Ant Defeated!
XP Gained: +0.00003
Ant Defeated!
XP Gained: +0.00005
Ant Defeated!
XP Gained: +0.00003
Death. Famine. War.
These were three names of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. She’d studied them once, and Cas had decided that the fourth was perhaps the most out of place.
For, you see, Conquest had another name: Glory.
Ant Defeated!
XP Gained: +0.00004
Ant Defeated!
XP Gained: +0.00002
Quite an attractive thought, no? Unlike the others, the name seduced the listener into thinking of their own ambition, rather than of the calamity that was sure to follow.
Everyone considered their own victory, but few dared to imagine: what did the face of Conquest look like, when civilization crumbled down to its bedrock?
Well, after ten thousand years of human ignorance, Cas alone had the answer, now; and she was surprised to discover that it looked like her!
“Mwahahahahaha!”
Lacking a mouth, she had to imagine herself laughing, and man did she imagine herself having an awesome voice as her shadow fell over the colony fortress, and an army crumbled underneath her heel.
The ants had nestled their colony into the cranny of a wall, but, oh, how their desperate machinations to save themselves failed against the face of Conquest!
“Mercy? You ask?” Cas goaded bitterly, slamming herself into the nook and crawling her flattening body into the entrance. “You dare to ask such a thing! Where was mercy when I was under your heel!”
Like a flood of rage, she squeezed her body into the cranny, cramming into every nook and cranny of the maze-like passageways, turning herself like a tree-branch as the colony forced her to conform to its alien figure. The sheer war that ensued left her feeling dizzy!
She couldn’t see where she’d put herself into, but she could feel the sheer mass of ants that flew into her, and which squeezed past the entrance and covered over her like a blanket only to be absorbed, spraying and stinging her with a caustic solution that rolled over her round figure.
+50 Ants Defeated!
XP Gained: +0.0019
+50 Ants Defeated!
XP Gained: +0.0026
+50 Ants Defeated!
XP Gained: +0.0011
Immunity Activation: Acid damage negated due to inherent immunity.
‘That was new.’ Cas turned her crystal to the new pop-up. Thinking for a moment, Cas reflected on the deeper meaning of this… that she could really go at ‘em with impunity now!
"hehe", she thought, failing to form a shit-eating grin on her featureless face.
+29 Ants Defeated!
XP Gained: +0.0009
Still… she drew back before reaching the brood chambers. It wouldn’t do to damage her future food supply. Sliding out of the colony she, with a dramatic flourish, looked down on the ant-colony with a level of superiority she’d only seen in Godzilla movies before turning and moving away.
Granted, the fact that she was shimming along at a literal snails pace did a lot to destroy the drama of the scene, but that hardly stopped her from making a speech..
Turning to them, a malevolent, alien sheen of cruelty lit up her crystal eye.
“Fools!” she boomed with a powerful, thunderous voice that only existed in her head. “You dared to attack a god, and even now, as you pay the price, you stand ignorant before me!” Turning with a flourish, she leaned slightly to gesture at the destroyed mud crumbles that remained of the colony's entrance. “Take this as a lesson from your new master! Stamp it on the hearts of your descendants and the graves of your compatriots! You have insulted the great goddess Slime! The water empress! And she has spared you a worse fate than you deserve. For this… insolence” she hissed the word like it poisoned her to hear, “your precious queen will have to pay a blood sacrifice of five hundred ants every summer! So it has been decreed!”
Cas cackled with silent glee.
Oh, how evil! How monstrous!
She could imagine the queen crying in her brood chambers at this very instance as her children were torn away from her to be sacrificed. “Mwahahahahaha!”
The ants… kept scrambling around and went back to the business of rebuilding their nest.
Cas sighed…
Life as a slime was really, really boring.
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Cas had spent every hour of the past few months formatting her Excel sheet, making it beautiful... worthy.
It had no features to do code, but Cas could still organize the data and add color splashes. Not to mention the fact that she could make simple graphs!
Level Up!
