No answer was provided to me. Eventually, the strange numbers that judged my abilities faded from my eyes, and I was presented with a view of what I had deduced was my mother.

A few months had flown by in the similar manner, in which I struggled to accept my new position in life. Being reduced from a fully capable and highly skilled adult to a newborn body was a huge bummer. I lamented the loss of my motorbike and my workshop, refusing to believe what had happened to me.

Yet, with every passing day the reality of my situation was confirmed more and more to me. I was a newborn... chimera named Juni. A creature that was similar to a human in many aspects but also somewhat different.

I had 10 fingers and ten toes, two eyes, one nose, two ears - these parts weren’t that different from a human.

The first difference I had noted was that my skin was unusually shiny and had a deep orange tint to it, sparkling in the light as if made from crystalline sand. Exactly the same thing applied for my new… mother. Her face was covered in dark spots resembling freckles that upon closer inspection looked like dark, small crystals.

By the third month, I didn’t have much difficulty in accepting this new entity as my mother. Perhaps I simply had some kind of newborn-Stockholm syndrome. It’s not like I could leave and I was fed and taken care of regularly.

In time, as my eyes developed, I noticed other differences. My mother's hair looked like nothing so much as rock candy on a string, where the string was black and wire-like, and the rockcandy was replaced by rubies. I liked pawing at her crystalline hair, enjoying the sight of the gems sparkling in the light. The interesting thing about her crystalline hair was that the gemstones were almost organic. I had never encountered a material like it back on Earth.

Her nails were long and sharp, composed from the same crystalline, ruby-like material as her hair with the exception that it was tougher.

My mother's eyes were more cat-like than human. Her irises were bright purple. Whenever the room was dim, her pupils expanded into deep lilac-colored pools and when light shone on her face they contracted into sharp, gemstone-like slits. She also had large triangular ears sticking from between the crystalline hair. Interestingly enough, her ears constantly pivoted to the source of sound like those of a cat would.

When she spoke she sounded almost human, but whenever she sang to me… the sounds she made were utterly alien. Her throat somehow produced long, somber tones akin to a mixture of Orthodox church bells and the song of a whale.

It gave her songs a very haunting and alluring quality, a sound that could not be ignored, especially when she sang with great passion. I was fascinated by her voice and often found myself listening intently while she fed me or performed various chores around the house. I had no idea how she was making these sounds. My own throat failed to replicate her songs no matter what I tried.

My own senses were growing sharper with each passing day, becoming far better than what I had as a human. I realized that my little dark nose could sniff out hundreds of things around our dwelling. I also discovered that each smell had a different texture and color to it. This led me to believe that chimeras possessed synesthesia. The hairs on my head felt different to me, too, and even my tongue could taste the air in ways no human tongue ever could.

By the fifth month I had accepted my new place in the universe as a child of the Tokimorimïtul chimera tribe. Sadly, I couldn't even begin to pronounce the name properly.

If the System and the way my mother moved through the house was anything to go by, it seemed that I was “reborn” in a world of very agile creatures who were part crystalline-animal and part human.

As my eyes developed, I was able to see further than the length of my arms.

As I did, I realized how strange and alien my new home was. The walls of our house weren't square - the entire interior of this dwelling was a very large, sideways dome-like shape made from white bone-mesh. The windows were made from some kind of a semi-transparent membrane akin to dragonfly lacewings which refracted rays of light that passed through them, casting small rainbows all over the place.

Every morning and night mom opened and closed shutters over the lacewing windows. The shutters looked like they were made from giant iridescent beetle carapace.

The floors were made from something that resembled soft moss. In fact, it looked like the floor was actually a living organism that changed color and texture in response to anyone walking on it. I enjoyed pawing at the floor watching it ripple and undulate with new colors.

The walls of the domed room were pure white and peppered with minute holes filled with crystals, looking similar to an ammonite fossil. As I stared at the crystal-covered walls I recalled how ammonite mollusk shells crystallized over millions of years when mineral-rich ocean water seeped into the spiral shell chambers. I wondered whether a similar geological process had formed our current home.

The living room of my new home was well decorated.

