It’s a good thing that modern technology hadn’t mastered mind-reading, yet. If it had, Dimen-X surely would have outfitted my transmitter with that capability, and I’d have a hard time explaining my thoughts, at that moment. Not that they seemed very put off by anything I did or said in the past. After RENA stopped recommending therapy, she mostly left my mental state alone. Maybe Dimen-X wanted a crazy person. Maybe they thought they could use that. There’s a thought.

I could see why Naomi was annoyed when she had had to use her staff. I had done my best to use the tiniest bit of mana - after all, I didn’t want to burn my own face off - and even so, I was exhausted. Perhaps it was less exhaustion than before, but it was hard to tell.

I was falling, rows and rows of stone spikes flitting past as I descended. The walls seemed to grow farther apart, until finally I couldn’t see the walls at all, even before everything else disappeared. It must have been a long fall, since I had time to think. The abyss was still nothing but inky blackness below me, and soon I was embraced by it, unable even to see Tom beside me. I slipped the ring back on my finger in the dark - which seemed to have no immediate effect - and hoped that it would stop me before I hit the ground, and fell into a daydream.

It was not my life flashing before my eyes, luckily. I didn’t want to relive that. I wished I could erase it, forget it. I would just be another NPC, then, and that would both be a relief and a tragedy. But I would never know it was a tragedy. So then is it, really?

Instead, it was a version of a recurring dream I sometimes had. Not the one with the woman and the field and the house in the country - but it occasionally featured the same woman.

In this dream - daydream, in this case, though it was hard to tell in the darkness whether I had fallen asleep, or not - there was Tom. There was always some combination of sex, violence, and Tom. Other details changed, but those were constants.

Sometimes I was Tom, and I would sleep with the woman from my dreams, and then I would kill myself in some spectacular fashion - jumping off of a building into a crowded street, or recorded live with thousands of viewers, guilt-ridden from robbing my friend, or else from a final sort of satisfaction.

Other times I was myself, and Tom was with the woman, and I shot Tom in a jealous rage, or beat him. Or else Tom was the woman - either all along, or suddenly, unexpectedly - and I wouldn’t realize it at first, and would sleep with the woman. Then the shock of it would drive me mad. I would kill him, then usually myself, as well.

Always Tom. Always sex. Always violence.

I never told Ms. Hayes about those dreams. You can imagine why. She’d have had a field day. Sent me to the loony bin, if they even still had those.

This time, there was only violence. I was punching Tom with numb fists. Bruising his perfect face, twisting the shit-eating grin.

Dimly, as if through water, I heard a terrible sound, back in reality. I couldn’t describe it if I tried, can only say that it sounded like what I imagined shooting a raw chicken out of a cannon into a concrete wall might sound like. I assumed that it must have been Nolan - perhaps he had hit a spike on the way down, or perhaps the ring was making me fall slightly slower, and he had reached to bottom first. I felt a little bad for him, despite it all. What a way to go. Splattered.

Before I knew it, I had stopped. One moment there was that dizzying sensation of falling, plummeting down into the depths of the planet. The next moment, absolute stillness. No impact. I just wasn’t falling anymore.

It is entirely possible I had been sleeping during the fall, and equally possible that I had been sleeping for sometime at the bottom before waking up. In fact, it’s more likely that these things happened than that they didn’t, as I didn’t feel the exhaustion any more. But it felt like very little time had passed.

I opened my eyes, and I was staring at red-tinted mud, about an inch from my face, my nose nearly touching. The moisture of it brought to my attention another way things could have gone wrong - if there had been a pool of water at the bottom of the pit, would I have hovered above it? Or would I have plummeted down only to stop an inch above the very bottom, and drowned? That is, if I didn’t break all of my bones when I hit the water. I was still a novice when it came to magic, and so I knew I’d gotten lucky.

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I got to my feet - an interesting maneuver, with the ring on - and stood. Naomi’s staff was still in my hand, and my slingshot still on my belt. Everything was accounted for except my drows - I had let go of it, of course. I only hoped the material it was made of would survive the fall. I assumed it would. Finding it would be another thing, though.

I slipped off the ring, and my boots hit the wet ground with a splat. I looked around, happy to see that the ambient lighting had returned. Then, as things came into focus and recognition dawned, I half-wished it hadn’t.

I was in a large, flat space. The ambient lighting was that hellish-red, but I realized quickly that it wasn’t the sole reason for the red earth. The dirt was soaked in blood.

Like something out of a nightmare, bones jutted out of the ground everywhere, legions of the dead broken against the pit’s bottom, refusing to sink below the surface. Littered among the bodies was trash of every description, and rats scurried among the wreckage, tearing bits of rotting meat from newer bones. These were not Kalamuzi, just regular rats, though large.

