//------------------------------// // Some of the Slime // Story: A Slimy Nightmare Night // by Scyphi //------------------------------// Ocellus had meant it too. Neither of them left the room for the next several hours except for once so Gallus could go use the restroom, and that had only been under the strict stipulation that he come right back. Clearly, she was quite unhappy with the griffon. Not that Gallus hadn’t repeatedly tried to apologize and make amends. “Look, Ocellus, I’m sorry,” he groaned again for what felt like the umpteenth time that afternoon, realizing they had both been in here long enough for it to have become afternoon. “And I get it, you spent a lot of time on this just to have it all go poof, but it was an accident! I didn’t mean for the drink to spill out, let alone into your science experiment and ruin it!” He turned his head from where he had been wearily lounging on the lower of the two bunk beds at where the changeling had been working at her desk almost continuously since the incident. He groaned. “C’mon, ’Celly, we’re going to miss Nightmare Night if we don’t wrap this up soon!” “Then hopefully we’ll figure this out shortly,” Ocellus replied curtly and, without looking up from the parchment she had been scrawling indecipherable magic and chemistry equations for most of this purgatory, jabbed a hoof back at him. “Now tell me all of the ingredients in the drink again.” “Again?” Gallus bemoaned. “Why can’t you just read them off the back of the can yourself like a normal creature? It’s what I’ve been doing!” “Because this is your punishment for ruining my gel.” “I said I was sorry for that!” Gallus repeated again. “More times than I can count!” Seeing Ocellus was unswayed, he added, “Look, if you’re going to blame anyone, blame Smolder! She was the one that even brought the drink into the room in the first place!” “Please, Gallus?” Gallus sighed, then relented, holding up the can he had long emptied hours ago out of boredom. “All right, Tsar Bomba energy drink…fifty-five percent caffeine, thirty-three percent sugar, ten percent taurine…” Ocellus shook her head. “That alone is already ninety-eight percent of the drink—is there even any room left for the water?” she asked sarcastically. “Sure there is, they list it at the bottom here, see?” Gallus replied, choosing to ignore her sarcasm. “One percent carbonated water.” “Just enough to keep this insane concoction fluid, I suppose,” Ocellus grumbled as she went back to her equations. “If it doesn’t give you cardiac arrest first, this stuff will rot your teeth.” “I’ll start caring as soon as I have some teeth to rot,” Gallus retorted, tapping the side of his beak knowingly. Ocellus didn’t reply and instead kept working on her equations for a moment. She then growled in frustration and slapped her hooves onto the desktop. “I don’t understand it!” she complained, rubbing fitfully at her temples. “None of these ingredients should’ve rendered the gel’s formula inert! Distorted its intended functions, yes…if anything, it should’ve excited it…not kill it entirely!” Groaning, she let her head fall onto the desk with a thump. “I just don’t know what went wrooooooo-ong-ong-ong,” she bemoaned sadly with a half-suppressed sob. Seeing how pitiful she looked, Gallus felt his heart soften and with a sigh, rolled over and heaved himself up onto his feet, stepping over and placing a reassuring paw over her shoulder. “Look, I really am sorry for messing up your formula thing, Ocellus,” he apologized sincerely. “If I could just snap my claws and undo it all, I would, but I can’t. So I’m sorry all that work you put into this got so messed up and didn’t work out like you hoped.” He gave her a reassuring pat. “But getting all worked up about it isn’t really going to make it better, right? Maybe what you need is to take a break from all of this…let yourself unwind a little and clear your mind.” Ocellus sighed, rubbing at her eyes. “Maybe you’re right,” she relented, turning away from the desk at last. She managed a small grin. “My brain does feel like it’s about ready to burn out.” “Yeah, I can almost see the smoke coming out of your ears now,” Gallus joked, which managed to draw a small chuckle out of the changeling. He then glanced at the alarm clock in the room. “You still haven’t gotten much sleep either, have you? So tell you what—the barbeque down at Sandbar’s place is going to be starting soon. While that’s going, maybe his folks will let you crash on their couch for a bit.” Ocellus shrugged, joining Gallus as they turned for the door. “They do have a pretty nice couch,” she conceded then let out a relieving breath. “And I suppose this all wasn’t a total loss…I’ll just have to keeping working and try and figure out a new solution so to keep this from happening again.” She shook her head as they arrived at the door. “It’s just…I really thought I