Chapter 2: Field

When Sunday morning came, Aoi felt like garbage.

“Y-Yoshimi, I had the strangest dream.” she mumbled.

It was the worst hangover ever. Her head and body were aching. Nausea permeated her being yet, unlike any other hangover she was absolutely starving. She felt gross--slimy. When she touched her hand to her face she realized two things: one, she was indeed slimy--very, very slimy; two, that green-blue thing was not her hand. It was hers, but it was not a hand.

It was wet to the point of dripping. The little indents in that ball at the end one might call ‘fingers’ lumped together. Panicking, she waggled her ‘arm’ and realized it was less an arm than it was a tentacle. She felt no bones, and nothing she knew as muscle. The texture was like a gelatin mold or something.

She moved this hand-thing of hers to her body, and realized she slid it right through the gooey mass of cells she seemed to be.

“Relax, stay calm, everything’s fine.”

Bracing herself, she opened her eyes and screamed.

Aoi looked down and saw her body: or rather the lack there of. Her once fit physique was now in this blue-green jelly. The legs she ran track with? Gone. She was in the crater from before, just a torso-and-up in this ‘natural’ bowl the meteorite made on landing.

Her eyes stung just opening them. She didn’t even have eye lids anymore, just these weird veneers of slime thick enough to blot out the little bit of light an early spring morning brings.

She wiggled that ‘hand’ again and watched the top ‘fist’ of it just fall off and plop into the puddle of goop.

Another scream.

“Holy shit holy shit!!!” she shouted, at this point realizing she didn’t sound half as clear as she thought she did. It was like she was talking into one of those old 20th century fans that made your voice sound all robotic, only it was wrapped in jelly for good measure.

Thoughts raced through her mind.

“It wasn’t a dream. It wasn’t a dream. Yoshimi left me, that fucking meteorite goo got me. Is it eating me now? Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck.”

Her entire body was stuck in this ooze. She was in the crater from last night. She had to be, only it was far bigger than she remembered. A good 30 feet at least, she’d guess.

While freaking out, Aoi tried to pull herself out, but only managed to jiggle the goop around. It’s then a bit of that slime at the edge of crater touched some grass, and Aoi felt the grass--tasted the grass. She realized she might actually be this weird ooze.

She felt another spurt of panic going on.

“No no, that can’t be.” She tried to slow her breathing but realized she was in fact not breathing at all. By now a chest had formed, but it was cosmetic. A shape out of opaque goop. She must’ve been getting air from somewhere else: her whole body perhaps? She had to be, she was alive, right? This wasn’t hell was it?

“Ok stop stop, Psych 101.” she thought to herself, trying to remember coping techniques for stress.

“How’d that go again? 5 4 3 2 1. Five things then four then three then... what was the first one.”

She gave it a shot. She thought to herself, loud enough to block out all the anxiety and ‘holy shit’ feelings of being... ‘this’.

“Five things I can see.”

Aoi looked around. She spotted some trees, a little out of her reach. She spotted herself, looking down, all oozy and gooey. She saw the grass on the edge of the crater, though it didn’t seem to be fairing too well on contact. She did not see her backpack, that was gone. She looked up and saw just a single cloud in the sky. Cloud, sky: the final two.

“Four things I can touch. Touch...” She lifted up her other ‘hand’ and it crumbled, but she felt it so she counted it. She focused towards some slimy mass at the edge of the crater and tried lifting it. She got it to creep a bit farther and snag some of the grass. She felt the wind warble her new gross jelly like body. Through all the horror of this, Aoi chuckled at the sensation.

“One more...” Aoi reached out, this time not even forming an arm so much as a tentacle and grabbed a yellow flower from the field of grass. She felt it, and then she felt her ‘body’ melt it down.

“I just dissolved a pissenlit with a fucking tentacle. Fuck fuck-”

Back on track. Three things should could hear. She heard the warble of her semi-solid state as it shifted around. She heard a bird on a tree, safely out of reach of her goo in case she accidentally were to eat it like she did the flower. She also heard the rustle of the wind against the field.

“Two things I can smell.” She smelled herself and smelt... nothing really. Maybe a sort of ‘wet’ smell. Neutral, but something. She also smelled the grass. Easy one.

“One thing I can taste.”

When the professor made everyone do this in class, he said it was fine to just taste the inside of your mouth with your tongue. Otherwise, he said, it was one of the hardest ones.

For one, she didn’t have a tongue, at least in the strict sense of the term. She had a shifting little shape of goo in her mouth, but that wasn’t tasting more than anything else. She didn’t taste much like anything.

The biggest bit of irony was that Aoi tasted everything touching her. This was the easiest one in the exercise for her! She didn’t think of it much till now--too much other stuff going on--but she tasted dirt and rocks. She didn’t feel them ‘digest’, but they were picked clean of anything remotely organic before kind of sizzling away. They’d settle to the bottom of her form like mud in water. She tasted the grass of course; she was apparently eating it while she slept. The slime that was her body was melting the crater around her and digesting organic matter to grow.

A bee hovered close by one of the flowers by her goo.

“No no run away little buddy hey! Don’t land there I can’t really control myself here...”

The bee obviously didn’t listen, landing on a clover that her goo soon bubbled over. There was another thing she could feel, taste, and hear and see. The chubby insect started vibrating like crazy. It did not like being melted alive, and Aoi had to admit she was not a fan of the flavor. She felt its limbs melt off first due to the lower surface area. Then, she felt its whole body deform into goo.

More of her?

A little did become more of her cells, but not all of it. She felt the bee’s mass inside her, like it was converted to this pliable gooey clay for her body to analyze. She felt as though she knew what it meant to be a bee, though couldn’t say how.

