I didn't say anything.
I wanted to. I have a tendency to mutter and mouth whenever. My old squadies used to slap me black and blue because even deep in hostile territory - any noise meaning getting shot - I still mumbled bad puns. So when I make a point I am not saying anything, there is a reason more compelling than getting shot keeping my lips locked.
“Skee skee skee.”
Seven butterspiders surrounded a yellow slime forty feet under me. The slime must have been two hundred pounds of quivering jelly, five or six times as large as any of the chitinous nightmares skittering around it, but it was losing badly. About a dozen holes leaked slime innards and it wasn’t hopping around anymore, just shaking a bit and blurping in pain whenever one of the butterspiders went for another slurp.
Part of me felt sorry for the poor slime. After all, I had lured it here. The perfect bait for my trap.
So long, suckers. Get it? Because they have those long proboscis…whatever. Yanking hard on the Tumble Hitch secured to the branch next to me, five vines spun out and loosed the several tons of rock I had secured in nets above the clearing below. There was a low whirring and clacking sound as the vines ran through the rough stone pulleys I had crafted, but after days of studying the alpha predator bugs of the forest, I had properly predicted their reaction: they looked up and paused. Any skittish prey would have jumped and bolted at the sound, which is why they didn’t realize the threat until the rockalanche hit them all.
*kerSQUISH!!*
“Boo-yah!” I howled and appropriately fist pumped, the entire forest drowning my victory shout with their uproar. Stepping off my branch, I fell to the ground with a little splat and made my way to the moat I had surrounding the trap while I reformed my feet back into shape. Swimming wasn’t an issue, I was naturally buoyant and the moat wasn’t wide. On the other side I made sure to thrust my spear into the head of two twitching bugs, the rest directly hit with larger rocks and not even twitched. Yellow, viscous slime was coating everything, the rocks having pushed the slime’s guts out in every direction, a filmy husk all that remained under the largest pile.
♫ Doo doodoo, doo doodoodoo doo ♫
♫ Walk without rhythm and it won’t attract the worm, ♫
♫ If you walk without rhythm - uh - you never learn, yeah! ♫
I had the whole Walken swagger going, grooving to Fatboy Slim and whatever lyrics I remembered. Nothing could stop my victory dance, this had taken sixteen days to plan and execute and it came together without a hitch.
“CLAAAAAA!!”
“Aaaaahstupid jinxing wubba lubba forest!” I screamed, jumping back over the moat and waving my spear overhead to keep the Giant Death Bird from eating me. Never gotten a good look at this creature, last time it swooped down out of nowhere and hoisted me above the tree tops before I was able to wiggle loose. No good, four talons grabbed me and brought me into the air.
I screamed again, more shrieky whistle than melodic voice, almost a dozen claws the size of footballs digging into my film and spilling my juices out. “I don’t even know if you’re the same bird from last week! Diediedie!!”
Silver feathers and white blood spilled all over me like delicious country fried gravy as I kept stabbing up into the belly of the this crazy bird thing. Must have been enough for it to drop me. We hadn’t cleared the trees so I only fell less than a hundred feet but I hit too many branches and splashed into dirt and tree roots, completely losing form.
I didn’t want to move. While I no longer had bones to break or organs to rupture, I kept my body in humanoid appearance and function through hundreds of layered films, essentially using pieces of the stronger outer skin of my slime body inside myself to simulate a human body. When I suffer major trauma - like falling to the forest floor after being pincushioned by some mutant bird - all those films inside me burst. Having one disrupt and burst is like getting punched in the face by an angry drill Sergeant. When I hit mud and roots, hundreds of them broke all at once. Honestly, wanted to pat myself on the back for not blacking out.
*puru!* I swore, trying to return my aching body to a body instead of a puddle. It took twenty minutes. Pain and exhaustion were warring for first place, reforming like this from scrap super tiring and I hadn't eaten in hours. Too bad about the gravy bird blood, what was left on me more muddy slurry than usable material. I settled on what I call my Gumbi, simplistic and one eyed, no mouth because I was running on a clock at the moment. Pausing, I pushed out the dirt and twigs stuck in me from the fall, the sense of relief like popping a juicy pimple washing over me, my jelly jiggling in satisfaction.
