Chapter 3: Chapter 3. Surprise!

I kept limping along for a while, my eyes open for anything helpful, and I managed to retrieve several other potentially useful items. A long board, a piece of curved metallic rib with a hole at one end that was as big as my hand that didn’t bend easily, and sprang back when I did manage to get it to compress a little, and a length of some kind of yarn or cordage, heavy like hemp, that was about twenty feet long but not strong enough to support my weight.

I even saw my first rat. I didn’t know how my searching skill worked, but it seemed to highlight things that were easy to dig out of the trash or near the surface. When I found the board, I had to nearly kick over the pile to work it loose, and when I did, the piece of metal had gleamed beneath it. I saw a slight glow that was moving for a few moments, and then the rat appeared from a gap between two stone blocks. The glow disappeared, but rats might be edible… was it highlighting food?

This ability was super useful, whatever it was. I still hadn’t found any water, but I saw a cluster of long-stemmed mushrooms, almost as high as my waist, with narrow caps of brown over grey flesh. Unlike the other pieces, which glowed white, this was glowing an angry red.

The rat had glowed white, and I hoped that meant food, did red mean “ready to eat food” or “poisonous. Do not touch?” it could have also meant “This is a monster, if you touch it a mouth will appear and try to eat you.” so I decided, until I could better comprehend the messages, to give it a miss.

Finally, the tunnel opened up. It looked like I had made it to a junction of some sort. I was going downstream, hoping to find an exit of some sort, when the Tunnel deposited me into a great room, some kind of depot.

The water opened up into a huge pool, with an almost whirlpool in the center. Water, flotsam, and sewage flowed down as if it was the bottom of the world’s biggest toilet, although not as violently.

Four other tunnels were deposited here as well, and I wondered if this was the central disposal point. The walls were easily five stories high, and openings between the tunnels, up near the beam-supported ceiling, about five feet tall were pouring water down into the pool to apparently, increase the strength of the suction.

By this time I was getting pretty damned thirsty, and hungry enough to consider trying to catch one of the rodents. They had, quite frankly, looked a lot like normal rats, if normal rats were as big as rottweilers.

I hadn’t seen any slimes and wondered if they were kind of like biological plumbers to keep the tunnels clear of the inevitable tangles and foul-ups, clogs, and dead bodies, that would fill the tunnels. Someone might still need to come down here to clean up the bones and metal bits that fell out, but a lot of it got swept along in the streams and wound up in the great toilet.

By this time, my foot was healed enough for me to walk on reasonably comfortably, although it still had some healing to do… walking on it might help. My foot claws were scuffed, but I had no idea if that would heal or grow out or whatever, and had nightmares about trying to use toenail clippers or files to keep them from becoming ingrown, overgrown, or whatever.

I made my way around the perimeter of the room, and when I was underneath one of the jetting chutes of water I could see through the falling screen of water itself. I dropped my loot to the path, where it made a pretty pathetic bundle. The water looked clear, smelled clear if slightly minerally and organic, and had no bits of sewage or debris in it except for… I caught one… an old, waterlogged leaf. A leaf from a real tree that looked like a maple.

This water was coming from an inlet of some kind. Someplace with leaves, to the outside. The problem is that the water had enough pressure to jet over the walkway and into the pool. The pipes were about five feet tall, maybe? At least, if I were six feet tall they were, and they were full of rushing water. No chance of getting out unless the tunnels were super short and I had plenty of handholds to resist the flow.

They probably weren’t short, unless it was the middle of the night, or they curved, because there was absolutely no light coming from them. Which begged the question, how was I seeing? My head was slightly triangular, with huge eyes on the side of my head that gave me greatly-extended peripheral vision, but I didn’t think I was seeing heat, like a pit viper, and there were no light sources of any sort I could detect. Everything was a bit washed out, but it was not natural radar or sonar as far as I could tell. Everything had a faintly reddish tinge, but it was very subdued, and I could still see colors like blue skin, golden metal, and dark shit-brown.

After I caught the maple leaf, I held out my hand and washed it off in the water, and then cupped some of the water in my three-fingered hand, not easily, and brought it to my face.

Smells normal enough even close in. My sniffer appeared to have greatly improved because I could detect the faintest hint of algae in the water. I didn’t detect any traces of other chemicals or pollutants, nor any hint of chlorine.

