Cas’s flight was a precarious thing.
It wasn’t ‘flight’ really. At least, there was nothing in her character sheet with the name. She had no ‘flight’ skill. This was only right, slimes weren’t meant to fly, after all. However, it also meant she was left lacking the usual accommodations a flight skill would entail. For example, she had no ability to float, or any crash protection, or really anything else that might say that the universe had ordained her to be able to fly.
Rather, her flight was more a consequence. Slimes couldn’t fly, but they could change shape. They could also harden parts of themselves, and create substances that they had eaten before.
All of these skills, along with a bit of clever shape design, some knowledge of airfoils, and lots of trial and error had – once cobbled through her mind – been enough to get her into the air.
So, no, her ‘flight’ wasn’t really ‘flight’. It was simply a consequence of moving a particular shape through the air.
The thing was, however, consequences oftentimes carried their own consequences. And the consequence of flying by using the laws of physics was that you had to… obey the laws of physics. Consequently, her flight form came packaged with a weight limit.
Her recent mastery of aura, along with the results of her earlier strength training had, of course, massively increased that weight limit to an astounding… fifteen pounds.
Shaving off one pound to account for her inventory, Cas was sitting pretty with a total weight limit of fourteen pounds for her body proper. At least, that was the limit if she wanted to fly with anything resembling agility.
It was a frustrating handicap, but that hardly mattered once she was in the air.
In the air, weight was a meaningless factor in feeling, if not reality. And Cas, hugging great gasps of air underneath a six-foot wingspan, endeavored to make it a little less meaningful as she drifted through the air, breaking her altitude record by a mile as she followed the fox-bat in its climb.
The fox arced its wings outward, spreading each finger of the wing to cup the rising thermals. Cas tailed it beat for beat, circling behind it as it traced the edges of a hot spot in the cooling desert, curving up in lazy spirals that made all the details of the ground blur together.
Above two thousand feet, the rock spire which stood so imposingly over the desert looked like a sundial made of toothpicks.
Another thousand feet, and even the spire became hardly discernible against the night-blue sands.
Cas had never flown this high before. Strangely enough, some part of her was almost scared to go higher. Distances meaningless to a human eye were somehow calculated intuitively by her crystal, and the knowledge disturbed her as the fox spread its wings out wider and – with a rising crescendo stretched out over minutes – caught the center of the thermal.
The desert heat threw them into the air.
Masses of air the size of mountains were their elevator. They were invisible, but Cas could feel the heated air rising all around her like a hot-air balloon.
That comparison might draw a peaceful image to mind, but it’s often forgotten that the interior of a hot air balloon is filled with a roaring furnace and chaotic air.
And the desert thermals were a whole ecosystem of chaos. As the rising bubble of heat rose, it spread out into the greater sky, as if popping the balloon. The turbulence and wind-roars left Cas feeling like a stray piece of confetti in a roaring cannon-mouth.
Still, she held steady, and the confidence of the rising fox bolstered her to follow.
Another thousand feet; the imposing thermals petered out, and Cas barely had the time to feel relief before the Fox – feeling the joyride petering out, started aggressively flapping, gaining altitude.
Cas, amazed at this show of effort, looked curiously down at the seven-thousand feet of drop space which seperated her from the earth.
‘What the hell are you flying higher for?’ she wanted to yell at the fox, but creating the bellows for her vocal cords would have ruined her aerodynamics. She doubted the fox would have heard her anyways.
The fox ignored her silent questions, and simply continued flapping, almost diving at the sky.
Seeing this, Cas mentally shrugged. Monkey see, monkey do, she decided, and scooping piles of air underneath her wings, she shot up through the air.
…
Cas was a better flier than the fox.
In fact, with minor exceptions, she was certain that [Killer of Omens] – the name she’d given her flight figure – was a more masterful flier than any creature earth had ever seen.
This wasn’t a brag. In fact, it was a natural consequence of the fact that Cas simply couldn’t transform her body into that of a bird. Birds were too complicated.
Rather, [Killer of Omens] was more artificial in design, modeled more after a glider than anything living.
This was an advantage to Cas. After all, she could shape change, and that meant [Killer of Omens] could, too. Once it took into the air, all of those unnecessary things that birds lugged around: heads, legs, intestines, vocal chords. Why, they simply melted away into its body, cannibalized to create larger wings and more optimal flight geometries.