had it there at last…so it’s disappointing to see I wasn’t actually as close as I thought I—” They both stopped when they heard a beaker suddenly tip over on Ocellus’s desk behind them. Turning to look back at it, they saw it was same beaker that was still holding the failed intelligent gel. Confused, the two exchanged looks before moving back to the desk to get a better look, seeing the gel was now oozing out of the tipped-over beaker and onto the desk. Gallus scratched at his crest, confused. “Huh,” he remarked. “Wonder what made it tip over like that.” “I don’t know, but we better clean it up before it spills onto the floor,” Ocellus said, picking up a cleaning tool from elsewhere on her desk and moving it to start wiping up the spilled gel… …Only to see the gel visibly flinch away from the offending object. Surprised, the two exchanged glances before Ocellus did it again and spurred the same reaction from the gel. “I thought you said that stuff wasn’t working anymore?” Gallus asked. “Rendered inert, yes, and it was,” Ocellus remarked, just as confused as him, tilting her head at the sudden revival of the gel. “I don’t know why it’s suddenly responding to outside stimuli again…but since it is…” She picked up the fallen beaker with her magic and used it to quickly scoop up the spilt gel, only to have it promptly overflow over the edges. Gasping in surprise, Ocellus dropped the beaker where it again thudded onto the desk, spilling the gel. The gel then proceeded to slowly ooze the rest of the way out of the beaker, quite possibly under its own power. Now Gallus was starting to get a little leery. “Wait a minute, there wasn’t nearly enough gel to totally fill that thing earlier, not even close!” he remarked. Ocellus realized there was only one explanation then. “It grew,” she breathed, stunned. “Somehow it’s actually grown in size…but how? It’s not supposed to, and it’d need some kind of energy source in order to do so anyway, so—” They were again cut off when the spilt gel finished oozing its way onto the base of Ocellus’s desk lamp, which almost immediately started to spark and flicker with magical energy, startling them both to the point of yelping in their panic. “It must have caused a short!” Ocellus reasoned as Gallus quickly ducked under the desk and pulled the lamp’s cord out of the wall socket, cutting its magical power supply. This stopped the sparking instantly. But he saw the damage was already done as he pulled his head back above the desk in time to see the gel visibly double in size while it slithered away from the dead lamp. “Okay, I think I know where it’s getting energy now,” Gallus remarked warily, starting to back away from the desk. “It must be feeding off any magical energy it can access,” Ocellus reasoned in awe, her mind a flurry of internal equations as she worked this out. But she, too, started backing away from the gel on the desk. “Probably even the ambient magical energy in the air…that’s how it was growing while it was still inside the beaker!” “So…what happens if it keeps doing that?” Gallus asked slowly, glancing at her. “I guess it’ll keep growing,” Ocellus reasoned back, glancing back at him. “And…how big are we talking here?” “Um…I can’t be sure…it might only be limited by how much energy it can get access to.” “Ocellus…last time I checked, there’s a lot of magical energy in the world.” “I know.” They shared an alarmed look at the gel inching across the desk, searching for a new energy supply to feed off of. Then, Ocellus abruptly lit her horn and fired a spell at it so to destroy it. This did absolutely nothing though, the gel simply absorbing the spell’s energy and starting to grow even more. So Gallus quickly grabbed a clear plastic container Yona had been using to hold rubber erasers, dumped out the contents, then slammed it over the growing gel and trapping it. He then backed away cautiously to see if it would hold, the two warily watching the gel within ooze around. They both jumped again when the gel managed to scoot the container slightly across the desk, but it didn’t get far before Ocellus thumped a stack of her school books on top of it, weighing it down. Ocellus then watched to see if the slime could still move the container, ready to thump on more books if necessary, but the container remained still, the intelligent gel unable to budge it. “There, that should hold it,” she said, breathing a sigh of relief. “For now,” Gallus said, not so reassured. “What if that stuff grows again?” Ocellus winced, rubbing at her temples as she sought a solution. “I don’t know what else to do, though! I can’t destroy it with my magic, it’ll just keep feeding off it! And it’s a gel, with no true solid form, so you can’t exactly just squish it, either!” “Then I think it’s time we got help from the experts,” Gallus concluded. As the sun started to set on the horizon, heralding