Lucy had chosen her opening social gambit wisely.

“My name is Sam!” the red-membraned microbe replied, radiating pride.

“Oh...cool!” said Lucy. “I had thought you might choose something a bit different, after what Rikorlak suggested.”

“It’s short for Samroth’ganash,” he supplied, at which Sam’s membrane wrinkled.

“No it’s not,” Sam told Lucy, before lowering their voice with a smaller stream of molecules. “He’s just mad because I called him Ricky.”

Rikorlak sputtered for a moment before replying very calmly.

“Rikorlak is a well-regarded name with a long and noble history, starting with Riklaxian the First, who…”

After that, Lucy had a very successful time interacting, she thought. Rikorlak and Sam were among the more talkative beings Lucy had ever met, and they gladly made up for any lack of initial conversational prowess on her part.

When their conversation did dry up eventually, she hesitated, unsure how to proceed.

Is this the ‘companionable silence’ part? she wondered.

No, that must be later. This feels much more awkward.

She frowned mentally as she looked at the two of them. Rikorlak had arms, but didn’t seem able to form hands very well, and Sam hadn’t formed any appendages at all.

Lucy wanted to learn more about their other abilities, but wasn’t sure if it would be considered rude.

I think we’re a bit past that point.

And other questions seemed to be hanging in the water unasked, just waiting for her to reach out and make them real. And since this was Lucy’s first time really joining in on their conversations, Rikorlak and Sam seemed to be waiting, probably wondering why she had decided to be friendly all of a sudden.

Lucy tried to formulate her earlier thoughts into words that wouldn’t make her sound like a sociopath or a politician. She couldn’t quite manage, so she went outside instead to retrieve the bodies of the worms she’d killed earlier.

It wouldn’t do to leave corpses directly outside her new cave-lair, and while Lucy herself was full from filtering the sulfur in the water with the help of her fungus, she thought the others might like to eat.

It also gave her time to think.

A tactical withdrawal, she told herself. To…

To what? What was her goal here?

Lucy had started off with ideas about the increased survival benefits of a group, but she had to admit that she was also just plain curious. Why didn’t Rikorlak leave her to die, if he took his job so seriously? And what was it like for Sam to basically develop a mind out of the blue?

Curiosity, Lucy thought sagely, is the secret sauce to conversation.

Armed with new confidence, she hurried back into the cave after taking a brief look around outside and not seeing any other organisms nearby.

She might need to travel to hunt, she knew, or find some way of attracting organisms to a certain area. But for now, she would rest and sate her curiosity.

Sam and Rikorlak seemed to be quite pleased by the offering of food, and happily sucked up the cytoplasm that Lucy’s dagger sent spurting from the worms’ bodies into the water.

Lucy left them to it, content to focus for a few minutes on her Oxidization. While her new cilia passively filtered the water for sulfur with impressive efficiency, it still felt good to take an active role every now and then to get all she could out of it, and her System seemed to award more Evolution Points that way.

As they were finishing up their meals, Rikorlak and Sam were both floating lazily, and Lucy went in for the kill, voicing the question that had confused her since they escaped from the sulfur-pits.

“Why didn’t you let me die?” she asked Rikorlak.

Nice and direct. Strong.

He didn’t seem confused by the question, but he still took a long time to answer, moving away from the last trickles of cytoplasm leaking from his worm.

“There is a contract,” he said finally, “between a soul and the person who collects it.”

“What, you have to sign for it?”

She was going for funny, but he nodded.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

“Yes, actually. But that’s not what I mean. The contract is sacred, and contains certain stipulations. Guidelines for proper conduct.”

Lucy pondered this. It made sense that Simon’s employees couldn’t just do whatever they wanted with the souls they collected, she supposed.

“How can it be sacred, if you work for…that side?” she pointed a hand downwards.

“Well, not everyone would agree, I suppose. But, well, it is sacred.”

Lucy felt his defensiveness, and sensed that this was an argument he’d had before.

“You obviously take this very seriously,” she observed, at which he nodded.

“My first oath was data-related, of course, but I’ve never been one to say no to optional trainings, and when they chose me to go out into the field, it was my duty, and I swore the Oath of Reaping like any other.”

Lucy felt her cytoplasm run cold. Was she talking to a Grim Reaper?

There’s no way that’s actually the job title, right?

She thought back to her dramatic encounter with Simon in her dreams.

No, she amended, that’s definitely on brand.

“So, what? It forbids you from doing anything other than showing up and collecting the soul?”

“That isn’t quite how all of my colleagues might see it, but yes. It doesn’t physically stop us from doing anything, but…well, rules are there for a reason, damnit!”

