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Chapter 29

Alone

I woke, worried that Nastyman had taken Kismet; then I remembered that she just didn’t sleep here anymore.

Breakfast was supposed to taste like nothing, or like ashes, but honestly, I remember that other than the onion bits being larger than I liked, it was actually pretty good.

Immediately after breakfast, I set about gathering water to wash my bedsheets in. It was a longer process with just me taking pail after pail of water from the well, but I’d just have to get used to that.

After hanging the sheets up to dry, I went about in search of a store that needed medical herbs that I had gathered while out on the spider hunt. They were more common than the graveyard herbs, but I swapped them out for others and still had a copper and two tin in profit.

.....

Well, I was famished, so I paid a tin for a bowl of vegetables and grains with a hank of salt pork on top.

When I got back to the Guild, I saw that my blanket, still wet, had fallen from the drying lines. I also noticed the chair I usually used to reach the lines had been taken elsewhere.

I climbed a wall and got the one end fairly even. As I proceeded from the wall, I yanked the sheet even. Eventually, I was at the far corner of the sheet.

Okay, that was taken care of. I went back to my room.

Or rather, what used to be my room. Helados and the Hayseed brothers were setting up there.

Taking care to stay away from Helados, I gathered Black Snake’s box. The rest of my possessions had vanished, as if by magic.

Maybe they were in my new room?

Duenas was our night guard, Labrys and Oxom our day guards. “Labrys, do you know which room I’ve been moved to?”

“How should I know? Do I look like your keeper?”

Well, okay. There were other ways of finding out. I set about to find one, and almost collided with Cosimo.

“The cat-girl! Where is she?”

“Probably with Hector.”

“Where is Hector?”

“I don’t know. Master Cosimo, do you know where my room is?”

“Ugh! Find it yourself, I’m busy.”

I went to Tangars, figuring if I could find my stuff, I could find my bed.

“I don’t have your things. Far as I know they’re taken to basement room 4.”

“The reject room?”

“Call it what you will, that’s your new bunk.”

The reject room was just what it sounded like – a room where the rejects went. Those who had done things like steal from their employers.

So I went to check on my blankets. They had fallen off the drying rope again.

Then I smelled the urine. This was deliberate, and vicious, and –

And I had just enough time to gather the water, wash the sheets, and get them downstairs before the room was locked from the outside to keep the rejects from escaping.

As I mentioned, there were still hairs from Kismet, even after the cleaning was complete.

#

As with goblins, there was an initiation ritual. My stuff was all broken; I stored Black Snake’s box into my inventory.

Black Snake popped right out; I don’t imagine that was a comfortable experience for either of us. She began circling my left wrist, and I began channeling Shadow mana to her. She was up to a point a day, maybe some immeasurable fraction over.

My bed had no mattress; I would learn later that the Rejects had a reputation for destroying them.

I sifted through my shattered belongings, ignoring the smirks from my seven room-mates. I wanted to just slash and bite and – and – something. Something painful.

I wouldn’t have come up with skinning alive on my own.

Nythia was training to be a drover; she’d also hit her first growth spurt early. She wasn’t as strong as she’d become as an adult, but trying to subdue oxen by pulling on their harnesses had granted her enough Strength to dominate the room.

I was still trying to make my bed when she just walked up behind me and pulled me onto my back.

“Look who’s new in the room, boys.” Three of the boys were already around me and chuckling.

The one to my left stood on my wrist as I tried to rise. The one on the opposite side pulled and kicked until he had immobilized that arm, pinning my chest to the floor.

I sent a message to Black Snake. “Go get Duenas.” My fear must have leaked through, because instead she just hid under the bed.

“I think you’ve enjoyed looking down on us.” She stepped closer.

The third positioned himself on my back, knees to either side of my head.

“Now, we’re all going to look down on you. I think we’ll start things off right. Lick my foot, and maybe that’s all that happens to you tonight.”

Pumas, I tried to remind myself. Show no weakness. So much harder when you’re pinned to the floor.

“Lick my foot, and get between the toes.”

“I don’t think that’s happening tonight.”

She pulled something from her inventory, and held my knife down near my face.

“Oh, I think it’s happening tonight. I heard your skin grows back. We’re going to skin you every night until you lick my foot. And then? Because you made this difficult for us, we’re going to find other ways to make you pay.”

“You’re bluffing. You know the punishment coming if you do this.”

She stuck the point of the knife between two scales at the tip of my nose. “Last chance.” She actually sounded happy about it.

I snorted at her.

[Extreme Vanity detected. 2 Vanity XP earned. After vanity resistance, 1 XP awarded. After divisor, 1XP has been awarded.]

“Okay, be that way. Hold him steady. You other three, watch and remember.”

Everyone thinks they are brave until the pain starts. When I finally broke, I was in such severe pain, I couldn’t even remember what I had to do to end it.

I’d like to say that Duenas heard my screams and stopped it, but it wasn’t until the door was unlocked in the morning that they found me, skinned to the shoulders, both eyelids torn off, passed out under my bed.

