DUMPLING LEARNS TO WALK

I walked out of the room, paying it no attention; there was nothing I could do about it anyways. Small feet pattered on the hardwood floors behind me. I opened the bathroom door and locked it behind me before making a beeline to the toilet. Once my bladder was nice and empty, I left the bathroom, seeing a flash of silver-white hair as I passed by. The door closing behind me. I continued ignoring it. I walked down the hall and entered the kitchen; I heard the toilet in the bathroom flush before the door opened. I could ignore it no longer. Not dumpling, she’d been following me, and copying what I’ve been doing for a while now, but what I couldn’t ignore was something far more important. I… was hungry. I’d been in the dungeon for two days now and had been putting off this question for as long as the few sandwiches I’d packed would last. But now, I could deny it no more. I needed food, and for that I would need to ask Shinome. I took a deep breath, and left the apartment, Dumpling pattering after me. Shinome, as usual, was sitting on her throne, eyes closed. Managing the undead or whatever it was she did. I made sure to affix my gaze to her stomach before speaking. “Shinome,” I said, trying to get her attention. “Human,” she replied. “Do you know where I could find food?” I asked. I saw her eyes open in my peripheral vision. She looked at me, she remained silent, considering as Dumpling, getting bored, began climbing up my back. I adjusted my posture to support the sudden increase in weight behind me, although she wasn’t very heavy, so I didn’t have to adjust much. “What do humans eat?” Shinome finally asked.

I considered this; I would say meat, but she’d probably just butcher a zombie, and try to feed it to me. I would say vegetables, but there weren’t any plants in the Lomari Labyrinth, or at least not on this floor. If I remember correctly from my reading up on the floors of the labyrinth, the 13th floor was icy and barren, and the 11th… I can’t quite remember, but I think there were a lot of mushrooms. Mushrooms… they were edible in theory, but I had no idea how to figure out which ones are poison without eating them and seeing if I puke up my intestines later. The book I had read all this information from had a section about finding safe food and water in the Lomari Labyrinth, but I hadn’t read that section extensively. “Actually, never mind, I will bring you food,” Shinome said. I looked up... meeting her gaze. And immediately my eyes were covered from behind. It was Dumpling. The adorable baby litch had covered my eyes. I reached up, and back, finding her head, and giving it several scratches and pats. I think she was just trying to mess with me but, even so, she’d saved my mind from another eye contact incident. Dumpling let out sever adorable noises as I scratched her. I felt a tingle of fear as a skeleton walked into the room, carrying a large plastic cooler. I arched an eyebrow at it. It walked past me and into the apartment. I set Dumpling the Despondylator down, before I turned around and picker her back up. She was big enough that it was awkward to carry her around, but she was still almost unnaturally light. I carried her into the apartment with me, as I followed the skeleton.

It walked into the kitchen, set the cooler down, placed a skillet on the stove… it… was cooking. I watched in absolute bewilderment as the skeleton pulled a red T-bone steak out of a package in the cooler. A fresh steak. Then I watched in more amazement as before my eyes, it prepared me, and Dumpling an extravagant meal. It even wore a fluffy white chef’s hat. Once it was done plating the food it carried the dishes over, setting them down on the table in front of me and Dumpling who had moved there to watch. Dumpling was sitting next to me. We had the same thing, a pan-fried steak, with potatoes and asparagus. After placing the dishes down, the skeleton gave a flamboyant bow, before turning on its literal heels… and leaving, taking the cooler with it. I grabbed the fork and knife the skeleton had left next to me, and gingerly cut into the steak, it immediately began leaking a little red. I gave it a hesitant sniff. My eyes widened and I immediately bit into it.

