Sean hadn’t known what to expect from a seemingly medieval village located on an entirely different world. There was magic here, so he had been prepared for random glowing objects or sigils carved onto every door to ward off evil. From what he had already pieced together, both from the map and comments Gel had made, this place was out in the middle of essentially nowhere and had recently had all of its occupants slaughtered by the undead. He had prepared himself to run into the medieval equivalent of a ghost town, or to find scenes of gore splattering every wall.
He had not expected to find armed skeletal warriors patrolling a clean, well-lit street lined by several buildings. The first pair Sean saw strode silently through some trees, crossing not ten feet in front of them. Sean had tensed, fighting the irrational urge to be frustrated with his pulse sense again despite the two skeletons clearly lacking any kind circulatory system. When neither had so much as glanced in his direction however, he had relaxed. They saw four more warriors, another two pairs of two armed with swords and shields, marching in slow circles around the boundary of the village as they walked in.
The “lights” were simple iron cages mounted high in several places along a number of walls, blue fire burning merrily away inside of each. Sean headed straight for the first one, his curiosity getting the better of him.
“Hole!” Gel nearly shouted, and Sean stopped mid-step, looking down to see what the slime was talking about.
Directly in front of him was a roughly three foot diameter hole that had been dug so perfectly straight down that there were no raised sections of dirt around the rim. He had been so focused on the flaming lantern things, he had almost walked right into it.
“Thanks for that.” Sean said, stepping wide around it and peering down. It didn’t appear to be too deep. Maybe ten or so feet down. But then it curved, almost like a tunnel, and Sean couldn’t help but wonder just what exactly had made it. Or what lived down there.
“You’re welcome. Now, there should be a kitchen in that one.” Gel said, pointing at the largest wooden structure in town that looked suspiciously similar to some of the larger taverns Sean had seen on a deployment to Europe. His hand waivered a bit, and the slime sounded distracted. “Whenever you’re done playing with fire, that is.”
“Ha-hah.” Sean said dryly, reaching up and unlatching the lantern from its perch. “I just want to see how it works.”
“How it works? It’s a fire mote.” Gel sounded confused, as if he were trying to focus on two things at once and Sean was the less interesting of the two. The slime shook himself, then refocused on the conversation. “You keep it in the cage, it eats bugs while absorbing nearby ambient mana, and it gives off light. Simple, and boring, but effective if you need light to see by. Which we don’t.”
“It being in a cage doesn’t bother you?” The blue flame inside the lantern swirled around, and condensed into a little ball no bigger than one of his knuckles. It stayed there, flickering silently, and Sean got the distinct impression it was watching him. “You were pretty pissed about that cube being locked up as an air purifier.”
“It’s just a type of fire spirit.” Gel said dismissively. “Spirits don’t have feelings, so this is fine. Besides, if you let it out, it might burn the forest down.”
Sean stuck one finger inside the lantern, curious to see whether the fire mote gave off enough heat to actually affect him. He felt nothing at first, until he touched the burning ball directly. It flickered brightly, exploding to fill the confines of the lantern for just a moment, and he jerked his finger back. The mote condensed back into a ball, and began to slowly spin once again.
Hu-uh. A little touchy, are we? The fire hadn’t hurt him, nor had he felt any heat, but maybe the blue mote could be used to start a campfire later. Sean held the lantern freely in his hand and started walking towards the tavern.
There were at least a dozen more holes in the street and between some of the houses, and Sean gave each a wide berth. He admired the architecture of the small village as he walked, which seemed both similar and dissimilar to that of log cabins. The walls were built at least ten feet high per floor using what looked to be entire trees with bark the color of burnished brown flecked with veins of dull green. The branches had been shorn off of each log and each was cut to fit, but the wood was otherwise untouched. Thick rope and a mixture of brownish clay mud held the logs together and sealed the holes between to create an airtight seal.
