//Writing Soundtrack: FTL OST / Pokemon Mystery Dungeon - Through the Sea of Time (Extended) / Pokemon Mystery Dungeon - Dialga’s fight to the finish (GaMetal Version/Metal Remix)

It took a loooong time for me to get up to even the entrance. Surprisingly, I was not in danger of falling, once my claw-arms grabbed onto something it was actually harder to let go than to hold onto it.

I had once heard that birds cannot fall from branches in their sleep because of how their claws worked and I was pretty certain my claw-arms worked the same way.

However, just because I was safe from falling, didn’t mean that I could get up easily since my arms still were not obeying my commands. It was actually kind of scary how easily I could lift myself up with their help, easily carrying my own bodyweight with them. Not that I had lots in terms of body weight, but still.

Something I hadn’t even noticed until now was the fact that I was neither hungry nor thirsty. After this exercise I would have expected to be exhausted and hungry as I haven’t eaten anything since I had woken up. Not that I knew of anyhow.

When I arrived at the entrance of the starship I was a little surprised to see that the door panel still had power. It was glowing dimly, flickering from time to time, but it had not been bright enough to be seen from all the way down, despite the complete darkness in the room.

When I touched it there was a moment before it read something in a language I didn’t know, although I noted it wasn’t the same flowery text on the doors of the first room.

Alert: Mental Adaptation increased. [ERROR] overriding language barrier.

Alert: New Skill Acquired: [Universal Language Adaptation].

I had a moment of fugue again, as new information poured into my head from the new Skill I had just acquired.

When I came too I was sitting in front of the door, ripping pieces out from the metal around me with my claw-arms and eating them. The moment I realised that I immediately jumped up and away, throwing the metal piece in my hand against the door.

The only issue was that in my haste to get up, I accidentally jumped off the platform. I screamed as I fell down towards the ground, too far away from the starship to grip anything, even with my extended reach.

The landing hurt and I’m pretty sure I broke multiple bones. The pain was so bad I passed out for a moment, desperately clawing to keep conscious.

I lay there for a long while trying to cope with the pain. My right leg was just pure pain and when I looked down I saw that the chitin had broken and my leg bent unnaturally sideways.

Yeah, that one is thoroughly done. To my surprise and horror I wasn’t at all traumatised by it. I had never broken a bone in my life, but of those that I knew of that did, pretty much everyone told me that they had vomited from the pain. I wasn’t even feeling sick, just hurt and resigned.

The more I lived and experienced in this body, the more terrified I got of what I had become.

My left claw-arm was hurt, although not broken, and despite the pain I could still use it to climb back up. If I could get it to do that.

With the help of my arms, my tail, and my claw-arms I crawled back to the pile of stuff that I climbed up the first time. It seemed that having more limbs than normal wasn’t all bad. But I really had to get out of the habit of getting frightened by all the shit going on.

I mean, I still think eating metal is really weird, but at the same time, if instincts take over when I’m out of it, it couldn’t be bad, could it?

This time it took me far longer than the first time to finally arrive back at the top. And when I finally did I collapsed on the platform, unable to stop tears of pain. I was mentally exhausted and completely done with everything going on.

I looked up at the console and finally read what it said.

Error: Authorization Error

Missing permission to come aboard

I growled in frustration and was surprised to hear it was actually a terrifying sound. While my voice was a mixture between sugary and buzzing insect, my growl was more that of an angry tiger or lion.

Without any real thought put into it I slashed at it with my tail. Which turned out to be a very bad idea. There was a loud screeching noise as my tail simply ran through the panel, shattering it into a thousand pieces and leaving a long and deep scratch on the outside of the starship.

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“Oh, fuck!”, I exclaimed, words that sounded entirely unfitting in my new voice and I growled in frustration again.

Okay, I needed to calm down, since I felt myself slowly drifting into rage. I closed my eyes and slowly counted to ten, before I let out a breath and settled myself.

Then did a double take as I realised I had to manually breathe in to even breathe out! I haven’t taken breaths this entire time?! What’s next, I’m immortal or what?

With resignation I got up, taking the pressure of my broken leg with my claw-arm, and waddled over to the door, touching it, hoping this [ERROR], whatever it was, would help me.

Alert: Door control has been destroyed. Repair the Door control to reinstate Door functionality.

Great, just… great. Well, nobody to blame but myself. I sighed deeply, noticing that I had to actively breathe in first, and made my way slowly back down, looking for another way inside.

