As she usually did, Lucy woke into darkness.
The tunnel she called her own, a long offshoot from the main chamber, was narrow. It extended in a slight curve, some ten or fifteen body lengths of grey stone.
She could make out dim conversation in the main room outside, a low murmur of yellow molecules that were already half-dissolved into the water by the time they reached her.
The ground had been mostly cleared of debris, which had been used to make the blockage that sealed her tunnel on the far end, preventing the entrance of anything from the caves beyond.
In the middle of the cleared ground, there sat a smooth stone encased in a hard, lumpy shell of goo. From a small hole in the shell, blue light had been shining, when Lucy fell asleep. Now, there was nothing.
Accustomed to waking into darkness, she didn’t realize at first that anything was wrong. Then she thought that the magical stone had disappeared or extinguished, somehow losing its energy while she slept.
But as her senses came fully awake, she realized that the light hadn’t gone out, it was just blocked.
Before settling down to rest, Lucy had planted three spores, each in their own little patch of cytoplasmic goo. She hadn’t expected to see much growth yet, so she was surprised at what she found.
The first two bits of her own cytoplasmic goo had been consumed, replaced with bristling patches of fungi, isolated as islands and evenly spaced in a neat row across a section of the tunnel.
The third sample, however, had been planted in the beam of magical light, and it had grown extravagantly. In front of the stone itself, a forest of tiny hair-like hyphae had sprouted up, dense and reaching back in a straight line to the original patch.
Eventually it reached the stone, where it had promptly covered the encasing shell and blocked the light.
Lucy realized that the tiny strands of hyphae were actually working themselves into the hardened goo encasing the stone, creating minuscule cracks and rifts in the protective shell.
Alarmed at the weakening structure, she picked up the stone and peeled it off from the magic-hungry fungus, then used her dagger to carefully poke out the remaining bits of clinging hyphae.
She turned the stone, carefully positioning the beam of light away from the ravenous fungi. Aside from the opening being a bit larger now, the magical stone seemed to be fine.
Feeling like she had averted a crisis, Lucy resumed her examination of the room.
In the forest of newly sprouted fungi, a faintly glowing worm dozed like an eel in a bed of hanging seaweed, nestled between the strands.
This is becoming quite the experiment, she thought, stretching her membrane to wakefulness.
Normally, she would have proceeded much more deliberately, testing specific hypotheses to see if a certain idea held water or not. She was trying to do that here, but without her normal equipment, it was a little bit tricky to run tests more specific than ‘I wonder what’ll happen if…’
Here, she felt like a gardener in more ways than one, tending her magical and fungal experiments to see how they would grow.
To see what they would teach her.
Already she had learned things. The magic, as Rikorlak had suggested, was clearly a form of energy, one that organisms like the fungi and perhaps the worm could make some use of.
She was even beginning to think her initial fears of radiation had been misplaced, but a nagging worry held her back from exposing herself to the light just yet. If it were such a potent source of energy, she wondered why more organisms weren’t taking advantage of it.
After its domesticating effect on the worm, she also wondered whether it had something to do with the strange advancement of microbial life in the area.
She understood that Rikorlak had been changed from his original form when he entered the area, which definitely sounded like god-magic to her. But what about Sam, who seemed to be a regular microbe who had somehow become sentient?
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It still just didn’t make sense, and Lucy’s mind gnawed at the problem as she watched the worm undulating gently among the hyphal strands.
As she looked at the tiny forest of growing fungi, Lucy found herself longing for some way to record her findings. She didn’t think she’d be tapping away on a laptop anytime soon, but she was determined to gain some more concrete data, and you never knew what minute detail might become important in the future.
So she spent the morning trying to devise a system for taking notes.
It wasn’t an elegant system, but by the end of a few hours she had worked out a way to scratch relatively legible symbols into stone by dipping a thin spike into her corrosive goo, then scratching on the wall.
The tip of her first spike had blunted almost immediately, and after some thought Lucy got the idea to make a new implement using Sam’s defensive slime, which hardened under the influence of destructive enzymes.
As useful as the ability to make it herself would have been, Lucy wasn’t quite sure if it was proper etiquette to ask a friend for some of their genetic information, especially when taking it would require some light stabbing.
