Chương 6: Abilities

Time dissolved in the soft blue-green glow. Without sunlight or a clock to help know the passage of time, Mark slept, woke, and ate when his body demanded it. Thankfully, his bladder remained mercifully silent; the thought of using that communal pit while forty hollow-eyed kobolds watched made his stomach turn. It was thirst that eventually forced Mark back into the tunnels. He had sensed water the first time his tongue had flicked in this warren but could not really sense where the smell was coming from.

Ever since the latrine incident and the leveling of the chemoreception innate ability he had noticed being better able to parse out where things were. Hunting the water smell seemed like a good way to test the new ability, so he followed the faint trail until it ended at a small spring down a side passage. When he found the spring, he received another notification. Chemoreception +1 Current Status: Chemoreception 3/100 Novice At the spring Mark convinced himself to ignore his fear of parasites and drank his fill.

He had decided if this was a dimensional warren designed as a perfect home for a kobold, the chances of him being in real danger from something should be very low. He definitely didn't think this world knew about germs, and he couldn't see them programming magical parasites in this place for realism. By this logic the mushrooms all over the chambers and tunnel walls were probably safe to eat as well, but he did think he would hold off until he asked Wes. Bioluminescent fungi just seemed poisonous on principle.

Since Mark hadn't seen a mirror in Wes's room, the spring's reflection was his first real chance to see his new body from an outside perspective. First thing he noticed was that he stood out with his red and bronze scales. Every other kobold looked drab and blended in with the surroundings. He wondered if his coloring was common or if he truly would stand out in public as much as he did in this warren. Mark was a little skinnier and slightly shorter compared to the majority of the other kobolds.

They all looked like they had spent years being active and building up strength whereas he looked young compared to the majority of the kobolds. Almost like he was an adolescent with further growth potential. However, despite his smaller size, his horns were perhaps a little longer than average. He wondered if they were decorative or if kobolds used them for defense. Mark imagined bending his head down and ramming the annoying phone tree kobolds, and started yipping before he could stop himself.

He spent time just holding his hands out in front of him and opening and closing his hands to see his reflection model it. He similarly opened and closed his mouth to note the sharp teeth inside and to look at the black forked tongue that was the source of the strange sense that guided him to the spring. Upon seeing his reflection Mark was distinctly reminded of many of the minor villains in stories he read to Emma.

He was a small walking lizard person of course the natural instinct to a human is he should be a villain. After getting hydrated and getting a good look at his new appearance Mark decided to keep exploring the tunnels. Before he began exploring again though he did grab a few of the shiny whitish gray spring rocks that were lying around. He had traveled through several tunnels before he realized the reason why he grabbed them was because he subconsciously wanted to add them to his hoard pile.

When he first awoke in Wes's room everything had broadcasted at roughly equal volume, and he had not been able to locate where any given scent was in relation to himself. Now there was definitive hierarchy. Closer sources arrived more intensely while distant ones faded into the background and he could even better trace the trail when he focused on a single chemical strain.

The dark passages that did not have the bioluminescent fungi he had been avoiding up to this point became a test track for whether chemoreception could guide him without light. In these tunnels, the warren became nearly pitch black, but his vision still never failed completely. Without the fungi, everything became monochrome with flat gray shapes emerging from black, but he could make out enough of the tunnel ahead to keep walking, and used his tongue to take detours when he sensed something interesting nearby.

No human eye could have functioned in this darkness, which made the experience both unsettling and fascinating. Eventually the system rewarded his experimentation but in an unexpected manner. Darkvision +1 Current Status: Darkvision 2/100 Novice He noticed the difference immediately after the darkvision notification appeared. The tunnel ahead resolved maybe two or three feet further than before, and the gray shapes were noticeably crisper. It wasn't dramatic, but it was useful.

He stood there for a moment just awed by the unexpected improvement in his vision. While exploring the dark tunnels, he continued to try to parse the scent data rather than letting instinct handle it. The warren tunnels had stopped smelling identical. The communal space had a distinct signature now, a blend of kobold activity and copper coins that separated cleanly from the damp mineral smell of his own passage.

