by Books Kid
INTRODUCTION FROM AYPIERRE
Slime . . . Rarely has an enemy been so well named.
This gelatinous, bouncing mass has, over time, however, become one of the best-known monsters in the world of video games.
Everything began in 1986 with a famous Japanese role-playing game, Dragon Quest, when a slime became the game’s mascot. After slime characters appeared in other more or less popular games (including Slime Rancher and Slime-san), it became obvious that Minecraft was going to have to have its own version of a slime monster.
Minecraft’s slimes are elusive and mysterious creatures. Inhabitants of the deep, slimes are found in the darkest and most secluded caves in the world. As a result, not much is known about the slime’s way of life . . . So, I grabbed my explorer’s helmet and my spelunking equipment, I armed myself with my trusty pickax, and I set out to explore these dangerous underground spaces filled with deadly traps and bloodthirsty creatures. After encountering many dangers, I was able to reach the deepest caves, where sunlight never shines.
It took me a few minutes to finally notice them. It’s quite a sight: you’ve got to see these strange, slimy monsters without arms or legs jumping in every direction.
AND WHAT A NUISANCE TO FIGHT!
In fact, a slime has a curious defense mechanism: it has an annoying habit of dividing when you strike it, creating miniature copies of itself.
Though tiny, these little horrors are not to be taken lightly! I found myself pushed into lava by waves of mini slimes more times than I care to remember.
The problem with slimes is that, despite everything, they are very useful when building things with redstone.
A little bit of slime residue, correctly used, can work wonders in creating: automatic doors, flying machines, mechanisms for launching torpedoes . . . I’ve lost count of the times when a difficult problem was solved with a few well-placed blocks of slime or sticky pistons.
To be honest, I even ended up creating my own slime farm, so that I wouldn’t have to place myself in danger by hunting for slimes.
So, imagine my surprise when I discovered the adventures of Slibertius! Before reading his story, I was far from imagining that a Minecraft slime could have any ambition other than being used to complete a redstone machine circuit. But, in thinking about it, I suppose it’s not everyone’s greatest dream to end up as a block or a piston . . .
But fashion designer—that is a surprise! I believe I ought to wish you the best of luck, Slibertius. You’re going to need it if you’re going to break into the world of fashion (without arms or legs)!
DAY 1
I SAW MY REFLECTION IN THE WATER OF THE SWAMP AND SIGHED.
I’m Slibertius, but everyone calls me Bert. And I’m a slime. I hate being a slime.
Would you like being a slime?
We’re all sticky and gooey and don’t have a proper shape. We’re nothing but a block of, well, slime.
AND YOU CAN’T DO MUCH WHEN YOU’RE NOTHING BUT A PILE OF JELLO.
Grumbling, I forced myself to look away from my reflection. It was too depressing. If only I were a skeleton, a zombie, or a witch. Heck, even being a cow or a pig would be more fun than being a slime. At least they have four legs. They can walk, run, or gallop. While I . . . I have to get around by jumping.
JUMPING!
It’s humiliating.
As I hopped from place to place in search of Minecraftians to snack on, I made up little rhymes in my head to make my bouncing a little more fun.
Hop on a log,
Turn into a dog!
Hop on a leaf,
Turn into a thief!
Hop on a tree,
Turn into a bee!
Hop on some grass,
Fall flat on your back!
I tried to come up with something better for that last one, but I couldn’t, so I stopped. Besides, I’d just caught a whiff of something interesting.
MINECRAFTIANS!
There’s nothing like sinking your teeth into a nice, juicy Minecraftian to make you feel better! And, if my sense of smell wasn’t wrong—and it never was—there were three, sitting around a campfire, as ripe as can be.
I let my nose guide me—what’s that? You didn’t think that slimes had noses? Well, we do. It’s just that the nose is very oozy, so it melts in with all our other ooziness. It’s an important part of our camouflage. Anyway, as I was saying, I let my nose guide me, and I soon spotted the flickering campfire.
“A SLIME! DRAW YOUR SWORDS!”
Seeing me approach, the panicked humans scattered, and I chose one to pursue. I jumped with all my might and landed right beside him. He was so frightened he dropped his weapon!
His friends tried to create a distraction, but, once a slime has chosen his prey, nothing can make him change his mind—and this Minecraftian was in no shape to fight against my supreme power.
Soon enough, I was enjoying a delicious meal, his companions having long since disappeared into the depths of the swamp.
Some friends!
They didn’t even try to fight me to save their buddy.
What a shame, really!
I could have gone for some dessert . . .
DAY 2
Even if yesterday’s dinner perked me up a little, it did not change the fact that I was still only a slime. Everything that surrounded me kept reminding me of that. The water in the swamp was truly a sea of mirrors, so wherever I went, I caught sight of my reflection and remembered just how ugly I was. I wasn’t as ugly as a human—but still, I wasn’t far off.
The big problem with eating Minecraftians is that it makes a mess everywhere. There’s way too much leftover packaging!
You have to bite through the outer layer of clothing they’ve put on before you can munch on the interesting parts.
