Acid Burns

the sap if they touched. In nature, the slugs and vines lived at opposite ends of the
continent. But time and chance sometimes brought them together, generating an explosive
reaction that made Raynolds, a chemical biologist, very excited. He once joked that
Garxxax's tropical storms were all that kept the planet from burning to a crisp. But in the
artificial biospheres, they could control and examine the reaction in safety.
The next problem was catching the slugs. They weren't intelligent per se, but they
had enough survival instinct to get the hell out of the way when endangered. Evidence of
this was found on the planet's rainforest floor, where clusters of tiny sinkholes hinted at
groups of zantar slugs that had burrowed underground.
Raynolds and his colleagues were trying to decode the makeup of the mucous that
allowed the slugs to carry it without being harmed by its corrosive properties. The mystery
seemed to be connected with their strange metabolism, which meant they healed
outrageously fast. Hesken had once shown Illyana video of a slug being all but sliced in two,
then stitching itself back together and moving on as if nothing had happened. On the video
it had taken less than a minute, and she'd asked Hesken what the frame rate was. He had
laughed, and said it was real time. No time-lapse recording required.
Now Illyana looked around at the devastation in the sphere, and wondered what
could have gone wrong. The vine sap ecosystem was all but razed to the ground. The
sprinklers had kicked in and saved some vines, but not before the fire's heat had cracked
open the dome above.
The floor was littered with the charred bodies of slugs. She assumed they were
casualties from Raynolds's experimental stock, freed when their jars and cages burnt.
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