Cohost writing prompt: @slime-that — Ooze that’s made of nanomachines, son
Vikran Born-for-War draws his chatter-blades on their sinuous fibrebone handles. “Leave this to me,” he says, in the smug way of a youth who has never tasted failure.
“That is a scryvern,” Xala the Reverse-Historian snarls. “Its akashic aurax will peel a man—”
Vikran has already hurled himself from the hollow in which they hide, howling, chatter-blades singing like wrongly-tensioned music boxes. There is screaming, squelching, silence.
“Has he killed it?” Nameless-1172 the sorcelite says wearily. “It’s gone all quiet. I bet he’s killed it.”
“I hate that self-satisfied little ratfuck,” Xala mutters.
“Are you mad?” Gadyaan the Hæmentalist squeals through zer filter-feeding whiskers. “There must be forty Mantle-Knights outside! Forty!”
“I can take them,” Vikran Born-for-War says, letting his cloak slip dramatically to the floor. From his back, he unslings the long, sneering polymetal snout of a Langrieve.
“Paragods behind the mirror,” Gadyaan chokes, eyes wide. “What kind of childrens’ storyscrip hero are you?”
“Don’t encourage the brat,” Xala advises under her breath.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Vikran,” Xala says. “The stairwell’s filled wall-to-wall with an ooze. Probably electrotrophic; it’ll be why the Ancients’ lightbars have all darkened in this section. You can’t go down there, it’ll melt you.”
Vikran runs his hand lovingly over the sticky-bone-whorl surface of his vambraces. “I am clad in xoma quasichitin,” he says. “I have kleavelimbs. I have a Halo of Metanegation. Witch, I am an untouchable force; I know what forces mean to do me harm, and a slime in a corridor and its mere acids? Nothing to me.” The youth smiles unpleasantly, eyeing her. “As are your constant attempts to sow self-doubt in me.”
“Oh, self-doubt,” Xala says. “Ah-hum! Very well! Take your self-belief and go wade, then, child.”
Vikran, still smiling nastily, clams shut the face-parts of his quasichitin shell, and swaggers into the stairwell.
“Did you know,” Xala says, after a charged few seconds, to the empty air, “that there’s an exacting semantic difference between slime and ooze?”
A smell like hot metal, with an undercurrent of sizzled meat, drifts up.
