Slime

I've encountered a hundred different gelatinous creatures in my career, and though they've all tried to eat me in a hundred different ways, I can never say I've truly met any of them. But one came close. It hid its face from the light of my torch and pleaded for its mother in the common tongue, and when I lowered my flame, it lowered its hands, I got one look at the dwarf skull inside the translucent ooze and ran from the cave.

-Oro Deepore, Spelunker

'Sapient Slime' might sound like an oxymoron, but countless first-hand reports insist that it's true. A translucent humanoid made of semisolid ooze mounted on a single stalk of thick goo instead of two legs, with a visible skull inside its head and sometimes a dozen veribrae and other bones floating inside its body. It can think, speak, sympathize and empathize and experience a variety of emotions, as well as wear armor, wield weapons, and even master spellcraft.

Unwilling Symbiosis

Under exceptional circumstances, when a pudding, jelly, or ooze completely consumes a sapient humanoid, something unprecidented happens in the digestion process. Though the victim is killed and their body dissolved, their fleshless skull - and something spiritual - remains intact inside the ooze and transforms the mindless creature into something more.

Over the course of the next few years, the ooze gradually undergoes something of a gestation period in which whatever consciousness or sapience that remains inside the skull permeates into the ooze and causes it to evolve. Physically at first, the ooze coagulating and solidifying and becoming more dense as it lifts the skull onto something resembling a neck, grows two arms and eight fingers and two thumbs, and finally stacks itself onto a long stalk of slime that supports its form. The slime's body almost always matches it's skull and resembles the proportions of the humanoid it absorbed. Almost nothing psychological remains from the victim of this amalgamation except a sense of self-awareness, a yearning for learning, and a very human urge to preserve itself.

A Newborn Abomination

A slime's first few years in the world are full of harsh lessons and cruel realities. When it finally musters the confidence and curiosity to leave whatever ruin or tunnel that it was incubated in, it has no idea that its kin are considered monsters and mindless devourers to the civilized world. Its first encounter with a hunter in the woods or merchant on the road will be met with fear or hostility. If it finds a town, it will likely be immidiately destroyed by the militia, or captured and subjected to testing by the local alchemist or wizard, or find itself in a travelling circus and paraded as a sideshow act.

If none of these things happen and a slime finds someone benevolent enough to mentor it, or a library where it can hide during the day and read during the night, or even finds a group of slimes that have created a haven for their kin, it has the potential to learn and grow and become something greater than the sum of it's parts, just an old skull and a mound of shapeless ooze. Even a morbid abomination can make a difference in the world, whether for good or for ill.

Slime Names

Most slimes pick their names based on their first words - usually just an onomatopoeia of the ooze moving or releasing built-up air from inside their body - which they cling to as an anchor of their sapience and repeat inside their minds as they develop, as though to repeatedly remind themselves that they're alive, lest they slip back into the animalistic oblivion that is an ooze's consciousness.

Slimes make no distinction between male and female when they're born, and have no evidence of what the gender of the skull in which they're inhabiting was before it was consumed, but some slimes are later assigned one or the other by other humanoids, or pick a gender themselves.

Slime Names: Helk, Poloph, Slehth, Gopi, Mulphup, Thelbem, Forl, Slith, Blipa, Squilk, Thep, Gorgerl, Lep.