Cas flattened her hooves into clover-shaped mud shoes, racing easily over the bog until the battered village fence flew under her like a victory tape.
Cas stretched her neck above the pointed roofs. It had been obvious from a distance that everything was abandoned. For good reason, considering that every house – despite sporting a fresh coat of paint and new roof tiles – was in varying states of collapse.
There was one house, however, that had most of its roof intact.
It was one of the smaller houses, with an expansive, unkempt lawn in its front yard. Cas could see many small creatures hiding in the tall grass. Apparently, it was a popular spot. Their eyes glowed as they looked up at her. They hissed and chittered with monstrous sounds when Cas took a step too close to the house.
Cas shot several clouds of acid over the field, and they scattered.
Not wasting a moment, Cas walked up to a broken, second story window, carrying the woman past the jagged portal of broken glass and making her preparations.
----------------------------------------
Cas worked quickly once inside.
Her body morphed into a crawling centipede as she squeezed through the window, holding the woman close with strap-claws on her back.
All the exterior windows were broken, and rain spattered into the house like the sky was a malfunctioning car wash. Splashing through the cold puddles, Cas crossed into a hallway, and crawled into the first interior room without windows.
She slammed the door closed behind her out of habit, and was surprised at how completely dark it became. Windowless-ness came with disadvantages, she supposed.
Cas lit a dim glow bulb and stuck it to the ceiling, where it cast strange, down-ward shadows on everything.
Finding nothing suitable to lay the woman on, Cas transformed her body into a resting place, and began her preparations.
…
As soon as Cas had seen the houses, and confirmed they were abandoned, her body had moved like a corpse, moving with a mechanical disinterest whilst her mind raced with ideas and plans.
All of those pent up expectations and overthought schematics flowed from her like water once she was in the room.
Cas’s body bloomed like a timelapse of spring. The major part of her body spread out like a low couch to support the lying woman, manipulating her figure like a tongue until she was sat reclined in a low, therapy session posture.
From this low couch, two needles grew out on stalks, one – pressurized against backflow – grew out next to the reclined woman’s elbow, sliding easily into the blue vein at the crook of her arm. Simultaneously, on the south end of the couch, near the woman’s feet, another stalk and another needle slithered out.
Cas ignored the second needle for the moment, the majority of her attention focused on the interior of the couch.
Normally, Cas’s body functioned automatically. Food would be at hand, and a stack of instinctual responses worked to break down, digest, and catalog all its constituent components.
Right now, however, Cas had to build a machine which – of its own accord – would be able to filter, separate and pump human blood up to the woman.
That couldn’t be done by instinct. That required planning, and Cas had spent every moment of her journey to this house taking account of all contingencies.
…
The secondary needle, which waved out from the foot of the couch, was the first step of the process. Blood would come through the needle and gravity would dribble it down the IV into the end of the couch. There, it would enter the couch, where an artificial heart stood ready to pump it through a series of large reactive filters.
[Sakkari Clone 5 Created][Rule 1: B1 >= B2; B1 - B2 = X; B1 ←B1 ∩B2 !!! ]
Cas saw the pop up even as she ignored it. Her clones could accept simple instructions, but they didn’t speak any human language.
Rather, it was a more intuitive language Cas commanded them by, one created out of her thoughts and intentions, and the first rule she assigned would– if translated to human language – say something like: compare the tastes of the first and second blood samples, filter any differing tastes out from the donor sample. Do it quickly.
Untranslated, the instructions took the form of a series of small filter tubes and clearways in the lower body of the couch.
The filter was larger than it needed to be, and the normally transparent body of the couch turned hazy from the sudden complexity of fibers that grew there, stretching for three feet from the foot of the couch up to the woman’s hips, where all that filtering collapsed down to two separate tunnels.
One tunnel led to a waste vacuole. The other went to a secondary heart where, after another few feet, and several contingency rules, the path finally connected up to the woman’s IV drip.
And, after triple checking the design, and feeling for any discrepancies in her intuition, Cas baked the rules in and let the couch gain its independence.
[New Slime Clone Created]
[Name: Hospital Bed]
[Rule Count: 6]
Cas felt a sense of sure relief wash through her as she budded off from the couch.
She had dedicated most of her mass to the creation of this clone. She’d dedicated most of her hopes to it as well.
She felt less lonely now that there was another figure in the room, even if that figure consisted of a mass of slime and blood filtration equipment.
Secretly, Cas was glad that events had forced her to externalize the process as much as she had. It felt less personal, and therefore more safe, to entrust success or failure to a machine.
