The water steamed in lazy curls that rose toward the cavern ceiling and vanished into that darkness there. Barjuchne lowered herself into the hot spring with a sigh that rumbled through her chest, her scales clicking softly against the smooth stone basin. The heat seeped into her muscles, easing tensions she had not realised she carried. Her tail coiled beneath the surface, the tip occasionally breaking through to flick water across the rocks. It was hard being a dragon.
But this right here was perfect.
Absolutely perfect.
Before the heat of the water had reached her, something else had hit her first. A sharp, acrid smell, faintly sulphurous, rising from somewhere deep in the rock beneath the spring's basin. She pressed one palm flat against the cavern floor and felt it through her dungeon sense. Beneath the rock of her dungeon core, she felt something else. It was not water this time, but pressure. Something volatile and flammable, sealed inside a pocket of stone far below the gate passage, close enough to the mountain's front face that it made the rock above it hum faintly with trapped energy. There was some kind of gas, she thought, that was trapped in the mountain stone. Interesting. She didn't exactly know what to do with a pocket of likely noxious cave gas some hundreds of metres below the rock, but it would find its purpose, as everything in her new world did at some point.
This one just hadn't found its moment yet.
For now, it was just another treasure of hers. She learnt from Rou-ya that such things need not be material objects alone. But something about the knowledge pleased her in a way she couldn't entirely explain.
But she filed it away for now.
Maybe she would have Veliah and Rou-ya show and tell her many new things later today that she could add to her hoard.
So far, however, today was seemingly a quiet day. Finally. She planned to spend every last minute of it right here, sitting in peaceful, utter, silent bliss in her hot springs. There were no tribute caravans expected to arrive. No terrified emissaries to deal with. None of that ‘Dragon Queen’ stuff. She might as well plan on taking the day off.
Barjuchne closed her eyes and let her head rest against the edge of the pool. The dungeon hummed around her with quiet ambient magic, a presence she had grown accustomed to over the weeks. Her claws flexed beneath the water, she lazily reopened her lids and lie there quietly in the waters, watching the phosphorescent moss cast green-blue light across the rippling surface.
Footsteps echoed from the tunnel entrance. Barjuchne's eyes snapped open.
A goblin warrior appeared at the threshold, spear in hand, clearly on patrol. He froze when he saw her, his yellow eyes going wide. His mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.
"Great queen," he managed, his voice cracking. "I did not mean to disturb -"
"It's fine," Barjuchne said quickly, trying to sound reassuring. Surely there had to be something important or he wouldn’t have come all the way down here to the core. She knows the poor guys are terrified of her. But the words came out as a low growl that echoed off the cavern walls with draconic resonance. The goblin stumbled backward, nearly dropping his spear.
"My apologies!" He bowed so low his forehead nearly touched the ground. "I will leave immediately! Please forgive the intrusion!"
"No, wait, I didn't mean -"
But he was already gone, his footsteps retreating at a sprint down the corridor.
What did he even want?
Well, whatever. If it was a big deal, somebody would say something.
Barjuchne slumped back against the stone, water sloshing around her shoulders. She closed her eyes again and tried to recapture the peaceful feeling from moments before. The water was still hot.
The silence returned. She exhaled.
But then, more footsteps. Lighter this time. Barefoot. Barjuchne did not need to open her eyes to know who approached. The faint scent of herbs and the particular rhythm of movement gave it away.
Veliah.
"I'm bathing," Barjuchne said, keeping her eyes closed.
"I can see that." Veliah's voice held that careful neutrality she used when approaching the dragon. "I brought clean fabrics and a scented soap. I thought you might want them. They came with the last tribute from the villages. Well, the fabrics at least," said the elf. "The soap Rou-ya made."
Oh. That was nice of her.
Barjuchne cracked one eye open. The elf stood at the pool's edge, holding a folded stack of linen and a bar of something that smelt vaguely of lavender.
"Thank you," Barjuchne said.
Veliah set them on a nearby rock, carefully out of splashing range. She hesitated, her green eyes studying the dragon with that analytical look that meant she was thinking something she had not yet decided to say aloud.
"Was there something else?" Barjuchne asked, trying very hard to sound patient rather than annoyed.
It came out sounding imperious. Commanding. Like a queen dismissing a servant rather than a tired person asking a genuine question.
Veliah's shoulders tensed fractionally. "No. I'll leave you to your rest."
"Ah, wait. Why don't you stay a while and -"
But the elf was already walking away, her footsteps quiet and measured. Not running, because Veliah had too much dignity for that, but definitely leaving faster than she had arrived.
Barjuchne sank deeper into the water until only her eyes and nose remained above the surface. Bubbles rose around her snout as she exhaled in frustration. This was supposed to be relaxing. Somehow it wasn't. How bothersome.
