Challenge #00498 - A123: Obvious Design Flaw

All those corrosive things humans excrete can come in handy sometimes, right?

(“We have to get out of this maze as fast as we can, but if we turn on the plasma cutter the monster will hear us!”

“Stand back, I got this” *spits at wall*)

“Sucrose! What the heck kind of alien builds walls out of sucrose?” asked Mabel.

“I have no idea, but we are going to need one hell of a dentist by the time we get out of here.” Trisha gave up licking the next wall to worry at the thin spot she’d been making.

“Power core’s five more walls away,” said Gladys.

Krink. Tink. CLACK. Trisha put a fragment of wall in her mouth. “You’re next, Mabs.  My tongue’s feeling like old leather.”

“Right.” Mabel wriggled through the hole and began licking the next wall in their way. “They could’ve at least sprung for flavouring. What’s wrong with a little hint of orange? Or mint?”

*

The entire crew huddled in their quarters, watching their monitors in horror as the creatures they thought captives were literally eating their way through solid sucra walls. Proof against anything that their fellow Hemitt could devise.

These aliens were unstoppable!

And yet, they avoided essential infrastructure. They did not eat the pipes or the wires, or any vital thing. Just the walls between them and their goal. But their unstoppability made a lasting impression on them, all the same.

Even now, with the humans declared merely insane and not hazardous, the Hemitt still make features about monsters that can eat buildings.

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