmIY.png]

And there it was!

Mathematical proof that the fox was getting fat!

That was the second time Cas had found cause to utter such a sentence. The first time was shortly before a fight broke out at a sorority house, but that wasn’t important right now.

That last graph wasn’t the most quantitative, but it told Cas enough to confirm what she’d long suspected.

The fox was engaging in hyperphagia.

Technical term: that meant it was eating a lot. Creatures on earth did that to gain weight, either before hibernation or as a prelude to a very long migration. Cas, looking at the fox and its wings, and noticing a distinct lack of any potential mates in the surrounding area, suspected the fox was preparing for the latter.

Most likely, it came to this place to fatten up, and it was on track gain ten pounds in preparation for the journey.

That was an interesting enough biology fact, but to Cas it meant everything.

Because, you see, Cas was a biologist.

She was the kind of person who read long winded papers with titles like: Fat Deposition and Length of Stopover of Migrant White-Crowned Sparrows.

She was also the kind of person who could do some quick math and realize that this fox – given its weight gain – was planning on a journey of at least five hundred miles.

That was important.

Because Cas was planning to escape this desert on wings, but the desert could be harsh to even flying creatures. Recalling her hazy memories of the Siablo III map, Cas knew this desert was the size of a continent, at least. If she flew for too long without finding water, she was in real danger of drying up before she made it out, and that was assuming she even went in the right direction!

Heading towards the interior of the desert was a bad idea, for multiple reasons.

The fox, however, had proven twice that it knew how to get around here. It probably knew a quick way out of this desert, and Cas was hoping to use it as a pathfinder.

Five hundred miles.

At least five hundred miles.

It seemed short compared to a year.

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Time was a strange mistress.

One swish of her dress, and months could pass by in a blur, leaving you so bewildered by their departure that you found yourself surprised by the fact that the time had come.

Spring had passed and the fox had neglected to hunt for the past two days, rather spending its days stretching its wings and flying higher than it ever had before.

Each time, in a panic, Cas dashed up to follow, but apparently those had been test flights, and the fox was safely sleeping now, snoozing away in the corner of the cave as Cas made her hasty preparations.

Living in the desert, It was difficult to gather enough biological material to grow. Drinking up some slimes from the cavern below was enough to keep her water mass constant, but gathering useful resources like bone, meat, salt, blood, minerals… that was a slog.

She could gather most materials from desert shrubs and succulents as she found them, but even those were few and far between, hiding underground wherever they were to be found.

And she was lacking in things she most needed for flight, namely bone and muscle.

Her alchemy was fine enough to turn one type of bone into another, such as mouse bone into lighter vulture bone. It was even enough to transform one kind of muscle to another, but using plants to make meat was beyond her.

TRUFTSSSTS

Cas thudded into the sand, scraping along the harsh surface.

Apparently, hunting was beyond her as well. Cas shook her head, springing to a four-legged stance, eye flickering about, searching through the dust cloud- there!

Watching the fox had taught her two things about the hunt: never give up, never hesitate.

And she didn’t.

It was a strange thing, to have your eye be separate from your head. Her figure was a mockery of the fox-bats. A four legged thing on spindly legs with a long, snake-like head that stretched out from the center, tipped at the end by a bodkin-point spear of hardened cow-bone.

As it was, that ‘head’ was a distant limb, controlled and aimed by the crystal eye that floated inside her and composed the center-point of her attention.

The head reared back like a fishing lure, and, calling upon her aura, Cas sprung it forward with a flicking motion that shot the head forward and caught the mouse mid-leap, piercing it fully through in a burst of blood.

She felt the mouse die inside her; the piranha solution that was her body greedily dissolved the creature into an opaque cloud of animal matter.

Cas hardly paid the process any attention, already running back and leaping up into a gliding flight. The sun was low in the sky, and she was always hesitant to be away from the cave during such a time. The fox often woke up at dusk, and it could leave any day now.

Leaving the cave in such a condition was a painful exercise. It left Cas feeling constantly as if she were walking away from an airport terminal that was always just about to board.

Thankfully, the fox was still there when she arrived, and Cas was left feeling a bit silly about her panic. Though, she still resolved never to leave the cave until the Fox was about to migrate. So, with so much free time and no intention of Leaving, Cas degenerated to that universal hobby of every prospective traveler and started double-checking her packing list.

It was a stupid habit, considering she only had two things on her.

She checked anyway.

image [https://i.imgur.com/F7Iio96.png]

A rusty, iron spearhead: one she’d found next to an ancient skeleton and had claimed by the rule of finder’s keepers.

The second item in her inventory was a tuft of cotton hiding a gram of something very valuable, and which was the key bit of paranoia that kept making her check her inventory to make sure it was still there. It was pointless! She knew it was still there, and no one could have stolen it. Still, a second after checking her inventory, she checked it again, looking to make sure the cotton ball was still in its place, that it hadn't been ruptured.

Huh… she wondered if this was what it felt like to try and sneak drugs through airport security.

That musing went unanswered, as the Fox stretched out a long tongue and licked at the air.

Cas had created a second crystal to constantly monitor the fox while her main crystal studied her character sheet. The second sight felt something like a human’s peripheral vision. It was clearer than that, though, and it pushed all her attention to this secondary crystal, where the fox bat was fluttering its eyes open and stretching for a particularly long interval.

And then, as unceremonious as any runway takeoff, the fox jogged through the cave and flapped once, twice, thrice before taking to the air.

Cas ran through her status screen, the illusion dissipating as she brushed past on four legs and, in a quick leap, soared into the air, supporting herself on doublet wings as she flew after the fox.

It was a familiar feeling. The earth fell away and the sky wrapped around her until she was surrounded by the new, more heavenly world of the sky. She’d done it hundreds of times before, enough times to no longer be enchanted by it, at least.

Despite this, she couldn't help her surprise when she saw that the fox was leaving this place with such an unceremonious stance, without even a glance back, as if leaving the cave, leaving home were an evening trip.

Then again, maybe this cave wasn’t home for the fox. Maybe it was something like an extended vacation spot.

Or, maybe, Cas didn’t know why this thought occurred to her, but it came unprompted nonetheless.

Maybe it was just the case that the Fox didn’t look back because it was more mature than her.

Despite being an animal, it had traveled the world every year of its life, and maybe that worldliness had been enough for it to realize that looking back wouldn’t accomplish anything. Maybe it had realized, after so many departures and returns, that you could never truly come home again.

Cas turned her eye inside herself and looked back at the cave nevertheless.

At this height, she could even peek over the thousand foot tall rock spire. Behind it, she spotted the small, grassy dot in the distance where the Oasis sat entrenched against the wasteland, against the village she’d spent a lifetime failing to fix.

She would return to this place, one day.

No, that wasn’t it. She would return to Kari, her friend, one day.

It was just that she feared: if even places could change so drastically over the space of a little time, were people any different? Would Kari even be recognizable when Cas came back. Would Cas be recognizable to Kari?

Cas banished the thought, and turned her eye away from the southern horizon.

Perhaps the Fox was right, she decided. There really was no point in looking back.