Chapter 2: Born – Into the Woods

Chapter Type: System, Social

It was still daylight when I awoke. I took a glance at my status.

Unnamed

Level 1 Magical Beast, Protean (lesser Titanspawn)

MIGHT: 1 (base health 15)

Athletics/Swim/Swimming Technique: 2

Health/Digestion/Digest Vegetables: 2

.....

AGILITY: 0

INSIGHT: 1 (modified from base 0)

VALOR: 0

Melee Defense/Dodge: 1

Dodge Natural Weapons: 3 (max effective rank 2)

Melee Attack/Natural Weapons/Bite: 2 (max effective rank 1)

RESOLVE: 0 (base sanity 10)

Sanity Skills/Stoic/Resist Fear: 1

CHARISMA: 0 (base serenity 10)

Empathy/Sense Emotion/Detect Hostility: 1

Handle Animal/Animal Friend/Calm Animal: 1

LORE: 0

Mystic Senses/Detect Magic/Detect Nature Magic: 1

TRAITS

Biomass Adaptions (size small)

Amphibian Lungs

Jaws (Lacerating Natural Weapon: 1, paltry lacerating damage)

Paltry Legs (bone structure needed, 3/60 dairy)

Scales (Physical Armor: 1, paltry protection from Blunt, Piercing, and Lacerating)

Curious (+1 INSIGHT, max 3, paltry INSIGHT XP Bonus)

Cultivation Techniques

Combat (Level 0, 2/10 XP to next rank)

Exploration (Level 2, 6/30 XP to next rank)

Omnivore: 2 (16/240 biomass)

Well, I had several problems within myself that I needed to fix, and pronto. Several of my subskills needed skills or even sub-statistics improved to use them at their full level. My biomass was at nearly empty (again), with a list longer than my status of things I wanted to develop.

But the worst thing, the one that added a sense of urgency? My magical beast level was now 1, meaning that I could now be located by Detect Beast. Or maybe Detect Monster. Maybe Detect Magic?

Fine. I didn’t know how it worked, I just knew that it did. The same skills I had used as a hatchling to avoid level one creatures that could kill me would now detect ME, and I was about as dangerous as a fish.

I’d seen fish plucked out of the ocean by birds; I could hear different birds chirping in the distance.

I lost a point of water urinating before even moving from my bed. So much for my subskill in Resist Fear.

I deployed all my senses, but identified no animals near my position. And I was thirsty.

Again wishing I’d ranked up Agility instead of Might, I stealthily crushed leaves underfoot, dragging myself to the river. I suffered through the nausea of not having adapted to fresh water yet, and set about trying to locate food.

And such volume and diversity of food! Before nightfall I had found no less than three meals, discovering the Nuts food type. I could chew up tree bark, but doing so induced vomiting. I’d need better digestive methods before I could expect anything resembling nourishment from it.

It was night when I encountered my first rodent, which fled without being attacked. I wasn’t sure what a rodent was, but I knew I wanted to eat one and find out. But they were fast, and seemed to have better senses than I did, and they scavenged smart.

And there were squirrels, which were also rodents. But they were also skilled climbers and jumpers, treating the trees as just another means of travel. They weren’t shy about throwing things from tree branches; I quickly learned to dislike squirrels.

By nightfall, I’d expended enough biomass, fatigue, sanity, and serenity chasing various woodland creatures. I gathered together a pile of leaves and crawled underneath, intending to ambush anything that came near. I was asleep before getting used to the chirping of nighttime insects.

#

The next day, I made two important discoveries.

The first was a partial deer antler. I’d mistaken it for a branch initially, but it smelled different as I stepped over it. I took a nibble – it was bone, which counted as Dairy! It was beyond my level to digest, of course, but the sheer volume!

Once I could digest the antler, I’d have bones out the wazoo! Well, for a small creature, anyway. I must have looked quite amusing, dragging myself along on spongy limbs, that fragment of deer antler in my mouth.

The second discovery was a small lake, where two rivers met and flowed downstream together. Most importantly, there was an area where the current was broken by roots. I could live there, fed by fish and algae, with nuts and mushrooms and other good things inland. And it had a shelf of soft earth nearby where I could leave the aforementioned bulky monstrosity.

And flowers. I couldn’t digest them, but I found their scent soothing, which improved my rates of healing for mental fatigue, and a smaller bump to healing serenity, which I was still losing from trying to chase shrews, and forest mice, and even the occasional squirrel.

