TOAD TOWN: 55 — Dripping with Slime? (Patreon)

Chapter 54 can be read here.

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There won't be a chapter next week for Toad Town, since I'll be in Italy for a short vacation.

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55 — Dripping with Slime?

“Are you sure we really need to let them live in my settlement?” I asked Imu apprehensively.

“Don’t ask me, you tasked Bel with the inclusivity requirement.”

“I think they’re kind of charming… in their own way,” she said, holding a salt-shaker in an iron-tight white-knuckled grip.

“No one even understands their language,” I argued.

“That’s not true, they brought a human translator,” she replied and pointed to the diminutive woman. She was covered in slime from head to toe and, even from where we observed the newcomers from the roof of a two-storey house, I could smell her and the people she served.

“I do not envy her job,” Imu remarked.

“She looks pretty content,” I noticed.

The newcomers were of a species that I’d never heard about before, which was called Slugmen. As their name suggested, they were humanoid slugs, although the term ‘humanoid’ was bent so far out of its natural meaning that it hardly applied to them, given that they all basically crawled along on the ground on their arms with their tail-like lower-body dragging behind them, leaving a shiny trail. They each had their eyes on two telescopic stalks that grew from their foreheads and their mouths were circular holes with teeth. Next to these creatures, even the most unfortunate Frogkind looked positively gorgeous.

Imu sighed. “How many does that put us at now?”

“Let’s see,” Bel started, “We have Toadkin, Frogkind, Humans, White Elves, Slugmen, Mossbears, and Noodle Beasts.”

“Why have you only reached out to mutant species!?” Imu yelled in outrage.

“I didn’t have a choice!” Bel yelled back. “Everyone hates us or think we’re creepy. Even the Mothmen!”

“It’s okay, Imu,” I said, trying to calm him down.

“Your settlement is full of freaks, Toady… It’s literally not okay.”

“We just have to meet the requirement until I evolve,” I told him. “After that, then we can purge them.”

Bel shot me a terrified look, but Imu nodded at my words.

“You’d better not!” she demanded.

“One can dream a little,” Imu muttered romantically.

“You know, I actually thought that your System was to blame for a lot of the problems, but now I see that I was mistaken.”

“She’s very serious,” I turned to Imu and said.

“Give her a couple more weeks and she’ll learn to just give up and accept the chaos and absurdity, like I have.”

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-Evolution Progress Image-

“There’s still a way to go,” I commented sadly.

“How did we manage to make ten million Toaken already??” Bel asked, confused.

“It seems we’re now the foremost producer and exporter of Coffee on the entire continent,” Imu replied.

“Speaking of coffee, how is the Goose5 doing?”

“You mean Pete?” I asked. “I built him his own coffee swimming pond in the castle garden. He seems to spend every day there now.”

“Who could’ve thought that so terrible a beast was tameable with coffee…?” Imu mused.

“Is this a good place for the National Diet?” I asked, changing the subject.

“You’d need to demolish forty homes…” Bel remarked.

“We’ll just move them,” I replied.

“You could put the building in the Eastern Quadrant,” Imu advised.

“But it’s such an impressive building! It shouldn’t be hidden away!”

“Fine, do whatever you want.”

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>Structures>Worship

—National Diet Building (Castle & Pacifists’ Guild Office)—

A place for elected members of the National Diet to gather and discuss proposals for laws and foreign affairs, the conclusions if which are then passed on to the King for review

Required Materials: Quarried Stone

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I placed the blueprint down and simultaneously tasked my Builders with moving the displaced homes outside my outer walls, since there was no more space for them in the Northern Quadrant.

“You do know that by putting the houses outside the walls, you’re effectively creating a slum, right?”

“That’s the point. The Slugmen can live there,” I replied.

“Man, you’re really ruthless. You do realise that one of the stipulations is that the species must ‘thrive’, right?”

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After being completed in a record-setting nine hours, the colossal National Diet Building stood complete and my Graveyard had fourteen additional graves, pushing its perimeter towards the treeline that’d already been moved back four times to account for the daily fatalities that fuelled its expansion.

“It kind of looks like…”

“A humanoid mammary gland!”

“Why is it shaped like that?” Bel wondered.

The three of us were alerted to the sound of stomping feet and turned in unison to watch as System ran over and began climbing the rounded side of the roof to get to the bit at the very top, while chanting, “NIPPLE! NIPPLE! NIPPLE!”

Bel turned back to face me and Imu, then said, with an uncomfortably-blank stare, “What should we do next?”

“I think Bel is having a mental breakdown,” I remarked.

“It’s called disassociating,” Imu explained. “It is necessary to survive this job with your mind intact.”

A moment later, a slime-covered girl walked up to us, with two of the disgusting Slugmen in tow.

The rightmost Slugman pushed himself off the ground and aimed his circular mouth at us, before letting out a series of burping and farting sounds.

“Duke Slippery Grease is greeting you with utmost sincerity,” said the slime-dripping human translator in a tiny voice. I realised she was only wearing a single piece of clothing, a so-called ‘swimsuit’ as the humans called it, and her face was blushed red. She seemed to be enjoying herself, judging by the strange grin on her face and the wild look in her eyes.

“Do you think she’s turned on by being covered in slime?” I asked Imu.

He turned to look at me with a blank stare, identical to the one on Bel’s face.

“Well, that’s not good,” I remarked.

Perhaps my Fairies needed another vacation…