She had long gone home and left me to my devices. Apparently the light outside was the sun setting. I had awoken in the mid evening and would need to wait till the next day before I met her acquaintance. Since I had nothing better to do, I ended up worming around the available space all on my own, sure to not touch anything too precarious as to be knocked over. Lots of various tools, I assume, were for the maintenance of the elevator and its mechanics. The rope coil turned out to be even larger than I had initially surveyed. Larger as in, there was yet another 8-foot-wide spool above the one most visible, even further inside the cylindrical indention. A couple grooved rollers allow its rope to go around a bend in the rock seamlessly.
The braking and locking mechanism was something I had only seen once in a museum for 1970's technology. A large metal wheel and a crescent C brake with two ropes on either side that could be pulled to release and engage its pads to the wheels outer surface. The metal showed long-term wear and tear as the outside of the wheel was near flawless mirror. Or it would be if not for the wibbles and wobbles caused from the unevenness of the brake pad material. A inch-thick grey-black soot coating a tray below the brake wheel had revealed this world's age of cleanliness. I was half certain if I had dropped a lit match right in the middle of the soot, it would explode in a beautiful display of tiny metal bits in every direction. Something akin to sodium metal powder poured into water.
The glowing white rock in a cart I saw earlier had some writing on it different than the basic rock cart next to it. Interestingly, the text of the writing bloomed with the same glow as whatever the contents of the cart were. I couldn't read it until a letter randomly swapped to something a lot more familiar. 'How odd'. Each character I could focus on turned into a letter I knew. Eventually the text wrote, Unrefined Raw Amerill.
The other cart, when I read it, the letters actually shifted around and read Land Fill. It had dawned on me I was using some kind of ability here. I couldn't read the foreign language so why were these things being translated right in front of me? Also, I had bound this system, or whatever the Sentre of Time had called it. They also had spoken and confirmed my inquiry to the benefit of my actions, so how do I benefit from this menu then? When I was a kid, I had read a couple of manga and found the style not my cup of tea, but I remember there being something like a keyword the protagonists always used to open up their menus or whatever.
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I figured as long as I kept to the more obvious or maybe limited myself to what might be a basic observable fact, I wouldn't expose myself as being from another world. And maybe, just maybe, when I am far more capable in the future, I will reveal my true self and discover the relation between monsters such as myself and other races in this world.
The second familiar face I had come to know, or the first I had seen at all, came strolling in with their friend in tow.
"He seems really smart, I tell you! Who knows how old they might be?" She said with no awareness of my wariness to revealing too much information.
This cued me into why I might have been discovered; I might really have been highly valuable goop. Still, I countered my own argument by the fact I wasn't collected in my entirety. Either that or the portion collected mattered much less so long as my consciousness was intact. If my being alone is what is valuable, maybe the bare minimum is ideal from an effort standpoint. And lastly, I could be overthinking this heavily; perhaps I hold no value other than being research material, and my life is but a side product. An anomaly to a piece of research, unimportant in the face of being a basic ingredient for some alchemist's potion.
Either way, all were seated, and I was being stared holes into. 'Did I miss something?'
"Yes, you did. I was talking about how you spoke, and Minister Pillum here had heard your half of our earlier conversation." She said with some indignation she hadn't revealed prior.
Minister Pillum was a dapper gentleman on the slightly larger side, with quite the resemblance to a human from the old ages on earth. His cuffs were folded inward neatly and had a monocle that rested firmly next to his, for a lack of better words, plump nose.
Minister Pillum nodded in agreement. "Your voice was and is abnormal; it sounds like a fully fledged and developed language instead of something more typical amongst monsters. This leads me to believe you either were enlightened, have lived far longer than any monster I have come to know and have lived among a civilized monster society somewhere deep in the mountains of Catalle, or lastly, are a reincarnation." His face stiffened with that last possibility.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Well, hiding much from this man was going to be a tough endeavor. His provided possibilities were, from what I could tell, hard to believe, unlikely, and spot on the money. How was I going to get out of this alive? I don't have any good cover story or any experience lying my way out of such scenarios.
