Chapter 2: Chapter 2. Between a stink and a soft place

The other reason I mentioned religion, is because even if my brain was wired wrong, I still couldn’t conceive of my own non-existence. I was me. Whatever it was that made me ‘me’, was now ensconced in a body that didn’t match my own. It had a few muscles, but either the alien in question couldn’t grow them as large as I had, and it also appeared to have a bit of a pot belly. I didn’t know if that was due to nature or indolence, but I was used to looking down and seeing a smooth expanse to my legs.

Look, I know I will die. It’s a given. But everything just...stopping felt kind of stupid to me. If there was nothing left when you died, why bother doing anything? Why bother caring about people, or caring about anything other than yourself? Why even bother with that, or having a family? Why not spend your life killing people and taking their shit instead of working and struggling if it’s all going to be meaningless when you die? Especially if you could get away with it, and I bet I could.

I didn’t want to kill people. I like to think of myself as a good person, whatever that means. Whatever it was that was ‘me’ had moved into something else. Had I died? The last thing I remember was trying to strap down the boom on board my ship while a hurricane raged off the coast of Hawaii. I remembered getting knocked into the ocean by a swinging crane, going into the zone, and watching the surface of the ocean loom towards me. There was a darkness, a sort of hole in the water, and then a body appeared… much like my own, clad in engineer’s coveralls, floating facedown in the ocean right next to the hole.

I hit the hole, or the water, or whatever, and then my foot started burning.

Maybe I had an out-of-body experience and was looking down on my own body. Maybe I had been rescued by aliens and my brain was stuffed into this blue thing?

I had read a lot of books. Every moment I should have been listening to a teacher, and on control watch in the Navy, I had spent with my nose stuffed into a book or exercising. I had read everything. Romance, military fiction, science fiction, fantasy, horror, political thrillers, historicals, classics, softcore… You name it, and I read it.

There were lots of books, especially translations of Asian manga, where the protagonist wound up in a different world. Sometimes, in a foreign body. Usually, that body was way better than their own, not a potbellied blue sleestax with an oversize head.

It also tended to be accompanied by some kind of fanfare. A tutorial, some god meeting them and explaining what was going on, being a chosen one, falling asleep in a magical cave filled with mystical vapors, or something like that.

Well, it looked like if I was chosen, I was chosen to get shit on, literally, right where shit is chosen to flow, a sewer.

There were no magical spells burning in my mind waiting to be used. No ancient weapons to be grasped. I held up my hand, palm towards the slime-thing slowly creeping closer, and yelled, “Ryooken!”

It came out more like “theeoothed”. My tongue and mouth didn’t want to shape the words correctly, and my voice was pitched much higher and raspier than usual. Ick. Nope, no magical ball of lightning or power. I tried “Fireball” which came out as ‘Firefall’ and again, nothing.

It was like being stuck in one of those first-person shooters, without a user interface. Castle Shitenstein. Duke Crap’em. Quack II. I snorted, which came out just fine. Maybe I’d stumble across a nail gun or rocket launcher hovering in midair, or hopefully a medical kit.

The blob thing was slowly oozing over the bodies, dissolving as it went, and getting larger, like something out of a nightmare slowly approaching.

I scooted back farther using my hands, and my tail swished a little. My foot was wrecked, but I was going to have to get to my feet.

The tunnel I was in was large for a sewer, nearly three times my height. It was ancient, constructed of fitted stones, and it looked like there was a path about my height on my side, where I was laying, No light fixtures, junction boxes, or any of the cool stuff I had seen in movies in the giant tunnels under big cities like New York, which I doubted actually existed. It was a square stone pipe, with a stream washing down one side that was twice as wide as I was tall, and with the slime on the side ahead of me, there was only one way to go.

I put my arms against the wall and slowly heaved myself to my… foot. Trying to put weight on the other one was agonizing, and little bits of dirt and detritus stuck to the raw flesh. It hurt less than it had a few minutes ago, but still ached horribly.

I when I stood on one foot, I felt top-heavy, but when my tail stuck out behind me, it felt balanced somehow. Whatever these creatures were, they probably ran quickly with their tails straight out behind them. I had a strange amount of control over the tail. I could swish it, but not curl it like a monkey, so it clearly wasn’t meant for gripping things, probably just for balance.

I managed to put a little weight on my foot by pointing my toes downward and resting on the less-damage claws. It hurt, but not nearly as bad as trying to put my full foot down. The tail actually helped my balance a good deal, and I turned, slowly limping away from the creature. Even injured, I seemed to be a lot faster than it was, and I was pretty sure it would be just as happy to dissolve a living creature as it was to consume the corpses… the acid burns on my foot confirmed it.

I hobbled my way down the path, my eyes open in case another acid blob appeared. It was like one of those things out of a Japanese fantasy game, except no battle screen appeared. “Fof. Fof the Floff.” I said and sighed. Hard consonants were not going easily, not with my mouth the way it was, so I kept practicing. If there was one thing I was good at, it was practicing sounding normal. “Fopf. Pfopf. Fbobf. Thbobth. Boff. Bob. Bob the flob.”

