In Can't Believe my Bass Guitarist is a Slime Monster!?
Kelsie checked the store shelf once again. She was
looking for something very specific and it didn't look like they had
it in stock. She glanced over at the store manager to try and get his
attention. No luck, he still seemed to be intensely interested with
the floor and was ignoring her presence completely. Kelsie sighed
internally. People ignoring her like this was almost an everyday
occurrence; she knew they didn't mean any harm personally, but it
still injured her self-esteem every time it happened. Such was the
life of a slime monster in modern society, shunned as an outsider.
She turned back to the shelf of guitar picks that
she'd been perusing before. Being a slime monster she required custom
picks due to the biological differences between her and humans. But
alas, it didn't seem like she was in any luck. They had picks for
mermen and centaurs sure, but absolutely zilch for slime monsters. Oh
well, she'd just have to deal with what she already had for now. She
quickly checked her internal slime watch, a common slime monster
trait, and realised that she'd spent much longer in this shop than
planned. With a curt “thank you” to the store owner, who
responded with a grunt more akin to a goblin than a human, she left
the music store and headed left down the hill towards the house of
her best friend Katie, and where she was scheduled for band practice
in just under 10 minutes.
“I'll never make it in time,” she muttered
under her breath as she made way briskly down the pavement. Suddenly
an idea came to her. Checking up and down the road for passers-by she
skipped over to the drain cover across the street. With one last glance
over her shoulder, and with a gelatinous sloshing sound, she
disappeared through the grating down into the drain; now she was in business. When
constructing their towns and cities, the humans had unwittingly
placed in super-highways perfectly suited for slime monster
transport. As she whisked down the sewage pipe she smiled at the
small triumph her human superiors had accidentally handed her. Down in
the drains was Kelsie's safe space. Away from the constant heckling
in the streets above and into an environment only her body could
handle.
Taking a sharp left Kelsie zipped along, unimpeded
by the various unspeakably disgusting objects littering the pipeway.
She didn't mind though, this is how a slime monster like her should be living; with the
grime of a subterranean abode. Next she took a right, then another
left, and finally a 90 degree pivot upwards. She had reached her
destination. With a satisfying glooping noise she appeared from the
tap in Katie's bathroom. She took just a few seconds to reassemble herself properly and proceeded to slowly push open the bathroom door. Creeping down the
hallway all was quiet, which meant band practice hadn't started yet,
success! Just as she was reaching for the garage door it swung open,
and the face of Katie appeared, paint adorning her cheeks.
“Kelsie!” she exclaimed, “you took the
sewer route again didn't you? I told you not to do that, you know what the
police'd do if they caught you... Oh well. Your bass's over by the
amplifier so go get set up.”
Kelsie nodded and, entered the suburban house's
garage. The other two band members were setting up too. June was tuning her guitar
against the back wall, her white feathered wings folded up neatly against her
back. Danielle the spider girl was there too, spinning her 4 guitar sticks at the end of her
arachnid arms. She smiled at Kelsie as she entered, the black paint
on her face cracking slightly.
“Ayy it's Kelsie, hurry and kit up I wanna
start playing.”
“Aye aye.” responded Kelsie, the excitement
already building in her, “just let me tune my bass.”
“No time!”, yelled Katie from behind her,
having already returned from the errand she'd been running, “we
gotta start playing now, I've already set the timer!”
Five seconds was all it took for June to play the
first chord, and five seconds was all Kelsie needed to throw the
strap over her shoulder and ready her pick. And they were off. From
the first ear-shattering chord played, Kelsie could tell they'd be
going full force on this one. The noise emanating from her amp alone
was enough to set car alarms off for miles around. She strummed hard.
Real hard. The vibrations from the noise travelled all the way up her
body, causing a rippling sensation up her invertebrate body. She was
vaguely aware that Katie had started singing at some point, although
singing was a generous description of the sound emanating from the
teenager's mouth. More like a power drill than a human voice, her
screams pierced over the low earthquake of Kelsie's bass. It
didn't really matter what chords she played. It never did. As long as
she didn't stop for a breath the cacophony could continue.
This was
harder than they'd ever played before, much harder; a new record for the Black
Eternal Suicide Death Brigade. Then the fire show started. Katie had
linked up her kitchen's gas stove up to a pipe transporting the
highly flammable gas into garden sprinklers set up in the garage.
They were set to go off when Katie pushed a foot pedal and go off
they did. Fire filled the room searing the hair off Kelsie's comrades
with the immense heat. Far from deterring the foursome it merely made
them more powerful, the noise level now rivalling a rocket launch,
causing visible vibrations in the walls of the surrounding house. Not
that the girls noticed, they had passed beyond mere mortal
consciousness. This was their life now. The creation of greater and
greater discord and to finally, finally deconstruct the cruel unfair
world they had been born into. Pull down the society that surrounded
them, treated them as outcasts, as lesser citizens. Destroy that
which their enemies had worked so hard to create. This was their
destiny. And collectively they could achieve the pure and total
annihilation of all civilisation. Order to anarchy. Form to chaos.
Kelsie suddenly became aware that she could no longer hear. Her
eardrums had long since burst and her only sensation was a loud
ringing noise along with the vibrating force of a Richter scale 9
earthquake of pure noise around her. Her vision was starting to fade
also, but she didn't care. None of them did. They were only doing
what had to be done. They weren't going to survive this. They had
never expected to. This was their final stand and BY GOD they were
going to achieve MAXIMUM ENERGY. Kelsie strummed harder than she had
ever strummed before, her jelly fingers being ground down into the
strings. Even the ringing had stopped now. The loudest silence ever
recorded. The fire had piped down to a simmer, like a cobra ready to
pounce. It was time. Katie turned to the members of the band and gave
a shrewd, bloody smile. Kelsie nodded. With a stamp on the ignition
pedal the entire garage was engulfed in a blast of plasmarised air.
The heat instantly evaporated the performers, no the heroes. Although
the heroes were gone, they had won. The legacy of that day turned out
to be louder than even the event itself. Echoing across the globe,
starting the fire that had been coming for so many years. The end of
life as you all know it; the age of monsters had begun.