From what Sean could tell, there were about two dozen houses on either side, with the tavern in the middle. The tavern featured what looked like one of those stone-shoulder deer painted a bright blue. Across from it was another larger building covered in intricate wooden carvings that Sean couldn’t make sense of. They looked almost like branches twisting in on one another, and if they hadn’t been woven into a massive circle that made up the double door entrance, Sean might have guessed the designs had been part of the original trees.
The doors were broken down, as were the doors of every other building, but that was beside the point.
“Sure you don’t want to check any of these houses out?” Sean asked, head craning as he snuck a look inside each one they passed. The closest house had a faded pillow with flowers on it that had been torn apart on the front steps. He angled away from that one. “Or do you want to loot those after the kitchen?”
When the slime didn’t answer, Sean stopped and looked down at him. Gel was staring around his ribs, back at the ripped up pillow. As before, Sean gave his friend time to think. He looked around the town, admiring the craftsmanship that had gone into building even this small village. Whoever these people had been, they had clearly taken pride in their work.
Sean was about to check in with Gel again, when his right hand raised and… waved. Down the street. At nobody. The portion of skull where his eyebrow had once been raised slightly.
“You uh, see someone over there?” Sean asked, looking around. He could sense uncertainty coming from the slime, whose eyes were now hopping back and forth across the street like a cat watching birds at a window sill. “Gel?”
The slime shook himself, both eyes rolling in what Sean had learned to interpret as a blink, and then began staring at nothing again. Sean looked from the slime, to the empty, hole-filled street where Gel was looking, and then back again.
“Startin’ to worry me there, bud.” He said, slowly.
“Ungh… There’s too many memories here. ” Gel grunted in pain the same way someone with an active migraine might try to wince away from their own mind. “I can’t… tell them apart.”
Something snapped inside Gel, and Sean felt it. An instant later, he saw it. The memories Gel was talking about suddenly filled his vision like overlapping specters, and the street before them came alive with animated images of the long-dead villagers. Each was tinged slightly purple, with wisps of smoke rising off them as they played out whatever scene it was Gel was remembering. They were also each tied to a specific piece of the real world.
The torn pillow rose from the air, held in the firm, inescapable grasp of a small girl with flaxen hair and a broad smile that held a gap between her two lower teeth. She sang softly into it until a voice called her inside, at which point the young lady promptly ran into the doorway responding to the summons. She hadn’t been able to see due to the pillow clutched so firmly to her face. It had saved her though, and even as she picked herself back up there were no tears.
Across the street a wooden square opened up on the second floor, revealing its function as a window while a woman with bright red hair and muscles like an ox shouted something to a man below. The exchange was unintelligible to Sean, but the tone was amicable. A chastising, but a loving one. One with the well-worn groove of words spoken a thousand times without a hint of anger.
Men cleared the open street, pushing aside bags and the tools of their day’s labors to drag their heels into the dirt. They formed a half-dozen squares on opposing ends of the road and were joined by women who danced from one partner to the next in a zig-zag pattern. It was like line dancing meets red rover crossed with hopscotch, and the unabashed laughter on each face was infectious.
There were dozens of scenes like this, many featuring the same individuals. They overlapped one another, repeated, replayed, and then shifted. It was dizzying. There was too much to watch at once. His orbs felt like they were trying to layer a hundred clips from the same movie onto a single picture. The more Sean watched, the more his head began to hurt. There were emotions tied to each scene, and even though they were largely muted by his undead nature, the effects were starting to pile up. He felt like a swimmer at the beach, watching the tides get progressively closer to tsunami-level with each wave.
Then Sean felt something coming, and he turned towards the town’s main entrance behind him. A new scene had begun to take over, forcing the other memories out of the way. It came with the strongest emotional resonance that Sean had felt yet: fear. Pure, unadulterated panic. Rallying cries that knew they were doomed before they began. Despair. A drive to survive… and then, hopelessness.
Sean knew without being told what these memories were. He could feel it in his bones, even before the changing scenes in front of him morphed into a single, town-wide memory. This had been Bancroft’s slaughter of Dry Run – the frontier village in which he now stood, and whose name he now knew. It was a scene of horror, and Sean knew he would remember it for the rest of his unnatural life.
