As the majority of my attention was on Camazotz eating his way through half a deer, a lower-level process was reading through his skill list. As usual, what I found was intriguing and raised more questions than answers.
[Improved Azoth Respiration (Death)]
In the lands of the dead, a black wind blows that no living thing may breathe. You have a scaling bonus to respiration of [Death]-aspected azoth, increasing with its [Death] aspect value (to a maximum of moderate).
This might have been the first confirmation by the system that I’d seen that azoth came in “flavors,” although it was such a genre staple that I’d assumed it was the case all along. I wondered if there was any correlation between azoth aspects and the various conceptual directions in which my skills tugged my dungeon mythos. Could there be goblin-aspected azoth? A goblin demesne? What would that even look like? I wasn’t even going to get into “the lands of the dead” and what that might mean about the cosmic geography of this world.
[Iron Stomach]
Large bonus to resist poison from food and drink. Large bonus to resist disease from food and drink. Small bonus to healing and durability of mouth, throat, stomach, and gut.
[Carrion Eater]
Prerequisites: [Iron Stomach]
Keywords: Mythos (Death)
You have learned to eat in the way of scavengers and crawling things. When eating meat, [Death]- or [Disease]-aspected penalties to food quality are treated as bonuses, and receive a small percent increase scaling with level. Shifts mythos towards [Death].
Interesting that [Iron Stomach] called out a specific body part like that. Had I seen any other skills that did that? [Chow Down], maybe: I’d have to double-check. [Carrion Eater] meant not just that Camazotoz could scavenge carcasses like a vulture, but that he was actually incentivized to do so — the fouler it was, the more sustenance he could derive from it. I wondered how high that bonus to nutrition went, and how it could manifest. Would supernaturally-healthy food have supernatural health benefits? As I was pondering that question, it occurred to me that Camazotz’s dietary powers were anti-synergistic with [Raise Zombie] — I needed those corpses for my undead army. Hell, I needed any corpse: I still hadn’t even tested that skill. New agenda item: locate and obtain a corpse. Did [Raise Zombie] work on animals?
I was getting sidetracked. Focus, girl. Skills. Camazotz skills, not Persephone skills.
[Ravenous Appetite] allowed Camazotz to voluntarily stack instances of the [Hungry] debuff on himself in exchange for the ability to eat with tremendous speed, and without limit on quantity. The skill even let him magically ignore the physical limits of his stomach’s capacity. That was straightforward enough, but it seemed pretty niche at first glance. I didn’t anticipate needing to win a lot of speed-eating competitions in my quest to overturn the order of this world. Its use-case became more clear, though, when I got to the last skill on Camazotz’s list. The cool-sounding one.
[Red-and-Black Feast Nourishes the Body].
Prerequisites: [Carrion Eater]
Cost: High
Duration: Indefinite
Keywords: Mythos (Death, Blood)
Life and death are your meat and wine. Partake of the red feast, and the black, and let your hunger grow as terrible as your appetite. While this skill is active, food consumed grants a very small permanent bonus to physical attributes, scaling with food quality, food [Death] and [Blood] aspect value, and skill duration elapsed. This skill may only be used once per month. Shifts mythos towards [Death] and [Blood].
Yeah, that didn’t disappoint. A skill with a long cooldown that cost too much to keep active for long, but that granted permanent stat bonuses? I could see why you’d want [Ravenous Appetite] — to maximize the amount you could devour during its limited uptime. I began making tentative plans to experiment, to find out how much Camazotz could eat in one sitting and how noticeable the effects of the attribute boost would be. Tentative, because the fact that it was early winter and our food supplies were dangerously low hadn’t changed. Ugh.
“So… what now?” Nar-shesh asked, staring at Camazotz. The great bat was hunched over what was left of the deer, staring back at the goblins as he licked his face clean of blood. For all he was twice their size and their equal in levels, he looked warier and more nervous than they did. “You said this is your second-floor boss?”
“Yup!” I said.
Nar-shesh dragged a hand down his face. “Persephone. Is this another Striga situation?”
“Um…” I said, as I considered the various things he might mean by ‘another Striga situation.’ They all had, for better or worse, the same answer. “Yes?”
He sighed. “Okay. Look, I don’t want to tell you how to run your shit, but that?” He pointed at Camazotz. “That is an animal.”
“Nuh-uh!” I said. “I gave him a person brain and everything!”
