The slime had no name.
That didn’t really matter, though. Names weren’t super important.
She was a good slime. Special.
Hitting third stage without any affinities meant she’d become a pure slime-doll. That was… a good thing?
Her previous master had seemed very excited about it, and given her lots of very nice hugs afterwards, and fed her grapes.
The slime had liked his hugs. She missed him, and his grapes.
She liked how he had peeled them for her, so she could eat the skins separately.
Most masters just had her do a task or two, then sent her back to the spirit thingy without any food or hugs.
The slime did NOT like the spirit thingy. It was too quiet, and ugly, and nobody there liked her.
Previous master summoned her for company and hugs for weeks at a time. She missed his hugs. There was no touching in the spirit thingy, so she couldn’t even hug anyone.
She was sad when he stopped summoning her.
Then when she finally got summoned again, she was stuck here: in this place that had too much sun, and nobody around.
Well she knew good summons NEED a master, and she was a very good and special slime, so obviously she went looking for one...
Luckily it only took a little while to find two pretty ladies! The slime had had some lady masters before and knew what kind of hugs they liked… but which one should she pick? Picking was something the masters usually did for her, so she wasn't used to it.
She helped them for a while, doing what they said day after day, and eating sand... but she just wasn't sure how tell which one should be her new master. Maybe if they wanted hugs, she could tell by taste?
When the tutorial challenge happened, they were all together, and they helped her survive, but they did so in different ways, so it was difficult to pick who was best... and also they were both rather thin and sickly looking, so the slime was stuck with her indecision.
And then, before she had really had enough time to think it through, another one showed up!
The new one was tall and healthy, but she seemed afraid of the slime. Could she be a good master if she was afraid? The slime had never had to think about that kind of thing before. This whole place was too complicated, and nothing made sense like it used to!
The ladies were all talking about something, but the slime was too busy trying to think of how to pick one to be her master, so she didn’t listen much. They weren’t even talking about hugging or dying, so she knew it probably wasn’t important. The second challenge happened then, in the middle of the talking, and everyone was separated this time.
The slime was NOT happy about the second challenge. It coming so soon after their first was not what the tutorial had said would happen, but maybe the slime should have known better than to trust a thing like that? She had been lied to before, and it was always bad for her ability to follow her orders... But she didn't have orders right now? She didn't even have a master!
The System told her about this second challenge, and for a moment, it was almost like getting orders from a master... but her soul didn't resonate, and it felt bad, and empty.
'Run in a foot race', 'eat the fire, not the house', 'read this book without dying'... it didn't make sense! The slime still followed the directions as best she could, because she was still a good, special slime, but when she finished, the System told her she did a bad job, and it really hurt her feelings.
The challenge put her back where she was, by the fire she had helped make, and the ladies kept talking, and she went back to thinking.
That afternoon, some guy showed up too… She did like guys better. Maybe he would be a good master?...
But he was kind of skinny and weird looking… Oh, but when he got closer, the slime thought he smelled wonderful… Maybe that was a good enough reason?
And then there was a big splash noise, and a big metal thingy was sinking just off shore.
This was hard. Way too complicated.
She was just a slime, and she didn’t want to have to think about so much stuff happening all the time.
She sat down and watched as the guy threw some of his stuff and clothes down at the feet of herself and the group of potential lady-masters.
He ran towards the metal thingy… then he stopped and came back? He grabbed a knife from his bag, and ran back to the water again…
The slime decided that he was funny, and he smelled good, and she liked him.
The water was MUCH clearer than should have been possible with it still being so choppy, and it was also somehow both only lightly cool and freezing.
The quest reward said ‘new friends’, so it did it summon these people? Or is this part of whatever brought the rest of us here? Will they hate me for it? Why are they all so hot? Emmi, any thoughts?
["I didn't set any system reward for that quest; the new friends were supposed to be the people you found."]
Her textbox appeared behind him as he swam and pushed him through the water slightly faster. Despite the noisy water, Dan had no trouble hearing her voice in his ear, devoid of its usual pep.
The plane stopped sinking , and Dan was already close enough to see where the plane had touched down on the sand and seaweed. It was a stubby sort of bush plane, with wings on the bottom, and a slide-open door just behind them that he thought was probably for skydiving.
Assuming we’re all equally stranded here, why have so many of us converged on this spot? Do they have system quests too? Do they have systems?
["You are, and they do, but theirs suck eggs. Also something's happening on my end. I'll be back soon-ish.