I sat on the couch; in a state I could only describe as a post-orgasmic delirium. I absently stroked Dumpling’s silky hair, and just stared into space. That was… by far… the absolute best meal of my life. I… I couldn’t even describe how good it was. I wasn’t a fan of asparagus, but I would take that asparagus over even the meal I had gotten from the one time I went to a fancy restaurant and treated myself. And that’s not even mentioning the steak… that steak. It didn’t taste like a steak, it tasted like the idea of a fancy steak dinner after surviving off of plain dry oats for a week before running a marathon. It tasted like someone had butchered a deity of culinary perfection and served them up as a meal. All of this left me one, very specific, question. What… was this place? I knew it was the Lomari Labyrinth, but… the Lomari Labyrinth was supposed to be this deadly dungeon in the middle of what used to be Michigan. A place where people go to either become rich and famous, or to more likely, die horribly where no one could hear their screams. A massive Labyrinth dug deep into the bedrock. Every floor its own sort of twisted maze filled with horrors. People didn’t even know how deep it went, the deepest anyone had ever gone and made it back was floor fourteen. And even then, they confirmed that they were able to find a staircase that lead even lower. Although at floor fourteen, almost every monster was silver rank, and the party barely even made it back. If diamond rank monsters even exist, they are probably only a few floors below me. Yet here I am. The 12th floor of the Lomari labyrinth. Over a mile beneath the surface… sitting in an expensive apartment, after eating the best meal of my life, that was prepared by a skeleton in a chef’s hat. What… what even is my life right now?

“Hoomin?” came a small voice from my lap. I jumped. Looking down to see… Dumpling. Had she just spoken? I looked into those glowing green eyes. “Dumpling… did you hear that?” I asked. She tilted her head to the side. “Hoomin?” she said. She’d spoken. It… was… so… cute! Her voice was small, soft, and somehow squishy. Like what you might think a kitten would sound like if it could speak. “I am Dumpling the Despondylator, not Dumpling, Mama says iz impotant to say the whole thing,” she said. a frown on her little face. I scratched her hair. She smiled, closing her eyes. “Hooman, Mama wants to know if yuu liked the food,” she said. before snuggling her head into my lap. “Okay, tell your mama, I liked the food very much,” I said, dumpling looked up at me. Beaming, as if she’d cooked it herself. As Dumpling settled in for what was probably going to be a nap that would keep me imprisoned on this couch for the next hour or two. I leaned back. The only reason I could guess this apartment existed would be to house someone, the problem with that is… who? The easiest answer was this necromancer who created Shinome, but whoever did that was probably the same person to create the labyrinth in the first place… I think. Or maybe they were just around when it was made. How old would that even make them? The labyrinth had been around for hundreds of years. And if they weren’t originally part of the labyrinth, they seemingly moved in and became part of the ecosystem. All this begged the question. Why? Why would someone seemingly so powerful, as to be able to create a silver rank monster, decide to sequester themselves away on the 12th floor of some death maze? Necromancers were human after all. Not only that, but they were generally well respected. They had the ability to be able to raise armies if left alone for long enough, so the Adventurer’s Guild was always seeking them out. They were more than willing to sponsor them and have the sit up in a well-furnished room and make them an army of skeletal wolves. It just didn’t add up. Something else was bothering me, all the undead on this floor that I’d seen were human. There were no zombie bears, wolves, or rats. Just humans. It’s almost as… if….

I observe as a zombie, tears into the throat of a human. The rest of his group, alerted by the screams. Not as if it will help them. The zombies are too close, their lives are as good as forfeit. My attention wanders back to the small creature, curled in my tendrils. I can feel her sleeping. She does that more than I would expect, considering I have no need of sleep. I wonder why. When I was human, I used to sleep. I used to get this strange feeling where I would slow, and everything would suddenly become more difficult in a way that is hard to describe. Then I would lie down and enter a strange, trance-like state for hours on end and, when it finally abated, I would get up and groggily stumble to the nearest source of coffee, before moving on for around sixteen hours or so, before doing it all again. Although now I was far more efficient, I never had to lie unendingly for hours on end getting nothing done, with nothing to say of the occasional ridiculous, and quite concerning, hallucination. I refocus my attention on the freshly-minted corpses. I’ve been getting noticeably more as of late; Usually I see very few humans, maybe one or two groups a week, but just these past few days I’ve had four. One group was strong enough that I had to deal with them personally. I feel Dumpling the Despondylator begin to stir in my grasp, wiggling her little tendrils in search of mine. She’s so precious. Hmm… I’m getting another feeling, this one isn’t unpleasant like the one I usually get, I actually quite like this one. I slip my tendrils in with those of my child, and the feeling intensifies, I feel my face contort involuntarily. I immediately glance at the coffin in the other room. Still closed. If the necromancer isn’t moving my face, than who is? Is it the child? I don’t particularly mind, but why would she do that?

