Kari was still having a bad time in town.
Well, it wasn't so much a bad time anymore. Kari had relearned her old social habits from before she met Cas. It was easy enough to keep the villagers distant, even as she grew close to Kari.
Nobody here was anything to her, after all, and she was sure they thought likewise.
Nadia laughed and waved an arm over her head. “Come on! You’re as slow as a Sakkari, Kari!” the girl teased back, looking very proud of her rhyme scheme.
...she had promised Cas to try and make friends, however.
“Ok! So, what’s next?” Nadia asked, dropping the last item into the basket.
Kari answered, “That’s all Cas wanted for today." She was glad for Nadia’s company, though she never found a compelling reason to admit that to the girl. It made Carrying the groceries easier, in any case.
“Glad to help!” Nadia answered, saluting with her whole body. “I didn’t have anything to do today, anyway,” she admitted, dropping her arm into a slack hang and looking a little abashed.
And, in the most literal sense, Nadia -- today as most days -- did not have anything to do.
For, Nadia was an Unari, like Kari, and was therefore left without a job whenever there wasn’t a corpse that didn’t need disposal, and now that Kari had graduated from her position, she wondered...
“Nadia,” Kari said, looking aside at the girl on their walk back.
The girl looked up from her contemplative pace, turning on that ten-thousand watt smile which was her trademark. “Yeah?” she asked, looking believably cheery despite the perpetual slouch which affected her spine and made her happiness look more like silliness.
“Have you…” Kari hesitated, “had to take any corpses?”
Nadia only beamed harder, laughing. “Oh, just a few dead mice from Ms. Gani’s place! Why?”
Kari didn’t know. “I guess… I just remembered… never mind.” Kari said, too self conscious to continue.
In truth, the Unari of a village hardly spoke to one another.
All the other Unari hated themselves and hated each other, and Kari – during her youth – had been confused to see Nadia walking around with a perpetual smile and good feelings. She’d been… different from all the other Unari, and from everyone else in the village for that matterr.
This attitude made her naturally likable, and it pushed the villagers to show her a bit more tolerance than an Unari deserved. As for Kari's opinion, well, they weren’t friends, but she always thought of Nadia as more tolerable than the rest of them.
They were reaching the edge of the village, where the dirt grew coarse with sand and announced every footstep.
On most days, by the time they reached this point, Nadia would split off to wander aimlessly as was her habit.
Today, however, she stopped, and something inside Kari made her stop, too. Looking back, Kari was surprised to see that Nadia was standing up straight for once, arms flat by her side and the collar of her shawl slacking down to reveal a nervous smile – all of Nadia’s emotions were expressed via smiles.
The smile shed it’s nervousness and became shy…
“I’m… having my birthday next week,” Nadia said, words full of meaning.
Kari stood shock still, for once silent from shock rather than disinterest.
Nadia laughed. “Mom says we’re gonna start the party today, and it’s gonna go on all week! The elder also said that I won’t have to carry corpses from now on… so, it looks like I got away with just handling a few mice after all. Aren’t I lucky?”
Kari couldn’t think of any appropriate words, so she simply smiled and nodded.
“Well… anyway. It’s gonna be a big party. I was wondering if you wanted to come, and – if you could – I know no one’s supposed to talk to her without you – but if the Sage is interested, then she’s invited too!” Nadia spoke the final few words in a rush, hands balled into fists and arms locked straight.
The girl simply stood there, beaming that innocent smile that never left her face. She was quite the opposite of Kari in that way.
She was the opposite of Kari, who could manage a sad expression as she shook her head and told Nadia: “I’m afraid she’ll be busy this week,” and turned before she could see what sort of smile Nadia would express at being denied even that.
----------------------------------------
Kari was worried.
It was a new feeling for her.
For the longest time, she’d lived life with a death sentence. There was a sort of comfort to knowing what her fate was, and to a girl like her – worrying about anything was as preposterous as buying sand.
Now, though, she had a life, and all the commensurate worries that came with protecting that life. She didn’t know exactly why, but she felt herself being crushed by dread as she thought of what might happen to it.
Kari announced her presence by placing her basket down with a thud at the doorway, swooshing aside the white curtain as she entered the shack.
Cas stood at a wooden table – an extravagance Kari had never seen up close before, magnifying stalk traveling along with her crystal eye as she hovered her attention over the surface.
“Did you get the Tamari Vines?” Cas asked without greeting, speaking robotically as if her intonation were being stolen away by the fascinations on her desk.
Kari’s first instinct was to scream, to take all her unresolved frustrations out on Cas for being so happy while the whole world was crumbling. In the end, however, she simply sulked. Sitting down, pressing her cheeks against her palms, she answered with a muffled: “yeah.”
“Good, good…” Cas trailed off, and then fell silent for the next thirty minutes, entranced in her work.