Glass-like, diatom-shaped bowls hung from the ceiling, filled with a variety of glowing, colorful liquids and plants. When the sunlight outside dimmed, the insides of the bowl glowed for several hours keeping the home interior lit with a very soft luminescence. I theorized that the fluid inside of the bowls contained bioluminescent bacteria.

There were several other rooms in our dwelling, each having its own function. There was a dining area, kitchen, a latrine, a few storage areas, and another room that served as the main entrance.

There was also a separate bedroom at the front where my parents slept and kept most of their belongings. I was segregated into a small, round alcove in the domed living room. A bunch of soft, colorful, fur animal hides served as my bed.

In the dining area, there was a big table made from a single upturned, polished tree root that braced a semi-transparent, thick, bug wing that functioned as the tabletop. The size of the wing had made me feel very nervous. I wouldn't want to meet with a bug this size back on earth. In a way, it made me happy to have such a unique dining room, a place where we ate dinner together every evening. My favorite food was a type of red fruit I called a "redberry" which mom mushed and fed me.

My dad was very different from mom. He was a dark-skinned chimera. His hair was formed from shiny, obsidian-like rock shards. His face was dominated by a set of sharp teeth and his amber eyes were shaped like those of a cat. His hands were larger than mom's and he possessed a set of dark claws. I didn't see him very often because he spent most of his time outside, presumably hunting while my mom took care of me.

Mother held me up to the window, speaking to me. I was slowly starting to understand her language.

“Aivm jii lestia,” she pointed at the sun.

I had interpreted her words as “That’s the sun.”

“Aivm jii Junï,” she pointed at me.

“June,” I repeated, butchering my new name, unable to say the weird, bell-like, musical ï at the end of my name.

Mom nodded with a sigh.

“Aivm jii Innii,” she pointed at herself.

“Imiiii,” I repeated the word that likely stood for “mom”.

“The sun rises and sets, blessing us with light.” Her long, delicate fingers moved to physically illustrate every word for me, coming up and down and opening and closing.

I tried to respond to her but only vaguely-similar sounding gibberish came out of my mouth. Making comprehensible words was still beyond me.

“Sun,” Mom repeated, looking tired and irate for some reason.

It went on like this for a while, with me slowly memorizing more and more words. I was fairly decent at learning new languages, so I was slowly beginning to understand her.

A few weeks later, mom finally took me outside.

First thing I noticed upon exiting the house was that the balcony leading from the interior of our house resembled a semi-flat surface framed by enormous, jaggedy teeth. Oh.

Hang on… We were living inside of a giant… dragon skull?!

The teeth and the jaw were decayed, worn out and darkened by time, covered in mosses and lichen, but I could definitely recognize that it was the maw of some long-dead, gargantuan monstrosity.

Mom brought me closer to the edge of the mouth. “The light of the sun reaches into the deepest levels of the Chasm, carried by the magic of the clouds."

She lifted me closer to the edge of the teeth and I looked down. It was a mistake.

Our skull-home hung from the side of a nearly vertical wall. Other houses like it also hung from the mountain-side covered in green moss. The mountain descended down and down and down. There didn't seem to be an end to it... the chasm below our house was bottomless as far as my eyes could determine.

As my mind processed the view I yelped in fear, trying to retreat away.

Mom pulled me back. She looked VERY upset by my behavior.

“Juni, why are you afraid of the Chasm?” She asked.

“No end,” I mumbled as a response, trembling.

She sighed and brought me back to my alcove bed, leaving me there alone. She walked away from me, shaking her head. I sniffed quietly. I didn’t understand what was it that got her so upset. The Chasm below our house was terrifying! How did she not understand that?

The next morning she brought me to the balcony once again, but this time thankfully she didn’t hold me over the edge.

"The skyriver flows from the Chasm," Mom said. "It keeps our men flying. Look, it's your Dad!”

I saw numerous male chimeras laughing as they passed by the village on fluttering, glittering glider wings. Their hands held bows made from large bones. It was a hunting party. Mom started to describe various beasts that they hunted down and defended the village against.

