The slime would have been ecstatic over its new wings, were it not for circumstances. Carrying its body on their emerald span, they allowed it nimble movements through the air and were perfectly capable of lifting its body, much denser than a hollow boned bird's. To say the least, they were more reliable than the clunky four wing solution it had used prior.
Much faster as well and nimble to boot. It would have done a couple of loops if it hadn't been carrying the body of Aclysia inside it. Reminded of the current predicament, it flapped its wings and kept looking around with the pair of eyes it sported on its underside, growing directly out of the slime. A second pair was sitting on the snake-vulture-deer construction, its current only head, and keeping a look around. It would have loved more eyes, but found that too much input on a single sense was the recipe for a nucleus-ache.
If it could avoid it, the slime wanted to never get ambushed in the air again. Or ambushed period. Being the one doing the hidden assault was glorious, now that it had experienced twice what it was like to be on the receiving end, it also understood why. There was just no telling what was going on in the moments of confusion.
Thinking about it, didn't the metal fairy screech something before all of this happened? Maybe she had seen the eagle and had tried to warn it. Now the slime was sad and depressed, its liquid main body becoming droopy and not at all aero-dynamic. Without it noticing, its flight path went from a straight progression to a slow descend.
A flicker, like a lightning bolt without any thunder or electrical shock. The lowered altitude must have made it hit something. There was a weirdly symmetric block of wood underneath it. Flicker, and it was gone.
The slime blinked all of its eyes repeatedly and checked behind it. There was just forest. What had that been? Something clearly magical, it reckoned that much.
Curious and in search of magical things that may help it with its situation, the slime turned around to see what it had accidentally flown upon. Taking a large turn also robbed it off a fair bit of speed, the slime carefully entered the area where it estimated it had been a moment ago.
Flicker. A circular cut-out of the forest vanished and gave room to the block of wood again. On second glance, it looked even weirder. It was as if somebody had sliced multiple trees apart and then stacked the thin pieces of dead wood on top of each other. A slanted ceiling capped off the brown.... Flicker. It was gone.
Now the slime had a rough idea where the outline of this illusionary barrier lay and it turned around once more to enter a circular flight that would have it slide along the edge. Flicker. It looked at the block of wood again, this time it noticed a few irregularities over its shape. Like that rectangle shaped board that was placed vertical where all the others were aligned horizontally. Or these translucent squares through which it could look at the other shapes made from dead wood and stone inside.
A walkway made from cobblestone split in front of the house and connected it to a small pond of water on one side and separated into many sub-paths on the other. Those, in turn, separated and framed eight hills of fertile brown soil on which several herbs grew, the kind the slime hadn't seen before. The rest of the circular area was dominated by simple and healthy grass and surrounded by a tall fence of grey metal.
It hadn't drunk or eaten in perhaps too long, judging by how its entire body urged it to plunge right into the pond. The fact that its urges quickly overpowered its consciousness only showed just how far the slime had stretched itself. With two flaps of its wings and at a moderate speed, the slime sunk into the clear water and began replacing what had evaporated through prolonged exposure to sunlight.
The air pockets between its feathers kept the slime from sinking completely. Getting rid of the wings completely was impossible, just like with the pheromone glands, but it could size them down to just a few centimetres if it was so inclined. However, as it needed them if it wanted to flee quickly and those times of transformations took time and energy, it refrained from doing so. In the first place, floating wasn't really a problem.
Then it felt the steps of someone approaching and turned its head. It didn't react with a panicked flight due to the way the walk towards it felt. Those weren't the hasty movements of a charging predator or the sneaky, barely noticeable quivers of soft-soled sneak attack but the simple walking of a deer that was grazing nearby.
Simply put, it was not the kind of behaviour the slime felt like it needed to be afraid of on the face of it. It still looked alarmed at the approaching humanoid. Something that it immediately felt rather silly for.
The lack of the chest extensions put it what the slime guessed to be the male of the species. It made that guess somewhat comfortably, as the metal fairy currently inside it had what passed for the recreation of a vagina (even if it was just on the surface and under a layer of cloth-esque skin) and it made the connection between those and the secondary sexual organ that were the mammary glands. By inverting that logic, it meant that a lack of breasts meant that this creature had the dangly parts, talking statistically likely between his legs.
Although the slime only saw a large brown assembly of cloth, the stained robe of a monk to anyone who knew society, instead of legs. It felt that there were two underneath and really had to wonder about humans and how many different kinds of skins they had. Made very little sense biologically, so what, were they wearing the skins of other animals over their own ones? Questions for later.
This particular male specimen needed a thick piece of wood in addition to his own legs, slowing his movements to a crawl. His hunched forward form reminded the slime of the very first insect it had eaten, slow and easy to prey upon. If they slime had been more than fifth that human's size, it might have attempted a takedown. Well, there was another reason aside from size why it didn't.
"My, my, what do we have here?" a surprisingly energetic voice reverberated in the air and the slime understood it. Not the individual words, of course, but the general meaning was somehow apparent to it. Like the content of these words were deciphered and broadcasted right into it, with the arriving sound only being secondary to the intent. "I would call you a chimera, but I have never heard of a chimera that is part slime around these parts. Much less of one that carries a fairy inside it."
The man slowly bowed down to the pond. His hands quivering on the cane and strained breathing made the slime feel like doing that much was an enormous exercise for the man. The only parts of him that seemed to be alive where those light blue eyes in his deeply wrinkled face. What little of his grey hair remained was combed back rather poorly.
After finally making it down to his knees, this old and odd man extended a quivering hand, covered in age spots and loose skin, towards the slime. Warningly, the snake head hissed and snapped its mouth a few centimetres away from the man's fingers. Just because it wasn't afraid of the man didn't mean it would just let itself get touched.
