The first thing I heard after my birth made me want to crawl back in the womb or just re-roll another life.
“PRAISE WYXNOS! A GIRL!”
“PRAISE WYXNOS!’
“PRAISE WYXNOS!’
“PRAISE WYXNOS!’
“PRAISE WYXNOS!’
“PRAISE WYXNOS!’
“PRAISE WYXNOS! A GIRL!”
“PRAISE WYXNOS!’
“PRAISE WYXNOS!’
“PRAISE WYXNOS!’
“PRAISE WYXNOS! A GIRL!”
“PRAISE WYXNOS!’
“PRAISE WYXNOS!’
“PRAISE WYXNOS!’
“PRAISE WYXNOS! A GIRL!”
Etcetera...
Fuck it. Fuck them.
Maybe I should explain my situation. Covered in after-birth gunk, with a terrible headache, I found myself surrounded by gnome males with stubby beards and steampunk clothes and paraphernalia, while my newest mother was tended by a midhusband. You heard it right, not a midwife, but a midhusband. Besides my mother and I, there was no other female in the… room? Cave? Definitely not a building. The roof was caked in soot from the torches burning lard stuck to the nooks and cracks in the cave walls.
The gnomes were lanky, with bones poking out of some spots. Was I in the middle of a streak of famine again? They seemed to have enough leather and monster parts, as the bed frame was made of bones and furs. I could hear the sounds of machinery in the distance. The hubbub of voices echoing in the caves. Yes, definitely a cave. Steampunk starved savage cavemen gnomes. Couldn’t get worse than that.
This gnome species told me to hold their beer. Boy, oh, boy.
Worst of all, these gnomes were staring at me as if they wanted this fiction to be deleted again [1]. That or they were baby-eating cannibals. At that point in time, my guess was fifty-fifty either way. But the sounds they made besides exulting the name of the God of Armani Suits didn’t sound like gormandizing groans. I wanted to run away but couldn’t do anything. I didn’t even have teeth to bite my tongue or access to my Perks so I could commit suicide. Fortunately, nothing happened. A midhusband cleaned me up and wrapped me in some unclean rags.
Once they left me alone, I tried to contact Nenandil. Nothing happened. NOTHING! Pandora? Might as well have never existed.
That’s when I freaked out for good and started to cry at the top of my lungs.
The midhusband approached and took me to my mother, and once again a nipple was unceremoniously shoved in my baby mouth so I could do what babies did to lactating nipples. At least the nutty peanuty peanut gallery had vacated the premises.
“What should we name her?” Mom asked.
“I’d rather let the husband decide on a name,” the midhusband that sounded much like some sort of father figure or patriarch raised a metaphorical red flag. “She seems healthy and strong, she’ll fetch a good price. And she’ll get a good husband, I’m sure of it. How’s she sucking?”
“Strong!” Mom cooed. “I think I want to call her Nokkibotemp Wromila.”
I almost named myself Misbirthilla. Seriously, if it weren’t for the fact that Lorna was probably among these Wyxnos-fanatics pedo-feral gnomes, I’d have hit the button now. If I could.
“No. She’ll be named by her future husband. Tomorrow, we’ll show her to the other clans and auction her off. We are going to make a fortune in scrap,” the midhusband that from their body language was probably husband without the mid, declared with finality.
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During my first day, I learned that these gnomes were stuck in the middle of a freaking desert. I found a lot of sand and silt stuck in some of their clothes and armor and in the corners of the cave. They had no currency and settled everything on barter among the clans. Mostly monster parts, and scrap. They had foundries where they melted broken, bent, and rusted metal armor and weapons. Maybe from a nearby Dungeon. They scavenged dead adventurers.
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But the volume and state of disrepair of the junk I saw them carrying told another story. No way they had this many dead adventurers this old in this quantity in a nearby Dungeon. These gnomes didn’t seem too strong or too powerful and I saw them using zero magic. Not even divine magic, given that of every five words they said, four were Wyxnos’ name.
Where the fuck did I end up?
They had not a single magical light. Not even the fifteen copper version you could buy anywhere in Windemere. All their light came from torches and the smell of burnt lard only added spice to the bouquet of sweat and carrion that permeated the whole cave system.
I also saw fuck all women aside from me and my mother. Seriously, I could be Snow White and the Ten Thousand Gnomes. Except I was one too. Everywhere I looked, male gnomes with their steampunk kitbashed junk armor and stubby beards whose hairs forgot how to grow or how to coordinate the direction of growth.
I too was almost only skin and bones, too small for even a gnome baby. Seriously, even accounting for adult size proportion, if a human baby was born like me, it would be shoved in the neonatal ICU back on Earth. And they thought it was normal. The only gnome with a modicum of body fat was my mother. Whose name I yet had to overhear.