It took me a really long time, and mostly it was because I had to work my right claw-arm to not use my leg. It was quite difficult actually, if I wasn’t paying attention I ended up using that leg once more, which of course was not a good idea.

Eventually I ended up beneath the next entrance, thirty-three metres in the air, with no significant platforms to speak of.

“After this I would not be surprised to get a climbing evolution or something”, I said, more as a joke, but of course my Interface popped up once more.

Hexclaw Scuttler

This evolution path is tailored towards movement in a three dimensional underground area. It is physically strong and focuses heavily on movement both vertical and horizontal.

Alert: [Hexclaw Hatchling] NULL is eligible for Hexclaw Scuttler. Do you wish to choose this Evolution Path?

Y / N

“Hell no!”, I replied immediately, the Interface once more vanishing from sight.

“Can’t even fucking joke around here, jesus christ…”, I mumbled, before I began the long and arduous task of climbing up the side of the starship.

It took even longer than the previous climbs, but on the bright side I slowly started to get a handle on controlling my claw-arms. While I was still far away from being able to fully utilise them, at least I wasn’t flailing around all the time anymore, only about seventy percent of the time. Silver linings, eh?

When I finally arrived next to the door I found the door control display was off. I was about to get really angry when it blinked on, once I got closer to it.

I tapped it with my finger, which for a moment brought up the question of how chitin was reacting to touchscreens, but I dismissed the thought. Just one more mystery in a long list of impossible stuff currently happening.

Error: Authorization Error

Missing permission to come aboard.

Alert: Subject [Hexclaw Hatchling] NULL possess [ERROR].

Alert: Use [ERROR] to override?

Y / N

Well, at least this time it worked. I mentally assented, once more feeling a mental click as whatever [ERROR] was did its job. There was a moment of pause, before the panel flashed green and the door opened.

The inside was… not what I had expected. Well, honestly I didn’t even know what I expected, but it certainly wasn’t this.

While the hallways had a certain flavour of Sci Fi stories that I could remember, the inside of this starship was oddly… ship like. I mean, big container ship.

Most of the interior was made of metal, with only very few details made in other materials. And there was light! It wasn’t particularly bright, before I probably would have thought it dim, but with my new eyesight it was almost blinding.

The hallway I stepped into led deeper into the ship, with closed hatches all along it, probably to multiple storage or living areas, it seemed to be the theme with this civilization. Which, now that I thought about it, was oddly human-like. True, the language that I found so far was nothing like what I knew, but the rest was weirdly similar to the generally accepted human Sci Fi designs. And while it wasn’t a perfect match by any stretch of the imagination, I had to wonder what kind of species had lived here before it all went to hell.

I walked along the hallway slightly, continuing to use my right claw-arm as a stand in leg, until I eventually arrived in front of a big central complex with lots of stairs and what I assumed to be some kind of elevator platforms, or similar things.

I just hoped nobody was home. Considering the active electronics I was certain something was still around. Well, one could hope, right?

After a little bit of trial and error I managed to activate one of the elevators to move, and while it went down instead of up I at least found myself in something more safe than a giant open area.

When I stepped out of the elevator I found myself in what was obviously an engineering area. Lots of cables, pipes, and other weird stuff lined the walls with panels and valves everywhere. I found a big box of tools, almost all of them half rusted and damaged, but the box was big enough to block the entrance to the elevator, so with a lot of effort I pushed it in front of it, if only to give me a warning should something come down.

Cautiously I walked through all the different paths, some of them blocked, some locked, some damaged, until eventually I came to a room that was probably taking up a good part of the starship. I arrived on a platform about halfway up the walls, with a walkway that went all around the edges of the room, with stairs going up and down in each corner.

In the middle of the room a gigantic… thing hummed and flared. It seemed to be a mass of energy or matter, weirdly black yet not, that was slowly undulating. I had no idea what it was but it immediately captured my attention. The way it moved was almost hypnotic and something about it just pulled me in.

A small part of my mind told me that it was a very bad idea to touch it, but I just couldn’t help myself. From the edge of the walkway my extended claw-arms were just long enough to reach, and so I did. The moment my claws connected with the weird bubble surrounding the mass of something everything spiked in a massive amount of pain, as if my entire being was ripped apart. It almost felt like something was ripping my soul out of me, it defied all equivalent forms of pain until the world finally went black.