It was peaceful at least and didn’t hurt, so Seinu was thankful for that. It had been tingling for a while but either his operating system had shut down his ability to feel pain or he had passed some threshold where he couldn’t feel it properly any more. He was frankly surprised he was still awake, floating on his back in the pool of acidic blue-green sap, staring up at the leaf that sealed him in.
He’d tried, with his strength failing and exhaustion gripping his limbs Seinu had attempted to climb out. He’d dug his claws into the slippery, waxy walls of the plant and tried to pull himself out but it was deceptively well designed. Evolution had given the large underground gourd a slight curve outwards about halfway up making it difficult to grip and climb along. The sap also filled the space inside the sealed gourd with a heavy, honeyed scent that made him lethargic.
It was also devilishly designed around the fur that almost every single creature sported to ward off the harsh cold of the planet’s surface. Plunging into the plant Seinu had gone under the surface, the gooey sap soaking his body entirely. His tail was just a sodden mass of dissolving fur coiled up on the bottom of the pool. It wasn’t just his tail though, his neck-ruff added a good seven pounds of weight to his wet body. The fur grew out around the base of his neck, merging into Seinu’s shoulders before growing long and hanging down. He’d seen some bunnies whose ruff merged into their chest and back fur forming a thicker layer and others like him whose fur hung free and long like a natural poncho covering his chest and back. Some of the oldest bunnies had ruffs that had grown so long they reached their waist, Seinu’s hung just below his shoulders but it was a great big wet mass of fur he couldn’t remove, now completely soaked in liquid, weighing him down.
Spluttering as his nose and mouth sank beneath the surface Seinu flailed, splashing his paws desperately, The bunny managed to push himself to the edge of the pool and grip the wall of the pod with one paw. The heavy fur around his hands was also soaked adding more weight, he couldn’t hold on for long and he kept drifting off. Usually he’d have had a hundred different ways to deal with this. He could have ordered his surface to turn into something waterproof, made his nanites start to eat and convert the sap or just fry the stupid plant walls so all the acid leaked out. But he had no access to the advanced nanites that suffused his body. Heck, it had stopped printing the warning message about using his visor when he tried to think commands, which was super worrying. The sap was eating its way into his body, and his fur was already mostly gone around his back and sides, the shiny, smooth purple slime of his synthetic body exposed and beginning to break down.
He had no idea how long it had been since he’d fallen in here. He was having trouble staying awake. His body was heavy and the air felt so thick to breathe. Heck, if everything had been working he should have been able to sit at the bottom of this plant fully submerged and wait for rescue. He shouldn’t even need air, but something was clearly broken. Lifting his other arm Seinu tried to dig his claws into the waxy wall of the gourd but his claws squished, deforming into a blunt, semi-solid mess.
“Oh… well that’s not good”, his bunny brain and instincts had replaced panic with a sense of dread and resignation. He lost his grip on the wall with his other paw and started drifting out into the middle. He struggled, paws splashing but this body really wasn’t designed for swimming; all he managed to do was set himself into a small spin in the middle, more sap splashing over his stomach as he sank lower. Several strands of his ruff were dissolving, pulling free and he could no longer actually feel his tail, he thought it might have detached.
This was probably it, defeated by a plant.
….
..
.
Splash
Firi landed in the plant, the thick sap reaching up to her stomach, held back by a forcefield being projected by her visor. It wasn’t much of a field, it could stop low level projectiles and keep something like this sap away from her body. According to the scans she was getting this organic soup was so caustic it could probably dissolve ship hulls given enough time, anything organic falling in here wouldn’t stand a chance!
“Aw feck,” she cursed, “According to these readings it’s like seventy percent bunny remnants… ugh these things are awful… why the fuck is there a plant on your stupid planet that is mostly industrial solvent and tasty fruit.”
“I dunno,” Thiln called down from above, “It’s… mmrfff… it’s super dangerous but the rrfff fruit is so good.”
“Oh god,” Firi looked up, “Thiln put that down right now! It tastes and smells so damn good because it’s made to lure bunnies in!”
