Cas summoned new facets of herself whenever she created a new form.
This latest figure, which Cas had christened [Ambulance Camel], left her feeling… surreal.
Cas had never got surrealist art. She’d always suspected it was some sort of social-signaling among the artists.
Handicaps were common in nature, after all. The peacocks’ tail feathers were the paradigmatic example. They were heavy, cumbersome, hobbling and liable to get a peacock killed; an obviously detrimental adaptation that – nevertheless – managed to display a creature’s fitness and get him all the chicks.
Cas had figured that surrealist art worked on the same principle. Succeeding in art despite only making ugly paintings was an objectively impressive feat in a usually subjective field
No matter its accolades, surrealism had always seemed like the product of crazy people looking for attention.
[Ambulance Camel] changed her mind.
She now realized that – contrary to popular belief – surrealism was actually quite a practical matter. Surrealism was, in fact, the simple consequence of trying to satisfy the demands of an insane universe.
The Camel, as she termed it, was her attempt to meet just such demands.
Long, spindly legs were the hallmark of the design, seeming ethereal as they lifted the greater mass of her body ten feet high into the air, walking forward with lazy, yard-long strides. The feet were like rounded tea-cups. They splayed out into clover-shapes whenever the weight of her body pressed on them, springing off violin-string tendons when the timing called for her next footstep.
Atop these spindly spires of bone and tendon was the greater mass of her body; it was stretched and disproportionately long, like a hearse. Her back was a flat bed, molded to the shape of the dying woman that rested upon it.
Much like the Bison, Camel was a sculpture created by distorting her memories of the dead calf she’d eaten all those months ago. As a result, the suspension was better than Cas alone could have designed it, and the woman’s body barely swayed as they sailed over the ground. Still, Cas couldn’t help occasionally glancing down to check on her. Her crystal eye floated sixty feet above the rest of the body, suspended in a miniature fish-bulb that peeked over the treetops like a periscope. Below the bubble-eye, sixty feet of neck stretched down into the body below.
This ‘neck’ was the thickness of a pencil and had the consistency of a wet noodle as lofted her eye high into the air. Occasionally, stray branches blocked the path, and it arced and weaved around them with a dancing stride. Her eye kept a forward gaze as it bounded through the treetops, charting a straight course towards the end of the forest – where treetops grew sparse and transitioned to flat plains.
Cas wasn’t sure why she chose the plains as her destination.
Clear cutting was a sign of human presence. Maybe there would be people there. Then again, it could also be a natural grassland. It probably was. Maybe she just craved a change of scenery. It made her feel like she was making progress in any case. It gave some meaning to her action, and made her believe that she wasn’t just carting around a dying body because she was too afraid to stay still.
A bright flash of lightning broke through her thoughts.
The storm had been building for a while now, chill winds howled over the treetops, buffeting against her eye and straining all sixty feet of the pencil neck strung below it.
Aura flared visibly across the entire length of the periscope. Cas felt an intense resistance as she forced her aura to the distant limits of her physical body, feeling like she was trying to blow up a bicycle tire by the time the faintest traces of aura reached up to cover her bubble-eye.
[Skill Level Increase: Aura 1 -> 2]
[Skill Level Increase: Aura 2 -> 3]
Cas didn’t have time to process that discovery, as the whole forest lit up like a camera flash.
CRACKABOOOOOOOM!
Much closer this time, thunder echoed through empty space as lightning danced through the sea of clouds above. And, as if the sound had shaken them loose, the clouds started pouring. Cas was in a very sparse section of forest, with the sky almost constantly visible; the ground was quickly growing mottled with wet patches.
In response, Cas hardened a stout, a-frame tent over the woman’s body, flexing transparent slime material between the posts. The tent set itself up with a thought, racing ahead of the storm. The sound of pitter-pattering was the only hint of rain which made it into the interior. It was an air-tight and water-tight shelter; Cas had foresight enough to create a louvered vent in the roof.
As had become her habit whenever something did or didn’t happen, Cas twisted the periscope to look down at her own back.
The tent was low, with the ridge of the frame barely three inches over the woman's body. It looked like a glass sarcophagus had been erected around the woman: something in between Snow White and Lenin. It left the impression of a geometric hump rising over the silhouette of her bizarre body. It left her feeling that maybe there had been a premonition of accuracy in the name she’d given this form.
Still, the final figure resembled a casket more than it did a camel hump, and the comparison only served to heighten Cas's anxieties as she lavished her attention back onto her patient.
Creating a second eye in her main body below, she once again surveyed the status of the woman's injuries.
A sterile gauze of slime material was glued over the bloody gash in her side, papering over the exposed rib and stuffed into the bloody teeth-marks that tunneled into her obliques like a nest of wounds. A soft tube rose out of the flat back and draped into the woman’s mouth. There, the sensitive tip monitored her breath, occasionally pumping a slurry of food down the woman’s throat.