the official start of the Nightmare Night festivities that evening, the School of Friendship was left rather empty and quiet. Not too surprising to the still newly-appointed headmare Starlight Glimmer, who figured her students were all out either visiting family and friends or partaking of the festivities. As they should be—Nightmare Night was a day to have fun, after all. In fact, Starlight wondered that even if the holiday hadn’t ended up on a weekend she still wouldn’t have held classes today. She knew Twilight wouldn’t approve of that…but Twilight wasn’t the one in charge of the school anymore, now was she? Let the students have their fun today. Starlight fully intended to join them, and was already dressed in her Nightmare Night costume too, but unfortunately, there was still one matter of school business she needed to attend to first. Arriving at the doors for the guidance counselor’s office, she knocked briefly. “Trixie, are you in there?” she called through the doors. Not getting an immediately response, she knocked again. “Trixie?” Still getting no response, she twisted the doorknob and started to pull it open so to let herself in. Immediately, a flood of smoky, spooky, fog gushed out of the room and poured thickly onto the floor, followed by a swarm of magically-generated false bats. A flash of lightning flared out from within the dimly lit room, just long enough to see it had been decorated from top to bottom with every spooky Nightmare Night decoration known to ponykind, generating such a powerful spooky atmosphere that it didn’t seem physically possible for it to be any more spooky. This was quickly followed by a deep and bone-rattling voice which called out, “ENTER…IF YOU DARE!” Starlight, however, was unmoved. “Trixie. Seriously.” There was a click and the lights came on, revealing Trixie seated innocently behind her desk, wearing an outfit that wasn’t unlike the cape and hat she normally favored, but colored black with dark purple trim and bearing Nightmare Night-themed decorations. She was also totally unrepentant. “C’mon, Starlight, it’s Nightmare Night! Get in the spirit a little!” “Yeah, that’s kind of what I’m here to talk to you about,” Starlight said as she walked up to Trixie’s desk, smoky fog still swirling around her hooves as she walked. “You see…” “Ah-ah! Hold that thought!” Trixie interrupted, holding up a hoof. She leaned eagerly forward. “Wouldn’t you like a piece of candy first?” Starlight narrowed her eyes at her, but seeing Trixie wasn’t going to dissuaded from it that easily, she relented. “Fine.” Trixie then eagerly turned to where she had a candy bowl set on her desk, a plastic pony skull poking up from the middle of it. Instead of picking out a piece of candy, Trixie instead pressed down on the plastic skull, which eye sockets lit up as it started to shake. “I’d lend you a hoof, but I don’t seem to have any!” it announced cheesily before cackling briefly. Trixie snickered, amused. “Ha-ha, this guy tells it like it is,” she said, before finally selecting a piece of candy corn and handing it over to Starlight. Starlight accepted it and politely popped it into her mouth. “Now,” she began as she chewed, “before you try and bring up any other distractions, I need to tell you that I’ve been getting a few complaints from the students about all of your Nightmare Night decorations in here. A number of them even wanted to come to me to consult with their problems instead of you because of it.” Trixie feigned a shocked gasp, pressing a hoof to her chest. “Really?” she proclaimed, distraught. “But why? Trixie’s just trying to get into the spirit of the holiday!” “One of the students had wanted to talk to you about how much Nightmare Night decorations tended to creep him out this time of year,” Starlight stated flatly. “Guess who changed his mind the moment he saw your office, though?” Trixie’s face fell. “Oh.” She looked around at her overly decorated office and winced. “Oops.” “Look, Trixie,” Starlight then continued with a sigh. “I get that Nightmare Night is your favorite holiday and all. But all of these decorations don’t make for a very conducive environment for counseling with students in, clearly.” “Oh, but I just love this holiday so much!” Trixie whined. “It’s a chance for Trixie to truly put to the test her skills as a showmare and illusionist!” “Hay, I understand that,” Starlight assured, and motioned to her own Nightmare Night costume. “I’m pretty fond of the holiday myself, as you can see!” Trixie wasn’t impressed, though. “Yeah, I see you decided to go with the Sky Trek uniform for a costume anyway,” she remarked wearily. Starlight looked down at her outfit. “What’s wrong with it?” she protested. “Nothing, it’s just…did you have to wear the red one? That’s just…tempting fate.” “Look, I’ll have you know…” But she was interrupted by Gallus and Ocellus suddenly storming