Chapter 3

Encounter

~<(0)>~

The entity kept moving. It didn’t know where it was going, but that was no matter to it. Its overall goal of growing larger still stood firm, and since it had outgrown the place of its creation, it seemed it would have to keep moving to grow larger. Since the first actively moving living thing it had encountered, it had come across several more. While the original little aggressive beings were a reasonable, if small, source of material, it certainly wasn’t actively attempting to seek them out, not that it really understood how to find them in the first place, it always seemed to catch them by complete accident.

While it kept moving through the tunnels, it ran across that soft disordered material it had experimented with previously. However, instead of the relatively small pool it had encountered before, this one seemed to stretch on, beyond the point the entity could easily reach. It also seemed to deepen rapidly which caused the entity to back up in uncertainty. It explored the edges of the room that the tunnel had seemed to open up into, finding that there didn’t seem to be any passable path around the large body of material. The entity didn’t want to turn back and find one of the other paths it had passed some time back, it realized that it didn’t have any other choice, so it steeled its resolve and pushed into this substance. Whereas before it had absorbed the material into its body but was able to stop it from happening, with the great amount of material surrounding it, the entity was unable to stop its own soft, disordered body from soaking up massive amounts, which it realized in a panic was causing its body to thin out considerably. The more diluted it became, the harder it was to control the material of its own body. It tried to push the foreign material out as before, but with the weight pressing down on it from all sides it was hard to fight the absorption. It thrashed and struggled to move to the surface, where it hoped it would have an easier time keeping the foreign material from entering its body, but amidst all the pressure from the surrounding soft disordered material, the same issues that were forcing the material inside it were also confusing its sense of up and down. It was as blind as it had been when it was in its original pool of soft disordered material, yet unlike its birth pool, this was threatening to thin it to the point of being unable to move. The fear of ending, which it hadn’t felt up to this point, boiled deep inside the entity. It didn’t know if this situation could bring about its end, but it wasn’t sure that being trapped, unable to move forever was any improvement over ending. Then, with a sudden thought, it remembered how big its original room had been, and it remembered that it had filled that entire room before it had started on its journey. It didn’t know how big this room was, but being a much larger size was an improvement over being the compact size it was. It started pulling matter from its central core, and immediately it felt the threat of ending back away as new, denser material spread into the world at large.

With this new mass, the entity started to attempt to move towards the surface, though despite its new mass it didn’t know the direction to go still, so it couldn’t tell whether its movements were actually making a difference towards its salvation. It pulled more of its mass out of the central space, filling up more space, pushing its saturated mass outward. It hoped that, if it pulled out enough of itself from the core, it could fill up the space and stop becoming more diluted. It kept going, pulling more and more of itself out of that central place, growing larger and larger. It wasn’t sure how much it would take to solve the problem, it hoped that it had enough and that this place wasn’t larger than the place of its inception. Suddenly, it realized that a portion of its body had breached the surface from the soft disordered material that was surrounding most of it and was thus as dense as it normally was. The entity used this denser part of its mass to start pulling the rest of itself up, though it quickly realized that this only caused the part that was above the surface of the material to be pulled back in. It somehow needed to stabilize the part of it above the surface or figure out some way to stop the saturation of the parts of it under the surface. It then remembered an experiment it had tried the last time it had run into the pools of soft disordered material. Throughout its entire body, especially in the places that were the most diluted, it focused on converting the foreign material into its hard ordered state. This started to thicken its own mass, but this worked to its advantage. It used its denser, more easily controlled parts to pull at the thicker, less movable parts of its being and started to pull a good bulk of its mass into its core to make it easier to pull up with the part of its body at the surface. It also realized belatedly that the hard ordered version of the material was less dense than the material itself and was actually helping it rise to the top overall. Within a short period of time, it had returned to about the same size it had been when it entered this great pool of material. It had a layer of the light hard ordered material below it and had no issue floating on the surface.