All around him, villagers fell victim to an ever-growing and unstoppable tide of the undead. He stood, transfixed, watching shimmering purple images of people he had never known flee as they tried to warn their loved ones in time. Some tried to stop and fight, to form a defensible line with whatever equipment, tools, or weapons they had on hand. Many were mercilessly cut down, but many were not and a pitched battle soon began.
It was… overwhelmingly one-sided. The villagers were brave, and several were clearly more powerful than Sean himself – one man shattered the skulls of multiple warriors with each swing of his fist – but they were outnumbered by at least 20 to 1. Sean couldn’t actually see an end to the army Bancroft had brought with him, but he guessed this one was easily twice the size of the one the cuboid slime destroyed back in the basement. Worse still, it was not solely comprised of skeletons.
Bancroft led the butchery himself, though he did so from the safety of the horde’s center on the back of a monstrous iron scorpion. There was nothing so formal as a name tag, but Sean could feel Gel’s recognition of the man through their bond or the memory, he wasn’t sure which. The necromancer that had killed him sported a long silver beard running halfway down his chest, a cloak of midnight black that seemed to absorb even the purple shimmer around the memory, and the most hateful dark eyes Sean had ever seen. His arms were outstretched as the horde approached, and his lips were moving, though it was impossible to tell from here whether that was to cast spells, to command his minions, or simply for dramatic effect.
Other humans used abilities Sean didn’t recognize in a half-circle around the necromancer, but what really drew his attention was the rest of the army. There were your average zombies, but there were also several with multiple heads, arms, or even a half-dozen legs stitched to their frames. There were unrecognizable dark shapes that swooped in and abducted women and child alike, more of those hell-hound looking things, building-sized skeletons that scooped up full-grown men in a single hand, and several other types of undead creatures that didn’t fit any mold or definition Sean could think of.
Dark animalistic shapes shrouded in shadow that walked with chained legs, half-skeleton half-mummy mounds of flesh-wrapped cloth rolled along the ground like nightmarish tumbleweeds, and a creature that looked almost human save for a bone crown that erupted halfway up its skull, sporting blue flames at each tipped point. Sean could well understand why the villagers were so afraid of this dread assembly, he was in shock himself just staring at it all.
He turned away from the onslaught, hoping to see some make it away as the memory sped through the battle as if it were on fast-forward.
None did.
Once the defensive line was crushed, Bancroft’s minions stopped merely killing their prey. They began to capture them, dragging their victims off into the night. A woman who had surrendered – no doubt hoping the two children behind her might be spared – had her left arm simply ripped off by a passing creature. The monstrous zombie that had taken it chewed happily on the limb as it walked away, as if it were a turkey leg the zombie had won at the fair. She was then yanked off her feet as both she and her children were pulled away, screaming and crying in equal measure.
Similar scenes played out all through town, with doors being kicked in or torn off as their occupants either made their last stands or accepted their fates. Sean’s anger boiled over, crushing the transmitted fear that threatened to overwhelm him – until it all abruptly cut off. The sudden disappearance of more than a hundred shimmering specters caused Sean to stumble backwards, looking for some new enemy.
Gel gasped as if coming up for air, his sudden relief palpable.
“Woah, okay. Where is, where are–” The slime sounded confused, and his eyes whirled around in Sean’s ribcage. “Oh. Okay… they’re gone… They’re all gone. Phew.”
“Were those what you see?” Sean asked quietly, after giving Gel a second or two to get his bearings. He did not expect the slime’s response.
“Huh? What did you see?”
“I saw a bunch of people running around living their lives, right before Bancroft murdered them all.” Sean responded softly, still able to see where those same people had been just a moment ago as he looked around. “I saw the battle.”
“Wasn’t much of a battle.” Gel scoffed, though the slime seemed to instantly regret it. “Mostly they dealt with stray animals or the rare group of bandits. They weren’t ready for a real fight.”