Looking around, I spotted one of the markers I had been leaving around the jungle in an effort to avoid getting lost. A simple stick with an arrow pointing towards the next stick in a path and two numbers; it wasn’t perfect, but it let me know I’d only flown about half a mile and my goal was due west a hundred yards.
Don’t get angry at the jinx, I thought, picking up my clothing and grumbling bubbles at my broken spear. Keep cool and nab the prize. Got more spears at base. Only a half hour later, the crystals up above dimming towards dusk, I was halfway up a large and twisting tree and grinning like a fool (no mouth yet but I got the lips on because I wanted to grin) as I reached over and gently snatched nearly two weeks of constant effort.
It looked like a wasp nest, a dozen or so combs all sealed in a hard, orange substance that glowed very faintly in dim lighting, a substance the so precious I had no comparisons in this world. About as big as me, the entire nest was more awkward than heavy and giving off a lot of heat. I wasn’t expecting heat so I nearly dropped it, the film compatible to my skin giving off little sizzles where they touched the combs. Wrapping my hands with my leather clothing I got a better grip and slowly made my way down the tree with my prize.
Time to cook. I thought in my best Walter White.
—————
Twenty Days Previous…
“I miss Amazon.”
Sitting in the sand on my beach outside my cave, I was using a sharpened, flat stone to flesh the latest green pig hide I’d obtained. Fleshing - the tedious work of scraping any remaining meat and fat off a skinned animal hide - was never something I loved doing. Dad had me tanning my first deer hide by age eight and I remember throwing up then crying the entire time.
“Stop crying,” he told me, adjusting my grip on the two-handled knife so the blade didn’t angle into the hide. “This isn’t Bambi. Bambi was a boy deer, this is a girl deer.” Thanks Colonel: I cried harder thinking I’d killed Bambi’s mom.
“I miss ordering things and getting things and not being forced to make things.” I lamented, pealing off the last bit of fat and throwing the white mass into my meat basket. I flopped the skin on top of the four others and picked them all up, heading towards my cave entrance. I still had a little daylight from the crystals overhead, though probably not a lot.
Yeah, crystals. I was in a giant jungle with some trees reaching hundreds of feet into the air, mountains and cliffs in the distance looking thousands of feet tall with snow on some, a salty body of water with no end in sight I found two days ago a few miles down river, and what I first thought was sky I could now see was the roof of a cave so far above me it might as well be sky. No sun, just large crystals shining a pinkish light hiding behind big, fluffy clouds. These crystals would grow brighter until “noon” then fade into mostly darkness at “night” and start glowing slowly brighter at “dawn.” It was longer than 24 hours, my gut telling me a day was closer to thirty or thirty six hours, but I couldn’t be sure until I got to figuring out how to make clocks.
“I miss ordering an employee to ‘do this’ and having someone else do something.” The crack leading to my cave had been shaped and widened, letting me walk through sideways with the skins held in front. Still hard to find, the entrance angled against another rock and could only be seen when standing right in front of it, but I no longer had to deform and form to get in and out of my home. I set the skins down once the cave opened up into its winding hallway and went back for my skinning stone and meat basket.
“I miss those same employees laughing at my jokes because I was the boss.” Loosening my knots, I braced the vines against the rocky hook and pulled the vines tight as I lifted a large stone slab over a lip it rested on overhead then slowly lowered the slab into place in front of the crack, the last bit slipping and falling into place with a loud boom in the cavern. A few thousand pounds of marble, there were hundreds of feet of vine and twenty seven pulleys to distribute the weight, allowing me to open and close my door in under fifteen minutes.
“Vines are looking a little frayed,” I muttered, studying the netting I had made around the stone and leading to my pulleys. “Gonna need to figure out a fast way to make rope soon.”
