Flo-One: Girl in Negav

Hey,

So this was supposed to be a very short story for the amuse-gueule. Obviously, it didn't work out. So here it is in long form.

Yours,

Ambrose,

Flo-One: Girl in Negav.

Negav swelters under the summer sun, what breeze there is only drifting the moist heat and sounds of the jungle out across the city. Beneath the dappled shade of trees, Tor Gardens Street is liberally coated with the hard pellets of Muris-shit rather than the myriad liquids of human waste.

This is the Kensington district of Negav. This is wealth. They say the houses here are bought in Ascarlin.

It's not untrue, just incomplete. In milligram quantities, they can be.

A Muris drawn carriage clatters by, the fine ladies it carries gossiping behind their hand-fans and taking no notice of a menial such as I.

There's more to me than meets the eye, and even the eye does not go wanting. Menservants sneak glances as I walk, and their noble masters are nowhere near as courteous nor shy about it.

They see a woman, wrapped in skin-tight latex, curves outlined in midnight-under-sunlight. That's what they like to see.

I'm not exactly... but it's real enough, I suppose. It's the image I care to present, anyway.

The Sagolian-style grand portico of number twenty-nine in the row of town-houses is impressive, but I'm going to the servants entrance instead. My wedge-heeled boots, of a part and a piece with my catsuit, thump down the cheap brick stairway to reach it.

My latex-clad fist raps against the door, as I disdain the knocker.

It's answered by a jolly, bright eyed woman wearing a flour-coated apron and wielding a rolling pin. The house cook, perhaps? I don't know.

She gives me the look a puritanical woman would give a fetish-whore, which is probably exactly what she believes me to be. I snap my hand out against the door before it's slammed against my face, and she brings her rolling-pin down on my forearm.

If she'd hit a human woman like that, she would've broken bones. Of course it doesn't hurt me at all.

“Hi,” I say brightly. “I'm the Exterminator. I believe a Mr Jeeves is expecting me?”

She blushes instantly. “Ah, yes,” she replies, shuffling aside and opening the door wider. Slightly. “The butler will receive you in the pantry-office.” Her gaze catches on my arm, where she'd hit me. “I apologise for-”

“No harm, no foul,” I reply as I brush past her, even though I've killed for far less.

I've been known to murder for no reason at all.

“Miss... Flo, is it?” Mr Jeeves greets me.

“That's my name,” I reply, “don't wear it out.” Or off... I've had it less than a year. Ever since I arrived in Negav... “I understand that you have a small infestation problem.”

“Yes, indeed.” Jeeves says. “I have to admit, you're not quite what I was expecting.” A solid workman-type in overalls with a tool-kit full of poisons, perhaps. “You look more like an assassin.”

“Only sometimes,” I say, inclining my head in a small acknowledgement. It's a small room, but he still contrives to back slightly from me. The Nemesii jealously guard their position at the top of Negav's assassination trade. Their talents are as undeniable as their appetites, and competitors can attract both as easily as their targets. I'm not exactly sure a Nemesii could devour me. But I could surely end up in their stomach, and that would be far from pleasant.

Still sometimes someone makes the same mistake Jeeves just did in advance, and it's not like I don't take the job if it's dangled before my faux-face.

“Ah... perhaps that's just as well,” he says, stroking his chin as the back of his well-starched suit presses firmly back against the cool pantry wall. “We have the usual offenders that you'll find in any old house: Silverfish, ants, cockroaches, woodlice, house-mice, rats, pigeons and bats. Though I don't expect you to do anything about-”

“I can handle the flying rodentia,” I reply. “The ones that are in the house, anyway.”

“Yes,” he coughs, “good. But my master values his privacy. There are many important documents and private discussions that occur within these walls which he wishes to go unobserved. Therefore if madam could also eliminate any strands of ivy that you might find growing within the house and also-” he glances around, voice dropping to a whisper, “-deal with any Tinies you might come across, then...” he trails off suggestively, thumb and forefinger rubbing together.

Oh. Tinies. How delicious.

“Well, anything can be done,” I reply. “But it'll cost you. Double, I'm afraid.” It's not like I need the money, but there's the principle of the thing. Murder costs more, that's just my policy. Jeeves blanches at the amount, and opens his mouth. “You're free to take your business elsewhere, of course,” I cut his presumed complaint off smoothly. “But if you're considering stiffing me, I'd invite you to consider the alternative aspect of my career.”

I'll assassinate your ass, in other words.

If I thought he'd looked stuffed before...

“Agreed,” he says, in his clipped butler tones.

“Excellent,” I smile. “I'm looking forward to a most satisfactory working relationship. I shall require a cleared room to work.”