“Are we?” Sean asked, and he meant it this time. It was one thing to say they were going to take down Bancroft one day – but the dude had taken out a whole goddamn village. Sean had just watched the necromancer wade through at least a hundred people – some of whom looked like they would have taken him down without batting an eye – as if it were a sunday stroll. None of the ones who had fought back had gotten anywhere near their real opponent.
Gel was uncharacteristically silent for several moments.
“We will be.” The slime said eventually, with firm conviction in his voice. Then, a second later. “Sorry you uh, had to see that. I don’t know what happened.”
“Probably the bond.” Sean said, as he resumed walking back through the town. Getting back to normal – or at least, moving forward instead of looking back through the past – felt like what they both needed right now. “Don’t worry about it. At least I learned a few things.”
“Yeah? Like what.”
“How hideous Bancroft’s beard is.” Sean said, and a few of the images he had seen flashed through his mind. The young girl with her pillow, the mother who had tried and failed to sacrifice herself for her children, and the necromancer’s pitiless, hate-filled black eyes. “Before we kill him, we’re going to chop that shit right off.”
“So long as I still get to eat him, you can chop him up in whatever order you see fit.”
“Deal.”
The pair continued walking through town for a while, chatting about very little of substance until the emotional curtain from before had faded into the background. When the dour mood had lifted, Sean asked the same question he had asked earlier.
“Which place do you want to loot first?” Sean indicated one of the houses on their left with his hand, before pointing back at the tavern. “The houses? Or should we do those after the kitchen?”
“Definitely after the kitchen.” Gel asserted, as if there were no other plausible option. “If there are spices anywhere in this shack sack, they’ll be there.”
“Do I want to know what a shack sack is?” Sean asked, stepping over the ruined doors to cross into the tavern.
Dried blood pooled in many areas across the floor, and there were splatter patterns on the walls and across shattered piles of wood that had once been furniture… but apart from those obvious indications of battle, most of the room appeared to have been left intact. There were still no bodies, but Sean imagined a necromancer wasn’t the sort to leave any behind anyway.
“Same thing as a meatsack, only wood instead of flesh.” Gel responded with his usual cheer, and Sean was relieved that the psychic aftermath of what had taken place here wasn’t enough to bring the slime down again. “Should be the first door on your left, and then left again.”
This door was the first one still in its proper place, though the top half had been cracked inward. Sean pulled the handle, swinging the broken section outward. He left it there, entering what was left of the serving station and kitchens on the other side. An abundance of thick cabinets, barrels, and several stone-hewn basins lined the room. Small sacks of what might have been garlic cloves in any kitchen on Earth hung from string nailed into the ceiling, which caught Sean’s attention immediately.
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
Despite the ambience of a lost battle in the other room, excitement ran through him. Whatever seasonings and vegetables he found in here would unlock a whole new world of culinary options for him. Sean felt a pang of regret that he wouldn’t get to experience any of that yet, seeing as evolution had not deigned to return his taste buds to him.
Maybe the next one will. Sean thought, and the small hope of that settled inside his mood like a warm flame. For now, if I can get Gel to eat something besides raw corpse, I’ll call that a win.
“Do you smell that?” Gel asked as they entered. “Smells like… actually, I have no idea what it smells like. Different? It smells different in here.”
“How are you even smelling anything?” Sean asked as he moved around the kitchen, opening every single cabinet and removing every barrel top in the room. He wanted to see what he was working with. “You don’t have a nose.”
“You don’t need a nose to smell things.” Gel responded, the slime peering out of his chest to get a better look at their haul. “You just have to absorb them. Scents aren’t filling, but there are a lot of them in here. It’s kind of…”
Gel cut off abruptly as Sean opened the next cabinet, revealing a large, purplish bit of produce that looked like a cross between a cucumber and a pineapple with leaves on either side. Red mold covered half of it, and that side of the vegetable-fruit had sunk partially into the cabinet. It gave off a strange vibe for Sean that he couldn’t quite place, and the slime shivered as a wave of air from the cabinet struck him.
