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A quest draw near! Command? (Dragon Quest Series)

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It is a well known fact that slimes are the lowliest and weakest of monsters. This fact is also...
1. An Eldritch Abomination Draws Near! Command?

siflux

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It is a well known fact that slimes are the lowliest and weakest of monsters. This fact is also, in almost every respect, incorrect.

Though it is not known if they were created or simply evolved to fill such a niche, slimes are blessed with many oft-overlooked advantages. For one, their digestive system, the only one in existence that can be called truly omnivorous. No item has yet been found that a slime cannot digest, up to and including divine artifacts. A slime must be able to fully engulf an item to consume it, and more strongly enchanted items take longer to degrade, but there is no true defence.

For another, slimes are uniquely known for their abilities to fuse and fission. Where other monsters must mate, slimes possess additional options to strengthen and spawn, and it is likely such that has led to the global prevalence of slimes.

Most importantly, when thinking of a slime as weak, they think of the humble, classic slime. Not its more powerful variants like the kingslime or darkslime. Not even the basic variants like the metalslime. But in truth, these slimes are all the same species. An ordinary basic slime can, with luck, consume enough equipment and money to manifest permanently a protective metal shell, or fuse with others to make a larger slime, or grow flight-capable wings and soar, or learn divine magic and ascend. It may, in time, do all of these things, even if it has the poor fortune to be spawned as a basic slime who must permanently morph into a stronger variant instead of as a more advanced cousin who was born with that first step already completed.

Yet there is a reason that slimes are considered the weakest of monsters. It is because all of them, from angelslime to wildslime, are universally delicious and safely edible by all species. Should a monster attack a town, be it basic like a Komodo or stronger like a Walking Corpse, the inhabitants will gain little from stopping it save their safety. Should a King Bubbleslime do the same, everyone will be having green jello for dessert for the next week. It's hard to take a monster seriously when it's made of delicious food.

In short, though a slime may reach adolescence in mere minutes -- yet another advantage slimes share over other creatures -- calling slimes as a whole weak is comparable to calling humanity weak just because almost all children are helpless to defend themselves or contribute to society.

That said, a basic newborn slime, of which you are one, starts out weak enough for a freshly minted hero to reliably kill, albeit at the cost of a little damage.
rocket.png


An Eldritch Abomination draws near!
KQ8_xLCQ.jpeg

Towering over you at over a meter and a half in height, the biped's skin varies between a more normal blue covering its torso and a mix of greys, whites, and browns elsewhere. A ring of metal encircles its head, and it holds a short, flat, pointed metal bar in one hand.
Command?
[ ] Fight
-[ ] Attack abomination
[ ] Magic
-[ ] You have no spells!
[ ] Item
-[ ] You have no items!
[ ] Run
 
Author's note: This quest is likely to contain somewhere in the range of 50-90% blatant use of material from the Dragon Quest series, mixed with a whole bunch of added slimes. For closest reference, refer to the Dragon Quest Monsters Joker subseries (of the Dragon Quest Monsters spinoff series). As always, an interesting narrative trumps numbers (not that I don't love numbers!), but when in doubt that's the primary place where I'm going to be getting my math.

Slime best mascot character.
 
[X] Fight
-[X] Attack abomination
 
A slime must be able to fully engulf an item to consume it, and more strongly enchanted items take longer to degrade, but there is no true defence
anyone else picture an easy end to the one ring


.[X] Run
 
I *want* to fight. My metagaming bits say that the QM wouldn't give us a "pick right or die" choice as the very first choice fo the quest, and that fighting is likely to wind up gaining more somehow than running, or that if we fight and lose, whatever happens to justify not dying is likely to wind up being interesting plot.

On a more practical note, though, this is obviously a protagonist. More than that, it's a protagonist who's managed to put together enough resources to get an actual sword made of actual metal. We're utterly outmatched.

[x] Run
 
... "Eldritch Abomination" ... lol.

But appropriate still from said PoV.

[X] Run
 
[X] Fight
-[X] Attack abomination

We fight, and we win. And once the Abomination lies broken and defeated at our... base? tendrils? (whatever the slime analogue for a foot is) we will absorb and digest him, becoming the first ever Heroslime.
 

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