Picking everything back up, I made my way into my now secured cave. It had gone through some major changes since those first jumbled days I spent trying to get myself together. I’d discovered something in those opening days, something that has given me a direction and goal to aim for. That discovery let me create the hallways and rooms I had branching off the main cave, let me create the growing pile of pulley wheels I had stacked in the corner, let me make the furnace cut directly into the rock I had in one corner.
A discovery about this world. A magical discovery.
“I miss my books, Internet, movies,” I said, more subdued, dumping the skins and basket next to my salt hole. I decided I was done, flopping down next to the salt water hole I made to cure the skins. “I miss people and…” I couldn’t shed tears, but the overwhelming sadness came anyway. “I miss you, dad, mom.”
I stayed like that until exhaustion put me to sleep, gently sobbing.
—————
When I was still learning, trying to get a handle on what I was and where I had been put I didn’t leave the cave until much later, so I wasn’t sure how many days it had been from my birth. This morning, my finger etched the thirteenth hash mark since I started keeping track.
“You need some alone time, Vanna,” I said, putting the skins I’d left out last night into the salt water and weighed them down with a rock. “This body is begging for a test drive.”
“I am alone,” I answered, imagining two of me in my kitchen back home. One of me wore glasses, sweats and a grimy tank top. The other was decked in crimson, lacy, revealing lingerie, including matching stockings and garter. My old “I’m working from home” and “I need some action” outfits. Both of me were seated at my small table, eating omelets.
“When has that ever stopped us?” Sexy Me asked, slowly lifting a fluffy bit of egg dripping Sriracha to her pouty lips.
“We are in a hostile world trying to survive,” Working Me replied, pointedly ignoring the food porn going on across the table and just putting omelet in her mouth.
“Didn’t stop you in Argentina.”
“Uuuuugh!” Working Me looked up at the ceiling and shook both her fists in the air. “I was young and horny and it had been two months! I was starting to get ideas involving wild goats!” Working Me paused, taking a breath. “Besides, I’m thirty five now, not some sexually frustrated teen.”
“Those green boars seem…well equipped.” Sexy Me was smiling suggestively, uncaring about non-sequiturs.
“I am not screwing the second half of a Seuss book!!” Working Me shouted, throwing her fork down. “I am not that desperate.”
“…yet.”
That final word from Sexy rang a little too close to home, bringing me out. I was in my worm farm, one of the rooms I had dug out of the marble. About the size of my old apartment, a simple square of five hundred square feet with a low ceiling, the room consisted mostly of a pit filled with dirt and compost, each corner having a bundle of mushrooms planted to keep the room lit. The walls and floor of the pit were lined with red bamboo - long and skinny trees (or reeds, don’t know much about bamboo) plentiful along the bank of the river and an excellent building material. When red bamboo was heat treated it got very hard and the worms couldn’t chew through it, unlike the marble.
Those worms I found the first day were not earthworms, though they have the same general shape. Now I could see color I found them blue and yellow striped and covered in a thin slime that reacted faintly to inorganic materials. I was calling them stoneworms and they were how I cut through stone and made tools.
“Why do they taste like aspirin and fried liver.” I mumbled as I reached down into the pit and grabbed a large handful of the wigglers. Grimacing, I took them in through my hand and watched as they sizzled inside of me, the bitter taste hitting regardless of where I dissolve them. I’d found I could focus and hurry the process along, the worms digested in under a minute. I reached back down into the dirt, repeating the process ten more times before pulling all the stray dirt and shooting it back out into the farm.
“Bleh!” I dry heaved. Walking over to a bucket filled with water I slowly poured around as much area of the dirt as possible and spreading another bucket filled with torn up leaves and grass over the top. The reproduction cycle of these worms was crazy, my farm able to replace the hundred worms I just ate in about three days. Even if I ate them all, though, I was finding them common in patches throughout the jungle. They subsisted on mostly plant matter but their ability to dig through solid stone was the number one reason I created this farm. I say dig but that thin goop they were covered in defied science.