"Huhrrff?" Thiln dropped the fruit he'd been sucking on and stared down at Firi in confusion as Ifelse translated for her. The yellow and white avali cursed her inability to speak bunny song and waved a hand at Thiln.
"No fruit… Ifelse keep him away from the damn evil fruit."
"Its fine," her translator said as Thiln picked the fruit back up and sank his fangs back into it, speaking around the pale red globe as he sucked up its juice, "The plant is a predator, it returns bunnies to the Land but it also provides us food. It's all part of the cycle."
Firi groaned, "Are you serious?” Thiln nodded his head and she shook her head and said “OK, we'll argue about this later… Seinu first."
Firi turned to her brother. Seinu was floating in the sap, unresponsive to her attempts to talk to him. He was in a lamentable state; the solvent-like sap and the stale, stagnant air in the underground gourd had clearly got to him. He was also soft, she could see his tail had separated entirely and was now purple mulch under her feet. He'd also lost nearly all the real seeming fur on sixty percent of his body, his hands and feet were deformed and his body was surrounded by streaks of melting silver that was dissolving back into purple slime before breaking down entirely.
His core still seemed solid and his head was intact but from the state of his extremities this solvent sap was quite rapidly working its way through him.
Looking him over she frowned in confusion. She could see clearly through his purple slime without any trace of the several technological gizmos he usually had secreted about his person. Kneeling down in the sap her knee pressed down heavily on something in the sludge at the bottom. A quick scramble later and she was holding the melting remnants of her brother’s EPP (Environment Protection Pack).
“Well this is just even worse…” she muttered standing back up with a grimace as the sap sloshed around her legs. She could see several other pieces of melting metal in the sap, it looked like as he lost his fur he’d also lost his ability to hold the technological objects inside his slime. She dreaded to think how painful this stuff would be on an actual organic bunny or her own feathers and flesh. Firi reconfigured the shield around herself and extended it to encompass Seinu and expel all the sap. Using a module attached to her belt she kept a barrier between herself and her brother. She then grasped the line attached to her belt and started to wheel in the rope, walking up the side of the gourd and carrying Seinu with her in his shield bubble.
She’d taken the time to anchor the line into the ground before coming down here and she was alarmed at the decay rate she was seeing. The section of rope that had been submerged in the sap was already down thirty percent and she’d only been standing in it for about a minute.
“Fucking hell,” She cursed under her breath, glancing back at Seinu then down at the innocent seeming pool of green goop, “Fucking hell, Ifelse are you seeing the decay rate on my line?”
“Yes Firi,” the AI responded, “The liquid in these plants is stronger than any known solvent I have listed in my data banks.”
“Right, get one of the biosphere survey drones over here from base-camp, we need samples of this stuff to help Seinu.”
“I’m ahead of you in that, the drone is already on route,”
Firi pulled herself over the lip of the plant then floated Seinu up after her. She set him down in the snow nearby and retracted the fields so he was resting in the snow. Finally, her “hardy” demeanour broke. It wasn’t normal for her to break like this, but now the instant panic of jumping through the atmosphere, finding her brother and getting him out of immediate danger was over. Her emotions were yo-yoing as panic started to get a hold of her.
“Seinu,” she shouted, reaching down to shake his shoulder, “Seinu wa…” her fingers went squish, for about four, five centimetres the surface of his body was almost liquid and even the solid purple core of compacted slime beneath felt soft.
Thiln crept up next to her and peered down and sang something in bunny. Her translator couldn’t make any sense of the words so she figured they were distressed. She reached out and hugged him, pulling the little grey and yellow bunny close as she scanned Seinu’s body again.
"Ifelse I am not getting any carrier from his operating system, I need some news please… is he… is he…”
Firi sank to her knees in the snow, hugging Thiln closer, the bunny was clinging to her tightly. She realised she was trembling, her breathing was coming in short, sharp gasps and she could hear herself emitting distressed little chirps as she called to Seinu. Her visor was reconfiguring and restarting its sensors but the results were the same, they couldn’t pick up any response from Seinu’s nanites and he was entirely unresponsive. She just about managed to hold back a sob and just hugged the bunny, he was hugging her, his head nuzzled up under her chin as they knelt in the snow and stared at Seinu’s lightly steaming purple form.
