Merchant Crab

Balthazar intended to ask what it was that they had forgotten to feed, but before the crab could even fully regain his footing from all the rumbling, Tom had already taken off back through the tunnel with Sal’s skull still in his hands.

“Hey, wait for me!” exclaimed the crustacean, following them out of the room. “Don’t leave me down here, I don’t know this place!”

“This is bad,” the worried skeleton said as he rushed through the corridors.

“So bad,” reiterated the skull, bouncing up and down in the other undead’s hands. “How did you let this happen, Tom? Wasn’t it your turn to feed it today?”

“It was, and I was going to! But then Balthazar showed up, Jim called for me, I went to go meet them, and I just got completely sidetracked!”

“I hope you remember what happened last time!” exclaimed Sal.

“What are you two talking about?!” asked Balthazar, trying to keep up with the running skeleton as they passed through tunnels and corridors, moved down narrow ramps and underpasses, until finally arriving at a large atrium with a wide double gate on the other side.

The rumbling and ground stomping had not ceased, and was now even stronger, coming directly from behind the doors in front of the trio.

“Well, it’s kind of a long story, Balthazar,” the nervous skeleton said, eye sockets fixed on the gate.

“Can’t you give me the short version?” said the apprehensive crab, unsure if coming all the way down there had been the best choice. “Start by telling me what’s behind those doors?”

“Our unwanted tenant,” said Tom.

“What??”

“Let me show you.”

The bony merchant pushed forward, towards the gates. Balthazar hesitated, wondering why he was following a spooky skeleton and a talking skull to a room that rumbled and shook the very walls around them. Nevertheless, he carried on behind Tom, not by virtue of courage, but by virtue of pure curiosity.

To his surprise, the skeleton cut to the right as he reached near the double doors, once again tapping the bricks on the walls in a specific order, which revealed another hidden passage into a side tunnel.

As they scooted into the small space, a small sliver of light hitting the wall revealed to the crab that there was a thin slit on the opposite side, allowing them to peek into the room behind the gates.

“This is our final chamber,” explained Tom in a hushed voice. “Most adventurers never make it this far, but if they did, this would be where we keep our best loot. You know, gotta have a nice lure to catch some fish.”

“Or skillful pincers,” said the crustacean.

“Anyway, one day we came down here to dump some new loot into the pile, and we found out we had a little infestation problem.”

Balthazar frowned at the other merchant, and leaned forward to look through the hairline crack on the wall.

Just as he looked into the room, a new roaring rumble shook the dust off the walls, as the creature inside slammed itself against the stone floor.

A viscous ooze blob sat at the center of the chamber, partially attached to one of the four support pillars of the room. It was easily bigger than the crab’s gazebo back at his pond, and strangest of all, its whole body, made of a gel-like substance, had a translucent golden color to it.

“A slime infestation,” added Sal’s skull, still sitting in Tom’s hands.

“Woah,” exclaimed the crab in a murmur. “It’s huge.”

“Yeah, that’s the thing,” continued the full-bodied skeleton. “At first we found just some small gray balls of goo around the room. We told Jim to get rid of them, but you met Jim… he’s not exactly great at doing what he’s told. Long story short, by the time we looked again, that thing had already eaten almost all the stuff we had in the room and grown ten times its original size.”

Balthazar winced. “Yikes. But then what? How did it become… this?”

“Well, then came the problem,” Tom explained. “The slime grew too big for us to get rid of it easily, and now it was hungry and demanding to be fed.”

“I tried to shoo it away with a broom,” said the bearded skull. “Back then I still had more bones than what you see now.”

“Yep,” Sal’s holder said. “That thing gulped up all of his bones when he tried to fight it. All Bob could save was his skull before the slime absorbed everything else.”

The crab peeked at the mass of ooze again, gurgling and bubbling in its chamber as it occasionally slammed the ground and walls near it in a hungry protest.

“So what did you guys do?”

“What else could we do?” Tom said with a shrug. “We kept feeding it as best as we could, so it wouldn’t gobble us all up and take the dungeon for itself. So long as we kept providing it with things to absorb, it stayed quiet and sleepy, digesting everything we brought.”

Balthazar glanced at his skeletal friend. “But let me guess, that only delayed the problem?”

“You got it. The more we fed it, the bigger it got, and the bigger it got, the larger its appetite. That’s why I started having to work overtime. We needed to fill the crypt faster and attract more adventurers here so we could keep feeding it.”

“Wait, you’re not telling me you’ve been feeding adventurers to that slime, are you?!” said the slightly concerned crab.

“Oh, no, no, of course not,” Tom said.

“Ah, alright, good,” Balthazar said with relief. “I may have no big love for most of those dunces, but even I would find that just a little morally questiona—”

“We started feeding it gold coins instead.”

“You monsters!” the crab blurted out as his eyes nearly jumped out of their stalks.

“We were running out of any other junk,” said Tom with an apologetic shrug. “Adventurers always carry lots of money in their pockets wherever they go, and that thing seemed to grow a taste for gold, so…”

“Can’t blame it,” said the crustacean. “Even I felt tempted before, but coins taste awful.”

“How would you know tha—”

“So anyway, you’ve been dumping coins into that blob of jelly this whole time? Is that why it looks golden now?”

“Guess so. It used to just be plain gray,” Sal’s skull said.