Yep, there were giant monsters out there. Enormous creatures of all sorts that attacked the hunter parties, just as chimera men hunted down smaller creatures. I often saw truly monstrous things rising sometimes out of the clouds beneath. They looked like enormous Eastern dragon-like flying millipedes.

Whenever giant flying monsters appeared in the distance, a resonating whistle resounded across the village and mom rushed inside and pulled the shutter beetle-wings closed. I guessed that the pearlescent shutters acted akin to an illusion of eyes inside of the skull as they reflected the sun and glowing clouds that drifted by.

The clouds within the Chasm functioned as described by mom. They somehow reflected the sun and projected it on lower levels of the abyss, keeping the entire vast space lit with a constant, soft glow that only faded at night.

One day, we ran out of our store of dried roots and berries. Mom didn't leave me in the living room. She put dark, leather, hand-woven armor on herself, setting me inside of a pack on her back and climbed out of the house through the front door. I tried not to scream in terror as she climbed around the outside of the house, gripping with her hands to the bone-mesh walls eventually reaching the stone wall covered in lush vegetation.

Nothing except for thin-ass straps separated me from the endless-seeming abyss below. Mom didn't pay attention to my whimpering and continued climbing around the house. Soon enough, she reached a rocky outcropping platform whereupon she dug through the ground for roots, sniffing and letting her nose guide her.

As she stuffed the roots into her pack and stood up to her full height I saw that the wall of the chasm that we were living in endlessly curled outwards in both directions. Numerous azure waterfalls cascaded from hanging mountains above into the vast chasm below us. It was beautiful and indescribably terrifying at the same time. Blue sky was high above us, but all around us was the chasm. I couldn't even see the other side of it, the gargantuan void that we were living in was staggeringly vast, seemingly more than a hundred kilometers in circumference!

Back on Earth, I wasn't afraid of flying or of heights, so why was I so afraid of some stupid ass bottomless Chasm?

I tried to understand my fear as I looked down. The problem seemed to be in the bottomless-ness of the damn thing. Whenever the spiraling, gargantuan, glowing clouds parted I could discern various formations, ridges and notches in the wall as it went down. Some of them looked as big as Mount Everest and looked like they had rivers and forests on them. Just a single ring of ridges looked as if I was looking at a view from a high flying airplane. Overall, it was a freaky, impossible view that went down and down and down without an end in sight.

At that moment, I understood that I wasn’t afraid of heights… I was afraid of infinity! I had Apeirophobia. Or something like it, anyway. I wasn't afraid of staring at a night sky on Earth, which was technically infinite too.

Simply put, back on Earth I had never encountered something truly as insurmountable and vast as the inexplicable Chasm of this world.

There was bone-chilling wrongness about it. Imagine if you will, an entire landscape turned 90 degrees that goes on forever and then you might arrive at an approximation of what I was seeing. Something so big and deep simply had no right to exist!

A thing like the Chasm couldn't possibly be on a planet like Earth because very hot magma flowed beneath the crust. Was Andross magma-less? Did the Chasm lead to a hollow world or a dyson sphere? Was this planet shaped like a doughnut... maybe? Were we living on the edge of the hole of the aforementioned planet-sized doughnut?

Perhaps my fear was from observing impossible geometry, the way each ring of clouds warped when they or I moved.

I felt that I was staring at a Lovecraftian monstrosity that featured utterly anomalous, alien properties that my mind simply glitched out from.

The closest thing I had experienced to this effect on Earth was a mildly unnerving feeling when looking at paintings of MC Escher or other eye illusion art.

I shuddered. It was simply freaky and unnatural and my brain refused to accept it no matter how hard I tried to convince it that it was fine. Viewing the Chasm directly was akin to staring at an ocean of spiders.

. . .

Weeks passed as I grew. I watched as the hunters flew by, following the skyriver current up into the sky and then dove down towards the forested chasm-sides. I wanted to defeat my fear, wanted to fly. I wanted my own wings, just like those that my father wore. However, aside from my fear of the Chasm, a potential problem was beginning to manifest itself before me - the chimera society seemed to be very segregated and patriarchal.

