For all the progress she’d made since her arrival, Liv still couldn’t help but look around at her soggy prison and despair. She had two overzealous puddles, a tree, and some damp prickly grass.
“This dungeon blows. My players would never have accepted something this puny,” she grumbled, chin propped on her palm in a thinking pose. She was doing her best, but it still didn’t feel very ‘dungeon-y’. Still! Discoveries were being made every day! She stood and straightened her studded jacket before heading to the southern edge of her ‘home’.
There, tucked into a patch of inch-high grass sprouts, was a cluster of Venus fly traps. At least, Liv was pretty sure that’s what they were. She honestly couldn’t be certain if Venus Fly Traps were some kind of genetic monolith or if there were variations that might indicate some kind of subspecies. Hell, even if she’d been a botany nerd, she wasn’t sure it would have helped much. Plenty of things seemed similar here to back home, but where there were giant salamanders and walking shrubs, who could really know?
She’d experimented a bit with one of the patches of carnivorous plants, investing some energy into growing the things into palm-sized mouths that would make Italian plumbers nervous. They didn’t offer her as much SP regen as other shrubs of similar size but made up for it when they caught a snack. She’d seen the thing snap up two mice and a small bird thus far. It was… pretty horrific, really, but interesting to watch in a morbid sort of way.
She turned back to look at the lone mangrove tree. She really wanted to play around with it a bit, but it was such a sizable chunk of her incoming SP that she was a bit too nervous to mess with it yet. It irked her, though. The tree felt like a feature she needed to figure out before she could use it to its fullest extent. Wandering around it on the surface of the water, she pondered for a while before her attention was drawn to a familiar shrub.
Liv walked to the shore and knelt beside the dormant Bushwhacker. He was probably the most overtly magical thing here, and she’d already looked him over a few times. It felt like there was more there, though. More mysteries to uncover.
It had taken some doing, but she had eventually discovered that Bushwhacker produced more passive SP when he was dormant, as he was now, than when he was actively moving around. It was a shot in the dark, but her running hypothesis was that some portion of that energy coming from photosynthesis and the removal of nutrients from the soil was taken up by his own body when it came time to move, leaving less flowing into her.
“I wonder if I could redirect passive SP regen to achieve something similar,” she thought aloud. If she could figure it out, the possibilities were endless. She wished Skye was there. That cottage-core nerd would be able to tell her all about- SKYE!!
Liv froze, grasping her head. Holy SHIT, Skye!! The name evoked an image of nut-brown skin, broad features, and a large mass of black curls over hazel eyes. Feelings of warmth.
“What the hell?!” Liv hissed in a whisper. How had she forgotten? Her head throbbed, causing her to grit her teeth. It was all still so fuzzy. Skye… She was important. Skye was… was…
/A dazzling smile, from between potted succulents perched atop a cubicle wall./
/A bright, full laugh at some sardonic one-liner Liv had spun out. The dark-skinned woman leaned heavily on the soda machine in her mirth./
Friend? Coworker! Okay! Now she was getting somewhere. Why was a coworker so important?
/The beating of a strong heart thrummed in her ear via the soft, warm skin pressed against her face. Skye’s breath hitched as a slick heat coated Liv’s fingers./
“Woah!” Liv blinked rapidly. “Okay, yeah, definitely more than coworkers.” No memories of home, though. No shared closets, no nights spent in front of the TV… Was it new? The feelings hit her like a freight train, but there was nothing there to suggest a long-standing relationship.
/A heavy bass pounded through the floor, vibrating in her bones. The pulsating lights played tantalizingly over the shimmering sparkles and makeup Skye was wearing as she swayed to the music. The curvaceous woman grabbed Liv by her tank top, pulling her close./
The tank top! Liv looked down. She wore the same clothes she had in that memory. That was the night. She’d been with Skye on the night she’d… died…
The crimson-haired punk slowly loosened her grip on her head, cracking her neck as she tried to take a breath and calm down. She’d taken three slow, deep inhalations before the oddity of her surroundings struck her.
The surrounding swamp went still and silent, causing the hair on the nape of her neck to stand on end. It wasn’t just her own critters that had stilled. The echoes of birds and chirping of insects from beyond the foggy veil had stopped as well. Standing slowly, she turned to survey the area.
She stifled a gasp on pure instinct, as a primal part of her psyche reacted to being so close to a large predator, the lizard brain heedless of her ethereal state. Before her, slithering silently into the first pool, was an absolutely massive gator. Masque was big, sure, but this thing was an armored, prehistoric killing machine.
It took her far too long to get her wits back, and whisper fiercely to her critters.
“Nobody move! Stay. Still. Hide.”
The ten-foot reptile slid into the shallow pool and paused. It began to look around, turning in place and actively scanning its surroundings in a way that Liv would not normally have associated with a tiny-brained lizard. There was intent in those eyes.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
The specter of a woman staggered back, mouth agape, as the gator reared up out of the water. Scales rippled and flexed over muscles that flowed like water, the shape proving more mailable than base nature could possibly explain. Then, standing in tepid water up to its mid-calf, stood a scaled, frill-crested, roughly humanoid lizard.
“Ho-ly fu-king shit…” Liv breathed. Whelp, there went DEFCON 2. She might have jumped the gun on that one, but in this moment it felt justified. The lizard man cocked its head, tilting a tiny ear hole in her direction. Could it hear her?! No, it had to be something else. She was looking around to see what could have caught his eye when the lipless maw opened and spoke.