“What does that even mean, ‘a person brain?’” Nar-shesh asked, throwing his hands up. “That is an animal. He can’t talk, he can’t understand us when we talk-” He turned back to Camazotz. “Hey, can you talk?”
Camazotz just blinked at him, not responding.
“See, look!” Nar-shesh said.
“He can talk,” I said defensively. “He just doesn’t speak goblin yet. I can understand him just fine, and he understands me as long as I’m speaking in Apophic.”
“You realize that you sound like every single pet owner right now, right, when they talk about how their pet is smarter than all the other animals and really understands them?” he said sardonically.
“Camazotz, raise your right wing for me,” I said.
“Why?” he said, eyeing Nar-shesh uneasily.
I didn’t really have a convincing material incentive for him here, I had to admit. “Because it will… make me happy?” I said tentatively.
He thought about that for a second, then raised his right wing.
“See? Told you,” I said to Nar-shesh.
“All that proves is that he can obey basic commands. A dog or a hunting-hawk can do that. Striga can too, but just in case you forgot, she’s almost torn peoples’ throats out on multiple occasions for walking too close to her. She’s half-tame at best.”
“I feel like you’re being a little hard on Striga and Camazotz,” I said. “He’s been sapient for less than an hour, and she’s only been sapient for two weeks. How smart were you at two weeks old?”
He opened his mouth, then closed it, visibly wanting to claim that he’d been smarter than Striga at two weeks old even though he knew it was implausible.
“Wait, hold on,” Teekas said. “Striga’s only two- no, of course she is, you’ve only been here that long anyway…” Her brow furrowed in thought, lips pursed cutely. “Nar-shesh, I don’t think it’s fair to call them animals.”
Thank you! That’s what I’ve been saying!
“They’re more like children.”
…Wait, hold up. Hang on a second. I said as much: “Wait, hold up, hang on a second. Children? How do you figure?”
“Well, I mean, it’s not a perfect analogy, but think about it. Let’s accept that they’re not animals, that they have the capacity for thought and learning but haven’t had much time to do it. They don’t know how to communicate, how to interact with other people as part of a family or a tribe. They don’t know who they are, really.”
“Most babies can’t kill a full-grown hog with the knives that grow from their feet,” Nar-shesh said with a scowl.
“I said it wasn’t a perfect analogy!” she said, exasperated. “They’re a lot less physically helpless than a goblin child, sure. I just meant in terms of maturity. They don’t know anything yet. We’ll have to teach them.”
“Hang on, no, that can’t be right,” I said, feeling increasingly uneasy with the direction this conversation had taken. “They’re not children. I made them as weapons, to kill for me. That’s not…”
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
“Okay, look, even if I accept the premise that Striga and Camazotz are Persephone’s kids, that doesn’t change the fact that this is a Striga situation. A child shouldn’t be a [Boss] either! I’m not gonna treat a newborn like he’s my equal,” Nar-shesh said. “And I don’t think the others are gonna be wild about taking orders from one, either.”
Teekas rolled her eyes. “Oh, I see, we’re all for sticking it to the elders and bucking tradition until it benefits you personally,” she said. “Mister I’m-Level-10-Now-So-I’m-In-Charge.”
“It’s- That’s not-” Nar-shesh protested, face flushing. “It’s a practical objection! A kid can’t be, like, giving orders in war and leading attacks and shit!”
“I feel like we’re getting distracted from the real problem here,” I said. “Striga and Camazotz can’t be my kids, because if they were my kids, then that would mean that I created life with no thought other than what it could do for me, and imposed a whole plan and trajectory for its existence on it without bothering to ask what it wanted or needed, which would mean…” If I’d had eyes, I would have squeezed them shut as I groaned. My heart was racing, which felt like a lot more of a workout than it did when I was human since my heart was my whole body. “Oh no. Ohhhhhh no.”
“Persephone?” Teekas asked, concerned. “Are you alright?”
I let out a plaintive whine. “I’m a mom,” I said despairingly.
Nar-shesh and Teekas looked at each other for a moment. “Yeah, Persephone, I think you might be a mom,” Nar-shesh said, with only a little bit of sympathy.
“Do you wanna-” Teekas began to ask him.
“Yeah, I’ll go get Ergiza,” he said, having anticipated where her thoughts were going. “This seems like more her thing than mine.”
“What do you mean, this seems like more her thing than yours?” I said, with only a slight tinge of hysteria to my voice.
