Cas relaxed that invisible muscle she used to summon the display, and it dissapeared.
Her character sheet was a mirage. It didn't create any real light, but it still left her feeling as if she'd suddenly been cast into darkness when it disappeared. The chunks of ichor and sinew that whirled about inside her like a disturbed blender broke down. A formless, mangled piece of meat passed close to her eye in the chaos, coming out of the haze as -- inches away from her crystal eye -- Cas saw an invisible force violently twisting the piece from a thousand angles. Blood and juice squeezed out of it, as it quickly lost all strength and consistency in Cas's suddenly hot interior. And, like an old rope breaking, it suddenly fell apart into oil and dark slime.
To her colorless eyes, the mass of flowing ichor that filled her body turned suddenly into a black cloud that swallowed up the whole world, mixing into a dense fog that swallowed up all the glimpses of light which had previously managed to sneak through.
With the darkness came coolness, and Cas felt that reaction and the heat that drove it slowing down.
Her body came with a thousand invisible switches, and Cas tried frantically to repeatedly hit the 'digest' button. She felt thirsty.
"Ugh, ohhgh!" A disgusted exclamation came from far away. Tentatively, Cas moved her eye forward until it pressed against the very edge of her surface, the fog thinning enough there that she could make out Kari in the distance. The girl hunched over next to a tree, pressing a balled up section of her dress against her nose as she valiantly tried not to throw up. Cas still felt thirsty, and, rounding her eye about to point at the Oasis, she tried to move there. There was something stopping her, however, something like a heavy weight in the pit of her gut. Moving her eye down, she was surprised when it bumped into a horned skull and pile of ribs.
Gritting in effort, Cas focused, recalling that feeling when thanksgiving was over, and she was just about to...
And then Cas fell asleep.
----------------------------------------
"...Cas"
"Ake.. up!"
Ugh...
Waking up was a distant memory for Cas. It was also a strange process when you didn't have any eye-lids. It felt as if the world were coming into being.
And, currently, what came into being was Kari, standing nervously in front smacking her with a long stick. "Wake, up, you stupid Sakkari! Oh, I knew I shouldnt've let you eat that thing." Just as she raised the dried branch into another murder stroke, Cas gathered the wherewithal to create her vocal chords. The process happened in a finger-snap, letting the words, "I'm awake" escape her newly formed lips just milliseconds before Kari bonked her anyway.
"Ow!" Cas said, more out of instinct than actual hurt.
"You're alive!" Kari said, surprising Cas with her tears.
Cas pitched her voice into a consoling stance. "Yeah, I'm fun, hun. I was just asleep, see?" She waved a stalk about in explanation.
Kari sniffled. "I didn't know Sakkari could sleep."
"Yeah, me neither," Cas looked askance around herself. Her body was more clear now. The ground around her was incredibly dry. Unlike the somewhat marshy consistency of the rest of the oasis, it was proper dust around her, and Cas could feel the taproots her body had sunk into the dirt. Inside, there was still a thin haze that sat suspended throughout her body. Looking down, revealed small sticks of bone sat on the floor, looking like dissolved sticks of chalk.
She tried calling upon that heat that digested everything and failed, a blaring message greeting her to say:
Absorption at Insufficient Level
Huh...
On some level, Cas felt she knew that.
Cas drew herself together. Rising up into a short vortext, the bone fragments whirled up into the center of her body, and the diffuse haze compressed around them into a protective pocket. Honestly, she couldn't spare the process more than a glance. Cas, jittery with the excitement of a girl with a new toy, gathered all that mess into a short pocket and called on the human figure that vaguely recollected itself around her.
It felt like she was in two places at once. There was her slime body, compact and dense and hugging the floor. At the same time, straddling above it like the Vitruvian man was that static sensation which -- in the most intricate detail -- called upon Cas to express her true self. It pulled her slime body up with a magnetic force, molding her body, and at the same time it was drawn down by the weight of matter is called to inhabit it. Cas's body felt hot, and-
"Cas?" Kari said for the fifth time, waving a sleeve in front of her crystal.
-and Cas remembered that she was with company, and she paid attention to the fact that the human figure felt very naked, and so she paused her exploration and turned a paintiful glance at Kari and asked:
"Do you have any spare clothes by any chance?"
----------------------------------------
Kari did have spare clothes and hand-me-downs in her inheritance, as it turned out, and Cas was starting to figure out that this village had a cloth based economy.