Beside her stood the new slime which Kari had a hard time taking her eyes off.
Noticing her entrancement, Cas interrupted her reverie with a soft chuckle. “I’m guessing you're curious about Sakkarina?
“Kari nodded, though her heart wasn’t in it enough to truly care.”
Cas laughed with an excited fugue, pushing a spaghetti bowl of plant fibers over the desk next to the girl. “Ok, try feeding it a Tamari vine!” she instructed, voice taking a prankster quality as she turned her stalk eye over to the girl.
Kari obliged. Reaching a straight hand out, she waggled the tamari vine over the slime before letting the plant slip and – with a generous *plop* – drop into the miniature Sakkari.
Cas had already seen it working many times before, but couldn’t help her joy and surprise when the vine sank into the Sakkari, and the slime immediately warbled to life. The slime warmed up on the crystal bowl it called home, warbling as it shredded the vine into fine fibers, roiled them together into a bubbling mixture and – as was Cas’ ingrained habit – stretched out a bent stalk, lethargically pouring the jelly-like result from the tip.
Cas quickly slid a bowl under the spout to collect the material, moving her stalk back in a mockery of Jazz Hands as she said. “Taa Daa!”
Kari tried to feign joy, but she didn’t feel like trying too hard as she said: “Oh, wow. I guess that’ll save you a lot of time.”
Cas was immediately leapt up to address the prompt. “Oh, it’s far more amazing than that! Look here!” she pointed to a sample of the glimmering Gem she’d taken from the cavern. “Actually, wait, I never asked. What color is this crystal?” Cas asked, scatterbrained as she tried to answer and ask every question all at once.
Kari squinted at the glimmering gem. “It’s a lot of different colors at once," she answered, "blue, green, purple, red.. it keeps changing.”
“Oooh, rainbow!” Cas exclaimed, too hyped to slow down as she took the finger sized jem and brought it up under Kari’s nose. “Well, now we know the color, do you know what this is?”
“Uh…”
“Wait, what am I saying? Of course you don’t! That’s what I’m about to tell you!” Moving aside, she gestured to Sakkarina and her eye-less, glimmering interior. “This rock is what sakkari are made of, Kari, and I think it’s what turns water into living slimes! This is the stuff that gives sakkari the ability to be learn and move and all that stuff! Do you have any idea what this means?” she all but yelled, bouncing in place like a rubber ball.
“U-”
“It means we could use this to train sakkari!” Cas spoiled, too eager to let her point go unsaid for a second longer. “Come, come,” she said, gesturing Kari closer to a crude map she’d made of the cavern. “Look here. See, about two thirds of the sakkari are coming out of these holes here and here," she pointed at the two southern entrances, "though they only recently started using the cave exit. They die in the desert, all of them.
“The ones that go south though here…” she pointed at a large dot on the map pointing towards the village, “...they're the ones that make our oasis!”
“Ok?” Kari said, struggling to maintain further interest.
“What I’m saying is,” Cas squealed with glee, “if we could train the Sakkari that come out of the north entrance to turn south, we could triple the size of the Oasis!”
Kari raised an obvious eyebrow, “why don’t we just close off all the other exits,? Why waste time trying to train so many stupid sakkari?” The question was phrased meanly, her attempt at trying to shut down the conversation.
Cas, hardened to questioning, and oblivious to Kari’s demeanor, simply oohed in the impressed manner of a teacher speaking to their star pupil. “Excellent question, Kari, but we might crowd the cavern if we did that. Remember the slime that was causing us problems?”
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Kari nodded.
“Well, it only became a problem because it got trapped there. If we locked them all in, they might start milling around, eating each other, growing too big to leave, then we’d have an even bigger problem on our hands!”
Another raise of the eyebrow. "Wait. I thought the 'monster stealing our water' story was supposed to be fake, though."
"It was," Cas answered, "but it turns out we were accidentally right. Besides, I thought only Sin and I knew about that fact," Cas said, turning her own suspicious gaze at the girl.
Kari only pled with a guilty look.
"Kari... what have I told you about eavesdropping!?"
"Well I wouldn't have to do it if you didn't keep lying!" Kari defended herself, hurriedly looking for a way to change the conversation. "Anyway... you said something about training sakkari."
"Oh, right!" Cas leapt onto the bait like it was hook. "I think we can use the stones to train them en mass. Kind of like how pigeions always know to go north. Wait... you've never seen a pigeon have you..." Cas paused contemplatively. “But, come here, look at this!”
The scientist in Cas had too much pre publication material to show, and she frenziedly pulled Kari to the next table, eager to spill her work before an audience.
Kari, by now had caught some of the infectious interest, and she felt a spark of curiosity in her as she peeked her head over the desk, running her eyes across the layout.
> ...