into the room in a panic. “Trixie! Counselor Trixie!” they both called as they plowed through the fog spilling out of the office at a full gallop, which was right about when they noticed Starlight was here too. “Oh! And Headmare Starlight! That’s even better!” “Hey!” Trixie protested at the implied blow to her ego. But Starlight, sensing something was up, motioned for her to be quiet. “What’s going on, what’s wrong?” she asked the two panicked students. Gallus stepped forward to explain, sheepishly raising a paw. “So…I accidentally spilt some energy drink…and now we’ve got this smart slimeball that we don’t know how to stop.” Both Trixie and Starlight tilted their heads at them, confused. “Smart slimeball?” they repeated in unison. They explained the situation in more detail as they were hurrying back to Ocellus’s dorm room. “So wait,” Trixie recapped as they galloped, “This slimeball…you’re saying it’s alive?” Ocellus made a hesitant wince. “Not so much alive as it is intelligent,” she reasoned. “Basically, it’s using a modified spell matrix to simulate semi-sentient behavior and to carry out a series of pre-set instructions as it encounters corresponding environments—mostly all of the normal tasks a changeling would seek to perform with ordinary changeling gel. Or at least that was my original intention.” She sighed. “The exposure to Gallus’s energy drink seems to have…corrupted it in some manner—at least it’s behaving in ways I never intended now. So I honestly can’t predict what it might do next or if it’ll even still follow those original instructions.” “If this spell matrix is all that’s making it functional though, then that’s how we stop it before it becomes too much more of a problem,” Starlight reasoned, calming down a little now that she saw a straightforward plan of action to take. “We just need to break that matrix, and that should stop it dead in its tracks.” “It’s not that simple, though,” Gallus said, not reassured. “This thing feeds off of magic and only gets bigger and more powerful every time it does, so you can’t use another spell to stop it, and if you can’t use magic to break this matrix thing, then how are you going to do this?” “Well, the more important thing is that it’s contained for the moment, right?” Trixie reasoned. “So as long as it’s still contained, that keeps it under control and buys us time to figure it out, right?” Only the intelligent gel wasn’t still contained by the time they got back to the dorm room. When they arrived, they found the container they had trapped it in tipped over and the stack of books pinning it down dumped in a heap onto the desk chair and the floor around it. The desktop was now covered with a thin but visible layer of teal slime. But there was no immediate sign of the ball of slime itself. This immediately put them all on guard as they warily started to scan the room for any sign of it. “…where did it go?” Gallus asked aloud, his voice wary. “It…couldn’t have gone far, right?” Trixie voiced, trying to be hopeful. Ocellus could only shrug though, uncertain. But before they had to search for long, Ocellus’s desk suddenly rattled, followed by some flashes of light from sparking magic coming from underneath. Ocellus suddenly paled. “The wall socket…it found the wall socket and is pulling magical power right from the town’s main lines to feed upon!” Gallus slapped his talons onto either side of his face, alarmed. “That thing doubled in size just when it got a few seconds of magic off of Ocellus’s desk lamp…if it’s gotten to a near constant supply now…” he trailed off, not needing to finish the ominous thought for them to understand. However, they still couldn’t see the slime itself, so Starlight silently volunteered herself to scout ahead, cautiously starting towards the desk. She jumped when it again shook, more violently this time, as if something was trying to move the desk from underneath. One corner of the slime peeked out from underneath of the desk, only hinting at however big it might have gotten now, before slipping back underneath again and out of view. Starlight hesitated, glancing back at the others to reassure herself that they were still safe, then started forward again, starting to circle around in front of the desk so to better see it. She only got part way when there was more magical sparking and the desk again shook harder than before. Alarmed, Starlight reflexively threw up a magical shield in front of her for protection. But Ocellus jumped forward, shaking her head. “No!” she declared, motioning for Starlight to stop. “A magical shield won’t stop it—it’ll just eat its way through it!” Starlight nodded, inwardly kicking herself for forgetting that so quickly, and lowered her shield again as she sought to recover her courage to continue. At the same time, Trixie scanned the room for a replacement, before ripping the blanket off of