“I'd, ah, understood that the house could remain in use?” Jeeves replied, looking mildly peeved. “There are certain rooms it will be somewhat troublesome to be without. Perhaps you could work around-”

I hold up my hand and silence him. “A single room will be amply sufficient.” I inform him with the tones of a magocrat issuing a decree. “Privacy; however, is an absolute requirement which you must guarantee. Some of the materials and methods I use, well,” I grin, and he shivers, “the consequences of encountering them would be severe.”

Most likely fatal, in fact.

“I think we can accommodate that,” he agrees. And proceeds to lead me up four flights of stairs: From basement to living-floor to the private space of the master and mistress of the house, to the rooms of their children and their governess, and finally to a rickety set of stairs that brings us to a pair of narrow doors tucked right under the eaves.

He opens the leftmost one, and we step within. It's low-ceilinged, hot and cramped with no carpet. Nor furniture, beyond a narrow bed and slim wardrobe suitable for holding perhaps a single uniform or set of street clothes. Fair enough, I suppose. You can only wear one thing at a time, and besides their uniform how likely is it a maid could even afford additional garments?

“This'll do fine, thank you,” I tell him. Indeed it's close to perfect.

“Apologies for the dust,” he acknowledges. “This room hasn't been used since the Mistress decided we could do with just the one housemaid. It's the bigger of the two, but the current girl prefers the street-side one for some reason.” Indeed, the room's single shabby window does face onto the garden. A dryad, forty-feet high if she's an inch, waves cheerily to me. I wonder if she views the room's dormer window as a kind of cookie jar? Maidservant's are cheap, after all, and tame dryad's expensive... “No reason for anyone to disturb you,” Jeeves continues. “You can stay as long as the job requires.”

I sense he'd quite like to get out of the room, and I suspect the Dryad's the reason why. Naturally, she doesn't bother me. I've got nothing to fear from any part of her.

Well, maybe her roots...

He pauses at the door. “Ah, how long...”

“Since I can stay - for which I thank you – I should be able to have the extermination finished sometime tonight. You'll be able to have my payment prepared by then?”

“Ah,” Jeeves replies, and I almost sense a blush. “By tomorrow morning, Miss Flo,” he says. “I had not expected such efficiency.”

“Sufficient,” I bob my head in a clear dismissal. Dealing with humans is so tiresome.

“I shall have the footman bring your equipment up directly, if that will suit?” He says.

I smile. “I have everything I require,” I say, “except privacy.”

He nods, somewhat uncertain but clearly sensing he's unwelcome. And warned by whatever remnant this pampered and protected popinjay has of the small survival instinct Felaryian adventurers – sometimes – live by that he'd better get out of here if he wants to continue doing so.

Not that I'm doing it consciously, you understand. But I'm mildly annoyed with him. And I am, after all, a predator.

The lock is a pathetic little bolt, but I shut the door and shoot it home anyway.

Then I remove my wig. A few drops of me stay with it, having stuck to its fibres in the heat, but its nothing I can't afford to lose nor need worry about. I set it in the wardrobe for safekeeping. It'd be a pain to wash if it got as dusty as the floor in here, though it'll need replacing soon anyway.

Made for humans and of their hair, wigs get eaten away so easily by prolonged contact with me. They're moderately expensive, too, in the length I need to cover down to the collar of my catsuit.

Good thing I don't have much else I need spend my money on.

I toss the thought away. Then I lay back, not on the bed but rather the dusty floor itself, and relax.

My flaccid body oozes out of the stiff and grippy fabric of my catsuit. It's cast as single-piece, and the only way a human woman could get into it would be some form of teleportation. I understand that it'd been formed by dipping a suitably-shaped manikin into a vat of this latex-stuff in liquid form. Then they'd sawn the manikin apart from the inside-out to get the suit.

Of course, the purpose of such a thing existing is something I prefer not to speculate on. Because I hadn't had to have it custom made...

The 'they' doing the actual cutting-to-pieces part of the work had been Tinies, of course. Just like the ones I'm about to murder.

For a paycheck.

It's a reason of sorts, I suppose.

Expensive though it was I find that outfit, and my cheaper but less-durable wigs very useful. Because if I'm going to pass among humans for one of them, then I need to focus my attentions on the form, colour and expressions morphed into what passes for my face.

Dripping through the ill-fitting floorboards, I extend pseudopods in all directions, and begin to hunt for the small and tasty things I'm even being paid to devour.

It can be tough, if you're a female single self-employed slimoid living in Negav. But believe you me, it's better to try to make it in the big city than it is to live out in some damn swamp with the slug-girls.