She stayed submerged for a long moment, watching the cavern ceiling waver through the rippling water.
Was there something going on that they needed her to handle? Was she being irresponsible by trying to just not do anything for a change?
The dragon girl surfaced with a splash, water streaming from her scales, and reached for the soap Veliah had brought. Rou-ya made this? Barjuchne sniffed it suspiciously, like an animal that had found an oddity in the woods.
"Wow. That's really nice," she muttered to herself. She didn't know Rou-ya could make these sorts of things too. She'll be sure to compliment the goblin princess on her work next time she sees her. Real soap. What an unfathomable luxury.
As for Veliah, Barjuchne makes a note to apologise for sounding too harsh later on. It’s a real problem she has to deal with. It’s just the nature of a dragon to be naturally frightening, even despite her own conscious efforts.
Barjuchne scrubbed at her scales, working the soap into the grooves between the armoured plates. The scent filled the cavern with something almost pleasant, covering the usual mineral smell of the springs. Her muscles gradually began to relax again despite the interruptions. The heat worked its magic, easing the constant tension she carried in her shoulders and back.
Oh well. Even with a couple awkward moments, this was still nice. It's good to have some quiet time, finally.
This was -
"- My Queen?"
The dragon's head whipped around, water spraying in an arc. Adjusting to the light, her eyes narrowed; the red slits glowed toward the approacher. The goblin princess Rou-ya stood at the tunnel entrance, clutching what looked like a stack of leather maps against her chest. The goblin princess froze mid-step, her golden eyes going wide.
"I- I can come back," Rou-ya said quickly.
"No, it's -" Barjuchne stopped herself before she could finish the sentence. Whatever she said would come out wrong. It always did. She took a slow breath, trying to find words that would not sound threatening. "What do you need?"
The question rumbled through the chamber with unconscious authority. Rou-ya flinched, her grip tightening on the documents.
"I had some ideas," the goblin said, her voice smaller than usual. "For the outer defences. But it can wait. I should not have interrupted."
"No," Barjuchne tried, wanting to say that she wasn’t interrupting at all. She’d actually be very happy to hear all about it. But that one single word is all that came out and it came out sounding exactly like a dismissal.
Rou-ya's green ears flattened against her skull. "Oh. I… Of course. I apologise for the intrusion."
She turned to leave.
"Rou-ya, wait -"
But the goblin princess was already retreating down the corridor, her footsteps quick and nervous. The documents rustled as she clutched them tighter, and then she was gone, leaving Barjuchne alone once more in the steaming water.
The dragon stared.
"...The soap is really nice," muttered Barjuchne.
Was it her? Was she doing something wrong? Barjuchne held her hand in front of her mouth, checking her breath. It smelt fine. She took a bite of the soap, hoping it would fix her. It did not. It only gave her an extremely bitter, bubbly foam along her teeth. Barjuchne let her head fall back against the stone with a dull thunk. The sound echoed through the empty chamber, mocking her failure. She stared up at the ceiling, watching steam curl and twist in the dim light.
Dragon Queen or not, she just wasn’t that good at talking to people when she was in ‘dragon mode’, and she couldn’t really control that. Sometimes she’s still just herself, but in this body. And sometimes, she was the body, despite herself.
— If that made sense.
The water rippled around her as she shifted position, trying to find a comfortable angle.
She closed her eyes and tried to remember what it felt like to be human. It wasn’t that long ago, was it? Only a few months, maybe. The memories were already fading, worn smooth. Memories of that other life, that other world.
Maybe this was just her life now.
Again, a new small sound caught her attention. There’s a splatting. Barjuchne opened one eye.
A juvenile slime stood at the far edge of the pool. It had apparently wandered in whilst she was wallowing. It must have got lost. Usually they don’t come down this far.
"Hey there, little guy," Barjuchne said softly, giving her best effort yet to not be terrifying.
The juvenile monster tilted itself, wobbling, perking with interest as it jiggled around toward the sound of her voice.
Bemused, Barjuchne rested her head on her folded arms on the rim of the hot springs, looking at the little slime that came closer, carefully prodding around as it felt its way to her folded arms.
“Do you want to be friends?” asked Barjuchne, smiling as the tiny creature cutely probed around the gap between her elbows. She laughed quietly at it. It was a very sweet little thing. “I promise, I’m really very nice,” she assured it, patting it gently with her open palm as softly as she could manage. The slime squished lightly beneath her, playfully pressing itself around her fingers. “You’ll love me even if I'm scary, right?”
