We find Kurt the lonely in one of the frozen tunnels that connects to the laminar river cavern. …Kurt has been staring at this wall of clear ice and charting in their tiny book for 30 minutes. The only thing they can see is some metal scrap that is more rust than iron and a plaque that is much the same. Do you understand how boring it is watching a little stigma stare at a coalition of rust that resembles a plaque who then tries to translate this mono-colored slab through the refraction of the ice.

“Rhhhhaaaaaaaaaahhh!”, Oh thank God, a wrathful and pain-filled yell echoes throughout the tunnel, like the sound you would make when you punch a man in the face after fighting through the pain of getting stabbed. Startled, Kurt falls to frozen ground; the hard leather cover of their journal softly clatters on the ground. Kurt then quickly grabs their small book and stuffs it under their hat and starts their pestiferous tapping of the sound of their dew claws as they run towards the sound.

…

We finally switch perspectives from that blot on my escutcheon to a new character! We follow the echoing yell to find a lovely cynocephalus leaning against the icy wall. She is wearing a warm black hiking dress and a dark green winter cloak, she is holding her side to stop the medium sized gash in her well-built abs from spurting a fountain of her maroon life juices all over the already stained tunnel. Around her are the remnants of a battle, sharp keratin spikes jut from every angle of the ice, some having been lodged into it so hard and fast that a sizable web of crags have begun to spawn at the points of impact. Blue and red iridescent blood is painted across the tunnel like one of those modern abstract art pieces where the artist had no idea what they were trying to say in the first place. The hand that isn’t stopping her from bleeding out is using the hem of her dark green winter cloak to clean her great sword of the nightmarish blood with a medium amount of effort due to her other hand being unable to stabilize the great sword and her bangs being so thick and low that they obscure her eyes.

The dog lady’s rather large ears perk up and she readies her still bloodied blade, a minute or so later the grating, clicking, and clacking of impotent little dew claws can be heard as the equally annoying little blue blot Kurt runs down the tunnel. Kurt is quickly stopped as the canid lass raises her sword’s tip up and thrusts until it pierced straight through Kurts tiny hat, in this state of fear Kurt blurts out the first thing that comes to their mind.

“Are you alrighT?”, says Kurt with some of the most genuine concern you will ever hear.

“P-pardon?” she asks as if she has threatened persons this exact same way 100’s of times and this is the first someone that hasn’t responded with angered shouting that she just put a sword to their face or a pleading cowardice not to be stabbed in the mouth, but in the face of a very sharp and long sword this naive little dullard responds with selfless kindness.

“Are you alrighT? You are graspiNg that rather gnarly wound.”, says Kurt with their weird non squeaky high pitch and their considerably less weird Blue koba accent where their voice warbles and they put emphasis on every 3rd syllable. The Blue Koba accent spawned from the Blue Koba’s rather information-dense language where entire paragraphs of information are represented by singular complex words such as elsoBararaRadollttoNko (which describes what paperwork Kurt needed to sign, where to sign it, and how to sign it) would be said with a warble between each syllable and every 3rd syllable accentuated to make sure the word didn’t run together.

“Um…no. I am not feelin’ alright.”, She raspily responds as she brings her greatsword back to her side and motions towards a dinner plate sized spike amongst the iridescent carnegie that is soaked in a distinct maroon colored blood. “I’m feelin’ much too light headed after pullin’ that quill out.”. She said this with the same tone that your friend would have after spilling room temperature soap on their least favorite shirt. Her voice has a light rasp like she has a bit of phlegm stuck in the back of her throat and she has an accent that is somewhat southern like you wouldn’t be able tell it was a southern accent unless it was directly compared to a midwestern american accent; as to why she has this accent I have much of a clue as you, we both just met her 6 minutes ago.

“I do not think you are supposEd to pull anythiNg out of wound or all blood comes out!” Noted Kurt in a rather worried tone as they pitifully rifled through their winter cloak for their 1st and 2nd aid kits.

“Yeah figured that after ma gash turned into a geyser.” she comments as Kurt pulls out their 1st aid kit and begins to approach her. She flinches a bit when Kurt reaches out one of weird little hands toward gNaRlY wound.