Looking at the remains of the human I had just devoured, I had a thought. They always wore clothes and armor. I had never seen one without something covering his body. I had always thought that clothing was worn to protect humans in case of an attack, but . . . What if there was another reason? What if humans wore clothes to change their appearance? After all, I couldn’t blame them: Minecraftians are disgusting to look at. They don’t even have pretty green skin. It made sense they’d want to hide all that horribleness underneath a layer of clothing in order to look a little better.
Once I’d had this thought, I couldn’t get rid of it. If a Minecraftian could change what he looked like with the clever use of clothing, then a slime surely could. After all, we are the superior species. It’s well known that slimes are the most intelligent monsters in the world.
I shivered with excitement as I began to think about my very first outfit. I was going to become the premier clothing designer in Minecraftia. Slimes would come to me from every corner of the world and wait in line for hours to buy one of my designs.
But what materials should I use?
DAY 3
I HATE BEING A SLIME.
DID I ALREADY SAY THAT?
Yes? Well, now, I hate being a slime even more. Do you want to know why? It’s completely impossible to wear clothes!
I closely examined every stitch of the Minecraftian’s clothing to try to understand how it had been made. I wasn’t too proud to learn something from humans. Evidently, this one’s armor had been made of leather, which was a huge mistake if he was looking to protect his skin. What a funny idea, to think that you could resist a slime attack with only a bit of leather to protect you!
Still, leather was a good starting place for my clothes, so, the first thing I needed to do was find a cow, which turned out to be harder than I expected.
Usually, you find tons of these boring creatures just wandering around. We pass
the time by jumping on them. But, when I most needed a cow, I couldn’t find one anywhere.
I hopped about looking for what felt like hours, but it was actually only about five minutes. I was never very patient when I was excited about something. Finally, I heard the telltale sound of mooing. I rushed toward the sound and found a cow, stranded on a little island surrounded by swampy water. It was calling for help. What a shame for the cow that I was the first to arrive!
“Here, little cowy-cow,” I cackled, as I charged at it and knocked it into the water.
“MOO!”
The cow let out a desperate call to its herd for help, but it didn’t stand a chance, and soon I had a superb piece of leather ready to be turned into a high-fashion garment.
And that’s where I ran into my first problem. You see, Minecraftians have these strange appendages sticking out of their bodies. They call them arms and legs. Thanks to them, clothes stay in place. But we slimes . . . we don’t have any arms and legs. We’re nothing but big slippery blocks. It was hard to figure out where to even start thinking about a way around this.
I tried to drape the leather around me, to give myself some kind of shape and to create the illusion of a more interesting silhouette, but the leather kept slipping off me. The worst thing was, the more the leather brushed against my body, the stickier it became, and that made it harder to work with. What started out as a beautiful, large piece of leather got smaller and smaller as it stuck to itself, until, I ended up throwing it away, an icky, slime-encrusted ball of leather.
“IT’S RUINED!”
I grimaced in disgust, frustrated that I was not able to create something fabulous without effort. The Minecraftians always made it look so easy.
Once, on a day I had been very hungry, I went to a village. I normally don’t get so close to groups of humans. It’s not that I’m afraid of them. It’s just that I don’t want to have to defend myself from attacks coming from all sides. However, at this particular time, I didn’t really have a choice. No Minecraftian had wandered into the swamp in ages, and I was starving. The village was the nearest source of food I could find.
Wandering through the village, I passed in front of an armorer and saw him making armor. He seemed to just wave his arms around and, presto! One set of armor. To this day, l have no idea how he did it. But me, I didn’t have arms to wave about, and, even if I did, something told me it wouldn’t be nearly as easy for me to maKe armor. I would wind up making a potato, or something.
I was going to have to go back to square one.
DAY 4
Maybe the problem was that I didn’t have enough material to work with. If I had several pieces of leather, I could sew them together, and use what I made to cover each side of my cube. Then, I could add little details, like pockets, in order to make my outfit a little more interesting. It would be amazing, once it was finished.
I got super excited again. Everything that the Minecraftians knew how to do, a slime could do better.
WHAT’S THAT YOU’RE SAYING? IF THAT’S THE CASE, THEN WHY DON’T YOU SEE SLIME CITIES EVERYWHERE?
It’s not that we can’t build them, it’s that we don’t want to. Why bother? The rain doesn’t trouble us. We just soak up the moisture and become even more slippery. It’s all the same to us whether it’s cold or hot, so we don’t need a shelter to regulate our body temperatures, and there’s nothing more wonderful in the world than the feel of sunlight on our gooey bodies.
There’s no point in building something just for the sake of it, but—mark my words—if a slime wanted to build a shelter, he could. And it would be the biggest and the most beautiful shelter in all Minecraftia. Maybe I’ll make that my next project, after I’ve proven a slime is capable of designing and wearing clothes and having style.
This time, I didn’t have to hunt for long to find what I was looking for. I came across a little herd of cows trying to find a path through the swamp. Why these stupid creatures even come to the swamp in the first place, I have no idea. Cow hooves are not made to walk on swampy ground, but maybe the reeds that grow here taste better than ordinary grass, or something like that. It’s the only explanation I can think of. Otherwise, I don’t see why cows come all the way here. It’s either that, or they’re even sillier than they look.
