Chapter 154: Welcome Snot

Learner’s notes: day 256: on grieving.

Death is what happens to these humans when a cascade failure in their specialized units leads to total unit shutdown. Some of these ‘organs’ are so delicate that a nick the size of the tip of my pinky can lead to cascade organ failure.

Truly poor design, but I already knew this.

Instead, what I have studied today is the social behavior of how humans respond when one of their own has died. In the city, I’m sure there were plenty of examples of this behavior, but it was generally rare and hidden behind closed doors.

With the sudden loss of thirty eight individuals, I was able to get a much better read on how to behave ‘distraught’.

There appear to be many categories that human generally fall into when mourning: Leaking salt water out of their eyes in private, leaking in groups, drinking excessive poison, breeding, ignoring others, getting angry, hitting things and other people, and telling stories.

The leaky ones are more women while men dominate the drinking excessive poison and getting angry categories, while breeding, telling stories, and ignoring others seems to be split relatively evenly between the genders.

Should I be leaking, then?

No, that’s not a good idea. Last time I pretended to find something funny, I scared away everyone who was there, for some reason. Duration and volume were probably off. And I forgot to smile. Or move.

For the purposes of successful integration, I should choose an option as close to neutral as possible, which is why I will temporarily distance myself from the others for a while, taking the role of one of those who ‘bottle up’ their emotions.

Day 257:

My ploy to simulate grief worked, but there were some drawbacks. A few people genuinely though that I needed ‘cheering up’ and tried to get me to take part in group activities such as drinking poison and breeding.

I refused the poison flat-out, but I considered the breeding offers for a moment. In the end I turned them down, as I don’t wish to have a human explore my anatomy any more closely than necessary. They already find me odd enough.

Although…Nevermind.

Side Note: Consider diverting construction work toward the sex organs…just in case.

On the subject of organs, my experiments toward accessing The System are coming along. The current plan is to create an entire body of specialized units, as relatively ‘human’ as I can make it.

Inside this body I’ll secrete away half a dozen pockets of ‘myself’, no bigger than a small tumor. I’ve asked around and most people don’t think a tumor would cause a problem with Breaking.

If the body suffers cascade organ failure, I will simply reabsorb them into my mass through the packets of ‘me’ left behind.

The work is tricky, as getting human units not to suffer extreme reactions to the presence of my units and visa versa is fairly difficult, as well as arranging the organ’s makeup in such a way that they can quickly and easily be reconverted into my original form while at the same time being ‘me’.

Each organ has to be modified seperately through trial and error, and each organ intrinsically depends on all the others in order to function, making this process extremely slow. each time I change one thing, there are near infinite changes in the way the other organs perform.

On the other hand, I have a much greater understanding of the human body than a few months ago, and that has to be worth something….

Perhaps I can earn human ‘money’ as a surgeon?

Explore the functions of more bodies and earn a place of respect among the humans while also obtaining this ‘money’ that so many of these humans seem to live their lives to obtain?

I believe that is what Kala calls ‘Killing three birds with one stone.’

***Calvin***

“Gah!” A man groaned as Learner yanked a massive wooden splinter out of his leg. Her fingers were slippery with blood and a squirt of red followed the palm-length object, splattering against her face.

She didn’t seem perturbed by it one bit.

“Son of a bitch, woman, you could be a little gentler,” The soldier said, unscrewing the cap of his flask and taking a swig.”

“That wouldn’t change anything, and don’t poison yourself, you’ll compound your problems. The only real reason to have that poison on hand is killing foreign units.”

“Huh?”

Learner snatched the flask out of the man’s hand and peeled the stab wound open before pouring the whisky over his leg, causing him to jerk and howl in pain.

“Be calm, it’s nowhere near your femoral artery.” She said, shrugging off the man’s screaming and thrashing as she cleaned out the wound with brutal efficiency.

“There we go,” She said once she was done binding the wound and patting him on the leg before sending the exhausted man him on his way.

I gotta admit, she’s fast.

“Who’s next?” She asked as she scanned the waiting line, pink tongue darting out to her cheek and bringing a taste of the man’s blood back to her mouth.

Most of the people waiting to have various wounds cared for suddenly had something better to do.

Learner seemed confused as the line evaporated, leaving a handful of the truly injured.

After the night before last, many people had crushed fingers, cuts, splinters and broken bones. Learner had offered to care for their wounds, and given her beauty – still remarkably similar to Kala’s – many people had taken her up on that.

While she seemed to know more about the human body than Calvin had ever thought possible for an inhuman monster from another reality, she was completely ignorant of other social faux paus. Like tasting people’s blood.

Oh well, she’ll get the hang of beside manner. She’s the best thing we’ve got at the moment, anyway.

Calvin turned his attention to the surrounding environment, the sunny day, lively underbrush and air filled with the noise of songbirds made it seem like there had been no flooding of any kind the night before.

Goob was at the prow of the barge, posing dramatically for some godsbeknownst reason, while Baroke was using an oversized sounding pole to make sure they weren’t going to run aground on a hidden sandbar.

It wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, but every hour delayed was another hour something could go wrong, so they tried to keep the fastest pace they could safely maintain.

On the back of the barges, Knick-knacks were constantly seasoning wood by magically drawing all the water out with a combination of powders that aggressively absorbed water from anything they were sprinkled on.

