Avatar of TheMushroomLord

Status

Recent Statuses

6 mos ago
Current Replace my bones with rats. I must writhe.
1 like
6 mos ago
You either die a hero or live and do something else.
1 like
7 mos ago
All fish dream of the stars.
7 mos ago
You cannot fathom my desire to install additional hinges in my bones.
1 like
7 mos ago
People are always saying that murder is bad, but you know who never gets asked? The victims. I have no idea whether murder is okay or not, but I certainly know who we should be asking about it.
2 likes

Bio

I am me... I hope.

Most Recent Posts

Petra felt no small amount of relief when the giant poking her didn’t immediately start screaming about monsters or the like upon her attempt at introducing herself, nor gave any indication that particularly sounded as though they saw her as a potential meal.

Even better, she managed to get some good information out of the giant’s response – well, maybe not quite good information, per se, but certainly useful. From the sounds of things, this world either didn’t have other talking slimes like her, or if it did, they were sufficiently rare as to make encountering one an interesting event. Extrapolating from that, Petra felt more confident in the idea that whatever she was – at least regarding her apparent intelligence – was something fundamentally different from a normal slime, which would seem to match up pretty well with her observations of her own neuroanatomy.

Unfortunately for Petra, it seemed her relief was destined to only be short-lived, and she didn’t get the opportunity to ask for any further information or clarifications, before the giant decided to perform what was quickly becoming one of her least favourite interactions, and promptly scooped her off the floor.

“Your name was <Name: Self> right? My name's <Name: Giant>! Nice to meet you!” the giant babbled as Petra scrambled to make her body pull itself into a more stable shape, lest part of her simply slough off under its own weight. Even if she wanted to answer the giant – and honestly she was more inclined to start screaming at them to please put her back down – Petra wasn’t sure she could actually do so safely; the idea of trying to form a communication pseudopod seeming like a really bad idea given how roughly the giant was handling her.

For several long seconds, Petra managed to do little more than blindly panicking, before finally pulling herself together – in both a literal and metaphorical sense. Presented with yet another challenge that her life as a human had done absolutely nothing to prepare her for, Petra once again turned to one of her few lifelines in this world, and tried to will her magic to somehow solve the issue.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, simply trying to magic away all her problems didn’t achieve a whole lot, but she did get the sense at least that her Biomancy could target the giant, which, in hindsight, she probably should have expected. Compared to observing her own biology, Petra felt as though trying to do the same for the giant’s probably felt something along the lines of trying to pass through a brick wall by pushing against it really hard – was that because she was a simpler organism or because she had a Resistance of 1… a question for when she wasn’t at immediate risk of falling apart.

Petra pushed until she finally felt something give and her awareness was flooded with the overwhelming information that described a living organism. Ignoring most of it, she quickly set about filtering out everything she didn’t need, honing in on the parts that were close to her body, then specifically the nerves, and then even more specifically the mechanosensory nerves. Could she just command them to all fire at once?

Petra hesitated. If she could manage it, it would almost certainly hurt like a motherfucker and make the giant drop her, but she didn’t exactly want to hurt the giant, who thus far didn’t seem intentionally hostile… actually for that matter, would she even be able to survive being dropped from however high up she was?

Abandoning her original plan, Petra instead zoomed out her organic sense, unfocusing it to try and get a better idea of the big picture and… oh. While Petra had realised that her improved hearing had somewhat skewed and exaggerated her sense of scale, she’d still subconsciously held onto the idea that whoever the giant was, they were big. The proportions outlined by her organic sense, however, were not that of a giant, hell, they weren’t even that of an adult.

Honestly, that explained a lot, actually. She couldn’t imagine many people being so willing to just pick up a slime, any more than most people were willing to pick up a random bug, but a child? That’d probably do it. Petra was suddenly very glad she decided not to go ahead with her initial, hurt them till they drop her plan. She’d have felt pretty awful if she had.

Still, having an explanation for what was happening didn’t do a lot to make Petra feel better about the situation – a child wasn’t anywhere near as non-threatening when they could easily crush her fragile body – and it certainly didn’t do anything to actually solve her current predicament.

For a moment, Petra considers simply hoping for the best and trying to wait out the child’s manhandling – surely they would have to put her down eventually – but then she imagined the countless alternative scenarios and quickly abandons that overly optimistic line of reason.

What were the chances that the child would stumble and drop her or squeeze her body just a little too hard before they ever got to putting her down? What were the odds the child would try to show her off to an adult, who, not knowing she was anything other than a normal slime, would freak out and kill her? Or that if and when they decided to put her down, they’d be a bit too rough and pop her like a ballon? Way too high all round.

Petra wracked her brain – or whatever magic it was that was currently doing its job – searching for a way to communicate to the child that she needed them to put her down, in a way that wouldn’t in itself risk her falling apart. If only she could use the messaging system on the child…

Had she not been freaking out, Petra probably would have felt rather stupid at that moment, and as it were, she still felt more than a little silly. Even if she couldn’t communicate with the child, that didn’t mean she couldn’t communicate at all. As if to punctuate her stupidity, Petra apparently had been the only one to forget about this function of her status screen, because apparently at some point while she’d been she’d missed a message from Down.

Contacts: "Down"
WHERE ARE YOU!? ARE YOU OKAY!?
Down

Well at least it looked like they knew she was missing, that was something at least.

Contacts: "Down"
I’m okay for now, but have big problem.
Me
Someone picked me up.
Me
Not trying to hurt me but they’re being pretty rough. Worried I might fall apart.
Me
Pretty sure he’s a child, but he might be a hobbit or something.
Me
Don’t know where they’re going. Can’t ask because I’m worried something will fall off me if I try.
Me
Please help.
Me
Neir Slums — Dilapidated Shack
@Zeroth@ERode@PKMNB0Y
As Petra waited for her magic to recover, she idly considered how exactly she was supposed to go about building herself a workable eye given the materials she had at her disposal, and thus far she was making very little progress. It wasn’t that vertebrate eyes were all that complicated, in fact, as far as organs went eyes were actually relatively simple, in her opinion. No, rather, the problem she was having was a lack of materials.