Okay, it was going to take some work. Talking to myself was weird, but I was not sure I wanted to talk to anyone else right now. Unless that someone else happened to be a helpful angel explaining to me I was chosen to bring the world into harmony and then I’d go home rich and happy with a harem of beautiful girls and all the tacos and coffee I could eat or drink.

Right. I am a taco fiend. My mother made sure I was a good cook, and I could make a decent meal under most conditions, but when I joined the Navy I was stationed in San Diego and had my first real Mexican food. I was hooked, I could devour street tacos with a little Pico de Gallo or Fajitas by the basket load. Now I judged every Mexican restaurant by its tacos and fajitas. If it didn’t meet my exacting standards, I would never come back.

Oh, and I stopped using the term ‘taco fiend’ after I realized it evoked snorts and laughter from my shipmates. Apparently, it’s sexual innuendo, but I knew what I meant.

Tortillas were easy. Flour, water, salt, and oil. Nothing else. And a taco was just some meat that could be prepared in various ways and a lot of seasonings. If you screwed up a taco, there was something very wrong with your food. The pico de gallo was a bit more challenging, but there were a million ways to make it that mostly just involved tomatoes or tomatillos, cilantro, lime juice, and onions. In an emergency, you could substitute or even just use onions and cilantro or only onions, but screwing it up took real talent.

I was hungry. Thinking about tacos didn’t make me salivate, but that was probably because I was thirsty, too. I had to be to think about food while I was running very slowly for my life.

The thing didn’t follow me, I guess it was still content with its meal, and I started slowly scooting down the tunnel. Thump-scritch, thump-scritch. I tried to be quieter, to avoid anything else, but with my injured foot that was nearly impossible, and to my ears, every light footstep and tap from my claws might have been a drum solo. Even my own breath and heartbeat, racing way faster than I was used to, was like a drumline solo.

I tried to calm down, slowing my breathing, but my heart rate was still much faster than normal for me, although it might have been nice and steady for the form I was inhabiting, and my breathing slowed and deepened. I could breathe much more deeply than I was used to, and I guess this form had larger lungs, even though it brought more of the disgusting odors my way.

“Okthay. Eshape, fyn chlean warrer, fyn weaphon or shool, fyn footh. In thath orther.” I state out loud in a low voice. Whispering would be bad. Whispers with my weird word-shaping problems might as well be hisses and would carry even over the sound of the water dripping.

Escape. Find clean water. Find a weapon or a tool of some sort. Find food. In that order. I was buck naked, I guess, and on checking realized that I was indeed a male, albeit a lot less of one than I was used to. That was good since some stories featured the protagonist arriving in a body of indeterminate or opposite gender.

If I were in my normal form, I might be able to tell from the gravity or something if this was Earth or someplace else, but here felt natural. I wasn’t going to try jumping with my injured foot, but I hope I had an advantage like John Carter of Mars or something, or my life was going to be very short and unpleasant.

Our captain had demanded that Coxwains, rescue swimmers, and emergency medical personnel attend survival training with the Marines, which was a breeze, but that meant I got to do it three times. The priorities were clear. A human could survive without water for about three days before they started dying or trying to drink their own blood or any contaminated source found. You could survive two weeks easily without food. Tools were needed for a lot of the latter, a weapon would help. This form’s claws might be able to qualify as weapons, or my teeth, elbows, knees, or even tail, but I doubted very much they could be used to start a fire or fashion a makeshift blanket.

Shelter might not be a problem, except as protection from the slime. The temperature was cool but comfortable, I wasn’t sleepy or exhausted, and my uninjured foot was suffering no more problems from walking on the dirt and stone than if I’d been wearing hiking boots.

Occasionally there were piles of detritus fetched up against the edges of the trough where the water flowed. For the most part, they were things I wouldn’t want to touch without a hazmat suit and a face mask. I was on the lookout for stuff that I could use as a tool, though, and I wish I’d had time to grab one of the bones from the corpse pile, but I had no idea how quickly the slime could react, or even if it would react if I ganked one of the pieces of its dining table.

Yeah, it was a little morbid, but I’d rather have a thigh bone as a club than nothing at all.

None of the bodies had been clothed, so either they’d been stripped before they were tossed in the hole, or they didn’t generally wear clothes. Frankly, I would be a lot more comfortable with a pair of pants, hopefully with a hole at the back for my new tail.

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Weirdly, one of the piles had a weird sort of glimmer to it as I walked by. Not a glimmer, a glow, but the glow didn’t seem to light anything, more like a hazy outline.

I carefully started picking through the pile, which was less disgusting than most of them, and when I touched an object the weird half-glow stopped. Dragging it out of the wreckage of splintered, rotting wood, shreds of some kind of fabric that was disintegrating, and a bone, I finally managed to see what it was.