The end, for now,

Ambrose,

First person narrative definitely works well here. With an interesting effect, since we're not supposed to identify at all with the narrator; she emphasises the fact that she's not humans and that she doesn't particularly like dealing with them, and she's a murderess. The idea of a slimoid finding such work is neat, and her final words in this story make perfect sense. I imagine she's not the only slimoid to have traded a precarious life in the swamps and forest for the alien but comparatively safe city.

Heh. It was only the comment about Dryad roots that tipped me off. XD

Anyhoo, a very good use of first person perspective and narration - for being the major city in Felarya there aren't many stories set in Negav. Maybe that short story idea of yours will be a chance...

great wok on that story ^_^
I loved the way you told it, concealing her nature until the end

Hey,

I genuinely didn't think I could continue this. Didn't see how I could square her size and perception of herself as a murderess with Felarya's cute-style vore. Still haven't squared that circle, but I've managed this continuation by going around three sides. Plus I've committed the sin of the cliffhanger. But here it is anyway.

This hasn't quite had my full-run editing process, so please point out any errors. Also unusually, I haven't written all of this story before posting it, so continuation isn't guaranteed. Still, I've got ideas that take me through to the ending, so it's not so bad as all that.

Also, it isn't the story I'd intended to write. It's a slice-of-life in Felarya, almost. Not vore - at least, not much. Not yet - and it isn't properly adventure either.

Anyway,

Yours,

Ambrose,


Flo-Two: Single Self-employed Slimoid

Beneath the floorboards of the maidservant's room, there's only dust and dead bugs. Desiccated already, there's no sustenance to be had here for a hungry slime-girl.

Besides, I'm not being paid to clean.

I slip upwards, in parts and through all four of the room's walls, finding no more food their than under the floorboards. A human would've considered the attic above the eaves inaccessible, and too hot and crowded besides. Its making me flaccid and puddly.

There are bats, up here. And lice, living in the insulation. After I flow through it, drops of me working upward through whatever gaps I can find, there isn't a single one left alive. I run up the rafters, tendrils of me spooling out and finding plenty of purchase against the rough sawn surface of the wood. The bats barely notice, as tiny rivulets of me run down and into their fur. If they're this used to it, the roof must leak a little under Negav's rainstorms.

Perhaps that little factoid might buy me a nice bonus on this job.

The heat draws a bead out of my runny body, and it glistens in the near-darkness before it falls. The droplet tumbles, and I'm both the pseudopod it falls from and the puddled core it splashes down into. As its impact ripples my surface tension and its tiny independent memories are reintegrated, I remember the isolation of falling, too.

In a human sense, it mightn't be too different to procreating, and then eating, one's young.

But I'm not human, and the metaphor hold up no better than my pliant body in this torrid warmth.

The sound this droplet of me makes as it splashes back into me startles the bats. It's a simple matter for even their weak strength to break free of my surface tension. Suddenly there are many flying parts of me, and hundreds of droplets besides.

I'm going to have such a headache reintegrating all those individual memories.

'Flying' parts of me. Except bats do not fly well with sticky slime-girl goop all over their delicate wing membranes. Especially not in an enclosed space. Their chattering is quite disturbing, but it lasts for mere moments before they drop from the air into the core of my form. I'm spread thin, but it takes no more than a moment to goop little hills of myself up and over them.

The droplets, less dense, take longer to fall. I'm right. It is a headache.

The bats' struggles don't last long. Not long enough, actually, given that they feel somehow good inside my floppy body. Once their flopping about and hopeless squeaking is over, it's easy enough to strike the few survivors down with pseudopods.

Sometimes I love my work.

They're more afraid of the light than of me. It holds predators they're ill equipped to handle. Not quite so much as in here though. Before long, they're all down, dead and digesting inside my body.

I pull the part of me that's temporally 'stomach' into a tight, out of the way bulge. I want to catch the pigeons unawares when they return to this roost tonight, after all. Then I let myself trail back out of the loft, and tumble down the walls through the maid's quarters, clearing them out of tasty little things as I go.

I dribble down into the walls of the children's floor. Four rooms: Children's, baby's, nanny's, bathroom. It's a big house, and there's a limit to how much of myself I can squeeze into my catsuit disguise. It also means I'm only comfortable splitting myself into two more quasi-cores.

I take the nursery and the bathroom first. There's nothing much here: Too far from the dark untended spaces of the attic for flying or fluttering things; too far from the warm and wet well-fed places of the kitchen and pantry for scuttling or squeaking things. Even osmosing out onto the tiles of the bathroom brings me nothing but mould and bacteria.

