Chương 5: Hell

Mark woke with his tail wrapped around his legs and his face stiff from dried tears. For three blissful seconds, he did not remember what had happened, and then his brain supplied the facts with clinical cruelty: he was a kobold, his body was a construct, he was trapped in a dimensional warren, and his family might be imaginary. His kobold vision rendered the underground chamber in shades of gray, while the bioluminescent fungi added eerie blue-green highlights. The nest of furs beneath him was soft.

The temperature was ideal in how it didn't make him feel lethargic or overly energetic and the ceiling height felt correct in a way he hated. Everything about the underground chamber screamed home to his kobold hindbrain while his human memories rebelled. His stomach, which had apparently been awake considerably longer than he had, cramped harder than it had before he slept. He looked around the chamber and saw the pile of rat carcasses waiting against the wall.

His tongue flicked out before he could stop it, and the sensory organ in his palate delivered its report with professional thoroughness. The meat was fresh, safe, free of detectable parasites, but unmistakably rat. He sat up and turned deliberately away from the meat pile.

There were many excellent reasons not to eat raw rat, including bacterial contamination, hantavirus, tularemia, leptospirosis, fleas that might carry plague, parasites, and the general fact that rats were famous for living in places no sane person would use as a kitchen. His tongue claimed the meat was safe, but could he really trust his magical chemical-receptor tongue over the entire medical history of Earth? Well, that did assume his Earth memories actually happened…

He examined the bioluminescent fungi, hoping to get some type of alternative that was not rat. Unfortunately, his scientific mind insisted that anything glowing in nature was likely advertising toxicity, and unless he could get some proof of the fungi's safety, the rats were if anything the less reckless option. If only there was some moss in this chamber or maybe some juicy insects. No, those options weren't any better… Non-rat meat did sound quite appetizing to him now.

In contrast, green leafy vegetables actually sounded less appetizing to him now in this body than the moss did to his human memories. Fruits, his mind told him, would possibly be fine, but without knowing what a kobold could metabolize, they could prove disastrous. Why couldn't I have gotten an instruction manual for this body? Certainly there has to be some overlap in foods that taste good for humans and kobolds without risking death by ingesting something that turns out to be unable to be processed by this body.

All of this thought probably was useless since his options in this chamber seemed to be limited to raw rats and poisonous mushrooms. There was an exit to the chamber which may lead to other food options, but did he really want to leave the safety confines of his underground chamber? His stomach cramped again, considerably harder, as if offended by his attempt to seek alternatives. He shifted to a different line of reasoning.

This body had been constructed from magic rather than conventional biology, which meant conventional nutrition might not even apply to it. Perhaps it ran on ambient magical forces on whatever fundamental substrate created constructed beings in this world. That was a reasonable hypothesis that deserved serious consideration, and he sat back down on the furs and gave it exactly that. I should just ignore the hunger and maybe it will go away.

Once free of this place maybe Wes could provide real food if the body does need something. Plus it has to be close to morning for him. He should let me out soon. Right? Mark's stomach made a sound clearly attempting to register a formal grievance with management.

"That's psychosomatic. I'm a magical construct. I may not even have a digestive system that requires conventional..." The cramp dropped him forward before he could finish the sentence. He caught himself on one hand and braced himself against the packed earth. His tongue flicked out again without permission, and the report came back unchanged. The meat was still there and still fresh. The fungi offered no decent counter-proposal. This body wanted meat.

Over what felt like the next half hour, Mark's brain had constructed eighteen separate arguments to not eat the rats present in his chamber. His stomach responded to each one with increasing editorial clarity, and a conclusion was eventually reached that satisfied his entire body below the neck. The meat was tender, juicy, and appallingly delicious. His stomach settled into quiet contentment while his human sensibilities screamed in the background like a smoke alarm with dying batteries.

It was shrill and persistent, yet thoroughly powerless to affect the outcome.

"This doesn't mean anything," Mark muttered around his second rat, because once you'd crossed the line into eating raw rodent there was no real logic in stopping after just one.

"I'm human, but I have to stay alive long enough to get back to my family. This is basic Maslow's hierarchy of needs. You cannot self-actualize if you've starved to death in a magical underground burrow." He eyed the remaining meat with anticipation, which was considerably worse than revulsion would have been. Mark left the chamber with his survival needs met but his dignity shredded. Sitting alone with nothing to do but sleep and look at his hoard and rat carcasses would drive him mad.

Leaving the chamber to explore would give him a purpose while he waited to be released from this pouch. He noticed that the unfamiliar limbs and tail fought him less now. His tail still threatened to trip him on sharp turns, but pacing around in his chamber had made even that not be as dangerous. The excessively high ankle forming his digitigrade limbs worked fine as long as he remembered he had to stand on the front of his feet and toes only.

The tunnel branched, and Mark followed the left wall for no particular reason. His tongue had been flicking constantly since he entered the chamber, cataloguing the space before he consciously registered what it was doing. In a few minutes the tunnel opened into a slightly larger chamber where a lone kobold sat on a stone bench, sorting copper coins with mechanical precision.

