NOVEL NEXT Circle of Life
Ant Defeated!
XP Gained: +0.00003
Ant Defeated!
XP Gained: +0.00005
Ant Defeated!
XP Gained: +0.00003
Death. Famine. War.
These were three members of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Cas had studied them once, and she noticed rather quickly that the fourth horseman was perhaps the most out of place.
For, you see, Conquest had another name: Glory.
Ant Defeated!
XP Gained: +0.00004
Ant Defeated!
XP Gained: +0.00002
Glory.
Quite an attractive thought, no? Unlike the other three, the name seduced the listener into thinking of their own ambition, for everyone considered their own petty victories when they heard that name, but few dared to imagine the obvious: what did the face of Conquest look like, when civilization crumbled down to its bedrock?
Well, after ten thousand years of human ignorance on the matter, Cas alone had the answer; and she was surprised to discover that it looked like her!
"Mwahahahahaha!"
Lacking a mouth, she had to imagine herself laughing, and man did she imagine herself having an awesome voice, as her shadow fell over the fortress,.
The ants had nestled their colony into the cranny of a wall, but, oh, how their desperate machinations to save themselves failed against the face of Conquest!
"Mercy? You ask?" Cas goaded bitterly, flattening her body through the entrance. "You dare to ask for leniency? Where was mercy when I was under your heel!?"
Like a flood of rage, she squeezed her body into the colony, flowing into every nook and cranny of the maze-like passageways, turning into a fractal as the colony tunnels formed her body into an alien figure. And in each of those tunnels, there were ants, and larvae, and dead insects and seeds, and Cas washed over all of it like a tsunami.
+50 Ants Defeated!
XP Gained: +0.0019
+50 Ants Defeated!
XP Gained: +0.0026
+50 Ants Defeated!
XP Gained: +0.0011
The sheer violence that ensued was mutual. Cas eating the ants, and the ants spraying and stinging her with a caustic solution.
[Immunity Activation] A screen came.
[Acid damage negated due to inherent immunity.]
'That was new.' Cas turned her crystal to the new screen. Pausing for a moment, she reflected on the deeper meaning of this – that she could really go at 'em with impunity, now!
+29 Ants Defeated!
XP Gained: +0.0009
Still, despite the new immunity, Cas realized that restraint was the hallmark of the wise. She drew back before breaching the brood chambers. It wouldn't do to damage her future food supply. Drawing back, she slipped out of the colony with a dramatic flourish, looking down upon her defeated foe with a level of superiority she'd only seen in Godzilla movies.
Granted, the fact that she was shimmying along at a literal snail's pace did a lot to destroy the drama of the scene, but that hardly stopped her from making a speech.
"Fools!" she boomed with a powerful, thunderous voice that only existed in her head. "You dared to attack a god, and even now, as you pay the price, you stand ignorant before me!" Spinning her crystal eye with flourish, she moved it to gesture at the destroyed mud-crumbs that remained of the colony's entrance. "Take this as a lesson from your new master!" she declared. "Stamp it into hearts of your descendants and the graves of your compatriots! You have insulted the great goddess Cas! The water empress! And she has spared you a worse fate than you deserve. For this… insolence" she hissed the word with particular venom, "your precious queen will have to pay a blood sacrifice of five hundred ants every summer! So it has been decreed!"
Cas cackled with silent glee.
Oh, how evil! How malicious!
She could imagine the queen crying in her brood chambers at this very instant, as her children were torn away from her to be sacrificed. "Mwahahahahaha!"
The ants… kept scrambling around, already back to the business of rebuilding their nest.
Cas sighed…
Life as a slime was... really boring.
Formatting an excel sheet was the mark of a the modern Sisyphus. Putting pretty colors onto a spreadsheet of all things was, not only a complete waste of time, but also a sign that your time didn't matter.
It was work for the interns! For the lab assitants! For the business majors! It was work for sad, sad people with nothing better to do in their life.
Speaking of, Cas had spent every hour of the past few months formatting her Excel sheet, making it beautiful, worthy.
Level Up!
*Level 2 Achieved*
New Skill: Partial Hardening.
Cas, a biologist at heart, was keen to see everything in terms of natural phenomena. So, of course she found it strange when corporate software popped out of nowhere and told her she had the charisma of a dead fish.
Really? Charisma 4? Her?
Sending a mental glare at the score, she panned her eye across the faint border of the status sheet. It appeared whenever she wanted it, and the information displayed was always consistent, but otherwise, it was a mirage. None of the other creatures in this cave reacted to it, anyway. Still, the status screen, she decided, was probably real to an extent. IReal like a dream, maybe, but real as such.
