Lady Oozolina
Lady Oozolina is not a real lady, but she lives in the Marquis’ Castle, so everybody calls her that way. After all, she’s not an employee: she’s a guest. A permanent guest arrived from the underground caves of the Tartarus Peninsula.
The principality of Dis rests on a peninsula made of the infinite tunnels and caves of Tartarus. Tartarus was a piece of Hell where the souls of the damned were tortured chained to the wall. Giants, titans and other powerful creatures that challenged the gods and defied the laws of nature were sent here, but so did many other sinners.
The supernatural origin of this place makes life possible deep below ground, far from the sun: musks, lichens, and fungi feed on the residual energies that permeate the tunnels, becoming the foundation of a bizarre ecosystem.
Humans have disinfested many of the caves and sinkholes of the region, securing the surface as best as they could. Some of the beasts still find their way to the ground above. The oozes are the most common ones: their gelatinous body can squeeze in the tightest cracks, so they can slither through the porous limestone to reach the grass above.
People can encounter puddles of this gelatinous creature. One has to proceed with caution since a hungry ooze can “pounce”, quickly extending a pseudopod trying to engulf a prey, digesting it with their acids.
Ooze trappers scour the pastures and grasslands, looking out for them, both for security and as game. The oozes are edible if processed: the ooze aspic is one of Dis most beloved dishes. (Oozes can be “farmed” but the results are disappointing in quantity and quality).
Kalim, a young shepherd boy, found Oozolina in a pasture. She was engulfing a sheep dissolving it, but besides that, it look calm and harmless. Her humanoid shape and the fact that it could not be split nor broken into pieces made her really strange. Even stranger, her behavior showed some kind of intelligence. The shepherd and his family brought the ooze girl to their farm and kept her in a big clay jar.
The voice spread quickly, and many wanted to see such oddity. The family almost started an improvised circus, making the curious pay to see “Oozolina the weirdest girl of all!”.
Their enterprise was cut short by the Marquis himself. Woland III of house Valseriom, lord of the Mark of Kimaris, sent his trusted wizard Armand to buy the oddity and bring it (her?) to him. The family gladly accepted the 50 gold sequins, an amount that could settle them for life, and give away their founding. The young shepherd Kalim was distraught: he grew accustomed to Oozolina, and she reciprocated the affection in her enigmatic and silent ways.
The wizard Armand saw the connection between the two employed Kalim as his valet, bringing him to the castle with Oozolina.
The parents blinded by gold didn’t oppose in the slightest.
Kimaris is in the southeast corner of the Tartarus peninsula, far from everything. The city sits atop a cliff, with the harbor uncomfortably situated at the bottom of a limestone staircase with a thousand steps. The roads are old and bumpy, a hazard for chariots’ wheels.
Nobody, not even his first cousins, wanted to see the Woland. It’s not because it was bad company: he was just a boring person living in a boring place. A very far away boring place: the Mark had nothing pretty or exciting to offer, just sheep and wind.
The Marquis couldn’t find comfort in family life: his wife, Berenix, saw her marriage as a punishment, cursing her parents for giving her away. While the children of a noble usually plot against each other to get the throne, the sons and daughters of Woland conspired to not get it: the firstborn preferred to take the vows than become the heir.
Oozolina was a breath of fresh air, a thrilling novelty, an exciting opportunity. The Valseriom family treated her with uttermost respect, as she was a traveler from a distant and exotic land. And, in a way, she was.
But in another sense, she was a local, intimately tied to the territory.
After a few days in the castle, she started to turn pale and shapeless… she was also getting smaller. She was developing the same traits typical of the ooze kept in captivity, the “farmed” ones.
Oozolina was restless and attempted to escape. The Marquis was crossed: he treated her like a guest, but she was a propriety in the end. Better she behaved.
Kalim and Armand had the intuition to let her go deep in the earth through a sinkhole. Something was missing in the diet of Oozolina, or maybe in the air. The first time she went back to the tunnels of Tartarus, everybody was afraid she was gone for good. She was away for a full day. Only Kalim stayed all that time near the sinkhole waiting for her. That time she came back, and she would come back every time since.
The fact that Oozolina had to go back to her “native place” once every ten days, more or less, was perfect for the Marquis and his family. Since the ooze-girl could not leave that place, everyone who wanted to see her had to come to them. And a lot of people wanted to take a peek at a lady made of green slime.
The first to arrive were the relatives, sure that a story so over the top was just a desperate attempt of Woland to get some visits. But they were impressed. The voice spread.
Now nobles, scholars, artists, poets, bishops, merchants, all come to see the wonder with different agendas, different curiosities, different theories.
Was she an exception or there was a land of ooze people? Was she an explorer transformed by an ancient artifact? Did she engulf the remains of damned souls becoming them? How does she see, hear, touch? Could she reproduce? Could one buy a piece of her to try and grow another ooze-person? What’s in the depths of Tartarus?
Lady Oozolina tries to respond to all these questions, but the answer often, almost always, disappoint.
Ozolina learned to communicate with signs and with writing. She can’t see flat surfaces, so teaching her to read and write was a challenge, but Armand used wax tablets: she could sense the reliefs and valley of the written word by touch.
The problem was the words of Oozolina were a puzzle: she doesn’t have basic concepts like colors or weather, she lacks the words for the smells and tastes she experience. The descriptions of the underground landscapes are illogic and baffling. Kalim is always beside her, trying to interpret and rephrase to the benefit of the noble guests.
The time Lady Oozolina spends in the deep, the pause she takes to refresh and renew herself is becoming longer every time: not by much, but she resurfaces some minutes later every time. She spent almost a day and a half now.
Armand the wizard thinks is some kind of melancholy: she’s a lady but also a bought object; she is from faraway but also home; everybody wants to meet her but nobody understands her; alone surrounded by people. At least there’s Kalim.
