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[i]Disorienting.[/i] That was the only word Petra could think of to describe the sudden influx of alien sensations she was experiencing. Actually, that wasn’t quite true; disconcerting also worked… and so did overwhelming or jarring… Okay, so maybe she could think of quite a few words to describe what she was experiencing, but regardless, most of them were bad and more importantly, it wasn’t something she was even remotely prepared or able to deal with quite yet. 

Forcing her attention inwards Petra managed to find some small measure of reprieve from her senses by focusing instead on her recollection of the past few minutes. A lot had happened in that time – much of which she wouldn't have considered possible just a few hours beforehand – and Petra wanted to make sure she remembered it all, desperately willing her hippocampus to permanently burn every last detail into her long-term memory. 

She recalled an ambulance ride – the product of her own stupidity – and then she’d been hit by a truck in an accident that had definitely resulted in her death. Except somehow she’d survived… or rather she didn’t? [i]Nondead? Un-died? Pseudo-killed?[/i] Petra struggled to find words to properly describe an event so thoroughly incongruous with her prior perceptions of how reality was supposed to function. Was this what those people who got annoyed when she tried to teach them something new felt like?

Right, she was getting distracted…

After she “died” she’d ended up having some sort of out-of-body experience, one in which time was apparently frozen and she could somehow move through walls. She’d been able to confirm the nature of her death during the time stop, literally seen the wreckage and her own mangled corpse within – well at least what bits of it were recognisably her amongst those of the paramedics that’d been trying to help her. Petra tried not to think about that last part. 

She’d have liked to have exploited the out-of-body state some more – just thinking about all the things she could have potentially learned like that if only she’d had the time to explore left her feeling a profound sense of regret – but for some reason, the moment a disembodied voice spoke into her mind and commanded her to step through a portal, she’d complied without even thinking about it. 

There had been two other women on the other side of the portal – supposedly an assassin and some manner of manipulator from what she’d been able to gather, both having also died recently from the sounds of things – not to mention the apparent cause of all the seemingly supernatural occurrences, a man seemingly pulled straight off the set of some kind of fantasy film, who could apparently in addition to the telepathy, mental compulsion, time stopping, and portals, create floating manifestations of people’s memories. In hindsight, the whole memory-viewing thing seemed like a pretty massive invasion of privacy, and it was probably for the best that Petra had at the time been more interested in observing the effect itself rather than analysing the contents of the memories themselves.

Perhaps more important than the apparent magic the fantasy man could perform, however, were the things he said. Apparently, they’d all been reborn in a world called Vecta, his world he’d referred to it a couple of times – Petra supposed the implication was that he was a god then, though he’d said something about his time in this plane being limited and had needed to physically view their memories, which didn’t exactly suggest any kind of omniscience or omnipotence, so at least he probably wasn’t a god in the Abrahamic sense. Or maybe he was just saying he was from a civilization capable of terraforming planets? Either way that was probably good information to have.

He’d also mentioned things like dragons, goblin tunnels, and races with insatiable hunger, which along with the several demonstrations of magic, pretty clearly pointed towards Vecta being a world with supernatural elements. No wait; fantasy elements not supernatural. Supernatural would imply that it was something fundamentally incapable of being understood, and magic or no, Petra refused to believe that anything could both exist and simultaneously be impossible to understand. 

On the other hand, magic potentially existing was a pretty exciting thought actually! Petra had hardly even begun to scratch the surface of the knowledge science had to offer back on Earth and had certainly never had even the slightest hope of being able to learn everything there was to learn there, but with magic on the table perhaps it would be all that farfetched to grant herself infinite time with which to learn? Did magic have to obey entropy? Actually, now that she thought about it, Petra had already seen firsthand that magic could be used to read memories, would it be possible for her to find a way to learn everything from everyone forever!?

Hmm… that last one might be a little ethically dubious and, in any case, she was getting side-tracked again.

What else had been said? The [i]possibly[/i] a god had mentioned something to the assassin about going to a place, though Petra couldn’t recall what he’d called it. And… Oh right! There had also been that other disembodied voice that spoke about scanning her soul and unlocking skills, that was probably important, even if Petra didn’t really understand what any of it meant. 

Perhaps she’d have known more if the fantasy man hadn’t refused to answer Petra’s questions, saying something about all being revealed “soon enough”, which considering she still didn’t have any answers, had clearly been a massive fucking lie – not that she was surprised, vague statements like that always seemed to more or less translate to “shut up, you’re annoying” rather than ever actually being a promise for answers. Petra decided she didn’t like the fantasy man very much…

Having gone over her memories of the recent past, Petra was left with one obvious conclusion; none of this was real. It was in all likelihood some kind of hallucination brought on by traumatic brain injury or near-death experience. As far as medicine was concerned, out-of-body experiences had never turned out to be anything but hallucinations, and had she really seen anything that her mind wasn’t capable of making up? Hell, perhaps the ambulance bit never happened at all and was purely a fabrication of her mind – the result of her hitting her head too hard when she fell out that window. What were the chances of an ambulance getting into a crash that severe after all? 

