I sit in a rocky clearing, my power armor remarkably shiny in the drab landscape as I perch on a rock, A small blue spiky slime bouncing in front of me is subject to an intense glare as I reminisce on just how I ended up here. A small swarm of drones orbiting me as they take dozens of samples of the environment, the information being ported directly into my mind, the soil and mineral content isn’t anything special, some fossils and the like but nothing outstanding. No ore deposits here, which makes building decidedly more difficult.

The day had started fairly simply, the portal had been opened and the first tanks and drones had come through without issue, the androids from the Nauvis side had followed through and rejoined their friends or simply started exploring the new city. There was some discontent given that Commander White had breached the news, the New’s being that there had only ever been one human on the moon rather than a colony.

Not quite the truth but…. I didn’t care to deal with riots. This revelation already had a fair portion of the androids freaking out and a larger portion treating me as some form of messiah. Not Ideal in the least, but it was better than dealing with riots from war machines. But while the news being released meant the androids on my side could safely be reintroduced to the larger population it was honestly a footnote compared to what happened next.

That being my own trip through the portal had gone my guards in tow in case anything happened, and things had immediately gone wrong. The portal structure destabilizing itself and a new exit being opened just in time for all of us to fall through, given you can’t exactly stop on your way through a portal.

This in itself hadn’t been an issue, the portal had still been open, just a few hundred feet in the air. Nothing that I couldn’t solve simply by engaging my armors flight systems, and the YoRHa squad, A2, and 2B and 9S all had similar if weaker systems. Letting all of us slowly and safely fall to the ground level where it should have been a simply task to either wait for a vehicle or get ferried out by a few of my drones.

Only the world's native creatures threw a wrench into that simple solution, just as I was bringing my logistics drones out of my internal storage a flickery yellow blob of slime glomped onto my armor, and with a burst of static and light I was just gone. Which reminds me, get anti-teleporting tech asap.

I mean I hadn’t been hurt as I crashed into the ground, even a fall from orbit wouldn’t and this was a four foot drop onto my armors face. But it was an embarrassing thing, especially given that I’d watched the fall in slow motion and still not stopped myself. The Sensor readings on that flickery slime had been… interesting, and had more than distracted me. Not to mention the sensation of existing in two places at the same time, I might be in every machine but that just made that worse, as there were two of me in every machine.

Did not enjoy.

After I had sorted myself back out and figured out how to move my limbs again I sat up in the rocky clearing I was now in. I was roughly four hundred miles away from the portal, a short trip by any standard. Only the issue there was the large ‘ocean’ between me and the portal. One not filled with water but instead with the slime, the same slime the creatures were made from. Which implied the ocean itself was alive, which was decidedly unnerving.

Getting across the ocean with just my logistics drones was possible, just rotate them out and recharge them on a cycle. Only it would take literal days to cross that distance with just the drones. Ground travel with my armor was actually quicker, and waiting for a transport was an even better option. That would still take a few hours though, so I was stuck here.

Honestly it wasn’t that bad, I had my armor, enough drones to fight a small army, and a new environment full of things to examine, like these slimes. There were four varieties I had observed so far, the staticy yellow slime, the rocky blue one, the one that resembled a cat far too much to be natural, and a pink variety that seemed to be literally everywhere.

Aside from their unique biology, they were far more durable than one would imagine. They had excretions that I could already see a myriad of uses for. The pink crystal for instance, it can seemingly be used for basically anything. It's edible, would serve as a suitable fertilizer for most plants, it’s burnable, and can function as an oil. I can refine this to suit basically any roll, maybe not well but it could. A jack of all trades material, if I just had this I could still make anything, and these slimes produce these from eating anything biological and have a roughly fifty percent conversion rate.

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I can turn one hundred pounds of fruit into fifty pounds of this stuff, and refine that further down into something useful. There are a few issues, like how it can’t serve as reactor fuel, but I’m not saying it can be anything but that it can fill any role in some form. It can’t power a reactor but it can burn to produce power for instance.

This alone would be enough of a reason to research this world more, but there are more materials produced by these slimes. The rock slime in front of me produces something that can be alloyed with any metal, making it lighter and significantly more durable than it had been. Any metal, meaning I’ll need to rebuild my entire army already just because this is too big an improvement to pass up. On my stronger metal alloys it only enhances them a few percentiles but with the plain steel I use for standard construction? More than doubles the durability. Still weaker than my tanks armor much less my suits but that means my buildings will be significantly more durable with barely an increase in cost.

I was going to exploit the hell out of this.

The cat slime was significantly less useful, largely because it seemed to excrete an organic steroid. Which while potentially useful would only work on organics, my own biology would filter this out before it could take much effect. Though I haven’t given up on finding some use for it.

And if those were the only slimes on this planet I would be genuinely shocked. The things seemed to be everywhere. Somewhat segregated sure with only the pink variety being ever present but that didn’t really matter. The creatures only seemed to prey on the avian lifeforms that ran about.

With my current observations done I called the drones back to me and pulled the samples I had gathered within my skin. The rocky slime I had been feeding watched me stand up with oddly expressive eyes. Something like wonder on its face, which meant I’d need to perform sentience testing. Human brains did have a tendency to assign emotions to things that lacked them but it never hurt to be certain. I let the small thing follow me as I left the rocky clearing behind and started off in the vague direction of the portal. I wasn’t likely to get much closer but I could explore and act like I was making progress towards the portal.

I didn’t doubt that the minds had already sent a veritable fleet, and that meant my rescue was only a matter of time. That meant I was free to relax, and as I got onto a large rocky cliff-face and saw the landscape before me, rocky red stone stretching on for miles, I knew that there’d be plenty to explore.

Ahead a few thousand feet and to the right a few hundred more I could see what looked like a river of the ‘slime sea’ that likely stretched out to the main mass, a few miles ahead I could see some verdant jungle, and to my left a few miles out I could see that the red stone shifted to purple. A full glimpse of my surroundings revealed I was on an island, maybe only a few hundred square kilometers.

I was taken out of my initial and instinctive scan of ideal factory locations by what sounded like demented laughter echoing out below me. Some two meter blob of black and incandescent slime was just… Laughing and lashing out with tentacles while pulling various slimes into it’s mouth. I watched three pink slimes with identifiable fear on their faces get latched and slowly dragged towards the thing which… just fuck no.

Immediately enough laser fire to put the sun to shame lanced out, and there wasn’t even anything left of the creature for me to research. Just a divot in the ground where it had been. Which was notably underwhelming, I had been expecting far more of a struggle from the thing. The slimes I had inadvertently saved by killing the offensive thing looked at me, and their eyes changed into a child's idea of a star, before they hopped up onto the slope I had perched myself on, joining the rock slime. I took a few of the fruits I had in my inventory out and threw them onto the creatures. Where they immediately ate them, seemingly immediately forgetting their traumatic experience.

It seemed my wait might not be as peaceful as I had previously imagined, as I sincerely doubted that that was the only one of those creatures.