Aoi calmed down enough to relax into herself, but things didn’t make sense. She was still starving. She was still green, or blue, depending on the lightning and opinion.

Aoi focused very, very hard. Her entire body was still this partial female figurine in a puddle of her own self: whatever that was now. She wanted to have at least some control here. She focused on forming a waist. She visualized a waist, but didn’t do anything save warble her body a bit.

So she didn’t think like a human, but a blob. She imagined the goop she was just kind of reaching upward. It did a little bit, and then she imagined it forming into the shape of her waist, best she could remember.

She didn’t remember very well. She got something like a cylinder before her ‘head’ started thumping again and she fell into the puddle.

She was tired, hungry. She was so hungry. She felt her body eat at the grass at such a slow pace. She wanted to just stuff the entire field of turf into her mouth. Never before did grass seem so appetizing.

She felt an urge in the back of her ‘mind’, wherever the fuck that was now. It was a deep urge. It honestly didn’t feel like her own. It was an urge to sleep.

Aoi was tired and obeyed. She usually slept in on Sundays anyways.

--==--==--==--

Aoi awoke again a bit better that afternoon. No headache, no nausea. She still felt a little out of sorts though, like her head weighed a bunch.

She reached out with her arms and yawned, delighted to see that they were back again. She pinched one arm with the hand of the other and felt flesh, albeit a little smoother than she remembered. She did the same for the other arm, and then the third arm and once she pinched the fourth she realized the last two weren’t arms at all, but tentacles.

She worked up her courage and opened her eyes.

Her entire body was a bright blue... or green. It was smack dab in the middle: a viridian shade. She yanked on the tentacle in her hand and felt a tugging sensation on her back. She reached behind and felt three other appendages there.

“Stay calm.” she thought. “Just another weird mutation haha... stay calm Aoi.”

“At least its flesh this time.” She sighed, and brushed some tentacles behind her ear. “My poor clothes though...”

She realized what she did and ran her fingers through what used to be her hair. It was all thinner tentacles and tendrils now. A tangle of smooth limbs acting as a facsimile. Aoi focused and managed to wiggle one. Having control over her ‘hair’ freaked her out enough to jolt upright from her sleeping position and burst through a thin wet film that formed over the crater she made her bed.

“What in the-” she yanked the remnants of the amnion-like layer off her body and stood up. Her entire body shook like she ran into a cobweb and was moving every which way to rock it off.

She looked down to see it by her toes and kicked it away--inadvertently knocking down a tree. It was the same tree from when she was goo, though it only came up to her knee now. It occurred to Aoi that she was giant.

She felt a brush of wind against her tail, and it occurred to her she had a tail. Of course she did. Aoi moved this other new limb to her chest so she could hold it. It had a sharp taper at the end, but otherwise seemed like that of a monkey or a cat or something. It was that same blueish green her arms where and her entire body was too, and was around her height in length.

Aoi rubbed her temples. She pinched her cheeks. This had to be a dream. She was doubting herself again. It couldn’t be though. Her stomach grumbled. She felt thirsty even though her mouth was filled with early-morning spit. Indeed, that urge which advised her to sleep earlier now implored her to drink.

Maybe some water would take her mind off things.

There was a pond nearby. Her and Yoshimi planned to check it out in the morning.

Aoi still felt heavy and slow. More than usual when she woke up every morning. She must’ve still been getting used to this body of hers: physically at least.

Her feet tore at the grass and dirt below, leaving deep prints about a man’s height in length. Despite that, she didn’t feel any dirt get stuck between her toes or anything. Instead, it just sloughed off her. Her blue-greenish skin produced some very thin, wet coating to it. Some strange form of natural moisturizer or cleaning fluid? Aoi was too exhausted to think about it.

She reached the pond and fell to her knees, exhausted from her lethargic jaunt over. Soon as she saw that sparkling water, she licked her lips. Her eyes caught the hint of fish moving in there and a primal hunger stirred. She opened wide and shoved her face into the clear waters.

She drank deep, chugging and gulping the water and everything in it. The green-bluish monster-woman had never felt so thirsty before, but she eventually stopped, felling a small school of little fish in that last gulp of hers.

The pond was now almost empty, just the bottom most layer of it filled with water--still crystal clear.

What Aoi saw in the reflection of the pond nearly made her cry. It finally hit her that she was a monster. The strange skin color, the hair tentacles. The irises of her eyes were a shimmering green. Her sclera were deep black now instead of the human white. Black pupils on green irises on black was the new state of her eyes.

At least her face looked the same. Still looked human. She sat on her knees now, looking at her reflection then back to her naked chest. Her human-shaped body was the same as before, mostly. The color was changed, and the tentacles and tail were new, true. Her nipples were a darker shade of viridian than the rest of her. She still had a navel.

Was this her life now? To be this huge monster-woman? Her sorrow faded; her anxiety disappeared for a moment. She started feeling angry! Aoi was upset that she was this freak. That she didn’t have a say in the matter. That her old life was gone. What the fuck would she do now? Stand outside the lecture hall building and watch through the window in a giant tarp or whatever the fuck she could get as clothes?

Aoi was also pissed at Yoshimi. Her girlfriend, the woman she admired--she just ran off! She woke up alone, in the middle of nature. Yoshimi didn’t have the courtesy to call anyone evidently. Does no one check out here?

She was still hungry, confused, but she didn’t feel so lethargic anymore.

Aoi rose to her full 50ft height and marched towards the town where Yoshimi and her arrived the other night. Maybe they could help her?