But then, the small slime reached up, a piece of its gelatinous body touching her sharp teeth as it blindly felt its way around its environment. Immediately, its instincts kicked in and it recoiled, jumping and hopping away in primal fear of encountering a deadly predator.
“Ah! Wait!” Barjuchne called after it, but it bounced away. Her hand sank back down in disappointment, her claws quietly clacking against the damp stone floors.
The terrible, horrifying dragon's eye twitched.
Barjuchne stared at the monster vanishing down the corridor and then slowly sighed, sinking down inch by inch deeper into the water as she submerged herself with full coordination. Once underwater, looking around to make sure she was alone, she clenched her head in frustration and screamed as loudly as she could just to sort of get the feelings out.
It felt good.
The water of the hot springs rolled into a wild, roiling boil. The mountain shook.
All around the dungeon, the steam vents and pipes in the goblin workshops and traps flooded out, the sudden burst of high-pressure steam blasting out in all directions. Goblins dove and ducked into cover everywhere as crude vents burst open left and right.
“...She seems angry today,” said Rou-ya cautiously, after finally staring at a burst of scalding steam from a broken pipe slowly coming to dissipate as the pressure finally lessens down at the source. “Should we do something?” asked the goblin princess.
Veliah, next to her in cover, shakes her head. “Whatever is bothering her, I think that it would be best if we let her calm down by herself,” says the elf. “She might actually eat us at this point,” she mused, narrowing her eyes in potentially serious contemplation as the two of them stared down a long, dark corridor that leads toward the depths.
A desperately escaping wayward slime hops past them from below.
“...Do you think she would do that?” asked Rou-ya, not getting an answer. But the sight of Veliah’s focused, cautious eyes made her gulp in worry.
Quietly, they watched.
Behind them, something massive moved. The crowd stared in confusion as the fleeing slime from before returned, bringing the company of several others with it as they charged down together back toward the depths in a gelatinous flood.
Rou-Ya and Veliah exchanged an uncertain glance, both of them wondering if it would be wise to question this or not. Ultimately, they both decide for their own safety not to risk angering Barjuchne any further.
“I wish somebody would be my friend!” cried Barjuchne toward the darkness all by herself, haplessly flopping over the side of the hot springs, hammering her fists into the stone and kicking her legs, splashing water all over her mountain of treasures and gold as her tail swiped through the air. One can't always be noble and dignified.
'This might be her last day off in a while,' the dragon queen decided then and there. She didn’t like them very much. Somebody being productive was more fruitful for her in seemingly every way.
A loud noise fills the air, like rushing water.
Barjuchne looked at a tide of slimes coming back through the darkness. “What the hell?!” she asked, quickly standing upright and spreading out her arms to instinctively guard her piles of treasure and gold that were far, far wider than her arms were.
The slimes all moved in the same direction, converging toward the main pool with unusual coordination. Their gelatinous bodies pressed together, merging and separating in patterns.
The goo bubbled and churned as the slimes almost seemed to be pressing themselves together into one whole mass. A hundred little things melted together. Slimes of blue hues and green oozes all melted together into one unified whole. At its centre, a mass of slime had formed that dwarfed all the others combined, coming up to a nearly human height. It rose from the liquid surface, its translucent body catching the dim light and refracting it in strange colors.
Barjuchne stopped at the pool's edge, watching. The large slime shifted and reshaped itself, its amorphous form taking on definition. A head emerged. Arms. Legs. The vague suggestion of features forming on what might generously be called a face. The whole process took perhaps thirty seconds, ending with a humanoid figure standing waist-deep in the pool, composed entirely of semi-transparent slime.
Weirdly enough, it almost seemed to be studying her from afar. It would make a shape that should be a face and then change a feature of its own as it learnt in real time, such as the distance of its eyes or the shape of its crown.
A slime person.
The slime girl, after curiously studying herself, turned her head and wobbled forward with alarming enthusiasm straight toward Barjuchne.
"Hello!" Her voice bubbled up from somewhere inside her gelatinous body, cheerful and simple. She ambled forward with a half-melted body with movements that were half-walking mimicry of locomotion and half-ooze lurching. Unused to moving, the slime girl tripped and stumbled along the way, converging in and out of a messy puddle several times as she awkwardly made her way over to the springs. The slime looked like a person trying to walk waist-deep in water, except that ‘the water’ was mountain bedrock. "You smell like food!"
‘Like food?’
Was this traitorous slime interested in eating her? Barjuchne readied to deal with the matter, flexing her claws.
The slime girl reached the pool's edge, arms outstretched, dripping. Her form was roughly feminine; curves were suggested more than defined, and everything about her was wet and translucent and thoroughly unsettling.
“I love flowers!” said the slime happily.
