CH60 Slime girl with a cape.
Merurmeru’s perspective, some days earlier.
Near Bob and Martha’s farm, a slime girl experimented with plumbing on their dam. Inspired by Alex's mention of milling grain, she aimed to build a larger water wheel than her previous nymph-assisted, slime-girl-sized version. Her current project involved reversing the mechanism of a spinny well to power it.
Rope was plentiful since Alex's rope-walk dance. The slime girl's setup on the dam consisted of a semi-circular pipe containing knotted rope and glass balls, designed to spin a wooden wheel. She encountered several issues. Initially, water flowing from the top of the dam lacked sufficient pressure to turn the wheel at all. A lower pipe placement provided enough pressure, but the rapid spinning of the wooden wheel on its axle generated excessive friction, causing smoke. A subsequent adjustment to achieve intermediate pressure spun the wheel, but after a day, the rope frayed and the glass balls cracked.
Merumeru sat there stumped when an unfamiliar lady with blue hair and sea-blue eyes came up and greeted her. “Hello there. I felt some splashes coming from upstream from the grotto and decided to check it out. My name is Aqua. What is your name, young miss?”
“Merumeru,” the slime girl answered.
“You really like playing with water it seems. Can you tell me how this works?” Aqua asked.
Guessing that Aqua wouldn’t understand her, Merumeru gave a short answer. “I’m trying to make a water wheel.”
“A water wheel you say? Isn’t that a little big for you?” The blue-haired woman asked.
“Wait, you can understand me?” Merumeru gaped.
“Of course.” She answered.
“How?” Merumeru gave Aqua her full attention.
“Because you are a creature of water. Nereids can communicate with any slime.” Aqua puffed out her chest proudly.
“Can you help make a water wheel?” Merumeru asked the blue-haired woman.
She shook her head. “Only if it is made out of water. Some of the nymphs might be able to help you make a big wooden wheel though.”
“I copied one of Alex’s sketches and they helped me make a small one. It is just not good enough for that mill or lathe thing.” The slime-girl pouted.
“Oh, do you know Alex? The one named by Alex Parker?” The nereid sounded interested.
Merumeru nodded. “Yeah, I think I came into being after Alex defeated a sewer slime. Maybe I’m a byproduct of two different kinds of magic.”
“That’s interesting because I came up here from the south because of a couple rumors I heard from the elemental spirits,” Aqua said.
“Are those like talking clouds? I saw some clouds that floated around in the dungeon. Did they have cute smiley faces on them? I didn’t know they could talk.” Merumeru waved her squishy blue arms around.
“No, they generally don’t have smiley faces on them. They are incredibly quiet so one wouldn’t be able to listen to them without being highly attuned to water, someone like my water nymph self.” Aqua said.
“Did you learn something good? Or is it a secret?” Merumeru asked.
“It should be kept a secret to enemies but, no, it is not a big secret. You might already know the first news. I learned that one of Sakura’s wood nymphs received a class from a rather obscure deity.” Aqua smirked. “One that hardly anyone gets a class from anymore.”
“You mean Luna! Yeah, she gave Ki a class and a bunch of others just the other day.” Merumeru hopped up and down.
“Yes, someone has really been making waves.” Aqua made a wave-like gesture with her arms.
“It is because Alex has this quest to defeat the demon queen from Luna.” Merumeru said nonchalantly.
“I guess having unrealistic goals is not a bad thing. Let me give you some information that might help. My other nereid cousins in the south have gotten news from the water spirits that sorry excuse for nobility there has taken notice of a new rival appearing.” Aqua said.
“Wow, that didn’t take long for them to find out. What happened?” Merumeru wondered.
“Something about landowning nobility classes. Property lines are very obvious to them. Sakura was never given peerage so to them her claim to these woods doesn’t appear as a valid one. Believe me, those sneering toads have tried time and time again to claim the woods as their own. But for their class to recognize their holdings, they have to, well, hold on to them.” Aqua chuckled.
“But what does that mean for us?” Merumeru asked.
