Born - Intruders

Chapter Type: World Development

They looked like giants to me, easily four or five times my size. They were grubby, rubbery looking things that loped along on two legs. With their other two limbs, they carried tools.

Hands, I realized. It would cost me over 100 biomass just to change the muscles and ligaments in my forward claws to match that level of agility. If I didn't know I'd need to max my biomass meter in order to survive the coming winter… but I did.

Their round heads looked to me as though a real head had been smushed in, leaving just the tip of the nose jutting out. They had the feral ears of rats or rabbits, but without the layer of fur. They radiated cruelty and hunger.

"Goblins." Eihtfuhr explained. "The joke of the civilized races. Dangerous in numbers, or if they live long enough to evolve into orcs, hobgoblins, or other goblinoids." He radiated amusement; did the goblin sniffing at the air at that time detect it?

"These goblins will not live so long." He sent, and jumped at the nearest.

Their highest level was eight; you don't need me to describe what followed. It was short, and brutal, and not even a contest. I moved after him, attempting to finish off those merely dying rather than dead outright.

Don't do that with your bite – goblins taste AWFUL.

"Well, that was a bit of exercise… aren't you done killing them yet?"

"Not from lack of trying." I said, taking another bite.

It is a strange thing to hear a spider sigh. "How many development points do you think I have accrued during my lifetime?" he asked.

"I would guess thousands. Maybe two dozen thousand?"

"No. I have earned only two thousand, four hundred and eighty one development points during my entire lifetime. With the one thousand points you earned last week – perhaps not all of them, but you should be able to handle two or three at a time. Instead – you are as deadly as you were."

No need to remind me. I was earning two, sometimes three XP per day. Which brought something to light.

"I'm not getting combat XP."

"Of course not; this isn't a challenge for either of us. Nothing new, nothing dangerous. Keep killing them, though. There's an achievement when you've killed a thousand levels worth of goblins."

"What is an achievement?"

"Achievements are like smaller quests. Easier to do, but smaller rewards. Are you still – we need to do something about your base damage. Strength is a sub-stat of Might. You should be able to train that using XP from your Physical Training Regimen."

He removed a monstrous sack from his back, woven from his own threads. He began stuffing goblins into it, taking care to pick up pieces of their equipment. I kept getting bad taste into my mouth.

"Ah." He said at last. "Look at this. Remember this stone, it is not native to this region. Flint and steel. Tonight, use one of these knives to butcher the goblins. Tomorrow, I will teach you about fire, and how to properly contain one."

There were eleven corpses; I didn't get much sleep. Oddly, I did get XP from the corpses, as well as hide, fetid meat, and a myriad of bones. But the urgency of prehensile claws was made clear to me. More than anything else, I made a mess.

I had a patch of goblin skin, which I had no idea how to cure into hide.

I had one and only one goblin steak, which just made me ill to look at. Many of the scraps, it shames me to admit, went into my stomach. Others ended up dirty or thrown into the river, where even the fish wouldn't touch them.

I guess my prize of that night was a pile of shin bones. Cleaning the bones was easy work, if vile.

Oddly, I made three XP that night through my Gathering cultivation.

#

Goblin meat, I discovered, was quick to turn to rot. Maybe goblins were better as fertilizer than food?

Eihtfuhr showed up early, carrying a sack of stones. "Down by the river. You'll want it nearby until you're familiar with camping. Dig here," he said, tracing a circle "I will arrange the stones around."

He introduced me to the concept of kindling, and the difference between green wood and firewood, and more safety precautions than I truly wanted to listen to. After an hour of watching me fumble with the flint, grinding it against the steel file, he struck a spark with his first try, and had a fire within a few minutes.

"The key from here is to add the smaller sticks, and then use those to catch the larger. Go bring that steak, if something hasn't already wandered off with it."

Nothing had. The beasts of the wood again showed their wisdom.

"Meat is simple to roast. Place it on a skewer, thusly. Now hold the stick in your mouth and hold the meat close to the fire. Not so close that it burns, but close enough that it cooks."

It was a charred lump of barely more edible protein when I was done. The fire, barely holding on at that point, was easily extinguished. I didn't even need to get a second lungful of water from the river to cough on it.

"I admit, I had expected worse and hoped for better." He said. "You will need to be elsewhere in the woods until you heal. Foul as this flesh is, it will attract scavengers. There is a suitable campsite upriver."

The meal gave me Indigestion, which caused me enough pain to lower my sanity meter. It took five hours to clear the goblin steak from my stomach. Hardened orbs I mistook for nuts were instead deer spoor. One of us was amused rather than disgusted by that.

"There used to be a pair of beavers here, migrated from the lake north of the wood. Don't go there. That is human land."

"What is a human?"

"Imagine goblins, but built to double that size, and athletic. Humans are agile and skilled in combat. The best among them wear metal for armor, and take me a few blows to keep down. Some are skilled in the ways of the bow or magic, and can do damage from a distance. My mother died protecting this wood from humans."

"They sound horrible."

"Their people have been a blight upon my folk. They fear and envy us, and that leads them to needless hostility. If we were closer to their nesting grounds, they would gather a group and clear this wood of everything that could be a threat to them. If they were unable to do that, they would let fire loose in the wood, sacrificing everything just to claim the ruined lands for themselves."

He went on about the monsters known as humans for hours.

You probably know about them already; I sat there, my attention grabbed by a horror story like none other. It was dark before he excused himself for his nightly rounds.

What would I do if humans came, if they killed Eihtfuhr? How would I survive? I fell asleep atop the beaver mound, but not quickly, and my sleep was fitful and restless.

