Chapter 41: Book II – Chapter 1- He Caught The Scent

Corbin had only been a dog for about ten minutes when he caught the scent of evil.

For now though, he stared at the new world in confusion. Or more accurately, he experienced the new world and wasn’t ready. His sense of sight, for one, was awful. Although he was almost sure he’d been near-sighted in his former earth life, this was much worse: everything was in gray tones. Well, he tried to reassure himself that at least here he was working with a 20/20 grayscale situation.

The smells, on the other hand, were something else entirely. It wasn’t a spectrum he was smelling, but something more like a tesseract. He’d never had so much input coming in through his nose and it was too much to handle for a good little while. He knew, for instance, that Priscilla was wearing greasepaint makeup, that it had undercurrents of magic, and had been on her face for almost an hour. 

Seriously, his nose was good enough that he could smell the ripe, fruity and somewhat rancid aroma of the magic beneath the overpowering scent of the greasepaint. And that was just one smell out of dozens going on right here. He detected honey, several types of pollen and the scents of the bees carrying them (this world’s version of bees anyhow), the stink of sweat out of Kyesiara and Priscilla, and the smells of their equipment: leather, wool, the brass buckles, the iron and steel of their blades and arrowheads, the residual scent coming off the wood of the arrow shafts, and the list went on. He even detected the retreating waft of godly magic in several different forms, from before the temple had lost all deific power. 

He was in trouble if he couldn’t get his head around this.

“–listenin, Corby me Corb?”

“I can’t… the smells…” 

“He’s overwhelmed by the sensory changes,” Kyessy explained. 

“I coulda picked that up just from the whinin’ lil miss talks-to-furry-creatures.”

“I don’t know who you’re calling little. I’m taller than you by at least two hands.”

“Loike I wouldn’ know he had a super nose now that he changed into a bleedin’ pupper. How stupid do I look?”

“I wasn’t about to mention anything, but you’ve explicitly asked–”

The argument continued from there, while Corbin tried not to throw up. The corpses were piled up and it apparently didn’t matter that they’d only been dead under five minutes, because he could smell them. The nauseating part wasn’t the decomposition, but rather the fact that it smelled delicious. His instincts had him ready to run over there and chow down… and his brain was mortified.

He lurched away from the corpses and went off to get a whiff of some wildflowers instead, and his two companions followed. He had a brief flash of clarity: were they fighting over him? 

“Why’d you come back?” he managed to ask.

“Never you mind,” Kyessy answered, then gestured down at Corbin when Priscilla opened her mouth to begin more of the cat fight. Cat/goat fight. Whatever, he was too tired to figure out what it was. 

Maybe they were fighting over him. Maybe he had a budding harem… no, that was an awful thought. He had to turn into a human before he had a single thought about romance. Plus, Prissy was too prissy for his tastes, and Kyessy had left him to die. 

New Corbin rule: no harem before human. That was a slippery slope best left avoided until a) he figured out who the mysterious girl from his past actually was to him, b) Vethros was no longer threatening to rise and destroy all of creation and remake it in his image, and c) he changed his story into one that wouldn’t need a beastiality tag added to it, via becoming human. 

He did the dog-drying-off super shudder, and felt quite a lot better. 

He tried to bring the girl from his patchy memories back, and only succeeded in getting a grin and a laugh. The way her freckly face scrunched up in a laugh was adorable but not proof that she was his girlfriend or wife.  

“Aww,” Prissy said. Apparently his shuddering was adorable to her.

“Don’t.” He was trying to forget having licked her face. He turned up to Kyessy, who now towered over him. “What made you come back? I have to know. I need to know if you’re going to stay.”

“And gimme his card, for pity’s sake!” Prissy said, “At least I won’t have to keep wondrin’ if yer gabbin’ at him or snipin’ at me.”

“Wait, let me see it.”

Kyessy produced his card and laid it down. It still shimmered with colors, he was sure, because a metallic sheen played over the Mad Card Again! trading card. Now instead of an angry raven, he beheld an image of an adorable, dopey looking corgi, grinning and it with its super long tongue hanging out. 

“Oh my God,” he muttered.

Corbin Dogherty, Canine Familiar the card now read. It was still level 4, and the stats for the top half were still the same: telepathic communication, shared ability use, sympathetic HP loss, but this dog form had brand new abilities: 

 

 

• True Scent

• Worry

• Tireless

 

 

It kind of made him want to get locked into being a camel forever, honestly. The camel abilities had been no joke, most especially the incredible intelligence bonuses and the ability to see all the game stats.

True Scent was more of a hindrance right now. He’d have to get used to it. But in actuality, once he’d leveled it up like he’d done with True Sight, he could now perceive and distinguish between various different auras. 