Lucy looked at him in surprise, but his anger quickly faded.

“The language of the contract is quite clear, even if some choose to disregard it. A soul is a complicated, not so separate thing, and believe it or not, premature removal can have some serious side effects.”

I believe it, Lucy thought, slightly queasy at the idea of her soul being ripped from her corporal body. Good thing they were short-staffed and sent the rule follower from Analytics.

“And…what is a soul, exactly?”

Lucy got the impression that Rikorlak was suddenly uncomfortable.

“I’m not sure I can just tell you,” he said finally. “But to start, I might ask what you think—”

As he spoke, Lucy saw a large shape approaching through the partially sealed off tunnel, accompanied by a small vibration that echoed through the water of the small chamber.

She felt a brief surge of relief.

Just in time. Saved by the—wait, shit!

Lucy got ready to fight, even as she mentally thanked the creature for showing up right when it did.

Where the hell did that thing come from though? I was just over there!

More time must have passed in conversation than she had initially realized, but Lucy was still surprised to see anything emerging from the tunnel, which had been very empty an hour ago.

The creature lumbering towards the little group was large, filling the tunnel more than halfway. It hardly slowed down as it neared the obstruction, reaching forward with two long, flat pieces of armored membrane that protruded from around its mouth.

Well, that solves that mystery, Lucy thought, recognizing the pieces of organic matter she’d found in the second chamber and had taken to be claws.

I’m gonna call them claws, she decided. They were near the mouth, but didn’t seem oriented quite right to be mandibles for eating.

Unlike the pair of claws she had found earlier, the ones on the living organism had a number of hooked barbs sticking out of their long, flat structure.

Barbs that it was now hooking into the sludgy mass that half-blocked the tunnel as it came close enough to do so, opening its mouth at the same time.

Lucy saw a greenish liquid start to spew out, but as soon as the organism opened its mouth, it must have felt the same burning sensation Lucy had when exposed to Sam’s defensive slime.

Probably worse on the inside, she thought, as the mouth of the creature snapped shut and it began to back away.

Lucy had formed her spike and readied her enzymes for a fight, but the organism was already awkwardly turning around in the tunnel, scuttling back the way it came using four tiny nubs on its underside to move.

She kept her spike-dagger formed but lowered the arm that held it.

“Should we—”

Before she could speak, the creature was back, repeating the same procedure as before.

On the third time, it learned to keep its mouth away from the chemical sludge, using its armored claws exclusively instead.

By that point, Lucy had a good guess of what it was going for, as well as a plan.

Before the creature could tear through their half-finished tunnel blockade, Lucy swam over to the pile of worm corpses and scooped them up with a hand.

It was possible the organism had come to eat Lucy and co., but it had showed up only after Lucy cut open the worms and spilled their cytoplasm into the water, and it clearly wasn’t a fan of Sam’s defensive chemical.

Its mouth was also small and didn’t seem to have teeth of any kind, so it seemed more suited for slurping up worms.

Just like spaghetti, Lucy’s traitorous brain told her.

She tested that hypothesis by tossing the handful of dead worms right below the scrabbling claws.

Yep, she thought, as the creature began to feed and Lucy readied her dagger, just like spaghetti.

“Are you killing it?”

Lucy expected, if anything, for the childlike microbe to be a bit upset about the idea, but an excited sheen had come over Sam’s membrane, and their words were interested and eager.

“Err…no.” She looked over at Rikorlak, who watched impassively. “I mean, that’s an option, but right now I’m just, uh—”

You’re supposed to be straightforward with kids, right? Not talk down to them.

“I’m just stealing its genetic information,” she said, to Sam’s apparent confusion. Lucy could see the question forming in the wrinkling of Sam’s membrane, and preempted it.

“So that one day I can have shovel-hands, if I want.”

Lucy thought about the genes she still had stored from the doctor-larvae, and briefly imagined herself as a one-celled microbe with a multitude of different appendages sticking out of her body.

We’ll figure out the design later, she told herself. Right now we’re just…collecting possibilities.

While the creature finished up the worms, Lucy stabbed it with her spike, using two arms to send the dagger deep into its leathery membrane.

The creature immediately jerked backwards and began to flee, and Lucy let her dagger tug free.

A stream of the creature’s cytoplasm squirted into the water and started to disperse, and Lucy quickly sucked it up with her membrane channels.

She directed motor proteins to guide the flow into her main vacuole, where she stored the creature’s gene-filled ribosomes for later use. Then she swam back past the half-blocked tunnel entrance to where the others still floated.

“Well,” she said brightly, pleased with both her social performance and the unexpected genetic material, “I guess now we can finish sealing up that tunnel!”