If the question was which made more sense between the existence of magic that casually defied Petra’s understanding of both biology and physics or all of it being the result of a hallucination, then Occam’s razor pointed pretty clearly to the latter being true. Except, maybe that wasn’t the question she should be asking… Petra could accept that her current perceptions probably weren’t rooted in reality, but at the same time, fundamentally the only things she could possibly act on were her perceptions. That being the case, would acting as though her experiences were real not be the most sensible course of action? 

Having resolved herself towards a particular course of action Petra finally turned her attention back outwards towards the daunting task of making sense of her senses. Thankfully, she found that in the time she’d spent thinking, she’d already managed to adjust somewhat to the foreign sensations. While they still felt uncanny and wholly off-putting to her human mind, at least now the experience wasn’t overwhelming to the point of distress. In fact, now that she could properly get a feel for her new senses, Petra found growing more and more fascinated by the second. 

Usually, when someone thought of senses, it was the five main senses they thought of; sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. Someone more familiar with the senses or who thought about it a little more might add on some of the more obscure ones, things like balance, temperature, proprioception, or hunger. Humans actually, had a whole lot of senses with which to interpret the world, some more obvious or developed than others. Petra’s new body by contrast had only a few senses but made up for it by having those it did possess be far more developed and multifaceted than anything she’d had as a human. 

Petra no longer possessed a sense of touch or hearing, but instead, had a sense of proprioception so refined that she could [i]“hear”[/i] and [i]“feel”[/i] just by the way the way her environment distorted her body. Her senses of temperature, gravity, and moisture were also somehow rolled into this proprioception, her mind somehow intuitively interpreting the subtle changes to her shape brought about by these factors. 

The roles of smell and taste had similarly been replaced, merged into a single new form of chemoreception, one spread along and throughout Petra’s entire body. Some part of Petra felt the fact that she could constantly taste the ground, air, and even her own body should probably have been at least a little disconcerting to her though thankfully, there was enough of a disconnect between how a human experienced these things and how she was now, enough that she was more or less able to just avoid thinking about it. 

Perhaps the most notable of all her senses however was the one that doubled for sight. The strange sense had fed Petra nothing but incomprehensible information right up until the point she’d first tried focusing on it, then as if by some miracle, the information had resolved into something that not just fulfilled the function of sight but which was literally experienced as sight. Admittedly, the mechanics behind this sight clearly weren’t even remotely close to how human sight worked – Petra was pretty certain it wasn’t even light-based – but regardless, even the little familiarity gave her something to latch onto. 

Through this [i]“sight”[/i] Petra could perceive countless particles moving throughout her surroundings, tiny motes of impossible colour that upon contact with Petra’s body fed her a wealth of information on the path they’d travelled, creating a sort of 3D map of her surroundings. 

As Petra observed, new particles seemed to constantly pop into or fade out of existence, seemingly at random – or at least in response to stimulus beyond Petra’s ability to perceive. It took Petra a bit to realise what the particles probably were; at first, she’d thought she might be observing radioactive decay or something along those lines – though the behaviour and speeds seemed wrong for that and it wouldn’t have explained how the particles could seemingly collect information on their path travelled – then Petra remembered one of the things the second voice had said. [i]Magic Sense[/i]. She was probably seeing magic. What she’d give to see some of the tricks the fantasy man had pulled now that she could see like this. 

Thankfully, the magic particles were numerous enough and moved fast enough that Petra was able to receive essentially constant updates to her [i]visual field[/i], enough that she could more or less [i]see[/i] in real-time, at least out to a certain range, though the further away she looked the spottier her vision became, with patches that hadn’t been updated in a while or else which she hadn’t observed in the first place becoming more and more common the further out she tried to look, by simple nature of probability.

That brought Petra to the elephant in the room. Her body, or perhaps, her lack thereof. Now that she actually bothered to focus on it, as far as Petra could tell, she was more or less shaped like a smallish puddle on the ground. 

Was she some kind of terrestrial cnidaria? A giant amoeba? A slime mould? No wonder her senses were all so weird, she wasn’t a mammal or even a vertebrate at all, hell, even being an arthropod would almost certainly be closer to human than whatever it was she was. So far as she could tell she was firmly on the opposite side of the animal kingdom from anything even close to resembling a primate, and that was assuming she was actually an animal at all and not a sapient algae or something like that.

Right. Freaking out wasn’t going to help her right now. She needed to calm down and figure out what she could, and from there she could work out a plan. Her first priority should probably be to figure out if and how she could move, and after that, what kinds of things this body could eat – while Petra didn’t feel hunger in the human sense anymore, what she could sense indicated that whatever she was, not actively eating something wasn’t something her new species was meant to do for any extended period, and she’d already burned through a lot of her energy just sitting there thinking. 

Moving first. Petra was almost certain that whatever kind of creature it was she was it could move. The rate at which it got hungry and the acuity of its senses wouldn’t make a lot of sense for an immobile creature. That still left the question of how to move? Clearly, it wasn’t anywhere near as intuitive as moving as a human had been, and focusing on parts of her body and simply willing them to move with all her might failed to make it so much as twitch. 