He was so deformed and out of kilter; she had never seen him like this. Even the memories of what had happened when he was a kit were not this bad. The adults had kept the rest of them away from him as he was rushed to the nursery infirmary. But what little she had seen wasn't this bad, he had barely any fur left and was just a mass of deformed purple slime. She was crying, she could feel the tears pouring down her cheeks and there wasn’t anything she could do, then a drone careened through the trees.
It was one of the base camp's emergency medical drones, Ifelse parked it practically on top of Seinu and it extended several needle like probes into him. It hummed softly and then projected a whole series of holographic displays into the air. Firi didn’t recognize most of them, she wasn’t really trained in emergency medical procedures let alone ones concerning Seinu’s unusual slime body. Ifelse re-appeared, their avatar forming atop the drone and chirped softly,
“He is not dead,” Ifelse reported, “I am now in direct contact with his core; his nanites are online and his operating system is in emergency mode…” the AI paused, “Everything for up to an inch below the surface is offline, this is why your visor cannot get a signal, there aren’t any transmitters left operating on the surface.”
The AI crept to the edge of the drone and stared down at Seinu in disbelief, “Their entire atomic structure is being dissolved… Firi, this stuff is bad, the medical programmes in my Infirmary say we need to clear the denuded slime off him,” the feathery hologram looked up at the yellow avali, “I am afraid this next bit is going to be gross and very distressing. I am going to opaque the forcefield I put around him.”
“What, what is wrong?” Firi demanded, “He’s made of the most advanced, top secret bio-synthetic material the Illuminate has ever made, how can this sap be dissolving him!?”
“As we discovered,” Ifelse said patiently as they established a forcefield around Seinu and turned it opaque to hide the slime bunny from sight, “The organic sap in this plant is one of the strongest solvents we have ever seen. Probably so it can melt the very hardy creatures living down here.”
Another drone drifted out of the trees and sank down into the opening of the plant, “I am analysing it now and feeding the raw data directly to the Infirmary computers but I need to strip away all of Seinu’s nanites that are infected, what he needs now is something he can begin converting into mass.”
“Ok,” Firi took a deep breath and clambered back to her feet, still clinging to Thiln as the bunny also stood up, “We’ll, go get him some of this awful fruit.”
“It being awful is subjective, based on ideals and cultural differences…” Ifelse paused as she glared at the AI, “But yes it would help.”
Firi turned to look down at Thiln and rubbed his head, speaking to him and letting her visor translate, it was slower than the AI talking to the bunny directly but it gave her and Thiln something to do.
Meanwhile the forcefield around Seinu split off a bubble that drifted over a container the drone deployed and dropped it inside. A different field came on over the top of it and a biohazard symbol switched on radiating warnings. Firi tried to ignore it as she worked with Thiln to gather fruit, the little bunny had offered up the use of his hat as a basket and she was picking them off the above surface portion of the plant.
“Ok that’s all of them,” she stared down at the small red orbs, the soft fuzzy fruits had deep red skin; she shuddered at how much like blood they looked, “Ifelse, do we need this plant for anything else?”
“Not really but… oh…” the AI cut off and watched as Firi took a laser off her belt and set fire to the whole thing. It was soon a collapsing mass of burning leaves and fronds but the pit itself was intact, “The root system attached to the sap gourd will just regrow the plant.”
“No it won’t,” Firi growled, pulling something else off her belt, “Do me a favour and pull the sample drone back out.”
Ifelse hurried to oblige and move the drone as Firi tossed a grenade into the hole. It went off seconds before it hit the sap and just filled the entire gourd with white-yellow plasma which did a good job of setting the whole thing on fire.
“Well now that is out of your system perhaps we can feed the fruit to Seinu and stop terrifying poor Thiln.”
