Pregnancy was fun in fantasies, in reality, it was months of unchecked body horror which would undoubtedly have permanent effects on your body if not your entire life for the rest of your entire life. So no, actually, the more I thought about my new… skills… I was not suddenly on board with them.
“I’m getting post-term abortions and selling their corpses to that fancy merchant guy,” I muttered, eating the last chunk of the loaf of bread I had essentially eaten whole with spoonfuls of butter.
“But–”
“Nope,” I interrupted. I felt both slimy and sticky, too bloated to be simply bloated already. The viscerality of whatever was going on was deeply unpleasant. Deeply unsettling.
Why couldn’t I have just gotten slime tentacles of something? I could have gotten something horny without it being… this. I was a kinky girl; there was so much for the universe to choose from. Why fucking this?!
Sex had literally never been less on my mind since I had found myself here. I was a tad busy trying to survive. I didn’t even know how to masturbate with my left hand!
I didn’t even want to investigate the aforementioned ovipositor.
Though… the bright side… zero fertility meant no human babies, and maybe no period. Oh. Oh. Y’know… actually, I felt a little better about the skill after all.
“Pamelaaaaa, are you done sulking yet?” Candy asked for the millionth time. She really did have no patience. “I wanna go build a dungeon now!”
“Where exactly do you plan to do that?” I asked weakly.
“I don’t know, but we can’t find a good spot if we go look,” she retorted.
“Can dungeons be moved?” I asked begrudgingly. “Because we could just keep it in here until we find somewhere permanent.”
“No, too fragile,” she hummed. “We should go back to the forest, lots of places to hide things there.”
“I’m not leaving the city,” I shivered. “Did you ignore the part about monsters increasingly coming down from the mountains?”
“It will be fine! We are strong now,” Candy protested.
“No, we’re not,” I rolled my eyes, stomping over to the table to eat more cheese. “And I won’t be… I’m not going out there until it’s safe,” I pivoted, swallowing the lump in my throat.
“But Pamela—“
“I lost my fucking arm, Candy!” I snapped. “I know you are excited about the skills, but for the love of God, just consider what I’m dealing with here!”
Candy was quiet.
“I mean, I almost died out there, I had to get a limb amputated! And now you’re just chugging ahead with slime spawning despite how uncomfortable I am about that skill! And I know you’re selfish, and that’s just who you are, but I am really not in the mood today,” I huffed, cutting a bigger hunk of cheese and eating it angrily. This food was really not going to last at this rate, but cheese was budget therapy or something.
“Okay,” Candy replied, sounding utterly disappointed. “We can wait to build the dungeon. But we need slimes, Pamela! That’s my job, I have to spawn them, that’s why I am an empress slime! It’s my purpose…” she trailed off weakly.
I frowned at that. “You don’t always have to follow your purposes. You’ve gotta figure out what you want to do, not just what you’ve been told to do.”
“But I want slimes, they will be cute and menacing,” she continued pleadingly.
I snorted. “I’m not saying no slimes, I’m just saying…” I didn’t even know what I was saying. Candy had already… started things, and we needed to make cores fast to have a hope of making enough money. My discomfort was only going to slow us down. Though oddly, that realization didn’t magically make the discomfort go away.
I pressed against my stomach. I just felt bloated and swollen. Already a weight which hadn’t been there before. I grimaced. I wasn’t remotely horny enough to find any fun in it.
“Just… please talk to me before you do anything to my body,” I sighed. “This is weird, it’s weird to be… gestating slimes. Humans have a lot of associations with pregnancy and stuff, and now my body has been hijacked and altered without my consent.”
“Oh,” Candy mumbled.
“Like what if you got a skill that made your slime grow human babies?” I closed my eyes with a grimace. A nightmare image, and a very stupid analogy.
“Eww,” Candy replied. “That would be terrible. They are so ugly and useless. They can’t even fight! No use to a hive.”
“Um…right,” I blinked, surprised it had seemingly worked that well. “Look, it’s weird and yet another thing to adjust to, but I’ll get used to it. Just… We share the same body now, which means we need to be good roommates. Please just ask first.”
“Okay, I can do that,” Candy agreed.
I let out a sigh of relief.
I went about the usual morning routine, bathing myself with a cloth, trying and failing again to tie my hair up one-handed, getting dressed and mentally prepared for whatever the day held.
The layered robes hid the bloating just fine. I went for another walk with no real purpose in mind, I simply felt cooped up.
Despite the excitement of initially gaining new skills, I was… somewhat underwhelmed. Two of the skills were just about slime spawning. And while gaining experience from a dungeon would certainly be nice, I didn’t exactly have the resources or ability to properly defend it. If I had been a prime target due to Candy, then an undefeated dungeon core would get gobbled up super quickly. Plus… I wasn’t rising, leaving the city.
Which… was maybe extreme; there were plenty of people living and working outside the walls. But beyond the farms was brush and tall grass, and I knew exactly the kind of things which lurked inside.
I had been having far too many nightmares to risk it. I knew firsthand how wrong everything could go so fast.
But then what was I accomplishing? I had skills now. I had a skill that would allow me to level up even faster. I couldn’t just not use it.
And yet staying alive was far more important than anything else. I could simply enjoy my time alone, kill slimes, and make some money. Wait, fuck.
“How long will lesser pink slimes take to… gestate?” I asked quietly, brushing past a few boisterous children crowding the road.
“Umm, a few days,” Candy answered uncertainly. “I’m still waiting for our mana to recharge so I can keep working. It would be faster otherwise. Can we digest another pot of stew?” she suggested hopefully. “It would let me work so much faster.”
“Well… it seems like the kind of thing that will exponentially grow,” I offered. “The more slimes we create, the more the dungeon can grow, and the faster we level up and so on. You’re just going to need to work on patience.
“But I don’t like being patient, I get bored, and there's nothing to do in here,” she grumbled. “At least you get to eat stuff.”
I frowned, turning the corner to head back towards my lodging. “You’re feeling cooped up… inside me?” I asked gently.
“A little,” she admitted. “I just… I miss rolling around in the grass and digesting small critters that were foolishly brave. And now… I’m stuck inside you forever.”
That made me hesitate. In all my frustration, I hadn’t really considered how Candy was feeling about the whole situation. “Maybe a skill will give you more freedom in the future?” I suggested optimistically.
“Maybe…” she sighed, “I just don’t like it so much when I’m… trapped.”
I snorted at that. Oh, up until now, she had been fine being a parasite because she had wielded the power. Now that she had desperately entwined her life with mine, she wasn’t quite so satisfied. But needling that point would be kicking her while she was down.
“Feeling trapped really sucks,” I offered sympathetically. “How about some lunch? We could get a pastry. Would that cheer you up?”
“What's a pastry?” Candy asked.
“Oh, you sweet summer child,” I smiled, “I’m going to blow your mind.”