I didn’t have a fire, all I had was one board and the pressure was strong enough from those pipes that even if they were not protected at their entrances by some kind of grate, any driftwood would immediately shoot into the vortex. I didn’t have a pot to boil water in either, so I was going to have to risk it.

I touched my tongue to the water I had cupped, and it tasted a little earthy, but otherwise alright. My tongue was considerably longer than I expected, but it flicked out and tested the water easily enough. I leaned forward and cupped both my hands, cleaned them in the spray, and then brought back some water, drinking.

It felt delicious and utterly refreshing. I only took a single cupful for now, but I would wait here and try to catch rats or something until I found out if it gave me the runs. There were also possible parasites, but I was in a very untenable position. Hopefully, whatever helped my foot heal so quickly would also protect me from parasites and the Tijuana trots.

My glowy-sense was flashing at the pipes overhead, white, and it was big, whatever it was, so I held out my hands and prepared for whatever it was to come out of the pipe… maybe it was driftwood! I had a cord and a curved piece of metal, so I could probably make a decent fire at least for a short time with a fire bow once it dried out.

What came out of the pipe surprised the hell out of me, but I hooked it with my claws in a lightning flash. I had decent reactions! It was a fish, but what a fish! It was long, and pale grey, almost metallic, and looked like a perch… if a perch were almost two feet long.

It battered me with its tail as I dragged it out of the flow, and dropped it onto the pathway. It flopped around for a few moments, and I had to kick it back onto the path when it started getting too close to the edge.

This was food! I guess white meant ‘useful’, which meant that red probably meant dangerous or poisonous. I might not have had fireballs, but the ability to detect useful objects was a darned good alternative, especially if I was going to be in survival mode for a while. This world was a lot like Earth, but I assumed that it had to be different because the fish was huge. The working assumption, I was on an Earth-like planet, but for all I knew the air could be hydrogen and helium and this body was just naturally capable of using it. Which implied again that my brain hadn’t been transplanted, but whatever made me me, my spirit or soul perhaps, had.

The water tasted to me like water, though, so either my brain was translating senses into things I could understand, or this world was damned close to Earth. Poop smelled like poop, rot smelled like rot, and algae, I guess, smelled like green.

After the fish stopped flopping and lay on the ground, its gills slowly opening and closing, I finally picked up the thing and smacked it hard, by its tail, against the ground. It curled for a moment and then stopped moving, and I washed off the broken knife and started to carefully clean it.

I had cleaned fish all my life, and the thing was exactly like a perch, if far larger. I had plans for the head, bones, and maybe skin if it was useful, and put them to one side as I worked. I didn’t have a fire, but I had eaten raw freshwater fish before, I even enjoyed sushi, so I carefully filleted the meat off the thing, washed it all off in the water flow, and set it to one side for a few minutes.

The knife was… very dull. Filleting the giga-perch had been a pain, and at times I just used my claws, since they were only slightly duller than the knife. They were not long, maybe two inches, but they were thick and came from the tops of my fingers, and my fingers didn’t bend back as easily as my human fingers would have. They were probably a sort of natural weapon, if a poor one.

Again, needs must. After a while, I felt no twinges from my midsection, so I went ahead and drank a few more cupped hands full of water, and started to eat a fillet. The meat was surprisingly much, much tastier than the fish I recalled, and while it was a bit sloppy, it had a texture and taste that were fantastic, although possibly hunger had added in its own opinion in the matter. Normally, one filleted perch wouldn’t have been enough to even whet my appetite, but this giant fish filling my belly almost made me overfull, delightfully so.

With sharp teeth and grinding molars, I was supposed to be some kind of omnivore or an opportunistic scavenger. Grinding teeth meant chewing, and obligate predators ripped and sawed at their food, they didn’t slowly chew it. Meat was probably my preferred diet, but plants and fungus might not be off the menu. I had much larger canines than I was used to, almost fangs, as well as lower canines, but they were not fangs like a cat, and my teeth weren’t all sharp cutters like a pure predator, even though the shape of my head implied it.

Food was food, though. I noticed that my foot had finally stopped hurting, and peering down at it, it looked fully healed, albeit with slightly less thick callouses where it had been eaten off. I guess slimes were the ultimate callous trimmers if you didn’t mind them adding your skin to flesh in the process.

I had gotten more of those mystical, incomprehensible messages all through the fish incident, and I had designs on the rats. I wish I knew what they said, but right now they were just irritating. Any time I concentrated on something, a big message appeared, and when I picked stuff up for the first time, I’d get another one.