There were a number of eels in the lake, which fed on the fish. I tried defending my spot, but after losing over half my health, I had to flee onto dry land. For four days, there was a significant penalty in biomass while my body healed itself.

There was a day when I spotted a deer, but it was level three. It was foraging for nuts, and chased me off when I approached. I didn’t catch a fish daily, either, being wary of the eels as I was. But I continued gaining biomass, slowly but surely. Oh, I may not have been an alpha predator, but I was an expert in scavenging.

As luck would have it, I did finally catch a tiny vole (a rodent). It was doing something in the branches, and not paying attention to its balance, and it fell into the water. I plunged into the water once I realized how bad it was at swimming; into the water, CRUNCH CRUNCH CRUNCH, and out without being attacked by a single eel.

An entire plethora of mammalian adaptions flooded my awareness; I must have been mystified for hours. In particular, there was Four Chambered Heart. I’d been saving up for Adrenal Surge, but quickly put that one on the back burner. Improved stamina, improved health, and thermal tolerance – almost as good as an extra point of Might, and actually something I could almost afford.

I lost two points of sanity each day as I gathered the needed proteins to re-shape my heart. It took a day of minor adjustments, and nearly popped my eyes out of my sockets. The changes in my circulatory system would take weeks, at a biomass cost of nearly four times what the heart itself had cost.

It was worth it, as I’d suspected.

Ever since leaving the lagoon, I’d noticed that I became colder, and thus slower, as the water evaporated. In the shady world of the forest, that effect had become more pronounced. But now – well, soon – I would be generating more heat internally, and keeping more of it. So long, initiative and speed penalties!

#

I nearly lost my life several times during those weeks. I urinated into the mouth of a wolf cub to escape its jaws, fell into a hole and nearly starved digging my way out, I even found a poisonous mushroom and nearly died from that. As I became more and more comfortable on land, I began exploring more often and farther.

And then, the big exploration evolution. The health boost improved my digestion, and after another investment of more biomass than was practical, I was keeping pieces of the antler in my belly. I now had four fully working legs. I could lift my belly off the ground. I could walk.

Running was iffy, and resulted in a lot of painful collisions. I tore my side open on a large rock, and once even tripped over my own tail. (Okay, I was trying to learn Tail Lash while moving. My bad.) But by now I was healing three times faster than as a hatchling, and these injuries just slid off me.

Inspired by the squirrels, I tried jumping. I could bonk my head on tree trunks with the best of woodland animals, but I couldn’t get the distance or height of those darn tree rats. Ditto for climbing; I knew the theory of how to do it, but I just always slipped and fell.

It was humiliating; I could see other creatures doing these things, but couldn’t do so myself. I just didn’t have the instincts they did.

And then there was the badger. It was level four, which wasn’t the highest level animal in the forest. But oh, it was territorial and it was mean. I would turn and run, and it would still take a bite out of my tail. I debated just shedding the entire thing, but then kept it for a simple reason – while the badger was biting my tail, it wasn’t, for example, tearing open my throat or my belly. I was glad to have grown proper legs before meeting such a combative foe.

In retrospect, I was worried about the wrong things. I hadn’t seen a single humanoid footprint; not even a goblin. Of course, I couldn’t have known that the world had once been over-run with various upright beings, but I should have known that it wasn’t just my siblings and the animals.

I should have known, but I didn’t.

So, during the twilight dusk of another day, when I was curled up pretending to be a rock, hoping that maybe I could catch something off guard, I was surprised when my senses alerted me to A FREAKING LEVEL 16 MAGICAL CREATURE coming right at me.

Now, I’d been in the forest several weeks, maybe less than a month. I lived in terror of the level 6 wolves, and of the bears above them at levels 8 and 9. So, yes. I was utterly motionless, barely even daring to breathe. To my credit, I didn’t void my bladder.

It chittered right up near me, and in a clear mental voice, it broadcast, “I KNOW YOU ARE THERE.” I didn’t receive it as words; I still didn’t know what words were. On a good day, I could exchange emotions with the animals about me, perhaps a simple picture.

Like the squirrel that threw an acorn at me, imagining it going through my body as though through soft mud. As I have said, I had learned to not like squirrels.

But the image sent by the other – it was clear and focused and had PURPOSE in a way even my siblings had not. The sheer MEANING implied in that statement was nearly a holy discovery.

Well, I certainly wasn’t going to ambush him then. (The sense I got from his thoughts was definitely male.) I uncurled myself and faced him.