And cas had put granted every advantage she could to the machine. Every component was over built twice over. In fact, she’d dedicated two thirds of her mass and all her hope to the creation of the clone.
That left seventy three pounds and a hopeless expression for Cas, as she slid away from the couch and – with a brief thought – engaged the [Human Figure].
It was a familiarly extreme sensation. The flash and power of change struck through her like a lightning bolt, impossibly intricate structures assembled themselves, and in a moment she was left standing on two legs, taking deep breaths in the darkness.
Quick strides brought her to the foot of the couch. There, with the manner of an impatient snake charmer, Cas grabbed the head of the waving needle and stabbed the singular fang into her vein.
Her needle was larger than the woman’s, and the associated Iv tube was more like a hose. A black line of thick blood ran down the transparent cylinder, glimmering darkly in the dim light. It reached the couch and – as if jump-started by the taste – the translucent heart awakened and started beating, turning dark as the blood stained its flesh.
Budump. Budump.
Each muffled heart beat forced more and more of the blood through the hazy filter.
Cas was a universal donor, so – theoretically – she shouldn’t have needed to filter anything, but she played it safe considering she was on an alien planet.
And she was glad to have done so.
The couch shuddered a bit at the taste of her blood, and the waste vacuole quickly started filling with dribbles of clear liquid which had been separated out from the blood. Something in her plasma?
The red pigment passed the security check, however, and the second heart started beating, stained a darker color by the more concentrated solution of blood.
It beat at a slower pace than the first heart for some reason, and a cacophonous chattering was the result as the two hearts fell into and out of phase.
BadumpBadump. BadumpBadump. Badump. BadBadump
Two more feet of trave through the couch, and various contingencies diluted the dark liquid with salt water, and soon a perfect bead of blood was arcing up into the woman’s elbow.
And then… nothing.
For seconds, then minutes, then nearly and hour of nothing and silence.
The wooden floors thudded heavily as Cas paced at the foot of the couch, the IV needle tugging at her like a chain whenever she strayed too far..
Cas didn’t know what she’d been expecting from the woman. A sigh of relief? A musical number about how she instantly got better? The woman hadn’t changed at all!
Cas looked again at her face. It was muddied by dirt and her hair ran in wild strands, but there was something peaceful in her expression… something which seemed to reflect the edge of her mortality.
Maybe that was just her beauty talking, though. Beautiful people tended to have their expressions described with more eloquence, and Cas was always quick to find a reasonable justification whenever something touched that venerable side of her.
And then Cas referenced her internal clock, noticing that the woman hadn’t moaned or gasped gasp for over ten minutes, now!
That was a hopeful sign.
It felt so crude to be using visual signals to diagnose the woman.
Cas had gotten so used to tracking the woman’s blood acidity by taste, she’d forgotten that Human Figure couldn’t do any of that!
She’d have to remember to create a display next time she made a clone like this.
BadumBadum. BadumBadum.
A sudden change in the tenor of heart beats distracted her. They sounded more… hollow. now. Looking down, Cas saw that the Hospital bed had clamped her donor tube shut, and the hearts were beating empty.
Cas removed her needle, sticking it into the couch’s flesh for want of a holder.
That was a good sign. The couch had been instructed to stop the transfusion whenever the woman’s vitals held steady, and the woman’s face looked just a little bit more quiescent, anyhow.
----------------------------------------
Unhappily, the good news left Cas with little to do, and she spent the next several hours worrying.
Eventually, even her pacing lost its lustre, and Cas once again fell prey to her desire to do something which at least seemed productive.
Checking over the woman again, Cas resolutely turned her back and made for the door.
Opening the door let in a flood of white sun-light which washed into the room like a flash-bang. Cas stepped back from the doorway.
She resisted the urge to squint as the light overexposed itself onto her retinas. Squinting was a purely human habit. The light didn’t hurt the crystals which sat at the back of her eyes; reacting negatively to the pain would just be a poor form of larping, as far as necessity was concerned.
Still, it was a surprise just how sharp her senses were. It had been so long since she’d used [Human Figure]. It was easy to forget its advantages.
Her vision, normally dim and distorted by the shape and color of her body, now had an almost spectral clarity. Looking closely, she could see the individual grains of wood in the door, and everything seemed to have a third dimension to it.
Walking out, Cas splashed by a puddle of cool water that had formed near a broken window, surprised at how disappointingly dull her sense of touch seemed.
You couldn’t have everything, she supposed.