After all – if creatures inhabited a universe that gave them information about themselves – why wouldn't they evolve the ability to read that interaction somehow?
'Know yourself' and never lose a thousand battles, and all that.
There were two other sheets on the status screen. One labeled 'inventory', the other: 'notes'.
The inventory was a vast and empty. plane of cells It made a note whenever she swallowed a rock ,or anything else indigestible, but otherwise she found no use for it.
The notes, on the other hand, well they were a girl's best friend, if that girl happened to be a naturalist.
Already, she had turned the formerly blank space into a miniature encyclopedia, and one so perfectly formatted it would leave you squealing in amazement!
...
The section on plants was colored green, and it was a short one. The only thing of note was that the 'grass' wasn't actually grass. She may not have been a botanist, but she was familiar enough with plant taxonomy to know that grasses possessed covered seeds and a root system. These 'grasses' had none of that. They were a mess of features from all over the plant kingdom.
In fact, none of the plants in this cave were from Earth!
It wasn't a surprising revelation, but at least it confirmed that no Planet of the Apes, 'it was Earth all along' shenanigans were about to happen. She hated twists like that!
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The animals were just as strange. Their forms converged on Earth insects, but there was always some small and important detail that revealed them to be aliens. The 'ants' had eight legs, the 'flies' didn't have larvae, and the 'beetles' didn't have wings. And, Cas loved it! So many new species! So much avenue for new study! And in just such a small cave, too!
This had been a major bulwark to her sanity. Keeping busy was always her way of calming her mind down, but as a Slime -- a creature that spent its days crawling around a dark cave and staring at an Excel sheet, the opportunities to keep busy in the real world were few. In her notes, on the other hand, she was an explorer! She was a human again, and had a life worth living -- she'd made connections, too.
It moved her, for instance, when her friend Marissa hatched a brood.
Time flies when you're tracking the life cycle of an alien bug, and the past month had zipped by as she traced the progression of Marissa's nest.
Cas crawled along the ceiling of the cave, going to that special, stone outcropping where Marissa had laid out her eggs. There, Cas was happy to discover she'd arrived just in time, observing as - with miniature effort - the little 'flies' kicked their way out of the small, brown eggs and shook their wings with anticipation.
Cas opened her notes, updating with the latest section on the bugs.
[
Notes
Ecosystem
Animals
Tiger flies
- Mother died one week before hatchlings emerged. Whether a fluke or design of the species requires further study. ]
The little flies seemed unbothered by the lack of supervision, and – after warming up in the morning sun over the course of the hour – one by one, all of them flew away -- except one.
One fly remained on the outcropping. It was small, and born with deformed wings.
It crawled around the edge of the outcropping, looking up at the last of its brethren as they disappeared beyond the limit of its vision.
Cas observed as the fly crawled around its little world, pacing from one edge on the stone platform to another, pausing at the precipice and feeling an instinct to do something its body wasn't capable of.
This continued for three hours, the fly growing steadily weaker and weaker until, in its final hour, it lay down and stopped moving.
[
- Young hatched simultaneously in morning time. Require food within three hours of birth. Little parental care expected.
]
Cas closed her notes. She was tired of watching bugs for today. Besides, something about that pacing fly inspired her to venture outside the cave.
The cave was a barren hole carved into the side of a Greystone slab, a damp, dark crack barely large enough to fit a car. Still, it was a haven compared to the outside.
Outside of the cave, the environment quickly turned inhospitable. The air was dry and baking, and soft dirt transitioned to shifting sands. Cas flattened herself out as she rode over the new terrain.
"SCREE, SCREE!"
She wasn't alone. Sharon and Tara were out here, too, and they were at it again.
"SCREE!"
Sharon and Tara, named after the most annoying of her college roommates, were slimes just like her. And just now they were, commencing their eternal blood feud.
Scree! Sharon rushed forward like a snail, rudely bumping into her opponent with a jiggle.
SCREEEEE!
Tara clapped back, executing a devastating body slam with all the force of a pillow fight.
Cas wasn't sure why they bothered; slimes – as she'd discovered – were far more durable than they were strong.
Which- well. Of course they weren't strong. They had no limbs, no muscles, no organs- nothing! The only Ace slimes had was their ability to change shape.
Shape change was a hell of a card, however. Everything about slimes revolved around this one trick. They ate by changing their shape to engulf prey, they moved by changing the shape of their underside in a wave motion, and they made sounds by...