So I did what any overthinker would. I started peering at escape routes and fighting possibilities. Much more the prior. I didn't see many options in the department of fighting. I didn't have viable methods of fighting yet; no clue to my capabilities. Even less so, confidence in my ability to manipulate my body in a manner effective in combat. So running it was if things took a turn for the worse. I could always try and escape out the entrance of the cave, but this left a lot of potential possibilities that could very well be worse than being alone here with these two. What was outside this cave? Was it in the middle of a city? the middle of nowhere? A cliff with a 2000-foot drop? Well, that last possibility was essentially the same as my only other option. Back into the ravine.
'I would rather not indulge in the topic of my speech. Rather, I'd like to know how to keep my voice in the minds of those I desire alone instead of broadcast for any and all to hear.'
This took him aback. He looked like I had given him an answer he fully expected and surprised him at the same time. "Well, I wouldn't know how you 'broadcast' your thoughts into others minds in the first place. Afraid I couldn't help you there. However, your intellectual capacity is wider than I initially thought. Most intelligence in monsters is rather limited and reduced to flimsy notions of ideas and concepts relayed through the pedestals, of which I was informed you were quite capable of communication without. And lastly." His face steeled into a greedy grin. "You sound firmly over the age an elder slime would die."
This was my cue, along with the sudden movement in an attempt to grab my bucket-contained self, to get the hell out of here. I shot up to the ceiling and bounced back in the direction of the inset elevator. Rushed heavy footsteps, and a gasp from the more friendly face in the room came from the back of my vision. With the bucket kicked to the side, he was hot on my gel. I elongated and slapped down on the mud brick floor, losing bits of myself in the grooves. There is no time to pick myself out of those cracks; just run. I fell down this hellishly deep pit once; I can do it again. And hopefully being conscious will let me stabilize my fall instead of splattering everywhere as I had when barely awake.
Their face had gone entirely pink in the face of failing to capture me easily. A rage I had only seen once back on earth from a very drunk man outside the last remaining and most successful casino of them all. He was a little more than half way to me when I started slipping through the gap next to the elevator. I went through rather quickly as soon as I had the notion to become more fluid to speed things up. My lacking forward thinking had allowed him to close the distance almost entirely, but I was long gone before he even had the chance of successfully capturing me. Or at least I thought so. I was in a world where I had no clue to the capabilities of such an individual. Magic? A slime-petrifying device meant precisely for such a goal? I left that thought to brew in the background; I was falling again and knew it this time. I had a notion of gravity now, clearly an improvement to my senses, and was approaching what felt like the peak of the balance between acceleration and resistance.
I knew two things. One, I was roughly moving at terminal velocity, and two, I had no idea how far 1200 strides was. Neither of which looked like a happy ending. Time to brainstorm and fast.
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| Name: Pillum Val Coust |
| Title (44): Discoverer of _____ |
| Date & Time: Unspecified |
| Location: Subterranean, Benchak Amrill Mine Entrance |
| Status: Enraged, Physical Exhaustion |
The damn thing had gotten away! What a foolish mistake to have not brought it to a more confined space before trying to spell out its demise. An opportunity rare, coming only once every several decades, had just squished through a 1-inch gap beside the elevator to one of the deepest and most treacherous cracks on this damn continent. What a bloody foolish mistake.
He slammed his fist down on the elevator platform, splintering a board in its place. His brow wrinkled.
Standing up, he reached into his waist pouch and snatched a gold coin out to pay for the damages. The mana he had poured into his legs in an attempt to catch the creature had left cracks in the brickwork on the floor. The spell in his hand meant to solidify the slime; he smirked instead engraving it on the coin he was handing to the unsuspecting lady manning this mine. He knew something of it's level would do no more than make her arm go limp for a few minutes. He flicked the coin in her direction and headed out the pathway to the main mine building. "What a foolish mistake." He mumbled under his breath, shaking his head. "Should have joined my brother in training all those years ago."
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| Name: Ms. Misha |
| No Title |
| Date & Time: Unspecified |
| Location: Subterranean, Benchak Amrill Mine Entrance |
| Status: Saddened, Surprised, Disappointed |
Her eagerness and hard work had been in vain. Someone with no hate in their voice, she had worked to collect and gather them back into one piece. They had conversed with no formality or status and interacted without restraint. But in the end, greed and corruption, something all those in power gave control to, left her with waste. The coin numbing her hands. Was that all she deserved?