Turning down the hall, she walked deeper into the house, searching through all the rooms and closets.
Having given up most of her mass to the hospital couch, Cas was left with seventy three pounds to make her body out of. That came out to twelve years old, as far as Human figure was concerned, and that resulted in almost all the dressers and doorways being out of reach for Cas’s diminutive figure.
After four rooms worth of searching, however, finally, she came upon a miniature dresser her own size.
It was a tiny thing, barely taller than Cas’s diminutive figure and with the tiny cabinet pulls perfectly sized to Cas’s child-like hands.
Even the sound was well engineered, as cas battered the doors open.
Inside were various dresses, sized to fit the interior of the junior wardrobe.
Luckily, all of them seemed to be just her size.
………
Ok, in truth, they were just a bit oversized, but eating a few pounds of mass from the couch and gaining a year had been enough to make the article fit nicely.
Cas twirled about in front of the mirror, giggling and twisting as she checked the look of the back.
The frivolity of the gesture was at odds with the style of the dress.
It was a plain, black and white apron dress. It had crisp corners and plain stitching. It felt almost like wearing a school uniform, seeming to lack any color or pop that might be present in a more personal design.
Then again, it only looked black and white to Cas. For all she knew, it could have been dark red and neon yellow. Cas sometimes needed to remind herself that colors existed outside of her character sheet.
Shoes were scarce in the house, but the interior was all rugs and polished wood, in any case, easy on the feet.
Taking a closer look at her new dress, Cas resisted the urge to count the stitches. Her new powers of sight wanted to goad her into making full use of them.
In fact… ever since she’d taken on human form, it felt as if she were bursting with power! Her aura seemed almost tactile as it sparked through the hot blood and flashing nerves of this new body.! It felt like the aura was tickling her all over with joy, and the recent success of saving the woman was intoxicating, and not to mention this cute new dress!
Cas felt the need to start squealing, and with the shamelessness of a child, she did.
“EEEEEK!” hopping lightly on her feet, sheci rcles in front of the mirror.
“Hahahaha!” she started laughing whooshing around the room with her hands out in airplane posture! Being a child was amazing! Cas had been stuck in the mentality of her sixteen year old body for so long; this was just the restart she needed!
“Vwooooom!” she motored out, sprinting down the stairs and circling the living, skidding to a halt suddenly as she saw something shiny in the couch cushions.
Snatching it up, Cas studied the glimmering coin in her hand. It felt large in her small hands, heavy with wealth as she counted the intricately stamped leaves in the metalwork. She wanted to hold onto this random coin forever. Was this what if felt like to be a stamp collector?
It felt like the whole world was sparkling with joy. Cas didn’t even care when she splashed into the cold puddles and soaked her new dress. It was all just so amazing.
Even just pretending to fly as a child had brought her more joy than actually flying as a sixteen year old! It was obvious, now that her mental age carried over from the age of her last [Human Figure], and Cas was tempted to make sure she stayed twelve forever. Being a teen had been such a dreadful bore!
Painful memories resurfaced at that, however, about all the frivolous mistakes she’d made because of her childishness back in the desert village.
That pang of guilt cut through her joy.
Despite her mental outlook, Cas still had the memories of being an adult back on earth, and her intelligence stat seemed unchanged if her status sheet was to be believed. Although she had lost a few points in wisdom.
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Perhaps it would be wiser to get back into an adult body before committing to any major actions. Enthusiasm was a good substitute for competence, but competence was nonetheless desirable. Still, despite that conviction, Cas managed to convince herself to stay in her twelve year old form for the next few days.
After all, the woman needed constant looking after, and leaving the house to hunt for more mass or disturbing the couch was a no go.
Granted, the couch had been overbuilt from the start, and it wouldn’t do much harm to steal mass away from it, at this point, but Cas refused to think on the matter any further, and for the next few days busied herself with caring for the woman with a vigorous intensity which had rarely come so easily to her as an adult.
----------------------------------------
Cas shouldered the door open, casting a rectangle of sunlight onto the woman's upper body. Carrying a wobbling wash pan filled with water in her arms, Cas resisted the urge to yell some happy greeting as she walked into the hospital room. Recovering guests needed quiet.
BadumpBadum. BadBadum. BadBadum.
The hollow, chattering heartbeats of the hospital bed greeted her, filling the room with their muffled pulsations.
The heartbeats weren’t necessary at this point, but they continued beating senselessly. This happened because Cas hadn't explicitly instructed the clone to stop pumping when it was done. Common sense wasn’t an element of its design, apparently.