How were they making sounds, actually? It was an important question. Cas wanted a voice, too, even if all it'd be capable of was incoherent screeches. She'd tried to shift her own body around, create pockets for air, anything to mimic them- but it didn't work. Her body just collapsed in on itself. There was no structural stability to jello, it turned out.
Screeeeeeeeeeeeee!
Tara, catching up, slammed against Sharon once more and Cas – invested in the sudden change of fortunes – paid attention like she had money on the fight. Her attention revealed something.
There was a dark band on the surface of Sharon, where the light refracted strangely.
Tara slammed into Sharon, and the slime's interior jelly compressed, but the exterior band stayed firm.
That… reminded Cas of something.
Calling up her status screen, she pulled up her newest skill.
[Partial Hardening: Level 1]
[Gain the ability to partially harden your form.]
The description, as always, was unhelpful beyond measure, but – looking at Sharon – Cas had been given some wonderful ideas.
Focusing on a spot inside of her, she directed her effort and… 'clenched her fists' was perhaps the worst way of describing what she did, but that was how it felt as she hardened the region.
A small sphere of densified jelly appeared inside of her.
She relaxed, and it dissolved.
She focused, and it appeared again.
She looked left, and it moved left, sending tickling sensations through her figure. She looked right and it moved right.
Curiously, she tried to harden and soften it at the same time, and a soft, high pitched, 'squee!' emitted from the sphere.
It was a small, insignificant sound. But… it was the first sound she'd made since she'd gotten here! The first sound she'd controlled that was outside of her own head.
Cas was entranced.
She moved the ball in circles, loopty-loops and swirls. She dissolved it, remade it, reshaped it into a thousand different figures of her imagination, and she paid it all the careful attention she'd previously lavished on insects and moss.
She'd learned quite a lot.
There was a limited amount of the 'hard jelly' she could make.
[
Notes
Skills
Hardening
- Hardening seems to require the use of some limited resource. Perhaps trace mineral intake?]
As a result, 'hardening' one part of her required softening… everything else. Creating hardened jelly the size of a softball transformed the rest of her from Jello to Hand Sanitizer.
This was fixable. Hardening her outer surface allowed the 'armor' to make up for the softness of her insides. Still, the hardened jelly was still… jelly. It barely had the consistency of clay when she focused her heart into it.
But armor wasn't why Cas was so excited about this discovery. There was something else that had caught her imagination.
Cas – trying to avoid overthinking the practicality of her idea – simply tried it.
Using [Shape Change] to pull herself apart, Cas swallowed air and trapped it inside her center. The air-pocket floated up through her body, trying to escape.
Cutting it off, she created a shell of hardened jelly that held it in place.
She hardened a tube, and several intricate pieces formed themselves, self constructing more from feeling than imagination. Her eye followed the process, watching as complex vocal chords and floating supports assembled themselves. The trachea extended, a sharp tongue flopped into existence and licked out against the well formed lips.
It was a horrifying sight at the end. The mass of air pockets and complex anatomy she had developed within herself left her half blind, forcing her eye to peek around a twisted thrush of internal anatomy just to see the outside world.
Scree Scree!
In the din of the background, she could hear Sharon and Tara screeching.
"Heh," she let out a short laugh, imagining they were celebrating her accomplishment. She then paused in shock. She'd actually laughed! She'd actually made that noise! It even sounded kind of human. But it was a simple sound; did she dare to believe she could speak?
She looked at the pocket of air she'd formed inside of herself, and she tightened it, pressurizing it.
Scree! Scree! Tara screamed, making way towards the cave entrance. Sharon huffily followed behind her.
Cas thought of what to say on such a momentous occasion. What would be an appropriate first word for a being such as her?
"Let there be light?" Hmmm… too humble, maybe.
"Call me Cas?" Not literary enough.
No, no, it had to be something appropriate for a genius like her! Something she could have those ants chisel into stone tablets once they accepted her as their god!
It was possible that Cas had quite a high opinion of herself. Perhaps it was because of this unwavering confidence that she completely ignored the scree-ing slimes as they raced into the cave. Maybe it was this sense of invincibility that allowed Cas to ignore the darting shadow that flew across the sand dunes in a predatory motion.
And it was definitely because of this that Cas never revealed her first words on this world had been, with reluctant acceptance:
"Ohhhhhhh, I'm an idiot," when, at last, she noticed the streaking missile of flashing fangs diving onto her.