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“RelaX I am trained medicAl practitiOner.”. Which is true, after he was moved from being a mechanic (due to them helping ease the robots’ fears of death) they became a prison doctor which was terrible for their mental health due to prisoners taking the kindness that Kurt offered and attempting to twist that to their advantage, Kurt usually didn’t have the clearance and had to tell the prisoners they couldn’t get the item they wanted, this in turn led to some of the most enjoyable and violent one-sided yelling matches you will ever witness, including a very memorable attempt on Kurt’s life by an Elvish baron who attacked Kurt after they gave them baby carrots instead of actual babies. Even Kologru found these vicious quarrels amusing as they quote “Show the depravity that one falls to as they attempt to maintain the status quo that is their loneliness. This depravity then drives others to the nearly bottomless pits of despair and loneliness that they find themselves in.”, I then told Kologru that he was misreading the situation in which his response was telling me to “Invaginate your form so you can fuck yourself right off.”. Yeah Kologru is a snob.

“I am Kurt the Koba by way.” Utters Kurt as they examine lady fido’s laceration, perhaps as a way to break the 3 previous minutes of incredibly awkward silence.

“I’m Jack. Jack Christophdathr.”, finally we got a name to go with that hair covered face…

Oh man she’s christian or the daughter of a Cynocephalus named Christopher, which for most of these mut men is like your father being named Muhamed.

Jack winces a bit as Kurt examines her wound. “I am going to clean and patch wound up the best I can for now, then I will start fire so you may properLy heal.” Kurt then begins to gather the keratin spikes to act as fuel which will probably smell like burnt hair. Before the silence has a chance to get awkward Kurt finds it best to break this tranquil peace and starts to yak, “I used to work at KologRu before doing this. If you do not mind me asking what did you do before coming to outer KologRu?” Kurt had rehearsed this exact same icebreaker along with 14 others for every night for the past 9 droning years and you can tell in their inflection with it being an almost nervous monotone as this the first person that wouldn’t emotionlessly taz them if they tried to conversate with them.

“My sister friend and I were the bodyguards for some monks as we’re headed to a town in Everywhere.” While not important to anything right now due to Everywhere’s very nature it will definitely be important later. Due to the mostly non-euclidean and entirely inconsistent nature of this once transitional space of the multiverse; this Realm of Nightmares has no consistent or reasonable layout of space or time, the closest thing you could get to a map is to get at least 4 industrial-sized cork boards, the type where you need to get a specialists to install them, enough pins, post-its, and yarn to stock a 1st world country, and an S.S. Titanic’s worth of schizophrenics, amnesiacs, and perfectionists to constantly connect locations, correct location connections, and debate location connection correction corrections. There are a few exceptions to this inconsistency of the Realm such as the beautiful tropic homeland of mermaids (it’s too good for them) and the Glass Desert, homeland of those fashion obsessed slavers otherwise known as the Yellow Koba, the most notable exception is Everywhere which unlike other static mappable places you can get to nearly everywhere from Everywhere with a modicum to extreme amount of effort. Despite Everywhere’s nearly omnipresent connections the actual land quality of the land is utter dog-shit, the soil can barely grow anything, there are only like 3 even somewhat fine places to build a town and one of those places is infested with kinda giant vampires, and the entire place smells of licorice for some reason.

“Then why are you alone? Are there others that need help?!”, Says Kurt in their pitiful voice as they lift their head from the fetus of a fire they have just started.

“No, they should be fine… I hope. I got separated from ma group for just a bit and the next thing I know is the freezin’ ground underneath ma feet.”

Kurt is stumped about what to say next. All books they had on icebreakers never really specified what to say next. So nervously they switch to the next best thing, another far too well practiced ice-breaker. “I like looking at snow dunes, do you like looking at snow dunes!?”, they nervously shout, the squeak of their voice nearly cracking the ice.

“Well I can’t really look at anything I’m blind”,

“I could not tell this… so do you like coffee or tea?” and now they're just going down the icebreaker list, this is going to get very mind numbing very fast so let's look at something else. I’ll be back in about a week.