Slime and Punishment

Moving as discretely as she could, the slimegirl returned to an alleyway near where Gobriella had set up shop. Gobriella had everything broken down, all the other curios stuffed in an old bag. Her favorite sitting rock was slung over her back, hunching her even lower. She was dragging the folding table behind her with her other free hand.

"There you are, Peri." Said Gobriella. "What did you manage to get?"

Peri took the handle of the folding table from Gobriella with one arm and retrieved the toy from inside her with the other. She emptied the contents into another conveniently summoned hand. "Not much. He didn't have a lot around. I didn't take all the money because I hoped he would just assume he lost it or spent it."

Gobriella looked at a small spice bottle. "What is this?"

"He had saffron in his spice cabinet. I heard that stuff is expensive."

"Maybe, but probably not worth taking..."

"Like I said, not much there. Elves live spartan lives. I'm surprised he went for me at all." Peri took the folding table from Gobriella. It was easier for her to carry it without dragging it on the ground. She'd offer to carry her sitting rock as well, but Gobriella kept that one for herself. She was too afraid that Peri would just eat it.

Before they went off, Gobriella asked, "Where's the watch?"

Peri would have swallowed nervously, if she was inclined to do so when nervous. "There was no watch."

"Of course there was." Gobriella said. "He had that gold chain on his waistcoat. Don't tell me you didn't notice it."

"That's what I'm saying." Peri persisted. "There WAS no watch on the end. The chain was just sewed in place. It's a fashion thing, I guess."

Gobriella shrugged and let it go. Neither of them were deeply encumbered with concerns of city fashion. She was already encumbered by her sitting rock. They started walking home.

"Why do you always take the sunglasses?" Gobriella asked. "You don't even have eyes!"

Peri set the sunglasses up on her forehead, as if it mattered. "Sunglasses..." She began. "are the one thing you could steal from anyone... and they will just assume that they lost them."

---

They both returned to Gobriella's not-very-nice basement apartment in a less-nice old building with visible cracks in the foundation. Peri was always curious if she could slip into the building through that crack...but she didn't want to leave behind her cool new shades.

Gobriella took the meager take and set the bag near her bed. She'd call her fence in the afternoon... if she even had to get them involved to move one pair of sunglasses and a few bucks. Meanwhile, Peri began her nightly procedure to continue the scam the next day.

Peri summoned an aluminum roasting pan and put it in the oven. She set the oven to as low as it would go, about 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Peri slipped into the pan and closed the door behind her, settling into a pool of loose jelly in the pan.

Some hours later, when Gobriella finally woke up at the crack of 1PM.. Peri would be very dehydrated indeed. She was a tacky slime sheet on the bottom of the roasting pan, nearly the consistency of caramel. After gently dusting the empty flashlight shaft with cornstarch, Gobriella rolled Peri's desiccated slime up into a cylinder and slipped it into the flashlight.

"You OK, Peri?" Gobriella asked.

The cylinder of slime lethargically formed into the familiar pocket pussy form that she was familiar with.

"Good." She put the lid over the portal of the device.

Peri sat motionless in the container. She didn't like being so small, so... sticky. But there was no other way to fit into this device. A mature slime taking up as little space as they could would still be a lump about a foot across. Maybe if she made herself really dense and hard, she could manage it. But then her slime would be stiff and rocky, and the device would be incredibly heavy.

And if she wasn't squishy and pliable... how could the buyers get their penises in?

That half-elf had a pretty big one. There was hardly any room for her once he got in, and his jizz was sweet and slightly grassy. It was definitely the nicest encounter she'd ever had while running this scam. And this guy seemed to like slimes... for some reason. Elves and slimes didn't really occupy the same parts of the forest... maybe he just wanted a taste of what he had never had. A near-eternal life was plenty of time to develop some eccentric tastes, which might explain all the polyester...

Peri felt herself warm up involuntarily as she fantasized about her last encounter. Surely, there would be one waiting for her tonight, too? Gobriella was quite the saleswoman... Peri could hardly wait.