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

I see the small creature come skittering from the other room. I feel as if she’s been deliberately testing methods of locomotion recently, almost every time I see her move, she’s using a new method. This time she’s shifted her nails to hooked, hardened and sharp claws so that she can cling to the stone surface of the environment easier. She comes crawling up the wall and across the ceiling, like the spider from which she got her glittering silver hair. The illusion breaks when, instead of repelling from an anchored line on the ceiling like a spider would, she drops the seven or so meters directly into my lap. I hear her small bones crack from the landing. She lets out a squeak of protest, as her bones snap and pop back together. That nice feeling is back now. I wonder what precisely it is. I should ask the human. But first, Dumpling the Despondylator needs attention. “Greetings little one,” I say. “Hewlo Mama.” I frown. “It’s Hello, not hewlo, now try again.” “Hewlo.” “No, Hello.” “Henlo?” “Hello.” “Hell…mo?” “Not quite, You have the first part correct, the last part is, lo.” “Holo?” “Almost, Hello.” Dumpling the Despondylator scrunches her small face up in concentration. “Hel…lo? Hello!” She says triumphantly. I smile down at her and give her a big hug both on the physical side, and the other side. “Well done little one,” I say, as my arms and tendrils squeeze her tightly. It is at this moment that the human female enters the room. “Hewlo!” Dumpling the Despondylator says. I frown at her. Although something about the mispronunciation is… endearing. I decide to let it slide.

I watch closely as the small, warm, squeak nubbles at the toes of a zombie. I reach out in the other place, ensuring the zombie doesn’t move. I crouch lower, waiting for the perfect moment to pounce, I wait… my pupils narrow, I wiggle my but, readying my muscles and balancing myself before… I leap. The squeak notices me as I descend upon it, it scampers as fast as its small legs can carry it. It runs, and I follow. It rounds a corner. I attempt to do the same but can’t arrest my momentum and I skitter into a wall. I grumble as it scrambles into its hidey-hole. Even so, I don’t think this method works well either. I look at my arm, and then my leg. I fall back on my butt and examine the limb. Is there a way for me to accelerate faster? How did the squeak do it? I push my questions to Mama. It takes a fraction of a second before I feel her attention on me. Her tendrils stir as they envelop me, and she pushes something into my mind. Digitigrade? Leverage? Mechanical advantage? I whimper, the concepts lost on me. Okay, okay. So, it has special legs that make it move fast? What was wrong with my legs? They looked like the human’s legs, and Mama’s legs. Why didn’t they have the best legs? Why does the squeak get better legs than Mama? I frown, I extend my legs and morph them to be more like those of another creature in Mama’s memory. My stride shifted to the bounding stride of a deer as I return to the room where Mama’s physical self is. I need to know how these legs work. I cross Mama’s room and enter the human lady’s room where the skeleton with the poofy hat made me the tasty food. I begin looking for something specific.

I wander into the kitchen after brushing my teeth looking for something to snack on while I watch something on the television. There I find Dumpling… sitting in a pool of clotted purplish blood, as she carefully dissects her own left leg with a chef’s knife. “Oh shit, Dumpling!” I shout, rushing to the small creature. She looks up at me, her glowing green eyes filled with confusion, as her cheeks are spattered with her own blood. Oh crap, oh crap, oh crap. That is… a lot of blood. I had absolutely no idea what to do, I could heal myself, but I couldn’t help her. I…. Shinome. “Dumpling, we….” She interrupted me, “It’s Dumpling the Despondylator,” she said, cheeks puffed out. “Yeah, yeah. We need to go see your mom, okay? I’m going to….” I was about to lift the small lich and take her to her mother when her leg suddenly warped, and shifted, the muscle and tendons fusing back together rapidly before finally closing under a layer of skin. She stood evenly, as if nothing had happened and she wasn’t covered in a concerning amount of her own blood. “We’re going to see Mama?” she said excitedly, bouncing slightly in place. That was one of the most disturbing things I had ever seen… how was she still so cute? It made legitimately no sense.