“Phew. Okay, that’s uh… wow.” Gel sent over the mental equivalent of a sharp inhale. “Whatever that is, it smells horrifying. Dibs!”
Sean’s right arm dove for the clearly expired vegetable-fruit, scooped it up with clenched fingers, and swiftly tossed the entire thing into Gel’s mass. Mold and all. The slime shivered even more than before as he rapidly digested it. For the first time, Sean could actually sense the slime’s mass growing in his ribcage. It wasn’t much, maybe only an ounce or two, but it was noticeable.
“Good find?” Sean asked, amused. He moved over to the next cabinet.
“Mmph. Oh yes. Need more of those.” Gel confirmed. “It’s called a… Marmlat, I think. Yeah, I remember it now. Marmlats. The villagers ate the insides fresh or diced up, but the mold in there really adds some pungent tang.”
“It added… tang?” Sean had never considered using mold as an ingredient in the kitchen. He knew it was a crucial step in the making of cheese, but he had never dipped his toes into that particular endeavor. The amateur chef in him was intrigued by the possibilities this opened up. Especially since he wouldn’t have to worry about health concerns.
That alone opens up plenty of options.
“Yeah. Like…” Gel struggled to find the right words to compare the flavor as they finished opening up the rest of the cabinets. “Like when you find a liver that’s more full than you expected. Those always have some tang to them. The marmlat was like that, but softer.”
Sean made a mental note of that as he began cataloging the rest of what had been left in the cabinets and shelves. There wasn’t terribly much left. Clearly some raiding of supplies had taken place since the battle in the front room. There was still more than Sean had expected though, and far more than they could hope to carry out of here. Gel helped him identify the stock as they went, sampling everything at least once.
They found: two barrels of coarse rock salt, another of bright silver sugar that Gel swore was its natural color, a half-dozen wheels of various types of cheese inside tightly woven grass that had the consistency of plastic, several mounds of fruit that Gel identified as treeans (star-blue berries the size of enlarged grapes), lumlots (peaches with brown coloring and a nut-like outer shell), and hawlons (sage-green melons with a peach-like fuzz). There were also a few of the marmlats tossed behind the barrels of rock salt, and an entire box worth of… corn.
Whole leafed, unshucked, brown corn. Sean stared at it for a second, wondering why freaking maize of all possible vegetables would be the one to be the same here as it was on Earth. Next to silver sugar, elongated purple pineapples, and literal fruit-nuts… corn.
Guess it’s just… one of those things. Sean thought with a shrug, before noticing something odd. At the bottom of one of the rock salt barrels there was a spout like one might use to spill ale, only there was an extra bit of wood tacked atop it. The design wasn’t visible from where he was, so Sean coaxed Gel into helping him rotate the barrel so that it faced them so he could get a better look.
Carved into the attached wood was a depiction of what could only be a unicorn frozen mid-leap. It looked like the attachment was designed to fit the spout as if it were some sort of lever, but that didn’t make sense. If it opened an entire hatch of the thing, the entire barrel’s worth of contents would spill all over the floor. You couldn’t serve someone like that, and as far as Sean knew it didn’t make sense for salt either.
As he was trying to puzzle out the potential function for such a mechanism, a memory from back home tugged at him. Seizing on it, Sean reached out and pulled down on the lever. With a satisfying creak an entire section of the barrel opened up, revealing a hidden compartment underneath the rock salt. Inside was the most perfect cast-iron frying pan Sean had ever seen.
It was the color of a midnight sky, complete with a pattern of soft stars gleaming down the handle. The inside coating of the pan was an alternating onyx and amethyst spiral galaxy that appeared to move as he turned the pan. Sean didn’t even recall picking the pan up, but he marveled at how perfectly the handle was balanced against the pan’s weight. He tried a few flourishes with the pan, and his delight grew with each simple movement.
“It’s… perfect.” Sean said reverently, before quickly adding. “Dibs!”