You were supposed to give people easily digestible stuff when they were wounded, right? Or, were you not supposed to feed them at all?
Sensing that the woman’s breath was growing dry, Cas pivoted and started spritzing salt water into the woman’s mouth.
Hydration was a must, or something like that. Wasn’t there an acronym for this situation?
Something about ABCs?
...
It wasn’t lost on Cas that she didn’t know what she was doing.
The thunderstorm grew darker.
----------------------------------------
CRRRAAACKAAKAKAAKAK!
A dizzying stairstep of white light cracked through the clouds, refracting through the hazy curtain of rain.
The forest was truly sparse now, replaced by a flat plain where – every now and then – an aged tree might pass by like a signpost. The rain was chilly and hard, and it cut against Camel's body at acute angles.
Still, Cas was surprised at just how cozy the environment remained inside the tent. The floor was transparent, giving a clear window through the back of her body, where she saw the skeletal muscles tugging at the leg tendons like marionettes whenever she took a step. The working muscles created heat, which warmed the interior and formed a soft haze of frosty dew on the tent walls. Despite the amenities, however, the atmosphere in the tent had become intensely uncomfortable for Cas who – for the twelfth time – checked again on the woman’s breath.
It had been weakening steadily for the past hour.
Cas’s disappointment was a surprise to herself. She’d only bandaged the woman on a slim hope, after all. So what if her breath was weak? What else could be expected of a dying person? Irrational feelings were perhaps the hardest to discard, however, and Cas studied the woman, closer this time.
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
The woman was surprisingly hardy, She’d held strong for the most part. She’d even tricked Cas into believing she might recover, but the past ten minutes had been a continual collapse of her medical state along with Cas’s hopes. Her face was the definition of pale, now, turning clammy and worn with pained expressions. Her breath was a wispy thing, barely registering on the tip of the feeding tube even as her heart rate grew increasingly erratic.
A pained whispering gasp escaped the woman.
The sound of suffocation was painful, and paranoia Cas to check the air vents again. They were fine. Cas had known that before she checked. She could taste the fresh air whispering in through their bent forms, but she felt an intense, needling pressure to just do something. She felt an urge to check on the amenities, to activate the feeding tube again, to pump the air vents, or to give the woman a foot-massage, or just to do something, anything! She wanted to race ahead; she wanted to do something; she wanted to hide away and let the woman die out of her sight. What was the point in carrying her around if she wasn’t going to get better?
Cas clamped down on all of these disparate commands. Taking a moment, she allowed herself to think, and her thoughts organized themselves in a mechanical manner, listing all the variables with dispassionate clarity.
The woman was in critical condition. That much was obvious from the beginning. Cas had closed her wounds, but… But then what?
Cas tried to recall everything she’d learned from House MD. The woman was pale, erratic heartbeats; she’d just been stabbed and lost a lot of blood. Probably not lupus, Cas gathered.
In fact, feeling a bit adventurous, Cas was willing to bet that this was a case of severe blood loss. It pained Cas to acknowledge the obvious: that this was an ailment with only one remedy: the woman would need a blood transplant.
That was a scary reality.
Blood transplants required equipment. It required the ability to test for blood types, and sterile needles, and hospitals, and someone who knew what they were doing! Not to mention the fact that, most important of all:
A blood transplant needed blood!
Cas would have screamed if she could, feeling her anxiety reach new peaks as the woman moaned again.
Cas's eye paced through the observation tank she’d raised in the tent. She didn’t even know why she was still thinking! There was nothing to do. She didn’t have a single needle on her, much less an iv and… blood.
Then Cas stopped, and remembered what she was: a sakkari.
More than that, she was a sakkari that had just unlocked Create Structure as an ability. How had she been so stupid!?
...
It was said that one shouldn’t handle sharp objects while excited, but – despite her tizzy anticipation – Cas’s stalk was as steady as a clock.
It grew slowly out of Cas’s back, next to the woman’s left arm. The tip molded itself into a straight needle-point, and the stalk arced around like a hydra that, after a moment’s probing at the woman’s skin, punctured the vein at the crook of her elbow.
The flowing, mild taste of the woman’s blood washed over the needle.
[New Reagent Catalogued]
[Human Blood]
The taste was watery, punctuated by an acidic tinge that seemed to spike with every heartbeat.
Likely, this was being caused by an overload of carbon dioxide in the blood. Another desperate gasp from the woman attested to this, and Cas hurried to the solutions that came to mind.
Scanning through the reservoir of materials suspended in her body, Cas was quick to notice that she had several dozen liters of fresh monster blood in reserve. She tried to transform it.
