"Awww I wasn't gonna hurt you." ...she flickers on the view of the pirate ship to find a "box" and try that.

Pirate ship view will permit her to interact with boxes as if they were boxes. If she tries to move any the slime will do its best to mimic its behaviour but perhaps the lack of sound and texture information will give it away anyway.

She sits and then resumes seeing reality and pats the slime she's sitting on.

It does not wobble in response to that, but a different slime, outside the barrier, does.

Huh.

Pat pat... pat pat pat... pat pat pat pat pat... pat pat pat pat pat pat pat... pat pat pat pat pat pat pat pat pat pat pat ?

That same slime outside the barrier jumps twice. Then it jumps three times. Then five. Then seven. Then eleven.

"Inconclusive." She gets out her notebook and starts taking notes.

"...it is probably better for this barrier to be here than not be here," he concludes after mulling it over for a bit. "It is permeable from this side, we can leave and nothing can enter, and it does limit the number of slimes that can easily interact with us to two, rather than all of them."

"They're so fast and the area is so limited that I'm not sure that helps unless you do something like all try to touch walls in different places at once while some of you are sitting on boxes? But it might make them work harder." Scribble scribble.

"It may not be better by enough to matter, but it is still probably better."

Simone's gonna try a diagnostic spell on a slime-seat.

A standard entity report appears before her eyes. She sees results perfectly consistent with an old wooden box covered by a half-rotted tarp; Elisabel, from her perspective, will see something else, though she might need to walk over to Simone to read it all.

She hops up to go check. (Does her chair stay where she left it or go somewhere else?) And then she copies it all down, and shows it to Simone.

"Merde."

The slime stays there, but it does not stay box-shaped.

As for the report: the amount of mana in those slimes is not literally off the charts but there's certainly never been any other slimes with this much mana that Simone's ever seen. They're lightning-elemental but they have very high elemental resistances in full generality, as well as general magic resistance and defence that are higher even than what one would normally expect for the deeper levels of the Protean dungeon. And all of the other stats repeat this theme: they're kind of bullshit.

Elisabel shows this readout transcription to the other party members.

Tristan is too experienced to blanch but he definitely takes a deep breath to recenter himself.

Etienne doesn't really want to sit on one of these any more and relocates to the floor.

And here's Philippe. "So euh the folks upstairs think we should all retreat and come back later if we want to support Elisabel in the project of communicating with the dungeon and come up with a 'real plan' but we are of course free to do whatever we want and it's just a suggestion. So they say. They did not know what a real plan would look like when I asked and said that it was just because this was a very unexpected thing that we should think about carefully and have a plan for what to do rather than figure it out as we go along. 

"Franchement ils étaient drôlement condescendants, comme si on n'était pas des professionnels, quoi..."