Slimes, as homogeneous as they might seem at a glance, turned out to contain a variety of different materials, which Petra would have no problem separating out with her magic… well actually, it’d probably be exhausting work, but very little problem at the very least. The issue was, that even with what she had, none of them had the material properties she needed for what she wanted to create, and getting that down was the bare minimum for her to even start on the project, let alone solve all the other countless issues that would no doubt arise in the process.

Petra felt herself growing frustrated by her inability to think her way around the problem, or do much of else in the meantime, when mercifully, she was given an excuse to drop the matter for the time being, in the form of a message from Up – or rather, from Cassius, as she had to remind herself the guy had introduced himself.

Contacts: "Cassius"
C should be speaking with Meira right now. If you have questions, send them over to him so he can ask. I am bed-bound right now, so I won't be able to pick you up. Are you still in the shack? It's night now; I'd recommend hiding somewhere because there's a possibility of someone else occupying it for shelter. Slimes aren't considered dangerous, but maybe they're considered food.

Also, what's your name?
Cassius
Cassius was bed-bound? That was worrying. Was he sick, or had he been injured? Perhaps he’d been involved in whatever scuffle Down had gotten into, or maybe if this world was as openly violent as it seemed to be, he’d been hurt in some other conflict.

In either case, Petra thought Cassius’s message seemed to calm to indicate that he’d been crippled or anything quite that bad, and she hoped she wasn’t just misreading things. Even if she still had a somewhat poor opinion of Cassius, Petra wouldn’t have wanted the guy to get hurt whatever the case, but the realisation that literally half of the people she could be taken out of the picture as easily as that had her suddenly very concerned.

By the standards of her life up until now, the idea that two people she knew might suddenly be crippled or die out of the blue seemed almost unbelievable, but now she realised, that wasn’t a standard she could in any way rely on to hold true. Actually, if anything, she could probably rely on it to not hold true. Which made her current lack of both independence and people to rely upon all the more concerning.

As for the other part of the Cassius’s message, that was perhaps even more worrying.

With any luck, people wouldn’t consider her food on account of slimes being creatures that wouldn’t hesitate to devour literal shit, but even so, the very idea that someone might try it made her more than a little nervous, and even short of being seen as a meal, Petra could very easily imagine slimes being considered a pest to be exterminated not unlike how most people see cockroaches.

Contacts: "Cassius"
Appologies. I forgot to introduce myself. I’m Petra.

If you’re sick or injured I could take a look at you and see if there’s anything I can do with my Skill. I don’t exactly have any way of making it to wherever you are right now though, so it’d probably have to wait if I did. Sorry.
Me
After firing off a quick response, Petra set about figuring out just how she was meant to get out of this shack. It wasn’t exactly like she could see where she was going, and blindly wondering out into the open would probably put her at even more of a risk of being noticed than rolling the dice on whether a random squatter decided to occupy the shack.

Actually, now that she was looking for it, Petra was suddenly very aware of the vibrations coming from outside the shack – a persistent background noise she’d thus far ignored, but one which she was suddenly very aware might be the steps of people moving about outside. Actually, scratch that, there were definitely people outside; while most of the vibrations were utterly meaningless to Petra who still hadn’t figured how to interpret the sense, with her newly enhanced hearing, Petra was able to occasionally pick up snippets of conversation magically translated into something she could make sense of.

Trying to think quickly, Petra considered hiding in the gap in the floorboards like Down had suggested, except she realised she didn’t know where exactly the hole was. She was pretty sure it was somewhere over…

Petra was still trying to figure out the exact location her designated hiding place was, when the worst possible case scenario happened, and she felt one of the sources of vibrations outside break off from the others, resolving into a more distinct vibration that seemed to draw closer my the moment, until just a couple of seconds after she noticed it, someone entered the shack.

If Petra could have, she would have probably frozen like a deer in headlights, as it was her body already happened to be stock still, so instead through the haze of her panic, Petra somehow managed to throw her movement program back together, moving as fast as she could towards the tarp beneath which she’d first arrived in this world – a hiding spot she only now remembered existed.

Of course, Petra’s efforts were in vain – even if she couldn’t see them, there was no reason to expect the newcomer wouldn’t be able to see her, not in the relatively tiny confines of the shack – and she made it all of halfway to her would be hiding spot, before in three steps the newcomer moved and cut her off.

As she cancelled her movement, Petra could only feel her panic growing. She didn’t exactly have a measuring stick by which to gauge this newcomer, but compared to how Down and Cassius had felt, it seemed as though this person must be positively gargantuan, and it was only thanks to the small part of her mind that was still capable of rational though, that Petra was able to realise that that perception was probably at least in part because of her now enhanced senses.

Before she could think up any kind of solution or even just make her piece with her inevitable death – perhaps for the second time today – Petra felt her body deform as the giant poked her with something. Then a moment later, they poked her a second time, followed shortly by a third.

For a confused moment, Petra was surprised that the pokes didn’t hurt, before she realised that she couldn’t feel pain like that anymore and concluded she was being stabbed. A second later, Petra realised she was not in fact being stabbed, and the pokes really weren’t injuring her at all, and in fact, they were almost gentle.

The sudden realisation that whoever this was, they apparently weren’t trying to kill her – at least not for the time being – caused Petra’s blind panic to die down a little – though only by a little, since there were surely all sorts of nefarious reasons one might poke at a slime – and she was able to regain some measure of order and reason to her thoughts.

Not exactly able to run and still desperately needing information, Petra once again drew on her magic to try and get some sense of what was going on. Her magic, perhaps unsurprisingly, wasn’t exactly suited to the task, but examining herself through her organic vision she quickly determined that whatever it was she was being prodded with, it was definitely organic, as with each and every poke her body peeled off a small amount of the offending object for digestion. Whatever the substance was, it was clearly a lot tougher than regular flesh, but no so tough as bone, which she’d already discovered she was hardly able to digest at all; her body only managing to pry free a few cells with each poke.