Thiln, however, didn’t look distressed or terrified; he was chirping in approval as he watched the deadly plant burn, his eyes wide with awe as the flames lit up the dark. He was getting to see all the technological wonders today, first this angel of an Avali had ridden out of the sky on wings of fire and now she was destroying trapdoor gourds whilst rescuing his friend. It was still a terrible day but getting a little bit better and now they had fire! Fire was magical, Fire usually only happened when lightning hit a tree during the Screaming Snow and she had literally made it!
Firi smiled at Thiln and took his hand, leading the way over to Seinu’s field bubble and helped the bunny drop the fruits through the permeable hole Ifelse made. She was sort of glad she couldn’t see inside but she couldn’t stop worrying.
“What are his chances?”
“Now that I have expunged all the infected mass, the Infirmary thinks he will be ok, with the sap removed his remaining unaffected body should lift itself back out of crisis mode,” Ifelse said. “He will no doubt be a bit traumatised but Seinu should be ok; the shuttle is fifty minutes away, I do not want to risk teleporting him in this condition.”
“Why the delay?” Firi demanded with a chirp, feathers fluffing up, “Selenu should be here a lot sooner than that!”
“She has changed plans, with Seinu stable and safe with us she has decided to dock the Momentum and switch to the medical shuttle."
“Oh,” Firi settled down in the snow, “That makes sense… we’ll stay here and guard Seinu, redirect some of the anti-predator drones to this spot I want full coverage.”
“It shall be so Firi,” Ifelse said as the yellow avali held Thiln in her lap, the two conversing, slowly through the translator as they waited for evac. At least the weather had fixed itself; which was odd, the storm should have lasted for hours more. Firi frowned and checked her backlog of messages from the pack, she found the reason for the storm breaking up. Taran and Ki had turned their modified laser on the storm front and obliterated it to try and improve conditions. Chantelle was now lecturing about long term meteorological damage, mostly to distract herself from worrying about Seinu so Firi left her to it.
The yellow Avali was quite glad there there were no clouds around anymore, and, besides the fire and the lights from Ifelse’s projections, the whole place was being lit up by Babupekkakerok’s two moons, the stars in the sky and the beautiful aurora lights, whose reflection on the floor inspired calm.
“That’s a good sign,” Thiln said sitting up, “The light clouds are here.”
Firi looked up at the sky and frowned, tapping the side of her visor to change the settings on the light regulator, “The Aurora? I can barely make it out I am afraid, it’s just bands of white light in the sky to my eyes.”
“Oh…” Thiln tilted his head, “That’s a shame, they are all different colours blending together. But it is a good sign, if the weather changes to light clouds after the screaming snow we take it as a good sign.”
Firi smiled down at the bunny in her lap, “You have stories about the light clouds?”
“Oh yes,” the bunny said brightly, “Would… would you like to hear? I am not as good at stories as Gra but I know the tale of the light clouds.”
Firi glanced over at the unconscious shape of her brother inside the protective force fields, “I would love nothing more than to hear your stories about the light clouds.”
“Yay,” Thiln smiled, clearly as glad for the distraction as Firi was, “So the tales goes that the Land…”
Selenu held Firi in her arms and watched with concern as a group of drones moved Seinu’s bubble onto the medical shuttle. Ifelse's hologram was riding on top of one of the drones and looked over at the lime coloured Avali before riding the drone through into the main med-bay, sealing the doors behind them. Selenu sighed and squeezed Firi who was resting, half asleep against her. She wanted to be by Seinu’s side but Firi needed her and the Odyssey's medical programmes working through Ifelse didn’t need flapping birds under foot right now.
“How bad is it?” Selenu asked as the image of the AI on a nearby monitor, “I mean, his nanites should be proof against anything.”
“Bad,” Ifelse said, “He lost thirty seven percent of his mass, another hour and he’d have passed seventy percent, another ninety minutes in that gourd and he’d have passed beyond the point of recovery,” the AIs hologram paused, “We might have got some of his nanites out of the sap but my readings suggest he wouldn’t have been in there any more.”