The hooman carried me out into the room with Mama as I wiggled my left leg. It felt all tingly and fuzzy for some reason. It had been feeling like that since a while after I cut it open to see how it worked. I couldn’t figure out how it worked. It was mostly full of meat, tubes full of goo, sturdy tubes not full of goo, and long white sticks made of the same stuff Mama’s chair was made of. The bendy part of my leg was especially weird. “Umm… Shinome,” The hooman said. I looked up at Mama, her pretty glowing blue eyes meeting mine. Her eyes were so pretty. I liked them. “Human,” she said. “I found your… um… I found Dumpling cutting open her leg in the kitchen.” Mama frowned. Then thought for a moment then sighed. “Little one, don’t cut open your leg,” Mama said. I was indignant. “How am I supposed to find out how it works if I can’t look at the inside?” I complained. “Listen, I know you don’t feel pain, but you aren’t indestructible.” “Indestrububble?” Mama patted her lap, and I leapt from the Hooman and scampered over, sitting myself down on her lap. Mama pulled her shirt open, revealing more of her purplish skin, then she jammed her hands into the center of her chest. They sunk in deep, purplish goo spilling out as she pulled the hole open. Inside were more white sticks, several lumpy meat things, a layer of yellow-white stuff just under the skin, and in the very center of it all a glowing white orb, swirling with grey mist… or was its grey swirling with white mist? Either way, it was kind of big, about the size of… Actually, I don’t know. It was about as big as my hand when I had it fully opened if that size was a ball.

“Do you see this?” she asked, pointing to the orb. I nodded. “This is my core; every monster has one.” “Does the hooman have one?” I asked. “No.” “Why not?” “Because she’s a human, not a monster.” “What’s the difference?” I asked, “like how am I a Dumpling the Despondylator, and the squeak is a squeak, but if my thinking was in the squeak, I would be a squeak, and not a Dumpling the Despondylator?” I specified. Mama frowned. “We’re getting off topic,” she said. “This core is the source of who we are, it is what prevents us from succumbing to injuries. If a human had their head cut off, they would be dead. If I had my head cut off, I would just grow a new one.” I nodded. “But there is a limit. Every time I lose my head, a little energy is taken from this orb, and once it runs out, I would die.” I suddenly felt sad, I didn’t want Mama to die. “I don’t want you to die,” I said. She smiled gently at me. “And I don’t want you to die either, that’s why I don’t want you to cut open your leg anymore. If you space out the damage. Like how every so often you break a bone or two, that’s fine, it gives you time to recover. But all at once like that is a different story.” I nodded. “But how am I supposed to find out how to make my legs better?” I asked. “What do your mean?” “Well, the squeak has better lags than me, it gets to go faster sooner, while I have to go faster slower, but I want to go fast, fastly like the squeak does,” I said. “Then make your legs more like the rat’s legs,” Mama said. “But why are the squeak’s legs better? How can I make my legs the best legs?” Mama smiled. “You already have the best legs, little one. The rat’s legs are good for a sudden run, but say the rat suddenly has to swim. It can only swim so fast, whereas you would be able to change your legs to be better in the moment. You have versatility.” “Versily?” “Your legs are the bast because they can always be the best legs for the situation.”

Later on, when the hooman did that thing where she took a long nap. I was still awake. I was wondering something. I’m pretty sure I also had a core like Mama did. And I kinda wanted to see mine. Mama’s was so pretty and I couldn’t forget it. So, I shifted my hands to be more like the knife and cut into the same spot mama did. Then I pulled it open, and light began spilling out into the kitchen. I couldn’t see. So, I ran to the room with the toilet and the mirror to look at my core. It wasn’t the same as Mama’s. Mama’s was all silvery and glowy. Mine was glowy too but… it wasn’t silvery. It was gold.