Still, it was a harmless thing, and Cas easily overlooked it as she set the washbin down next to the woman’s bed. The sounds had already faded into the background as she pulled out the washcloth and squeezed it dry.
…
Cas cleaned whatever parts of the woman were exposed to the sunlight, wiping away the obvious flecks of dirt that smeared her face, and carrying away a good bit of makeup along with it, to tell by the sudden lightening of her eyelashes.
From there she moved to her hands and feet, where she vigorously scrubbed under the woman’s fingers and rubbed the dirt out from under her nails, washing away the caked blood and hard scabs wherever they stained the skin of her torso.
As a perfunctory effort, Cas made a visual inspection of the hardcast which she’d taped over her wounds. It was transparent to light, and Cas was able to see that the woman was healing fascinatingly quickly. The exposed rib was already covered over by flesh.
Curiouser and curiouser…
----------------------------------------
[
* Notes
* Ecosystem
* Animals
* Human
* Mysterious Woman
Blood transfer appears successful. Universal donors transcend universes, it seems.
Although, the Hospital Bed rejected something in my plasma. This suggests that there might some difference in the humans of this world.
[New Note]
Her constitution continually exceeds my expectations. The wounds in her side have almost half healed in a few hours, now that her blood levels have certified. Although I worry such rapid healing might stress her. Aura is able to do amazing things, but I doubt it can create matter from nothing. Drawing on so much energy to heal might stress her reserves.
Perhaps it’s time to start a feeding schedule?
]
----------------------------------------
Cas, now a ball of slime and of a juvenile enough mind to enjoy the constantly beating hearts, stood beside the unconscious woman, perusing her ingredients list.
Her most recent use of Human Figure had wiped away all the monster parts, and her reagent mix was left as a pantry of human body parts.
It was a creepy list to read through. Human blood, human flesh, human bile… Cas felt it in bad taste to feed the woman food made from human body parts.
Technically speaking, it wasn’t cannibalism.
Those human parts were originally synthesized from the remains of horrific hyena monsters, after all, but Cas wasn’t sure if the woman would be able to see the silver lining in that.
Still, beggars couldn’t choose, and Cas had been panhandling for months at this point.
Getting over her ill feelings, Cas synthesized a sugar slurry from the blood, and stuck diligently to the new feeding schedule she’d drafted: twice a day, nothing but sugar water and plant slurry, just like your hospital used to make.
In fact it was probably better than hospital food. With such fine control over the mixture as Cas had, it was a simple matter to filter out any indigestibles from the final product, turning the food into an almost pure essence of sugar and nutrients. This stuff would probably rush into the woman’s system with a minimal need for processing. And, hopefully, a minimal need for waste disposal as well, Cas hoped, looking upon that brown possibility with some discomfort.
…
A day passed with no number 2s, and Cas was left to brood in the night, pacing through the finely decorated interior of the house.
It was a small house, two stories tall and barely wide enough to let Cas travel ten feet before a wall or corner forced her into a turn.
Still, a thousand square feet was a full quest of exploration when seen through the eyes of a child, and Cas’s twelve year old mind ravished every square inch of it with attention.
The exterior design was almost modern, but it was obvious the people of this world had yet to appreciate open floor designs. The whole inside of the house was siloed into a maze of interior rooms connected by thin passageways. Every closed door and locked cupboard seemed like a secret chamber, goading Cas to discover its secrets.
Mainly, those secrets were unfurnished rooms and broken windows, and puddles of rainwater soaking the sheets, but Cas never seemed to tire of the discoveries nonetheless.
Life was what you made of it, and Cas’s youth had managed to turn an open house into a treasure hunt.
She couldn’t say what she was looking for, exactly, but Cas knew she’d found it when she peeked behind the downstairs couch and found the doll.
…
It was a pretty little thing, with dark hair and brilliant gems encrusted into the wood in place of eye-lashes.
Cas appreciated the weight of it in one hand, tossing it lightly and watching as the limbs clattered about senselessly.
She felt drawn to the toy somehow. Cas had never cared for dolls, but there was something about this one that weighed more heavily on her mind than it did her hand.
Finding so many abandoned houses had been a fortuitous thing for Cas. Busy as she was with the blood transplant, Cas hadn’t thought much of it, but now that the woman was stable, Cas felt her curiosity ignite at the strange set of facts.