Now that this emergency had passed it realized that, while under the surface, it had managed to take in a few new oddities. Upon examination, they all seemed rather similar, though with a few differences. They were moving around like the being it had encountered that had attempted to poison it. However, they seemed suited to exist within the soft disordered material it currently floating on the surface of. Each of them was thrashing wildly, attempting to escape its grasp, a pointless action, though the being figured that it was probably due to that desire to not end. It could understand that feeling, as it had just escaped a time when it wasn’t sure it would make it out before it ended. Upon closer examination, they seemed to be far softer than the first being it had encountered, with their bodies giving as the entity pushed against them, and their movements did not reveal the same interlocking plates the first being had.

The entity decided it had examined enough, and that it was time to start disassembling the first of the beings. It wanted to do so individually, so that it could draw as much information as it could from each being that it could before it ended and stopped moving. Over the course of the 4 it had inadvertently captured it gained a wealth of knowledge. These beings used this… liquid it seemed, to live in and breathe. Like the previous being, these ones needed to consume other things to survive, and laid eggs to make more of themselves or, in one of them, did something else it didn’t fully understand to help with this process. It seemed like two of these beings needed to cooperate to be able to make more of themselves. This made the entity wonder if it would ever be able to make another one of itself. It came to the conclusion that it would likely need another one of itself already existing to make a third one of itself. It truly had no idea if another like it even existed.

It had ended up floating on the surface of this liquid that these beings lived in for some time, time that seemed to stretch out to the entity. The beings it had dismantled and absorbed had taught it a considerable amount, like each of its new discoveries had done. It seemed each of them had felt some effects of the hard ordered state that it had put the liquid into, some sort of effect that was only present when the liquid was in its hard ordered state. This was quite curious to the entity, as it hadn’t felt anything other than the material that made up its body thickening up and becoming more sluggish. It experimented a bit with hardening the liquid near the surface without engulfing it first, and slowly started to widen the platform of hard ordered material floating on the liquid. Once the entity had widened its platform enough, it started to start hardening the liquid in a sort of path to what it hoped was the edge of this room.

After it had managed to move past this dangerous pool, the entity kept moving. It ran across 2 more of the 6 legged, 2 pincer, tail poisoning beings and absorbed them without difficulty. It also came across another grouping of the nonmoving living objects, which it also absorbed simply due to it being easy, despite gaining little more than mass to add to its body. It also came across different beings with many legs that offered quite little in terms of new information, though the entity still categorized this under that of a new living being.

~<(0)>~

The trek inside the cavern had been mostly uneventful so far. The creatures they had encountered so far were mostly animals that used the caves as a place to hide for safety as they slept, or ones that would raise their young in little burrows in the cavern walls. Nothing had attacked them, though as they were a large group of people this wasn’t surprising. She knew from old experience that there had been creatures deeper into the caverns that had been changed by the strong thaumic radiation levels that permeated the entire cave system. Of course, this was information that was thousands of years old, but she imagined it was still likely accurate, if not even more so due to the intervening time. Of course, due to the sheer size of the underground system, they’d had to rest nearly a day’s journey into the dark.

It was said that beyond about a day’s journey into the tunnels, the creatures began to transition to those that spent their entire lives inside the dark, and eyesight became more or less optional. Thus, though it was little more than a nuisance, several wild creatures had wandered into camp. Or, at least, they would have had the guarding soldiers not dispatched them swiftly. The corpses had been burnt and disposed of away from the camp. Lyrei had heard that these creatures were considered passably edible, though not exactly pleasant to dine upon. Of course, almost all elves were completely vegetarian, so the possibility of the meat as a meal was basically nil. Lyrei, being as long lived as she was, had tried it a few times, and hadn’t really liked it. And she certainly wasn’t going to experiment with it here, in front of this group of idiots that barely deserved the title of elf in the first place.

