Preview of Beep and Wayra
Wayra had lived by the ocean all his life. However, that did not mean that he knew how to swim. He’d tried once, but the waves that were easily taller than his three feet in height had made it impossible.
“Are you ready?” the purple dragon bounced next to him, not just up and down, but her whole frame wobbled up and down as if she had no bones.
Because she truly did not have bones. Her body was made of purple slime, and she had a rounded-off look, like a plush he had once bought her, and she had devoured and began impersonating.
The kobold huffed. “I do not think this is a good idea.”
“Why not? I thought you liked the water? And didn't you want to make an offering to the dragon Enni to meet your cousins?”
Wayra's blue-scaled tail flicked back and forth, and he scrubbed spindly fingers through his short-cut mane. “Well, yes.”
Beep the slime dragon waited only about three heartbeats before saying an insistent, “Well?!”
Wayra huffed. “Well, I never learned to swim that well in deeper water, and the pearls are going to be out deep.”
Beep flicked her tail. “Oh, is this one of those you need to breathe things?”
Wayra made a face at her. She did not need to breathe, as a slime, and his need to do so had confused her from time to time, something that was definitely a concerning sensation when she also had a tendency to...
The thought was not quite even formed when a tendril just reached out of the side of her body and wrapped forcefully around him. “Beep! Don't yo-"
But, his insistence that she “not dare” was also cut off as she just dragged him into her. Her body was soft and warm, and she could envelop him like this whenever she wanted without any particular warning.
He flailed. He was hyper-aware of the feeling of her soft, slick body pressing into his, between his toes, between his fingers, practically between every scale, soaking into his hair. It was sweet-smelling (when he could breathe, which was not right this second), and heated... and gloopy. Every time he was let out of her afterwards, it was a toss-up of whether he would feel dry or not.
He worried that she was going to digest his clothes again. She liked to impersonate them, but they didn't seem to come off this time. He felt her gripping big sections of his body, shoving him down toward her belly from her shoulder and neck, curling him up there so she didn't have to change her dragon shape too much.
A pocket of air opened, and he took a deep breath. “Beep! This isn't helping!”
The slime dragon laughed-burbled at him. “Shush, you don't even know yet, Wayra.”
The kobold squirmed indignantly, and she began walking with him.
That was also, always, a strange sensation. Her body rippled around him, each movement not quite the way something with muscles ought to move, because of course, she was pretending to be a thing that had muscles and bones.
Slime dropped on his nose from the roof of her stomach, and he sneezed. “Beep! You're ignoring me again; we talked about this!”
“And I said that I would listen to you when you said smart things.”
He was infuriated, and as she squeezed on him to stop his flailing about and tantruming preemptively, he was also flustered.
She waded into the water with him, and he grew quiet after all.
She was not easy to see outside of, things were actually dense, despite how translucent she looked. However, he could see the light change, and he could feel the way her body holding him became just a little lighter, though not less snug since she liked to hold tight.
He huffed. “You are just going to carry me into the water and be my air?”
She made a smug burble at him, and he felt incredibly sassed.
And yet, he also felt grateful, because it did solve the whole swimming problem.
And it would make getting that pearl a lot... well, safer. Pearls were valuable, so he thought they were probably not easy to find.
When he didn't say anything, she gave him a really tight squeeze, and he flailed, his soft body slipping on his. “All right, fine, it was smart. But you could have told me.”
The smug laugh that she made told him she was never going to start explaining herself, no matter how much he complained. In fact, making him complain might be the point.