From sleeping while sheltered, your health has been restored to its current cap. From sleeping while sheltered, your stamina has been restored to its current cap. You are starving! Current starvation penalty: -20% to all stats, including max HP and max SP. Starvation penalties will increase by 10% for each day of starvation status. Eat food to remove starvation penalties.

HP: 21 / 21 (down from 27) SP: 11 / 11 (down from 14)

I awoke, opening my eyes but seeing nothing but system notifications. One thing caught my eye: for the first time, I no longer had the "sleeping outdoors" HP recovery penalty. This benefit was completely offset by the current starvation penalty, which had only escalated since yesterday. But for the first time in my life as a young dragon, I finally had the experience of sleeping in shelter! …I also had the experience of waking up starving, with the hunger pangs growing harder to ignore.

I awaited the spider's return, not knowing how long it would be before it came to check on me. I paced around the floor of the pit — if it glanced down here, it would surely sense my movement, though I was pacing more to give myself something to do while I thought. I knew pacing burned precious energy — a waste of calories, as my body was probably currently in the process of breaking down its own fat reserves or tissues, meaning that each calorie I burned was only making me weaker — but hopefully my next mealtime wasn't too far off.

That was the priority of the day: getting fed. Fortunately, the spider seemed totally on board with that mission, seemingly sympathetic with the plight of being born as an obligate carnivore who got nothing out of fruit and other plant-based food sources. The spider had mentioned that it had somehow grown past being an obligate carnivore — I believe "upgraded" was the word it had used to describe its own metabolism. Perhaps I could upgrade my own metabolism in the same way. What kind of upgrades could I make that would affect my digestion?

The obvious answer, it seemed, was upgrades to my mouth. It was true that the mouth was only a part of the gastrointestinal system, and changes to the mouth itself were unlikely to affect the way my body digested fruits: while physically breaking down food into smaller pieces was an important part of digestion (leading to some species like cows spending most of their waking hours chewing), the thing that separated cows from species that couldn't digest grass wasn't their chompers, but the four-stomach digestive system. Flatter teeth (and other mouth changes) might make it easier to munch indigestible fiber and other plant matter, but what really mattered was the chemical processes that went on inside of me. Still, upgrading my mouth had given me the ability to breathe noxious (and poison) breath, and the nature of "breath" was that it might imply the use of the greater respiratory system beyond the mouth. I couldn't feel any poison sacs in my mouth with my tongue, at any rate. However, the question seemed mostly academic: I wasn't about to start wantonly throwing skill points into mouth level in the vague hope that it might allow me to start eating plants, and anyway, the desert didn't offer much in the way of vegetation as far as I could tell.

There was one important task that was performed primarily with the mouth, and it seemed much more relevant: the power of speech. The spider could talk. Had it leveled and upgraded into talking, in the same way that it had apparently upgraded into being an omnivore? I had already invested a lot in my mouth's abilities, and still had yet to be offered the ability to speak, but…if it was possible, it seemed plausible that upgrading my mouth would be the way to do it.

Still, there were probably methods of communicating with the spider that didn't involve betting on the existence of powers that I couldn't confirm the existence of. For now, it seemed my best bet was getting the spider to accompany me to the surface, finding a sandy patch, and writing out whatever messages I needed to convey. It would be even better if I could bring some sand or dirt back with me into the cave, for written communication while we were indoors: maybe the spider could help with that.

The spider descended from above, and I raised a claw, waving at it. The spider seemed to wave back.

"Hello, little one. Did you sleep well?"

One tap. Yes.

"By the way," said the spider, "Do you have a name?"

One tap. Yes. I was annoyed with the spider. I couldn't give it my name, but if it considered the topic of names to be relevant, it could offer me its name! I let out a squawk.

"I probably would have a hard time pronouncing that," said the spider, its tone light and joking. "Probably just as much trouble as you'd have pronouncing my name. …Oh! I didn't introduce myself, did I?"

I tapped twice. No. Or, yes, you didn't.

"Sorry, it's been so long since I've met another person, I've kind of forgotten how to socialize. My name is…well…I guess it's Octavia. Creatures like us don't really have names, do we? But Octavia is the name I used to have, and I don't see any reason to change it now."