Lyrei didn’t sleep much during the night. If she were being honest, she didn’t trust most of the group in the slightest beyond their strict role in this expedition. Besides, she’d invented stimulant spells millennia ago, and she wouldn’t need to sleep for days if it came down to it. She had spent most of the night adjusting the sensors on her equipment, as being in such a thaumically saturated environment meant they were far outside their current sensor range. It was during this point sometime when the moon was probably high in the sky outside, that her sensors started emitting keening wails of sensor overload. That shouldn’t have been right, she’d spent hours adjusting them to the higher level thaumic radiation, and they shouldn’t have been maxing out for at least an order of magnitude greater than the current levels. Or, as she realized, looking at the various numbers, what had BEEN the current levels. As she hurriedly shifted the scope of the devices upwards, she realized that this was the level that had been registered by the Central Leyline Convergence Reserve sensor suite shortly before the levels had dropped drastically. In other words, the thaumic energy that the sensors were currently picking up was why the expedition had come here in the first place.

Lyrei knew she needed to act NOW, or else she’d lose invaluable, and irreplaceable data. She grabbed her equipment, and to the hurried shouts of the current shift of camp guards, she ran off into the darkness with sensor gear held tightly to her chest.

Elves naturally had better eyesight than a good portion of other races, and this extended to being able to discern things better in the shadows. It had always been this way since their creation back in the dawn of time before written language apparently even existed. If she were anyone else, she might have wished that the Tears of the Goddess that her ancient ancestors drank to facilitate this racial transition had given her better darkvision. Of course, Lyrei, most powerful sorceress on the planet, had a spell for that.

She was sparing not even a moment, casting spells to sap her exhaustion as she ran, spells to enhance her oxygen exchange, especially as she went deeper underground. She passed by overgrown blind scorpions, silvery snakes twice her size, and side passages coated in the skittering masses of cave centipedes. All of these were ignored thoroughly by her, and either chose to ignore her as well, or were annihilated by her passive protection spells. She had only one worry, and that was to triangulate the position of this mystery creature, and to get even more detailed readings of it. Of course, if she managed to capture it, that would be even better, because… well, she hadn’t exactly thought that far ahead. But regardless, research was on the line here, this wasn’t the kind of thing that she, Lyrei Araphine, could just let slip through her grasp.

She saw it when she entered a larger cavern to place her final triangulation sensor. It was…. It was beautiful. Shimmering with a rainbow of colours and taking up most of the other entrance, the slime was lighting up the room in a dazzling array that mimicked the reflection of water on the ceiling. It didn’t seem to be doing anything in particular, mainly just moving along, feeling the wall as it went. Lyrei had never seen a slime this big; normally once they reached a certain size, they would either split into multiple slimes or be limited by things such as nutrient input or water evaporation. Slimes were also notoriously devoid of any real animal intelligence and would frequently just die of their own personal form of dehydration or starvation. They were one of the quirks that had come from the activation of the Saturation project. With all the extra thaumic energy permeating the world, if it concentrated in areas for long enough, it usually spontaneously mimicked lower life form intelligence and created various magical life adjacent beings, slimes being one of them, and definitely on the lower end of that simulated intelligence scale. This one definitely didn’t seem to be breaking that mold at least. Lyrei wasn’t sure why it was shimmering like that, though she was fairly certain she’d never seen one like it before.

She idly wondered why she hadn’t picked up readings on this creature, and dully realized that her scanner was wailing from being this close to it. This wonderful creature wasn’t some separate anomaly that she had just happened to run across… it WAS the anomaly, the very reason she was here in the first place. “Ohhh, you beautiful creature you. You just soaked up all that concentrated thaumic energy and now you’re probably wandering around drunk and high.” It looked to her like it was made purely of gelid thaumic energy, the way it was shedding the thaumic radiation like that. She didn’t have a working theory about how it was suppressing the full force of that energy yet, but she’d figure out something later. For now, she needed to capture it; Her future research depended on it! She realized belatedly that she’d forgotten her staff back at the campsite, but that hardly mattered at this point. She was at LEAST 3000 years old, and the proven top thaumic spellcraft user in the world, if she couldn’t cast the needed spells with no catalyst besides her hands, she didn’t deserve to be able to capture this wonderful specimen.