Prissy’s aura, in sight terms, was an ever-shifting pink and green and yellow monstrosity constantly pulling into itself. In smell terms, it was… her aura. Overly saccharine, in your face, unique like a vegan: it loudly exclaimed everything it was, but in smell terms. Kyessy’s aura, however, had been almost uniformly green, brown, and a bit red. He figured the red was for maximum violence every now and again, and the green and brown were for warning people to stay off her lawn. Now it was an earthy, natural, slightly unpleasant smell that warned people off, but could blend in with nature.

A lot to get used to.

Worry was used for locking on and shaking the shit out of a target. He could lock up an opponent’s arm and render it unusable, or immobilize a target by grabbing onto a leg. Not bad as a replacement for his Terrifying Aura, and he’d use it every chance he got. It cost minimal mana, so he could go for it again and again.

As for Tireless… the prompt that appeared read the following: Your Endurance is considered five times higher for purposes of running or swimming long distances. Honestly, Mimicry had been great, and had gotten him out of a lot of jams so far, but what he was going to miss the most was flight. Tireless was just the game system’s way of giving him unlimited Endurance without actually giving him any more hit points. Which was lame, but being able to run forever was probably going to be pretty great. 

Plus he was adorable. No more Charm dump stat! Yes! He couldn’t wait to use this as an opportunity to do some vamping and spying.

He checked out his character sheet and saw that everything had changed there, just as he’d figured. Even though it was unsurprising, it was still pretty shocking.

“Holy shit,” he muttered.

 

SPECIAL attribute array: Corbin Dogherty, Canine Familiar

Level 11

XP: 0/16,000

 

Strength 6

Perception 8

Endurance 6

Charm 9

Intelligence 3

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Agility 10

Luck 14

Skills: 

Mingle (Charm) level 1

Inspect (Perception) level 2

Survey (Perception) level 2

Kismet (Luck) level 1

Serendipity (Luck) level 2

 

HP: 35/35

MP: 10/10

 

He was really grateful, on the one hand, not to be a complete weakling, though by tabletop RPG standards these weren’t astonishing. Compared to his raven stats, though, he was like a golden god. Or maybe that was the newfound Intelligence of 3 getting his hopes way higher than they ought to be. Either way, he had 18 points, from level 1 to 10, to spend, and he was going to spend them right friggin now.

Some of his skill point buys had been kept, but not his stat point buys. The prompts then informed him he had 9 sets of level ups to do, so 18 stat points to be placed. He knew he wasn’t allowed to dump more than 1 stat point into a stat per level… but he could raise his Intelligence by 9. 

Or his Luck.

Ugh, he was always so indecisive when it came to distributing out stat points. When he played games, he often saved up stat points until he started dying over and over again. This wasn’t a video game, not really, so he’d better get it done with now.

Okay, Luck had served him well. The first six level ups went into Luck and Intelligence. He threw an even six of his 18 into Luck to give him a nice round 20, and with respect to Intelligence; he couldn’t stand the look of the 3.  

Now, though, he had two partners along for the journey, so perhaps he needed Perception less than before. He put two points in Charm, three in Endurance, and his last three in Strength. 

He also had two points to increase his three abilities. The first went immediately to True Scent, which became True Scent Level 2. As a raven he could see auras, and now as a dog he could smell them, which would probably be as gross as it was necessary. The Tireless upgrade gave him even more of an Endurance bonus against becoming fatigued, which sucked bigtime. He threw the second upgrade into Worry, making it Worry level 2. 

It now read: When you latch on to an enemy, you gain a scaling +1 damage bonus for every attack after the first. Enemies have a -2 on their opposed Strength checks to shake you off.

 

SPECIAL attribute array: Corbin Dogherty, Canine Familiar

Level 11

XP: 0/16,000

 

Strength 9

Perception 8

Endurance 9

Charm 11

Intelligence 9

Agility 10

Luck 20

Skills: 

Mingle (Charm) level 1

Inspect (Perception) level 2

Survey (Perception) level 2

Kismet (Luck) level 1

Serendipity (Luck) level 2

 

HP: 50/50

MP: 40/40

 

As before, each point of Intelligence boosted his MP by 5, and each Endurance boosted his HP by 5. It was no 1469 like Hale the tanky tank had boasted of, but it would do for now.

He gave Prissy a look, and she interpreted this correctly. Soon enough she had his card equipped, and after a few seconds of experiencing smells as he did, she mentally shoved them aside and got several deep breaths. 

“No wonder,” she muttered.

“You two have to figure out your differences if–”

He caught the scent of something wrong. As soon as he did, the Vethros-ometer in his periphery jigged and shot up a tad. It was just an increment, but a definite and noticeable one. 

He couldn’t help himself; he growled in anger. 

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