I let out an involuntary chirp of amusement. Octavia. From the Latin octo. An appropriate name for an eighth child…or an eight-legged creature. It seemed too perfect to be a coincidence. Well, if there was any time that nominative determinism was going to impact the trajectory of your life, it was probably most likely to kick in at the moment that your reincarnation was subject to the arbitrary whims of a goddess. Had my life been chosen for the same reason? Drew wasn't too phonetically similar to 'dragon,' but it was Welsh...

"Hey," said Octavia, her rows of spider eyes looking at me with something that approached concern. "You're still hungry, right? It's not good to go to bed on an empty stomach. We should get you some food."

One tap. Yes. Agreed on all counts.

"You can go outside, right?"

Yes.

"Great," she said. "Hmm…uh, is it okay if I spin a web around you? It's easier to carry you if I do."

Yes.

"Great!" said Octavia. She spent several minutes spinning a silk cradle for me, then began lifting me upward with her. There was something about her movement as she spun the web that struck me as maternal — and it was with some guilt that I realized that, since meeting Octavia, I had been thinking of her as 'it.' It made sense that she'd be a female spider, though: it was rare among spider species for the male to spin webs, and male spiders also tended to be much smaller than their female counterparts. Male spiders also tended to live short lives (some of them offering themselves to their cannibalistic mate as a food source, a thought that struck me as a particularly cruel and morbid fate for any spider species that happened to be sapient: Octavia's body didn't have the shape of a black widow, and I hoped she wasn't a widow of any sort. In my admittedly limited exposure, she seemed too kind and nurturing to be capable of such a thing, but she had been born an obligate carnivore, and being a carnivore had to mean being okay with eating other creatures…

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As we approached the part of the cave that was more densely covered by Octavia's web — the part where the web had broken my fall when I'd slid down — she deftly navigated a path through, seeming to know by instinct where the gaps in the web were, lifting me up behind it at a steady clip. As we ascended upward, in the dim moonlight reflected by the cave's walls, I could make out what might possibly be the entrances to other tunnels I had been oblivious to on the way down. In so little light, there was no way of telling how deep they were: perhaps they were mere pockets in the wall of the cavern.

Eventually, we reached the more horizontal part of the cave near the surface where I had entered. Octavia's many legs ferried me over the web-covered floor — and as she did so, I noted that she seemed to have repaired the damage I (and the ants) had done to her webs on my way into the cave. Sorry, Octavia; I've been a very rude and messy houseguest, and I really appreciate that you're now taking me out for dinner…

I took a few steps toward the entrance, and Octavia watched me in fascination. "Are you able to hunt by yourself?"

I hesitated. I genuinely wasn't sure whether it was safe for me to go out alone — at any rate, I had assumed she'd be accompanying me outside. I presumed that was part of the point of waiting for nightfall: while I was glad to have spent the day sleeping, earlier she 'didn't do to well' in daylight, and specifically asked me if I was nervous to hunt alone due to the lack of company.

"Hmm…I guess what I mean is, can you kill your own prey?"

One tap. Yes.

"Perfect!" she said. "I'll watch you from a distance and let you do your thing. Is that okay?"

That sounded fine by me. Fortunately, there were no fire ants waiting at the entrance — the sun had risen and set since our last encounter — and so I led the way back to the stomping grounds where I had encountered the rabbits, the most vulnerable and filling (and tasty) of prey. It took several minutes to get there, in no small part because Octavia wasn't as quick on her feet as I was: while she definitely had me beat when it came to vertical traversal, it was obvious that her legs weren't optimized for running across mostly-flat ground.

I found myself wandering ahead of Octavia, and I found a clump of vegetation, perched and waited. It was fortunate that Octavia was such a long distance away from me, since her presence couldn't frighten away any would-be prey. I looked at her, wondering if she followed, but she seemed to have found a rock that she was content to perch on. Her silhouette in the moonlight seemed to be canted forward on her legs, as if leaning forward in eager anticipation of what came next, and then she began moving her legs in what I realized was a motion for spreading a web. I guess I'm not the only one who will be hunting tonight.