Hissing, clicking, growling syllables shaped entirely alien sounds; but it was clearly language. She could hear the cadence of structured communication in there. Now if only she had any way of knowing what the heck it was saying.
It held out a clawed hand, palm out, towards the misty barrier to Liv’s tiny world, as if signaling something she could not perceive. She crept closer, striding across the top of the water till she could look it in the eye, safe in the certainty that she was already dead. What was it going to do? Double kill her?
“Yeesh. Somebody ate his lizard Wheaties.” She murmured, looking it up and down as the being tipped its nose upward and loudly sniffed at something in the air. “I’m, like, six one in these boots, and your shin-deep in the water. Dang.” She was trying to do the math in her head to see just how tall the lizard man was when it spoke again. It gurgled and growled out in a rhythmic pattern, pulling a tiny leather flask from its hip. A dipped claw in the dark green slurry traced a fine ring about each of its eyes. Was this a spell? Was she getting to see some honest to gods MAGIC?!
The lizard’s eyes blazed with a pale blue as the spell took hold. Then, as Liv was less than a foot away from the being, trying to better observe its actions, those burning blue eyes snapped right onto her face. Liv screamed, flailing, and the lizard man’s head bobbed backwards on its lengthy neck, pulling away in a slightly more dignified indicator of surprise.
“HOLY HELLA!” Liv exclaimed, pressing her hand to her chest to still a heart that wasn’t there. The scaled humanoid tilted its head, questioningly.
“You!! You can see me?!” she waved her hand towards its nose. The sight of somebody trying to back away from her outstretched hand had never filled her with such elation till now. Before she could say anything more, though, the lizard spoke again.
Nonsense. Complete gibberish. But it was obviously speaking TO HER. It gestured toward itself, making sounds Liv had no way to remember or replicate. Then, in a movement that left her entirely stunned, the scaled shapeshifter BOWED. It hunched forward at the waist, dipping till the frill atop its head dipped below the level of her chin.
“Wha? Uhhh… I don’t- Am I supposed to-?” Live gave up and just returned the gesture. She had no way of knowing how the lipless being before her felt about that. It wasn’t the most expressive of faces. The next sentence out of the scaly entity came with a distinctive upward lilt in the final syllable. The lizard man held a one palm out, with his head cocked at an odd angle.
“I don’t understand.” Liv slowly shook her head, then pointed at her ears. Hopefully he didn’t interpret that as ‘I’m deaf’ or something. Patiently, it tried again. Liv was pretty sure those were new sounds, and the almost iguana-like creature now emoted even more broadly. He cupped his taloned hands at the center of his chest, before pushing them outward towards her. Her knitted brows and small frown must have clued him in to her utter lack of comprehension, because he seems to give up on speaking for the moment.
He strode past her, looking all around her home. Liv felt a chill spike in her chest as she considered that he may be looking for her little friends. She was about to protest when he spied the massive fly traps and knelt to inspect them.
“You… want plants? I can grow plants,” she offered futilely, as this reptilian visitor seemed to come to a decision of some kind. Tilting his head upward, it gave several coughing caws that echoed faintly, and motioned towards the fog.
“I don’t understand. You want me to follow?” she pointed at herself. “I’m stuck here, bro. I got nothin’.” From the mist came another scaled entity, carrying with it a pouch that looked like it had been made from the head of a deer. The first being took it, placing a clawed hand over it and bowing its head, whispering softly.
“Are you… praying?” Liv wondered to herself, wishing more than anything that she had some way of communicating. The first thing she’d ever encountered from the outside that was aware of her, and she ran into a damned language barrier!
The sack bearer motioned, beckoning something outside to come closer. More scaled faces peeked through the gray wall. A whole group of them. Seeming to sense her confusion, the praying one, leader maybe(?), motioned broadly towards the group. Then it turned and uncurled one arm in an upwards brushing motion towards the opposite side of her tiny pond.
When Liv didn’t respond right away, it clicked and hissed, moving one arm languidly to indicate the group again. Then that same arm dropped down to skim the water, its talons making a walking motion that parted the pond scum, and then drawing up again to point at the other side.
“You… you want to cross?”
A tilted head was the reply, incomprehension was a two way street.
“You…” She stepped over towards the group and motioned with arms out wide.
“Want to walk…” She made an exaggerated March across the surface of the pool to the other side, then pointed out into the fog. “To the other side?”
The lizard leader bobbed it’s head up and down enthusiastically. She really hoped that meant yes but how the devil could she know?
“Uh… yeah. Sure! Go ahead I guess.”
She made a dramatic bow, motioning with one hand outstretched to the opposite side of her domain. The leader coughed and spat in a loud call over its shoulder, then stepped up to her and laid the deer-head bag at her feet. It bowed to her once more, and then walked into the mist.
“Did I just become a toll booth?” she asked, looking down at what was clearly an offering or payment of some kind. When she looked up again she was shocked to see a mass of people making their way through. Hulking, scaled, sharp fanged lizard people. At least thirty of them. They wore loose mail made of bones and shells, and hefted thick, sturdy looking spears in their hands. Many of them bore wounds as well, in various states of repair. Some looked natural, like a gnarly scoop of a bite missing from one of their tails. Others were most certainly man made. The still bleeding slices of a whip marred one’s back while another had an oddly rectangular patch of skin on their arm that was missing… They all shared the same grim looks. One thing was for sure, these guys were ready for action.
It dawned on her, finally, what she was looking at. A term from her American history books in grade school came to fill the gap in her lived experience. A war band. This was a war band.
“Gods be with whoever pissed you guys off. They’re gonna need all the help they can get…”