---

The next day, Gobriella sold the sex toy containing Peri to another gentleman. He had reflective sunglasses and a woolen cap covering most of his head but for a few colorful streaks of hair sticking out from the front. Perhaps there was a whole dyed rainbow underneath.

Peri was sold to the man without a haggle and put into a messenger bag. She rocked back and forth against his books and other sundry before being retrieved twenty minutes later in the man's apartment. The man took the lid off and looked inside. Peri could never help but feeling a little embarrassed, having a private area inspected so closely and exclusively. Sure, slimes looked like whatever they wanted except for their color. She's purposely shaped her pussy to be visibly perfect, neat and very tight. She still felt herself warm up a bit as he looked down the shaft like she was a handheld telescope.

The man did something that most men didn't do once they got her somewhere private. He set her down and left the room... with the lid off. He didn't even take his pants off! Why didn't he replace the lid? She could get dusty! What a fool!

For a while, Peri didn't dare leave the plastic housing. Something wasn't right. Maybe he got distracted... but what man gets distracted away from sex? Sex WAS most often the distraction!

Peri heard something coming from a nearby room. Snoring. This guy bought her and the fell asleep before she could even taste any jizz. The nerve!

Shifting her weight a bit inside the device, Peri rolled herself towards a digital clock on the man's stove. It was around one-o'clock in the morning. She didn't usually have to wait this long to get penetrated. But if he really was asleep... no harm in looking around, right?

Peri pushed herself out of the device, crawling her tacky form towards the stainless steel sink. With any luck, it would be full of water... she threw herself in with a little more abandon than she normally possessed.

Splash. She landed in a sink filled with sudsy water and dishes. She quickly absorbed all the water, soap and all. She reformed into her humanoid shape, her 'legs' sticking out from the sink like she was taking a bath in a tub far too small. Some of the leftover suds clung to her form, giving her some unnecessary modesty.

Peri didn't like the taste of soap. She blew a bubble with her mouth that floated all the way to the ceiling before bursting. She also dug a pan out from inside her that had lodged in her when she reformed. For sitting in a sink filled with suds, these dishes were very clean. Maybe this was a good brand of dish soap or something.

She crawled out of the sink, her feet a little slippery from the soapy adulterants still in her. She opened the fridge to see what else she could drink to expand her volume and thin out the soap. In this person's fridge, there was soda, OJ, some purple stuff... and a commercial orange-flavored soft drink that promised lots of Vitamin C. Why would someone buy this if they already had orange juice? Then again, why would someone fall asleep after buying a slimy plaything? This person clearly didn't have their shit together.

Darn it, Peri was curious. She removed the blue cap from the sixty-four ounce bottle of commercial orange soft drink. She upturned the bottle over her mouth, letting it all flow into her. Her slime rehydrated rapidly, her color lightened... she felt more like herself again. And it tasted alright. Slimes were notoriously undiscriminating diners. She wondered if her biology even needed Vitamin C.

Once all the commercial orange-flavored soft drink had dissipated through her body... Peri felt something inside her. A foreign object, something that might have been hidden in that bottle. She'd eaten some bottlecaps before when she couldn't be bothered to keep track of it, but this was some sort of plastic capsule, maybe a few inches long and somewhat pill-like. Was THIS the Vitamin C?

Her body was primed to digest and absorb the food, so those same mostly involuntary chemicals worked on the capsule until it cracked open. From within the capsule, there came this awful chilly feeling, almost impossibly cold. The slime touching the capsule froze instantly, expanding outwards from her center like a snowflake. Peri tried to get away, to break away part of herself to stop the petrifaction, but she was too late. The freezing caught her in a very undignified position, feet frozen to the floor, arms outstretched in wild wavy curves trying to escape. Even her face was slightly distorted as it froze, like sliding a portrait around the glass of a photocopier while it was scanning.

For the very first time in her life... Peri could not move at all. Even in the horrible confines of the fake sex toy, she could wiggle about a bit. Peri was now a statue, frozen so cold that she could feel the patina of ice forming on her surface, the moisture in the air condensing on her and instantly freezing.

