[Who: Nameless Slime]

[Where: Forest Clearing, Cave Adjacent, Rocky Hill in the Woods]

[When: Somewhere around mid-afternoon, maybe?]

I look at my pitiful stack of stones and sigh internally. Now, I may not remember much, but I’m pretty sure even a toddler would be at least twice my strength. Most of the sticks and stones I could find were out of my ability to do much more than roll or drag around, and even then that was iffy. Turns out, don’t have much in the way of grip strength either!

Stupid slime fingers! Useless for grabbing things! Out of anger, I launch multiple pseudopods at a nearby tree, gripping tightly onto the bark when my limbs make contact with it. Pouring my will into my desires, the tree rapidly melts and falls apart where my slime meets it.

I want to shout, to scream and vent my frustrations to the world, but as I quickly discover, I can’t even do that much! Instead, this little act of destruction will have to do the job for me. I know I don’t have any lungs; I checked, using my weird handy dandy hand-vision. In my self-reflection, I can see that they’ve just got semi-translucent slime stuff and that weird star in their middle. Not even eyes, which makes how this one is seeing themself a real mystery.

Yes, I said ‘their’. Whatever parts this one used to have, they’re not there anymore, nor could I sense anything analogous. Since I didn’t really feel like either of the two main options I could remember fit this new me, either, ‘no thank you’ it is. Frankly, it’s a relief not to have to worry about that stuff anymore, actually.

Neutral of gender, indeterminate of sex. That’s me.

Well sod this, I tell myself, and I plop myself down right there, determined to at least try to learn to speak. It’s my own bleepin’ body, and it will do what I gods-damned want it to do!

Oh hey, apparently there are gods, according to my half-baked memory. Or at least believed more than one exists.

Two hours later, I had yet to make any progress on anything. Not with my firepit, not with attempts to speak, and definitely not with finding any water or people.

The best I’d gotten was close to just jiggling my body as fast as I could, creating some sort of wobbly noise or trapping some air and shaking that really fast. I glurbled and jiggled and sloshed around, hoping for inspiration of any kind. It would take a LOT of practice to get any sort of dexterity with it, and to top things off, I no longer had a mouth, a tongue, or even vocal cords!

Being able to vocalize meant that I would have to figure out how to speak all over again, an endeavor that could take who knows how long just to pronounce basic phonemes.

On the plus side of things, just by faffing about, I’d learned quite a bit about myself, and how to use my new body. Seeing as this was looking to be my new reality, getting acquainted with my functions was only the smart thing to do. Moving my slime about, thickening or thinning it, and generally squishing myself into all sorts of shapes, I experimented and learned. The fluid dynamics of myself are fascinating, to say the least.

Raising my mass upwards in my version of standing up, I dust myself off as best as possible, only splattering myself in the process. “Glrugrglrurg,” I sigh, releasing trapped air bubbles. No shortage of that around here, and all my sloshing about gets all those bubbles around everywhere inside of me. They’ll randomly gurgle out from time to time as I move about.

Maaaaan… This place sucks! I can’t see for squat or even talk right, and I’m starting to feel the bite of hunger again from all that effort.

Urges rise up in me, deep-seated instincts of my new body whispering its desires, telling me what I needed to do. To seek energy. Well, duh, of course, energy is important.

But what gives energy to slime? Only one way to find out, and that’s experimentation! Always an important part of any story of a person suddenly finding themselves in a new and unfamiliar body, though mostly expository in nature. Another one of those half-remembered tidbits… Super boring stuff to hear about, but then again, it’s pretty boring on this end too, if you can imagine that.

See, for most creatures, like your humble narrating slime here, obtaining food is mostly a waiting game. Waiting for food to come your way, whether you seek it out or whether you wait in ambush, it’s all waiting either way.

Take this critter here, running over this way. Some little winged mouse-like thing, totally unaware of its impending doom. A web of thinly stretched slime traps it in its sticky threads, engulfing the poor critter. Without hesitation, urged on by instincts, it’s dissolved alive.

Alive, and aware, exactly as planned. Cruel? Nay, for this slime’s a predator slime, and they’ve gotta get used to being a predator if they’re gonna wanna survive!

Layer by layer, the poor thing trapped inside is stripped to the bone, struggling still to the very end, even as the muscles dissolve. YES! A shudder of ecstasy, encouraged by the twitching of the food inside.

OH GODS! IS’SO GOOD! MM! Cheesy goodness, get in here! YES! MORE! MORE! MORE! Is that cheddar? No, it’s got a little fiery kick to it… ah! Extra-sharp cheddar and pepperjack cheese! Fluffy white bread, grilled to perfection using mayonnaise, even? HAHA YESMORE MMYES!

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

The slices of ham add some much-needed juicy saltiness, oh so perfectly fried… bread is crunchy on the outside, with soft and chewy innards.

NEED MORE! ALL GoNE neEED MOrE! hUnt feeEd hunt feed hunt feed hunt

Huhn… huh feed? Wuh? What happened to the cheese sandwich I was just chowing down on? It went… it went…

Oh wait, that’s right, I ate it! I giggle, er, gurgle uncontrollably, and collapse into a puddle on the ground. I’d done it! Caught and consumed my first meal in this new body, all by myself, and it was AWESOME! Another rustle in the bushes alerts me of my next meal, the sound waves vibrating against my entire body.