It was a knife! Thank you for this bounty. I don’t know why it was glowing, or why it stopped, but I was not going to argue with my good fortune. It was shaped a lot like a Carving knife, one-sided. The blade was badly dinged, with chunks taken out, and the tip was clearly broken off, with the sheared-off end curved slightly to show how it had broken.

It was made out of some dull silvery-orange material. Not red enough to be copper, but possibly bronze or, more likely, cupronickel. The blade was a bit too thin for bronze to hold up well, although based on the nicks and broken tip, it hadn’t held up that well at all.

The knife was much larger than you would expect for a carving knife, and fairly heavy as well. The darned thing was longer than my forearm, and wider than it, as well. If it was a weapon, it would be a poor choice, but for me, it was like finding a .44 magnum compared to what I had before.

The moment I realized what it was, something… weird happened in my skull. When I zone, it’s like I take a step back from whatever I am doing or is being done to me, and it felt like, in that ‘step back’ place, there was something trying to catch my attention.

I wasn’t normally able to zone without some kind of stress to trigger it, but the thing, whatever it was, was not actually visible. It was like I was thinking about it strongly, but without any effort or input on my part. I tried to concentrate on it, but it was like this tingly thing you get at the edges of your vision when you got up too fast or were getting a migraine. Alan Dean Foster had called them ‘Gneeches’ in his spellsinger books, but like those tingles, the harder I concentrated trying to see it, the harder it avoided my look.

Finally, I just relaxed a little and tried to clear my thoughts and mind, like my trainer had said when you are trying to meditate. After a few moments, it felt just a little bit like going into the zone, and I got a thought in my mind’s eye, not my real eyes.

984179148270980129842109840-219083209832

109505471598631-2397847328168031207401238647`-

901856809198732091827350873209823704387102398606342980728

A second thing appeared below the first.

09586509873403987408908956659-58-=518-9∞

Weird. It was like something alien was inside my head, in my thoughts. I didn’t recognize the script, but the infinity symbol implied some kind of pause. Unless those symbols were different.

Maybe this was whatever language the local lizards spoke? The idea that it was inside my head was… disturbing. It was very artificial, did the locals, and I was just spitballing here, communicate telepathically, like texting? Either my brain was transplanted and it included some kind of wetware to get this, or I was inhabiting a new brain with my new body, and this was natural to it.

If it was a telepathic message, what did it say? “Are you okay”? “Do you need assistance?” or more sinisterly, “Why are you stealing my knife?” or, “I thought I killed you. Why are you still alive?”

I didn’t understand it, and dwelling on it wasn’t going to change anything. I didn’t know the script or the language, so puzzling it out would require a bunch of time I might not have. If it was in English, I could use acrostics, but if it was in an alien language, I had literally zero chance of figuring it out without some kind of relation key.

It did seem to have periods and question marks, so maybe I could use that as the beginning of a key.

Maybe… I peered closely at the knife again, willing it to give up its secrets. It glowed again briefly, and then a message appeared in zone space.

09857110578

5417895236

091856984237510984s

015789846`

Maybe that word meant ‘crappy oversized knife’?

But what was with the glow? It wasn’t real. When it flashed at me, I realized it was not in my vision, it was in the same place where the messages had appeared, almost like an overlay, but not in my normal vision.

Now I had a new question. Was I even in the real world? I had seen a movie once where the guy woke up in a virtual world after a Long Coma. Was this all computer-generated?

Not in my world, it wasn’t. No weird lag spikes, no pixelation or breakdown. The pain in my foot was as real as could be imagined, as was the feel of my body, my hunger, and my thirst. It was possible my brain was plugged into some hyper-advanced computer somewhere playing a game of ‘Let’s see what happens when we put a human mind into an alien lizard-thing!’ inside of a jar somewhere.

Again, that did not actually make much of a difference to me. Real or not, I was thirsty, hungry, and in pain. Better to treat it like it was real rather than assuming I was somehow magically immune to whatever was really going on. Pascal’s wager in a different venue. Treat it like it was real, or assume it’s all fake and get eaten, dissolved, or whatever because it turned out real. Treating it like it was real would hurt and cost me labor if I was wrong, but treating it like it was fake could potentially kill me if I was wrong.

To me, it was real, and I was not going to get all tangled up in EST-like ruminations on what is real versus what your brain perceives as reality. Stuff like that is for private thinking time, not 'running for your life' time.

Apparently, looking hard for anything that could help me survive made something happen that made broken knives seem to be surrounded by an ambient glow effect. I didn’t know how much farther it would reach, or what it would highlight, but walking out of here with a collection of crappy tools would at least mean walking out of here.

Weirdly, my foot hurt considerably less now. It had been about an hour since I started moving, and I looked down and noticed that there was a fine layer of skin where it had been burned off. Neat! Fast healing! I gingerly put some weight on my foot, and it still hurt, but hopefully, in a few hours, I should be able to walk on it normally… or as normal as this body got.

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