A Dangerous Glimpse: Part 2

“Draw or write about your character trying to stop the boss without fighting it. Do they tie it down with ropes? Do they melt it with a hair dryer?”

 

That afternoon at the sewer repeated a nauseating number of times in Miss Yarieal’s head.  The college student rationalized what she should have done differently for two days.  Professor Nowergeen was acting so suspiciously.  He had never ended class so early before.  Miss Yarieal just wanted to be certain he was safe.  And now he was in the hospital.  Now he could create fire.  Now there was–or had been–this… was it even a portal?  Professor Nowergeen certainly thought so.

When the college student was confident–or more accurately desperate to find out–that no one else had investigated the sewer, she returned one similar Winter evening.  It was easier than she first thought, finding the bit of cement where the frame manifested from.  She thought she had destroyed it but no.  Through the lenses of her mask, she could see faint traces of heat, or something like heat.  Radiation perhaps?

Either way, it wasn’t growing.  Maybe it was healing after she swiped through it before.  The gloved girl reached out to the faint trace before retracting.  She knew what these gloves would do.  She peeled her sleeve back just enough to give her access to a strap at the end of her glove.  

The glove came off, showing a cream and brown-speckled feathery hand underneath: fingers like a scalpel.  Miss Yarieal gingerly pressed her fingertips against the rough cement.  She felt it.  It was similar to electricity tantalizing one’s nervous system.  This energy, however, was slower, and luckily painless.

Painless or not, the student pulled back.  It was enough though.  The frame began to regrow just barely.  Miss Yarieal lifted her phone toward it but hesitated.  The phone was pocketed a moment later and instead, she examined her hand: twisting it back and forth from rear to palm.

The sight of Professor Nowergeen’s arm combusting played in the student’s mind.  She prepared to slap her still-gloved hand over the other if the same result were to follow.  She hadn’t asked the professor how he got that elemental power but if this was how it spread, it was worth a test.

 

She closed her hand into a fist.  

 

The faintest echo of grinding muscle matched her tensing knuckles.

 

She concentrated.  Her free hand hovered shakily for a near minute.  Nothing was happening.  No fire.  No smoke.  Her hand didn’t even feel warm in the Winter weather.

Believing that the process was a failure, Miss Yarieal relaxed her hand: sighing with a turn back to the faint frame.  Then she jumped.  She nearly hit her head on the curve of the tunnel.  The frame had grown.  Instead, now it had a faint green outline rather than red.

The student took a balanced breath before repositioning and attempting again.  She kept an eye on the glowing frame as she went.  Professor Nowergeen must have practiced a bit before he attempted because this was taking the young student much more time to manifest… whatever it was she was supposed to manifest.

After another minute, the frame had grown to about four inches and Miss Yarieal started to feel movement on her hand.  It wasn’t hot.  It was like a worm was crawling over her–

“Geck!”  She rasped out.  Something was growing underneath her skin.  Instinctively, she put a hand to her mouth but it was covered by the mask.  She felt dizzy.  She knelt down.  She was going to vomit.

With a slight whimper, the student reached out and touched the sliver of a growth.  It began to shrink.  She could feel it vanishing.  It was itchy and discomforting in so many ways.  

The frame began to close up again.  Now sitting in front of it, the masked student tried extending her hand toward it.  Maybe she could– No, there it was again.  But at least this time she felt it on her palm.

A few more deep breaths.  She gave one large push and pop, out through the palm of her skin erupted a thin, green, stem.  It was moist and smelled of aloe.  There was no real hole though.  It was like the stem was one with her body.  It didn’t hurt but the discomfort remained.

The professor controlled fire, and now the student controlled… plant-life?  The Earth?  She wasn’t given much time to reflect before a rather disgusting noise rang through the man-sized tube.  Something green and thick had spewed out through the frame and onto the icy sewer floor.

Miss Yarieal stepped out of the way with far less distress than she had shown with her hand.  Somehow a pile of green, glittery slime appearing in front of her was less frightening than a flora parasite in her hand.  But then the slime started to move.  That changed things a bit.

The student was now looking at a pair of simplistic circular eyes and a squiggly mouth.  There was even a big pink tongue in there.  The slime looked mildly annoyed.  It was either cleaning off some bad taste or panting. 

The student thought the creature hadn’t seen her yet as it started to idly scoot about but she quickly realized that it was approaching her in a sort of flowing zig-zag pattern.  Before the creature could close the three-foot distance, the masked woman carefully retreated.  All the while, she kept crouched: observing the slime closely.  It was coming after her feet and didn’t seem to care that she was staring.  It wasn’t staring back.

The lack of half-decayed body parts in the creature gave Miss Yarieal some confidence but she had to make sure it wasn’t acidic.  She circled around the slow creature and tapped its moist trail.  It wasn’t melting the ice and aside from the unpleasant stickiness, it wasn’t painful to the touch.

It was time for the next step.  Miss Yarieal reached out and placed a hand on the slime’s top.  She hovered enough to not submerge herself and the slime stopped immediately.  It looked up at her and closed its mouth.  It still looked mildly irritated but now it had this air of curiousness too.

For the sake of not getting slime on her phone, the masked student rasped out a very faint, “Hello.  Can you talk?”  She could hardly converse herself but the slime didn’t audibly reply.  Instead, it launched.

Before Miss Yarieal could react, the creature had pounced at her head: covering her mask immediately with its glittery liquidus mass.  The student stumbled back: swiping at it with her gloved hand.  A sizzling and smoking followed as the creature dissolved almost immediately after touching the mask.  The bits slapped off by the glove were evaporated into a gray-green mist shortly after.

In the darkness of the tunnel, Miss Yarieal tore off her jacket and her mask.  In the shadow of the man-sized tube, she examined the now spotless helmet and slime-stained fur-collared coat.  The basic gray t-shirt underneath was untainted.  Once she realized it was already over, she felt inclined to rasp out, “Didn’t mean to… I’m so sorry.”

 

Miss Yarieal refastened her mask on and folded her coat.  No one on the bus back to her apartment questioned the faint green wetness.  A grueling hour later, she was sitting on a vanilla carpet surrounded by gray walls.  Lying in front of her was the jacket.  She sat cross-legged, waiting to see if the slime would regenerate from it.