After about an hour, the warren had acquired shape and texture in his mind, its tunnels sorted by smell as much as memory. Chemoreception +1 Current Status: Chemoreception 4/100 Novice A few minutes later, the warren rewarded his stubborn experimentation again. Darkvision +1 Current Status: Darkvision 3/100 Novice The gains were small, but each one did show noticeable improvements. What would happen if the numbers rose high enough that the system stopped calling him a novice?

Would that cause a more noticeable jump than these incremental gains? What other abilities could he level? Was there a list somewhere? Hopefully he could discover abilities he could improve without having to lick the cave air and wander around in dark tunnels. The warren was large but not infinite, and he mentally mapped it methodically. Most of it matched what he had already seen, with tunnels, chambers, and kobolds performing their loops, but two areas were different enough to make him pause.

The first was a shaft with crude ladder rungs descending into darkness much deeper than his darkvision could resolve. Whatever was down there had left a signature his tongue placed as neither kobold nor rat nor anything else he had catalogued. It seemed possibly large, yet definitely old.

He stood at the top of the ladder for a moment and decided that the distant unknown creature at the bottom of a dark hole was a problem for a future version of himself who maybe had more information and definitely wasn't as prone to tripping on his tail. This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version. While he truly doubted by this point anything here would be programmed to try to kill him he still didn't want to test that theory just yet.

The second was a chamber awash with bioluminescent fungi, its ceiling three or four times higher than anywhere else in the warren. At the far end stood an enormous red door banded in black metal, which appeared far too tall and too heavy to have been made by kobolds. Black script marked the center of the door, written in characters he had never seen before but somehow understood anyway. Only one word was present: GUARDIAN. One kobold sat on a crude chair beside the door.

Stranger still, he was the only kobold in the warren who was dressed, and that alone made Mark stop. His clothes consisted of a dark tunic belted at the waist, leather armor pads at the shoulders, and what appeared to be a ceremonial sash covered in the same draconic script as the door. Mark's brain helpfully translated the writing on the sash as HONOR GUARD. The kobold's eyes were gold instead of orange which was the other notable difference for this specific guard.

"Excuse me," Mark said. The gold eyes tracked to him with solemnity.

"The Great Scaled Master's sanctum is not for warren-born. Return to duties, clutch kin-kin." So, possibly a dragon behind the enormous red door. That was probably fine. This was supposed to be a comfortable dimensional habitat for a wizard's familiar, not a pouch full of death, although Mark's confidence in Wes's product research had suffered several recent setbacks.

"I'm looking for a way out," Mark said.

"I was hoping to speak with the Great Scaled Master and see if he could help me."

"All are where the Great Scaled Master wills. Return to duties, clutch kin-kin."

"Is there anyone else I can speak to? Someone who can..."

"Return to duties, clutch kin-kin." The gold eyes never changed expression. He was dressed in ceremony, given a title, and seated beside the most important door in the warren, yet he was just as empty as Digger sorting coins in the dark. He went back to his chamber and tried the same focused approach he'd used for checking his Status page. He focused on a single word… Ability. Text appeared, differently formatted than the status page, with a header he hadn't seen before: INNATE ABILITY LIST Note: Partial list only.

Non-citizen familiars are unable to access full citizen abilities. Only basic innate abilities you have potential to level are detectable at this time. Chemoreception: 4/100, Novice Darkvision: 3/100, Novice Vision: 1/100, Novice Earth Magic: 1/100, Novice Metal Magic: 1/100, Novice Draconic Language: 16/100, Apprentice Common Language: 45/100, Adept Trap Construction: 1/100, Novice Trap Detection: 1/100, Novice Draconic Ancestry: Unawakened The word Non-citizen made Mark's blood boil.

It was as if personhood were a subscription tier Mark had failed to purchase. There were ten innate abilities. These were evidently things this body had been built with as native to the body as the scales, tail, claws, and forked tongue. Learned skills improving through practice made sense. Many of these should follow that logic. Language abilities, reading, trap construction, and possibly even magic could be trained.

However, what made no biological sense was a sensory organ improving because he used it repeatedly. That was not practice; that was physiology getting patched in real time. Having his darkvision improve like it did today felt like if he went to an optometrist and rather than give him glasses they told him to look at more things until his prescription improved. The strange thing was he had proof that it was real. He had walked the dark tunnels and come out with measurably more range.

