An Even Bigger Mess (A.S, OPEN)

[ThePopcornFairy]

"Aw, snap!" Eric laughed as Evan was completely blindsided by Arti chucking the gem at him. "Sly dog! He caught you monologuing!"

Smiling between Evan and Arti, Eric meekly responded to the latter's question with, "Well, if I were to hazard a guess, I'd say it's a sapphire. Or maybe a lapis lazuli, so... water? Wait, she is the water one, right? I-I haven't watched the show in a while... Wait, no, we were talking about Magic School Bus. Was there ever an episode about gems and minerals? I feel like there would've been, but I guess I missed that one. Honestly, they didn't show us Magic School Bus in school all that much. It was mostly Bill Nye..."

[ParamountKeymaster]

"YIPE!!!" Lost in his ramblings, Evan had no time to react when Arti hurled one of the stones at him, the blue gem striking him and lodging itself inside his forehead.

Almost immediately, Evan felt the stone sizzling and dissolving in his head, slowly spreading outward. Rigid and wide-eyed, he looked down to see that the tingling sensation was accompanied by blue, inky, vein-like strokes coursing through his body like dye in water. "Whoa WHOA WHOA WHOAWHOAWHOAWHOAWHOA...!!!" Panicking, not sure what else to do, Evan scrambled and fidgeted in place as he helplessly watched the melted gem slowly merge with him, staining his slime and turning it from orange to blue.

Soon enough, the dark color had completely consumed him. Once the fizzy feeling had gone and Evan had calmed down, he silently looked himself over, if only to double-check that there was not one speck of orange left. Other than that... he felt completely the same. Still gelatinous, still slightly unstable, still gross.

He slumped slightly and frowned at Arti. "Well, there ya go. I'm blue now. Ya happy, Ms. Frizzle?"

[DanteMGalileo]

"You look blue, but I'm not sure if you can play the blues. You just look sad. However, this discovery has put me in a state of indigo-indigigginess!"

Arti took out his phone to play a sad trombone sound at his bad joke. "Okay, you're blue now. That's my attack. ... You feel any different? Eric, you wanna throw some more and hypothesize?"

[ThePopcornFairy]

"Ooooooh..." Eric looked Evan over, fascinated by the color change. "Yo, listen up! This is a story... of a blue thing and all his stuff is blue!"

How he could acknowledge both the slime and Evan without realizing they were the same entity was anyone's guess. It was best not to question the specifics of Eric's stupidity.

"I don't get it." After blinking off that bit of nonsense from Arti, Eric smiled again and responded, "Hey, have at it. I'm just along for the ride at this point. The RIDE ON THE MAGIC SCHOOL BUS!" He joyfully grabbed an imaginary steering wheel with one hand and honked its horn with the other, producing a real, audible horn noise that echoed through the forest.

[ParamountKeymaster]

"Yeah, sure..." Evan grumbled, covering his face with his hand as he scowled at Arti through his fingers. "Let's just throw away more of these gems and gaze in wonder at the magical color-changing slime. I'm sure that once we've seen me turn every color of the rainbow, we'll have all the answers as to what happened to me, what each color means, how I can get turned back to normal, and wait, since when are you two taller than me?"

Evan once again looked down at himself, discovering that his limp body was slowly melting into a formless pile like ice cream on a hot sidewalk. He let out a muffled yelp, simultaneously noticing that his hand had stuck to and fused with his face. He pulled his arm away in a frantic effort to separate them, his hand stretching and dripping like a glob of syrup until it snapped back into place, albeit in a lumpy shape just barely reminiscent of a hand.

Immediately afterward, Evan shot up and straightened himself out. His body complied, pulling itself inward and upward, only to end up significantly skinnier and over two feet taller than normal, evoking another startled cry out of him. He then closed his eyes and forcefully squatted, his body compressing until it reached its former size, jiggling for a moment and finally settling into his familiar, human-shaped form.

Evan opened his eyes again, looking himself over, his body tense and his mind intently focusing on remaining solid. He held his hands up, stretching and kneading his gripped fists until they both had five fingers again, the Paramount Key still floating inside his left palm.

"............I HATE THIS. I HATE THIS. I HATE THIS."

[DanteMGalileo]

Well, that wasn't quite what Arti had expected to happen!

"Hey, great big soft jelly thing," Arti said, poking Evan. "At least you have a mouth and can thus scream. ... Wait, aren't we in a crisis?"

[ThePopcornFairy]

...Okay, even Eric was willing to admit that wasn't normal.

"Huh..." He tapped his chin, curiously studying Evan, finally putting together the blindingly obvious connection between him and the slime. "So I guess it's not just a haircut, is it? Yeah, that one took me a while, I'll admit it."

Still, it was Eric's natural instinct to take things in stride, prompting him to smile and elbow Evan. "So... you're Jell-O. That's not so bad! I love Jell-O! Who doesn't love Jell-O?!"

[ParamountKeymaster]

"STOP SAYING JELL-O!" Evan barked just before swatting Arti's hand away, too irritated to even notice that the slime wasn't burning Arti's skin this time. He then took a deep breath, doing his best to calm down at least a little, still rigid in spite of this. "Could you guys please help me out here? Or at the very least stop enjoying this?! Because I'm seriously about to lose my FREAKING MIND AND... and..."

