Before I could even open my eyes, agony seared through my entire being. I tried to move, and my body felt wrong. It didn’t fit together properly. An attempt at a scream bubbled in my throat but came out as a mere squeak. This is all wrong. Wrong, wrong, WRONG.
Light painfully assaulted me as I managed to get control of my vision, and I surveyed the room around me.
“It’s alive!” the fanatical, disheveled man screamed. We were in some kind of ritual room filled with cages, and based on the blood and viscera around us, it seemed like some kind of torture chamber. Why is this man torturing me?
Except torture didn’t seem like the right conclusion. What did he say? ‘His pet?’
I tried to look down at my body, but all I saw were weird, pink little paws. Twisting slightly to look around, I froze when I saw the massive scorpion’s stinger poised above me. I twitched, and the point of the tail twitched as well. Wait…
As my gaze traced down the length of the tail, I saw that it was connected to a furry body. My body.
The old man was wheezing and cackling, doing a little jig, and clearly halfway to madness, if not further along on his journey there. He was also enormous, or so I thought, but after a moment I realized the truth.
I was just very small.
Trying to think back to my last memory, I found it hazy, but I knew that I had a life before this. I was someone. Now… what am I?
Level: 1
Attributes: [Amalgamation][Bound Soul][Chimaeric Core]
Skills: n/a
Startled by the system screen, I let out a squeak and jumped back, and the wizard interrupted his celebration to bend down and peer at me.
“Yes, welcome to life, my pet. You will be the first of many. You must be hungry!”
The madman stalked away quickly towards the corner of the room, and lifted a board off the top of some kind of tank. He reached in, snagged something, then quickly covered the top back up before returning to me.
“Eat,” he said, and dropped an insect in front of me.
I recoiled in surprise at the insect, then examined it. It seemed to be a grasshopper of some sort, and it seemed poised to jump.
Reflexively, my stinger shot forward and pinned the grasshopper to the floor.
“Excellent!” the old man cackled. “You seem to have control of your tail, at least. Does your mouth work?”
I was a bit revolted, but I also felt a deep hunger inside of me. I grabbed the insect with my front paws, and released it with my stinger. It struggled slightly in my small rodent hands, but it was already too injured from being impaled to get away from me. I brought the creature to my mouth and bit down.
My strong incisors easily broke through the chitin of the insect and I took in a mouthful of the surprisingly meaty and chewy insides. I had been expecting it to be gooey, for some reason, but it was actually pretty tasty.
(Level 0) defeated. Experience gained.
profile 100% complete. Added to [Amalgamation]’s Loadout options.
What was that?
After finishing my meal, I still felt hungry. The man seemed pleased, and he moved to pick me up. As soon as his hand came near me, I plunged my stinger into the fleshy bit between his thumb and index finger.
At least, I tried to. My stinger bounced off some sort of barrier that lit up when I attempted it, and the man, clearly a wizard of some sort, chuckled.
“Hah! That’s the spirit, my feisty creation.”
I hissed at the wizard, but he picked me up without a care and placed me in a cage next to the grasshopper tank, mumbling to himself as he walked away.
“Now that I’ve succeeded, I should be able to make a more powerful one…”
The door slammed shut behind him as he wandered away, already thinking about his next experiment. I scowled towards the old man. Why do I hate him? Shouldn’t I be grateful that he gave me life?
That felt wrong, like my body had felt when I first awoke. I examined my attributes to see if I could learn more. The one that pulled my attention was the one that mentioned my soul, so I checked it first.
[Bound Soul]: In order to power a [Chimaeric Core], a soul must be bound to it. Soul origin: human.
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I knew it! Disgust flashed through my mind at the wizard. My memories from my past life were hazy at best, but I had been a living human before this, and the wizard had sacrificed me or something to make this monstrosity that was my current self. That, or my soul was captured after my death, denying me whatever should have followed in the natural cycle. In either case, my hate for my creator and captor seemed justified.
[Bound Soul] mentioned [Chimaeric Core], so I checked that one next..
[Chimaeric Core]: Requires [Bound Soul]. The control core which operates and modifies the [Amalgamation]. Mass storage: 0/0 grams.
Mass storage? Something I would need to figure out later, I supposed. I checked my third and final attribute, growing curious about how it all tied together.
[Amalgamation]: Requires [Chimaeric Core]. A constructed body of combined profiles as defined by the Loadout.
The message I had received when I ate the grasshopper mentioned profiles and my Loadout. Curious, I continued on to view it and see what it was about.
Head:
Body:
Limbs:
Tail:
That seemed fairly simple. I had a vague memory from my previous life that told me that there should be more to it than this. Perhaps I could upgrade my Loadout over time.
In the meantime, I tried to change something. I picked my Limbs, and tried to pick the newprofile. Maybe that would let me jump extra high.
WARNING! New profile uses less mass than old profile. Lost [Amalgamation] mass will be stored in [Chimaeric Core] mass storage. Insufficient room to store lost mass. Continue and discard mass?