So this world ran like a video game. Except instead of being the hero Mark was placed in the body of the annoying animal sidekick. Given the ability screen reported some potential for earth magic, Mark decided to test it. The only issue was he had no idea how to do it or what it would actually do. Mark pressed one hand to the floor of his chamber. A hole digging itself was the first thing earth magic ought to manage, so that was what he pictured.

He tried to will magical ability into the ground by thinking about it. He imagined some type of energy coming from his hands and going onto the ground in front of him. He had hoped for some type of movement, even just a small ripple, that would confirm his power. At least to have something occur that could indicate its potential for power if he trained it. Instead of moving, the ground became informative. Data entered his mind with the dry confidence of a survey report.

The material was stable and packed loam with good drainage. Fungal growth would be acceptable, and the soil was suitable for tunneling that would take only minor reinforcements.

"That is not magic," he said.

"That is just a very opinionated soil report." Mark wasn't sure what to feel. On one hand, failing to do obvious magic preserved some small corner of reality where impossible things remained impossible. On the other hand, it was magic! He was in a magical world and owned by a wizard, so of course he wanted to do real magic, but instead it looked like his earth magic was just learning whether the earth around him could grow mushrooms and be dug through easily. There was still metal magic.

Mark picked up the brass button which sat next to the bent spoon on his hoard and focused. He hoped he might be able to alter its composition or do anything that resembled actual magic. Unfortunately his metal magic seemed as limited in scope as his earth magic. Instead of transmuting the metal, bending it, or anything incredible, he discovered that his brass button was made of copper and zinc but also had trace amounts of lead and other random metals. The impurities were consistent with cheap casting.

"Great," Mark said.

"I have an internal spectrometer as a magical power." He pulled up the ability list again, this time to learn what each entry actually did. The screen obliged. According to the descriptions, vision covered ordinary kobold sight, in bright or dim light, whereas darkvision took over where there was no light at all. Chemoreception, the screen unhelpfully noted, detected chemicals in the air. Draconic language stated that at his current apprentice level he could speak on advanced topics and could read at a basic level.

Common language was listed as adept, and it covered the ability to speak and read complex topics with a special note that this did not include magical texts. He assumed complex speech and text was more difficult than advanced. Which meant that there were significant benefits going from novice to apprentice to adept. Although he also noticed there was a huge numerical difference between apprentice and adept so maybe there was some other classification in between.

Mark was certain the Draconic language was the chanting he heard by the shrine which sounded so different from anything he remembered from his Earth memories. The language he used to speak with Wes sounded like English to him, but he suspected that was only how his brain translated the Common language. Likely his memories were why his Common language value was so much higher than Draconic.

Mark had always desired to learn a second language someday, but intuitively learning the language of dragons was not what he had in mind. Earth and metal magic, at least at this level, were just information sources exactly as he had experienced. The earth magic currently might be excellent for true kobolds who cared deeply about digging, or for anyone with agricultural ambitions, but it had very little obvious use for a psychiatrist trying to get home.

The entries on trap construction and trap detection were almost insulting in their simplicity, stating only that kobolds learned to create and notice traps more readily than other species. He remembered seeing the kobold in the communal area building what looked like a primitive bear trap, which meant that, if despair and boredom ever became sufficiently powerful motivators, he could probably ask that automated phone tree for lessons to build up this skill. No, that's admitting this is my life now.

I want to go home, not become a better leveled kobold. Trap making and detecting is not exactly a useful skill for a thirty-five-year-old psychiatrist. Draconic ancestry had no information on the status screen. Mark assumed this must be a natural kobold property since all kobolds are distantly related to dragons. However he did have some nagging doubts. If it truly was standard kobold biology, why would it need to be awakened?

The thought of becoming more dragon scared him anyway, and that was reason enough not to look closer. Some doors may be better off unopened. All he wanted was to fall asleep and wake up in Dallas. Every new thing he discovered about this body, every skill notification, every entry on that list, was another brick in a wall between him and the life he remembered. At some point there would be enough bricks that the wall would stop looking like something he could climb over. He wasn't there yet though.

Mark still had hope.