I hated it. It was past time to shout “Lok’tar O’gar” and raid Mad Max Victorian Caveman Ironforge. Just like the good old times before everything went to shit with Cataclysm. Heh. Cataclysm. These gnomes could use one.
So instead of looking at poorly dressed malnourished gnomes, I focused on hearing the conversations around me. Several distinguished (read, less malnourished) gnome men came to take a look at me during the day. If I was going to be put up for auction then they were examining the merchandise beforehand.
But I endured the attention and listened to the conversations. This sub-species of gnome had a ridiculously skewed male-to-female ratio. Something in the ballpark of one in a thousand. How did they escape extinction was a baffling subject for research. The explanation came a bit before the slave auction. Trust me, if one is selling people against their will, that’s slavery.
Where was I? Oh, yes. Birth-gender-ratios and the survival of their species. The gestation period was only three months, and mothers usually gave birth to three to six gnomes. And they were fertile within days of giving birth. I had four other siblings, all of them male, and I never saw one of them. Male babies were taken to a lower cave level and nursed by the litter. And with gnomes this filth, litter was a proper collective noun for the babies. I decided to call a band of adults a “rubbish of gnomes”.
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Finally, the day of the auction came. I was wrapped in a stinky monster fur that itched like hell and taken to a grand cave. Mom didn’t come. It was a sausage party and I was the spirit of the party. The midhusband was there, in some patchwork armor that the trashdump of gnomes surrounding him thought was very impressive. Right, a new collective noun. A large gathering of these gnomes is a trashdump.
“Today, the Wurideneg clan will auction the finest baby girl these sands had never seen! Behold!”
He took me from the gnome carrying me and unceremoniously removed me from the furs and did the Lion King thing. Nants ingonyama bagithi baba to you too, steampunk midhusband. I had no option but to dangle from his arms, letting thousands of gnomes admire Simba in the flesh.
Genocide became my favorite word. Only two things stopped me from doing it. The least reason was that I was curious to know in what wretched part of Yznarian I was. Because I never heard of such a gnome tribe and most of the world was pretty civilized. They were too weak and low-level to survive in the demon side of the Scorched continent, and he mentioned desert. I knew of only a few deserts. And the major reason was that I couldn’t do Jack Shit.
“Let’s begin the auction! Who is going to give me the best price on this beautiful baby? Did you see how chubby she was? I bet she can birth ten warriors at once.”
Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Not gonna happen. Sorry, Lorna. I’m going to kill myself in a blaze of glory as soon as possible.
They started to bid with monster parts, monster meat, kobold heads, and scrap. Now, how did they evaluate the value of their pile of rotten rubbish? By literally piling it up on each corner. The gnomes were divided between eight clans and each occupied a sector of the grand cave. Each clan started to bring in wheelbarrows filled with scrap and moldy monster parts to dump on a big pile. The bigger pile would get the grand prize, me.
If I could use my item box, I’d buy myself free of this mess. Alas, Nenandil was M.I.A. and so was Pandora. A growing fear was settling in my heart. I saw wounded and maimed gnomes. Some had their festering wounds badly dressed with stained bandages that were used more than two… thousand times. And they kept saying Wyxnos’ name as if the guy would let his Italian suit anywhere near this refuse disposal facility.
But there wasn’t a single [Priest] to cast a light spell, much less heal them. No enchanted items. But I could see dead adventurer’s gear and Dungeon delvers armor. No way people would delve without any magic. And by the looks of the stuff, some of them even still had the skeletons of their former owners inside, nobody looted the dead before the gnomes got them. So why weren’t they bidding with coins or magic items? With this many injured gnomes, potions would be worth a fortune, and the clans were clearly going all-in on this baby auction.
Occam’s Razor came and missed my neck. Religious fanatics without priests. Adventurer gear without enchantments. Wounded people without potions. Fantasy setting without the fantastic elements. Nenandil is silent or dormant. Wyxnos wouldn’t let all this Faith go to waste. He’d appoint a priest or two in here, for sure. No way these guys would hold back the magic stuff in such an important and heated auction. Even as I wasted time musing here in my scratchy stinky fur wrap, the wheelbarrows kept coming. No way Nenandil would leave me alone.
The only plausible explanation, the one with the least amount of assumptions that explained all this was one and only one. This place was a fucking dead magic zone.
Party wipe! Party wipe, please! Let me re-roll my spawn point. In that heated moment of despair, I swore to put these gnomes out of their misery.
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[1] MDW: [RCA test image] The fourth wall will be repaired promptly. We now return to our original schedule.