The brilliant elf gathered magic at her fingertips, wisps of her powerful energy resonating in complex fractal patterns she’d invented so long ago. She didn’t need a spellbook for what she was going to use, she’d memorized hundreds of thousands of runes, sigils, spell constructs, and more that ironically slipped her mind. She closed her eyes, visualizing the containment parameters for the spells she’d need to cast. The first was a barrier to keep the slime from leaving through the exit it had apparently entered the room by. She had pondered for a few heartbeats between a physical barrier of some kind, perhaps some kind of earthen barrier, or something more like a spell construct, such as a wind barrier. In the end, she had settled on a wind barrier, as it would provide active resistance, rather than simple passive resistance that an earthen barrier would give. An earth barrier could be broken with relative ease, and she wasn’t sure how powerful this creature was. Her magic, however, would not so easily be breached. All it took was a portion of her mental capabilities, so she pushed it off onto one of her parallel mental states. This was something that she’d developed after a lot of research when she was actively working on the Saturation Project. Since then, she’d managed to add a new mind about once a millennium, which just went to show how she was still growing even more mentally powerful. As much as she would have loved to keep herself in that state all the time, it was mentally draining, even for her. She hadn’t used this in a long time, which basically meant she hadn’t used it since last week. She also had a mental enhancing spell that she activated to speed up her perception of time, allowing her to… basically spend way too much time thinking about things while comparatively little time passed outside her mental spaces. Auxiliary Process 1 handled the process for the wind barrier, prepping and packaging the spell for her Core Process to fuel and cast. Next up was the second step in capturing this slime: hindering. Slimes by definition were mainly comprised of some form of liquid. Often times, this was water, though in a few such as heat related elemental slimes, or metallic slimes, liquid fire, magma, or liquid metal replaced the water content. This didn’t appear to be any of those exceptions, so this slime likely contained water for liquid content. That meant that the easy, and likely most effective solution was ice or cold of some kind. Auxiliary Process 2 decided that an area of effect spell would likely be the most likely to cause the greatest amount of hindrance to the slime. A Portable snowstorm would do the trick. Immediately she directed her ever present aura spells to start drawing in all available moisture for the spell. While it didn’t exactly need water to create the snowstorm, it could reach lower temperatures the more water the spell was given access to. As this was a deep, quite damp cave, and the room was large with a few small puddles of water, she was assured that the spell would be reasonably potent. This too, was packaged and sent off for Core Process to fuel and cast. The final spell she’d need to cast was the cage to fall upon the trapped slime… in a manner of speaking. Auxiliary Process 3 had several dozen options, ranging from enshrouding the entire creature in a block of ice (Although she’d either have to provide additional water to that or go with the greater version of the spell, create greater Dry Ice), use some sort of active magic to trap it and compress it to whatever minimum size the slime could reach to take it with her, create some form of physical barrier (Of what kind, she didn’t know what would work best), or use dimensional manipulation to wrap reality itself around the creature to hold it in what was essentially an unbreakable cage. Whichever option she chose was only temporary, as she’d set up something permanent when she was back at her research lab. Going the ice route was likely the easiest option, as it didn’t require active input, and she could just top it up as they made their way back. However, due to the lack of moisture, as she intended to drain everything she could to fuel the area of effect spell, it would either be far weaker than it needed to be, or she’d have to go for the more powerful version which drained carbon dioxide from the air and turned it to dry ice. This was definitely far more powerful, and wouldn’t need to worry about moisture content, however dry ice could easily burn and cause permanent, sometimes deadly damage. Auxiliary Process 3 wasn’t sure if the slime she intended to capture might be harmed by the severe freeze that dry ice would entail. Active magic should be able to easily trap the slime. Something like a universal wind barrier, slowly closing in from all sides to compress the hapless slime until it was a more manageable size. Or perhaps walls of liquid metal, a similar effect, but strengthened by her magic. Once she got it to the right size, she could just solidify it into something strong and capable, perhaps Adamantite or something. Both were workable, though each had its downsides that needed to be considered. Using an active spell such as wind magic meant it would have no off state that she could leave it in. Of course, keeping such a spell going for the duration of the return trip would be child’s play to Auxiliary Process 3. However, despite her sheer superiority, Lyrei had been known to make mistakes before… on occasion…. Once every 3 centuries at most, okay? And, as a direct extension of Lyrei Araphine, Auxiliary Process 3 could not accept the possibility that it might trip up at some crucial moment and allow the containment spell to unravel. Of course, it would likely be as simple as recapturing the creature, but that wasn’t the point. Failure was not an option… Period. The Liquid metal idea was workable as well. Active magic to compress and capture the slime, but a simple twist of physics and its prison would be properly physical and wouldn’t require any additional input from the sorceress. However, once more, there was a vital flaw that, if exploited by the slime, would result in a failure state. As Lyrei had never encountered this creature before, she had no idea of its capabilities, what kind of strength it possessed, or even if any kind of metal would properly contain it. That left the final option of manipulating the very fabric of space and time to seal the creature in a prison of warped reality. The biggest downside to this was that out of all the options, this one would take the longest time to set up. Dozens of spatial coordinates needed calculating, as well as vectors explaining the route that each wave of manipulation would need to take effect.