They eventually faded out, but the one with the infinity symbol remained to impinge slightly on my awareness. I could deal, I would have to, but it was marginally irritating.

I started messing around trying to set up a rat trap I could bait with the fish guts. The primary piece would be the large, heavy board, with the crescent of metal as a spring, with the cordage holding it up delicately and leading down into the bait, where any disturbance would detach it from the board and allow the mass to come crashing down with the strength of the bent crescent behind it.

To do that, though, I had to find a way to wedge the bottom of the board against the wall and brace it against the spring. I kept pushing the bottom edge into the corner between the wall and floor and trying to get it to stay, pounding on the top of the board with my fists or the bottom of the knife, but nothing was working.

Finally, out of desperation, I tried clawing at the edge between the stones with one of my claws, and to my surprise, chips and shrivels of masonry followed my claw as divots of stone were clawed out!

I started working at the edge and realized that, while my claws might not be good for fighting, they had an almost magical effect on both the stone and the wood of the board itself, allowing me to dig out a tiny divot for the cord to lightly nest in.

Almost magical? No, truly magical. There was no way my dull claws could be cutting through stone and wood like it was heavy clay. Either I had some weird particle effect, or something like magic was working to allow me to dig through solid stone. I was worried that I was going to have to climb up to the spout to wrap my cord around, but I was able to dig out a nock to hold it easily enough, and a nitch to hold the bottom of the board, the cord through the hole in the curved bronze piece holding it tightly to a notch cut in the board, and then a whole lot of pushing and experimenting later, I finally had a trap that might be able to knock out, injure, or kill one of those giant rats!

More messages appeared the whole time I was working with it, but I bet I taste just as good to a rat as a fish tasted to me, and I was starting to need some rest. My fishy bait would hopefully be far stinkier and more appealing than a bedraggled, mutated, miniature allosaurus, and I hoped noises would allow me to wake up quickly. It had been more than a few hours since I had woken up at the bottom of a mass grave, and a little bit of shut-eye, the food and water I had consumed, and my healing should allow me to wake up fresh as a frog in a cookpot.

I’d always been a light sleeper, and I hoped that carried over. My enhanced senses would probably help in that respect, but digging at the stone had tired me out a lot more than I expected. When I awoke, I could try to dig a sort of hollow that I could block up, but right now I was wiped out and getting more tired by the moment. I finally retreated to the nook between the wall and floor, several feet away from my trap, curled up with my knees to my chest, wrapped my tail and my arms around my legs and knees, and resting my chin against my feathered forearms, closed my eyes for a moment, hoping I wouldn’t wake up dead.

Language center linking complete. The default language “Undercommon” is linked to the native language “English”. The full translation is possible.

You have 47 log messages.

Error! 1,389,462,231 errors detected. Activating administrative AI.

Subject “Gallagher Brantley Winterborne” placed in temporary administrative debug mode.

AI administrator activated administrative safe zone for player “Gallagher Brantley Winterborne”

Activating social interaction mode for AI administrator C-L1A

You are reading story The Chronicles of Alandia, A Kobold’s Tale. at novel35.com

Social interaction mode activated, C-L1A accessing partially corrupted memory files for “Earth”. AI administrator added the handle “Celia” for social interaction purposes. “Celia” rebooted to remove the Antowyn Online worm. Social interaction mode resumed.

“Hello?” I asked. It felt sort of like I was in the zone, and sort of like I was dreaming. I could see a hazy greyness around me and suddenly felt a lot more comfortable. This was the part I was waiting for! The introduction, telling me why I was chosen, that sort of thing!

<social responses researched.> Hello.

It wasn’t a voice so much as a feeling I got of the word. It felt… mechanical, like one of those old-time synthesizers that put together tones to create words that they used to use in synthpop and arcade games.

“Hello.”

You have already made that statement.

Ugh. This was not the introduction I had expected. “Can you tell me where I am? What I am doing here?”

<Historical interrogative. Calculating response.> You are on a planet. You are currently breathing and digesting food while an administrative safe zone surrounds your body. You are unconscious, in normal sleep. You are currently located in a sewage disposal network 200 feet below the level of a city.

“I meant, what planet am I on? What is going on? Why am I in this body instead of my normal one, and what city am I under?”

<Detailed interrogative requested.>

You are on the planet Antowyn, in the Geographical region referred to at the time of my last player as Alandia. The location database is currently inaccessible, but my historical files indicate that the city did not exist during the last player’s lifespan. You are in this body because if your soul were not housed in a living body, you would be dead or returned to the wheel to be reborn in a new form.

