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?
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.