It was the scariest thing that had ever happened to Peri. Adventurers wanting a bit of experience by chopping up the helpless slime... that never bothered her at all. Most slimes that got out of the forest were in possession of no small bravery and durability. But all that hinged on the idea that a slime could never effectively be trapped anywhere. If you were fast enough, slippery enough... you could escape nearly anything.

Of course, no slimes had ever braved the northern tundra, for obvious reasons. There was no escape from this. She was trapped, completely frozen and immobile. She could not speak, she could barely think... what could she do now? Wait to melt? That could take forever. There wasn't even any sunshine in here...

Someone kicked in the nearby door. The sudden shock, the helplessness... it made Peri feel like she would pee her pants, which would be an amazing trick considering she never peed nor wore pants.

"We got her, boyeee!!" Said the rainbow-haired man who had purchased the toy from Gobriella, talking into the camera built into his phone. "She tried to sneak into OUR HOME, disguised as a novelty sex plaything, just so she can re-inflate and take our stuff! Caught her red-handed, everyone! Or maybe I should say purple-handed."

The man moved in closer, not actually touching Peri, but bringing his face within a few inches of hers. He took out a second cell phone and took a variety of selfies with different mocking or other silly faces, possibly imitating her frozen grimace.

Peri couldn't even move to shiver. She was not one who normally indulged her anger enough to make her soft body into sharp points... but how she wished she could right now. She would skewer this man into a multicolored pin cushion.

While she was distracted by the rainbow-haired man's antics, she felt something snap away. Another man with short dark hair and sunglasses had used a pair of barbecue tongs to break off a narrow piece of her and place it in a plastic tub. He proceeded to do this with every narrow part of her frozen form. When her lack of limbs made her resembled a surviving statue from antiquity, the dark-haired man brought the frozen pieces out of the room.

Before he could return, the rainbow-haired man zoomed his camera out a bit, and extended his arm to barely tap the unbalanced Peri off her frozen legs and to the floor, where she shattered into a million pieces against the tile.

The dark-haired man came back in with the hand truck he had summoned to move her... and stared at the enormous pile of crushed ice and slush that had been newly created.

"Come on, Rog." He complained, setting the hand truck aside and summoning a push broom.

---

The life of a non-solid creature like a slime was hard to understand from the perspective of anyone who had more solid and permanent features like a brain or other organs. If something traumatic happened, like being frozen and shattered... how would one describe that? How would one ask a human about that experience? 'That time you were spread across an entire football pitch... what was that like?' That would be lunacy.

The only way Peri could think about it was like TV static. She was still there, but in so many little pieces that none of them could really think or act or do anything. Maybe a single piece could move if had thawed sufficiently, but... then what? The fragment of slime could inch about, but... to where? She'd have to wait for everything to thaw before even thinking about that, the way someone might wait for an ice cream headache to pass.

Maybe if she dreamed of that half-elf dude, she could warm herself up again. She liked him a lot more than this other dude, and not just because the elf man actually went to town on her. She felt parts of her grow warm... but it felt more like an external source. Was she now outside? It still felt dark...

When Peri came back to her senses... she was in a small basin sitting on some heat-proof silicone trivets on the concrete floor. The darker-haired gentleman was heating up some of the frozen bits in a metal pan on an induction hot plate and reintroducing it to the larger chunks of frozen slime in the basin.

Peri's reformation into a more humanoid shape was sudden and dramatic, almost like fissionable material reaching critical mass. Peri's face and arms reformed, reaching outwards just as they had before the trap was set, like a woman reaching out from the surface of a pool to escape drowning. Peri looked around, forming herself a neck and torso to do so, trying to remember what was going on... and where the rest of her was. She ran out of slime before she could make anything below the waist.

"What happened?" She slurred her pronunciation a bit, sill trying to make heads or tails of where she was. The ceilings in the room were high and undecorated but for some fluorescent lighting and large industrial fans. Must be hard to reach up there and change those bulbs. Even if she stretched out really high, that would be tough. It was like the inside of a warehouse.

Not that she was much in the mood to stretch. She still felt a few solid lumps of ice inside her that she pushed to the surface to melt against the warmed slime that was just poured in. She turned her head to find the man with the dark hair and sunglasses sitting in a folding chair in a zip-up coat next to a table with the hot plate.