Selenu turned to stare at the burnt remnants of the plant nearby and shivered, she then looked across the devastation surrounding the area. Firi had got bored of waiting for them to arrive and torched every plant she could find. She had been going to censure her for that but now she sort of wanted to hunt them down across the whole planet and finish the job. A foraging party from the village had also arrived, attracted by the pillars of fire. They had approached cautiously at first, then more openly once they saw Firi and Thiln. They were busy piling the fruit Thiln and Firi had removed from each plant in their hats, baskets and a couple of empty boxes from the shuttle; it was going to be quite the haul of food for the village.
It also wasn’t ideal, Selenu had been worried that the loss of these fruit producing plants would harm the village. But according to Firi the distribution of “Bunnies get fruit” vs “Plants melt living bunnies into mush” was weighed very heavily in favour of bunny mush. She’d also set fire to the snapping death plants as well and she’d discovered another cave full of more Arbolin, the web spinning bunny eating bugs. They had been introduced to the wonders of plasma grenades, and their caves were now hosts to bare rock and lumps of chitinous charcoal.
“How,” Selenu demanded, “According to the doctors back home he could be reduced to a single blob of slime the size of my hand and rebuild himself!”
Ifelse pointed toward a flashing biohazard container that was being transported aboard the ship. The floating platform stopped and the field around the top switched off allowing Selenu to peer inside at what looked like a container of blue-green goop with tiny flecks of purple in it.
“This is the mass I had to remove from Seinu,” the AI explained, “The sap has continued dissolving all of it, the nanites have all been broken down and melted into more sap… if Seinu had stayed in that gourd for too long there would have been no intact nanites from which to rebuild,” The AI glanced towards the shuttle, “He can rebuild from a blob of nanite infused slime, but they need to be intact, inside that gourd, melting in that sap he would have died.”
Selenu felt cold, her ears drooping as she hugged her sister closely, “I… I had no idea these things were that dangerous!”
“They were marked in Seinu’s visor and as part of our anti-predator patrol system, they are included in the notes we received from Sawi’s pack on the planet too, but we had not done a full in depth investigation on them, we just knew they were dangerous.”
“And it wouldn’t have mattered anyway,” Firi mumbled, “Thiln thinks Seinu was running on instincts so he didn’t stand much of a chance.”
Selenu hugged her then stepped back, “Thank you,” she said, “For jumping through the atmosphere, I don’t think we’d have got here in time otherwise.”
“Anything for the pack,” Firi shivered and drew the cloak she’d given her closer around her shoulders, “I am going to see how Thiln is doing, poor bunny has been through a day, I was rather mean towards him while forcing him to track Seinu down.”
She wandered over to talk to the sand coloured bunny and Selenu slumped down on the ramp of the shuttle. She just sat for a while watching everyone else and feeling pretty rotten, she should never have left Seinu alone down here. Wiping her eyes she had to pull himself together as Cri and Cal walked over; the identical copper furred twins had their hats on, the purple material and magnificently huge white bobbles bright against the dirty, trampled snow.
One of them sang at Selenu and she had to look desperately at Ifelse, her translator wasn’t set up for their language; Bunny Song. She’d been meaning to do it but wasn’t scheduled to be on the surface to meet them for a few more weeks. The AI’s avatar sang back at them for a bit, they folded their arms, the pair of them looking stubborn and determined as they sang at the AI and turned to look at Selenu once they finished.
“They say they are coming with us,” Ifelse said, “Seinu is one of them, if we are taking him back to his Space Igloo they are coming too.”
Selenu stared at the two identical bunnies for a moment then sighed and nodded, “Fine… fine I am not going to argue with them right now, I’m not in the mood. But please get me a translator so we can talk.”
“Very well Captain, we should depart immediately; I want to get Seinu to the infirmary ASAP.”
“Very well,” she turned, “Firi,” he called to his sister, “We need to get Seinu back to the ship, are you coming?”
“No,” she called back from where she was talking to Thiln, “I am going to escort the foraging party home, there is no telling what predators have been stirred up or attracted by all the fire.”
She glanced back at Thiln then over at the others gathered around the fruit pile, “Send Ki down to me when you get back, we need to review our entire anti-predator set up. I’ll send a list of things I think he should bring but keep me updated on Seinu, ok?”
“Will do sis, you take care, ok?”