The kobold was young and female according to the info his tongue supplied as his eyes had no way to tell, and she was his first clear look at what he had become. She was a three foot tall dragon-like biped with mottled brown-and-copper scales that blended into the cavern. She possessed oversized, scale-covered ears which rose from her head, with two short ivory horns curving backward between them.

Like Mark, she wore no clothes, although her reptilian anatomy exposed none of the mammalian features he associated with nakedness. Regardless he wished they were both dressed. A lifetime of modesty did not disappear merely because he had awakened as a bipedal lizard. The other kobold glanced up at Mark with bright orange eyes.

"Greetings, clutch-brother! Fine morning for work, yes-yes!" The cheerful voice didn't match the hollow eyes.

"Hello," Mark said.

"This one called Digger! Good name! Strong name! Clutch-brother have name?"

"My name is Mark. I'm just exploring, since this is my first time in a kobold warren and..." Before he could finish his thought, the other kobold started talking.

"Mark! Good name! Strong name! Mark want help sort treasure? Very exciting work! Much shiny!"

"No, I'm just exploring and trying to see what else is here in your warren." Her expression didn't change. The coins kept clicking through her fingers in the same rhythm.

"Mark want help sort treasure? Very exciting work! Much shiny!" This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

"Can you understand me? I just want to look around. What all do you have around here?" Click. Click. Click. The coins continued their mechanical journey from one pile to another. Her eyes tracked the movement, never quite meeting his.

"Hello? I'm talking to you."

"Mark want help sort treasure? Very exciting work! Much shiny!" It dawned on Mark what was happening. Digger was an automated phone tree in kobold form just waiting for the right keywords to trigger her next response. Mark stared into those orange eyes, searching for any sign of a person there. All Mark could see was the uncanny valley made real. Honestly, it made sense. This was a fake dimensional warren made for familiars to rest and have a spot away from their masters.

An Earth equivalent to this would be a very elaborate magical kennel. Whoever created this pouch wouldn't use real creatures to fill out the warren but instead use the magical equivalent of robot kobolds. Given the way Digger kept trying to teach him to sort, were the warren's kobolds designed to be a tutorial on how to be a kobold for newly created magical constructs?

Trying to pass to the next part of the "phone tree", Mark sat beside Digger, picked up a coin with deliberate slowness, and placed it in a different pile. She looked at him approvingly.

"Mark good-good sorter!" Mark then asked, "How many others are there? Can you show me around?" She stopped sorting and looked at him.

"Many clutch-mates! Whole warren full! All happy, yes-yes! Come, this one show!" Relieved he finally got her to say something different, Mark happily followed Digger into a larger cavern which was alive with movement. At least forty or fifty kobolds worked with methodical purpose on different tasks but mostly in silence. Kobolds dug at walls with small picks or their claws, attempting to excavate tunnels.

Others sorted copper coins and shiny pebbles occasionally chirping with pleasure but always with identical intervals. It was like hearing a stuck recording because every chirp was the same sound. Another group crafted crude tools, their movements flowing through the same sequences again and again. One of them appeared to be making a primitive bear trap which looked rather dangerous. Near the side of the chamber, a dark pit opened in the floor.

Mark drifted toward it before common sense could catch up, wondering whether it might lead to another tunnel or chambers deeper underground. Mark's tongue sampled the air on reflex and he discovered that the pit was a communal latrine, and the revelation arrived as the nastiest combination of smell and taste he had ever experienced. It was worse than the first time he had encountered C. diff in medical school which until this moment was the worst smell he had experienced.

This was likely because this was not merely a smell. His mouth now knew things no mouth ever should have been asked to know. Mark's stomach lurched so violently that he staggered backward which caused him to trip over his own tail. Fortunately he caught himself against the chamber wall with one clawed hand. Mark then discovered firsthand that kobolds could vomit. Unfortunately, rat carcasses were considerably less appetizing on the return trip.

When Mark was finally able to regain his composure, unexpected text slid across his vision similar to the status page that alerted him of being a magical construct the night before. Congratulations on your first innate ability level up! Chemoreception +1 Current Status: Chemoreception 2/100 Novice The universe had just rewarded Mark for tasting a communal toilet, and had encouraged him to do it more. Mark was on his feet before he knew he'd stood.

He crossed the chamber at a near run and seized the nearest kobold by both shoulders, a stocky male crouched over a half-finished snare.

"I need a B52!" Mark said, and his voice came out louder than he meant and kept climbing.

"Do you understand me? I am a board-certified psychiatrist, I am decompensating in real time, and I need emergency medication STAT before I become a danger to myself or others. I will sign whatever consent you want." The kobold beamed up at him, apparently unconcerned that Mark had grabbed him by both shoulders.

"B52 is great name! Strong name! B52 want help build snare?" Mark let go and spun to the next closest kobold, a female sorting pebbles.

"I need an antipsychotic! Any generation, I don't care, you can give me Thorazine for all I care because I will accept the Thorazine shuffle the rest of my life as long as it means I wake up as a human! This is an emergency!"

"I known as Pebble! Thorazine is good name, yes-yes!"