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With a grumble, the other two Auxiliary Processes and the Core Process grumbled and Auxiliary Process 3 for taking so (Subjectively) long to decide the course of action. The response was a terse “I’ve got something, just do your parts, and I’ll give you what you need when the time is right.”

Suffice to say, even inside her own consciousness, Lyrei Araphine had trouble getting along with people.

Lyrei’s eyes, glowing a brilliant bright white from the sheer amount of energy coursing through her body, opened so she could see the cavern and the target it contained. She cast the wind barrier, blocking off the tunnel behind the slime, which seemed to not even take notice of the magic. A free part of her wondered if this thing was truly blind and oblivious to the world. Normally slimes would be able to detect at least this… but it was obvious that this was a unique specimen. Her second spell started to activate, drawing all the moisture in the room and into the tunnel behind her to fuel the spell, even going so far as to pop the top off her canteen to drain the water within. A glowing spell circle that occupied most of the room started glowing on the floor as she dynamically cast the snowstorm. Immediately, the temperature in the cavern dropped to below freezing, and the water that the spell had captured was now released as a howling blizzard that wrapped itself around the slime. Then, nothing happened, and continued to not happen as the storm raged on.

Inside her mind, Core Process was screaming at Auxiliary Process 3, which was desperately working to come up with the proper parameters for the complex spatial manipulation spell that was the final piece of the puzzle for the plan. It asked Auxiliary Processes 1 and 2 for help with the final calculations, and in the murky slowed time that came from the frantic perception boost that was being applied, the spell started to take shape within Lyrei’s grasp. Space began to twist around the slowed and restrained slime, the jaws of the trap moving to snap shut, appearing so slow to Lyrei’s perception.

Then the world spun as, despite all of her protection spells, something slammed into her back, causing her to tumble to the ground, letting all her spells evaporate in an instant. Time snapped back to normal for the elf, and she felt the heavy form lying on top of her. She turned her head to see one of the elven soldiers who had apparently tackled her to the cavern floor. The idiot was already climbing off of her and standing up, and she was about to get up too to give this monumental moron the tongue lashing of a lifetime, when a giant shard of ice pierced the elf in... too many places to count. This wasn’t a targeted attack either, she realized, as when she turned back to look at the slime, it had used a combination of its own body and the ice that had been forming on it to emulate a deadly, frigid porcupine, lances passing less than a hand’s width above her own body. Her protection spells would have easily classified that as an attack from an enemy and protected her accordingly, but this was far too close to comfort, even for her. Already the ice shards were cracking and falling down, shattering all around the being as it undid whatever it had done to cause it to happen in the first place.

Lyrei strengthened her defensive spells and started to try and crawl away, hoping that she might be able to get to her feet. She really wanted to get away from this creature and berate someone for interrupting her while she had nearly captured the slime. As she stumbled to her feet as she was several feet away from where she’d seen the slime last, a shout from one of the elves made her turn her head to look back at the slime right behind her. Her perception of time ramped up, and her mind split into all processes as she watched, horrified at the rate the slime was apparently approaching.

