Katpride
Story Collector
Griffonage wasn’t really sure what to call the creature that was currently responsible for shutting down the boardwalk. It was hard to put words to. From her perch - atop one of the trendy clothing shops that seemed to spread, mold-like, over every halfway respectable boardwalk and well past the still-assembling police barricade - she could see that the creature seemed to be covered in some kind of vivid green goo, and that it was about the size of a person, perhaps on taller side, and that it was not a bear.
She wasn’t sure who had first called it a bear, but whoever they were, they were probably even more confused than she was. And she was pretty confused. But even so, although Griffonage had never seen a bear outside of the zoo, she was definitely, 100% sure that bears did not ooze green goo. And it was oozing, pretty continuously from what she could tell, because despite the slimy trail it left in its wake the shroud of slime around it never seemed to lessen in volume. At least it was slow, she thought, watching as it made its way past a storefront and around a standing sign.
Or, uh, scratch that. It didn’t go around the sign. It went through the sign, schlorping the whole thing into itself. There was a brief flash of light within the creature, and when it continued moving the sign was nowhere to be found.
“Huh.” Alright, that was kind of cool. But she should still probably stop the thing before it made its way to… wherever it was going. Maybe she could corral it, and then hand it over to the police. If they had some kind of containment cell that was capable of holding a weird slime monster, that was. That seemed like the sort of thing that the police should have, right?
Right. But first, she had to do the corralling. Getting to her feet, Griffonage took out her slingshot, shaking one of her water balloons to activate the chemicals within. Carefully, she lined up her shot, then released the band, rocketing the balloon out to splatter at the indistinct feet of the creature. There. That should-
A lot of things happened, when her balloon hit the creature. First, there was an explosion of foam, swallowing up the legs of the slime monster in one big burst. Second, the slime monster, for the first time in the several minutes she’d spent observing it, stopped moving forward. And, see, these things would totally be a victory in her book, if the third thing hadn’t been the creature snapping its head around to stare directly at her, vivid pink eyes glowing against the green of what she was rapidly realizing was not, in fact, a covering of goo, but the creature’s whole green slime body.
Griffonage was already backpedaling when the creature’s arm snapped out, pointing at her, and the sign from earlier made a dramatic reappearance in the form of being ejected with considerable speed in her direction.
“Eep!” Throwing herself against the roof was definitely better than being brained by an advertisement, so that’s exactly what she did, landing forearms-first on the wavy metal roofing. Chancing a glance at the creature showed that it was absorbing the foam she’d thrown at it, now, and already dragging its arm down to point at her new position.
Welp. This might not have been her best plan.