Merurmeru’s perspective, some days earlier.

  A certain slime girl experimented with different kinds of plumbing contraptions along the dam they had built near Bob and Martha’s farm. Her current project was reted to the spinny well thing that pulled water out but in reverse. Her goal was to try to do that water wheel that Alex mentioned. She’d made a small water wheel before with the help of the nymphs but because it was slime girl sized it wasn’t very useful for something like the milling of grain that Alex had mentioned when they first met.

  One thing that they had a lot of was rope. When Alex had danced up a storm with the rope walk, she’d created more rope than a pair of elderly farmers could ever use. On the small dam, a semi-circur pipe with some knotted rope and gss balls spun a wooden wheel. She had two problems. First, the wheel just wouldn’t spin if the water pressure wasn’t enough. Her first experiments just used the water coming off the top of the dam and it would just flow through the pipe with a rope in it and not spin the wheel at all. Her next experiment had the pipe further down in the dam’s wall and that worked well at first. However, It spun too fast. The friction from the wooden wheel spinning on a wooden axle got fast enough that it started smoking. The third try worked better with a in between pressure that spun the wheel but not enough to start a fire. That failed too. The rope frayed and the gss balls cracked after a day of running it.

  Merumeru sat there stumped when an unfamiliar dy with blue hair and sea-blue eyes came up and greeted her. “Hello there. I felt some spshes coming from upstream from the grotto and decided to check it out. My name is Aqua. What is your name, young miss?”

  “Merumeru,” the slime girl answered.

  “You really like pying with water it seems. Can you tell me how this works?” Aqua asked.

  Knowing that Aqua wouldn’t understand her, Merumeru gave a short answer. “I’m trying to make a water wheel.”

  “A water wheel you say? Isn’t that a little big for you?” The blue-haired woman asked.

  “Wait, you can understand me?” Merumeru gaped.

  “Of course.” She answered.

  “How?” Merumeru gave Aqua her full attention.

  “Because you are a creature of water. Nereids can communicate with any slime.” Aqua puffed out her chest proudly.

  “Can you help make a water wheel?” Merumeru asked the blue-haired woman.

  She shook her head. “Only if it is made out of water. Some of the nymphs might be able to help you make a big wooden wheel though.”

  “I copied one of Alex’s sketches and they helped me make a small one. It is just not good enough for that mill or the thing.” The slime-girl pouted.

  “Oh, do you know Alex? The one named by Alex Parker?” The nereid sounded interested.

  Merumeru nodded. “Yeah, I think I came into being after Alex defeated a sewer slime. Maybe I’m a byproduct of two different kinds of magic.”

  “That’s interesting because I came up here from the south because of a couple rumors I heard from the cloud spirits,” Aqua said.

  “Are those like talking clouds? I saw some clouds that floated around in the dungeon. Did they have cute smiley faces on them? I didn’t know they could talk.” Merumeru waved her blue arms around.

  “No, they generally don’t have smiley faces on them. They are incredibly quiet so one wouldn’t be able to listen to them without being highly attuned to water, someone like my water nymph self.” Aqua said.

  “Did you learn something good? Or is it a secret?” Merumeru asked.

  “It should be kept a secret to enemies of these nds but, no, it is not a big secret. You might already know the first news. I learned that one of Sakura’s wood nymphs received a css from a rather obscure deity.” Aqua smirked.

  “You mean Luna! Yeah, she gave Ki a css and a bunch of others just the other day.” Merumeru hopped up and down.

  “Yes, someone has really been making waves.” Aqua made a wave-like gesture with her arms.

  “Yeah, it is because Alex has this quest to defeat the demon queen from Luna.” Merumeru said nonchantly.

  “I guess having unrealistic goals is not a bad thing. Let me give you some information that might help. My other nereid cousins in the south have gotten news from the water spirits that sorry excuse for nobility there has taken notice of a new rival appearing.” Aqua said.

  “Wow, that didn’t take long for them to find out. What happened?” Merumeru wondered.

  “Something about ndowning nobility csses. Property lines are very obvious to them. Sakura was never given peerage so to them her cim to these woods doesn’t appear as a valid one. Believe me, those sneering toads have tried time and time again to cim the woods as their own. But for their css to recognize their holdings, they have to, well, hold on to them.” Aqua chuckled.

  “But what does that mean for us?” Merumeru asked.

  “Hopefully nothing, with the famine down south the only noble css that the gentry sees as useful are agrarian types. Impoverished baronies can’t really do much but send a handful of people to get their boots stuck in the swamp’s muddy waters. After all, the Demon Queen’s war was always on humans. She never ordered her generals to attack pces that could prove they were not harboring them. Sorry, I told Ki all this so there shouldn’t be any trouble for you.” Aqua spshed a foot through the stream.