"Listen to me, please! I know I have to be in a psych unit or hospital somewhere. I'm delirious or in a coma, or having a brief psychotic episode, and I know someone is watching me on a monitor right now and writing notes. This cannot possibly be real. This is not happening. You are all symptoms!"

"Will Thorazine help sort-sort?" the pebble sorter said while continuing to sort pebbles. Mark screamed, and the sound that came out was higher and sharper than any yell he'd ever produced. Mark had hoped for emergency medication that would prove he was psychotic and none of what had been happening to him was real. Failing that he at least hoped for some change in response from the constructs. He did not get either.

"I'm not a kobold! I'm not named hallucination! My name is Mark Wright. I have a wife and daughter. I just need to go home. I cannot live in a universe that rewards me for accidentally tasting fecal matter!" The elderly female kobold he held by the shoulders patted him on the snout like a misbehaving child and asked whether B52 wanted to learn about herbs.

"Stop being robots… I'm yelling and in severe distress and literally so unpredictable you have to think there's a strong chance I could hurt you! Someone is supposed to try to calm me down, tell me I'm safe and that the medication is going to help, and then you give me an injection. I will get tired and calm and then when I wake up I will be back in my reality. That's how this works. That's how it's supposed to work…"

After several minutes, Mark's voice shredded into a rasp, his legs trembled, and his hands finally slid from the shoulders of the last smiling kobold. He walked away from them and bent at the waist, hands braced on his knees, chest heaving while his tongue flicked uselessly at air that tasted of copper, rocks, contented kobold, and a faint hint of the latrine he was trying not to think about.

Around Mark, work continued in its perfect rhythms, because no one had stopped or altered their behavior in any meaningful way during his outburst. The pebble sorter continued sorting pebbles and the snare maker continued making his snare. They had never been alarmed in the first place despite him just showing some very alarming behavior. If he were delirious in a hospital somewhere, he would have been chemically restrained well before now.

As bizarre as this was, Mark had to accept that this evidently was his reality. No one was going to give him some medicine to send him back to Earth no matter how much he wanted them to. The five stages of grief were not actually a neat staircase, no matter how many pamphlets pretended otherwise, but he could still identify denial when it was screaming itself hoarse in a room full of fake kobolds, and the screaming counted for anger as well.

He had cried enough the night before to qualify for depression several times over. Bargaining was what he had done after the panic attack, when he accepted the body as a construct but refused to concede the mind. As for acceptance, if reaching it required him to stop searching for a way home, then he intended to fail that stage indefinitely. Mark straightened back to his default slouched position. His throat hurt from all of the yelling.

The kobold sitting on the floor closest to him making what appeared to be the primitive bear trap now looked at him.

"Psychotic, want learn build trap?" Mark ignored the trap making kobold, and instead decided to explore a bit further. He picked a side tunnel at random and walked. At a fork in the side passage, a kobold faced the wall, arms rising and falling in a perfect mining rhythm. The kobold had no pickaxe or tools, but he acted like he did. He performed the motion again and again, striking nothing and accomplishing nothing. Yet the kobold's face remained serene, as if he genuinely enjoyed the useless movement.

Two kobolds nearby were digging with their claws, actually expanding the tunnel, and both invited Mark to join. A pull to join them rose in him, quieter than the hoarding instinct and much easier to set aside. This time he declined politely. He was not indulging the instinct, but he was also trying not to take his anger out on the kobolds. They might be robots with no real personalities, but that was no excuse to treat them poorly. The other fork led to a larger chamber where a shrine occupied the central alcove.

The shrine held a small gold dragon statue, which was no larger than Mark's forearm. About a dozen kobolds occupied the room, and each knelt in turn to place a polished rock on the shrine. Once the offerings were complete, they began to chant in a language thick with consonants no human throat could shape. Despite the fact that he had never heard the language before, Mark's brain translated it for him.

"We exist to please. We are grateful to serve. Great Scaled Master gives purpose. We are blessed. We exist to please. We are grateful to serve. Great Scaled Master gives purpose. We are blessed." Mark stood frozen at the entrance. The kobolds swayed in unison, praising their enslavement with peaceful blank faces and vacant eyes. It was the most frightening thing he had seen in this warren of horrors. He remembered Wes saying that the false memories should fade in two to four weeks.

What if this was how kobolds naturally behaved, and in two weeks he would be down there with them, swaying, chanting, and grateful to serve the "Great Scaled Master"? Mark had seen enough. Unfortunately, his route back through the communal room took him past the latrine at the exact moment something happened there, giving his new senses a vivid and entirely unwanted flashback. He ran back to his chamber, tripping only once, which was progress. Back in the chamber, what came out of Mark next was not grief.

He did not recognize it until it escaped his throat as a high, rapid yipping sound that echoed off the tunnel walls. It bore almost no resemblance to human laughter but some exhausted part of him knew that was what it was. Mark clapped both hands over his snout to suppress the yipping, but it did not help.

He could curl back into the nest and sob until there was nothing left in him, or he could laugh at the fact that the universe had made him a raw-rat-eating hoarding lizard who gained experience points from accidentally tasting a toilet. For the moment, the yipping won.