>
> There, laid out before her was a long strip of white cloth. On it there were pinned four different specimens, laid out purposefully, one after the other, as if to display the gradual development of a single creature over time.
>
> It was the standard egg -> larvae -> pupae -> adult diagram Cas had seen presented in every entomology museum – though she’d never had the opportunity to make one herself until now.
>
> In most ways, her diagram was identical to those life-cycle sheets, with the small caveat that her project was made up entirely of her collection of pet rocks.
>
> Laid out on the white cloth were samples of that rainbow gem from the cavern, at various stages of transformation.
>
> The samples were laid out in order of size, and the first step in this transformation was an intensely glowing example of the magic stone, small and oval in posture, and quite dense with surface texture and impurities.
>
> Then came a larger stone, looking like a bloated version of the original, as if the first stone had been a sponge that was getting filled with water.
>
> The third stone was larger still and looked even less substantial, as if connected by strings and strands of dissolved stone.
>
> This process continued on until the largest stone she’d been able to find concluded the end of the progression. Nearly the size of the smallest slimes, it looked like a combination of steel wool and swiss cheese and had the general look of a skeleton with bubbles of water hanging between the solid strands of stone that filled its volume.
>
> The final step before birth Cas imagined no one would be able to see – for -- in the murky depths of their puddles -- she knew the stones dissolved completely.
>
> And, though she'd never seen the process directly, Cas imagined that, for a brief moment afterward, the dissolved solid formed a region of mineral that disassociated itself from the surrounding waters, a region that came alive.
>
> The heavy, muck laden waters would protect these newly born slimes from being dissolved into their own element, and this new living thing would crawl from its inanimate womb.
>
> ...
This was the general speech Cas had prepared for the explanation of her diagram.
And she went further beyond when it came to Kari. Cas walked her involuntarily student through this life-cycle, pointing out all the characteristic features which she thought defined each life stage, and trying to explain the recoiling effect the stone must’ve had on natural osmotic process before the glare in Kari’s eyes stopped her.
Coughing, Cas got straight to the point.
“Anyway… what I’m trying to say is that tripling the Oasis is only the beginning of it! With this stone,” she gestured at the diagram with a shaking stalk, “we could actually make more slimes. Kari,” she moved closer to the girl now, turning her voice into a low, excited whisper. “I’ve been down in that cavern. There are cracks in the floor no human could fit down, cracks that run hundreds of feet deep into the earth.”
Cas paused at this, hesitating as if revealing debating with herself to reveal the existence of a surprise party.
This brief bit of unintended showmanship managed to revive Kari’s interest, who asked: “What’s down there?”
Cas answered finally: “There's water down there, Kari: millions and millions of Oasis’ worth. There’s more water down there than you can imagine, and only the sakkari are capable of tapping it. If we could grow them, if we could make them bring more of it up… Kari, we could increase the Oasis by hundreds of times over! We could grow it by thousands, tens of thousands of times over again afterwards! This oasis would be a lake, and these five villages could be the heart of a great city!”
Cas was rambling now. This excitement had been building inside of her for several days at this point, and the energy behind it seemed relentless as she finally had the chance to let someone else in on the secret.
Kari only asked: “What’s a city?”
Cas let out an involuntary laugh, almost manic as she realized her own mistake.
Thinking on it for a moment, and looking into Kari’s confused eyes – Cas finally settled on the simplest description of ‘City’ she could think of.
“Thousands of people!” Cas answered, looking out her window towards the spire in the distance. “Thousands and thousands of people living in the same place without having to fear starvation! Living next to so much water they could bathe in it! Kari,” she turned to the girl, taking her hands in gentle stalks, “we’d have so much food that we could throw it away! We could built towers, castles, and throne rooms! We could live like kings! And you’d make for a good court assistant, I think!”
She giggled at that last statement, tickling the girl’s side and noticing for the first time the girl’s bad mood disappearing as Kari’s eyes glazed over. ‘Kings…’ she’d heard that word in old stories before.
To sweeten the deal, Cas laughed: “And you could be my loyal court assistant instead of my errand girl. How does that sound?”
A hint of a smile came back to Kari’s features.
“See! I knew you’d come along!”
Cas had been implacably happy ever since she’d made this discovery. Whether it was Kari’s recent mood, the village troubles, or even annoying visitors with make-up problems, she just felt that there was nothing that could keep her down.
Because, now, she had a plan.
First step was training all the slimes to go in the right direction. That would go a long way to increasing water supplies over the next few years.
Then, making new slimes. A decade or so from now, that would the good basis for a lake, then the city.
And then… well, the world was their oyster at that point. With the resources of a city at their disposal, they’d have the ability to do anything they wanted. Send out expeditions into the desert, beyond the desert, make contact with other civilizations, establish a trading outpost. She’d be playing an RTS at that point!
Slime sage for the win!