*Level 2 Achieved*
New Skill: Partial Hardening.
image [https://i.imgur.com/9dhmYMa.png]
CHARACTER SHEET
* Entity: Cas
* Classification: AquaMorph Slime
* Level: 2
* XP: 17 / 100
ABILITIES
* Shape Change: LVL 2
* Absorption: LVL 2
* Acid Immunity: LVL 2
* Partial Hardening: LVL 1 (NEW SKILL)
VITAL STATS
* Health: 30/30
* Size: Small
CORE ATTRIBUTES
* Constitution: 44
* Strength: 2
* Wisdom: 12
* Intelligence: 33
* Charisma: 4
* Magic Affinity: 5
If Cas could still muster facial expressions, she would’ve cast a suspicious gaze at the status screen blaring in front of her. It was… strange.
It was rather plain looking -- more like an excel sheet than anything you’d see in a videogame. In fact, it looked almost exactly like an excel sheet, down to the column markers and sheet tabs. Cas was a biologist at heart, and she was keen to see everything in terms of natural phenomena. So, of course, she found it strange when corporate software popped out of nowhere and told her she had the charisma of a dead fish.
Really? Charisma 4? Her?
Sending a mental glare at the score, she turned her attention back at the translucent screen, panning her eye across the faint border. It appeared whenever she wanted it, and the information displayed was always consistent, but it was otherwise a mirage. None of the other creatures reacted to it, anyway. Still, the status screen, she decided, was probably real to an extent. It was just information, after all.
Probably, there was some part of this world that reacted to creatures differently depending on their ‘stats’. And – if creatures inhabited a universe that gives them information about themselves – why wouldn’t they evolve the ability to read that interaction somehow?
‘Know yourself’ and never lose a thousand battles, and all that.
Though, why would the status screen look like a combination of a video game and a 2017 excel spreadsheet? And why would it be in English, or even in writing at all? It was vexing, considering how much of the past month she’d spent agonizing over the thought and going nowhere. Maybe it was just presented in a format her mind could comprehend? And, considering she'd spent the the majority of her past life playing videogames and formatting Excel sheets -- it was clear she needed to get new hobbies this time round.
There were two other sheets on the status screen. One was labeled ‘inventory’, the other: ‘notes’.
As expected, the inventory was vast and empty. It made a note whenever she swallowed a rock or anything else that was indigestible, but, otherwise, she’d found no use for it.
The notes, on the other hand, were a miniature encyclopedia, and so perfectly formatted it would leave you squealing in amazement!
She’d paced across this cave a thousand times, and taken note of everything inside twice over, and oh how she liked to look over her notes. They were so easy to edit, too! She just had to think the words and voila, there they appeared! So much easier than touch typing.
The first category was plants. It was the shortest section, considering she never specialized in that field, but she owed a debt of gratitude to all the grass blades that had saved her in her first days here! She considered them all her special friends…
Cas sighed, turning a melancholy glare at a nearby shrub. ‘I really need to get actual friends, Sarah,’ she thought to the plant.
Sarah was unhelpful, as always.
...
Back to the encyclopedia, the section on plants was a short one. The only thing of note there was that the ‘grass’ wasn’t actually grass. She may not have been a plant biologist, but she was familiar enough with plant taxonomy to know that grasses had covered seeds and a root system. These grasses were… well, not that at all. They were a mess of features from all over the plant kingdom and more! In fact, none of the plants in this cave were from earth!
It was a surprising revelation. At least it confirmed that no ‘planet of the apes’, ‘it was earth all along’ shenanigans were about to happen. She hated twists like that!
The animals were just as strange. Their forms converged on earth insects, but there were always some small and important details that revealed them to be aliens. The ‘ants’ had eight legs, the ‘flies’ didn’t have larvae and hatched as adults, the ‘beetles’ didn’t have wings and, honestly, she loved it! So many new species! So many new wonderful creatures! And in just such a small cave, too!
Honestly, that had been a major part of what kept her sane these past few weeks. She was a slime, a small, insignificant creature that spent its days crawling around a dark cave and staring at a depressing excel sheet. But… in here, in her notes, she was an explorer! She was a researcher. She was a human again, and had a life worth living…
If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
And, it honestly moved her when her old friend Marissa hatched a brood.
Time flies when you’re tracking the life cycle of an alien bug, and the past month had zipped by as she traced the progression of Marissa’s nest.
Sticking to the walls, Cas moved up to crawl along the ceiling of the cave, going to that special, stone outcropping where Marissa had laid out her eggs. There, Cas was happy to discover she'd arrived just in time, observing as - with miniature effort - the little ‘flies’ kicked their way out of the small, brown eggs and shivered their wings with anticipation.
