Chương 6: Basic Human Decency

Morning came, announced by birds that had no consideration for anyone who'd spent the previous day running from beetles. I opened my eyes. I closed them again and continued my snoring. The rock on my face had shifted to an angle that suggested it had also fallen asleep on the job. Something started shaking me gently.

"Wake up. We need to go." I ignored it and responded with a different variety of snoring.

"How about slapping her?" A different voice offered.

"Would you please be quiet?" The first voice was gentle but terrifying at the same time. The shaking escalated from gentle shaking through vigorous shaking to shaking that made my head wobble at angles that would concern my neck. The rock fell. I opened my eyes again. I sat up slowly, blinking in the morning light. Aria was in front of me. Zebron behind.

Still in a daze, the human brain surfaced first, which was unfortunate, because it immediately remembered last night's observation and decided this was the perfect time to address it.

"Are you two dating?" There are questions that land like stones in still water. There are also questions that land like stones thrown at someone. This was the second kind. My head snapped to the side as I registered pain and confusion, roughly in that order.

"I thought you were against slapping her?" Zebron looked at my cheek with what might have been respect. I touched my face gingerly. Internally, I was scolding the human brain for asking stupid questions. We had a rock. We were safe. Why did you ruin it? It was important information! Getting slapped is not important! Aria looked mortified.

"I'm sorry, I just — you can't just — that's not—" Zebron stood up and stretched.

"Anyway, let's go." Aria looked at him and pouted.

"What?" he asked. With a "hmph," she pointed at me.

"Anyway, we need to take a bath first." Zebron looked at me. Then at my bloody, white, long-sleeved shirt. He scratched his head.

"Fine. But make it quick." Aria pointed at someone I hadn't noticed until then.

"And make sure Norman doesn't peek."

"Wait, last time was an accident," Norman defended his honor.

"The last time was an accident. The time before that wasn't."

"That was the time I had mistaken the girls' bath for the boys'!"

"There is a guard for a reason. You can't pass him unless you sneak."

"I didn't sneak! I asked him for directions! I asked him politely: is this the boys' bath? You know what he did? He just sipped his tea!" Aria looked at him. Looked at his ignorable face. Her glare, the kind that had previously resembled someone inspecting garbage, turned wide and bright. She wiped the edge of her eye and sniffed. Zebron looked at Norman with blank eyes.

"Can't believe you managed to remember him through silly stuff."

"Anyway, watch him!" Aria took my hand and began leading me toward the sound of running water.

The river appeared through the trees. My eyes widened. It took me approximately three seconds to jump in, clothes and all. The cold shot through my system. Perfect. Blessed. Right. I submerged completely, rock and all. I stayed under until my lungs began filing complaints. When I surfaced, Aria was standing on the riverbank. She carefully undressed, folding each piece of clothing before placing her staff on top. I watched this process with interest while the human brain noted that the staff looked expensive.

I looked down at myself, still fully clothed. Oh. That's how humans do it. I began pulling at my shirt. It had decided it was now part of my skin and was not interested in being removed. I pulled harder. When it finally came free, I let it go. The current immediately grabbed it.

"What are you doing?!" Aria dove in and swam after the shirt with impressive speed. She caught it before it could escape downstream to freedom. She swam back, clutching the rescued garment, and faced me.

"You don't just — clothes are expensive! You can't just let them float away!"

"They were dirty."

"That's not — that's not how—" Aria took a deep breath.

"Okay. New rule. When you take off clothes, you put them on the bank. Safely. Where they won't float away."

"But the river—""Bank. Safe. No floating." I considered this. Salamanders didn't wear clothes, so this rule had never applied before. But apparently humans cared deeply about fabric ownership even when it was covered in blood.

"Understood," I said, though I didn't really understand at all. What followed was a comprehensive lecture on "basic human decency" that covered: This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

Proper undressing procedure (remove clothes, place on bank, THEN enter water) Why you couldn't just shed your skin when it got dirty (humans didn't work that way) Appropriate bathing techniques (soap existed, apparently, and Aria had some) Why you had to keep your undergarments on even when bathing with other women ("It's just — it's PROPER, okay?") Hair washing (a complex process involving something called "working it through") Why you couldn't drink the bathwater (even though it looked perfectly clean) I absorbed this information. Humans, I concluded, had complicated relationships with water. Salamanders had it figured out: Get wet. Stay wet. Done. But humans needed rules, soap, special undergarments, and apparently you couldn't just float your clothes down the river even if the river wanted them.

"Are you listening?" Aria grabbed my shoulders.

"Yes." I was actually listening, though I was mostly thinking about how nice the water felt.

"And you understand why we don't ask people if they're dating first thing in the morning?"

"Because it results in getting slapped?"

"Because it's… Yes. Actually, yes. That's basically it." I nodded. Aria sighed. She began helping me wash properly, which involved a lot of scrubbing and several comments about "how did you get blood in your hair?" and "no, you can't just stay in the water forever, we need to leave." Then something passed overhead. Not a cloud. Clouds made things cooler, not hotter. I looked up.

