Cohost writing prompt: @slime-that Goo that’s gone all spikey
“I hate you,” Purfleet the swordsman says conversationally.
“I am the greatest thing since clean underpants,” Chelkin tells him beatifically.
It had started back in town, when the alderman had given their novice group a pitying look over — Purfleet in threadbare soldier’s garb, Parsimony-Pays-Its-Way the wizard still in student robes, and hand-me-down ones at that, the sullen elf with her clearly adolescent attitude problem, whose name still eludes everyone, and Chelkin. Beaming, round-faced, farmer-looking Chelkin.
“I’ll give you an advance on your fee,” the alderman had said. “For adventuring gear.”
It hadn’t been much, but they’d been in visibly better-equipped shape when they met back up the following morning; Purfleet hauling a new backpack, festooned with rope and lantern; Parsi with an impressive-looking orb; the elf festooned with knives; and Chelkin....
Chelkin had turned up strung all about with bottles, and a small and unobtrusive roll of alchemical supplies. And they’d spent the night catching wild slimes to put in all the bottles.
“Fuck,” the elf had said. “We’re going to end up The Ooze Man and his Idiots.”
The elf did a lot of complaining about Chelkin.
“Dickhead,” she said, on the road, when they were ekeing out the last of their fresh perishables from town and forage from the day’s travel, and Chelkin turned out a pocketful of wild grass seeds; “d’you have a millstone in your pocket? You can’t digest the husks on those, they’re worthless for food—”
“Enzymes,” Chelkin said placidly, and dumped them all into one of their bottles, waiting for a slowly frothing while, and turned it all out into a pan, measured a judicious glob of another slime and some pinches of stuff from their supplies into it; the mess rapidly grew all over the mass of dissolving husk, broke the seeds inside down to powder, churned and bubbled and formed a swelling dough-filled skin of ooze.
They eventually put the pan on the fire, and the ooze husk crisped, browned, split, peeled cleanly away; and Chelkin generously shared around their…bread?..however ginger people were to accept it.
“Gods rot,” the elf seethed at being shown up, and sulked all the way through eating seconds.
Oozes, it turns out, are full of surprising uses; especially combined with just a select handful of carefully-picked cantrips.
“Amazing, how the few cantrips in common use were selected most by accidents of the turn of history—” Chelkin says placidly, as if they’ve not all heard this a hundred times apiece by now, and they’re not all separated in a mad scramble in the depths of a barrow, with something a-coming after them right fucking now.
“I hate you so much,” Purfleet says.
Chelkin grins, waggling the flask in which they’ve dumped powdered iron into yet another ooze, which has turned a stony, filmy colour.
“No you don’t,” they say, and pour the stuff in a shimmering puddle across the threshold of the chamber the two of them have fled to. “Do you know, there’s a companion cantrip to Light which is of so little renown, even scholars are surprised to hear that it’s been known and perfected for centuries—”
“I do so,” Purfleet says, gripping his sword tight and watching the dark beyond.
A leisurely foot extends from the blackness; a fraction of a moment before it splashes into Chelkin’s puddled ooze, they say, in a rapturous whisper, “Magnetism—” and the ooze bursts into points, spikes, a wriggling organic thicket of caltrop-points, onto which their pursuer’s sole descends.