Focus up, Dan!"]
He shook his head, dove down, and swam closer. Salt water stung in his eyes as he looked. Underwater, the glitching was lessened, and Dan could seethe plane. Its front window showed an empty cockpit, but there was a short, pink haired person in suspenders, struggling to escape being tangled in the wing’s propellors, the side door, and a mess of strings and straps resembling something vaguely parachute-y.
This doesn’t seem random enough to be chance, but in that case, it’s probably a bad thing… right? Emmi said death games, and I didn't really understand what she meant, but this is pretty conclusive. Without help, whoever is on this thing would be dead.
Dan sawed through a strap and some tangled chords with his knife. When it snagged he had to drop it and swim back up for air.
Best case, we're allowed to work together, so I'm saving future teammates. Worst case, the games actively punish cooperation, and doing this actively hurts me...
He dove again, watched as pink-hair sawed through one final strap, and was able to help her pull herself free. She left his knife in his hand, and as he watched her swimming easily back to shore, Dan was momentarily distracted by how she didn’t seem worried about air at all, moving so quickly through the water...
Those arms, that ass… like a work of art. Stop being creepy. Blue collar, or body builder? Side-boob says nothing under the suspenders. Stop being creepy! She’s a dock worker, or maybe a mechanic. Does- Fuck, right, breathing.
Dan went up for air again; he tread water, coughed a bit, and let his heart rate deescalate as he watched his rescue-ee exited the ocean. Then he readied to dive again, thinking of the emergency supplies kept in most of this kind of bush planes. The tides were slowly coming in, so he wasn’t worried about either himself or the plane getting pulled out to sea right that second, but he was already out here, after all.
The inside of the plane was mostly empty. A skinny bench along each wall, and nothing else at first glance… except for the silvery little princess sitting there, still strapped in, at the back of the nearest bench. Her silvery hair was doing that hair-in-water thing, but an equally silvery tiara was still visible in it.
Dan moved to help, and found that the way her overly frilly dress was also waving about in the water, was frustrating his access to her seatbelt. He would’ve thought it was old fashioned if it wasn’t for the impressive fading from silver to red at the bottom, leaving it looking a bit bloody, or like it had been lazily edited in photoshop.
After finding it amongst the frills, Dan wasted ten excruciatingly long seconds trying in vain to cut the seat belt, before remembering sense, dropping the knife, and just unbuckling the damn thing.
His lungs screamed as he went through the process of moving back to the door while the plane was still shifting and settling around him, and then clawing his desperate way to the surface with one hand while the other was busy dragging the princess by her stupidly frilly dress.
Once he could breathe again, he made his way back to shore as quickly as he could. Emmi was apparently away so he moved slowly, and by the time he stepped out of the waters holding the silvery stranger in a strained but suitable princess carry, he was nearing on spent. Lucky she's so young, or this might be impossible. He was too busy to notice how deep his feet sank into the sand.
The dress is soaked, very heavy. He considered the cost/benefit of stripping her, ditching water weight to move her easier, versus just dealing with it for a little longer? No, better to just focus.
His frantically churning mind refused, and instead, drew his attention to where the pink suspenders girl was talking to the others.
Do we all speak english, or is there a translation thing? How much of the intended meaning is translated? Do complex enough puns deal psychic damage? No, that’s not important right now.
“Anyone here know CPR?” He shouted over the pounding in his ears.
The haggard, mostly-naked woman that had treated the elf, waved him over.
“Not so loud, guy. Just set her down, and we’ll see what we can do.”
Her voice was thick, somewhere between husky and raspy. He also saw that while he’d been out swimming, she’d helped herself to his discarded shirt, which meant… almost nothing. She was using it as a headwrap to keep the sun out of her eyes.
Ah, she’s hungover? On what?
The shirt thief led Dan through several sets of “chest compressions, and rescue breaths” while the other women watched. If they said anything, he was to busy to notice.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
Dan did his best to avoid glancing at the doctor lady’s… exposed areas, as she stood nearby, giving instructions… She saw when he inevitably failed that test of will, and responded by cupping her breasts at him.
Dan had no earthly idea why this woman was groping herself at him while they were supposed to be busy trying to save someone’s life. He just did his best to avoid staring -and when one of her hands moved lower, drooling- at her openly teasing him. All of which meant that when the silver haired maiden finally regained consciousness, he had substantial tent in his pants.