It was enormous, red scales catching fire in the light, and it had the approximate shape of a lizard in the same way that mountains had the approximate shape of rocks. Technically accurate and missing the point entirely. I opened my mouth.

"It's a li—" Aria's hand covered it.

"Red Dragon," she whispered.

"They have strong opinions about being called lesser. Do you want us to be roasted alive?" I shook my head.

"Then we agree." Aria lowered her hand slowly. The dragon was already moving, drifting toward the horizon.

"Let's go. Before it notices us." She started walking toward the bank. I followed. The sky went darker like night — but hotter. Hotter than the sun directly overhead. Aria froze mid-step. I looked up for the second time. It was much bigger than the first one. Black fire ran along its length, and it dwarfed the Red Dragon like the Red Dragon had dwarfed us. Burning black claws closed around the smaller dragon mid-flight. It roared once, then dragged the Red Dragon away. The darkness and the heat went with it.

I looked back at Aria. She was trembling.

"What is the Dragon King doing here?" she whispered. I tilted my head. I thought the Dragon King was already dead? [Of course someone else took over.] I see… Aria didn't say anything for a while after that. When she'd finally calmed down, she climbed out of the river first. She wrung out her hair, then crossed to where she'd left her clothes.

"Get out of the water as well." I stayed in the river. The water was still moving. Still cool. Still right, in the way that very few things had been right since I'd woken up in this body. The sun was climbing, which meant the day was warming, which meant leaving the water would become increasingly inadvisable from a moisture-management perspective. I blamed the dragons. Specifically, the dragons' inconvenient arrival and subsequent departure, that had interrupted my extended submersion.

On the bank, Aria crouched by her folded clothes and staff. They moved backward. She froze.

"…Eh?" The heap of fabric rose. Underneath it was a monkey. It was small, brown, and had bright, clever eyes. It held Aria's undergarment and put it on its head like a crown. It grinned.

"Why you—" Aria lunged. The monkey moved faster. Darting sideways and then, in a single bounding arc, directly toward the river. Directly toward me.

"Catch it!" Aria's arm shot out, pointing. I rose from the water. The monkey reached the bank and jumped. It landed on my head with a thump, gripping my hair with small, surprisingly strong hands, and laughed: a chittering sound that managed to convey genuine amusement. I stood very still. The monkey laughed again. Then it stopped. Its weight shifted. I felt it lean forward. Felt one of its legs rise. Oh, thought the human brain. Oh no, I thought. The monkey kicked. The rock hit the ground.

There was a moment in which I looked at the rock sitting on the ground, then listened to the monkey sitting on my head, laughing. The human brain processed what had just occurred and its implications. I crouched down and picked up the rock. Wait, the human brain said. Wait wait wait. Think about this. If you swing at it and it moves — and it will move, it's very fast, it is demonstrably faster than both of us — then the rock continues downward and I am the one who experiences the consequences first.

I did not think about this. Not because the reasoning was wrong, but because the monkey had kicked my rock. The rock that had been on my head through beetles, fire, water explosions, a Giant Spider, and one very presumptuous morning. The rock that had, by any reasonable salamander standard, earned its place. There were consequences for kicking things that had earned their place. I lifted the rock. The monkey chittered and tensed. Its weight shifted on my head.

I brought the rock down the way I remembered a certain creature smashing something on its belly. The only difference was that I was trying to smash something on my head. Same thing. No it's not! the human brain protested. System! Stop this idiot! [You have unlocked Otter Rock Smash.] The monkey leaped, but the rock accelerated. It arrived before the monkey's trajectory did. The impact was decisive. I thought I was going to die again, the human brain said, after a moment of pure white silence.

[You can now use a rock to smash at high speed.] Is that a skill? It sounds like everyone could do it. Slightly faster, perhaps, but fundamentally— [And summon an otter that can do the smashing for you.] The human brain considered this. Did you just improvise? [It's implied when you read the skill name carefully.] I'm fairly certain you improvised that. [It's thematically consistent.] You improvised it and you're constructing justifications after the fact. The voice did not reply.

It had made its point and was done. I looked down at myself. I was red again. This was becoming a pattern I found unreasonable given how much time I'd just spent getting un-red. I stared at what remained of the monkey. It was less than it had previously existed. I looked at the rock. The rock appeared untroubled by recent events. I placed it carefully back on my head. Aria arrived at a dead run, skidded to a stop in the wet grass, and stood breathing hard as she processed the scene.

Her gaze moved from my head, to my clothes, to the significantly reduced state of the monkey. Everything was bloody.

"It kicked my rock," I explained. Aria closed her eyes. She stood like that for a moment, doing something that was probably breathing. When she opened them, her expression had achieved a kind of exhausted peace that comes from accepting that certain things are simply how they are.

"Let's take a bath again." I nodded immediately and walked back into the river. The water received me without complaint. Off at the edge of the river was an animal I was vaguely familiar with. It was floating with a rock on its belly, smashing something. Probably a clam.