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I know, “defied science,” says the slimegirl.
My first farm was a fail because they just dug holes out of their pen. The second didn’t fair much better, eating my bamboo up. Only after I figured out the bamboo hardens from fire treatment did I start work on the farm.
“Bubble bubble toil and trouble,” I said, sorting my inner slime to get the material I wanted into place, a large brown blob moving up my arm and traveling to my breasts, where it joined other blobs of various colors all packed close together.
I didn’t come with a rulebook, tutorial, Blue Box or sassy imp to tell me what was going on here. I wasn’t the summoned hero pulled from Earth to fight the Demon King and given a magic weapon by the moe but inevitably sexy princess. From day one everything I have learned has been through luck, trial and error or inference from reading too much web fiction. There was no “get everything figured out and start my harem” when I arrived. So when I ate those worms on the beach, I didn’t know I had special slime powers and had distilled their essence.
I don’t have a better term for it. Alchemy, maybe? What it means is any time I’ve eaten anything I take in their mass and add it to my own - though not on a one to one scale, more like eating and putting on weight. I probably had three times as much mass as I did when I woke up, putting my height in human form at around three feet. It was frustrating how slow it was going but I found the green pig meat was helping speed my mass absorption greatly. On top of gaining mass, I was seeing discolorations in my body left over that didn’t feel like foreign dirt or sand. They felt like part of me but not, totally weird.
It took days to work up the courage to figure it out. The largest blob at the time was colored red and I expelled it into a corner of my cave. Nothing happened, thought it was how needed to poop from now on. When I tried using some of the skins to mop up the mess I heard hissing. Looking at the hides I saw it was eating through the skin slowly; there was some smoke and a reaction. Previously, after seeing how quickly I dissolved food, I tried to go full Alien and extract some of my inner slime to use as a weaponized acid. Come to find out, there must be an internal chemical or magical reaction because once my slime leaves me it is no more harmful than an old episode of that Nickelodeon TV show.
I continued the experiment, eating everything I had been eating until I found the mushrooms were leaving red splotches. Brown was the worms, white the fish, green the pigs. I got nothing from eating red bamboo or tree leaves, though I couldn’t be sure. I haven’t figured out what the pig or fish essence did but when I combined the brown and red, something happened.
“Less daydreaming, more working,” I chided myself, having spent too long staring at nothing. Grabbing the water bucket (I use bucket loosely, it being more like a large and deep marble bowl), I went down the hall to the pond and filled it, bringing it back to the farm for tomorrow. I brought the other bucket out and put it next to the passage leading to the door, ready for my mulch run later today.
Pulling a vine, I open a small flue at the apex of the ceiling to let the smoke out when I got to work. I then started on second breakfast, eating about a third of the mushroom around the pond and plucking a large one and shaking it around the pond to plant some more. They would be fully grown in two days.
“They really are magic mushrooms,” I said, savoring the sweet taste I got from the last shroom before taking the large red blob in me and storing it next to the brown in my breasts. I went over to my pulley station and got ready for work. Taking bits of both blobs, I moved some of each to my hands as I picked up a chunk of marble and some flat sheets of red bamboo, placing them in front of me.
“Two parts brown, one part red.” Combining them, I feel my arms getting hot, quickly coat my palms with the concoctions. Seeping it through my outer film, my hands feeling a hot burn, like touching boiling water. The reaction is instant, clouds of white smoke streaming out like steampunk leaky pipes and the marble in my hand is reduced to a small disk. The process is very quick, like a blowtorch to styrofoam, only seconds to get the rough shape, a few more seconds to smooth it as round as I can get it, then the final touch as I jab my finger in the center and spin it right round baby right round.
Red bamboo is very pliant if soaked in water shortly after cutting it down, soaking it changing the durable wood to the flexibility of wet cardboard. The shoots are soaked, cut and unrolled onto a flat piece of marble I have, then marble bricks are placed on top so I get, in only a few hours, flat(ish) wood planks. Heat treatment prevents water from soaking into the wood afterward and the new shape is permanent. Work intensive, these wooden sheets are vital to making the housing for my pulleys.