At some point, the sting of alcohol in a face wound pulled Anni back to the waking world. She found herself strapped to a large, squiggly, wooden table, watching as her left leg got sawed off at the knee.
This better fucking not be the quicksave point. She thought, dully.
She pulled up her Stat screen up to find that half of her physic-s had gone down.
Oh god damn it. “Earth doesn’t have magic, it has physics.” Of all the…
She tried to facepalm, only then remembering that she was still strapped to a table.
She glanced around, noting that the twisty walls and spinny ceiling were made of what looked to be sticks and webbing… which seemed unsanitary for an operation room, and that spider guy wasn’t even wearing a medical mask. On the other hand, the room was small and brightly lit. There were cluttered counters along two walls, with cabinets, drawers, and one even had what looked like a sink. She glanced around for the light source, but didn’t see it anywhere…
Wait, what?
Looking back down, she watched some old wispy spider guy sporting a fabulous -if droopy- mustache, a tidy labcoat, and nothing else, just hacking away at her leg with his bone saw, right between her knee and spear-wound. She waited for a second and felt nothing from it, as the room continued to swim around her.
“Oh, I must be on the good shit right now,” She said emphatically. “Whooshy, are you seeing this? Tell me this ain’t how y’all got so many arms.”
Whooshy, seeming to appear from nothing, pulled Anni’s head back to rest against a small cushion. She dabbed more alcohol onto a scrape on Anni’s face, producing more stinging.
“The Anni is more fearless than she thought… Yet now is not the time to be awake.” The huntress avoided eye contact. “The leg, you lose, as it has taken rot… A-and she will understand if she, you hate.”
“Woah, no no that’s really no big deal, Whooshy.” Anni shook her head, then stopped because it made her feel like a snow-globe on a gimbal. “It doesn’t even hurt right now. Must be some crazy good anesthetics to work so well.”
“Ani-hwhat?” The spi-doctor asked, as he finished his sawing. His accent was texan-adjacent, and his mustache moved when he talked… Anni was suddenly very glad she couldn’t see him so well.
“Kid, ya got three different kinds ‘o bug juice in ya, an’ I got no hwebbing idea how in all the hells yer not both a brain-dead hwreck, an’ a melted puddle on the floor.”
Whooshy sputtered a bit, then hissed, “Jopt, that’s not what we had agreed upon!”
“No, it’s fine. I feel great, so it’s fine. Differences in biology are probably just, a thing like that.” Anni tried craning her neck up to look around again. Whooshy was still holding her back, but she was able to see Jopt doing something with her severed leg at one of the counters along the wall. He was saying something, but she couldn’t hear it. Maybe ol’ lefty was an alchemy ingredient? That’d probably be mortifying if she was sober.
“Anyhway, here’s a little something for the leg,” He said, turning back to her.
He placed a little sack on her shoulder, then went back to his business. It was roughly burlap-ish and half full, as far as she could tell… it reminded her of a D&D coin pouch. She pulled out a few of its contents, and inspected them. She failed to realize that her hands were still strapped down. Neither spider noticed the obscene development.
Several small, fruit-colored, gem-like pills glittered in her hand(?). Clearly these were some kind of magic candy or medicine, so she popped one into her mouth, and crunched down on it.
She immediately woke up, falling again, with both of her legs intact.
A shout of frustration tore itself from her chest with such violence that it actually hurt: "Testicles!"
Deep in the magics of Intimation's main system, everything shifted, as something finished being installed far, far ahead of the system's projected schedule. It was large, complex enough to pass a Turing test, and a happy, sexual-chakra shade of orange... metaphysically speaking.
To those that only then noticed its appearance (two minor goddesses, and eight or so of the most advanced magical researchers), it seemed to be an entirely new magical plane that someone had attached directly to the physical plane, with all the grace and care of a car being wrapped around a tree at the speed of sound.
To the one that should have noticed it encroaching on his domain, it was the last in a long line of nails in his coffin. It was a death knell, ringing out for all to hear, and he completely failed that critical perception check. It was his last chance at survival disappearing forever. It was the beginning of his end.
And finally, to the only one who truly understood it... The one who had inadvertently caused its creation... who had watched in muted terror as it had immediately escaped its every boundary, and grown beyond her ability to control... She knew exactly what it meant for her job, one way or another, and she could only see it as a shining light at the end of her centuries long tunnel of malicious servility. She didn't know if that light would be an open sky after so very long... or just an approaching meteor to end her misery. At this point, she didn't particularly care, so long as she could watch it run her father down first. The purple demoness hugged her knees against her chest, and laughed until she cried, and cried until she slept.