Cas stretched her figure into a cylindrical trunk. Kari, standing on her toes, had to reach her hands over to slide the garb over the slime. Entirely unnecessarily, at her side, she'd also stacked a whole host of wraps and cloth strips that she claimed were underwear. Cas didn't have much to do beyond play a tree as Kari attended to her, adjusting the folds and bands of the shawl with delicate tugs until it hung beautifully onto the vague figure of a mannequin Cas had formed her gelatinous mass into.
"You look so different," Kari prompted for the fifth time.
Cas ignored the repetitive statement, answering rotely from the mouth in her midsection. "I'm just larger, Kari. It's no big deal."
Kari fell silent, it seemed she was still recovering from the shock of her apparent death, and the walk from the village and back had done little to clear her head.
Desperate to break the silence, Cas spoke. "So... you're sure the Oasis is a good place to do this?"
Kari nodded. "No one will show their face in this place for a week. They wouldn't come if a Jinguri was chasing after them."
"Oh, good, good... it's nothing bad. It'd just be a lot to explain, ya know?"
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
Kari replied with silence. Falling to her knees, she tugged at the hem of the long skirt uselessly, buying time.
Cas had explained the basics of what she was planning to the girl, but the girl hardly seemed impressed by the concept. She'd been looking strangely over at Cas since she woke up, and whatever was bothering her had inoculated her to any new shocks.
"Can... can I ask you a question?" Kari asked suddenly.
"Uhm... sure."
"No, I mean, It just might be a rude question to ask," Kari mentioned, standing up and twiddling with the wide hem of her shawl.
Kari had seemed suddenly uncertain around her after the change. This surprised Cas. The girl was hardly a master of polite conversation in the first place. Maybe the shock of her death had done something to rock her? But, still, it hardly made sense, what sort of question could be so bothersome.
"Uhm..." Kari looked like she was choking, trying to spit the words out and looking like a perfect mirror of herself when she'd been telling Cas about her status as an Unari.
It was strange how quickly Cas found herself understanding Kari's feelings. Spending so long with someone would do that, she supposed, but there was something about the girl that was brilliant and which made Cas want to pay attention, and which made Cas realize that: this would be the first time Kari had ever asked her a direct question about herself. In fact, Cas found it strange, looking back at her memories. Other than Korivenna when she was feeling combative, no one in the entire village had ever asked her to answer a question about herself directly. Everything was done in a polite, slanted manner of assumptions and waiting. And this was all despite the fact that she was a slime from another universe! It boggled her mind how something so obvious could manage to go so over her head. Perhaps it was considered a faux pax in the village?
No matter the case, Cas wasn't about to let any ridiculous traditions like that get in her way, and she answered chipperly: "Kari, we're friends. You can ask me any questions you like about myself!"
The expression on Kari's face was a christmas miracle. "Really?"
"Really," Cas answered, adding after a moment: "I reserve the right not to answer, though. Anyway, what did you want to know."
"Oh..." Kari looked embarrassed. "Well... it's actuallly not that big of a deal-"
"Kari!" Cas pulled out her big sister voice. "I know you didn't waste my time like that to leave it a mystery."
"Well..." Kari slid her eyes aside, "I was just wondering, you looked different."
"Yes, you've mentioned that," Cas said, prompting for more.
Frustrated at the lack of support from Cas, Kari finally sighed and spat the question out in full: "Why are you red, now?"
"Huh?" Cas looked through herself uselessly, things starting to finally make sense. "Was that why you kept mentioning how different I looked?"
"Well... yeah," Kari looked askance, rubbing her arm. "I thought you'd explain eventually, but you kept ignoring it. Sorry if it's personal or something."
Cas laughed. It was amazing how it took this for her to realize that the girl never asked her questions. How many answers had the villagers been able to draw from her with innocuous statements like that.
Pouting at the reaction, the girl hunched over into herself. "It's not funny," she murmured. Apparently, asking any such 'personal' question was the height of rudeness in this place.
"Oh, It's actually my fault," Cas explained. "I don't see color, you see."
"Huh?" Kari tilted her head in rendition of a bird. "What, so you can't see things that have color?"
"No. I just can't see the color of things. Everything looks like it's the same color to me. It's like... everything looks like it does at night... it's hard to explain," she finally conceded, realizing she wouldn't be able to reference movies or even sketches. "In either case, you don't have to feel embarrassed about asking me questions, ok?"
Bashfully, Kari tilted her chin down so that only her eyes peeked over the high collar of her shawl. "So... I can ask you questions about color?"