Kinda like I’m a giant tuning fork or something, interpreting the vibrations of my body into recognizable sounds. Wonder what’s doing the interpreting, because as far as I can tell, I’m just slime and that weird crystal that I’m terrified to think about. Why should I be so terrified of something that’s a part of me?

No… Not terrified… I think I’m… protective? Getting rid of it would be REALLY bad, I feel. Examining it using my internal awareness of myself, I find that my slime is densest there. Beginning to suspect that this gem might be REALLY important because bringing it closer to my surface fills me with dread and anxiety.

With relief, I send it back to the center of my mass and just let it do its thing. That’s probably my nucleus, or control center, or brain, or whatever it is that contains my entire essence and allows me to inhabit and control this awesome new slime body. It’d probably be a good idea to get that thing protected as best as I can, honestly. The thought of it becoming damaged fills me with terror, the source of the fear I sense when I focus on it.

For the sake of simplicity, I’m just gonna call this little star gem, about the size of a pool cue ball, my ‘core’. To protect it, I’ve hidden it high in the branches, the rest of me stretched into a hastily improvised net. My control near the far edges becomes less dextrous the more distant my slime gets.

Not that I have much dexterity in the first place.

And these little winged rodents, another one of which is headed to the trap that is me, I’m gonna call ‘em… flight-mice! Just a little personal joke, because I think they’re actually flightless, the wings being mostly vestigial. Possibly. My only experience with them is as dinner, so I only have what I’m learning from dissolving this next one, layer by layer.

It’s a lot of hard work to keep focused, especially when it tastes so bleepin’ delicious! This one is boxed dinner macaroni and cheese, for example. Not great, but not terrible.

I keep at it, occasionally changing locations to not alert the little flight-mice of their impending doom. These guys are all over the place, and they ALL taste like various cheeses or cheese-focused dishes. Yum!

Maybe there’s a nest or a colony of them nearby. Ah well, more for me!

I get a sudden urge to go back to the cave. Ha ha, no can do, mysterious pull on my consciousness! Busy catching food! With each flight-mouse I catch, I can feel myself grow ever so slightly stronger, my mass increasing proportionally to my meal. It’s nice to be able to replenish what I lose when I move about, you know?

As the afternoon stretches into the evening, I keep turning my focus toward the cave, and a feeling of dread builds up inside of me. What happens if I stay out into the night? Surely it can’t be bad for me, right?

Shrugging off my worries, I wander further and further out into the forest, finding interesting plants here and there. I get about five hundred meters away from the entrance of the cave when I splatter against an invisible wall.

Or at least, that’s what it feels like to me. A solid barrier blocks me from progressing any further, flattening me against the air as I impact it at top slime speed. Dark hexagons flash in the air around me for a brief moment, and the next moment I’m thrown backward at the same velocity at which I’d hit it.

A reflective barrier? What? What is this? I ooze along the invisible wall, hexagons lighting up as I touch them. Tracing the walls of the barrier, I find that it’s roughly spherical, and I seem to be on the inside of a dome of some repellent force. The walls seemingly stretch on into the distance, curving in the direction of the cave, whose direction I seem to be constantly aware of at all times.

Who put this here? Who dares stop me, the mighty… Uh… The Mighty… Slimy Me?

Man, I can’t call myself that! I need a real name! I don’t wanna call myself something silly like Steve or Slimon though or… Stephanie or Slimantha.

I’m better than that.

Yank!

This time, the tugging alert on my consciousness causes me to jerk hard in the direction of the cave, interrupting my investigations into how completely this barrier surrounds me and the place where I woke up earlier.

Yank! Yank!

YANK!

Argh! Alright already! You’ve made your point! Clearly, something wants me back there, and if it’s not some weird new quirk about me being a slime thing, I’m gonna be really upset but ultimately do nothing much because, let’s be real here, I was basically just born today.

Finding the invisible barrier to be totally impenetrable to even my dissolving, I disappointedly head back, catching a couple cheesy flight-mice snacks along the way. The pull lessens the closer I get to the cave, and I swear I feel a faint sigh of relief ‘behind’ me when the clearing comes into view. Of course, with my three-sixty vision, I see nothing there.

A chill passes through me, and I remember the time. Honestly, spending the night inside the cave sounds like a better idea than in a lean-to outside the cave.

Looking closer, it’s not the worst place to call home. My urge to go inside intensifies, and I give one last look at the now-night sky. The stars are coming out in force, and one patch in particular stands out to me.

Glowing and luminous in reds and purples, a nebula, a cloud of luminous interstellar gasses, blocks a sizable portion of the vaguely familiar Milky Way galaxy. Another of my few remaining memories, I suppose. If I recall them correctly, nebulas are known as “star factories”, the ovens in which new stars are baked. Fascinated by the sight, I extend a pseudopod and examine myself at the same time.

Star core… glittering birth and rebirth… purple… amorphous and shifting nature… That’s it! I know what I’ll call myself!

Nebula!

Perfection, if I do say so myself.

‘Nodding’ in satisfaction, I return to my cozy little cave for the night.