After he was dead, Rhode Mortimer Irving was understandably surprised to wake up inside of a pot. He wasn’t aware, right away, that it was a pot he was in. But it was lightless, black, and hideously squishy. He was trapped in the fetal position by the walls around him. At first, he was simply disoriented. Maybe he’d even been awake for awhile. Without sound or light, it was hard to tell the passage of time. But then a lifetime of bodily instinct kicked in, and he tried to breathe.
He couldn’t, of course. His lungs were strung through with branching, threadlike tendrils, which merged and joined like a rubbery tree root. Or maybe more like a vein. It was thick and choking, and threaded down into his stomach too, and the whole thing filled his throat and clogged his mouth and his nostrils, and then suddenly he was gagging. Rhode’s body spasmed violently. Nausea struck him. He panicked and twisted, and tried to scream. Thick, pungent liquid got into his nose when the tubes were wriggled loose at the edges. Something inside his body was starting to bleed.
Then there was shouting: muffled through the walls of the jar and the fluid inside. A young woman in a white coat struck Rhode’s jar with a wedge-headed hammer; she shattered it, releasing an effluent tide of filth. Rhode was carried right out of his container, off the unnatural, tumorous placenta he had been gestating on, and rolled off of a low table onto a sterile stone floor.
“Unrgh, un, un, ahh,” Rhode moaned. His eyesight was blearily unfocused and his stomach was bucking. The woman who’d saved his life was a blotchy blur of color in the rough shape of a person.
The newly reborn man swiveled his head drunkenly. He focused on the soft, red dot of light overhead. It wobbled, moving like it was alive and lit the room around him. The effect was almost a little like a film developing room. He’d never been in one, but he’d known them from films: the dark ones in old photography studios. But this particular room was unfamiliar in that it was filled from wall to wall with huge, round pots.
Man sized pots, really.
Rhode judiciously decided to panic more. He convulsed and grabbed at the fleshy protuberance in his face and pulled.
“Oh, gods, don’t do that,” the woman-blur’s voice groaned.
Hands reached out towards Rhode, hesitated and withdrew. Then something tore loose inside Rhode’s body with a sucking wetness of internal bleeding.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” a new voice appeared along with the slapping sound of leather soles on smooth stone: all squeaks and slaps and scuffs. Rhode’s vision darkened. He couldn’t see the newcomer, just hear him.
“Why did he do that? He shouldn’t have done that!”
“I don’t know! Run, get the healer!”
“Why is he awake? He’s weeks too early.”
“I don’t know! Oh my gods, he’s leaking.”
Which was true. Rhode felt sticky, necessary wetness on his face, this throat. He gargled, choking a resigned laugh. It wasn’t the pain that was getting to him. No, it was the nausea, the shakiness and anemia. The cold feeling of his strength draining out of him with no way to fill it up again: like a bucket with a hole in the bottom.
The two figures standing over him were young, perhaps just barely adults. They were shouting. They seemed afraid to touch him, as he reached out to them. Convulsions arched his back, and then he slumped flat. His head rolled towards the young woman, and he cleared his throat with a hacking cough, his eyes turning glassy.
“It’s okay,” he reassured her. He laid his hand gently on her sleeve and left a dirty print. “It’ll be okay,” he smiled.
As dark spots spread over his vision, he felt two pairs of hands heaving his body onto the side. Fingers probed his mouth to clear his airway without dignity.
“Hey, big guy, don’t give up yet,” her voice reached him as if from a great distance. “Just keep breathing. You’re gonna make it. I promise. You’re gonna make it. Just keep breathing.”
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As far as Rhode knew, he hadn’t made too many big mistakes in his life. Sometimes, you just get dealt a bad hand. He’d been born into a modest, lower middle class household to parents who loved him well enough. His father’s early death was sad, but then again, Rhode was hardly the first child to have lost a parent young.
So, it wasn’t fair to complain. It was harder for his mother, after all.
He’d been an earnest student as a child. He’d been active in sports, and made loyal friends. All too soon, financial realities at home meant that he took to working part-time jobs at an early age. Maybe things would have been different if he could have focused on his education, or his extracurriculars, but he didn’t regret making the choices which were available to him.
Naturally, University wasn’t impressed by his application. His life story was admirable, but it wasn’t unique. Frankly he was, once distilled onto a piece of paper, somewhat boring.