#

Say what you will about sleeping on a dome of sticks in the middle of a river, when you wake up with diarrhea, the river is right there.

Ugh. Goblin meat. I didn't even get swept that far downstream before everything passed. I lay there on the bank, taking a detailed status of my –

Wait a moment. My dietary needs had jumped again.

Sure enough, somehow I had gone to level 3 magical beast with no appreciable change in my status screen. Okaay… so I knew it wasn't an age thing, because of my longevity.

No *visible* changes. So something was changing, it just wasn't something I'd thought to track. Hrm, statistics with substats, skills with subskills, traits, powers, spells. Cultivation, magical development, biomass adaptions … I even had a sin tracker, whatever that was for.

So what was I missing? Something had improved…

My stomach grumbled, coinciding with a wave of nausea. I vomited on an empty stomach, but the hunger won the battle for my motivation in short order. I know, I know, but it didn't count as a point of Gluttony.

On the way back to the beaver den, I realized I had left the fish net at my previous camp. That net had made the last few days convenient, but it wasn't worth risking my life for. Foraging it was, then.

Vegetation was readily available, and had the advantage of not running away.

The good spots were all taken by animals, busy filling their own stomachs. I found a ripe tomato and a bit of digging uncovered a potato. And then, I had to race back to the river. Stupid diarrhea, stupid goblins.

It wasn't my best of days, but it wasn't my worst. I decided to watch a family of wild hogs – from a safe distance. Eyesight wasn't my best of senses, but I could get by on it.

Those gluttonous pigs had to have stomachs larger than my whole body, the way they ate. But I learned a good bit about how to forage from them. Mmm, better than watching bunnies.

Actually, I spent too long watching them, and was hungry again. I knew better than to try to compete directly with them – but there were acorns up in the trees, in bulk.

While not the most acrobatic of beings, I could climb when something was chasing me. I made it halfway to the buffet before finding myself on the ground, wondering what had happened. Well, I knew the gist of it.

I suppose I was lucky; a fall from much higher would probably kill me.

I nibbled on some grass while looking up at the nuts. I knew those were good food.

Wait – what was I doing? I had just swallowed some grass. Meh, it seemed that for all its lack of nutrition, I could digest it now. Nibble, nibble, nibble. There had to be real food around here somewhere.

I spent too long in a clearing, and had to sprint for cover when an avian took interest in me. Well, I suppose I was getting in good cardio for my Physical Training Regimen. Hey, I was almost about to earn my first weekly XP on that.

My first indicator of something wrong was the deafening cry of the hunting hawk. My second was the feeling of claws penetrating my side. I reflexively turned and bit, getting a mouthful of blood and feathers.

It went on like that for perhaps four or five seconds, both of us dodging and striking and just making a mess of each other.

With a cry of surprise and pain, the hawk was away. It had half its health left, I had less of mine and multiple Bleeding conditions. And I'd been so ready to say the day was shaping up earlier.

Obviously, I survived. But I didn't know that then, as I limped off to hide next to a tree root. I hadn't even registered my first combat XP. I had survived my first actual fight with a predator.

It took me two tries to slow my heartbeat, which only lowered it from racing to merely running fast. I needed to stop that bleeding quickly, before I passed out. Fortunately, there was a sage plant just a short walk away.

Sage is a terrible plant to eat, but pressing its leaves into wounds (which would be easier with prehensile claws) helps them to clot and reduces the chance of infection. That said, they itch like crazy and come right off if you go swimming.

I didn't pass out hiding under that sage bush, and the bleeding eventually stopped.

The rest of the day was vegetables, with an occasional nut or fungus. A helpful squirrel even left behind most of a tomato. I actually racked up more than my average daily take of biomass.

Eihtfuhr showed up before dusk, unusually early for him.

"Why didn't you drink the goblin healing potion?"

"The what?" I asked.

"The. Healing. Potion. The Potion. That. Heals. You."

"That sounds nice. What does a potion look like?"

He blinked, different eyes in sequence, not all at once.

"Follow." He said.

There was a large boar at my old campsite, but its interest was in the remnants of the corpses, not in the disordered pile of gear. Eihtfuhr retrieved a small glass bottle with a cork. Glass was shiny, but it had no nutritional value. Honestly, I hadn't been able to figure out what to use it for.

"Here. Drink this. No, don't swallow it whole! What are you doing?"

What followed was about five minutes of fumbling, somehow ending with the cork stuck on one of my claws, and the potion (most of it) in my mouth. I swallowed.

I immediately lost a day's nutrition.

"I see a countdown timer." I said. There was an indication that I'd get a full day's physical healing when the process finished.

"Good. How long is the timer?"

"It's an hour, whatever that is. No, wait. It's under sixty minutes." A full day's healing in an hour! I needed to learn how to make these healing potions!

"Has nobody explained time to you?"

I admitted nobody had. I'd just kind of… guessed, and watched the numbers go down. Sixty seconds per minute, now sixty minutes per hour. A day must be sixty hours long, I concluded. But I knew that was wrong, so I asked Eihtfuhr about it.

"How do you use your System timers without understanding time?"

"Okay, what is time?"

"You understand what numbers are?"

"Uhm? Yes. That's the way the status screen measures one thing being bigger than another, right?"

All his eyes shut at once. His breathing stopped. "You can't be serious."

I pulled the representation of my Truthspeaker class from my status window, and sent him a mental copy.

"How do you possibly use your System without knowing such simple things?"

"What's a System?"

FRUSTRATION. "I did think that might be your response. Let us talk as we walk back to your campsite. This is going to be a long night for both of us."

I nibbled as we talked. Corks have negligible nutritional value.