Merumeru was trapped listening to Cosmos tell stories and explain things for quite a while. After being a polite, good girl, she eventually got out of the cabin. It took seven cups of tea but Cosmos decided to show her around.

 

“This is some kind of advanced workshop I believe.” Cosmos slid the large metal shed door open.

 

Merumeru looked inside.  It was dark,  But she could make out several workstations and various tools and gizmos mounted on tables.  The most exciting thing was how much metal was here. Metal beams framed the building with sheets of metal for the walls and ceiling.  A few glass tubes fitted in metal ballasts hung from odd strings from the ceiling.

 

“There are a lot of odd contraptions in here.  A few of those things I think are supposed to work by capturing lightning.  Maybe they were farming lightning elementals somewhere and zapped through those metal wires coated in something like rubber.  I don’t know. I didn’t look around enough.  When I portaled this away the big metal wires that connected it to some place far away had to be cut.  The lightning stopped flowing and a bunch of things stopped.  There are a couple small lantern things that have weird panels that collect sun rays and turn them into lightning but this building doesn’t work without the wire being connected to lightning.” Cosmos gestured to a spinning blade on a weird fixture.

 

Merumeru saw a bin with pipes in it and excitedly grabbed the tubes and bends.  She pulled them out and inspected them.

 

“Oh, you like those pipes?  Some of them are made of a strange material. They are all soft, light but hard, let me check.”  She put her hand in front of an eye in a peace symbol, closed one eye and said “Magical Spectrometer vision!”  She closed the other eye and the open one between the fingers flashed a rainbow of colors.  “It looks like that smooth pipe you are holding is mostly made up of carbon and hydrogen.  Fascinating.”

 

She led the slime girl back outside and showed her a horseless carriage like the one that Alex would wind up and ride around. “This is some kind of caravan.  It must have taken a whole team of really high leveled smiths and wainwrights to create it.”

 

Merumeru ran a hand along the front of it.  The shell was a mix of that strange thing that Cosmos called carbon and hydrogen and metal.  She poked the big black wheels on it.  They looked like they would be much better at going through the mud than the wood and metal wheels on the carriage.

 

“Wonder how it works?  I wasn’t so sure at first but I found this document called the owners manual that explains how it works.”  She pulled out a key and unlocked the door.  With a pull it opened up and revealed the interior.

 

Merumeru stood up straight and peered into the strange contraption.  She saw two seats in the front part and an open space in the back.

 

“Oh, a bench can be set in the back.  It is in that metal building.” Cosmos pulled out the manual and flipped through the pages to show the instruction on placing the seats in the back.  “I haven’t messed with it much.  Some of the things that are supposed to be added I don’t think we can get here so it is best to not try to operate it I think.”

 

Merumeru looked at the page the magical girl pointed at but didn’t really understand.  Fufi and Alex hadn’t taught her much about letters and stuff.  Though the fact that Cosmos could tell what stuff is made of was really neat.  When she was making bricks to create pipes back in the mountains some of the rocks she found were really weird and trying to dissolve them made her feel sick.  She thought maybe they were special and wanted to bring some back to have Cosmos look at them.

 

“Hey if I get some rocks can you tell me if they are special and can be used for exciting things?” Merumeru asked.

 

Cosmos smile, not understanding. “Of course.  Won’t that be nice.”

 

Some of the rocks had what looked like metal in them but it wasn’t the same kind of metal that the dungeon dropped in pipe form when Alex was doing the doll dungeon.  What did he call it?  Iron pipes?  Yeah that was it…probably.

 

Merumeru waved goodbye and skipped back towards where the pipe was.

 

“Where are you going?” Cosmos asked, looking a bit sad like she was about to be abandoned.

 

“To the mountains I shouldn’t be gone more than an hour or two I’ll be right back.  Don’t worry,” Merumeru said.

“Well if you want to go I won’t stop you.  But please don’t tell anyone from the office.” She paused and shuddered. “I really don’t ever want to talk to another bill collector again.”

 

Merumeru made her way back to the portal pipe and Cosmos followed, chattering along the way.

 

Despite her insistence that she wanted to avoid her coworkers and hide away, the magical girl seemed quite lonely. She also expressed her frustration that her beloved planet has the majority of it under the foot of demons who were slowly turning it into a wasteland.

 

Merumeru approached the pipe, waved, then hopped inside.

 

“Oh, what a cute portal skill.” Was the last thing the slime girl heard before appearing at the chicken fort.

 

The pipes to the town, the temple and the sky island were all there.  A little slime girl clambered out of the one for the sky fort.

 

Next, she leaped up into the air and tucked into a ball pose before landing into the pipe that went to the frozen mountains.  The slime girl collected some of the rocks that didn’t sit well inside of her.  