the lower bunk bed and giving it to Gallus and Ocellus to hold in front of them as a shield. It wasn’t perfect, but hopefully it’d at least be enough for the two students to beat a hasty retreat if needed. “Stay here and keep back, just in case,” she advised the students then joined Starlight, looking nervous. “Any ideas?” she asked her fellow unicorn. Starlight hesitated then turned her head to reply when there was more sparking from under the desk, serious enough now that the lights throughout the whole room suddenly flickered before going out, followed by a soft “pop” of a fuse being blown. Then, with one final jolt from under the desk, knocking things off of it, the intelligent gel finally revealed itself in full. The teal ball of slime had indeed grown in size, to the point that it was roughly the same height as an adult pony, depending on how the versatile goop arranged itself. In the dim lighting, it looked rather intimidating, especially with it moving around of its own accord. Trixie and Starlight both backed up slightly as it slithered in their direction, partly to stand between it and the two students behind them, and partly out of legitimate fear of what the blob might do. “We need to contain this thing somehow,” Starlight finally responded, belatedly answering Trixie’s question, “somewhere where it can’t have such ready access to magic and keep it from growing even more.” “Okay,” Trixie replied, nodding. “So how are we going to do that?” Starlight bit her lip as the blob continued to ooze idly in their direction. It didn’t seem too concerned about them at the moment. “Uhhh…” she scanned the room for some kind of inspiration, or at least something to trap the intelligent gel in, but there was no longer anything big enough. She racked her brain for anything she knew was in the school that could, and eventually thought of the cafeteria freezer. “Okay, we need to see if we can lure this thing out of here.” She lit her horn as brightly as she could and waved it at the blob, hoping the magic would attract its interest. Trixie, however, grabbed the desk chair with her magic and hurled it at the blob, which only embedded itself into the teal goo with a wet slap. Starlight shot Trixie a glare. “I was trying to make it angry, so it’d chase us!” Trixie said, explaining her half-baked idea. “From what Ocellus said, I don’t think it can get angry, so all you’ve—” She was cut short when the intelligent gel unexpectedly spat out a series of smaller balls of slime at them like a cannon. Two missed, but only barely, while a third hit the blanket Gallus and Ocellus were holding up like a shield with a splat (to which they both yelped), while the fourth knocked Trixie’s hat clean from her head and glued it to the nearby wall. Startled by the sudden action, both Starlight and Trixie reacted instinctively and, being unicorns, did what came naturally to unicorns and used magic to defend themselves. Trixie fired off a magic firework at the intelligent slime while Starlight simply fired a laser of pure magic right at the center of the giant blob. Both released flashes of near-blinding light, but did little to the blob as it absorbed both magical attacks like they were spaghetti noodles before heading straight for their source, growing larger still as it did. Starlight and Trixie stumbled to try and back away from the blob’s sudden approach, but it was faster, latching onto Starlight’s forehooves before she could get clear. Yelping, she tried to tug herself free to no avail, so Trixie doubled back to help, only to get trapped as well. Frustrated, Trixie had time enough to shout to Starlight, “See, this is what I meant about you wearing the red shirt!” before both ponies were engulfed fully by the intelligent gel and vanished completely from view. Gallus and Ocellus could only look on in horror. For a moment, they were too stunned by the suddenness of it all, but then Gallus, finding his voice, finally bellowed, “Oh my goldfinch, it just ate our teachers!” Ocellus didn’t respond. After all the day’s stress and her overall lack of sleep, this was finally more than she could take. So with a groan, her eyes rolled up and she collapsed to the floor in a dead faint, tangling herself up in their blanket shield as she dropped. This just left Gallus facing the slime ball on his own, a fact he became consciously aware of as it pivoted around, as if turning to face him. The thought occurred to him that this meant it was his chance to step up and save the day, be the hero for not just Ocellus and his teachers but possibly numerous others as well. All he had to do was face off with this still-growing and seemingly indestructible ball of intelligent gel that ate magic. Which was why Gallus instead wrapped up Ocellus’s limp body in the blanket and ran out of the room, screaming his head off and dragging the changeling behind him.