None of this was as dreadful as the omphalos.

I assumed that’s what it was. If Naomi had not given me the name, I would have only seen it as an enormous pile of flesh.

It rose above me like a gigantic beehive made of bodies and refuse, made of interlocking meat and bone and steel and leather and all manner of garbage heaped up impossibly. It was as tall as a ten story building, at least, and was domed at the top, and it was banded with bands of doors, and the doors led to wide avenues which hung suspended in the air - some by ropes, others supported by wood, bone, and old weapons, and other simply collapsed. And down these avenues walked Kalamuzi - dozens of them, hundreds of them.

The mound was still far off, luckily. None of them could see me from where they walked.

The smell was as unbearable as the sight, and I retched. It seemed to sting my nostrils, and the only solace was that before long, it was as if my sense of smell was so overwhelmed that I simply couldn’t smell anything, anymore. Like how staring into the sun might make you blind - breathing in the coppery scent of blood, the sickening miasma of rot - it made my nose senseless.

When the vomit came, there was a relief to be done with it. It was going to happen, so might as well get it over with. I wiped my mouth.

If I had fallen down there at some other point - even just before Nolan had arrived - I would have despaired. I might have just curled up on the fetid ground, and waited to be picked clean by rats, rather than face this horrifying reality.

But now, I was focused. I understood myself, fully. Dimen-X had sent me to discover wealth - I had done a better job of discovering myself.

I was full of hate. Specifically, I hated Tom. Maybe someone would think badly of this, but I didn’t. It’s who I was. I wasn’t Tom. I was the guy who was going to beat the shit out of Tom. I could live with that.

Would I keep copying other people? Of course. I was still a parasite, still a broken NPC. But my understanding had deepened. I was a true parasite - one that killed its host, drained it of all it had. Not because it had to, though it did. But because it hated its host. And because that hatred, that parasitism, defined it.

In my hand was Naomi’s staff - I had every intention of returning it, but for now, it was mine, scavenged, a part of my collection. Joining it was a slingshot taken from her dead ally, and an extra steel ball looted from a long-dead adventurer. My fire magic was ripped from the dying breath of a Aryote, and the ring and the melting magic robbed from under Berenguer’s nose. The move I’d used against Nolan had been fleeced from Susanna’s fight with Cadoc. Even my body, my face, was stolen - copied painstakingly from Tom.

I was a scavenger, a thief, and I took what I had to, which was everything.

If I wanted to get home again, I had to take. If I wanted to pay off my debts, my mom’s debts, I’d have to take. If I wanted to see my friends again, if I wanted to see Tom again, if I wanted to punch his nose in, I’d have to take, and take, and take.

By all means, Nolan should have been the one walking away from that fight. But he wasn’t. Because I took his place. First I took his sword. Maybe I even took his honor, like he accused me of. I took mental photos of his lover, and guilt wouldn’t keep me from looking at them, because maybe they would keep me going. I took his sword, his honor, and then, finally, his life.

Suddenly, a question. It was strange how random the timing seemed to be, but that was something to consider another time. That alien dimension was asking me a question - the same question it had been asking me the whole time, ever since I had arrived. I hadn’t been able to hear it before, only knew it was a question, only knew my answers were yes or no. But it was the question of my life.

Will you take it?

Yes.

I felt Nolan’s mana flow into me. Much of it seemed to vent out - electricity was not fire. But much of it I could use, and I focused on that. The heat that electricity causes. The burning. The destruction. My mana pool fed on these, and grew, and I felt stronger, reinvigorated.

I wasn’t crazy, and I wasn’t evil. I knew that. I’d suspected, at many times in my life, that I was, but I wasn’t. Is a tapeworm crazy for eating your food before it reaches your stomach? Is it evil?

Besides, unlike a tapeworm, I could use my parasitism and my stolen power for good. I could pay off my debt, pay off my mom’s debt, and rescue my friends. Sure, I would also use it to beat Tom, but so what? I deserved that. I would also be making Dimen-X lots of money. That was just the cost of doing business.

I looked around, and the bonefield didn’t seem so bad, all of a sudden. It was full of trash, and among that trash, there could be things I could scavenge. My drows would be somewhere, and I had to believe that my friends were here somewhere, too. This was clearly the Kalamuzi’s home, so Amaia and Naomi had to be, as long as they were still alive. If they weren’t there, I would simply take everything I needed to get to them.

As for Cadoc, that maniac would stay alive, somehow. And I’d find him.

I gripped Naomi’s staff tightly in my left hand, and began searching for my drows.