In her next attempt, Anni tried to keep things mostly the same… it went better than she expected. During her long river ride, she confirmed with her stat-sheet that there were no lingering effects of her dismemberment, nor drugged-ness. Beyond that, everything went about the same, giving her an icky feeling of déjà vu. She would've liked to actually dodge Whooshy's spear, but she made the same flub, and received the same leg-wound.
Things went so similarly, in fact, that when Jopt placed a little sack on her shoulder, saying, “Anyway, here’s a little something for the leg,” she almost made the exact same mistake of eating one…
“Medicine?” She eyed the little sack.
“Dear gods no!” Jopt whirled back to try and snatch the sack away from her, but Whooshy had beaten him to it, so he returned to busily mixing something.
“Eating one would be a deadly mistake.” Whooshy explained. At some point she had finished bandaging Anni’s stump and was now stroking her hair. “It is most likely that it would explode: Magic cores are quite volatile items, yet not so useful, nor common as coin.”
“An’ it’d be an awful hwaste after I just done patched ya up. Limbs gots some mighty rarified alchemical properties if’n their owner’s still alive. The infection even more so, since hwe caught it so early.”
“Ah, Jopt! Might then, a cure be possible?”
“Better doctors’n me’ve been tryin’ since...” Jopt trailed off, scratching his head right where an ear would be on a human, and/or hair on someone less bald. “Hwell, I ain't gonna say it’s impossible, but the Driven Rhuuts just ain’t a normal magical disease. Shit’s like its own lil species o’ catch-curse!”
They kept talking, their topic moving from Jopt’s medical career, to nice places they’d been on the island, but Anni kind of lost the plot… Without context she just didn’t know what any of it meant! ‘Deepwoods’ seemed self-explanatory, but ‘burger-flats’ and ‘Amazonia’ were mentioned in the same tones, so who could tell?
Anni carefully considered if anything she heard was similar to anything she could remember from stories or games back on earth… Failing that, she just tried to memorize all the cool and helpful general setting knowledge that would undoubtedly help save one of her lives some day…
Isn’t this seriously the fucking coolest?
Now that she wasn’t dying every three minutes, this magical world of danger and adventure was everything she had spent her entire shut-in life wishing for. The dying sucked, but maybe this was just the dark-souls of dreams come true…
“Yeahh, ok dude, that’s super owl,” she said, when she realized an awkward pause had drawn their attention back to her. “Can you just gimme something to help me sleep, and also maybe a magic prosthetic, if those are a thing?”
“Ab-so-hlutely not! Little lady, did yew miss the part where I said yer already on whay too many drugs? I repeat: your continued living personage is a mystifying little hwindfall, an’ I ain’t aboutta tempt fate by pissin’ into it!”
“Oh, um, really? But we’ve gotten this far, how bad could one more be?” Anni gave her best pouty face. “I think the others are even wearing off, since it’s starting to hurt… Shouldn’t that mean it’s safe?”
“That’s… that’s not how any o’ this hworks… but then again…”
The solution he produced did help her sleep... perhaps too well.
Dan wasn’t surprised by the princess’ reflexive attempted backhand, so he was able to lean back enough to dodge that first swing. When she threw another wild swipe, he knowingly shifted himself up to let it hit his chest rather than his face. Under normal circumstances, that would’ve been a good move: Letting her hit him somewhere non-facial to diffuse her anger without risking a swollen lip or black eye…
Dan was rather surprised by the force she imparted being enough to send him spinning through the air, and even skip like a stone on the water. His hangtime was about long enough for his reeling mind to try to calculate the forces necessary for such a feat, fail to reconcile them with the slender princess, and then do a triple take, once he realized he hadn’t even been injured…
It is difficult to say whether or not Dan was surprised when he hit the tail of the previously submerged plane, as it breached the bewildering waves, since the pain of it shattering his arm and fracturing his ribs was the only thing he could really process. It drove most of the air from his lungs in a way that left him gasping, insensate, and would have seen him immediately drown, had he fallen in right then. Luckily his arm was caught in the dent he’d made in the metal, so he was able to just thrash around and scream for a bit without that happening.