Before Barjuchne could react, the slime reached out and wrapped herself around the dragon’s hand, swallowing it in her absurdly stretching mouth. As she consumes the limb, the slime’s ‘face’ drifts sideways in her own body, adjusting to its new position elsewhere.
Barjuchne felt the contents of her hand taken from her. Then she understood.
The slime was not making an attempt at eating her. She was eating the lavender soap.
A second later, the slime’s face changed to portray exactly the expected results. Her sunken-in eyes widened to comical proportions. She made an exaggerated, bulging expression with her cheeks that swelled like balloons and a moment later a mess of half-digested soap suds dribbled out of her like a rabid froth.
[MONSTER][SLIME GIRL]A humanoid entity formed from the coalescence of multiple smaller slimes. Semi-transparent and roughly hominid in shape. They are capable of reshaping their amorphous form at will, extending limbs, and consuming organic matter through direct contact. Their makeup is deeply acidic to unprotected skin. They tend to have a cheerful disposition but are rather unpredictable.
While they can take on any shape, it has been noted that ‘slime people’ prefer to take on a mimicry of female forms, adjusting to the shape of the dominant race of the region they inhabit. It is assumed that this is because they have learned that adventurers are more likely to interact with them favourably, sparing them from being hunted, than with their male-copying counterparts.
Rank: C+“These flowers taste bad!” cried the slimegirl, desperately trying to wipe her face and tongue with two slimy hands. But the soapy residue kept flowing out of her as some internal chemical reaction played out in her goopy insides.
A chunk of soap fell from her lips, splashing back into the water.
Barjuchne felt her suffering, having experienced roughly the same thing herself only a minute ago.
“What are you?” asked Barjuchne, looking at the sight of the slime girl who was crying and flailing around. It would be funny if it wasn’t so heartbreaking. She looked like someone who had gotten into a metal cookie tin only to find it replaced with a sewing kit.
“Hungry!” replied the slime girl in a pout, angry, as if she had been personally betrayed.
The dragon leaned in, looking at her. “No. What are you? How did this happen?” asked Barjuchne.
The slime girl stares blankly for a moment, staring vacantly into her eyes for a time. She lowered her gaze, then looked around the chamber, and then ultimately focused back on Barjuchne’s pupils.
“...I haven’t eaten yet. So that made me hungry,” she replied, plainly. She tilts her head.
“That was not what I was asking about,” replied Barjuchne dryly. “I’m asking why you exist.”
“Oh!” The slime claps her hands together and then, excitedly, starts playing with the top of her own head. She squished her features and her ‘hair’ and ran her hands all along her entire gelatinous shape to push and mould the material of her substance into a lump on top of herself.
A crown. She made a crown out of her own slime.
“My sisters and I lived at the hell-lake for generations, stuck there with nowhere to escape to,” she proclaimed.
The ‘hell lake’? That beautiful mountain paradise crater lake, where she first harvested the slimes?
“The dry sticky needle trees in all directions. The dry, cold mountains in all directions,” said the slime, clasping her hands together piously. “My people were stuck there for as long as we knew life. But you freed us, great dragon!” said the slime.
Barjuchne blinked idly.
The slime stuck the tips of her fingers together. Her lower half, strangely enough, twisted itself tightly together like a wrung-through towel. “So… when I heard your request,” she started, her index fingers melting together. “I knew that I needed to answer it. It was my obligation, dragon,” she explained, wobbling from side to side on her precariously corkscrew-tightened base. Inside of her, little air bubbles rose to the surface, visible through her translucent mixture.
“My request?” asked Barjuchne dryly, studying the entity.
With closed eyes, the slime clutched her cheeks, her palms melting into her face deep enough that her wrists were making contact with her face. “For saving my people and giving us a new home, I, Blibli, the princess of the slimes, promise myself to love you even if you're scary,” she swore.
“...Huh?”
Before Barjuchne could become master of the situation, Blibli, the slime princess, leaned in and latched onto her like a hunting octopus. Slime tendrils slapped themselves over the dragon’s shoulders and neck. Others latched around her waist and sides.
A second later, a pair of cold, soft lips make contact with Barjuchne’s. The two of them fell back into the water as the slime left the land entirely, leaping onto her, as the promise is sealed.
…She just wanted to take a bath today. How did this happen?
[HOARD UPDATE]Princess Acquired: [Slime Princess]Some primitive [Slimes] can now become [Slime People], who will now defend your dungeon far more effectively!"Ew! You also taste like soap!" yelled the slime, surfacing for a second to complain as soapy foam rose toward the surface from her mouth.
The dragon Barjuchne sank beneath the water, the slime princess shaking herself out to wipe off the bubbling lavender suds, submerging herself again with her.