Oh, no way. I canceled my choice and frowned mentally. It sounded like the legs would be the actual size of the grasshopper’s legs, instead of scaled to my current body, and if I lost the mass then I probably couldn’t switch it back after. I wasn’t sure how the wizard would react to that.
After trying a few more changes, I found that all of them would result in either lost mass which I would need to discard or required mass which I didn’t have in storage.
For the moment, it seemed I was stuck as I was.
Turning my focus outward, I examined my prison. It was a simple cage, with bars that were just tight enough to confine a rat like me. An insect could probably slip through the bars, and my mind flashed back to my [Amalgamation]. I could turn the rest of my body into that of a grasshopper—possibly a scorpion, I wasn’t sure—and likely escape, but then what? I would have to discard my mass to make the change, which meant that I couldn’t turn back into a rat after. Not that rat is that much of an upgrade. At least a mammal was semi-familiar to me, though; I wasn’t sure I could live life as an insect, and it would likely be a short life at that.
Beyond my cage, there were other cages, filled with other small animals. Mostly, the animals were creatures that stirred my foggy memory. I spotted a cat, a rabbit, a snake, a crab, a bat, a frog, some kind of lizard, some birds, and more, but my attention was drawn to the animals I couldn’t name.
In one cage was something that looked like a tapeworm, but it was the size of an adult man’s arm. In another cage, some kind of giant amoeba that jiggled slightly every few seconds. There was also some kind of scaly black gremlin creature with an ugly sneer on it’s resting face, a mouth full of sharp-looking teeth.
The creatures all seemed strangely subdued. It was like they were living in extreme slow-motion. Perhaps the wizard had cast some sort of stasis spell on their cages to make it easier to do his experiments. Despite this largely being a bad situation, I felt fortunate that I wasn’t similarly subdued.
I continued to look over the creatures, recognizing only some, trying to place the strange others. Were these other creations of the wizard that made me, or natives of this world? Why did they feel foreign and even monstrous to me, while others felt familiar or comforting?
The wizard didn’t return until the following day. I had spent the night sleeping fitfully, bored out of my mind for most of my new life. Can’t believe the highlight of my life so far was eating a grasshopper, I thought miserably.
When he did return, he selected a crab and a rabbit from their cages. I watched, horrified, as the insane old man started hacking them apart and reassembling them into one creature.
At one point, he pulled out a crystal of some kind. Another chimaeric core, maybe?
He started to mutter over it, guttural whispers that sounded warped and echoed. The air seemed to shimmer and gather around the core, and it lit up with a purple energy before he stuffed it into the experimental creature he had assembled. He quickly stitched it up, and began to chant some more.
My hackles raised and I felt a deep sense of foreboding, but as the energy reached a crescendo in the room, it faltered and collapsed in on itself.
I peered out from within my cage, transfixed by my potential new brethren’s first movement, but the new chimaera failed to come to life.
“Damnation,” the wizard grunted, and punted the failed chimaera at the wall. The combination of corpses hit the stone with a splat and began seeping a dark gas, some kind of energy which dissipated back into the aether or wherever it had been collected from. The wizard started to stalk towards the door in disgust.
Screeching at the top of my lungs, I managed to get the wizard to stop and look back at me.
“Oh, right. Yes, you must be hungry, my pet.”
The wizard hurriedly walked to the tank of grasshoppers, pulled out a couple, and tossed them in my cage dismissively before he returned to his grumbling and left the room.
I dove on the insects, impaling one with my stinger and holding it in place while I grabbed the other with tooth and claw. Eager to feast, I munched through the chitin to reach the delicious meat, and then used my scorpion’s tail to bring the second to my eager grasp to join the first in my belly.
(Level 0) defeated. Experience gained.
(Level 0) defeated. Experience gained.
I wonder how many grasshoppers I’ll have to kill before I’ll level up, I thought as I smacked my little rodent lips. They were so weak that they didn’t even have a first level, so the experience gain was probably minimal, but it did seem like I was getting some small amount from killing each one.
Across the room, the failed experiment lay in a rather disgusting heap, but I eyed it hungrily. The crab and rabbit that made up the chimaera were already dead, so I wouldn’t get any experience, but perhaps I could get the profiles for the creatures if I ate them, and they would certainly sate my appetite.
Unfortunately, I was trapped in this cage. The only possible escape I had established was discarding most of my mass to turn into an insect, but I wasn’t sure if I could even eat the meat as a grasshopper. I certainly wouldn’t be in a good position to kill anything and gain the experience I needed to level up, if that even did anything.
No. Until I gained the ability to store mass, I had to play it safe. Settling down and getting comfortable, I stared out from my cage at the door, waiting and hoping that something would happen again soon.
kind of rat/scorpion/grasshopper is it?" Particularly the fact that whatever scorpion this was seems to have a tail that's a somewhat comparable size to a rat.
aren't smaller scorpions in this world. Or maybe there are, and I would have to call them "little scorpions" or something, but I'm going to avoid that and stick to very generalized concepts of animals. I guess the world has less speciation than Earth. When I introduce certain other animals, like "owl," you'll have to work with context cues to figure out that I mean a big owl (like a great horned owl or larger) as opposed to one of the tiny barn owns it could be.