Two rectangles, two thick slats, stack the rectangles on the slats so it looks like a thin box with two open ends, narrow and lengthen my finger to punch four holes in the corners and a larger one in the center. Four thin dowels that I roll and taper on one end and a larger tapered dowel and I’ve got all the pieces cut just as the burn in my hands settles down to a warm heat.
“Neeeeeeed metal,” I whined, prepping my hands for round two. Had to cut out seven more before I started on putting them together. “Sooooo tired of making these things only for them to work half the time.” My first attempt at a door had fallen on one of my legs and took me hours to slowly inch it out. Easily in my top ten of worst pains.
Couldn’t be helped, only so much weight can distribute onto wood and stone before something broke, no matter how complex my compound pulley systems got. A bit of iron would drag me out of the Stone Age and into the Industrial Revolution.
Two hours later I was pounding the last tapered dowel into the final pulley with a round stone for a hammer, finishing my pulley-making for the day and moving myself into the hallway for my next project. Stripping off all the bits of clothing I had, I lamented the state these hides were in. Stiff and ratty, I couldn’t truthfully call them clothing. Tomorrow, after taking the hides out of the salt and putting them in a tannin tree bark mix I had, I should have proper leather to work with this week.
“Manners might maketh the man, but clothing maketh the woman.” I mourned my rags even as I warmed a little, my previous conversation coming back to me, naked body on display.
“Later.”
Stepping into the room next to the worm farm, I took the rest of the red and brown, mixed it, and spread it all over the front of my arms, legs, and body. This room was only partially finished, the rough outline already etched with the center only partially cut out. I was on fire, my outer film burning up with the reaction these essences made, the entire space exploding in white smoke as I quickly walked around the room.
When I ran out of my alchemy, I was laying on the floor and losing form, exhaustion greater than any PT turning me into loose ooze. I had cleared about a third of the room, though I hadn’t yet dug down to raise the roof or slowly smoothed out the walls. One happy accident I attributed to stoneworm mucus was whenever I burned away stone, it fused the surface it touched like a strong concrete, making cave ins unlikely. I still made sure to leave columns at appropriate intervals but every little bit helps.
“…puu…get up…puu…got more…puu…to do…”
I took my time, putting myself back into shape and crawling out, a white haze still hanging in the air but quickly dissipating and running up the open flue in the main room. I stood when I got to my clothing, putting them on and shuffling back into the main hall.
I dipped a leg into the pond and drank a gallon. Early on, afraid of what lurked in my pond, I’d taken a few glowing mushrooms and swam down. It was deep, at least thirty feet and I found a strong current coming from and going out two black apertures. Unwilling to get lost, I swam back up. No tentacle monster, but doesn’t mean one can’t suddenly show up, either.
Taking a slab of green pork off a shelf I’d cut into the wall, I shoved half my body weight of Hamton shoulder into my stomach and relaxed as I dissolved it, meat and bones and all. Not the best, tastiest meal I could be eating, it was like a ham smoothly: not quite right in flavor or texture but very filling. In the future I wanted to cook, season and enjoy food, but right now it was fuel.
“Fuel and some green essence I have no idea does what.” I told myself in irritation, gathering the things I’d need for my trek outside today. Stone knife, spear, large basket, mulch bucket. Wouldn’t need much, only got a few items on my list today.
“Time to harvest some vines.Yay.” I said without enthusiasm, picking up everything and making my way out of the cave.
—————
Vine harvesting had been my primary objective. These vines hung from most of the trees in this jungle, some over a hundred feet long and miraculously all the vines I have found uniformly the same one centimeter in diameter. In the beginning, after I had gotten my body together and I was starting to tentatively explore my new world, my love of Brendan Fraser’s George Of The Jungle came through and I knew I had to try swinging on one. I did, it was awesome right up until I ran into the tree, but after I cut a vine open I learned this was no ordinary plant.