This house was… exceptionally nice. It had slate roofs, fresh paint, clean rugs where the rain hadn’t soaked into them. In fact, if you ignored the broken windows and that hole in the roof, it looked almost brand new. Obviously the damage hadn’t been from old age.
The house also seemed to be lacking in valuables. No jewelry, no money except for a stray coin she’d found in the couch cushions, and no personal effects other than a forgotten doll. Everything here – the clothes, the cutlery, the rugs – they were the sort of things you left behind in an emergency.
It seemed whoever lived here had just enough time to take their shoes and valuables before evacuating. But why had they been running? And how long ago?
Cas looked at the doll.
Transforming back into her slime form, Cas glommed it into her body.
[New Reagent: Human 2 Skin]
[New Reagent: Human 2 Hair]
[New Reagent: Human 2 Oil]
The skin oils left a patterned film all across the surface of the doll. Obviously it hadn’t been washed in a long time, and the oil itself was hardly dried. The doll couldn’t have been abandoned for more than a week.
Cas spent the rest of the night licking doorknobs and smoking imaginary pipes. It was surprising how much you could learn about a family by hints.
It had been a three person household.
One girl was being raised by a single mother for the past few months. The skin cells on the only male uniform in the house were distinctly different, and far older than any other sample. They seemed to have abandoned the residence a few days before the earliest signs of damage to the house could be accounted for. So, they’d known it was going to happen ahead of time, whatever it was that had caused so much damage.
And Cas, for some reason, felt an intense interest in finding out what it was.
Maybe, as a jaded teen, Cas had found it easy to fly over thousands of miles of mysteries, but right now Cas felt like she wanted to know everything in the world. Why, why, why was the essence of the thought driving her.
And, indeed, ‘why’ was the look in the woman’s eyes as she woke up the next morning.
----------------------------------------
It was like something out of a movie. The woman’s eyes were a light color as they fluttered open, squinting against the sunlight that streamed in through the open door, seeming annoyed by the cool towel the girl was rubbing on her forehead.
“Huhhh?” she groaned out deliriously, looking over at the girl who beamed down a smile at her.
“Hey.” Cas said softly, removing the towel and leaning on her seated knees in an excited posture, trying desperately not to jump up and pull a victory screech at the recovery. She’d known the woman’s vitals were stable for the longest time, but to actually see her waking up! “I’m Cas. You don’t know me, but… well, I suppose I should ask how you’re doing first.”
Cas spoke thoughtlessly in English, the words tripping over themselves to get out of her mouth.
The woman merely offered a confused look in her direction, trying to say something but feeling dragged down by exhaustion before fluttering her eyes closed and she fell into a deep sleep again.
Cas cursed herself for wasting the opportunity. What was she thinking, speaking in English of all languages? She would have been better off trying Nemorian. At least that was from the same universe.
It had been an honest mistake.
Cas had developed a habit of speaking in English ever since she’d left the village. The habit started when she caught herself thinking in Nemorian, and making basic English mistakes which would have – on earth – drawn out that pedantic crowd of grammar snobs which corrected people's use of homonyms.
Granted, Cas had been an armband toting member of the Grammar Nazi arty, back on Earth; it was partially the reason she’d committed herself to remembering the English language.
Secondarily, her status sheet was written in English.
Most importantly, however, Cas considered the language as one of the only things she’d brought over from home. Even if it didn’t have any use in this world, Cas wanted to hold it close, as a reminder of a time long past. She dreaded the day she wouldn’t be able to remember old conversations and famous quotes from that other world.
----------------------------------------
A second day passed uneventfully, and Cas kept to the feeding schedule.
However, she stayed in the room when night fell, this time, eager to be present, should the woman wake up again.
Dawn passed to midnight, and Cas entertained herself with the contents of the room.
After all, just because she couldn’t leave the room didn’t mean her exploring had to stop.
Back in a slime form, Cas took an indistinct shape of bulbs and stalks that reached out to taste everything in the room.
Cas paced around the borders of the room, careful not to disturb the Hospital couch in the center.
She traveled and tasted everything, the well worn stools and short desks that lined the walls, the sugary food stains that had soaked into the floorboards next to the short coffee table, even the old shelves and books that tasted of dust.
And indeed, her sense of taste told her more about these people than an hour of conversation might have.
It was a study, filled with books, but mainly used for tea-parties.
Like she’d suspected, the people that lived here were not big readers.
It was in the twilight hours of midnight, however, that Cas was drawn from her investigations by a stirring in the center of the room.
Forgetting hersellf entirely, she dropped the metal lamp in her stalk and turned all attention to the hospital bed where Cas’s soul nearly leapt from her body as she saw it!