Cas took notes.
[Mother died week before hatching. Whether fluke or a design of the species requires more study].
Regardless, the little flies seemed unbothered by the lack of supervision, and – after warming up in the morning sun – one by one, all of them flew away over the course of the hour. Well, all but one. It was a small fly born with deformed wings.
Cas had been trained not to put human emotions on animals, but she couldn’t help but see a certain longing in the creatures eyes as it crawled around the edge of the outcropping, looking up at the last of its brethren as they disappeared beyond the limit of its vision.
For the next three hours, Cas watched it as the fly crawled around it’s little world, pacing from edge to edge on the stone platform, pausing at the precipice and feeling an instinct to do something it wasn't capable of. This continued, the fly growing steadily weaker and weaker until, on the third hour, it lay down and stopped moving
[Young hatched simultaneously in morning time. Require food within three hours of birth. Little parental care expected.]
It was strange how close she’d gotten to these bugs, but…
Cas closed her notes, sliding along the ceiling and wall down to the floor. She was tired of seeing bugs for today. And, something about that fly pacing to the edges of its outcrop had inspired her to venture outside the cave.
The cave was a barren hole carved into the side of a greystone slab, a damp, dark crack barely large enough to fit a car. Still, it was a haven compared to the outside.
----------------------------------------
The wind howled deeply underneath the hot, blue sky. Swirls of sand were sent into the air like paints before quickly dispersing.
Outside of the cave, the environment quickly became inhospitable for grass, and the soft dirt she’d grown used to turned quickly to sand. Cas flattened herself out a bit to keep from sinking, enjoying the shade the stone cliff provided as she surfed along the miniature sand dunes.
“SCREE, SCREE!”
She wasn’t alone out here, of course. Sharon and Tara were out here as well, and they were at it again.
“SCREE!”
Tara clapped back, rushing against her competitor and executing a devastating body slam with all the force of a pillow fight. Really, she wasn’t sure why they bothered, slimes – as she’d discovered – were far more durable than they were strong. Impossibly durable at times, actually.
Slimes were durable, slow, weak, fairly dumb and, out of all things in the cave, they were the topic she spent most of her efforts studying.
Cas had always been a keen observer of nature, and she’d picked up a lot in her time.
Slimes had no powers beyond the ability to exist, eat, and to change their shape. And, really, that was no understatement. Everything about them revolved around this one trick. They had no limbs, no muscles, no organs, nothing! They were blobs that changed shape and, quite amazingly, they managed to use that trick to do everything!
They ate by changing their shape to engulf prey, they moved by changing the shape of their underside in a wave motion, they even communicated by changing the shape of their surface.
Scree!
Sharon cried in defeat, moving back away from her assailant at a snail's pace. And, Cas moved a little closer, trying to observe the sharp vibrations that ran across the slime's surface in time with her call.
Sharon was about the size of a soccer-ball, slightly larger than Cas herself. Otherwise, she was quite a plain blob of light-blue jelly. No.. wait. Cas corrected herself, looking closer at the slime as the morning sun-light passed through her. There was a dark band on the edge of her surface, where the light refracted strangely.
Tara, catching up to her, slammed herself against Sharon once more and Cas paid attention to the strike like she had money on the fight.
Entranced, a strange excitement ran through her at the new discovery, and everything seemed to chug along in slow motion as Tara slammed into Sharon, and the slimes interior jelly compressed, but the exterior band stayed firm.
That… reminded her of something.
Turning away from the fight, Cas called up her status screen, and pulled up her newest skill.
Partial Hardening: Level 1
Gain the ability to partially harden your form.
The description, as always, had been unhelpful beyond measure, but – looking at Sharon – Cas had been given some wonderful ideas.
Taking control of her eye, she moved the crystal far back against the edge of her form, and focused her vision on a spot inside of her, and there, she -- ‘clenched her fists’ was perhaps the worst way of describing what she did, but that’s how it felt as she focused on the spot, and observed the slight change in color and refraction that took place inside of her. A small ball of densified jelly appeared inside of her.
She relaxed, and it disappeared.
Again, she focused, and again it appeared.
She looked left, and it moved left, sending tickling sensations throughout her figure. She moved right and it moved right. She tried to harden and soften it and a soft, high pitched, ‘squee!’ ran through her, the small sound smothered within her gelatinous form.