Zooming her sense in upon some of what material her own cells had managed to pull off of the object, Petra was met with the tell-tale cell walls that marked as having once been part of a plant. After a moment, Petra realised that it was probably a stick. Someone was poking her with a stick.

While it logically wasn’t any indication that this person wasn’t potentially dangerous to her – they definitely were – or even that they meant her no harm, something about the image of someone repeatedly prodding at a slime with a stick – perhaps just curious to have seen it act in ways no lesser slime normally would have – somehow felt a whole lot less threatening than all the myriad of awful possibilities she’d been imagining just moments before, and like that Petra felt the worst of her panic drain out of her.

As she calmed down, Petra recalled her earlier worry about ending up stuck on her own.

She had of course already considered the potential consequences of letting the inhabitants of this world know that she wasn’t a normal slime – after the reality bending implications of magic existing, and alternate worlds running off of fantasy tropes, that had pretty much been the first thing she’d considered – and she’d pretty quickly decided that it would be an incredibly stupid thing to try without first knowing more, Earth’s own witch hunts coming to mind.

Except the realisation that she had exactly two people she could communicate with – just two lifelines to support her while she was essentially crippled – clearly indicated she hadn’t though it through well enough. Obviously, trying to communicate with one of the natives would immediately out her as being special, and that might get her immediately captured or killed, but what did the alternative scenarios look like?

Petra considered a reality where she didn’t ever speak to the locals, and thought that it’d probably be awful. It might be safer, but at the very least it’d probably be lonely, and worse, she’d be crippling her ability to learn about this world. No. That clearly wasn’t a valid option, at some point she’d have to talk to someone who hadn’t come here from Earth.

She thought about a world where she slowly worked up to being able to talk to locals, taking measures to be cautious as she went, but decided that that scenario wasn’t that much better. She had no idea how long that might take, and there was so much she wanted to do and learn. And what if something happened to Down or Cassius while she was useless? Then she would be stuck on her own and everything would be that much harder, if not impossible.

Even after considering all that, Petra thought the smartest thing to do would still be to wait, just a little, until she had the slightest clue to go off of, but she also realised something else: she really didn’t want to. There were so many questions she wanted to ask, questions that couldn’t be answered by anyone from Earth, and she wanted to ask them right now. Each and every minute she spent waiting was another minute spent not satisfying her curiosity, and somehow that seemed worse than some nebulous risk of being burned at the stake.

Petra realised she was being stupid but decided she really didn’t care. The worst that could happen would be dying, and she was pretty certain she’d already done that once today.

With an effort of will, Petra tried to add the stranger to her contacts. When it became clear that that had once again failed to work, Petra mentally sighed to herself and switched to her less convenient method of communication. After a couple of false starts, Petra managed to get a hang of the process again, attaching meaning to the slapping of her pseudopods as she slowly spoke.

“He̶l̸lo… Is t̴her̴e̸… ̶a̷ re̴aso̶n… y̸o̵u're poki̷n̶g me?̶” Petra slowly asked. “C̴oul̶d... yo̶u̶... y̶ou... ple̸a̵s̷e sto̷p̸?̸”

After a moment’s consideration, Petra recalled how she’d forgotten to introduce herself to her companions from Earth and decided since she was already this far in, she may as well do things properly this time.

“I’m <Name: Self>…” Petra only remembered immediately after saying it, that her slap-speak couldn’t actually handle names, and was glad that she couldn’t cringe with this body, carrying on as though nothing had happened. “I wa̶n̷t t̸o̸ know̷ ever̵ythin̸g… an̵d a̸m… som̸e̴t̷hing lik̵e… a hea̴l̴er… or ma̷ybe̴… a̸ doc̶t̶or… So̷r̴ta.̵”

Petra had intended to make it clear that she could be at least a little useful on the off chance it made whoever this was less likely to want to squish her like the vermin she probably was, but immediately regretted describing herself as a doctor, because magic or no, she absolutely wasn’t qualified to perform medicine. Either way, what was done was done, and now all she could do was wait and see how the stranger responded.
Also got a bit swamped on my end between uni assessments and immediately falling sick afterwards – turns out pulling a triple all-nighter isn’t great for my health, who’d have thought? Now that I’m not so much of a zombie, I think I should be able to finish my sheet at some point tomorrow.
Neir Slums — Dilapidated Shack
@Zeroth@ERode@PKMNB0Y
Catgirl? Leg? Guard Station? Petra was probably more confused after reading Down’s message than she had been beforehand.

From what she was able to gather, the gist of things was that someone had tried to pick a fight with Down – or at least they’d somehow gotten involved in one – and at some point in the resulting scuffle, the instigator had gotten their leg cut off by a third party that may or may not have been some kind of cat person? Petra decided that it probably made more sense to anyone that saw what happened, and that she shouldn’t think too hard about the details.

More importantly, apparently the person that’d gotten the impromptu amputation was expected to survive the wound. That was certainly interesting, since as far as Petra knew, you couldn’t just survive a wound like that – not without receiving immediate treatment at least – so either Down had greatly exaggerated the severity of the injury, the inhabitants of this world had different biology to humans back on Earth, or the guy had received some kind of magical healing. Petra suspected the latter.

Whatever the case, wasn’t cutting a guy’s leg off way too extreme a response to a fight? Petra was certain she was missing more than a little context, but even so, the outcome made her more than a little nervous. Even ignoring the fact that cutting someone's leg off should’ve been far too difficult to casually do, it seemed like far too brutal a response to any crime, which spoke to a world far more violent than Earth.

In hindsight, perhaps Petra should have already expected that kind of thing from this world – swords were weapons, and most depictions of magic back on Earth were at least somewhat violent, so of course a Sword and Sorcery world wouldn’t be soft and fluffy. Then again, maybe she was judging this world unfairly. Was Earth really all that much better? Now that she thought about it, you didn’t need to go all that far back in time for brutality to be the norm, and even in the modern day it wasn’t like war and suffering didn’t exist, she just hadn’t had to personally see it.