First, it wasn’t grass green, these vines are neon green with veiny streaks of gray running through them. The gray is a tough thread and it weaves in and out of the layers of the vine, a cross section looking like the rings of a tree. It was as flexible and as strong as nylon rope of the same size. At least, for about a week, when the vine dries out and starts to crumble. I’d only had my door for three days but the discovery I’d have to replace all those vines once a week was already forcing me to plan on something else.
Back on topic, I had been harvesting some vines atop a tall tree when I heard my least favorite sound.
“Skee!”
“Democrats!” I cursed, dropping my knife and spinning around, nearly following my knife to the ground on the thick branch I was balancing on. Where the branch met the large tree, fifteen feet away crouched my nemesis. Eyes now properly working, I could see the chitin carapace of the bug was vivid orange, each segment catching the sun like a mirror. The legs were a paler orange and its black head had crimson, segmented eyes giving my trypophobia a run for its money. It was slowly coming at me, likely realizing I had nowhere to go but down.
Good idea. Looping my arm around one of the vines I hadn’t cut yet, I spun it around my hips and repelled off that branch as quickly as my slimy hands could take me. Both hands busy, I couldn’t give him the finger, so I stuck my tongue at him as his creepy poolnoodle-mouth started licking the residue I left on the branch.
Hitting dirt, I jumped over to where I’d left my spear and brought it up, pointing at the bug. It, apparently not thinking my stick was a threat, proceeded to follow down my same vine as skillfully as any spider in its web.
“Come on, Straw Face, your mouth is illegal in California!” Yeah, it has been years since Iraq, my fight banter was a little rusty.
Butterspider don’t care. “Skee!” it replied, joining me on the ground and looking at me like I was going to be delicious. It was still longer than me but I think I outweighed it at this point.
No point in waiting. Juking left, I stepped right and lunged, my spear aiming for where the neck connected to the body of this monstrosity. It was fast, probiscus shooting over my left shoulder where I had been feinting. I got close enough to its red eyes to see hundreds of me grinning like a madwoman as I thrust my weapon forward. Only red bamboo with an angled point cut into it, the heat treatment had made my spear hard and strong enough to bury the entire point into a tree trunk when I practiced. I was honestly expecting this fight to be over with skewered bug right now.
*clnkSNAP!*
The tip of my spear shattered, splinters flying, some fast enough to stick in me. I had hit that carapace dead on and instead of breaking it was a little dented, otherwise pristine. Shock froze me, the sound my spear made like a mallet hitting sheet metal. Metal?
“AAAHH!!” I screamed, my surprise costing me, the butterspider taking advantage and sticking its proboscis into my left eye. I shook with ataxia seizures and I could feel its suction drinking me while I flailed my arms at its face and pushed it away. So much pain lightninged through me as I got its sticker out of my face, my inner slime gushing out fast enough I could feel myself shrinking. Covering the leak with a shaking hand, I crab crawled away over the tree roots. The butterspider was having its own problems, spinning in place and shaking its head in erratic motions. Maybe it was sensitive in the eyes and I got a lucky hit in.
I was getting tired, unnaturally so. Terror jolted me back on my feet despite the numbing haze. Not only an anti-coagulant but also a sleeping venom. I may only have seconds to act before I closed my eye and found out if I could die twice. Taking a stumbling few steps, I fell onto the back of the bug and wrapped my legs around its neck. It started convulsing immediately but I held on. One hand still busy keeping my insides inside, I formed the other into a simple spike. Pushing the remaining specks of red and brown into that spike, I watched and waited for the reaction to start up as I rode this bucking bronco.
“Orkin says hello!” I shouted, stabbing my hand into the back of this thing’s furry head, punching out one of its eyes in a rush of green and black smoke. We both collapsed to the ground, my vision swimming in and out as I felt myself loosing control and going back to simple blob.
My last thought, getting a blurry glimpse of the dead insect before blackness, was I hope it didn’t have any friends.