The woman was sitting up!
What a joy! What a happy moment! Cas rushed forward, eager to greet the woman and congratulate her on her recovery.
The woman had gotten the head start, however, and she surprised Cas with her speed as she stood up from the couch before Cas had a chance to process the new events.
----------------------------------------
Sara wanted to rub the crud out of her eyes. It was her habit to do so when waking.
This time, however, her body changed tactics, leaping up with intense revulsion from the slimy, warm surface she’d been resting on.
Up in a flash, her eyes caught up to her body as she looked around. It was almost entierly dark, but for a dim, bloody-red light. The source of it was a fleshy bulb that stuck to the ceiling like some sort of parasite.
It was a very subtle light, that the bulb produced, but it gave just enough to show Sara exactly the sort of hell she’d woken up in.
BadumBadum. BaBudum. BadBadum. BadaBadum. BadadmdumBadum!
A cacophonous noise drew her attention down, where she saw that the bed she’d just been lying on had hearts inside of it. It had two, living, beating, bloody human hearts, and it even squirmed aside a bit, like a disgusting mass of spasming flesh flinching, waving a bloody needle tip around with the incompetent, searching, motions of a blind monster.
In fact it was stained with blood, the entire, horrid interior of it filled with flesh and red and horror. And, looking down, the woman saw the hole in her arm, and the blood trailing from it, and the still beating hearts, and she screamed.
“HaaaAhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!”
Sara didn’t know when the far wall had crashed against her back, but it held stiff, preventing further retreat.
Her scream filled the room, seeming to come from outside of her, but through it, another voice pierced the veil of sound.
“Sore! Sare Namu NoreNore Detu!”
It was a human voice coming from quite an inhuman figure in the distance. A mass of tentacles and flesh casting dim shadows on the book-case behind it.
“Kare hetu-!”
----------------------------------------
“A friend! I come, as a friend!”
Cas spoke using the most basic words she could muster, hoping some, at least, might cross any potential language barrier.
It was the ‘no habla espanol’ of first contacts, and Cas was desperately hoping that the small words were intelligible as she continued.
“Friend. Friend,” Cas repeated. “I want to help. Help You! Can you understand me?”
The woman replied fluently in screams.
“Ahhhhhahaahahahah!” Turning the vibrato into a whining, cringing reprise against her general surroundings.
Cas, shocked by the reaction, and quickly understanding how inhospitably she’d decorated the room, tried to speak in loud, though calming overtones, the way one might call to a panicking horse.
“Please!” Cas begged, trying to communicate with her tone if not her words, a record list of all the peaceful Nemorian words turning in her mind. “Friend! Uh… Friendship! Sister! Safety! Togetherness!”
“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”
The woman’s voice was powerful, and it filled the room enough to put any Scream Queen to shame. Cas was almost glad to have chosen a room without any glass at hand.
“ahhhh-”
And, it was shockingly abrupt, how suddenly the screaming dissapeared.
BadumBadum. BadBadum.
The beating hearts reasserted themselves in the quiet, as the woman took a few deep breaths, shaky hands grasping at the flat wallpaper behind her for support.
Cas let out a sigh of relief through her vocal tract, trying to seem more human by the action.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry. I didn’t want to scare you!” She spoke again in the nemorian dialect, choosing simple words and making her tone obsequiously apologetic. “Be friends?” she asked, inflecting her voice down in a clear question.
The woman, her breathing more even now, stood up from the wall and fixed her skirt.
Despite her calm demeanor, her voice was savagely angry, shivering with rage. “Who do you think you’re speaking to, talking nonsense words like that, monster? If you’re planning to say your last words, do try and make them something understandable.”
What was surprising, was that Cas understood this sentence.
More surprising was the fact that Cas understood it because the woman had spoken in perfect English.
Most surprising of all were the murmurous incantations that suddenly filled the room as the woman raised a glyph and tossed a fireball the size of a car at the Sakkari.
Cas had a brief moment, before the fireball engulfed her, to consider her mistakes.
She spoke English? She was awake? Fire? Glyphs? Fireball?
Unable to process all of it, Cas decided to address each new fact one at a time. Of course, deciding which fact to prioritize was itself a problem, so Cas picked at random.
It, therefore, left a strange impression on Cas, when her final thought before the flame blast hit her coalesced to: ‘Wait, shouldn’t it be “Whom do you think you’re talking to?”’
And then the air boomed and Cas's world turned into fire.