Slimes shouldn’t have been able to move at that rate, normal slimes at least. It was frighteningly clear that this was no ordinary slime, and she never should have treated it as though it was. In the corner of her vision, she noticed that it wasn’t moving, it was expanding. She… didn’t understand why this was happening, but it was clear that this was how it had concealed all the thaumic energy it had absorbed. A part of her hoped that her defensive spells would protect her from this advancing onslaught, but she realized with growing terror that even if they were able to recognize the threat, she wasn’t confident that they’d be able to stop what had become a wall of glowing slime. Could she cast some sort of spell to stop this fate from overtaking her? An Ice spell might be able to stop the advance of the slime, but there was so much of it that she couldn’t guarantee that anything less than the area of effect spell she’d cast earlier would do more than delay the inevitable by a few moments. Would a teleport spell work? Maybe in conjunction with the ice spell… would it buy her enough time to cast the spell and escape? She didn’t have time to deliberate further… this was the chance she was going to take. Two Processes worked on gathering entrance and exit coordinates, while avoiding dumping her in a wall. And One process worked on prepping as many smaller ice spells as it could manage, feeding each one to the Core Process as soon as possible.

Ice spell after ice spell slammed into the writhing, advancing mass of gelid material, thickening it and freezing on impact. It wasn’t enough, it never would be, but it was helping. Little flicks of her wrist spread the impact points out, giving her a better shield against the onslaught. Suddenly, the two Processes that had been working on the teleport spell fed it to the Core Process, and thaumic energy started to flood the mental spell construct. In that instant, the layers of ice she had been forming to shield herself from the slime shattered as the creature came in from all sides and crushed the barrier within crystallized masses of its own body. Before her eyes, the wave overtook and engulfed her as her teleport spell went off.

~<(0)>~

The captain of the elven soldiers cursed as he and his men ran through the tunnels after that crazy bitch. Damn spoiled princess was what she was. Everything had been going fine until her noisy little devices had started going off one by one. She’d fiddled with them a bit before grabbing a few things and rushing outside the perimeter he’d set up for the watch. He had barely any time to start waking up others in the expedition before she was fully out of sight. While he was more than willing to let that crazy bitch die somewhere in this underground labyrinth if that’s what she so desired, she was apparently supposed to be a good portion of the magical power for the team and so letting her die, or worse… vanish for Goddess knew how long, would be a decidedly bad decision, one that would surely get him demoted if he chose to make it.

Now he grumbled as the only partially awake expedition team followed behind him and one of the Leyline Management Team members who was apparently using some sort of device on the Sorceress’ staff to track her current whereabouts. This was honestly the only way they would have had a chance in hell of following the insane woman, as there was absolutely no other trace she’d left behind that the captain could tell. All the damn caverns and tunnels in this accursed place looked the same. Water, lichen, mold and mushrooms, stalag-whatevers on the roof and floor. He was going to tear that bitch a new one when he caught up to her. At this rate, they’d never find the way back, and would likely have to teleport out. They were going to at best, delay the mission, and at worst, fail it completely all because ‘Miss High and Mighty all-powerful Lady Araphine’ had decided that her own goals were superior to those of… well… the entire expedition team.

They passed around a bend in one of the various nondescript tunnels and he caught sight of her. His vision narrowed in on the Sorceress, who ironically seemed to be having trouble with a large slime specimen. She should have just let the appropriate team members take care of the problem from the start, if he’d been there from the beginning this damn slime would be dead by now. Enough was enough. He ran full tilt towards her, slamming the bitch to the ground to restrain her.

But, as he was struggling to get a good grip on her, the leader of the expedition, the Head Monitor of the Leyline Management Team shouted at him and told him to stand down. Bewildered and confused, both wanting to follow his orders as well as take control of the situation and get the problem solved ASAP, he half rose to give several reasons why he should continue doing what he was doing, to his acting superior. The next moment, all he knew was pain, and then blissful nothingness as ice perforated his body, killing him instantly.