Petra pushed the thoughts away and instead focused back on the Down’s message, trying to pointedly ignore the suggestion that she eat a person’s leg. Admittedly, it was probably a legitimate suggestion; she had after all mentioned she could steal cells from things she ate. Not that that was much of a reason to eat the leg in this case – aside from being cannibalism(?), being composed mostly of muscle and bone, a human leg wouldn’t exactly have any particularly useful materials for her. If it’d been the attacker's eyes that’d been gouged out, on the other hand… wait no, that would have been even more violent.

Contacts: "Down"
The catgirl said her name was Meira, and if what Cassius said about her being an adventurer holds up, it's probably safe for me to do as she said. I'm gonna try and get info from the guards. But while I'm gone, you should try to hide, okay?

I dunno if you've already figured out how to move or not, but maybe imagine yourself as like...a train? Saw a video once about how Japanese metros were like slime molds, moving efficiently between food nodes/cities. Maybe make a bunch of cilia like treads underneath you?
Down
Petra was just about to shoot off a reply, when Down’s second message came through, and a moment later she was alone.

Move like a train, huh? Petra thought Down might be confusing that study where slime moulds were able to organise themselves into a layout similar to the Tokyo metro with them somehow moving like a train, but that did still give her an idea for how to move more efficiently.

Forming a pseudopod – a task she’d gotten pretty good at by now – Petra laid out the appendage along the path she wanted to travel in a manner she imagined as being similar to a rail and then with some trial and error, managed to shift her mass along the appendage, reabsorbing it as she went. The movement wasn’t exactly fast – maybe equivalent to a slow walk for a human – but compared to her earlier attempt at locomotion, the difference was night and day. Petra still had to adjustment her program whenever she wanted to change her direction or speed, but doing so was relatively easy, and after making a couple of modifications to more easily aim her pseudopods and to start forming the next set before fully absorbing the last, Petra found herself moving about the small shack almost confidently.

After maybe a minute of enjoying her newfound mobility, Petra’s attention was drawn once again to the severed leg – its ‘scent’ tickling at her smell-touch – and she was finally forced to confront one of the many realities she’d been trying to wilfully ignore. Petra had stopped her body from single-mindedly consuming anything organic it touched, and that wasn’t a decision she had any intentions of changing any time soon – not when she neither wanted to discover whether slimes could get food poisoning nor spend all her time slowly feeding off filth – but as she’d already observed, brains were hungry organs and slimes had surprisingly developed brains.

Off the top of her head, Petra could recall that the human brain took up something like 20% of the calories a person consumed just to power itself. Obviously, what passed for a slime’s brain was nowhere near as developed as a human’s and in fact probably wouldn’t be able to think at all where it not for whatever magic that held Petra’s consciousness here, but the fact remained that slimes apparently had unreasonably developed brains for creatures that didn’t seem to be built to perform any task more complex than what a slime mould might.

While her body literally didn’t have a sense for hunger, to her biomancy that fact meant very little, and a quick peek at her biology was enough to confirm Petra’s suspicions. It probably hadn’t even been an hour since she’d stopped her body from constantly eating and yet already Petra could already see her body struggling to compensate for the halted caloric intake, various metabolic pathways switching as her body switched into starvation mode.

In other words, as far as Petra could think of, if she wanted to avoid slowly starving to death, she more or less had two options. She could give in and spend almost all of her time, passively scraping the floor for any filth she might be able to consume, risking whatever diseases that lifestyle might entail, or she could do like early humans did and turn to more energy dense sources of food to fuel her brain… put like that, and it wasn’t really much of a choice.

Apprehensively Petra approached the severed limb, discarded on the floor after its owner was taken to jail, then after several minutes of hesitating, she finally bit the bullet, or more accurately engulfed the leg, and started digesting her meal.

Almost disappointingly, as difficult as the decision to eat a part of a person had been, the actual process of doing so turned out to be very much anticlimactic. It wasn’t like Petra had eyes with which to see what she was doing, and to her ‘organic vision’ the process hardly looked different from when she’d digested the bugs or detritus. She could sort of taste it, but even then, while her touch-smell filled the role of taste, it wasn’t like she experienced the sense as anything like it. In other words, as long as Petra didn’t think too hard about what exactly she was doing, it wasn’t exactly hard for her to ignore it entirely, and it was shockingly easy for her to think about literally anything else.

Deciding that now was as good a time as any, Petra set about working on fixing her senses.

To start with, Petra checked up on the photoreceptors she’d sequestered from the insect she’d eaten, finding that it’d replicated nicely, the single cell already having divided into dozens upon dozens of copies of itself. While that was somewhat impressive, it still wasn’t nearly enough for her to do anything useful with, and in any case, even if she had an endless number of the cells she still wouldn’t be able to produce anything like a proper eye with them. That being the case, Petra turned her attention instead to her hearing.

She examined the receptors that facilitated her sense of touch and hearing – elongated things that responded to any change in their conformation. Tentatively, Petra tried moving some of the cells closer to her outer membrane, and found promising results.

It wasn’t exactly a great result, and probably wouldn’t be enough even if she moved all the cells to her outer membrane, but it certainly seemed as though the cells closer to her surface fired off more frequently than those located deeper in her body. That result wasn’t exactly surprising, considering the cells were picking up vibrations in her environment, though she discovered that moving the receptors resulted in a corresponding loss of her proprioception, which in hindsight, she probably should have also predicted. Considering proprioception was vital for her ability to control her body, that wasn’t an acceptable cost.

On the one hand, Petra could just increase the number of receptors in her body, but at the same time the increased sensory load would only serve to increase the amount of energy she’d need to spend processing it, which was one of the problems she was trying to avoid, and that wasn’t before even considering that she was already planning on massively increase that load by adding sight to the mix. She supposed she could always try compensating by reducing the number of chemoreceptors throughout her body, since she wasn’t exactly reliant on that sense, but even then, that approach would only take her so far.

