Catherine had long since ceased functioning as a living creature should. She was blind and deaf. Her mushy muscles and tendons were tattered, and connected to nothing… Guts floated freely in a belly of slime. Heart, lungs, genitals, all had been liquefied. Her brain still functioned, the blood within it replaced by oxygen rich slime. The slime mimic fired off neurons in the fatty gray matter, siphoning off her knowledge for use in its hunting, at the same time reading the worst pain of her life and forcing her to relive it over and over again in an endless loop of torturous suffering.

The Slime mimic moved her bones around in its squishy sac, admiring its new skeleton. It would use these bones to keep a human form until it had captured its next prey. It looked around its nest at all its siblings as they feasted on a bevy of weak human females. The dumb animals mewed pathetically as they were digested by its fellow Slime Mimics. This nest had been a particularly successful one, having been founded several hundred years previously. Nests inside villages or the Capital could be very successful, and raise many new Spawnlings in a short time… but they were also risky… If a spawnling’s first predations were unsuccessful, the humans often could find the nest and burn it out. A nest like this, just off of a main trade route was the perfect place to hunt and keep hidden.

It turned its gloopy head to enjoy the sight of the one this Catherine knew as Vivienne… She was a mother of two. The Slime savored the new knowledge it was acquiring, as Vivienne spasmed and stretched, defecating because of the pain. This one didn’t seem to have a very bright brain, which was a shame.. But there were still a number of small things the Slime learned from scouring the organ clean. By the time it would come to digest the girl's brain, there’d be nothing left of her knowledge or personality inside of it. All would have been devoured by the slime for its own benefit.

This Slime Mimic had lived for dozens of years already, and was smarter than any of its prey ever had been. The elder slimes were hundreds, even thousands of years old, even smarter than anything in the World of Bones, save maybe the Dragons themselves. They spent their time in the great pool at the heart of the nest, communing with each other, sharing their wisdom and spawning the next generation of Slimes.