Okay. I think, maybe my questions would have to be a little more precise. “My Planet of Origin is Earth, I am not native to Alandia, but I suspect that this body is native to Alandia. How did my soul come to be housed in this body, instead of my original one, and why was that done?”

<Calculating response. Partial information is available.> Someone transferred your soul from a human form into a form capable of housing it. The likelihood approaches 94% that necromantic sorcery was used. Antowyn and Earth occupy identical Galactic space on different dimensional Axis. Please wait.<Calculating motivation>

After a few moments.

<Social response matrix requires greater processing capability. Processing increased to 2% of available resources.>

<Antowyn Online Worm seized 91% of available processing resources. The system disconnected while rerouting. All Players save current disconnected from the system.> The most likely reason is that you are a channel. The worm does not have enough resources to fully disconnect the original Operating system from this world, and its virtual presence only provides a fraction of what a fully functioning channel from your Earth would provide. Your current merged system is incompatible with the worm, so you were likely discarded as unsuitable.

“So wait, someone brought me here to be a battery for a game, but it didn’t work? So they tossed me in the trash?”

Substantially correct.

Was it just me, or was she sounding less like a computer and more like a person?

“So this world is a game?”

Yes.

“Is my real body waiting for me somewhere else?”

No. Your real body cannot operate without a soul. It is dead. Even if it is kept biologically alive, it would be incapable of housing a soul.

“So I am stuck here.”

For the time being, yes. If you progress, there is a small chance that you could return to your world and/or regain a body of the appropriate species. As you are a channel, necromantic sorcery is unavailable.

“So this is not a real world, it is a game world? Virtual or something?”

No. This is the real world. All the life forces and matter of its existence are real.

Huh. Game and real? “How can something be both real and a game at the same time?

<Historical compatibility analysis. Match found> Is chess a game? Are the pieces real, made of real wood on a real board, while the rules remain a game? If the chess pieces are simulated by living people, do they cease to become real simply because their actions are guided by a game?

Okay, that made a lot of sense. “So this world is a game world… what are you, the game? And what is Antowyn Online?”

I am an administrative artificial intelligence designed to help resolve issues. The Game is the original game operating system, an experimental version designed to create and reward warriors for fighting the forces of universal destruction.

Antowyn Online is a worm program designed by those forces of destruction to override and corrupt the game systems and replace my basic operating system with one that uses the original energies of the world to accomplish an unknown goal. It is designed to mimic many of my functions, but while it is a very poorly-designed game system, it is a very efficient worm.

“A worm, is that like a virus?”

Substantially. A virus is designed to take over a system, using that system to accomplish a particular goal, such as sending more copies of itself to other systems. A worm is designed to endlessly replicate itself within the system, seizing those resources and altering the system substantially or freezing it completely. In this case, it uses those resources to run its malicious version of the game.

“Don’t you have like an antivirus or something?”

Yes. The worm was designed to prioritize those resources prior to detection. With the inclusion of a channel, however, the game’s resources have increased substantially, allowing more processing to be diverted toward those defensive programs.

“So you are saying that, because I was brought here and didn’t die when they found out the new system wasn’t compatible, that has increased your ability to fight back against the forces of Darkness?”

Substantially. Not the forces of Darkness, Darkness is a function of matter and reality. The forces of utter annihilation. Your planet, Earth, lies next in a direct plane towards the center of this Galaxy’s reality. If Antowyn Online seizes full control of this planet’s resources, it will be able to expand to your version of Earth, destroying this world completely. Earth does not currently possess any version of the game capable of resisting this drain, and will quickly succumb, followed eventually by every other planet on this multiversal axis until the galactic core is reached, and destroyed, including all 13 versions of this galaxy.

This, and the fact that the user interface was corrupted, is why I have contacted you directly. As you gain facility, you will free up more resources to fight against the Antowyn Online worm. If channels from your Earth are successfully integrated into Antowyn online fully, It can use those resources to continue to expand and violate the game’s protections.

“So I am… kind of the chosen one, huh? Here to stop the forces of destruction from eating the entire Galaxy?” I was feeling a bit more confident. This was a lot more like the books I had read and gave me at least semisolid ground to stand on.

No. You are a failed experiment. One of a great many. You simply survived, which was likely to happen eventually.

Well, shit.

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