He backed off and ground his mandibles together. Much later, he admitted he had believed me to be behind the rock. When that rock unfurled itself into a reptilian with sharp teeth and shark-black eyes? He had trouble believing I was only a level one.

?? Name Unknown ??

Child of Anansi

Level 16 Magical Creature (Arachne)

He looked like a giant spider to me, drab and brown and black, covered with short spikey hair that resembled quills. He had twice the number of limbs I did, lacked a tail, and clearly was NOT covered in scales.

“I am here.” I tried to send back. Even to my mind, it sounded unclear, slurred. It was the burbling of a soft brook to the unrelenting tide of his thought-voice.

“WHO ARE YOU? WHAT ARE YOU?” He asked. “DO YOU KNOW?”

I summoned up images of my brothers, of my sisters, of the final carnage that drove me from my home. “I am these”, I sent back.

“Yes”, he sent back, soft as silk, “and no. You are THESE, and you are more”. A thousand blue dots (one, then two, and ending at 45, so technically 1035 blue dots), and then one red one. “THIS is you.”

.....

My first thought was that it wasn’t true. My sisters had been the colorful ones. I was green, or brown, more often mottled grey. I blended in with those around me, how would I have stood out like the red dot? “I don’t understand”, was the only thing I could reply.

He sent across images, of just another meal. Me, paralyzed, slowly digested by venom and sucked out through my own skin. But then, confusion, my confusion – and his. The intention came across clearly. I’d gone from a meal to a puzzle. “Do you have a name?”

Name? What was a name? I dimly recognized it as a series of sounds. I hissed out a series of sounds, trying to summarize my sense of self using vocalizations which I’d just never used that way before.

“Hrm. Rhishisikk. My name is Eihtfuhr. Come with me. Fall behind, and I will eat you.”

He moved impossibly fast, running at speeds I just couldn’t match, showing a balance that seemed godlike, and able to leap from the ground all the way up to the middle limbs of trees.

“Faster!” he chided me. “Stop stepping on leaves and twigs. I know you are better than this! Be better! Be faster!”

It was impossible, of course. Even with the stamina boost my heart gave me, I just didn’t have the physical and mental fatigue to keep moving at my top speed. It was nowhere near his top speed.

“You are more than this. Faster than this. Better than this! Show me!” And then, “Oh, so hungry...”

He leapt through a tree’s branches, snatching a slumbering possum. Even discounting the venom, it was dead before Eihtfuhr was on the ground. He slung the dead beast over his back, sometimes pausing in his travels to look back at me and take a quick drink from the beast.

He ran me ragged, he ran through fields, jumped across rivers, made tree limbs I couldn’t reach his personal highway. When I reached utter exhaustion for the second time, he threw the corpse away in frustration.

historical

“HOW DARE YOU LIE TO ME! YOU ARE NOT THIS. NOT WEAK. SHOW ME YOU. SHOW ME YOUR STRENGTH.”

“I – I can’t.” I’d taken actual damage to my health, my sanity, and my serenity by stressing myself so far beyond my limits for so long. “I’m not that strong. Not like you.”

“YOU. ARE. LYING. I WILL KILL YOU NOW.”

“I’m not lying!” I barely understood what he meant when he said LIE. It wasn’t a concept I’d even come close to considering.

Venom dripped from his mandibles as he placed them on either side of my head, while I lay there, helpless.

“I [SWEAR] that I will never lie!”

Oath Accepted: I will never lie.

Open Truthspeaker class?

I didn’t understand what was going on, only a vague sensation that doing this would make me stronger, tougher. I accepted without even trying to think about what I might be giving up.

TRUTHSPEAKER accepted as primary social class.

Congratulations! You are now CHARACTER LEVEL ONE.

1000 Development points awarded.

The list of new abilities bombarded me. I had no understanding what was going on.

“EH?” thought Eihtfuhr, releasing my head.

“Blrglsfrm.” I said, or maybe it was “Hsrnguum.” It was something profound like that. I twitched helplessly, as an entire universe crammed itself into my head.

There was a sense of SATISFACTION, but it wasn’t mine. “AT LAST, THERE YOU ARE.”

“Arglefumgy!” I exclaimed.

[You have reached negative health levels, and are losing consciousness. You have reached negative sanity levels and will experience madness. You have reached negative serenity levels, and will be emotionally distraught.]

“YES”, he said, placing me on his back, exactly where the possum had lain before. “LET’S GET HOME. I HAVE MUCH TO EXPLAIN TO YOU.”

#