  “Umm, okay that sounds nice.” Merumeru pulled out the torn rope from the pipe.

  “Oh, pipes, that reminds me of the quest I got and the real reason I came here.” Aqua fished through the pockets in her dress and pulled out a white and yellow feather.

  “To complete the quest, I just need to tell you about something else my cloud friend told me. There is a cabin in the sky belonging to Alex Parker up in the mountains to the northwest of here. It is near the old temple of Catalina where a cloud hides it. Luna gave me this feather to give to you along with that information. It can only be used once. To use it, you have to eat it and then go as fast as you can. When you get going fast enough, hold out your arms straight and take to the skies.” Aqua said.

  Many days ter….

  Merumeru finished her test plumbing invention. She called it the accelerator piping system, or ASP for short. While Fufi and Alex were out exploring the temple she was pushing limits of piping technology.

  The ASP was simple with her spacial pipes facing one another. One pipe hung down from the ceiling of the rocks while the second was pced on the ground, facing up. The pipe configuration allowed a slime girl plumber to fall down into the pipe that would drop her down into the same pipe to which she would fall down again. The tricky part was the final portaling. A second pipe opening was right next to the looping one. It came out at a pipe which was angled upward at a forty five degree angle, pointed directly at a suspicious cloud that never moved far up in the sky.

  The slime girl slid a pair of aviation goggles over her head. One of the things that Alex had told her in a bedtime story was that going too fast made it hard to see because of all the wind. So people that flew would strap bits of gss over their eyes.

  Merumeru clutched the feather in her hand and dove into the pipe. She fell out of the pipe above her. Not long after, her world became a blur of falling and pipes. Eventually, she steadied herself enough to get her hand with the feather into her mouth. When she did, a yellow cape appeared on her back. The cape, and holding her arms out straight stopped her tumbling. She altered her fall just enough to nd into the pipe slightly to the side and was catapulted into the sky.

  Her cape fluttered behind her and she shot towards the cloud with great speed. She quickly realized that she wasn’t slowing down. Perhaps it was the cape? She continued at terminal velocity straight towards the cloud. That was a good thing because after a few seconds then gravity would have stopped her ascent and she’d go spt against the ground.

  Merumeru soared into the cloud and kept going. She rose above the clouds, cape billowing behind her. Much to her consternation, there wasn’t anything different to see from the above cloud vantage point. If what Aqua said was correct there should be a cabin in the cloud but she had no idea which part of the big cloud contained it.

  To stop her ascent, the slime girl messed with the cape. Eventually, she came up with a solution that tying the cape around her boots would cause her to dive. Wind piled into the cape and it puffed up like a parachute. Merumeru knew about parachutes because that was one of the things that Alex had said during bedtime stories. Her favorite stories were always inventions from that other world.

  It took a bit of practice to fly like this. If her weight was forward she’d dive but if she shifted back then she would bounce back upward. Her flight was like bobbing.

  Up, down, up, down, up, down.

  She bobbed into the mist but there was no visibility. Eventually her flight was rather rudely stopped by a tree. She smacked right into a branch and bounced off other branches until she tumbled to the ground. Luckily, the ground was not far. She worried she’d fall through the bottom of the cloud and the fall would be thousands of feet. No, she fell just a little bit, which was good because as soon as the flying stopped the cape disappeared in a puff of mist, making a strange sound.

  “Meru?” The slime girl asked, searching through the thick mists.

  “Quack!” Came a voice in answer.

  Merumeru followed the quacking. Eventually she came across a pair of ducks fishing in a stream.

  Being ducks, the ducks only quacked. They didn’t answer any of Merumeru’s questions.

  It wasn’t the cabin that she was looking for but it was good for stage two of her pn. The slime girl set about creating a pipe in a rocky spot near the spring. It took a few hours but she got it to match the one that was already in pce in the apple fort. When she completed it, she hopped down and her head popped out.

  Chickens were still keeping watch on the ramparts. They eyed her and clucked.

  Merumeru went back the way she came and looked back at the ducks.

  The ducks eyed her and quacked.

  Everything seemed to be working properly so Merumeru picked up some fresh eggs from the chicken coup and headed back to the pipe that connected this pce to the area near the temple.

  Apple fort now had three pipes in the hub: Town pipe, Temple pipe, and Cloud pipe. Hopefully cloud pipe could be renamed as cabin pipe soon. But she could explore that pce ter. Her job was to keep watch over the carriage while Fufi and Alex were out.