Of course, first, she had to get a few delicate resources on hand first.
Oh, right, the resources…
“I’ve got to go tell Nemaris!” Cas remembered. She hadn’t even told the village elder about her grand plans yet! Stupid research! Why did it have to be so interesting?
Cas raced for the doorway.
Her large body jiggled against the sudden acceleration, knocking back to bump against her sample table, which Kari sprung to steady as Cas rushed to her impromptu meeting.
“Be careful!” Kari yelled after her, voice half-inflected with worry and annoyance.
...
The call instilled a familiar, carefree feeling in Cas.
In fact, her recent weeks in the village had all had that tenor of nostalgia in them because, truth be told, the community here was something special.
Annoying gossipers, overbearing fashionistas, roguish-storyteller-gym bros, and grey-haired elders alike… the people here had no trouble treating her like family. None of them felt embarrassed to come to her with their troubles, or to offer their help to what they saw as hers. It was a feeling of community Cas hadn’t experienced since she left her home town back on Earth.
It was a feeling of community she didn't know she'd missed so much, and for Cas it felt like she was living through a second childhood in this dreamy desert village. In fact, it felt like she was living in an idealized childhood.
Ideals hardly lasted in the real world, however.
For some time afterwards, Cas would look back on this period of her life with some regret because of what she -- in the light of her happy life -- had allowed herself to ignore, even when the truth came knocking at her door.
Cas brushed aside her cloth door and – with great surprise – forced herself into a skidding halt.
The girl leapt back gracefully, landing with a happy, backwards march that almost left her dancing. Stopping herself, Nadia stood back up into a slouch and graced Cas with an apologetic smile. “Sorry,” she said, starting her sentence abruptly. “I know I wasn’t invited, but I was talking to Kari earlier and… well. Actually, I guess I should say my name first. Hi!” she said with a sudden energy, as if restarting her sentence, “my name is-”
“Nadia!” Kari interrupted, her earlier, worried tone completely taking over as she stepped out of the hut. “What are you doing here?” she pointed at the girl, “I told you, we don’t need any invitations! Cas – I mean the Sage, is very busy right now!”
“I know,” the girl stepped forward. “I just wanted to speak to the Sage really quickly!” she explained pleadingly.
“She’s busy,” Kari replied coldly.
Kari – still growing familiar with her new role as Cas’ assistant – had been growing sterner and sterner with interlopers. However, the panic in her voice rung strangely in Cas’ ear, and the smile that the new girl ‘Nadia’ wore was so sad that Cas couldn’t help herself:
“Kari,” she raised a stalk, speaking with a professionally measured tone, “It’s fine. Sometimes we need to hear the villagers out, don’t you think?”
“I did hear her out, and I told her not to come here!” Kari explained, panic intensifying. “I told you not to come here!” she sent an accusing glare over at the girl, who could only send a pathetic smile over as an apology.
“Kari, It’s fine. I’d like to talk to her.” Cas spoke more authoritatively this time, and Kari fell silent, a helpless grimace coming over her expression.
Cas than turned over to the girl, who’s beautiful face was still smiling, even as her body looked on the verge of collapsing from nervousness.
“Hey hun, it’s ok.” Cas spoke softly, unnaturally adopting the mannerisms of her aunts, and feeling thankful for having done so – her normal personality felt dangerously unqualified as she looked into the scared eyes and smiling cheeks of the girl.
Nadia remained silent, shaking in place and fox ears flickering wildly in the wind. Her lips drew down into smirk as her eyes closed shut over her tears.
“Honey, what’s the matter?” Cas asked, taking a more serious tone, always feeling at a loss with crying children.
“Please…” the girl said after a while, the word spoke with hope and questioning. “Please, could you let me stay with you, too?”
Cas hesitated. “Hun… don’t you have parents you can stay with?”
The girl laughed. Or, maybe it was meant to be a scream. It was hard to tell with the admonishment in her voice. “Don’t be funny!” she laughed. “You have to know what I am by now! I wouldn’t be coming to you if I were anything else, would I? Haha!” The laugher quickly died into sobs as the girl fell onto hands and knees, smile disappearing from sight as she beamed it down at the desert. “I’m… I’m an Unari, like she used to be.” She lifted a hand to point at Kari without looking at her. “I…” she stopped to let out a choked sob. “It’s my last week here. My name is Nadia, and, and I’m… I don’t want to die!” she let out a choked cry.
Cas, if she’d had the strength to listen to her brain, would have shut down the girl’s hopes immediately here. She would have stopped the girl from making the impossible ask before putting her through the heartache of being denied it.
However, whether she had that strength or not was moot, as the girl suddenly broke out with a wild cry:
“Please!” she asked, hands clenching divots into the dirt.
“I’ll do anything, just save me, too!”
And so, the end of Cas’ childhood in this new world came to an end, with a whimper.