Born a Monster

It was a dumb plan; once free of the rope, the sack went directly into one of my stomachs.

I’d also been planning to go out the window; that was high against the roof (I could easily leap to it) and had a metal grillwork.

So... door.

I’d had a variety of sticks and stones and herbs, but only the stones had survived my need for biomass, for nutrition. None of them were thin and wiry, the sort of tool one could pick a lock with. I went to fiddle with the lock, only to discover that the keyhole was on the other side.

I knew nobody cared if I screamed, so I did. That had all the effect on the door someone would expect. Probably for the best, though. Even if I unlocked it, the guard or guards on the outside would just kick the door into my face...

Into my face.

The door opened inward.

The hinges were on my side of the door.

.....

I had a rock.

The pins were secured by smelting a metal button on the bottom, and while professionally done, it wasn’t done masterfully.

I tried two whacks with a rock, resounding throughout my cell. I waited.

Then I cursed myself as an idiot, and just set a two minute system timer.

Oh, it seemed to crawl, just to spite my eagerness. But no guards came, no alarm was raised.

Well, enough bad things happen in my life that I don’t question the good. I set about the job with gusto. Moving a door by its hinges? Not the sort of heavy activity to be doing when your skin is just a mass of scabs. <1 >

It was long, and noisy, and involved more than one scream.

Nobody came.

I seemed to be on a basement level; none of the other cells seemed occupied. There was a janitorial closet, filled with all kinds of edibles (as I gauged edibles, anyway) and nothing that resembled soap.

And there were stairs. Wooden planks, each six servings long and wide. Stale, yes, but not rotten. I salivated as I made my way up.

The door wasn’t locked; there was no guard on duty.

I blinked. Had they mentioned a shortage of guards? Well, yes, yes they had. Still... to leave prisoners unwatched?

I crouched there long enough for the blood dripping from me to start forming a pool. When I decided it wasn’t a trap, I tried the front door.

Locked.

But the finger levers to unlock it were on my side of the door. Click, click, and light push. The door needed a heavier push to actually move, rusted metal grating on more of the same.

One breath, two breaths, still no alarm, MOVE!

In the distance, there were guards. They might have been on patrol, but they weren’t moving just then. They were busy talking to each other about lack of water and how it impacted their romantic lives.

Idiots. I didn’t even need to cast Shroud to sneak past them.

One of the great things about having an actual sense of smell is that it’s easy to locate the kitchen. Even with the fires banked, the smells of grease and stew drew me like a magnet.

There was a window wide enough to fit three of me, the shutters thrown wide to let out the hot air of the day. What more invitation did I need?

Some cooks keep a dog or a passel of cats, or some other manner of guard creature. This one hadn’t even locked the pantry.

A basket half full of eggs, sacks of flour and roasted seeds, dried fruits and vegetables; those that didn’t go into my stomachs went into inventory.

And then, the cupboard bare, I set about finding the service door (easy) and tracking the cook’s scent toward the warehouse. Not a large warehouse, just another building of mud bricks. Guarded, yes, but not by enough guards to even watch all the entrances at once. Two in front, one in back, and nobody watching the roof.

Their loss. I needed new skin, and that meant I needed into that building. I needed FOOD. Okay, I needed more food.

You will hear experienced burglars talk about dislocating their joints as though it were normal. It’s not, the process is... okay, yes, the process is a lot like sneaking around a fortified campsite at night without your skin, little pitter-patter of your own blood not even reaching your ears anymore because the [Anemia] has you dizzy and disoriented.

It turns out that my own blood wasn’t enough of a lubricant to assist me down the narrow chimney, but both myself and gravity wanted me at the bottom. Not graceful, but I made it.

Sweeping aside the linked iron rings that kept large sparks in the fireplace, I discovered...

No, it was sad.

I’d been imaging a larder, packed at the seams and with sausages dangling from the ceiling.

Oh, there were barrels of water and bottles of … I suppose it was grog, perhaps swill. It wasn’t beer, which is what the label said. <2 >

There were shelves, filled with pasta and nuts and more pasta and raw grain and dried fruits and yes, even more pasta. I started with three of the water barrels, and then loaded up my inventory with shelves of dried goods. Remember when I’d laughed about being able to pack up a small campsite?

System inventories don’t stack things as densely as you can in physical space. I won’t even pretend to understand how it works. I just know that it does. I could have even packed away more food, if I didn’t care about the guards starving the miners to death.

I flagged the skin first for rapid healing, and then pushed it further as my multiple stomachs went to work. After about an hour, the bleeding finally stopped.

The locks, again, were easier opened from the inside.

I emerged into the open air, closed the door behind me. There were no guards in sight, so I made my way toward the south wall.

I was about halfway there when the alarms began to sound, horns blaring three times. The guards, in various kinds of disarray, made their way... to the east wall.

“Spirits of the night, spirits of darkness, I am Rhishisikk, Shaman. I ask of you the loan of your vision, let me see through shadows as you do. Dark Vision.”

No, they were clearly headed the wrong way. I actually took three steps that way to see what was going on before I stopped myself. I had no weapons more powerful than a rock. I had no armor. My clothes, such as they were, were hastily stitched together sacks.

It was time to GO. I had food, water, and little else.

And WHAT was wrong with my tear glands, that I was crying about that?

No. I had to go. If I died here, how would I keep exploring?

So I spun south, and down, and got a face-full of sand. What the hell?

[Anemia. A condition caused by loss of blood. Anemia causes...]

<Dismiss. Just Dismiss.>

And I’d been ready to sneak into a formation of armed soldiers. Wait, those noises I knew. I’d been ready to sneak into a battle.

I scratched the skin where a flexible new scale was starting to poke its way through. There were a lot of those; what I needed most was time. Under Shroud, I approached the southern gate. The noises had stopped by the time I reached it.

The guards... where were the guards?

The gate was wide open.

I crouched in the shadow of a boulder, listening to the silence. Then to a tittering giggle, then another. And then, like a wave of tan and brown and black, the Hyenadae proceeded inside. Five, ten, fifteen...

Over a hundred of them, spears to the front, and archers in the back. They set off north, toward the buildings, not toward the wall. All save six, who took up guard positions at the gate.

The new guards began distributing pieces of the old, and if they saw me go up and over the wall, not one of them cared enough to call out for me to stop. None sent an arrow into my back, the scales still to soft to serve as an armor rating.

Once I thought it was safe, I began sprinting (picking myself up as needed) into the featureless desert. When the sky began changing colors, only then did I stop in a dry riverbed. Two wooden boxes served as a bed, and a loose bedsheet on two tasty-looking poles served to mute the sun.

It was enough; even the sun couldn’t keep me awake.

Food, water, clothing, shelter.

And I had a rock, just in case.

I was free, and could...

[Divine Quest Received! Avenge yourself on your tormentors! You must...]

I shouted things no priest of vengeance should.

<1 > Actually, don’t do any kind of heavy work without your skin; when I have to, I can deal with that level of pain and bleeding. Unless I’m reading this for some nostalgia or amnesia or other reason, you the reader should never do this.

<2 > When I was rebuilding my intestinal tract, I did spring for that human digestive thing that lets you get an extra nutrition out of any alcohol that provides one or more nutrition.