“Why would you call dibs on something you can’t eat?” Gel wondered, clearly nowhere near as impressed as Sean was with the kitchen implement. “Also, what’s that dial do?”
“What dial?” Sean asked, before hefting the pan to inspect the underside. Sure enough, right at the base of the handle there was a small circular dial with notchings in it. Curious, Sean flicked one finger over it, incrementing it by a single notch.
Immediately, a clear liquid substance spread out from the center of the pan until it lightly coated the entire surface. Sean dipped a finger in to test it, and his initial suspicion was quickly confirmed.
“It’s oil!” He exclaimed to Gel. “This pan makes its own oil!”
“And that… matters?” Gel asked, curiously. “Can’t you just add oil?”
“You could, but now we don’t have to carry any.” It was crashing over Sean just how useful a find this pan was. His imagination was running wild at the possibilities, but he quickly reined that in. Now wasn’t the time to start whipping up meals
“I just wish we had a reason to take this.” Sean said, the thought of putting the pan back instead of in his satchel felt like it physically pained him. “I can’t justify taking something that won’t help us out.”
“What do you mean? I thought you said you were going to cook for me.” Gel pointed out. “Didn’t you say you needed a kitchen to do it?”
“Not the whole kitchen. Just this right here would work fine. I could make all kinds of things for us.” Sean tried to keep his sadness out of his voice, and he didn’t add: But I won’t be able to taste them.
“Well… then do that.” Gel spoke slowly, as if he didn’t understand why Sean was hesitating despite the nearly-full satchel they already had. Then the slime dropped the bomb shell. “Buffs from food should help us out, assuming you can figure out how to make us meals that provide them.”
Sean almost didn’t know what to say in response he was so stunned. “You’re saying we can get boosts from eating the right food? That’s a thing? That’s a real thing?”
“Yes…” Gel said slowly. “Didn’t you–”
“Of course I didn’t know!” Sean exploded, lifting his hand and the pan up into the air. “Why didn’t you tell me that’s how it worked!?”
“I thought you knew! You were talking about cooking before!”
“That’s because I love cooking! I didn’t know food could have–” Sean nearly sputtered his words about inside his own head. “--magical effects!? How does that even work?”
“You tell me, you’re the one who loves to cook! I just eat things!” Gel said indignantly.
“Oh my god.” Sean thought, wishing he had a free hand to face palm in that wouldn’t result in him literally fry-oiling his own skull. His body shivered, and Sean felt the undead equivalent of a deep-breath settle over him. “Alright. Okay. Food is magical here. Tracking that now.”
“Not all food.” Gel corrected. “Just certain recipes. Combinations? I don’t know. All I can remember from the chef who worked here, Stephani, is that she went through a lot of trial and error trying to pull magical properties out of her food… but it didn’t always work.”
“Okay, but if food has those properties, then how come we haven’t seen any before? You’ve been eating nothing but raw ingredients since we met.”
“Right. Raw ingredients. That I break down into mana. As in–”
“As in you break down their inherent properties.” Sean finished for his friend. “Okay, that’s… that’s definitely going to be a conversation for later. For now we need to know which ones to take. Did Stephani’s memories highlight any for you out of what’s here?”
Gel wobbled a bit back and forth uncertainly. “Not… really. Her brain was pretty messed up when I got to it. I only got a few smooshed pieces. So I know that you can make meals like that, but I don’t know what they’re called, how to do it, or even what ingredients she used for her own stuff.”
“That is… not very helpful.” Sean admitted, looking around the kitchen again. There were no obvious notes and certainly no recipe book laying around… which wasn’t terribly surprising if creating those kinds of dishes was as hard as Gel was making it sound. Still, he had to ask. “Did she happen to have a cookbook or something?”
“Nope!” Gel responded, in a tone that Sean found distinctly unhelpful and far too cheery. “Stephani was paranoid someone was going to steal credit for her creations, so I know for a fact that she never wrote any of her experiments down. Or at least, I think I do.”
