The planet has no name, only a smell. Its whole crust is one swamp, packed with thousands of craters, and every crater is full of glowing goo: green, purple, blue, sometimes a red that's too hot to look at. Travelers call it The Ooze Pits, the few who come back.

The goo is alive, in its slow way. It's warmed by something deep under the planet's crust. It churns for years, and then one night a crater swells, bubbles, and burps up a little shape covered in slime. That's an Oozling. Each one crawls out of its own puddle and carries a bit of it forever: the color of its sky, the junk it found at the bottom, the tiny critter that crawled out alongside it.

Most puddles make the familiar kinds: Crabs, Mushroom Heads, Slime Sloths, grinning Skulls. A few puddles near the hot vents make Fire Skulls. A few near the frozen poles make Ice Cyclops. And now and then a puddle sits too long in the radioactive drizzle, and what comes out is Mutated.

The Oozlings keep crawling out.