Petra considered the rudimentary ‘ears’ she’d created to assist her in hearing earlier. The attempt had been clumsy and awkward at best, and in all honesty, it hadn’t worked all that well, but she still felt the basic principle had some merit. What she needed was some kind of structure to help her channel sounds towards the receptors, making the process more efficient without necessarily requiring her to add additional cells. Obviously being stuck as an amorphous blob for the foreseeable future made having any large external structures difficult, which ruled out creating a more permanent set of ears, but perhaps she could go smaller?

Focusing on her outermost membrane, Petra willed her magic into forcing it to change, painstakingly moulding tiny projections to sit atop it like microscopic hairs. Her first attempts were all failures, and it took her a while to realise that the cells that made up her membrane simply lacked the structural properties to do what she wanted them to.

Unwilling to give up so easily, Petra diverted her attention towards the pieces of human flesh slowly being dragged into her body for digestion, searching for any parts that might assist her with her current project. As it turned out, her earlier assessment that a human leg wouldn’t have anything she wanted might have been a little premature – it might not have any functional components she particularly wanted, but it was a veritable treasure trove of structural components.

Selecting several of these components – Petra suspected were mostly hair and cartilage and perhaps some other connective tissues, though she didn’t check what exactly – Petra set about her second attempt at creating the tiny hairs, tinkering with their design until she finally had one she was somewhat happy with. After that, it was just a matter of connecting the hairs to the mechanoreceptors she’d moved to her outer membrane and spreading the structures across her entire surface.

The entire process what quite time-consuming and required her to stop and rest her magic several times, but by the end, Petra was quite pleased with the result. She found her creation functioned more or less exactly as intended, the miniscule hairs amplifying and transmitting vibrations from the air to the receptors in her membrane, feeding her a constant ‘hum’ of background ‘noise’. Petra thought the final product might be somewhat analogous to the stereocilia used in vertebrate hearing, though she was pretty certain stereocilia were organelles rather than separate attached structures.

Admittedly, the result was somewhat less useful than it could have been, since the actual experience was still nothing like human hearing, and thus, Petra still couldn’t make sense of the sounds she was hearing, but with any luck she’d be able to adjust to that sooner or later, and more importantly, with this she should be able to hear well enough for the translation function to work.

Contacts: "Up, Down"
Good news! I’ve figured out hearing… sorta. Can’t really make heads or tails of the information yet, but give me time and I might be able to figure out how to parse it. At least a human brain would be able to adjust to it, so depending on what parts of me are running on human logic, I might be able to. Either way, I think this should be good enough for the translation function to work, so if you need me to eavesdrop on anyone or anything like that I should be able to now.
Me
Was trying to finish this today, but I'm sick, somehow it's already almost 5 am, and I'm barely holding awake, so that's not happening. Since it won't be done until I wake up I guess I'll jump on board the WIP CS bandwagon for now, though mine might be just a little (read very) more WIP than the others. Have a half-baked hedge mage/utility caster.

Also, it has also occurred to me that I've made a couple of assumptions, particularly regarding how magic might work in this setting, and/or used terms that might not be setting accurate, so correct me if I've messed anything up or you have any details to share.

Definitely interested.
Neir Slums — Dilapidated Shack
@Zeroth@ERode@PKMNB0Y
Petra felt a little frustrated as she lay as a puddle on the floor of the shack. Not that there was much else she could have been doing, but doing nothing when there was so much she needed to ‘see’ and discover, didn’t exactly feel great. In hindsight, she probably should have been a little more conservative with her mana – or whatever it was this world's magic ran off – as without it, she was more or less immobile.

Hmm… Perhaps she could set up a program to move herself more effectively, rather than modifying her preexisting one every time she wanted to move or stop moving? Except, so far as she’d been able to manage thus far, her programs were restricted to responding to her senses or else constantly doing their thing without outside input. What she needed were programs that could respond dynamically to her thoughts, except how was she supposed to set something like that up, when, at least as far as she could tell, her thought processes and physical brain were now entirely separate things?

On that note, Petra also knew she’d have to figure out what the limitations to her ‘mana’ were, which was a whole other challenge in its own right. Was there some threshold she would cripple herself or die if she went past? It wasn’t like there was an easy way to test it, and it wasn’t like she could just look up the answer. Maybe she could ask someone – or more likely get one of her companions to ask for her – but how common were spell casters? They were usually pretty rare in fantasy stories, right? Would a layman be able to answer her questions?

And that wasn’t even covering the physical side effects of using magic – though that topic at least would probably be a lot easier for Petra to test herself. Down had said they’d gotten a nosebleed after they’d used magic themselves, so unless they’d banged their head or something, there was almost certainly some kind of physical side effect, the question was what? Was the damage to specific parts of the body or more spread out? Did using magic cause the body to start heating up? Was it ionising? Did it cause cell lyse?

Petra hadn’t noticed any cellular damage to her own body while she was messing with the insect’s photoreceptors, but at the same time, she had been fully focused on the task at the time, and from what she’d observed of her biology, any cells that were damaged would likely have been consumed soon afterwards.

If the side effects of spell casting was something like generating heat, that would probably be manageable, but if it were more along the lines of random cellular damage, then that might be more of an issue. Maybe not for Petra herself – she was pretty sure her current body would fare pretty well against that kind of damage and, perhaps somewhat ironically, her magic could likely deal with any biological side effects it produced – but for any human spell casters it might be an issue.

Petra was just about to send Down a message warning them to avoid casting magic until they could figure out whether it caused cancer or something when everything went to chaos. Well, ‘chaos’ might’ve been putting it a bit strongly – whatever happened only lasted a couple of seconds – but still, it was enough for Petra to realise something was up, even with her limited senses. One moment, she’d felt Down stomping across the shack, and the next there had been a loud noise that wasn’t words and what Petra though might be some kind of scuffle, followed shortly by a new voice – at least Petra assumed it was someone new speaking.