So she just asked for a little bit of the red slime, and Sam was happy to oblige. A little bit of shaping and a squirt of enzymes later, and Lucy had a new tool.
And as she concentrated on maneuvering the thin implement as carefully as possible, she found that, as ever, her practice was rewarded.
There were no myelin sheaths or neural connections here, but somehow, her System enabled her to learn, and as she practiced, she improved.
It would be some time before she mastered the awkward process of writing with a pronged hand enough to copy down anything really useful, but for now she was content to work on this new skill as she waited to see if the worm would show any adverse effects from such high exposure to the magical light.
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Days passed with no obvious harm to the worm, and Lucy’s fungal garden grew. Eventually she had to separate out the samples to give them room to grow, feeding the two regular ones her own cytoplasm and letting the third use the magic light to grow, though she didn’t let it grow all the way into the stone as it had before.
Filling her time with the practice of her writing system and observation of her experiments, she still had plenty of time leftover for conversations with Rikorlak and Sam, some of which yielded some rather interesting results, like when she had asked Rikorlak what planet he was from.
Feeling nervous, Lucy wondered at first if her social skills had atrophied from too much time staring at a glowing worm and scratching at stone, but as Rikorlak turned away from the sliced-open worm he’d been feeding on to answer, she realized that what he said next would probably change how she saw the entire universe.
As if that hasn’t happened already.
It had, she admitted, but it was different to hear a specific example, something she could imagine as actually existing out there in the world.
“Well,” he mumbled, membrane still half-full of cytoplasm, “it’s designated in the Galactic Directory as Water Planet 705, but local inhabitants usually refer to it as—”
Lucy heard the communication molecules flowing her way as a long hissing noise that made her cilia stand on edge. Rikorlak finished the name with a guttural clack that she was quite sure she couldn’t replicate.
Water Planet 705 it is then.
“And it has…oceans?”
It perhaps wasn’t the most insightful question to ask about a water planet, but Lucy didn’t know where else to start. She was a scientist, damnit, not a journalist or party thrower!
“Oh yes. Well, the name is a little bit of a misnomer really, since the oceans aren’t visible from space. Underground, you know. Actually, the local name is a misnomer as well, since the Blood-Tournaments aren’t usually lethal these days unless there’s an accident. But I guess they came up with the name back when things were a bit more vicious.”
She stared at him. Underground oceans sounded interesting, but not quite as interesting as blood tournaments.
“You have tournaments where you—wait, what exactly does the local name translate as?”
He slurped up more of the worm’s cytoplasm in a motion that was disturbingly similar to a human eating corn on the cob.
“Endless Blood-Stained Seas of Eternal Anguish, Home of the Lethal Blood-Tournaments. They still use it sometimes to promote tourism.”
As the conversation continued, Lucy listened, more and more drawn in as Rikorlak described some of the Lovecraftian lifeforms native to his homeworld.
When the talk was through, she gestured to the dwindling pile of dead worms, and raised the point that had been on her mind throughout the meal.
“We’ll need more food soon,” she said, looking to the blocked entrance to the cave, “which will give us a chance to see what’s going on out there.”
Sam’s membrane brightened at the idea, but Rikorlak grew suddenly sheepish. She gave him a friendly pat on the membrane as she made for the privacy of her own tunnel.
“Don’t worry,” she said, “we’ll just poke a little hole first to see, and if they’re still swarming, we’ll lure a few in and close it back up. If what we saw a few days ago was any indication, there won’t be a living thing in the whole area anyways.”
Rikorlak seemed encouraged by the idea, and Lucy left having thoroughly enjoyed the socializing.
Turns out I just needed to meet aliens to make friends.
Even with the warm glow of companionship, she felt something gnawing at her as she left, a fear that things were not going quite as smoothly as they seemed. She told herself it was just fear of the unknown mixed with Rikorlak's tales of strange and vicious lifeforms, but as she settled into her chamber to rest once more, a feeling of dread washed over her as memories came to mind of buzzing wings and severed cilia.
We’re safe here, she told herself, we left him far behind.
Drifting off into restless sleep, Lucy hoped and prayed for peaceful dreams.
But hope was a fickle thing, and it was all too easy for prayers to be ignored.
And somewhere out there in the darkness beyond sleep, she swore she heard mandibles clacking.