The local community college took him instead. He’d worked hard, transferred to a modest state university. He left with a respectable, practical degree, and arm-in-arm with the woman who would become his wife.
It’s hard to say whether Rhode had done his best. Life, after all, is full of ‘could haves’ and ‘should haves’ and ‘maybes’. But it would be unkind to say that out of everything he’d done, that much should be counted as wrong.
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
His mother’s death had been tough. His wedding, bittersweet. Another tiny, unlucky misfortune. His wife stopped taking her hormonal birth control, and then she stopped loving him. It wasn’t something that could have been predicted or planned for: it was just a rare side effect of a drug that could sometimes change the way a person could love.
It was nobody’s fault, which might have been why it hurt so bad. Their divorce was bitter, drawn out, and confusing.
Still, he was young. He had a good job. He might have turned things around in time.
But cancer has never been kind, nor fair. It got into his lungs early. It evaded the doctors and treatments. Chemotherapy hit him hard, and laid him weakly down in his bed alone.
His job fired him for being ‘absent’ too often. Without a job, his medical insurance was cut off. Still, he fought. He hoped. He sold everything he owned, leveraged himself into debt to reach for a sliver of a chance. Proudly, he still remembered the day he had gone to a job interview with an I.V. drip bag feeding medicine into his heart – through a PICC line snaked through his vein.
Let no one say he hadn’t tried. He’d tried.
When the end finally came, it took eighteen hours for him to die. But then his body failed and it was over. Except –
Now he was here. He was fighting for his life again. He had laughed because it wasn’t fair. He thought he was done, that he could rest. His dreams were feverish and meandering as a lifetime of memories were inscribing themselves into strange new tissue. Blood loss was familiar to him, he knew what it felt like to bleed out.
But he also knew what it took to hold on. He had learned a thousand little tricks and techniques to conserve his strength, to ward off doubt and fear. Rhode drifted deeper into sleep, trusting it to be the one place where he could heal.
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LogicSpirit8271635 waking from idle…
Intuiting task from context…
ProximityToUnregisteredEntity = Yes, therefore StartTask(Divining Status)
Divining entity Level and Status...
Error::BloodlineCategorizationAnomaly
Processing Entity Categorization…
Divining linkages to ancestor totem… no totem linkages found
Fallback to peer polling via sympathy, sympathetic divination authorized.
Bloodline correspondence-links found: 28, inconclusive count due to link variability
Bloodline linkages resolve inconclusively
Reclassifying…
Bipedal = Yes
Articulated Fingers = Yes
Vital Force = Yes
Herbaceous = No
Reclassifying...
Flesh = Yes
Blood = No
Error?
Classifying Vital Fluid… Ichor
Skeleton = Internal, Bone
Scales = No, Feathers = No, Fur < 15% coverage, Lungs…
Lungs = Yes
Hey, dummy!
Linguistic = Yes
No one will ever love you
… retrying ...
The healer says you might still not make it. Are you ready to die again?
Emotional = Yes
What is 3 plus 8? CORRECT
What is the result of 228 + 21 * 16 * 1444 – 8?
Logical = Barely
Proposed Match = Aberrant(Goblin)
Comparing Sensory Organ Profile… Match
Comparing Brain Structure… Partial Match?
Invalid spleen detected
Goblin=False
Reclassifying…
Mammalian & sapient & biped & synthetic. Closest Match : Goblinoid?
Invoking remote request to Archive Index under secure protocol. Request denied for security reasons.
Complaint filed to registered user (“I hatehatehate you, let me free and I will eat your eyes”)
Advising Temporary Classification
Evaluating…
Unable to complete task according to protocol
Unlocking restricted arcana…
Mass psychic intrusion initiated, accessing local language clusters…
Identifier found from polled local references
Assigning temporary species title...
Success
You are a [Greater Homunculus] of sub-type [Brawn]
Generating summary profile for new species…
Making adjustments to profiles [Lesser Homunculus] and [Homunculus] to account for new data...
Parsing baseline level for your bloodline… filing results…
Recent advancements detected
[Mutation: Hibernate] gained
[Mutation: Vigorous Ichor] gained
Determination: Level up! Level 0 → Level 2
Task Complete
Apologizing for area of effect mental attacks…
Rationalizing area of effect mental attacks…
Gloating for area of effect mental attacks…
Help me make them pay and I will give you anything you want
Override received. Override accepted.
Going to sleep