“Oi, you… shack. One… <Name: Up> acquaintances? Could you bring… bastard… at gate? … <Name: Newcomer>… bring him in for questioning… ask.”

Wait, was Down being asked to bring Up to the gate or was it the ‘bastard’ someone else? Had Up done something to get themself in trouble? Petra thought about it for a second, then gave up on the matter; trying to piece together what was going one when she’d probably only heard half the words said at best, would be a waste of her time, especially when she couldn’t see what was going on.

More importantly, Petra had observed another interesting phenomena; the translation function struggled with names. Sure Petra could understand exactly who was being talked about when she heard the name, in fact, she was pretty sure as long as it was being translated she’d know exactly who was being talked about even if two people shared the same name, but the fact remained that despite having understood the names meanings, she still didn’t know the names. Was that a clue as to how the translation function worked?

Realising she was getting distracted, Petra mentally made a mental note to think about the phenomena further later, along with all the other crazy things she’d need to contemplate.

Contacts: "Down"
What happened? Is everything okay? Did Up do something?
Me

… Well, it wasn’t really important, but, compared to all the other things she needed to test it would be pretty trivial, and more importantly, wouldn’t require any magic, so…

Contacts: "Down"
Also, assuming you can read the language, if you see any signs for shops or things like that could you read them to me aloud and then send me their names? Trying to figure out the translation function. I need both things with names that have other meanings and those that don’t.
Me
??? — Dilapidated Shack
@Zeroth@ERode@PKMNB0Y
For the most part, Petra just patiently waited for her magic to recover, while her companion experimented with their own. Even blind as she was, Petra didn’t fail to notice when the other mage finally got their own magic to work, her gelatinous body immediately picking up on the sudden influx of information transmitted via vibrations through the air and floor, with each spell.

Were they shooting projectiles of some kind? Controlling the wind? Perhaps just producing raw force? Once again, Petra found no small part of her longing to have her human vision back, if only so she could get a good look at the actual spell casting process. It was magic! Just think of all the things she could learn just by watching it!

Mentally sighing to herself, Petra turned thoughts away from the nearby spell caster and to the broader nature of magic itself. Just what was magic, exactly? Obviously Petra knew she wasn’t even remotely qualified to ask that question – certainly not when she knew so little about the subject – but qualified or not, the question burned at her mind regardless. Some tiny part of Petra’s mind immediately motioned to dismiss the question – to simply label the phenomenon 'supernatural' and leave it at that – but the rest of her mind called that part traitor and smothered it down.

Supernatural was a term used to describe things that were beyond understanding; things that fundamentally didn’t follow the rules of the universe. Strange as everything she’d seen was, Petra didn’t yet feel ready to accept the idea that there were things that couldn’t be understood. In fact, that was one of the few ideas she probably wouldn’t ever be able to accept. Sure, the universe might follow a different set of rules to the ones she’d thought they did just a few hours ago, and sure, she was almost certainly, a long, long, ways off from even beginning to be able to understand these new rules, but even so, everything had rules, and anything that had rules could eventually be understood. All she needed was enough time and the right questions.

The only problem was Petra wasn’t quite sure what exactly the right questions were. She’d already cast magic, several times even, which should have given her plenty of questions, and it had, but most of those questions were surface level; important to answer, certainly, but insignificant or impossible to answer without prerequisite knowledge she didn’t yet possess. What she needed was something deeper. Something foundational.

Petra thought about it for a bit, trying to focus on the ways she was sure magic violated the laws of the universe as she knew it. She felt almost certain there was something to this particular line of reasoning. She continued to mull over it for a while, and then it hit her; obviously there were all sorts of ways magic appeared to violate the rules of reality she was familiar with, but one stood out above the others; ontology. Magic had a concept of ontology.

Her own magic, [Biomancy], worked on biological systems, except biology didn't really exist except as a human construct. Sure, things that are biological exist, at least in the sense that people can describe them as being such, but that's an illusion – one of the neat little boxes we group things into for our own convenience of understanding. In reality, biology is nothing more than an emergent phenomenon of chemistry and physics – a runaway chemical reaction that started self-perpetuating almost four billion years ago. People know what life is, but the universe shouldn’t; not any more than it recognises an aeroplane or a fairy tale.

And yet the universe does seem to recognise it. And that’s weird. Really weird. Possibly even weirder than the universe producing handy little status screens with which to categorise us – which is in itself something that couldn’t be pulled off without some way of recognising what things are and categorising them.

Does that mean that the universe is aware or that there’s some god like driving force behind it? Not necessarily, but certainly a possibility. It’s also possible the recognition comes from somewhere further down the chain; say for example if magic isn’t fundamental to the universe itself but was created by conscious agents, sufficiently advanced technology and all that… or maybe magic draws its understanding from its users or something like a collective consciousness?

Petra’s mind spins as she thinks about that. That’s already a lot of different possibilities – each of which would require a completely different approach to dissecting and analysing the field of magic – and even now she’s still thinking of more, not to mention all the countless possibilities that’ll no doubt never even occur to her.

Before Petra’s thoughts can spiral into total madness, she’s pulled out of them by a notification. Oh, right, the other guy.

Contacts: "Down"
Gud news: Magic work. Can Jedi push stuff and shoot swords. Bad: Nose bleed, head hurts. If I hav aneurysm plz w8 48 hrs b4 eating me. Thx.
Down

Eat them? Petra’s almost insulted by the idea she might do such a thing. Even if she’s inhabiting the body of a slime now, she definitely wouldn’t consider eating someone unless she was really desperate… then again, examining a human corpse would probably help a lot in her mission to build herself a proper body, and how much progress would she make if she were able to steal human organs wholesale… wait no, bad thoughts.

Moving swiftly on, Petra focuses her attention on the important details of the message. Her companion seemed to have some kind of force magic – though the term, “Jedi push stuff and shoot swords” left the details frustratingly vague – and they’d also pushed their magic far enough to see side effects, but no far enough to be particularly worrying.