“It’s not me you have to worry about,” she chirped, “Look after our slime bro.”
Selenu nodded, waved then headed back up the ramp into the ship, she checked Cri and Cal were buckled in and left Ifelse talking to the bunnies as she hurried to the cockpit. Babupekkakerok was proving to be even deadlier than she’d ever imagined; there was no way she was letting Seinu back down until Firi and Ki made it safe. Even with all their avali tech and Seinu’s synthetic wonder body the planet had nearly defeated them!
A lesson learnt, but a deadly one she was not going to repeat! For now though they were returning to the Odyssey and Seinu would recover.
It was quiet in the lounge, everyone was sitting around waiting for news. Ifelse was locked away in the medical lab with Seinu and the last news they'd had was when the AI had made Selenu place a call to the Illuminate Medical Directorate for further assistance.
Chantelle sighed and dropped the tablet she'd been trying to read from and looked around the room. She had arrived from the moon she was surveying about an hour ago and found the rest of the pack, her family gathered here. No one wanted to talk much and besides an update that Seinu was in with the medical drones there wasn’t much else to do but wait. Selenu was standing pensively nearby staring at the doors to the infirmary. Taran was curled up in some beanbags and the bunny twins Cri and Cal had joined him to make a big pile of fluff and feathers. Firi was still on the planet with Ki. Their new bro had been very driven, jetting off to the planet determined to make it safe. Pulling herself up, the blue and white Avali moved over to Selenu and took her hand, tugging them back towards the beanbags.
"Come and sit down with us Sel… you can't do anything."
"I need to know if he's OK," Selenu chirped, turning her gaze to look at Chantelle, "I should have been here damn it…"
She chirped in exasperation and tugged her toward the beanbags more forcefully, "You being here would have made no difference."
"I'd have got to the surface a lot faster, found him quicker, saved him from this."
Chantelle clucked her tongue against her teeth and pushed Selenu into a beanbag. The orange fabric rustled under her and Taran rolled free of his hug pile with the twins to hold Selenu tightly as Chantelle sat down with them both.
"You'd never have found him without bunny help," Taran said as Chantelle hugged them both tightly, "We all thought he was safe down there, none of us could have predicted this."
Cri… or Cal chirped something in bunny song, she still couldn't tell them apart. They had translators in their ears now, so they could understand the Avali and their own translators turned their song into avali words for them.
"Seinu is a very brave but foolish bunny, he should not have gone outside before we finished teaching him how to be one of us."
"I agree with our guests," Chantelle said, "He never should have gone outside alone."
Selenu squeezed her eyes shut, tears rolling down her cheeks, "We never should have left him alone, I should have never left him alone."
Chantelle sighed and rested against her, pressing her head to her sister's chest and hugging her even more tightly then before. Taran and the twins also piled in to offer warmth and comfort to everyone. It was soon a proper Avali hug pile, the two bunnies slotting into it perfectly as they all just held each other.
'It's not your fault," Taran chirped, "He'd tell us all off if we tried to coddle him, this is what he loves doing."
Selenu nodded and lay into the hug, going quiet. But Chantelle knew their big sister and pack leader, she'd be blaming herself for this for months now. She was about to try and reassure him when Ifelse manifested an avatar above them all.
"He's going to be just fine," they reported, "A bit mentally traumatised but he's converting food into mass, his doctor pack on Avalon helped me reboot his operating system too. They are coming straight here as well, they'll be here in a few days, Director Ck’akk is sending them straight here in a picket courier, so it can fly a lot faster then the Odyssey.”
"Can we see him?" Taran asked.
Ifelse hesitated then nodded, “He is still very weak and recovery is going to take awhile, you can all come inside and see him, for a bit but then he needs to sleep."
Somehow despite being under all of them Selenu was up first, a bunny under each arm and through the door into the infirmary. Chantelle picked herself up slowly and followed the others, pausing to thank the AI before heading in to see her slime-bro with the others. It was good he was going to be OK, but she'd have to talk to him about Selenu later when she got the chance. The only one she'd believe when they said it wasn't her fault would be Seinu. For now, however, all that mattered was that he was going to be OK.