I don't so much digest it as co-opt it to aid in my own digestive processes, speeding it along thin strands of myself connecting to the part I've left upstairs as 'stomach'. There's nothing but practicality in the decision. Once I've made what use I can of the millions of minuscule living things I'll unhesitatingly shred their cells for whatever nutrition I can thus obtain.

I feel not the slightest guilt over the effective civicide.

There's a baby in the nursery. And since there's no one else here I goop a pseudopod down over its cot and consider the tiny, helpless thing with its too-wide eyes, stubby limbs and altogether lack of teeth. Of course I don't have them either. But it's a monoform. It gurgles – surprisingly, its process of digestion sounds not unlike my own – splubbering out bubbles of precious fluid, something that you'd never catch me doing.

Whatever meagre intelligence is inside that small head, a head that still contrives to be too large for its helpless body, catches sight of me and locks on its gaze.

One eye, anyway. The other spirals disconcertingly. It cocks a helpless hand at me, and makes a small wave of its fingers. I preoccupy myself for a moment, teasing it by batting back with my pseudopod. Just for fun, I form a little face on the 'pod's blobby end. But I take slim pleasure from watching the human child so-easily mirror various expressions I've worked so hard to master to masquerade in their society.

I don't understand human reproduction. Take one slimoid: Add food, water, and time sufficient for slimoid to double in size. Slimoid mitoses: Old slimoid; New slimoid, just as capable and survivable as its mother-sistertwin.

Under different circumstances, I'd have no hesitation about absorbing the humans offspring. After all, I've just determined to do the same to hundreds of thousands of bacteria, some of them quite young and all far closer kin to me than this monoforms spawn.

But... I can't double in size, even at the limits of pressurization my catsuit and I can withstand. Children, sistertwin-daughters, are the price I pay for my high-rise and rolling lifestyle in Negav.

Besides, its progenitors are my employers, and even though they'd never be able to prove anything those sorts of rumours it'd still be bad for business.

Oh! A small treasure of copper-carbonate corrosion built up on and in the bathroom's pipework. It's not food, strictly speaking, but its very important for the health and good functioning of a slimoid's slime.

That's why we're often such a lovely translucent turquoise.

When we're healthy, at least.

I have a hard time remembering corroded metals are quite common in this city. I could turn myself every rare metal colour of the rainbow should I so desire.

But a country-girl's gotta remember her pseudopods in the swamp back home somehow, so blue-green it is.

I trickle my way into the walls of the children's room. They're twins, or at least it appears to me that they are so. A single, solid face I could recognise every time. It's the stretchy bits over moveable, controllable substrate that I have such trouble with. Mimicking them is bad enough in general, let alone recognising and differentiating them with simple passive optical senses... I get by. They might be twins, or they might merely have a strong sibling resemblance.

Most slimoids couldn't do better than human. Many would be stuck at bipedal monoform.

I recall that the pink-clad one with clearly defined legs and the shorter pale-yellow skull-extrusions is likely to be male. The dusky-blue clad one, apparently with a properly-conjoined and mutable lower-half, and the longer and suitably flaccid skull extrusions is female, and in fact merely following the fashion of her gender.

By the time I'd realised this, itself sometime after discovering that mere humanity wasn't enough, oh no, one had to have a sex, I'd already self-identified as female. Strange that a truly neuter species should, for so stupid a reason, come to care about the humans 'battle of the sexes'.

I don't understand that properly either. How would their species continue to procreate if one side ever triumphed? Unless their females have some secret plan to become a truly advanced and multiformoid species?

Or the males either, I suppose... but I'm now sufficiently a partisan in this eternal war of theirs that I would no longer wish it won by the masculine.

This city is corrupting me.

“Are you sitting comfortably,” the children's nanny says, snapping my attention back to the here-and-now. Stomach and bathroom-pipe-scraping can run on instinct for awhile. Her charges bob their flaxen-haired heads. “Then I'll begin,” she continues. The wood-pulp product she holds is quite large, each page thick and gaily decorated. With a sort of stylised, green-blue tailed, pink-chested, blonde-haired worm and a green tree.

“Tell the story, Nana,” the children chorus as she settles herself.

She makes them wait another moment, with the sternest of glances, to punish their interruption. Human children should, apparently, be seen and not heard. Slimoids, children or otherwise, had better be neither seen nor heard. Lest they end up in a slug-girl's gut.

“This is the story,” Nana begins, “of The Very Hungry Naga.”

It certainly provides a very interesting perspective. Glad to see it continue.

It's getting really intriguing and interesting ^_^
Nice work on exploring her psyche