—————
It had friends. I woke up sometime later next to the carcass, weak and small; I think as small as when I rebirthed here. I couldn’t see and forming an eye was slow going, but I could hear numerous pneumatic skees in the distance. Getting my crap in gear I formed an eye and found the battlefield empty. Part of my face still burned but I no longer leaked, though the purple gooey ground was testament enough to how much I had lost before coagulating. No sign of the bugs but I would not survive another fight, I had to get out of here.
Glancing at the carcass, I paused as immediate survival warred with long term survival. I might not get a better chance to study this thing than right now.
Screw it, I thought, building myself into a simple claymation figure, two stumpy arms and two stumpy legs, the arms ending in Lego clamps. Can’t get a lot of fine motor skills to work and I can’t move fast, but this form is better than hopping. I grabbed one of the vines I had cut down before all this happened and started wrapping up the dead bug with a couple of simple half hitches. Taking the other end of the vine and throwing it over my shoulder, I started the long and slow trek back to the cave, dragging my victory booty behind me.
It was night when I got back, having to stop multiple times and dig up some worms before moving it a few more yards. I didn’t have the strength to close my door, hoping I wasn’t going to wake up tomorrow playing the part of a Capri Sun. I just grabbed the largest piece of pork I had left, wrapping as much of me around it as I could and drifted off to sleep, dreaming of some green eggs to go with my ham.
“God, I’m sorry we haven’t talked in a while.” I said after waking up and starting the process of forming my body, laying amid the mushrooms around my pond. “This hasn’t been what I was expecting.” Understatement. “And its not like I read about slimegirl reincarnation in the Bible.
“But I’m here, alive and safe and cancer free. Yesterday I was complaining I didn’t have any metal and yesterday I discover a possible source of metal. I might even chalk it up to coincidence, but I know better. Thank you.”
For the rest of the day I spent my time taking apart, absorbing and dissecting my enemy. Its carapace was copper, simple and pure copper, explaining the orange color. I have no idea what they ate to get so much copper, my understanding is they ate slimes and - unless I was missing something in my diet - slimes don’t eat a lot of copper.
“Magic,” I muttered, stoking my fire as hot as I could make it, setting a piece of carapace on a shelf next to the flames. I wasn’t expecting much, bamboo can’t generate enough heat to melt copper, but I wanted to be as sure as I could this was actually copper and not some mystical resin. Getting the fire going was irritating because I was twice as tall as I was now when I made it and so I had to drag over my bamboo flattening bricks to create a booster stool.
I’d cut off some goopy flesh and slurped it down, ecstatic when after I finished the meal there was a sliver of orange essence. I couldn’t immediately determine what this new essence would do but I was excited to get testing later.
“I need to hire a maid,” I said, surveying the mess of parts scattered around my main cave. It wasn’t like I had a workroom made yet. The abdomen was yielding the most information, a large sack connected to the anus filled with a heavy lump of solid copper. It must have hardened when it died, somehow able to keep it in a liquid state and secreted for, I guess, nest material?
“It builds nests?” I asked, the germ of an idea forming. “If I get them as babies, can I make a butterspider farm?” I’d have a renewable source of metal. Once I figured out how to get my fire hot enough I could really jumpstart my plans.
All I need is the perfect trap.
—————
Back in the present, while Vanna gathered two intact and now unguarded butterspider nests and placed them into a secured room she planned on using for her copper farm, thirty miles away a group of creatures were plodding their way through the jungle on a large and well-traveled road. These creatures were part of a caravan, a long train of carts holding stacked cages containing a menagerie, all either struggling to be free or resigned to their fates. Large, hulking and reptilian creatures in chains slowly pulled the carts under the whips of their drivers.
The leader of the caravan, an enterprising but aging male, anthropomorphic frog, had heard the loud crash in the middle of the jungle when Vanna released her trap. He was curious, but decided his cages were full of enough fodder for market right now. No sense risking what he had for maybe getting something more.
Next time he came through this jungle, though, he planned on finding out if there was anything out there worth capturing.