There were no girls flying on bug wing gliders out there as far as I could see. The far stronger and faster men were in charge. Mom, for her part, took care of the home. She was constantly maintaining and polishing dad's glider wings, weapons, and armor.

Every item inside the house was made from insect parts put together by my mom - there was no specialist mass production or even basic forging as far as I could determine. Mom didn't use tools for her job, relying on her strong hands and sharp claws to craft simple lattice-weave clothes from various monster bits. It reminded me of medieval basket weaving.

As time passed, I learned to communicate better, expressing a desire to learn from whatever mom was doing around the house. I watched her diligently as she worked, and tried to imitate her. She'd smile at my attempts.

"You'll get there soon enough," she'd say. "It'll be a while before your hands are quick enough to weave spiderfly silk or strong enough to bend the Sendarkan carapace into shape."

I nodded to her. She was right. It would take me tons of practice and a lot more strength to produce anything of value.

Every evening I watched as she prepared the dinner, and I wondered why it was that we couldn't eat meat like my father. He loved to hunt, bringing home creatures that he killed. I watched mom skin and butcher them, then prepare the meat into various dishes. The smell alone was wonderful.

After watching her cook, I decided to grab a slice of meat from the table.

"No." She slapped my hand. "Meat is for our hunter. Roots and berries are for us girls."

I sighed wistfully. Being born a girl in a hunter-gatherer society was starting to get on my nerves.

My “experience” was ticking up very incrementally and painfully slow. After months of being alive it sat at 47 points. I wondered what would happen when I reached 50.

As far as I could tell, chimeras lacked an understanding of mathematics such as multiplication or long division… so their System was most likely locked.

I had no idea what this meant.

Did my mathematical knowledge from earth make me special? Could I somehow use the system to get strong enough that I could overcome the local patriarchy rule and learn how to fly?

I really didn’t want to be confined my entire life to an in-skull lifestyle raising children. I had to figure out how to optimize gaining experience. What exactly was “experience”? Doing mundane baby-things like learning how to talk and walk was useless in terms of bringing up my XP. It was ticking up painfully slowly and I had no idea why, so I couldn't optimize my gains.

To bring up my status chart all I had to do was say something along the lines of “define self” or “stats”. As I did, the menu flashed at my face:

Name:

Juni Tokimorimïtul

Age:

7 months

Species & Subtype:

Chimera spawn

Level:

0

Experience:

47/50

Health:

0.5/0.5

Stamina:

0.6/0.6

Mana:

0.1/0.1

Mana regen:

0.1m/hr

Strength:

0

Agility:

0

Dexterity:

0

Vitality:

0

Charisma:

0

Magic:

0

Luck:

0

Intelligence:

0

Wisdom:

0

I didn’t understand why the System defined things like my Intelligence and Wisdom as zero. Also, did I have no Charisma as a cute baby? Was I an ugly child or something? It just didn’t make much sense to me. Surely, I knew a lot more than a zero sum of information? Surely I had the wisdom and knowledge of an adult, not a newborn? Did the system judge my body instead of whatever my soul was? How could my overall health of my body even be defined with a 0.5? Surely, I was a healthy child. Or maybe the System simply sucked at evaluating me.

I tried to move around as much as I could to increase the amount of my stamina through exercises. It didn't work.

The value labeled “Magic” in the chart told me that someday I would be able to do magic. Alas, neither of my parents seemed to do any sort of magic so it would have to be something I had to figure out myself.

My imagination kept me from succumbing to boredom. I recalled forging and the various processes involved in the shaping of metals and materials through hammering, pressing, or rolling and considered how I could make myself new tools out of monster parts so that I didn’t have to rely on my hands alone. Even having scissors and a needle would make a difference! Perhaps a crossbow would put me ahead in terms of firepower?

The mystery of the bottomless chasm called out to me every time I looked out of the eye-hole windows of my skull home. I wanted to know what life was like outside, above the walls of the pit. I wanted to know what mysteries existed in its depths. I wanted to build myself a new workshop, restore everything that I had lost when I touched Chernobylite and fell through a crack in the universe to a whole new, monster-filled world.