“Hopefully nothing, with the famine down south the only noble class that the gentry sees as useful are agrarian types. Impoverished baronies can’t really do much but send a handful of people to get their boots stuck in the swamp’s muddy waters. After all, the Demon Queen’s war was always on humans. She never ordered her generals to attack places that could prove they were not harboring them. I told Ki all this so there shouldn’t be any trouble for you.” Aqua splashed a foot through the stream.
“Umm, okay that sounds nice.” Merumeru pulled out the torn rope from the pipe.
“Oh, pipes, that reminds me of the quest I got and the real reason I came here.” Aqua fished through the pockets in her dress and pulled out a white and yellow feather.
“To complete the quest, I just need to tell you about something else my cloud friend told me. There is a cabin in the sky belonging to Alex Parker up in the mountains to the northwest of here. It is near the old temple of Catalina where a cloud hides it. Luna gave me this feather to give to you along with that information. It can only be used once. To use it, you have to eat it and then go as fast as you can. When you get going fast enough, hold out your arms straight and take to the skies.” Aqua said.
Many days later….
Merumeru finished her latest plumbing invention. She called it the accelerator piping system, or ASP for short. While Fufi and Alex were out exploring the temple she was pushing limits of piping technology.
The ASP was simple with her spacial pipes facing one another. One pipe hung down from the ceiling of the rocks while the second was placed on the ground, facing up. The pipe configuration allowed a slime girl plumber to fall down into the pipe that would drop her down into the same pipe to which she would fall down again. The tricky part was the final portaling. A second pipe opening was right next to the looping one. It came out at a pipe which was angled upward at a forty five degree angle, pointed directly at a suspicious cloud that never moved far up in the sky.
Merumeru, a slime girl, recalled Alex's bedtime story about needing eye protection for fast flight and put on aviation goggles. Clutching a feather, she jumped into a pipe and fell out of another above. The world became a dizzying rush of falling and pipes until she managed to put the feather in her mouth. Instantly, a yellow cape appeared, halting her spin as she extended her arms. Adjusting her fall, she landed in a side pipe and was launched skyward.
Soaring towards a cloud with surprising speed, her cape fluttering, Merumeru realized she wasn't slowing down. She reasoned the cape was the cause, and this constant velocity was fortunate, preventing a fall after gravity would have otherwise taken over.
She burst through the cloud and continued rising, her cape billowing. Disappointingly, the view above the clouds was unremarkable. If Aqua was right, a cabin should be within the vast cloud, but its location remained a mystery.
To descend, Merumeru experimented with her cape, discovering that tying it around her boots caused her to dive. The wind filled the cape, transforming it into a parachute, another concept learned from Alex's bedtime stories about the other world's inventions, her favorites.
Flying took practice. Leaning forward caused her to dive, while leaning back resulted in upward bounces, making her flight a bobbing motion.
Up, down, up, down, up, down.
Entering the dense mist, visibility vanished. Her flight ended abruptly when she collided with a tree. Striking branches, she tumbled a short distance to the ground, a fortunate outcome as she'd feared a much greater fall through the cloud's base. The moment her flight ceased, her cape dissolved into a misty puff, accompanied by an odd sound.
“Meru?” The slime girl asked, searching through the thick mists.
“Quack!” Came a voice in answer.
Merumeru followed the quacking. Eventually she came across a pair of ducks fishing in a stream.
Being ducks, the ducks only quacked. They didn’t answer any of Merumeru’s questions.
It wasn’t the cabin that she was looking for but it was good for stage two of her plan. The slime girl set about creating a pipe in a rocky spot in the water. It took a few hours but she got it to match the one that was already in place in the apple fort. When she completed it, she hopped down and her head popped out.
Chickens were still keeping watch on the ramparts. They eyed her and clucked.
Merumeru went back the way she came and looked back at the ducks.
The ducks eyed her and quacked.
Merumeru gathered fresh eggs and returned to the pipe leading to the temple area. Apple fort's hub now contained three pipes: Town, Temple, and Cloud. She hoped to rename the Cloud pipe to Cabin soon but prioritized watching the carriage while Fufi and Alex were away.