Goober Receives Flowers and Food

Summary

In Session 5, Safia conducts an experiment to determine whether positive stimuli affect Goober's behavior. Safia picks pleasant-smelling flowers and offers them to the goo ball, followed by a fuzzy peach, treating Goober like a mood ring to test its reactions. Rather than displaying emotional responses, Goober simply absorbs both items into its mass using tiny pseudopods. This experiment reveals Goober's Pac-Man-like nature—it gobbles up whatever is offered—and establishes an important property: Goober produces copies of food it observes the party eating, but the taste of these copies depends on what Goober has recently absorbed.

Details

Safia initiates the experiment by selecting flowers that smell and look nice, wanting to see if pleasant stimuli will make Goober feel more relaxed. When Safia offers the flowers to the goo ball, Goober extends a tiny pseudopod and absorbs the flowers into its mass. Safia then throws in a fuzzy peach, which Goober absorbs in the same manner.

The party realizes that Goober functions as "kind of just a gobbler, like Pac Man," indiscriminately absorbing whatever is offered rather than displaying mood-based responses to the quality of the stimuli.

The experiment has an unexpected consequence that becomes apparent when the party camps at night. When Goober sees the party eating, it produces copies of the food it observes them consuming. However, the taste of these copies correlates directly with what Goober has recently absorbed. After consuming the flowers, the food Goober produces tastes like grass and petals, despite visually resembling beef jerky.

Participants

• Safia — Conducts the experiment, selecting and offering flowers and a peach to Goober to test whether positive stimuli affect its behavior
• Goober — The subject of the experiment, absorbs the offered items using pseudopods and later demonstrates its food-copying ability

Consequences

• The party discovers Goober's absorption mechanism: it extends pseudopods to take in any offered material
• Goober's food-production ability is revealed—it creates copies of food it sees the party eating
• The party learns that Goober's absorption history affects the taste of the food it produces: flower-fed Goober makes food that tastes like grass and petals
• Safia's "mood ring" hypothesis is disproven—Goober does not display emotional responses to pleasant or unpleasant stimuli, but rather absorbs indiscriminately