Balthazar squinted harder through the peephole, focusing on the center of the creature’s translucent body, where he spotted a big pile of gold coins within, as well as some loose loot and a chest, surrounded by bubbling mucus.

Ew, but also… ooh.

His eyes widened with a mix of slight disgust and great want.

It’s just a slime, how hard could it be…

“How come you guys haven’t just found a way to get rid of it?” asked the crab, turning back to the other two. “Slimes aren’t exactly the smartest foe to face.”

“You’d be wrong!” said Sal.

“Jim kept dumping whatever random loot he found into it,” the bony merchant continued, “including things like Potions of Intellect, and a bunch of Intellect boosting gear. Next thing we know, that thing has grown way too smart for our own good.”

The skull rattled angrily. “It started blackmailing us!”

Tom nodded. “That slime got smart enough to see every plan to get rid of it coming. We were outmatched at every turn, and then it threatened to collapse the whole dungeon around us if we didn’t keep bringing it loot and coins daily. This is our home, we have nowhere else to go!”

Balthazar glanced at the slime on the other side of the wall again, a large portion of its body firmly attached to the surrounding pillars, likely supporting beams to the whole structure.

“But wait,” the confused crab said, “if the slime did that, wouldn’t it also be bringing the whole place down on itself?”

Tom brought his face very close to the crab’s, sad frown all over his bones.

“Yes, but the slime doesn’t have any bones, Balthazar.”

The crabby merchant’s eyestalks arched inwards in annoyance.

Big as it was, it was still just a slime, hardly a match for a crab determined to get his pincers on a pile of gold.

If it’s smart enough to threaten a bunch of skeletons, it’s smart enough to understand what I say.

“I’ll sort your pest problem,” announced Balthazar as he skittered towards the gate.

“What?!” exclaimed Tom. “Are you crazy? Come back here, what do you think you’re going—”

But it was too late to dissuade him, Balthazar had already pushed the double doors open with his claws and stepped inside, filled with determination in his step, as well as an unreasonable amount of loot greed.

A guttural, stuffy voice echoed around the chamber, like a big barbarian with an awful case of throat congestion.

“Finally, lunchtime. I started to think I would have to bring these pillars down on—” A pair of bubbly orbs that vaguely resembled eyes rolled inside the slime’s translucent body to face Balthazar. “You are not one of the usual skeletons.”

“Hah, very observing of you!” the crab cheerfully said as he stepped into the room with a casual attitude. “I’m a traveling merchant. Balthazar is my name, and I’ve heard so much about a fascinating golden slime that I just had to come and see you for myself. Quite magnificent, you are!”

The slime observed him lazily before speaking in a bored tone.

“I am Montgomery, the Great Destroyer, and you’re not fooling me, I know you’ve come to try and get my precious gold, crab.”

Well, darn it, that didn’t take long. And who the hell calls themselves that?! Balthazar thought.

“Oh, ha ha, you are right, but only partially,” he said with a chuckle.

The slime eyed him quietly, perhaps even with some bubbling interest. Or maybe it was just gastric reflux.

“As I said, I am a merchant,” the crab continued. “Of course I have an interest in gold, why would I hide that? Gold is great, I’m sure you agree. I mean, look at you, that much is clear to see!”

Montgomery continued quietly bubbling, unfazed by Balthazar’s attempt at a joke.

The merchant glanced at the beckoning coins within the monster, his heart beating faster at the shiny gold glowing through the layers of mucus separating them from being together at last.

“What is it you want?” asked the ooze in a bitter, congested voice. “I am hungry, and my patience runs thin.”

Balthazar tried to take his focus out of the coins and back into how to get them out of the slime.

“Well, you’re incredibly smart, I hear, so isn’t it obvious? I’m here to bargain! Make a deal. A trade. Some exchange of goods. Perhaps something of mine for something of yours, like… coins, maybe.”

The ground shook once more as the creature suddenly slammed the old dungeon stones with its heavy body mass, nearly knocking the crab off his feet.

“You think you will scam me out of my delicious meal, crab?!” Montgomery shouted. “There is nothing you could possibly have that I’d want over my coins!”

Balthazar gulped nervously. The angry slime sure looked bigger and more intimidating up close. On the other pincer, the loot pile also looked much bigger the closer he got.

“Come on now, everyone always wants something more,” said the merchant, tentatively stepping closer, unable to resist the appeal of so much gold at near arm’s reach. “It’s only a matter of negotiating. Let’s make a trade, shall we?”

“You’re right,” said Montgomery in a poisonous tone. “I never tried crab before. I bet it’s delicious.”

[Gift of the Crab: failure. Target’s INT too high.]

A portion of the slime’s body suddenly reached out like a tentacle, wrapping around one of Balthazar’s legs. He tried to shake it off, but the gel-like substance stuck itself to him like glue, slowly slithering its way up and pulling him closer to the blob.

“I’d rather just skip the negotiation part,” uttered the sludge with evil glee in its voice.

The crab turned his eyes to the exit in a panic, stuck in place by the sticky ooze, but all he had time to see was Tom and Sal running towards the room right as the gates slammed shut in front of them, leaving the skeletons out and trapping the crustacean inside with a very hungry slime.

“Oh, crabapples…” said Balthazar as he watched the acidic muck creep over his leg.

[Warning: you are being digested.]