"You can ask me questions about anything. I might not answer everything, but I won't get mad if you ask. We're friends, right?"
"Right!" the girl answered, bolstered in her response by the affirmation of their friendship. "So... why are you red?" she asked again, a little less hesitantly.
"Hmm... I think it might just be the blood of the Calf," Cas theorized. "I ate moss, mostly, when I was green."
Kari seemed to accept that answer, and Cas, no longer able to resist that bubbling pit of electricity in her gut, that call from the phantom body that hosted that gut, allowed the body to take hold of her form and let go.
Cas had expected something like a gradual change, or flow, as if she were being poured into a mold.
The reality was closer to a car crash. On every level, all at once, with a single, violent, explosion, her body changed. The marker of life was change, but it felt like she was dying as an intense energy struck her like the heart of a lightning bolt. And in the heart-beat of that blast, in the short instant that only allowed her body to twitch, ten thousand things happened all at once. The first among these ten thousand things, however, was the second crystal eye formed from nothing in her center, turning her vision into kaleidoscope as she looked into all of space and saw glimpses of the impossible complexity that swarmed into existence across every inch of her body.
Cas had no hope of directing even a single one of these processes, as she felt the cells and protein pumps and muscles come into existence, and the bones crystallizing into perfect renditions of tibia, and a rib cage quickly obscuring the beating heart that found itself in a half-constructed body. Complexity had a way of composing itself, however, as all the associated parts organized themselves and Cas felt her eyes moving on their own volition -- or perhaps under the instruction of the rest of the body -- moving up into the darkness of her newly constructed skull, and slotting forward into the sphere of clear fluid, behind the lens made of nothing that looked at the light and constricted just perfectly enough to bring the entire world into focus.
It was... amazing. Cas had long forgotten what it was like not to be a slime, and this body... no, this new world was amazing. Turning suddenly she looked up. The sky looked so clear. It felt as if she could stare off into infinity without the distortions of her own body flexing everything into unnatural shapes.
KRSCH! KRSCH!
"Cas?" a girlish voice came from behind her. The sound of sandals on sound was crisp to her ears, and the voice might as well have belonged to an opera singer for how clearly it sounded out the consonants. In every aspect of her senses, Cas felt as if she'd taken the mufflers off her self. She could feel the cool wind. She knew she was near water by the smell. And her sight, oh goodness her sight! Whipping back around, her body felt like lightning as she focused her gaze on Kari, drinking in the sight of the girl. She didn't even miss color anymore! Her crystal eyes, bolstered by human lenses... every part of the girl seemed so clear. She wanted to laugh, and she did.
"Haha! Hahaheee hehe!" Cas danced lightly on her toes. She could feel the air entering her lungs with a thought. Bringing her hands up, she placed the sweaty palms up against her bust. She had a heart beat! She could feel the vertigo in her gut and the sheer amazement of what she'd just witnessed!
She was human again! She could see like an eagle! She could hear like an owl. She felt like a god! And she looked... twelve years old!
A brief moment of silence as she looked down at her short figure. The girl's clothes fit her perfectly. This was expected considering she only had 90 pounds of material to work with, so, really, she didn't care. "Hehe!" she laughed, collapsing into snorts of joy as she walked over to the girl that stood shock still, looking at her in awe. "Yeah, I think I can get a bit older if I just eat more stuff, but -- " she hopped in place, landing on one leg and posing with outstretched arms "-- I don't look too bad, huh? I think it looks better, actually, It'd look a little ratchet to be wearing kids clothes as a twenty year old."
Slowly, Cas felt bits of her non-professional personality coming back to her. She wasn't sure if it was because of the new body or her general excitement, but she didn't care. Strutting about, she tried to do a cartwheel and failed, landing into a laughing mess onto the ground.
"Hey, help me up!" she giggled, too happy to pick herself up off the floor.
Kari took the girl in both hands, and Cas kept laughing.
"Hey, what do you call a- hey," Cas, calming a bit, noticed the curious expression on the girls features. "What's the matter?" she asked, growing more serious.
"Well..."
"What?" Cas implored.
"It's just..." Kari paused. She, in fact, didn't pause for too long, but Cas responded in doubletime in her panic.
"What!?" she looked at her back and twirled in place. "What is it?"
"Why..." Kari began, still hesitating.
"What!?" Cas implored.
"Why are you so black?" Kari asked finally, pointing an accusatory finger at the girl.