He cut himself off as Arti's last comment sunk in, quickly filling him with dread. No one could really fault Evan for getting so caught up in his sudden change in chemical composition, but it had been so alarming that he had nearly forgotten about the larger issue at hand.

"Oh God, the worms..." Evan dropped his head into his hands in despair. "God, why did this have to happen to me now? How am I supposed to deal with both these things at once?!"

...........................

After a short pause, Evan weakly tugged his arms, once again finding his face and palms glued together. "_{...Iforgodaboudat...}"

[DanteMGalileo]

"If we're being totally honest, I forgot until like five minutes ago," Arti said, walking up to Evan. "I forget a lot of stuff. If I remembered to change my underwear, if I remembered to go grocery shopping, if I left the oven on..." And then he grabbed the poor slime boy's ear, wincing slightly at the slimy sensation.

"Let's got kick some alien ass fast I've got a show to catch."

Wow, that yanking's gotta hurt.

[ThePopcornFairy]

"Worms?" Eric tapped his chin, intrigued by this new development and Evan's devastated expression. "What, we talking some kind of pest problem, or does this have to do with Carter? You know my mom's a vet, right?"

He turned to face Arti, smiling and nodding along with his ramblings. "Yeah, I do stuff like that all the time. Like yesterday, I forgot my... forgot... my... um... I... forgot... what I was going to say. Dang, I am not on the ball lately, am I? Whatever happened to my ball? Did I leave it at home? Say, that reminds me, where are we? Aliens? What aliens? I though we were getting rid of worms."

[ParamountKeymaster]

Well, given that Evan's ear was little more than an ear-shaped mass on the side of his head, Arti was pretty much just pinching a small handful of slime. Still, it did its part to get Evan's attention, prompting him to separate his hands from his head in another gooey spectacle. While he morphed his face back into shape, he didn't have the energy to do the same for his arms, leaving them misshapen and noodle-like for the time being. It was at that moment that he noticed the lack of any sort of pained reaction from Arti, making Evan realize that the change from orange to blue had also turned his slime from acidic to basic.

But, as far as he could tell, there would be plenty of time to figure that out later. For now...

"Dude, these worms have infested the entire island," Evan stated with a level tone. "There are potentially hundreds... maybe thousands of them out there, many of them presently undergoing metamorphosis into what I can only assume are even deadlier monsters, and until we find a way to get that cloud out of the sky, they're just gonna keep coming. I don't think we can get rid of all of them as quickly as you're anticipating. ...Granted, Kendall hinted to me that it would only take a week, but even if that is the case, I barely know where to begin beyond killing the worms already on the ground."

[DanteMGalileo]

"In that case, I say we take the redneck approach to this!"

Noting the incredulous look on Evan's face and the... whatever on Eric's, Arti pulled out the fiery pan. "First, we need to get all liquored up! You two know where we can find a good bar? And then we shoot at everything that looks suspicious. Easy peasy lemon squeezy."

[ThePopcornFairy]

"Thousands? Man, that's a pretty big worm problem," Eric mused, somewhat alarmed by this information based on the baffled look on his face. "But... we're gonna shoot them? Are guns really the solution to this problem? I'm no good with guns to begin with, but that kinda seems like overkill if we're just dealing with some little worms, even if it is a metric buttload of them."

Eric then nonchalantly pointed up a nearby tree. "Y'know, unless you're talking about those worms, in which case, I kinda see what you're getting at."

[ParamountKeymaster]

Evan just glared and let out a long sigh. "Okay, even if that was a viable plan... one, I'd like to avoid personally adding to the increasing destruction, and two, I don't even know if I'm capable of getting drunk. I don't really have... organs... Wow, I have so many questions..."

He turned to stare incredulously at Eric, then followed his finger and looked into the tree, instantly going stiff and wide-eyed when he finally noticed that something was rustling in the branches. A lot of somethings, actually.

Sure enough, the rust red, fanged head of a wyrm poked out from between the leaves, hissing at the trio below before snaking its way down the trunk. And even as it did, it was clear there were still at least two more writhing around in the treetop.

"YEP, THAT'S THEM," Evan yelped, hastily drawing the Master Morning Star from his strife deck and pointing it at the approaching wyrm.

KRABOOM

A lightning bolt erupted from the tip of the soul crystal-empowered blade, striking the ground just a few inches to the left of the six-foot wyrm, knocking the shrieking creature aside and leaving it slightly charred. The force of the blast caused the keyblade to jolt backwards and out of Evan's slimy grip, eliciting a yelp out of him when the hilt took part of his hand with it and clattered to the ground, surrounded by splatters of the blue gunk.

[DanteMGalileo]

"WHOA HOLY CRAP ON A CUPCAKE WHAT IS THAT-"

Arti instantly raised the fiery pan in front of him, taking in the red wyrm. Well until Evan blasted it aside at least. "... Y'know, I was expecting something worse. I guess I won't have to liquor up. ... Still gonna shoot at anything that moves funny."

And then he picked up something in the trees. "BACK OFF SPACE SCUM I'M ARMED. OR COME CLOSER SO I CAN ROAST YA. EITHER WORKS. ALSO EAT THE BLUE GUY WITH ONE HAND FIRST. I'M SURE HE TASTES BETTER. LIKE BLUEBERRY."

Some knight Arti is.