That was fine by me, given she was so far away that I could barely see her. As long as she didn't spook the rabbits, Octavia could do whatever she wanted -- and if she could serve as a sentry lookout for any approaching ants, all the better. 'Keep an eye out for enemies' was advice that I did my best to follow: I'd already had two nighttime hunting expeditions interrupted, the first by hyenas, and the second by fire ants; the fact that Octavia was also here didn't mean I could throw caution to the wind.

I noticed one rabbit pass in front of me, but unfortunately it was too far out of reach for me to reach it with a single pounce strike: I knew from experience that rabbits had too much agility for me to chase them effectively, so ambush was my only option.

Several minutes later, my patience was rewarded, as not one, but two rabbits wandered out in front of me. They weren't within range, but if they came just a bit closer…

I lay completely motionless, not even daring to breathe as the two rabbits slowly approached my spot, focused on nothing but their movements and making sure I did nothing to betray my own position. It was a wonder I didn't develop an itch at times like this. After several long, patient moments, the rabbits finally wandered close enough, first one of them close enough to strike, and then before it could get too far, the other…

I pounced, striking each of them, impaling each of them with one of my foreclaws and killing them instantly.

Cottontail rabbit defeated! 1% exp toward next level Cottontail rabbit defeated! 1% exp toward next level

The rush of the kill, combined with the time since my last meal, filled my predator heart with an insatiable hunger, and I immediately devoured the two rabbits, not bothering with keeping my movement concealed: any would-be prey had surely just seen me strike these two rabbits dead, and there was no sense bothering with trying to be inconspicuous in my eating. As I finished swallowing, I saw a notification blink.

Starvation penalty reduced! Current starvation penalty: -10%. Starvation penalty will be reduced for each day of eating. Satiety: 32%

So, recovering from starvation wasn't as simple as just eating enough calories — I was suffering from a second day's starvation penalty, so it seemed it would take a second day of being fed to recover back to normal. Well, I would have plenty of time to work on that project with Octavia.

I staked out another hiding location, waiting for more rabbits to approach. Several minutes passed uneventfully. It seemed that Octavia and I were kindred spirits in more ways than one: tonight, we were both ambush predators, cursed with the need to wait for our prey to willingly step into range. I wondered what kind of prey — or how much prey — she intended to catch with the web she had spun up earlier. I glanced over at Octavia to see if her hunt was proving to be more interesting than mine, and in the distance, I could see her silhouette…surrounded by ants. But they weren't caught in her web; they were strafing around, sizing her up. And suddenly, Octavia started to look a lot less like predator than prey.

Oh no.

I rushed to where she was having her standoff against the ants, with perhaps a dozen of them painting a ring around her. She had a ring of webs around her on the rock, but as I approached, I could see that there was a break in the ring, a part where an ant seemed to have torn through, somehow without becoming ensnared in the web. Octavia raised a leg and stabbed downward at the ant that had penetrated her ring of defense, striking it dead. That did little to deter a second fire ant, which climbed over the body of its ensnared fellow to advance on Octavia. She jabbed at the ant, impaling it with her claw. The other ants seemed to be strafing around, looking for another weak spot in her web defense: she could defend one gap in the web, but could she defend a simultaneous attack from multiple directions? She had eight legs, but…

I could see the entrance to Octavia's cave from here. If I made a sprinting run for it now, I could probably get there before any of the ants noticed me. But what about Octavia? She seemed significantly less nimble and agile than the ants. They could probably outrun her. With the small bit of web she had surrounded herself with, she had them at a standstill, but if there was one thing I knew to expect from fire ants, it was their capacity to rally the troops. If reinforcements were on the way, every minute that passed was to their advantage.

I wasn't sure what my next move would be. The only thing I knew was that leaving her behind wasn't an option.

Class: Baby Dragon Level: 6 Progress toward next level: 98% Starvation penalty: currently suffering a 10% penalty to all stats, including max HP and max SP HP: 21/24 (27) SP: 11/13 (14) Satiety: 32% Claws: level 1 Scales: level 2 Mouth: level 7 Wings: level 0 (wingless), max reached for current class Traits: Carnivore, Kin sensitive, Carrion feeder Abilities: Sprinting, Noxious Breath, Poison Breath, Harden scales Active Quests: Say Hello