~<(0)>~

To say that the Head Monitor, Aleon Perdan was pissed was an understatement. He’d been woken up rather suddenly by a frantic and angry captain partway through the night to explain that, for whatever reason, Lady Araphine had run off into the darkness. One of his subordinates was, thankfully, able to notice that she’d left her staff behind in her haste and was able to get an object bond trace spell running on it, so they could trace her movements through the cave system. It was only a direction in three-dimensional space, but it was far better than moving blind in search of her. He trusted that Her Ladyship would be okay… her reputation wasn’t for show after all. He was perfectly aware that even if he said something to her, she’d brush him off as being beneath him, or something to that effect. She was incredibly antisocial and grated on most people’s nerves from how she acted and treated other people she didn’t see as her equals when it came to intellect, which was basically everyone.

He ran around the corner and skidded to a stop, momentarily stunned at what he was looking at. Right next to him, the team member that had jury rigged the tracking solution was staring agape at the same sight too. On one side of the room was a massive glowing slime that would have drawn most of his attention had it not been for the other spectacle in the room. That STUPID elven captain had tackled the Lady to the ground and looked like he was going to attempt to restrain her. If he kept it up, he was likely going to end up with his arms blown off, which would just bring even more annoyance to the Expedition leader, AKA him, the Head Monitor of the Leyline Management Team.

The words had just left his mouth, telling that idiot to get off the immensely powerful sorceress for what he hoped were obvious reasons, when he realized that the slime was moving. He hadn’t given it much thought, until now at least, and he wasn’t sure what it was doing until it was much too late to even attempt to warn either of the two elves closest to it. The whole slime seemed to expand like a porcupine, lances of ice spearing outward, supported and partially formed by its own body. The elven captain was dead before he even was able to hit the floor, which happened moments later as the slime supporting the ice spikes retracted into the whole of the creature. Lady Araphine seemed miraculously unharmed, seemingly due to the fact she had still been on the floor when the slime had attacked. He was about to order the mages under his command to subdue and destroy the slime so they could get Lyrei Araphine to safety, when it started moving towards the group with great speed. After a heartbeat, he realized he’d been dreadfully mistaken. It wasn’t moving, it was expanding, and at a rate he could hardly comprehend. He shouted and pointed, frantically waving to try and get Lyrei’s attention. She seemed to understand and turned, firing ice spell after ice spell at the monster as it doubled, then tripled in size, continuing to grow even more with each passing moment. Her spells seemed to be doing the trick, as the ice hampered the monster’s growth in the area immediately closest to her. He had no idea what she was going to do beyond that, as it was obvious this was only a temporary solution. He cursed himself and raised his own hand to start casting offensive spells at the slime monster. All in a moment, the ice that had been Lyrei’s defense up to this point shattered, destroyed by some new attack from the slime, and to the horror of the Aleon, she vanished into the depths of this horrid being. Then… with a twist of space time, the entire creature vanished, Lady Araphine and all.

The entity had kept moving, working to its next discovery, and ever more mass to add to its body. It had left a smaller tunnel behind and was working its way slowly into a larger cavern. It was eager to find new things to absorb and learn from, as each new being it absorbed meant a chance to understand more about the world it was in, and itself. It was in the process of absorbing some of the non-moving living objects that were clustered to the side of the room when it realized the outside of its mass was becoming harder to control, thickening and approaching hard ordered state very quickly. It was confused, as it hadn’t used this ability on any of the liquid that seemed to be everywhere around it for some time now, it didn’t understand how this side effect could be happening, unless somehow some other living being was causing this to it. It was quickly becoming more of a problem, however, as the state was reaching further into its mass, making it impossible to move within the room, and making it difficult to even move the soft disordered material within this hardening shell of itself.