Before Petra could consider the matter further, her thoughts are interrupted yet again, by another message. For the briefest of moments, she's hopeful that it might be a more detailed breakdown of Down’s experiments with magic, but then she realises the message is from Up – not that it isn't detailed, just somewhat less interesting than magic, if important nonetheless.

Contacts: "Up, Down"
The Adventurer’s Guild exists, and Meira, the woman I left with, is part of them. Slimes are categorized as monsters, but are thought of as useful for cleaning up corpses. The city’s name is Neir, the country’s name is Cethaim. King Selm is the top of the hierarchy, and nobles manage territories beneath him. There are no ongoing wars of note. A convenient excuse for our appearance here is a ‘teleportation’ spell. You can make money as a treasure hunter in ‘dungeons’ here or pick up odd jobs as an adventurer, but if both of you finished school, you would likely be able to get a job inside the city.
Up

She was classified as a monster? Petra wasn’t quite sure how to feel about that. On the one hand, the idea of worrying about what labels people decided to apply to her while she was stuck in this body felt more than a little silly to her, but at the same time, she really hopped that wouldn’t make things difficult for her. The “useful for cleaning up corpses” addition gave her hope that she wouldn’t be attacked on sight at least.

The rest of the information gathered also seems important and Petra makes sure to commit it to memory as well as she can – just in case her message log automatically deletes itself after some predefined period or something like that - though she isn't sure how applicable it’ll actually be to her, given her slime situation. Were normal slimes even sapient? She was, obviously, but she also clearly didn’t have the neural architecture for it.

Contacts: "Down"
What’s the plan? If your magic is something you can defend yourself with, or your too physically taxed from using it, I think it’d be best to wait for you to recover a bit before we do anything.
Me
Also, if you’re planning on going anywhere, do you think you could carry me around in something? I can’t move very fast like I am right now.

Also if I’m concidered a monster, even a relatively safe one, maybe it’d be best to keep me hidden? Otherwise you might be able to tell people I’m a summon or familiar or something like that, but without knowing much about magic, that might be ill advised. For all we know summoning magic isn't a thing or entails additional details.
Me
??? — Dilapidated Shack
@Zeroth
The other person in the shack though her method of eating was cool, and Petra couldn’t help but mentally grin to herself at that. It was cool; really, really cool.

Contacts: "Down"
Nice! And, if you were able to digest the dirt, you could potentially dig tunnels to hide or get around unseen if need be. If something bad happens, the bug-hole I dug is...uh...to your left?

If you wanna rest, I'm gonna practice my own magic. Once I feel like I could conceivably defend myself I'll try to find us some water and a way to filter it. Bound to be a well around here but I'm sure it's filthy.
Down

Could she dig? Petra supposed there was no reason she wouldn’t be able to, unless perhaps the ground was too compacted or something like that. Then again, would she be able to eat indefinitely? Probably not, but surely, this body had a way of disposing of waste.

Against her better judgement, Petra peaked back at her internals. She didn’t have to search for long until she found what she was looking for in the form of the numerous cells dedicated to waste disposal. Several different kinds of cell carrying off the indigestible remnants of her arthropod meals, as well as various other kinds of waste, both that from the insects and the waste her body itself was producing throughout its normal activity, transporting the waste to her outer membrane where it’s promptly pushed out of her body and into the unknown.

From her observations of the process, Petra fells pretty confident that she’ll be able to dig, if in all likelihood very slowly, in fact she can probably even dig through things she can’t actually digest – things like sand and gravel – just by engulfing and expelling the material. Of course, given the lingering effects of her last attempt at magic, Petra isn’t exactly eager to try the process out just yet… actually that was a lie; she is very eager, just not quite eager enough yet for her curiosity to out way her sense of self-preservation.

As for the water problem, contamination, as Down mentioned, is an obvious concern, especially assuming a medieval context. But since her thoughts were already on it, wouldn’t it be possible for her to filter water in a similar fashion to her hypothesised digging method? Petra certainly didn’t feel as though there was any reason she wouldn’t be able to simply engulf some water, digest or separate any contaminants, and then expel the purified fluid – at least not once she’d recovered her magic a bit.

Contacts: "Down"
If you need to filter water, I think it should be possible for me to do it. I’m pretty confident this body can digest anything organic in the water and I think I could seperate out any inoragnic contamination. At the very least, if I can’t I should be able to identify if the water’s contaminated. Might be a bit gross to drink water that’s come out of me though, but it’s not like everything we drink hasn’t been piss or sewerage at some point, right?
Me
Also, good luck with your magic.
Me
??? — Dilapidated Shack
@Zeroth@ERode@PKMNB0Y
Petra stared at the message box, partially because it was the only thing she could see and partially because there was a fair bit of information for her to dissect there.

Firstly, ‘universal translation’ supposedly being common in fantasy stories – at least in whatever stories Down had read – was yet another big point in favour of the fantasy logic hypothesis, even if it still wasn’t nearly enough to count as conclusive evidence. What could she do to get more concrete evidence? How exactly does one imperially test whether or not the world follows formal logic? She needed something testable. Perhaps she could think up a list of fantasy tropes and then try to verify whether they applied or not? Petra wasn’t sure.

Pushing the matter aside, Petra turned to Down’s next observation, one that was far more immediately useful; they were in a shantytown – or at the very least something that appeared to be one. Petra supposed that if this world truly was running of some foreign logic, it was entirely possible that shantytowns were somehow natural formations here, but at that point she’d have to start throwing out basic assumptions, so for the time being she decided to go with the far more reasonable assumption; this world had intelligent life in it – beyond her companions and her, that was – and moreover, whatever that life was, it was probably at least somewhat human-like.

Even more interesting than Down’s observations on their surrounding, though, were their comments on magic and their own Skill. It seemed as though their Skill was also one pertaining to magic, and while they didn’t say specifically what it was Petra was certainly very interested to find out. Did the third person that’d come with them also have a magic Skill? Petra wondered how Down’s Skill would compare to her own. Two examples obviously wouldn’t be enough for her to establish a pattern as to how magic worked, but it’d at least be a boon in helping her make guesses, certainly a lot better than just one.

