That ended as amicably as the experiment could have hoped. At the very least, they weren’t in the water, and no one died. While the humans go back down to the food court, the experiment sticks around up top in the now deserted upper deck with both of its empty bottles in either hand, the poison bottle in its sleeve, and no stick because its human decided she wanted it for some reason. Probably planning on poking the bigger human with it, if it would wager a guess.
Not that it would. The motivations of humans were both mysterious and ridiculous. It would rather not think too hard about that kind of thing, since doing so tended to ‘volunteer’ one for special assignments. It would much rather not do extra work for no reason, thank you very much.
Speaking of extra work for no reason, it started filling up the bottles with the miasma now that there weren’t any distractions. There was a decent chance that without any other stimuli to distract it, it might be able to stay on the same task for more than five minutes. Not a good chance, but a decent one. It helped that with the movement of the ship the experiment was constantly syphoning a stream of the purple-ish substance into the first container rather than like when it was on relatively stationary ground and had a finite amount to deal with until it moved along.
In fact, it managed to work for ten minutes.
Stabbing the cork back into the one bottle it had been filling this whole time, the experiment stands up from it’s position back where that guard from earlier was standing. Walking around in circles for a couple seconds just to shake off the boring, it heads over to the downstairs area of the ship. Following up on its human, it finds her and Wang Yun down in the galley, eating noodles of some sort. That put a bit of a damper on the theory that the miasma completely eliminated the physical needs of the human body. Only weak evidence though, which didn’t completely discount the hypothesis. None of the experiments technically needed to eat, but they did in fact partake in the elective process. Food tasted good, of course. It also put the slightest bit less strain on the internal system keeping each of them functional. Not enough to have any notable difference when it came to efficiency though, which meant they could still end up set on tasks that precluded the luxuriance of being able to take part in the consumption of microwaved burritos.
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
It could go for a microwave burrito.
“Hey, would you kindly stash some of those bowls into your inventory for later?” asks the experiment. Kepa Ying slurps up another noodle while her eyes look around the room, and the bowl disappears into nothingness. Hopefully that was going to be good in the morning. A bit of spicing it up would make for a bracing start of the day, assuming it ever got around to sleeping. That was another thing that it technically didn’t need to do, but that did happen to be one of the few things that it could reliably use to pass time in greater increments than five minutes.
“So, was anyone supposed to be standing guard up there on the deck or anything?” it asks conversationally. The girl probably didn’t know, but she had a better chance of having pulled the information out of one of the other humans than it did. Since it hadn’t gotten the information, it’s chance was set at zero percent, and literally anything other than that was a greater chance.
Before she could respond, the experiment is distracted by a sudden stabbing pain in its all of it. That signified plant life. Looking around, nothing had really changed in the environment. It would have expected that the guy who controlled plants might have come in, and been indirectly attacking it again with his existence. Lin Laotian, if it remembered correctly. Wang Yun had used him as an excuse as to why he thought Kepa Ying was a pushover, but it was pretty sure he was a somewhat less than reliable source of information about whatever intel he had previously gained. More likely, Lin Laotian had done something along the lines of telling Wang Yun and whomever else that its human had a bodyguard, and the rude human had taken into account the idea that a bodyguard was meant to protect their charge, inferring that the charge would be less capable at defending themself than the bodyguard was. Combining that with the experiment’s physical stature, it was a reasonable deduction that Kepa Ying was weak.
He had been working from some faulty assumptions though.
It seemed like the plant life pressure was coming from all directions at once. Well, if there was one thing that always helped with the problem of things being alive, it was poison. Unstoppering the bottle in its sleeve with its tail surreptitiously, the experiment hands the full bottle of miasma to its human to store, and slips a small stream of deadly poison out of the bottle to spread it on the floorboards.
The ship jumps in the air, and a scream emits from the deck. That probably wasn’t good.