#

I wasn’t even awake when I was aware of Black Snake, hiding beneath me on the cold hay. She was constantly sharing her HUNGER, so I fed her.

I wasn’t in the hospital, that was above ground. My system informed me I had:

[Blood loss, level 2.

In Shock, level 3.

Cut open; all bleeding conditions do double damage.

Scalped: permanent serious injury

No lips: permanent serious injury

No eyelids: permanent serious injury

No eyes: permanent serious injury

Punctured eardrums: permanent serious injury

No tongue: permanent serious injury

Vocal cords severed: permanent serious injury]

Among others. Nerve damage, severed tendons, muscles sliced clean through. It was all there, in clinical precise language.

[Unless Protean Shapeshift Healing is employed, permanent injuries will affect your abilities to shapeshift.]

Wait – Protean Shapeshift Healing? I found it, under my maternal Bloodline, something my system hadn’t even bothered telling me existed. Activating it required five Development Points, and a minimum of 1000 biomass, more than double what I was capable of storing.

But toggling it was enabled.

Literally, it was like having the option to cast a healing spell, using yourself as the component to be consumed. How badly did I need to be whole again?

I toggled the power, and began moving the time slider.

[Biomass storage exceeded; Biomass will be pulled from Maternal Biomass Loan Reserve.]

Maternal Biomass Loan Reserve? What was that?

[Maternal Biomass Loan Reserve: 687/2500 used, 7 biomass per day interest (1%). In times of serious injury, the limits of this reserve double to 5000 biomass points.]

.....

Well THAT explained a lot, like where my biomass had been vanishing to. The Reserve felt like a tunnel, and I could feel something, well, titanic on the other side. She was big, she was cold, she didn’t even know that I in particular existed. But when I was born, or laid, or however you want to describe it, she had set into our systems this emergency fund.

Amphibian lungs? 1100 biomass to develop in the speed it did. I’d be dead if not for my System. There were other accountings there, both my transformations and some evolutions my System mandated without my okay.

In the end, I set the healing for a month at a cost of 1815 biomass points, over a hundred meals gone with a single action. It was the lowest cost that guaranteed healing all of my serious injuries.

And I sat down to consider how much I wanted to trust availability of food versus those evolutions that would help me survive. Well, mentally sat down inside my Lucid Dream.

It took me a good deal of thought, and in the end I had to make some hasty decisions due to my Dream mana pool running out.

But when I rose again, I would possess a power ... well, okay, I’d be roughly where Eihtfuhr and Red Hare had wanted me, just with 4602 biomass debt, and a burning need to consume food. Oh, and biomass couldn’t go directly toward improving one’s Lore statistic.

But – vengeance would be mine.

#

I was asleep when they moved me from the basement into the infirmary proper.

Reynald decided that medicines and magic were wasted on me, since I would just heal normally. I pronounced a curse of eternal itching on him, but found it impossible to spit without lips.

Initially, Sangru served me broth, which I devoured. He quickly moved to solid foods, and then just gave up and fed me kitchen scraps and kept a bale of hay near my bed.

All of it was biomass, and I practically inhaled it with wild abandon. Three stomach slots, fifteen minutes to digest a serving, was twelve servings per hour. My maximum stack size was six for normal foods, or twelve for grasses, such as hay.

I lacked vision and hearing, but scent told me of my visitors. Reynald at first, Cosimo every two or three days after that. Kismet visited, and I smelled Hector even though he rarely came inside the hospital room. Sometimes she would talk, but I couldn’t understand her words at first.

In fact, I spent most of those initial two weeks in severe pain. Some days, my meters didn’t recharge. I think that knowing I was going to recover helped reduce the loss of sanity and serenity.

That also included my mana pools. As the priestess predicted, Black Snake rapidly became desperate for mana, and tried to siphon directly from me. She wasn’t able to; I rapidly realized she didn’t understand how to tap anything for mana.

I tried teaching her the Tap Night ritual, only to be informed her Insight wasn’t high enough.

It cost ten development points, about two thirds of the development points I had left, to overcome that hurdle. But she was able to feed herself after that, and did so with wild gluttonous abandon.

And I just lay there, sometimes insensate, sometimes writhing and screaming, and sometimes just enduring the pain to chew and swallow food. I didn’t even have the energy to tell my molars to just go away.

My System told me as my biomass debt started to go down.

[Maternal Biomass Loan Reserve: 4339/2500 used, 44 biomass per day interest (1%).]

The total went down pretty quickly, as long as I did nothing but eat and digest all day. Once I had to do things? With my meters as low as they were, that was stress to put off until later.

Incidentally, thanks Mom, for setting this up. I know it couldn’t have been easy, and must have cost you quite a bundle.

On the fifteenth evening, I could hear. Not clearly, not yet. But more than nothing. I fell asleep with the surety that I could finally at least listen to my visitors.

I wasn’t expecting my next guests, but I really should have been.

#