The ore was multi-colored.  There were some black blotches with some silver colors and a dull brass for most of it.  After getting an armful, all she could carry in her little gooey arms she hopped back into the pipe, coming out back in the chicken fort. With another hop she spooked the chickens and cannon-balled into the sky island pipe.

 

They clucked angrily at her for disturbing their roosting time.  But most of the clucking complaints were to empty air because Merumeru shortly vanished into the pipe.

 

Merumeru collided with Cosmos upon shooting out of the pipe.  Her collection of ore flew from her arms and fell in various spots along the area.  

 

Apparently, the magical girl had been sticking her head in the pipe when she shot out.

 

“Oof,” Cosmos said, rubbing her nose. “I didn’t expect you to just shoot out of there like an arrow.”

 

Merumeru didn’t hurt Cosmos.  She was a slime girl.  Her body was squishy. Unless she hit something with her super boots or her super gloves any impact would be bouncy.

 

“Sorry, I didn’t think that you would still be here.” Merumeru apologized.

Cosmos didn’t understand her.

 

The magical girl blinked a few times and looked around. “Oh dear.  You seem to have dropped your rocks.  Let me help pick them up.”  She grabbed a rock and picked it up. “Hmm, what is this you have here?  Let me check.” Cosmos made another V symbol with her finger and held it to her eye.  She said, “Magical spectrometer vision!” And her eye glowed a rainbow again. “Such a nice find, it looks to be mostly nickel, with some copper and oh, what is this dark stuff?”  Cosmos paused and squinted her eye. “It is Palladium.  That is a rare find.  Did you find a meteor or something?”

 

Merumeru shook her head and pointed down in the direction where the temple would be.  It looked like she was pointing at the floating island though.

 

“Hmm, it can’t be here.  This island is mostly altered granite and dirt. Believe me I enchanted it with strange gravity myself.” Cosmos looked a bit confused.

 

Merumeru shook her head, looking a bit frustrated.  She hopped up and down and pointed out towards the edge of the floating island then down. “I got them from the mountains by the temple of purity.”

 

Cosmos sighed. “I still can’t understand but I’m guessing that it is some other place.  I would say I’d like to go look for myself but if it is on the surface I’m not allowed to set foot on Terre.  I miss bringing the harbinger of love and justice like the old days sometime.” 

 

Merumeru nodded.  

 

“So what do you need rocks for?  I don’t see a blacksmith’s shop on this island.  Alex is a lumberjack not a smith.

 

They gathered the rocks and headed back to where the cabin was.  Merumeru grabbed some other stones and slowly started dissolving them.  She had seen how Alex made the bloomery and slowly started creating her own.  It took the rest of the day but she listened to Cosmos prattle on about the ‘old glory days’ and eventually had a bloomery set up.  She collected some firewood and coal from a lean-to and placed them in the bloomery alongside the rocks.

 

If trying to create blocks her way didn’t work she could do it Alex’s way where they burned them to separate the slag from the metals.  

 

Alex was worried about getting metal and Merumeru wanted to try to help out. 

 

Meanwhile, back in the town at the warehouse…

 

Alex and Fufi had finished their day of textile work and left for the adventurer's guild.

 

“Oh, what an interesting creation.  You are some kind of spinning tree?” Ki inspected the spider doll. 

 

She placed a hand on the wooden doll and communed with the plantlife there.  “Hmm, you are made of mostly fresh wood and are still alive.  It simply won’t do to leave you here in this dark place.  We’ve got to get you planted.  What is your name?”

 

Ki drew the name Charlotte from the different trees that  made up the construct.   “Oh you poor thing.  Let's get you some water and dirt.  With a little bit of magic you’ll be fine.”  The nymph infused the wooden bits with her plant magic and Charlotte started following her out of the warehouse.  

 

The pair left in the night and walked a couple blocks to find an empty lot with moist soil.  After finding a good spot, the wooden spider placed her legs deep into the dirt and Ki used some magic to sprout roots into the ground for the doll.

 

Ki did a little bit of altering of Charlotte to allow the places where the wood didn’t have a good path to keep all of it alive because of breaks that allowed gears to turn.  The tree didn’t have to follow the rules for plants.  A little bit of magic could fix that.  She replaced some of the leather pulleys with living vines that served the same purpose, pulling them off a surrounding building and grafting them on.

 

“Now for the final touches.  Leaves and flowers grew out of the wood.  By the end of Ki’s decorating, Charlotte’s wheels in her thorax were covered by lovely flowers and green leaves.

 

“See, isn't that better?  Alex really dropped the ball on keeping cuteness as the most important thing with you.  I’ll have to scold her later.” Ki chuckled.

 

“Most importantly, you won’t need to have a skill to keep you going.  You can spin and weave all you like.” Ki patted the plant-spider on the head and seemed pleased with herself.