Unfortunately for her, the others each offered very unhelpful comments upon seeing her buried in a pool of monsters. Wolfie was the first to speak with his wagging tail wooshing through the air.
“Nichika, are those your new friends? That looks like fun!”
“I’m not having fun here! Hurry and save me!”
Oswald slid his way down the cliff, stoically noting, “…I didn’t know you had that kinda niche foreplay fetish.”
“I so DO NOT! How did you come to that conclusion after seeing the mess I’m in?!”
Lambert dealt the ultimate finishing blow. He said the most ridiculous thing yet with a boyish grin. “Slimes can do the trick, but if I could choose, I’m far more aroused by tentacles—”
“YOU ARE ALL PERVERTS! PERVERTS I SAY!”
✦ ✦ ✦
RESCUED at last, Nichika stared hard at the monsters that had attacked (?) her. She didn’t know if they understood human language, but she put a question to them anyway.
“You weren’t trying to hurt me, were you?”
The dewy-eyed slimes lined up in front of Nichika and stared eagerly at her. Something about them reminded her of small forest animals, and Nichika adored animals. Her heart did a little flip.
“They’re…kinda cute.”
“Petacolons are timid monsters that flee as soon as they see people. Though these guys aren’t running for the hills, huh?”
“Petacolon?” Lambert’s casual mention of the monster name stuck out to Nichika for some reason. Tilting her head, she contemplated the word with her face scrunched up. “I feel like I’ve heard that word before.”
“You’re imagining it,” Oswald suddenly interjected, breaking his silence up till that point. He glanced at the horde of petacolons and dismissed them with disinterest. “We don’t have time to play with those balls of jelly. The fog is rolling back in. Let’s hurry.”
“There you go being heartless again…”
These white bean bun balls were definitely seeking help. Part of her was absolutely reluctant to leave them without trying. Nichika grabbed her master’s sleeve, stopping him from walking away.
“Let’s look into what they want first. Okay?”
“I’m with Nichika on this!” Wolfie chimed in.
“Y’know what they say: the good you do for people is the good you do yourself, buddy,” Lambert threw in for good measure.
Oswald heaved a long sigh. “They’re monsters, not people…”
Three against one. The odds were stacked against him. Determining it’d waste even more time if he argued, he relinquished the point. Wanting to wrap things up quick, he crouched and poked one of the rotund petacolon.
“Oi, round, squishy thing. What’s worrying you? Did someone trash your hunting grounds? Did your natural enemy show up? Or are your problems all made up by a certain goody two-shoes who can’t keep her nose out of other people’s—and monsters’— business?”
“I can too keep my nose out of other people’s business!” Furious, Nichika pulled back her fist to punch him, when she finally remembered what bothered her about the monster’s name. “Oh my gosh! I just remembered! You kept calling me a petacolon around the time we first met. How do I look anything like these things?!” she questioned, holding one of the limbless, nonhuman creatures next to her face.
Her friends compared her to the round blob for a few moments before giving their opinion.
“You look exactly alike,” her master said flat-out.
“Maybe your daydreamy gaze is similar,” Wolfie unhelpfully added.
“You give off the same aura,” Lambert offered, thrusting the knife that landed the final blow on her self-esteem.
“Oh my gosh!” Shocked and depressed, Nichika let the petacolon slip from her hands and fell to her knees in the dirt. “Th-This is what I look like to others?!”
“Petapeta! Korororo! Petakorororo!”
The white jelly buns bounced around Nichika to cheer her up. Their adorableness soothed her weary heart, but she still felt conflicted about their resemblance.
“Oomph!”
The hopping mob of petacolons suddenly started pushing her. Afraid of being swept away, she stood and followed the river of blue toward several giant boulders. She walked right into something bouncy when she stepped around the largest boulder.
“Auggh!” Whatever she walked into bounced her onto her bottom. The others showed up shortly after and gaped wordlessly ahead. “Oh no, what is it?”
She dragged her gaze upward and was lost for words.
Through the fog she faintly made out a large translucent, putty body that towered higher than the eye could see. Moreover, there was more than one. All the giant shadows she thought belonged to boulders were actually giant petacolons several dozen times the size of a normal one.
Mouth hanging open, Lambert kept his eye trained on the shiny ball of a creature and asked, “Hey, bud, what do you think we have here? A mutation?”
“No, more likely a matured version…or so I’d guess, but have petacolons ever been recorded as growing to giant size?”
From the sound of it, the giant petacolons were unusual even by this world’s standards. Lying here and there around the clearing, the giant petacolons inflated and deflated, but didn’t move. Whereas their smaller versions bounced and rolled around without ever staying still.
“Are they sleeping?” Nichika whispered, afraid speaking too loudly would wake them.
Her efforts were wasted by Wolfie who fearlessly pranced over to wake them. “Goooood morning! It’s morning time!”
He jumped up on one of their big bodies and pushed his front paws into its jiggly belly, only to be bounced backward.
“Hyaaaah!”
Wolfie tumbled into another giant petacolon, shooting him into yet another and another like he was the ball in pinball. The wolf soon vanished beyond the wall of giant, sleeping petacolons. Nichika reached out her hand in the direction he rolled, Oswald sighed, and Lambert pointed and buckled over laughing.
“Aaaah, there he goes…”
“What’s my stupid familiar doing now…?”
“Ahyahya! Lil’ Wol is awesome!”
Oddly enough, the giant petacolons didn’t wake despite the activity. Their eyes remained comfortably closed.
“I see now. You want us to do something about this,” Oswald asked the horde of small petacolons. They looked pleadingly up at him with tears in their dewdrop eyes. Entering investigative mode, Oswald rubbed his chin and voiced his observations. “Were they fed a sleeping tonic?”
“Why’d anybody do that?” Lambert asked.
“The why can come later. Let’s try to wake them.”
At Nichika’s suggestion, they each went to a different petacolon and tried every method they could think of to wake the sleeping giants.
First, they shook the blubbery balls. Didn’t work. Then they slapped and punched it, which had the effectiveness of hitting solid Jello. Nichika shouted at the top of her lungs right next to hers. Her screams vainly echoed through the valley. Oswald tossed ice-cold water on it from his magic bottle. The liquid absorbed into the petacolon in an instant.
“What is with this thing? It absorbed the water faster than anything I’ve seen before…” Nichika observed.
“That’s an amazing new discovery. By drying and flattening out the petacolons I can turn them into an item that absorbs the humidity from people’s rooms—”
“What horrifying ideas are you coming up with now?!” Nichika loudly rebuked her master’s chilling plan, and concentrated her energy on their next option.
While not the friendliest of ideas, she tried warming the petacolon up with fire.
“…It’s coming to a boil.”
“Look at it bubble.”
The giant petacolon was still asleep, its face the picture of calm, despite the fact that the water inside it was boiling. They had tested so many things on the round monster and still it slept. Just when their options had been exhausted they heard Wolfie howling in the distance.
“Heeeey! Guys! I found something funky over here!”