It was a small, quiet, insignificant sound that barely made it outside of her figure and was quickly swallowed up by the immense winds. But… it was the first sound she’d made since she’d gotten here! The first sound she’d controlled that was outside of her own head, and her eye flipped like a coin as she stared at the precious thing inside her that had allowed so many amazing things!
----------------------------------------
Cas was entranced.
She moved the ball in circles, loopty-loops and swirls. She dissolved it, remade it, reshaped it into a thousand different figures of her imagination, and she did so with all the careful attention she’d previously lavished on insects and moss.
And she’d learned quite a lot.
There was a limited amount of the ‘hard jelly’ she could make. About a handful inside of her soccer-ball sized figure. It was a lot less than Sharon could muster, but enough to make a lot of noise if she put it up by her surface.
The second limitation was that ‘hardening’ one part of her required softening… everything else.
[Note: hardening seems to require gathering up some limited resource. Perhaps trace mineral intake?].
And really, it had gotten quite dangerous. Creating hardened jelly the size of a soft ball transformed the rest of her from Jello to Hand Sanitizer.
Honestly, it wasn’t that big of a deal. As long as she only hardened her outer surface, the ‘armor’ made up for the softness of her insides, and she could keep her shape better than normal, too. Still, the hardened jelly was still… jelly. It barely had the consistency of clay when she focused her heart into it, and, there was something else that had caught her imagination from when she first let out that simple squeak.
Cas… had always had trouble speaking her dreams. Maybe she’d been afraid of failure or too content, but, looking back at her previous life more objectively, she’d been far too timid with her expectations.
So, it was with that wisdom that Cas – without thinking of the possibility of her idea – simply tried it.
She changed her shape, turning into a bag and swallowing a hand-full of air that she kept trapped inside her center. The air-pocket inside quickly rose through her body, trying to escape, and it blurred her vision whenever she tried to look through it, but Cas simply grit and latched onto the opportunity.
Squeezing herself around the air pocket, she created a shell of hardened jelly that held it in place.
From there, more of the clay-like substance formed a tube, and several, intricate pieces formed themselves. Her floating eye followed the process, watching as she formed the complex vocal chords and floating supports, but – for whatever reason – she proceeded with a confidence that told her she could’ve done this with her eyes closed, as vocal folds formed, the trachea extended, a sharp tongue flopped into existence and licked out against the well formed lips.
Really… it was quite a horrifying sight at the end, and the mass of air pockets and complex anatomy she developed inside of herself left her half blind, forcing her eye to peer through a kaleidoscope of complex refraction patterns whenever she wanted to look forward.
Still… for some reason, she was certain it would work. She had that familiar feeling as if she’d been naked and had put on her usual clothes once more. As if the familiar memory of her body were guiding the construction.
Scree Scree!
In the din of the background, she could hear Sharon and Tara screeching.
“Heh,” she let out a short laugh, imagining they were celebrating her accomplishment. She then paused in shock. She’d actually laughed! She’d actually made that noise! And it even sounded kind of like a human. But… it was a simple sound, did she dare to believe she could speak?
She looked at the pocket of air she’d formed inside of her, and she tightened it, ready to do the deed. She was nervous to speak after so long, feeling as if the whole world were waiting.
And waiting…
And waiting…
Scree! Scree! Tara screamed, making way towards the cave entrance. Sharon huffily followed behind her.
It wasn’t that Cas lacked confidence or anything of the sort. Put simply… she just couldn’t think of what to say on such a momentous occasion. What would be an appropriate first word for a being such as her? Cas mused.
“Let there be light?” Hmmm… too humble, maybe.
“Call me Cas?” Not literary enough.
No, no, it had to be something appropriate for a genius like her! Something she could have those ants chisel into stone tablets once they accepted her as their empress.
It was possible that Cas had quite a high opinion of herself. Perhaps it was because of this unwavering confidence that Cas completely ignored the scree-ing Slimes as they raced into the cave. Maybe it was this sense of invincibility that allowed Cas to ignore the darting shadow that flew across the sand dunes in a predatory motion.
And, it was definitely because of this high opinion, that Cas never revealed that her first words on this world were, with reluctant acceptance:
“Ohhhhhhh, I'm an idiot,” as the streaking missile of flashing fangs dove down and slammed into her figure.