The resulting globules of ooze-weaver slime were scraped off with a spatula and tossed overboard into the river, leaving the wood as dry as if it’d been sitting in the sun for a summer. The dust had been summoned using dupdomancy, so when it was dismissed, it would just leave the water in the river and a bit on the wood. No harm done.

The reason Calvin was willing to use a little extra time and effort to fill up on so much wood was because he wanted barges that were designed from something better than torn apart wagons, and if they had to spend the night in the trees again, he wanted his floor to be made of wood, not wobbly rope.

As they went, he could use the knick-knacks to create and swap out barges, until each of them was something that wouldn’t get sunk by a little flooding, as well as having the ones that were hauling the barges choke up on the ropes, ready to pull them off to the side at a moment’s notice.

It he had gotten word out to get off the river one minute earlier, nobody would’ve died.

Lesson learned. Calvin thought, glancing up at the sky. He was sure someone would bring it to his attention if it looked like there was another rainstorm coming: they weren’t idiots.

But I still want to be the first one to spot any problems.

“Uh,” Baroke said, pulling his sounder out of the river. The extra-long wooden pole had a thick sheet of transparent slime hanging off the end as the muscly archer looked on curiously.

“Any idea what this is?” He asked, glancing over at Calvin.

It looked like Ooze Weaver slime, which made sense, since they’d been throwing a bunch off the back of the boat.

“Did you use the sounder off the back of the boat?” Calvin asked.

Baroke shook his head.

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

Well, that’s odd.

“Calvin,” Kala whispered, tapping him on the shoulder and pointing. Calvin squinted, trying to make out what Kala saw in the woods. Her eyesight had always been better than his, for whatever reason.

“Oh damn, look at that,” Baroke chimed in, gawking at whatever Kala had pointed out, most likely distinctly aware Calvin couldn’t see it yet.

It was only after they’d gone a hundred feet or so that Calvin saw what they were pointing at.

At first he didn’t see anything, but once his eyes adjusted, he realized that the underbrush downstream was under water.

The bushes swayed gently back and forth as some quiet currents jostled them, showing the sluggish movement Calvin associated with being underwater.

A gleam of light caught Calvin’s eye where the sun reflected off a glossy, clear surface that bowed outward as it stretched between the trees, seemingly keeping the water contained and preventing it from returning to the river.

“That’s, um…What is that?”

As one they turned to look at Ella, who threw her hands up.

“Don’t ask me,” She said, shaking her head. “I’ve never been this deep in the jungle, and I don’t know anyone who has.”

As they began to pass by, they realized that it wasn’t one big reservoir of water, but many small ones, as evidenced by the subtle separation of their strange barriers.

One of them even seemed to have collapsed, leaving a chunk of dry earth flanked on either side by submerged land. The dry section trailed clear slime into the river, possibly explaining where the stuff on his sounder came from.

Is that slime holding in the water? Calvin thought, frowning. That implied a tensile strength that beggared belief, but he couln’t think of a better explanation.

They were in Ooze Weaver territory.

Off to the side, Calvin saw a flicker of movement, and watched as a globule of mucus dropped from high above into one of the little artificial ponds. A second later, the snot-ball hauled up, carrying dozens of various sized fish embedded in the slime up into the jungle canopy.

Seconds later, the smallest fish rained back down into separate ponds, while the biggest fish were never seen from again.

It’s a fish-farm! Calvin thought with a gasp. Ooze weavers must be intelligent!

Ants farm aphids, and you don’t see them competing for world’s smartest. Don’t make any assumptions just yet.

Calvin nodded silently. Not making any assumptions was a good way to avoid stumbling into stupid misunderstandings.

But when Calvin spotted an ooze-weaver standing on water ou in the middle of the river, gesturing toward the bank wildly with bright yellow flowers, It was a pretty easy assumption that they wanted them to dock

Ooze weavers loosely looked like spiders crossed with water beetles, except they were about the size of a man, sporting a disgustingly lumpy carapace that seemed to have a fleshy throbbing give to it, and large, paddle-like flaps on their feet that seemed to be made of closely packed stiff hairs.

Then cover the whole creature in a fine layer of slime.

It was no wonder Calvin’s Ooze weaver slime had been expensive. Between how dangerous it was to get here, and how horrifying they looked, the people who came back with slime probably stole it or fished it out of the river.

“What should we do?” Baroke asked, his hand groping for the bow he left against the railing.

Calvin glanced backward, casting his gaze across both banks behind them.

In the canopy, Calvin made out hundreds more insectile snot-farmers, practically dripping from the branches above them, chittering quietly as they watched the humans with naked curiousity and a smidge of apprehension.

Calvin couldn’t sense any overt hostility being directed toward him with Feel Intent, so he figured it was worth a chance. If their intentions were hostile, Calvin would find out quickly, and he could reverse the situation in a matter of seconds.

Might as well see what they want, Calvin thought.

“Hold the other barges in place, we’ll go over and see what the issue is,” Calvin said, sending word to the other barges.

Maybe they charge a toll of one loogie per passenger.

Maybe they do.

Wha – really?

You’re the one who said not to make any assumptions, Calvin thought wryly as their barge gradually approached the steep banks.