When I pounced on the first cow, the other cows scattered, but they were so stupid that they didn’t know where to run, and they kept bumping into each other and slipping in the water. Meanwhile, I moved forward, slowly but surely, in their direction. It didn’t take me long to collect a pile of leather, and I even snacked on some beef as I went, which was a nice little bonus.
Cow is not nearly as tasty as Minecraftian, but it does the trick when you get a little hungry after a long day of hunting. As I gathered up pieces of leather, I had an idea. A brilliant idea. The most brilliant and awesome idea in all of Minecraftian history.
Why was I trying to make ordinary clothes when I could make something extraordinary? Why didn’t I create a DISGUISE?
If I looked like a cow, then it would be even easier to get leather. I could blend in with a herd and no one would notice me until—BAM!—I jumped on them.
And if I could trick the world by dressing up as a cow, imagine what I could do if I were disguised as a Minecraftian . . .
DAY 5
I was glad to have collected a big pile of leather, because making a cow costume turned out to be a big headache. There was a bunch of unforeseen complications—such as legs.
LEGS!
WHAT IDIOT THOUGHT IT WOULD BE A GOOD IDEA TO PUT LEGS UNDER A COW?
I managed to slap together some legs by rolling the leather up in a tube, and then tying the top of the tube with a bit of string, which I had made from vines. The legs didn’t look too bad, but the problem was how on earth was I supposed to move with them?
I was able to tie the legs more or less together, but the hardest part was attaching the legs to me. I finally figured out how to loop the string around my body so that the tubes stood upright and I was perched on top. Then I encountered an even greater difficulty:
How was I supposed to walk with these things?
Slimes are not used to moving around on legs. I always thought jumping was a ridiculous way to move around, but now that I’ve experienced legs, I think jumping is, in fact, the most practical way to get from one place to another. You don’t have to coordinate your legs or remember which one you just moved to make sure you don’t fall flat on your face when you try to move forward. This is, if you could even figure out how to raise one corner of your body to move the leg forward.
Finally, I came up with a system that worked, but now I had yet another problem. How was I supposed to put the “body” of my disguise over the legs and attach the head to the front?
I struggled to figure it out, by myself, for ages. So many times, I wanted to drop everything and throw it all in the bottom of the swamp—but I refused to give up. I was determined to introduce fashion to my fellow slimes, and to prove to the whole world that slimes could look good.
I finished as the sun was setting. At last, I had something that more or less resembled a cow costume for a slime.
Tomorrow, I am going to do a test run and see if I can get close to a cow without being discovered.
DAY 6
It rained all night. Normally, that wouldn’t be a problem, but it turns out that costumes made of cow leather shrink when they get wet. So, I had to struggle to put it on the next morning. You’d think slimes would be able to change their shape, huh, given that we’re all wobbly and gooey. But no.
WE’RE NOTHING BUT VERY, VERY STICkY BLOCkS THAT STAY THE SAME BASIC CUBE SHAPE NO MATTER WHAT HAPPENS.
I put myself through a lot of pain, trying not to breathe and to make myself as small as possible so I could slip into my cow costume. It was a tight fit, but I managed to get it on. Really, really hoping that the string keeping everything together wouldn’t break, I threw one front leg forward . . . and crashed to the groun
d.
“HA, HA, HA, HA, HA, HA, HA!”
I rolled onto my back, struggling to get the cow legs off my face, and I saw Tiffin, the swamp witch, laughing at me.
“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen,” she cackled between bursts of laughter. “A slime wrapped in leather, like a sausage! What are you trying to do?”
“Nothing,” I answered, annoyed.
Why did she have to show up now, of all times?
“That’s funny, because I wouldn’t say ‘nothing,’ ” Tiffin replied. “In fact, I would say you are trying to look like an animal. A pig . . . No, a cow! Why would a slime try to pass for a cow?”
“No reason,” I muttered, gathering up the remains of my costume.
“I bet you’re trying to look better. Let’s be honest, though. Even the ugliest cow would still be better looking than a slime!”
“THAT’S A LIE. TAkE THAT BACk RIGHT NOW!”
Furious, I threw myself at the witch. Normally, Tiffin would be no match for an enraged slime, but this time I forgot I was still wearing my cow costume, and I got tangled in the legs again.
“Thanks for making me laugh, Bert. I haven’t had such fun in a long time,” Tiffin said, chuckling as she skipped off into the swamp. I cursed myself for having been stupid enough to try to make a costume that required me to coordinate four different legs—when I wasn’t even used to using one.
It was too much. I gave up on the cow costume—it was a bad plan. But it didn’t mean that I didn’t have other tricks up my sleeve.
DAY 7
Okay, the cow plan had been too ambitious.
But I had still learned a lot from the experience, and I realized I could disguise myself as something else, something much closer to my natural shape. Even if my goal in designing clothes had been to change my appearance, I realized that I had bitten off more than I could chew. If I created an outfit that worked with my shape, then I would have a solid base from which to make more elaborate creations later on. I only needed to make one piece of successful clothing to get my confidence back.