NO I DO NOT WANT TO ASSEMBLE YOU! I'M NOT A BAD GIRL!
[N!]
[N!]
[N!]
The words tore out of me, too loud in the muffled, watery silence of the bubble. I flinched at the sound of my own voice, which seemed to hang in the thick air before being swallowed by the gloom. Mrs. Sparkling Light's show always made it look so violent—a flash of light, a scream cut short, and the familiar was just… gone, folded into nothingness for a power-up. My chest felt tight. I dug my fingers into the sand, feeling the individual grains yield under my nails. Each one was unnervingly smooth and slightly warm, like beads from a broken necklace heated by the sun. I pulled my knees to my chest, wrapping my arms around them, trying to make a fortress of myself. The sand conformed to my weight with a soft sigh.
The bubble's membrane, just an arm's length away on all sides, shimmered with oily, rainbowed swirls, like petrol on a puddle but alive, slowly pulsing. If I focused past my own ragged breathing, I could see dark, shapeless masses drifting past in the blackness beyond, huge and slow as sleeping whales. Sometimes one would press closer, and the membrane would stretch inward, forming a faint, disturbing impression of a face or a claw before springing back.
"What does assemble mean? Properly?" My voice was smaller now, a scratchy thing. I wasn't just asking the shark; I was asking the silence, the sand, the creepy gelatin thing quivering on the coral slab. I traced a wobbly circle in the sand with my fingertip, not looking up.
Mr. Fin's gills flared wide, a slatted opening in his dark side. They expelling a stream of perfect, silver bubbles that drifted upward in a lazy column before bursting, one by one, with the sharp, acrid scent of iodine and regret. Pop-pop-pop-pop. Each tiny explosion made the air taste medicinal and my nose wrinkle. "Assimilate," it corrected, its tailfin slapping the wet sand with a sound like a wet towel hitting tile. The impact sent a tiny but distinct tremor through the seabed, and I felt it travel up through my tailbone. "Not assemble. This isn't some cheap Familiar Summoning 101 hologram you watched. You're not erasing it." One obsidian fin gestured languidly toward the trembling blob. A droplet of viscous, clear fluid fell from its tip and sizzled where it hit the sand. "You're negotiating a bond. You take a piece of its essence, it gets a permanent link to your… unique psychic signature. Symbiosis. You might gain a trait, maybe a sliver of system access. It gets…" Mr. Fin seemed to search for the right word, his galaxy-filled eyes rolling. "…a designated mortal. Pathetic, but statistically preferable to being dissolved by stomach acid."
[User Chiari do you agree to Assimilate at your owner user CosmicFlip direction with the endless faceted protozean essence of satiation? ]
[Y/N?]
The gelatinous blob trembled violently, not at the word 'negotiating,' but at the phrase 'permanent link.' I watched, fascinated and horrified, as it extruded three more pseudopods from its shimmering body. They moved with a liquid grace, sketching frantic, glowing runes into the sand. They were beautiful, in a weird way, like cursive writing made of neon slug trails. But as Mr. Fin's vast shadow passed over them, they dissolved instantly, the sand swallowing the light as if it were thirsty, leaving behind only faint, smoking indentations.
"See?" Mr. Fin's voice was a dry rasp, like stones grinding together in the deep. "It's… apprehensive. Probably thinks your emotional landscape is a radioactive, soggy dump site. Can't say its assessment is wrong."
"Hello?" I tell it. Something appears and blocks my sight.
[Endless faceted protozean essence of satiation: the anti hunger equation, food to fill the event horizont of a black hole with a single grain of rice. Thinking it's name causes mortal appetite to never, tastes like chicken or vanilla. Do not fill to endless maws under the ages of three billion years old without supervision.]
I shake my head and it goes away.
[N]
A distant, wet crunch echoed through the bubble, a sound with terrible weight and finality, as if something in the abyss had just bitten down on a giant, bony cucumber. I hunched my shoulders, instinctively making myself smaller, my chin dipping to my knees. The warmth of the sand beneath me suddenly felt cloying, like I was sitting on something that was alive and breathing slowly.
I swallowed, my throat as dry as the onigiri I'd never finished. My eyes darted from the terrified, quivering blob to Mr. Fin's impassive, star-speckled stare. A link. A trait. It sounded less like cooking and more like… adoption. A formal, cosmic binding. A weird, hollow ache pulsed behind my ribs, an old familiar feeling. I wrapped my arms tighter around myself, my fingers gripping my own sleeves. The fabric of my hoodie was still damp from… whatever had brought me here.
My gaze settled on the blob. It was scared. I knew scared. It was alone in this stupid bubble with a scary shark. I knew that, too. A stupid, impulsive thought shot to the surface, bypassing all sense, a life raft made of desperation and kiddie shows.
"Can't you…" I started, my voice cracking. I blurted it out before I could stop myself, pointing a shaky finger at the quivering mass. "Can't you just become my pet?"
The silence that followed was absolute and heavy. Even the distant, swirling currents in the abyss beyond the membrane seemed to still. The bioluminescent glows from the sand dimmed for a heartbeat. The gelatinous blob froze mid-shiver.
Mr. Fin's jaws slackened slightly. I saw rows of needle-like teeth, each as long as my hand, that seemed to fold inward upon themselves like a disappointed accordion. Then, a sound began to build in its gills—a low, wheezing, bubbling noise that erupted into a full, resonant BWAA-HA-HA-HA that shook the very sand and made the bubble membrane vibrate against my back. It was the sound of a submarine hull cracking open with laughter.