In Sean’s opinion, not writing your experiments down was a great way to have to repeat them, but the woman was dead now so that particular tidbit wasn’t terribly relevant anymore.
“Alright… What about things besides buffs? Can food restore mana if you cook it right?” If so, that would change the entire game.
“Hmmm.” Gel hmmm’d, and Sean tried not to act like he was hanging on the slime’s next reply. “Possibly? I don’t have any memories of it, though. I did say her brain was mush when I got it, right?”
“You did.” Sean admitted, relieved that the response hadn’t been a hard ‘no’. It made sense to him that there would be a way to do it, given that Gel was already doing that by dissolving his food. Sean would just have to try and recreate those conditions… or find the right combinations to do so with less effort. That was the beauty of food – the possibilities were endless.
He looked around the kitchen again, his mind chewing on the problem. If they didn’t know what to use, then taking everything was a waste. It would be better to just start small and experiment as they went with whatever they had on hand.
“Alright. I’ll try and figure the buff thing out later but for now, we are definitely taking this with us. It could end up being exactly the help we need.” Sean said, hefting the pan once more. It felt like a tangible piece of normalcy, and its presence was more of a comfort already than it had any right to be. He was relieved that they now had a reason to bring it along, even if he would have killed to have that information earlier.
“That’s almost exactly what I said!” Gel complained, and Sean ignored him.
He walked over and grabbed a cloth hanging off one of the nearby cabinets, using it to quickly wipe the oil off. Sean also made sure to reset the dial back to its starting position before he did so, turning off the ‘oil spigot’ as it were. Then he shoved the magical frying pan into their satchel, wiggling the rest of its contents around to make room. After that, they got back to looting.
Their last, and most exciting discovery in the kitchen (at least in Gel’s opinion) was a hand-carved box of reddish wood containing two dozen vials of unidentified spices and seasonings, each with their own specifically styled wooden cap. Gel gasped the moment Sean opened it.
“It’s so… beautiful.” Gel whispered reverently. “Dump it in. Dump them all in here!”
Sean laughed at his friend’s exuberance.
“Hold on there, champ.” Sean said, the foodie in him unwilling to let this golden opportunity to experiment with literal other-worldly spices go so easily. “How about we pick one to start, and see if you like that. Then you tell me how it tastes, so I can figure out how we might be able to use it in the future. Now that we have something to cook with, it’ll be good to figure out how all this stuff combines.”
Sean twisted the cap of one of the vials whose carving was reminiscent of a greyish fern they had seen on the way over. The box seemed designed to keep each vial stuck just enough that he didn’t have to use two hands, which was rather convenient. “Here, try this. Spices are usually pretty intense and less is always more, so let’s start with–”
Gel took the vial the instant its cap was off and then, predictably, threw back the entire clump of herbs inside before Sean had even finished speaking. There was a startled gasp inside Sean’s mind, before the slime went completely and utterly silent. A second later, Sean felt his actual stomach drop.
“Uhh… Gel?” Sean asked, raising the brow of his skull as he shut the box and took a step away from the container. “How’s the taste? A little intense?”
A second later, he added. “You okay down there?”
No response.
“Gel?”
Sean peered down, where he found the slime resting in a heap of goop on his pelvis. Both of Gel’s eyes were slowly spinning in opposing directions and had fallen to the bottom of his mass. Flakes of the herbs Gel had dumped in himself were still slowly dissolving in a clump. Sean poked his friend with one finger, a growing knot of worry forming in the back of his mind.
“Gel?... Don’t tell me you just got knocked off your perch by some oregano.” A quick look at Gel’s status page showed the slime hadn’t taken any damage, which was a relief. Sean was about to try scooping his friend up when the slime stirred.
“Wh-ho-hoo-WHAT in the endless wobble was that!?” Gel shouted in confused elation. “That was delicious! So potent. So sharp. So. Freaking. GOOD!”
“I take it you’re a fan of whatever spice that was, then?” Sean asked dryly.