He shrugged. “Being a single mom? I dunno. Who else do you want advice from? Ninkur? Sarsu?”
“How about the two of you?” I hissed in embarrassment. “My right- and left- hand minions? My trusted confidants?”
They exchanged another glance. “Nah,” Nar-shesh said.
“No way,” Teekas agreed.
“Fine. Whatever. I don’t want to talk to her right now, though. I’m still grappling with the ethical implications of all this and also the fact that I am finally literally turning into my mother.”
That got a sympathetic grimace from Teekas, at least. “What are you going to do now?” she asked.
“I was gonna do some tests of Camazotz’s new body,” I said. “Make sure everything works right.”
“I feel heavy,” the bat chimed in. “And weird.”
“Case in point," I said. "And thank you, Camazotz, that's good to know. Teekas, Nar-shesh, could you two show him the way to the surface?"
----------------------------------------
Camazotz shivered as he stepped out into the central shaft, a cold breeze falling on him from above. “Alright,” I said. “First, we’re going to be testing your flight capability. Do you think you can make it to the top of this shaft?”
He looked up, red eyes glowing in the star-lit dimness. Rather than answer with words, he simply exploded into motion. His wing membranes caught the air with a sound like snapping canvas, and the wind of his launch sent a blast of dust and dry leaves in every direction. The shaft was barely wide enough for his full wingspan, less than a foot of space on either side, but he seemed unconcerned. Bats were, Wikipedia had once informed me, remarkably maneuverable in the air — more so than birds, even.
As he flew, my attention was less on the admittedly badass spectacle of a giant bat rocketing up out of my dungeon like, for lack of a more suitable expression, a bat out of hell, than it was on the function of Camazotz’s internal mechanisms. The great tapestries of his flight muscles blazed with electrochemical action as his wings tore through the air. I watched his very bones flex and bend under the force of his exertions. They were supposed to do that, though — that was normal for bats in flight — so I wasn’t worried. At the center of the engine of his body were his lungs and heart, and boy, they were going. I’d read once that a bat’s heart could beat more than a thousand times per minute in flight. That was impressive when their heart was the size of a gumball, but it was downright ridiculous at Camazotz’s size.
As ridiculous as it was… I realized, quickly, that it was both too much and not enough. Camazotz’s circulatory system had already sprung half-a-dozen tiny leaks just from the pressure of his blood moving through it. Even as his heart raced and lungs frantically pumped, though, his muscles flooded with something that I assumed was lactic acid — I couldn’t see its molecular structure or anything, but it tasted like sour fatigue in my domain awareness. He physically couldn’t take in enough oxygen to fuel this level of physical activity. Sure enough, he only almost made it to the top of the shaft. Just a few yards from the surface, he slammed himself against the wall of the shaft, taloned paws digging for purchase on the stone. He hung there for a moment, panting for breath, before hacking up a mouthful of mucus and hauling himself the rest of the way up the shaft. He emerged in the cold night air and collapsed again, rolling onto his back and looking up at the stars. “Heavy,” he said, panting for breath. “Why am I… so weak?”
“That’s my bad, honestly,” I said. “I underestimated the metabolic demands of flight.”
“Metawha?” he said, twitching an ear in confusion. It was incongruously adorable on so fearsome a monster. I tamped down an urge to make stupid baby noises at him or give him scritches with the limbs I no longer had.
“Metabolism is when your cells — no, never mind, that’s too complicated to get into right now. I made you bigger to make you stronger, but I didn’t make you strong enough for how big you are now. Does that make sense?”
“No,” he said, looking both totally lost and frustrated that he was lost.
“Okay. Don’t worry about it, then,” I said. “I’ll fix it. This is why we’re doing tests, to see what I still need to work on about your body.”
Reinforcing his arteries with more vascular smooth muscle was simple enough, but I didn’t have such an easy solution for the demands placed on his heart and lungs. The heart needed more pumping power, that much was obvious, but I couldn’t just… make it bigger, could I? Wasn’t having an enlarged heart a bad thing for humans? Made you more likely to have a heart attack and shit? Plus, I was worried about the mechanical stresses on the heart tissue itself of pumping such a large volume of blood so rapidly. Maybe that was silly, though — whales had fucking massive hearts and theirs worked just fine, right? Then again, whale hearts were built for the exact opposite purpose of bat hearts — they beat slow to conserve energy and oxygen while whales dove deep underwater — and if I recalled correctly a whale’s heart was actually the smallest percentage of its total body mass among animals, whereas bat hearts were proportionately the largest.