"Its PET?!" Mr. Fin wheezed, its tailfin slapping the sand in great gusts of mirth, kicking up clouds of glowing spores. "Oh, land-grub. You sublime, ridiculous little salt-grub. A pet!" It gasped for briny breath, its whole body undulating with the force of its amusement. "Yes. Fine. For the sake of this doomed experiment, yes. You can pretend it's a pet. Assimilation is just… cosmic pet ownership with extra steps and existential risk. Now," it said, the mirth vanishing from its voice as if a switch had been flipped, replaced by theatrical solemnity.
[User Chiari do you agree to adopt at your owner user CosmicFlip direction the endless faceted protozean essence of satiation as your pet? ]
[Y/N?]
"Yes, if you do what I say."
[Y]
Its giant head lowered closer, the galaxies in its eyes spinning slowly. "Your 'pet' there is also your first ingredient. A versatile one. So." It nudged the coral counter with its snout. "What does the chef wish to make with her new… pet-ingredient?"
The gelatinous blob had stopped trembling. It had gone perfectly, perplexedly still. One pseudopod lifted slowly, its tip swelling into a bulb, then tilting to the side like a dog hearing a curious sound.
The sheer, crushing absurdity of it all crashed into me. I was in a bubble at the bottom of everything, being laughed at by a cosmic shark, asking a glob of alien jelly to be my pet so I could… cook it? Not cook it? I let out a breath I didn't know I was holding and hugged my knees, resting my forehead on them. The world narrowed to the dark fabric of my jeans and the whisper of my own breath. My voice, when it came, was muffled and flat with overwhelmed resignation.
"I am a chef?" I whispered to the sand between my feet. Then I looked up, a spark of stubborn defiance igniting in the pit of my stomach. I lifted my head and glared at the blob, then at Mr. Fin. "Then I want to make rice." I nodded, convincing myself. "I like rice. It's simple. It's good. Pets… pets probably like rice too. Right? You can mix things in it."
The shark's tailfin began to drum a slow, impatient rhythm against the sand. Thump. Thump. Thump. Each impact sent up a puff of bioluminescent spores that hung in the water like accusing stars.
[Abyssal Lobby, Judges present 8/8]
[Satiation of Lobby critical, 25%]
[User Y0g_S0th0th eyes a newly born Universe and drools ]
Mr. Fin's gills did that weird, stuttering flare again, a visible sigh. "Rice," it stated, all humor gone, replaced by a tone of profound, cosmic exasperation. "You wish to use an Abyssal Protoplasmic Essence, a thing of boundless potential form… to make rice."
The blob—my maybe-pet-ingredient—gave a wet, shuddering pulse, a single ripple passing through its form. It retracted its questioning pseudopod with a soft, sorrowful schlup. Then, as if responding to the very idea, the sand right between my crossed ankles cracked. A jagged, black fissure split open, no wider than a finger, and from its depth rose a single grain of rice. It was swollen to the size of a pebble, and it glowed with a sickly, radioactive green light from within, casting a faint, toxic halo on my legs. It hovered at eye level, rotating slowly.
[User princesspamperville23 (Starcrushing Vine Lvl 9849] is losing her patience]
[princesspamperville23 demands that user C'thullus the Ever-Hungering serves food or she will requisit his fin for supper]
[User NightSnack (Snail of Graviton Lvl 12400) snickers, it feasts on C'thullus the Ever-Hungering misery and offers an F Grade Species of the same Rank for the curious new species]
[User C'thullus the Ever-Hungering declined the most gracious offer and pleads with the lobby to wait]
Mr. Fin flicked it toward me with a casual fin-tip. It sailed through the thick air and smacked softly against my chest before tumbling into the cradle of my lap. It was warm. Not pleasantly warm, but fever-warm. "Congratulations," the shark droned, its dorsal fin twitching. "Your 'pet' has manifested a secondary ingredient. A Cosmic Base Grain. And it is, as am I, cosmically disappointed in your lack of ambition."
[Cosmic Base Grain: Endless faceted protozean essence of satiation worst form and its least appetizing dish.]
The grain pulsed in my hand with a low, sub-audible hum. I didn't just hear it; I felt it in my teeth, a dull vibration. Behind the shark, the coral counter groaned and reshaped itself, segments grinding and fusing until it formed a crude mortar and pestle of fossilized whalebone, its surface etched with writhing spirals that seemed to move if I didn't look directly at them.
I looked from the warm, judgmental rice grain sitting heavily in my palm to the silent, waiting blob, then to the ominous new tool. My pet. My ingredient. My first, stupid, glowing grain of rice.
This was going just great.
[User 1337_DeepOne_ (Deep One Hybrid, Lvl 5000) bets 100 Bubblepoints that the grain will be ruined in the next 5 minutes. Any takers?]
[User Cthulhu_R0FL (Great Old One, Lvl 10000) raises the bet to 500 Bubblepoints that the entire bubble will be dissolved in the next 10 minutes.]
[User Nyarlethotep (Crawling Chaos, Lvl 12000) quietly observes that the pet is already plotting its escape. The odds are in its favor.]
I could feel the judges' eyes on me, their comments buzzing in the periphery of my vision. I took a deep breath and closed my fingers around the grain. It was warm and slightly sticky. I looked at Mr. Fin.
"What do I do now?"
Mr. Fin's dorsal fin twitched. "Now, you cook. Or try to. The clock is ticking, and the audience is getting hungry."
[Satiation of Lobby: 20%]
[Warning: If satiation reaches 0%, the bubble will be dissolved and all contents will be forfeit to the lobby.]
I swallowed hard. This was not going to be easy.