Another feeling of Christmas night, and a powerful flap carried her thirty feet higher, overshooting the fox by a good margin.
Aura also helped.
The result of this was that Cas looked quite strange up close, when [Killer of Omens] was in good flight form. Her entire body was a wing, one that trailed almost artificially into a plane-like teardrop at her rear. If you took a picture, she wouldn’t have looked out of place in a CAD model. Her entire body was a single, smoothed aerofoil, the graceful line from front to back broken up only by the sharp rudder that rose out of her back.
Another break in the design flow was her forward ballase. For, while Cas didn’t need a head, she did need a counterbalance at her front. This was made up by a dense, spherical shape which stuck out of the nose of “Killer of Omens”, looking almost funnily like a hazard light if her red coloration was to be believed.
Of course, this also had its consequences.
Namely, her shape.
Cas, normally a spherical blob, was free to look all about her with that central crystal that floated about her insides and acted as her eye. Now, however, her formerly spherical, transparent form was transformed into a sculpture of intricate refraction… one which left her feeling like she was spotting the world through drunk goggles.
Both of her sides were flattened out into point-like wings that distorted the world. Her roof had a rudder which made the sky look squiggly. Her front was a spherical weight that left her feeling like she was trying to use a lollipop stick as a telescope. Her tail was a cone… one which gave her triple vision whenever she tried to look at anything through it.
This left her underbelly as the only, relatively clean, viewing window; fortunate when Cas wanted to watch the ground – unfortunately, right now, she was trying to keep track of a fox flying in front of her, so… some compromises had to be made.
Now that the thermals weren’t threatening to flip her over, Cas felt a lot more comfortable retracting her dorsal rudder. The stars quickly focused into clear points. Turning her crystal up, Cas watched the fox through her new moon-roof, feeling a lot of her height anxiety leaving her as infinite space replaced distant ground.
image [https://i.imgur.com/zrJuTpc.png]
She wasn’t here to star-gaze, however, and quickly returned her attention to Fox, who…
Cas paused with a moment of disbelief. That the damn fox was still flapping!
As a slime, Cas didn’t really feel the weight of physical exertion, but the rate of her wing flaps, as well as the constant draw on her aura… what kind of migration was this fox planning? Hadn’t it ever heard the phrase ‘marathon, not sprint?’
Another thousand feet, and the fox continued tirelessly.
A second thousand. They were at nine thousand feet, now – an accomplishment the fox seemed to have no respect for, as it continued its rush towards the sky.
It was after the third thousand, when they hit the magic number ten-thousand, that the fox stopped rising and Cas, once she’d caught up with his altitude, suddenly flipped in mid-air.
FWHOOOOOOSH!
A suicide rush of air hit her from the back.
Have you ever stood too close to moving train? Not at a terminal, but in the middle of a track, when a thousand tons of steel suddenly raced by at highway speeds. You know that rush of vacuum as if all the world’s air had conspired to push you onto the track, and it was all you could do not to give way to it?
Well… despite all she could do. Cas did give way. Her lack of a rudder left her feeling particularly unbalanced, as if she’d been flying on a soapy floor and stepped on a banana peel.
It was all she could do to squeak when the world suddenly flipped like a coin. Sky, dirt, sky, dirt circling around her as she crashed towards the earth.
Flattening her wings out like pancakes, Cas quickly crashed against the air, arresting her tumble. Nosing down, Cas fell into a controlled dive, falling several hundred feet, before flaring out her wings and turning into an upswing.
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Rightling herself, Cas flickered her eye about, looking round until the fox came into view, surprised to discover it had gained quite a lead on her.
How long had she been falling for?
Regaining her sleeker wings, and regrowing her rudder, Cas raced back to intercept the fox, this time growing her rudder an extra few inches as she tentatively soared up into heaven and…
FWHOOOOOOSH!
Again, that river of air. Cas warbled a bit, but her rudder worked overtime and her wings flattened out into a more stable configuration as the air unbalanced her. Wait, no… it didn’t unbalance her… it was speeding her up!
Of course! She almost cursed at herself. Prevailing winds! Birds used them as highways back on earth; why wouldn’t Fox do the same when they could?
The air lapped at her wings and pressed her forward into an effortless drag-race. It was so strange to be going so fast yet to feel no wind on your face. It seemed no matter how fast she went the wind flew faster still against her back! Faster, faster, faster, all without a single wingbeat!