Man, maybe the flesh-shaping powers should have gone to somebody with a biology degree. I didn’t know what I was doing! I had a big collection of random trivia, not a systematic understanding of meat mechanics!
“‘M thirsty,” Camazotz panted. I absently pointed him in the direction of the small surface stream that fed my third-floor water features. He stumbled off towards it on the ground, still growing used to his new gait. I kept half an eye on him as I continued chewing on my cardiopulmonary design dilemma. If the size of his heart was limited, but I needed more power… could I just add another heart? Would that work? Or maybe that was a dead end, and I’d have more luck targeting his blood oxygenation for improvement. Simple geometry was my enemy here: the square-cube law meant that at his increased size, Camazotz had more volume to oxygenate but proportionately less surface area in his lungs for gas exchange. I could make his lungs bigger, but he’d probably need to be breathing pretty rapidly during flight, so I had a similar problem there as I did with his heart.
Ugh, flight was hard! And complicated! Did I really need my second-floor boss to be able to fly? Were the spike caves even big enough for him to do so, now? Even if they were, he didn’t really need to be capable of sustained flight, he just needed to be able to stay airborne long enough to not impale himself on the spikes. I had a sneaking suspicion that this whole project might have been another ill-considered boondoggle, like my core room door.
It was in this mood that I found Camazotz, having submerged most of his head in the shallow stream in order to take great gulps of water. “Hey, Camazotz,” I said. He looked up in surprise, searching for the source of my voice. “If you had to, do you think you could get used to not being able to fly?”
His eyes widened. “No!” he said. “No! I can fly!”
“You might be too big to fly now,” I said, awkward and guilty. “At least, to fly for long. I’m not sure how to fix that. I’ll keep working on it, but-”
“No!” he repeated. “I’m not too big! I can fly! I can fly!” He was breathing faster, backing away from the hill-fort like he was about to start running. I looked into his glowing red eyes and saw distress there, genuine and deep.
It occurred to me that his statements might not be simple denials of reality. It could be that he was expressing his feelings as best he could with the limited vocabulary he had. He didn’t even have language yet, not really — [Apophic Tongue] was doing a lot of heavy lifting to distill the intent and emotion behind his animal vocalizations. Maybe for him there wasn’t a clear-cut difference yet between “I can fly,” “I want to fly,” and “I have to fly.”
“I’m not too big!” he said again. It was almost a snarl, this time, anger alongside the fear. Accusatory. He understood that I had done this to him: I’d said as much, repeatedly. It’s not my fault, his expression seemed to say. This isn’t fair. You made me this way.
It was a feeling I knew well. Seeing it from this side of the equation was new, though. It didn’t feel great. God, I really was turning into my mother. I sighed, deeply, and did my best to speak in a calming and reassuring tone to my giant, mutated bat son. “Okay, Camazotz. You’re right. You’re not too big. I’ll keep working on it. I’ll make sure you can fly again.”
A little bit of the anger and fear bled out of him, at that, but he still looked wary and half-ready to run, which I thought was fair. I wasn’t going to be winning any mom of the year awards based on my performance so far. Still, it somehow hadn’t occurred to me until I got him up in the fresh air that he could just… leave. Fly off into the night if he didn’t like how things were going. He had no loyalty to me, just an instinctive deference born of my [Boss] skill. I found the prospect alarming, and not just because of the potential loss of the time and effort I’d sunk into him. Camazotz was still a child. A powerful child, yes, and one already possessed of a bat’s ordinary suite of survival instincts, but his body and his capabilities were still new and unfamiliar. Atop that, as a level 10 monster, he’d attract attention — negative attention — in a way that an ordinary bat wouldn’t. He had no context for the dangers waiting for him out there. It was my fault he was facing those dangers now, of course, but still — at least if he stayed here, I could face them with him.
So how was I going to keep him here? Promise him food? Look at the size of him! He could hunt his own food, and he was already used to doing so. Promise him love? That felt both manipulative and unreliable. I needed to offer him something that was both immediately tangible and exciting. What did giant monster bats like? What did kids like? What did one-day-old boys who were also fully adult animals like?
Oh, wait, duh. Of course. This would even let me continue the test-drive of his new form.
“While I’m working on that, wanna go destroy some stuff?” I asked.