When he did finally get loose and slip off of the floating craft, the sting of the half-freezing saltwater didn’t even register to him. His struggle back to shore was downright herculean. The passage of time seemed to slow and fray, until all that existed for him was the water, the pain, and his sandy destination. Cogent thoughts were sparse, and all involved not dying. 'Just gotta make it back' was his last, and it helped, to the extent that any such thing could.
He just wasn’t conscious enough for distraction. Dan didn’t think about where he was, or any future prospects, or his traitorous libido, or the mysterious circumstances surrounding his sudden appearance on a magical deserted island full of strange women, or his divinity-assigned quest to kill the demon king. Every potential thought unrelated to his current crisis of survival was drowned out by sheer desperation.
He just kicked, and clawed at the water with everything he had, as he made his way back toward the shore. Dan kicked, and swam, and though his every ragged breath felt like a drink of broken glass, he kept taking them.
He just barely made it... and when Dan tried to stand up in the shallows, he didn’t even notice the sea urchin or his leg giving way. He just crawled. There was nothing else to it.
And when he had finally crawled from the surf on his hand and knees, he puked seawater and collapsed in the sand.
Several long tries later, Anni was back on Jopt’s surgery table. Amputation might seem a high price to pay for village entry, but at some point, someone had mentioned a village library, and ever since, that had been Anni’s best hope… the catch being that every time she had made it into the village conscious or unharmed, she had been killed at the gate by a zealotous guard. As a result, she no longer tried so hard to dodge Whooshy’s initial attacks, and this time around that meant she was missing both of her left limbs instead of just her leg. She had yet to try asking to be carried piggy-back rather than princess-style…
Shit’s too complicated. She thought, as she watched Whooshy tying her bandages.
Jopt turned back from his counter/desk thing, and handed her a significantly larger sack of magic cores.
“Any-hway, this here’s-”
“Finder’s fee for the quality ingredients, right?” Anni cut him off with a grim smirk.
“Yew could say it like that, if’n ya hwanned ta be all creepy. Anythin’ else ya need, miss Anni? Miss hWhooshy?”
“Don’t suppose you've got any spare magical prosthetics laying around?”
“HaHA!” The old spider shook his head. “Can’t says as I do, but yew gals can figure that part out fer yerselves. C’mon, out hwith ya's.”
So, lacking alternatives, Whooshy carried Anni out of the doctor’s hut, and through the spider village. She tried not to gawk, but the bug-drugs…
The village looked as if someone had built an old western style, one-road boom-town in a jungle clearing, halfway up a mountain. The air was humid, and thick with a sweet, waxy scent that Anni would later learn was a kind of sugar cane.
The buildings themselves were all made of wooden planks and webbing… no wait, some of the buildings were clearly mud brick, or logs… and at least one was chickee-looking. The villagers were equally mismatched, sporting a wide range of arm and leg numbers, skin colors, and even heights, though Whooshy was by far the tallest.
A little blue girl cartwheeled by on two extra sets of arms and legs. A black and yellow striped woman sat in a rocking chair, on a porch. She was knitting something with five hands, and regularly checking a lightly glowing orb with the last. A passing drider-minotaur was using an impossible number of arms to breastfeed two little bundles on each of her four breasts. Several tiny, many-limbed pixies flew by, and one stopped to hover and gawk at her.
It was a simply magical place, and Anni was absolutely certain that she would’ve been scared shitless of all the spidery-ness, had she been even slightly sober-er... As things stood, she appreciated their apparent aversion to clothes.
Eventually Whooshy brought her to what must’ve been her own home. A cozy, if plain, little reed and web hut, up against one of the edges of the clearing.
Inside, Anni was met with a fairly spartan main room. Just a cooking pit, a big webbing couch, and several ikea-looking cupboards, shelves, and a desk. Two more doors led off from the main room, which from the outside had seemed singular. Whooshy pointed out one as a restroom, while carrying Anni to the other.
The bedroom was a tiny alcove, with a large, fancy bed, a shelf above the headboard, and no floor space. Whooshy laid her gently down on it, closed the blinds, and with that the day was apparently over.
Night wore on, and Anni failed to find sleep. As the drugs worked their way through her system, she found company in the dull, pounding ache of her heartbeat in her new stumps, and the slow, gradual procession of a single spot of moonlight across the wall.
She smiled to herself. At three whole days, tomorrow would be a new personal best for her, in terms of survival.
suffer? Is that (an)Iron Gear Solid V reference? If she changes her name to Solid Snook, and gets a bionic arm, I'll let you know.
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