This sudden acceleration continued on for some minutes, propelling her until she matched the pace of the wind.
And then the world quieted down. Now that she nearly matched the pace of the wind, it like a gentle breeze against her back, only encouraging her forward whenever she slowed down or made a turn.
There was no headwind, either.
It felt almost like she was sitting in still air.
It was a strange experience. There were no points of reference to gauge your speed, and the ground crawled slowly no matter your hurry.
It was an eerie feeling, floating on nothing and traveling at blinding speeds.
However, what bothered Cas more was the obvious fact that, despite this, she seemed to know her speed. She knew that she was traveling at fifty-five miles per hour..
How did she know that?
Pointing her crystal down, she tried to find some hint as to where she could have gotten that information,, but she was again struck by the fact that the altitude seemed obvious to her when she looked down at the earth.
She wasn’t certain as to the exact distance. It looked to be somewhere between ten and eleven thousand feet. But, that was still a far cry from her experience as a human, where she might look out the cabin window of a jet and think: ‘looks pretty high’.
This ability of hers had always been in the periphery of her knowledge. Occasionally, on previous flights, Cas had made a mental note when she reached a thousand feet. It was done so effortlessly that she never bothered to notice it.
Now that she was of a mind to pay attention to it, however, it was strange that she seemed to have such a natural sense for distance.
Cas almost expected her status screen this time.
After all, it wouldn’t just!
[Yes I Would!]
The notification came with a new sheet on her status page.
image [https://i.imgur.com/dbrOR05.png]
Of course it would.
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Cas followed the fox through the night, eventually growing comfortable enough with the wind to lengthen her wings a bit. That had given a bit of kick to the turbo, and that had been enough to stop the fox pulling away as it had been for the past few hours of their flight.
Other than that minor issue, Cas found that there was nothing to do.
Being a terrestrial creature by birth, moving without effort was a new sensation for Cas. It wasn’t like riding a car or a boat.
It felt more personal than that.
Cas could feel the river of wind spanning miles to either side. It felt like a part of her, like some giant limb that could carry her in lieu of her own. It felt like she was surrounded by pure energy, which she could turn into motion with a mere thought.
It felt like magic.
It was just so effortless, so calming, so… boring.
Well, it had been exhilarating for the first thirty minutes, but they’d been at this for ten hours already! Ten hours, and not so much as twitch from the fox. It was just floating there like a statue!
And, Cas, already resolved to follow its every move, had been forced to stuff her restless soul into a body deprived of motion, getting the opportunity to move only when the need to make minor adjustments presented itself, an opportunity which – at this altitude and with such a sure tailwind – it rarely ever did.
Cas once again flattened the front part of herself into a square box. She felt a tumble of shaky turbulence run through her – she could hear the air protesting at the sharp corners of her new face.
In flight, such small changes in shape could run havoc on your aerodynamics, and a flat face pointing into the wind was an unpopular shape to change into.
However, the flat face had its advantages. The change gave her a clear, forward window to look through. Ignoring the shaking, she could see the fox ahead of her in immaculate clarity, where she found it was… doing absolutely nothing, still.
She would have admired its commitment to inaction, but they’d been at this for ten hours already, and Cas had run out of patience four hours in.
Well… she corrected herself, they’d been at this for ten hours and thirty minutes.
As it turned out, she had a natural sense for distance and time. Running those measures through her sheet allowed her to calculate all sorts of useful things, like miles per hour or complaints per mile. Goodness knows, that made more sense than her being able to measure 'speed' as if it were some real factor.
image [https://i.imgur.com/uJNC9wL.png]
And, seeing the clock strike six, Cas turned her eye to the eastern horizon, where – at this altitude – the leading edge of the sun had already burst blatantly into view.
Cas felt an instinctive urge to harden her skin. That was the general rule for slime in the desert. A stiffening of her flight wings warned her against that idea, however.
And so she reluctantly let the morning light shine through her transparent figure.
The sun’s rays were very gentle in the morning. Actually, they were a pleasant reprieve from the chill of the night, but Cas couldn’t help noting that that wouldn’t last for long.
The fox seemed to share her paranoid thoughts, and was already exiting the wind stream, banking subtly into a wide arc, heading for she knew not where.
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Cas had lost surprisingly little water over the course of their night flight, so she was happy to let the fox have first dibs on the dripping stalactite, which it lapped at greedily while Cas sat in a corner of the cave, perusing through the Notes section of her status sheet.