Contacts: "Down"
I think you’ve just got to think about it really hard to use magic and there’ll be a sort of draining feeling once you manage.
Me
Maybe… I’m pretty sure it’s enough to do something at least. There’s probably more to actually doing things properly.
Me

Even more than magic, though, the final part of Down’s message was what interested Petra the most. Shapeshifting and gaining abilities from things she ate? There certainly wasn’t anything like that listed on her status, but neither did universal translation show up, nor did anything governed by her biology, so it might be possible.

Contacts: "Down"
I don’t see anything like that on my status and I was already eating dirt or something when I woke up which didn’t seem to do anything, but I guess it couldn’t hurt to try.
Me

Not long after, Petra was watching her body digest several bugs, along with a not insignificant amount of dirt. At first she’d tried not to think about the fact that she was eating bugs, reasoning to herself that any perceived grossness was only on a superficial level and that is was probably perfectly normal for slime monsters or whatever it was she was.

Her apprehension only lasted a moment after she engulfed the bugs, however, before it gave way to curiosity, and she stared transfixed at her digestive cells peeling apart the dead insects layer by layer, in a manner that was simultaneously both slow and shockingly fast. No, it wasn’t fast so much as it was efficient; her cells dancing to incomprehensible chemical music, swarming towards the feast for just long enough to tear away and engulf their fill before vacating to digest and distribute their nutrient payloads.

Beyond watching her digestive processes, Petra was also looking out for any change that might indicate something had happened. No matter how frequently she checked her status, though, there was never once a change to the sheet, nor was there any miraculous moment where she gained access to one of the insect's senses, or method of moving, or otherwise felt any different at all. She tried willing her body to take the shape of one of the insects she’d digested with all her might, but unsurprisingly, that to failed to work.

Petra mentally sighed to herself. It was about as much as she’d expected, but it was still pretty disappointing. If she’d been able to shapeshift into the things she ate, then it might have been possible to gain a human form… or at least something closer to human than an amorphous blob, since she wasn’t quite yet up for eating people. Hell, if she’d been able to gain a bug's abilities, that might have at least solved her vision and movement problems… Wait.



Petra paused – or at least she imagined herself pausing, considering her body was already more or less as still as it was going to get. She wasn’t so lucky as to gain some mystical ability to steal creatures abilities just by eating them, but she did still have magic. Magic that supposedly operated on biological systems. Could she emulate something similar?

Petra focused her attention on one of the as yet less digested insects within her. She observed the insect as a whole for only a moment, before zooming in on the structure she was interested in; its eye. Petra had a pretty decent idea of how a human eye worked, but unsurprisingly the compound eyes of an insect were quite different, more specifically, they were a hell of a lot more complicated.

Perhaps if the insect were still alive and its eyes hadn’t already been partially digested, Petra might have been able to figure out some of the underlying mechanisms behind its eyes, as it were now though, she figured she had little chance. That was okay though; she wouldn’t need the whole eye for the idea she wanted to test.

Delving deeper into one of the ommatidium that made up the compound eye, Petra closed in on the part she was looking for. While a lot of the insect’s eye was fundamentally different from a human one, Petra was glad to see that at least the most fundamental components were more or less the same. Petra flexed her will once more, uncertainly straining her thoughts until she felt the magic give in – the draining sensation picking up ever so slightly – and with any luck, directing her digestive cells not to consume the rod cells at the back of the insect's eyes.

Petra patiently waited until the rods were free-floating before continuing her work. Somehow the effort of actually moving the rods towards her exterior was far more draining than actually liberating them in the first place and while the draining sensation itself grew no worse with time, Petra began to feel what she could only describe as an aching in some metaphysical part of herself; an ache she was pretty sure was connected to her use of magic. Or perhaps overuse of magic? She refused to stop quite there though.

Identifying one of her own sensory cells – one of the multitude of chemical receptors she was pretty confident was part of her ability to taste and smell – Petra forced the thing to disconnect itself from the nerve it was attached to through sheer force of will, before attempting to implant one of her sequestered rods in its place. Her first attempt at getting the cell to connect failed, or at least it failed to produce a functioning result, as did her second and third attempts. If moving the rods throughout her body had given her a headache, then this task was giving her the beginnings of a migraine.

It didn’t matter though, because on her fourth attempt Petra actually succeeded at getting the cell to attach to the nerve properly and suddenly she could see. Not see in any useful sense of the word – a single rod certainly wouldn’t be enough to do that, nor would completely covering herself in the things for that matter; she’d need to figure out more complex eye structures for anything like that – but it was sight nonetheless. A tiny pinprick of light, visible only for the fact that it encompassed the entirety of Petra’s ability to see, nothing more than a single data point informing her of the presence or absence of light.

Feeling surprisingly emotional at such a tiny change, Petra gave one last push with her magic, commanding her newly minted sensor to start dividing, before finally dropping her magic.

Petra realised that pushing her magic as she had, had been a very stupid thing to do considering her lack of understanding about what exactly she was doing; for all she knew souls were real and she’d just irrevocable damaged hers, or maybe she’d just barely survived and another moment of pushing would have killed her. Even if it were ‘safe’ Petra was certainly feeling the consequences of her actions, an impossible to describe aching sensation in a part of her being that she had not previously been aware of and didn’t particularly want to be now.

Even as Petra mentally berated herself for her bad decisions, she would have smiled if she could. She’d already told herself she’d fix her hearing, but now she was almost certain that she could, and more than that, that she could fix her whole body. Her understanding wasn’t nearly good enough yet, and if it had taken this much out of her to steal just a single cell she hesitated to think what it’d take to build an entire human body, but even so, with enough time and effort, Petra was sure she could figure it out.

Contacts: "Down"
I can do the stealing thing with Biomancy! I was only able to take a single cell for now, but I can do it! Oh and if you are going to do magic try not to push it too far. This is kinda painful.
Me
© 2007-2024
BBCode Cheatsheet