"Are you all right?" He asked.

"What happened to me?" She repeated. "What did you do to me?"

The man looked at her with a frown. Not a disapproving one, more of a sad frown. "Endothermic reaction. When your body dissolved the casing on the device, two chemicals mixed together that pulled heat out of your body."

"But why?" She asked.

"Because you tried to rob us."

Peri froze. Not literally, of course, but that procedure was no less unpleasant. What was going on here? How did he know about the scam? Peri had purposely taken very little every time she was out to avoid drawing attention to herself and blowing the scheme. That was why she didn't take that guy's watch...

Well, that was PART of the reason.

"What do you mean?" She asked innocently.

"I'm talking about what you would have done AFTER you had that drink."

Peri said nothing. She looked past him and saw a few rooms built into this warehouse, with 2x4's holding up the walls with huge right angles. It looked like...

A set.

She was set up. This was a honey pot. Someone had developed an elaborate trap... just to catch her in this little scam? So that rainbow-haired fellow could gloat and take selfies?

"Are we being recorded right now?" She asked.

"No. We're in private. What's your name?" He asked.

She wasn't certain that she trusted the privacy he was offering. "You can call me Peri." She answered. "What about you?"

"Tibo." He answered, reaching to his side and handed Peri something. It was a mug filled with liquid of almost an amber color, and as hot as coffee.

Peri held the lovely warm mug in her hands and sipped it. Her eyes immediately lit up. "This is delicious." She took a larger sip. "What is it?"

"Consommé." He answered. "I figured it might be just what your body needed after going through that... trauma."

Peri actually licked her lips and sighed after another lovely sip, both things she rarely did. Then again, she rarely savored food or anything else she'd eat. She'd just surround it and dissolve it like a natural glutton. She turned her head towards him and said, "I wouldn't have gone through any trauma if you hadn't set the trap."

"The freezing was the compromise between me and Rog." He said. "It could have been worse."

Peri glowered at him. "What could be worse than being solid, brittle... and then in fifty thousand pieces?" She snarled.

"He wanted to use Portland cement." Tibo said softly. "I wanted the trap to be a physical change rather than chemical."

The thought of her body mixing with cement, slowly becoming harder like stone and unable to move, and never being able to thaw, no matter how much hot broth she drank or hung half-elf boys she fantasized about... it made her quiver. And not in the suggestive way that humans liked when they watched her round parts wobble.

"Never mind. The freezing wasn't that bad." She conceded.

The man took a newly melted pot of slime and poured it slowly over her head. Peri cooed a bit as the hot slime slipped about her mostly solid form like water. The only thing she didn't like was how it made the consommé feel less warm.

She finished her cup and set it down on the concrete floor. She looked to her body to judge her current volume. Her top half was complete, but the rest of her was a thin puddle at the bottom of a basin, like she'd been subjected to the cut-the-woman-in-half magic trick. She never understood why that trick was such a big deal.

"Where's the rest of me?" She looked about. "I think I can melt the rest by myself."

Tibo pulled up a hardware bucket filled with purple slush. He poured the slush into her basin like the crushed ice that they set fish in at markets. Peri put her arms into the slush and stirred it around, eventually 'sinking' the rest of her body into it, melting away the soft fragments and returning to her fully humanoid form, sitting in the basin barely big enough for her butt.

"So... what's the idea?" She asked. "Prank a helpless slime girl into drinking something that will freeze her for the amusement of the Internet?"

"Prank? Helpless?" Tibo balked at that. "Why would a slime pretend to be inert before being brought into someone's home?"

"Maybe I wanted to surprise him and pop out like a djinn."

"Or maybe you wanted to get into someone's house or apartment secretly, rehydrate yourself inside and steal valuables from the person who bought you."

Peri tried to keep cool... emotionally, at least.

"Can you... prove that was my intention?"

"You stole the orange drink."

"Oh, yes." Peri said testily. "Because the punishment for not paying for two liters of orange beverage should be to inflict severe cryogenic trauma that could have killed me. I forgot that they passed that law."

"We were almost certain that would not kill you." Tibo said. "We wouldn't have done it otherwise."