The notes section was perhaps the most haggard of all sections in her status sheet.
There, Cas stored information on a thousand haphazard subjects, all immaculately organized. And, right now, Cas was perusing through the ‘plants?’ section of her notes, trying to find something that looked similar to the pungent moss that covered the cave the fox had set them in
Really, the word ‘Cave’ was a generous label for the hidey hole the Fox had guided them to. It was, in reality, a shallow groove carved into the side of a massive, stone cliff.
In all, it was four feet deep with a sheer opening that faced directly out to the five hundred foot fall which served as their natural welcome mat. The floor was angled lightly towards the precipice, worn smooth by the constant drip of water that had formed it and turned slippery by a carpet of slick moss that ringed the edges of the maw.
Hgrrrrrr! Rarh!
The fox-bat didn’t growl like earth mammals. It rather let out something more like a hiss combined with the hum of a refrigerator.
Still, the message was the same.
Cas looked up from her notes, surprised to find angry eyes and gnashing teeth hurling hate in her direction. Raised hackles and and a flashing, bright tongue giving her the guard dog treatment.
The message was alien but very clear. And Cas, making a quick decision, moved slightly to the side.
At this, the fox-bat calmed a little, though still it glared at Cas with angry, barely restrained eyes as it crawled into her corner and patted its feet there before lying asleep.
Cas looked around and kicked herself. The fox had been flying for hours and – unlike her it needed sleep. Also unlike her, it couldn’t simply stick to the floor in order to keep from sliding out of this cave.
That, and there was the fact that this was quite an enclosed space. Even having moved aside, Cas felt as if she were in a phone booth, still only inches away from the fox’s lightly breathing face. Animals were wont to get territorial when stressed and in enclosed spaces… it was only natural.
In fact, it was only logical that it would start getting testy with her.
No, Cas wasn’t bothered by that.
What bothered Cas was the fact that she felt hurt by the interaction.
It was a wild animal for goodness’s sake! What else had she been expecting? An apology? Was she expecting it to be grateful and patient because she fed it one time?
Was she losing her mind?
The thought gave Cas pause. She recalled suddenly that she’d spent the last four months in complete isolation. In fact, she had gone the last four months without speaking to a single other person.
She hadn’t thought much of the isolation. In fact, she’d spent over a year alone when she first arrived here. Four months couldn’t have been that bad, could it?
Had she… just gotten used to being alone?
Well, obviously not, if she was trying to make friends with foxes, Cas decided.
Anthropomorphisation was an ingrained habit among humans. It was the sort of thing that made people think their pets loved them, or that trees could talk. Cas, working as a biologist – often in labs that dissected animals by the thousands – had trained that particular habit out of herself quite thoroughly. In the lab, she never thought of any creature as anything other than a ‘specimen’. Her outlook on the outside world was hardly different. She’d long overcome seeing animals as people.
At least, Cas thought she’d overcome that piece of ridiculous sentimentality. It wounded her professional pride to realize that she’d slipped when it came to Fox… no, not Fox: the Zanzibat. That was the proper term for it. Maybe she’d make up a latin name later down the line.
The Zanzibat was already sleeping, and Cas spent the rest of the time occupying herself with updating her notes.
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[
* Notes
* Ecosystem
* Animals
* Zanzibat
-Description
Warm blooded creature, distinctive stripe along back. Color of stripe uncertain, but I suspect it would match the red coloration seen in its Siablo III rendition.
Belongs to a clade I’ve decided to name ‘mammaloid’. Non-standard integumentation around neck and head area confirms it’s not identical to true mammals. Most likely in different clade from the ‘vultures’ in note three despite superficial similarities.
-Activity
Crepuscular hunter.
Only observed eating meat. However, this may be due to lack of appropriate vegetation in desert region, or perhaps a consequence of hyperphagic period prior to migration.
*New Note*
Very excitable when not threatened, appears to adopt similar mannerisms to domestic dog when greeting friends. Although, perhaps this may just be an individual quirk of Fox’s.
*New Note*
Kind of cute, actually! If you ignore the teeth.
*New Note*
Zanzibat subject appears to transition to nocturnal habits during migration period. Perhaps a universal characteristic, but can’t rule out behavioral modification due to desert landscape.
Aggression levels appear to increase during migration, perhaps hormonal changes in preparation for summer?
Also… it was very rude to me today.
]