Somehow, this was worse than the thought of being diluted to the point of uselessness at the bottom of that great pool of liquid. It frantically tried to push against the hardened shell of its body, slamming its own inner mass against it again and again. It wasn’t sure if this was even working, but it had to hope that it would. It had survived ending once before, and it would do so again here. It attempted something new, hoping a sharper point would be able to break through whatever barrier had been formed of and on its body. Countless points, as thin as it could make them without losing their strength, slammed against the hard ordered barrier, and to the entity’s surprise and great joy, pushed through, causing the shell to completely shatter. In the moment after this had happened, the entity could feel its body spread out in a bizarre fashion, long parts of itself stretched thin from the momentum of the force it had put into breaking the shell. It slowly retracted these parts back into the whole of its mass, rotating its interior mass so that it could undo the thickened state that had been brought about by being in that hard ordered state.

It didn’t understand what had attempted to convert it into a hard ordered state, but it really didn’t like the idea. It wasn’t enough that this effect had stopped…. The entity wanted to make sure it wasn’t going to happen again. It didn’t know where this effect had originated from, however, so to this end it started pulling mass from its core and rapidly expanding to fill the room. So quickly, the entity felt a part of its outer mass start to thicken from similar effects to what it had just endured, though it was far more concentrated to a specific, small area on its body. However, it seemed that despite the localized area, it was also happening quicker in this specific spot. It attempted to wrap its own body around this portion to overrun it and allow the hard ordered state to undo itself naturally, but it seemed that as it tried, this effect spread almost instantly to the part of it that it was using to pull the hard ordered portion inside itself.

The rest of its body was expanding properly, nothing was slowing its advance, so it shouldn’t have been worrying about anything. However, it was clear to the entity that whatever was causing this state, and likely what had caused the previous state that had nearly claimed it by taking it by surprise, was in the path of its own body, almost certainly in the path of the portion that it was trying to return to its natural soft disordered state. Well, if this mysterious assailant wanted to use hard ordered material against it, the entity was more than willing to use hard ordered material to achieve its goal of finding what had attacked it. It formed two opposing sets of consuming parts out of the original hard ordered material it had found and brought them together, shattering the blockage, allowing the force of its expansion to push the part that had lagged behind forward so that it matched with the rest of its body.

The entity was vaguely aware that it had pulled a couple of things into its mass as it had expanded, and since the assault on its body had ceased, it was about to take the time to examine both of them. Then… the world became WRONG. Something had completely shifted, and the entity found itself falling into a great pool of liquid once again. Having an understanding of what would happen if it stayed where it was due to its previous experience, the entity made its way to the surface of the liquid and started forming a platform of hard ordered material to float at the top immediately. It realized now the irony that what had previously attempted to cause its end, was saving it from its end now, as it had the first time it had entered a great pool of liquid. Now that the rush it had experienced up to this point was no longer a factor, it started to examine the two beings it had absorbed into its mass.

It realized immediately that they were both similar, but different in two very particular ways. One was unmoving, and leaking a great deal of liquid, which the entity assumed was poison until it started examining the liquid closer. This appeared to be some vital substance for the living being to remain functional. It realized that, with this much outside of its body, perhaps that explained why it was not moving. Was this what it meant to reach the end? Did it mean to be unmoving and unresponsive to anything? The entity did not know. As it absorbed the unmoving being, it quickly realized that it did not have any information to share aside from the construction of its body. It wondered if this being didn’t have any information of this sort to share in the first place, or if possibly the state that it was in had taken away its ability to contain such information. The entity did not know the answer to this and decided to examine the remaining being in greater detail.

Like the previous moving living beings, this one was thrashing around, likely in an attempt to escape its grasp. It also seemed to be attempting to turn parts of the entity into a hard-ordered material, though this had next to no effect on the entity whatsoever. It did make the entity wonder if it had been the one to use these strange attacks on it before the world had gone completely wrong and its location had suddenly changed. This being, unlike the other, was not leaking this important liquid, and didn’t have as many irregular holes through its body. As interesting as this all was, the entity wasn’t sure there was anything more that this being could teach it by examination alone, so it started to absorb the second of the two beings into its mass properly.