After who knows how long of frustratingly fruitless efforts, Petra finally managed to achieve something; a pseudopod stretching itself out as far as her body would allow, then straining to reach further still. As with seemingly every other aspect of this new body, moving was weird. 

Rather than her body simply following her will in an intuitive manner as it had when she’d been human, Petra’s new form operated in a manner that more or less couldn’t be directly controlled. In short, Petra’s body could only act reflexively in response to various stimuli. The one small mercy, saving Petra from being condemnation to a life spent trapped on autopilot, was that while she couldn’t control her body directly, she could create and modify the reactions it moved to with some effort – it was a frustratingly finicky process and she didn’t have any such reactions to begin with so she’d have to build them from the ground up, but it was something. 

Petra’s first success at moving was in using a pseudopod to drag herself along the ground, though this method was hard to control and agonizingly slow. Her next attempt involved forming numerous tiny projections beneath her body and “crawling” on them, which was admittedly faster, but coordinating the projections proved beyond Petra’s skill level, so the movement was more or less random. She had an idea for forming herself into a ball and rotating her interior – [i]Cytoplasm? Mesoglea? Something else?[/i] – to roll around the place, but unfortunately getting her body to properly form into a sphere and more importantly to stay as a sphere while rolling, was a far more complex puzzle than she’d initially expected. Rippling her body like the foot of a snail similarly proved too complex for Petra to crack in any reasonable period. Petra would have liked to spend the time to crack all of these methods, but she simply didn’t have the time.

Finally, Petra found success in a variation of amoeboid movement – which in hindsight, probably should have been the first thing she tried given her body plan. By extending a pair of pseudopods in the direction she wanted to travel, Petra was then able to slide her body mass along the pseudopods like rails, reabsorbing them into her central mass as she went. With some tweaking, Petra was able to get the next pseudopods to form even before the previous had been entirely absorbed, allowing for almost continuous movement. It wasn’t fast by any means – probably substantially slower than the average human walking speed, though an exact frame of reference was kind of hard to gain without anything to use as a measuring stick – but it was at least fast enough, and more importantly controllable enough, that she could explore and look for food. 

That led Petra to finally observe her surroundings properly. She was pretty clearly in a cave of some sort, or more specifically a large cavern, one that had been thoroughly mapped out, in the time she’d spent thinking and figuring out how to move. Petra didn’t need light to see anymore, but nonetheless, she could tell the cavern had some amount of light filtering in through cracks in the ceiling, enough for the occasional patch of moss or lichen to grow where the light was most concentrated. Petra also spotted the odd insect scuttling around, presumably searching for food – either in the form of other bugs or the moss and lichen that presumably acted as the primary producers of this ecosystem. 

Petra set her sights on a centipede, dragging her body towards it with the intent of making it a meal. Perhaps unsurprisingly the centipede reacted to Petra’s approach by scuttling under a small patch of moss, though that was fine, she could try eating that as well. The tiny patch of moss was easily blanketed by Petra’s body and after some fiddling Petra managed to engulf the entire mass and draw it into her body. Did she need to set something up to digest it like she did to move her body or…

>> [Adsorption] activated!

Accompanied by a voice she'd already heard once before announcing the activation of one of Petra's skills, the moss simply vanished. Frustratingly, Petra couldn’t actually see the point at which the moss vanished – her interior wasn’t visible to Magic Sense any more than the inside of a wall was – but she certainly felt it, the space it had occupied only a moment earlier suddenly empty causing her mass to collapse inwards upon the newly created cavity with a wet pop. 

More importantly, when Petra tried to figure out just what had happened to the moss she was suddenly hit with a wealth of information. Well, maybe hit by wouldn’t be the best way to put it, the effect was far more subtle than that – a simple awareness of the answers to almost any question she could think of regarding the moss that had vanished, and even the centipede and other tiny invertebrates that had gotten carried along with it, subtle enough that if not for the dissonance between what Petra knew she should know and what she now knew, she doubted she’d have noticed at all – though at the rate Petra ran through questions in her mind, the difference may as well have been academic. 

Like that Petra’s priorities were flipped on their head, she’d still be looking for food of course, but suddenly the goal of simply surviving was secondary to trying to gain as much knowledge as possible as quickly as possible. Any and all anxiety as to her new life as a blob was forgotten as Petra set about trying to engulf anything and everything that she possibly could while searching for interesting things to consume.

[hider=QUEST/ACTIONS]
Quest(s): N/A
Action(s):[list][*]Eat absolutely everything that isn't nailed down.
[*]Search the cave for an exit or else interesting things to study/eat.
[*]Try to figure out where exactly she is. Could Archivist be used to pin down where the rocks and bugs Petra eats are from?[/list][/hider]
[hider=INVENTORY]
Adsorption:[list][*]Dirty Moss
[*]Assorted Bugs[/list][/hider]