“Sean, that was the most powerful moment of my life. Is there more of it? I have to have more. I need it. Right now. I need it right. Now.” Gel sounded like a coffee addict after their first shot of espresso, his words coming out faster and faster. “There were flavors in there I don’t even have the words for. Literally! I have no words! I need more words, Sean… and more SPICE!”
“Uh-huh. The spice will flow my friend, don’t worry about that. We’ve got plenty here. Now how did it taste?”
“Hmmm.” Gel said, pondering the question. “It tasted a little like the skin of that marmlat mixed with old toes, kidney, and… just a hint of brain.”
“I see. Okay, that’s… Hmm.” Sean tried to process that against the catalogue of earth spices he remembered, but seing as how he had never tasted basically all four of those comparisons… he quickly realized he would have to expand Gel’s palate if he were to have any hope of figuring out what things actually tasted like through the slime.
“There’s more, right? Onward!” Gel shouted with vigor, already reaching for the next vial.
“They’re not all going to be the same, you know.” Sean said, moving back towards the box. If only to keep his right arm from frantically grabbing at the air towards it. “Every spice is different.”
“Different?” Gel asked, as if tasting both the word and the very idea. “Are they all that potent? How do humans eat that all the time!?”
“Usually in small doses. So let’s try doing some of that instead of just cinnamon challenge-ing our way through this.” Sean said with a chuckle, throwing the box’s lid back open. “Besides, we can add these to other foods, and even when we do that any more than a sprinkle or two of the more potent ones will probably overpower the rest of the dish. Inhaling too much can even be dangerous, as you just found out.”
“How dangerous are we talking?” Gel asked, as the arm controlled by the slime froze mid-air over the next vial. “Also, how much is too much?”
“Depends on the person, but seeing as you’re supposedly immune to poison and that still knocked you down, I have no earthly idea how much it would take to harm you. Even so, I’d recommend going with just a small scoop or shake’s worth…” Sean began unscrewing the next cap for his friend, hoping that if he held the vial this time maybe they could save the glass. The last one had shattered on the floor after Gel ate its contents. “But I know who I’m talking to. So as far as what’s too much, I mean, that all depends on how much you can take.”
“All of it.” Gel asserted with rapid-fire confidence. “I can take all of it.”
Sean lifted and wiggled the vial, figuring they could always buy more of whatever this was if they ever found a merchant willing to trade later on, and his slime-controlled arm hesitated.
“All of it?” Sean asked, and he could sense the conflict in Gel’s next words.
“All of it.”
Just as the vial was about to be tossed down what Sean was beginning to feel like was his slime-hatch, a sudden chill spread throughout the room. It wasn’t just a drop in temperature, there was another aspect to it that Sean couldn’t quite identify, but which set his instincts on high alert. Something was watching him, and whatever it was, it was a threat.
Whirling back towards the doorway, Sean got the surprise of his unlife.
Gliding across the front room, through the broken furniture, and on a collision course straight for them was a hauntingly humanoid shape of pure, transparent darkness. Pale blue eyes like sharp icicles were the only facial features Sean could distinguish from inside its floating-robe-like body, and the thing had no legs or lower torso whatsoever. It did however, have ridiculously long spectral claws that Sean irrationally hoped were as insubstantial as the rest of it. The tracks those same claws were making in the wooden floor gave him the distinct feeling that was a vain hope.
When the thing noticed Sean’s attention on it, a thin line of absolute nothing opened just below its ice-blue eyes. Frost-covered teeth spread wide inside a dark, inhuman mouth. But the worst part was what the creature did next.
It spoke.
Unfamiliar words half-whispered, half-howled across the room as the air in the room shook with malice. Whatever the thing was saying, Sean knew two things without a doubt. The first was that the creature was clearly talking to them, and the second: it was not happy.
“Oh, fuck.” Gel muttered, mimicking a phrase Sean himself had used not long after they had first met. “That is, uh… This isn’t good.”
For his part, the slime warrior couldn’t help but agree.