[Transmutation Failed]
[Alchemy 101 at Insufficient level to break Monster - Animal barrier]
[Minimum required level: 55]
Despite her hopes, the failure didn’t surprise her.
With her newly refined palette it had been obvious – though not urgent to note at the time – that the monsters she’d eaten were… different.
It was hard to explain how, but... have you ever compared a human skeleton to a horses?
A discerning eye could note that they were, essentially, the same skeleton. At the basic level, both skeletons were made up of the same bones arranged in the same order, just stretched and distorted to create different shapes. And, taken in the grand scheme, horses, and vultures, and calves and mice and humans were made up of the same basic ingredients.
It was the reason that, ‘I’m so hungry I could eat a horse’ was a saying. A human could eat horse-meat and turn the horse meat into well… human meat. It was a testament to the brotherhood of all life, if you looked at it in a certain, cannibalistic, sort of way.
Because, despite all similarities, all life on the planet was related.
Monsters, however, just weren’t.
The monsters Cas had eaten: they were alien. Their flesh tasted strange, their blood was of a completely different nature, and even their skeletons had too many shoulder blades and strange articulations.
Cas would’ve had more luck trying to make human blood from tree leaves.
This wasn’t the end of the world, however. Cas had a reservoir of mouse blood she’d collected while hunting during the migration. It was only a minute amount, barely a cup, but the pained groans of the woman recollected her, and Cas – remembering something about beggars and choosers – resolved to work with what she had.
[Transmutation Failed]
[Alchemy 101 cannot transform **Mouse Blood** to **Human Blood**]
[Minimum required level: 30]
Again, Cas’s pessimism had foreseen the issue before it arrived.
Cas had a catalog of materials. She knew what mouse blood tasted like, and how it differed from human blood, but knowing was different from doing, and transfiguring blood required a whole lot of doing
Cas had worked with materials before. She’d managed to make vulture bone from cow bone for [Killer of Omens], but that had been a simple change in the shape of the structure. Changing blood, on the other hand, required transmuting the fundamental chemistry of a substance. And no matter how hard she tried…
[Transformation Failed]
[Alchemy 101 cannot transform **Mouse Blood** to **Human Blood**]
[Minimum required level: 30]
Nor how earnestly…
[Transformation Failed]
[Alchemy 101 cannot transform **Mouse Blood** to **Human Blood**]
[Minimum required level: 30]
It still failed.
It was an intensely frustrating project. It felt like trying to stack marbles with tweezers. The blood just always slipped from her grasp at the last moment...
[Transformation Failed]
[Alchemy 101 cannot transform **Mouse Blood** to **Human Blood**]
[Minimum required level: 30]
Cas's rage flew to new heights, blown up by the horrid feelings of death the woman inspired.
She stared desperately at her character sheet. That level 15 sat taunting her as a signpost of her own impotence. The blood rushing past her needle reached ever new heights of acidity, and, and…
As she took a closer look at her sheet, something made Cas forget her emergencies. It was something like a feather tickling the back of her mind.
image [https://i.imgur.com/3sEEztt.png]
[Human figure] was lit up again.
Cas had almost forgotten the sight. For the past few months it had been grayed out, inaccessible due to the weight requirement, but now that Cas was over weight again, it was back again in beautiful green.
That fact ran contrary to her pessimistic expectations because it… shouldn’t have been accessible to her. Her mass was mostly monster flesh, at this point and [Human Figure] turned her into, well, a human. The Human - Monster barrier, as her status sheet had called – it required level fifty-five in alchemy, didn’t it?
And then it hit her.
[Human Figure] was a level sixty skill. It could transform monster flesh into human flesh. It could make working human cells out of basic proteins, it could make functional eyeballs, and a nervous system, and all the myriad miracles in the human body which had once been attributed to god. It could perform the miracle which might save this woman's life because without need for thought or skill, it could make a perfect replica of Cas’s human body.
It could create a supply of Cas’s human blood…and Cas was O-Negative.
Bulumbp!
A wet sound, as sticky mud engulfed the Camel’s forehoof, sinking it several feet into the sucking ground. The tent pitched suddenly, almost tossing the woman before quick restraints rose up from the Camel’s back to catch her.
Cursing, Cas switched her attention to the periscope. A black mass of mud extended for miles in every direction. 'A bog?' Cas thought, 'In the middle of a grassland?'
This didn’t look natural..
Wait… no, it wasn’t natural.
Cas noticed the distinct, parallel lines that ran through the field. This wasn’t a bog. It was a farm! Tilling had a way of killing everything that kept soil together, and cas could see the chittering puddles that glimmered between the furrows.
Cas raised her eye another forty feet into the air, searching through the haze and the rain until she saw what she expected to find.
A hill, no, a village! It was an indistinct mass of dark figures, but a brief flash of lightning revealed all.
Cas saw many houses in the distance. They were all dilapidated.