The young man was sitting in his room, surrounded by loud guardsmen. He felt rather pleased of the chaos he had unleashed, though the path he took to get here was a bit weird considering it was a trip to the bathroom which started him on it. Of course the shit hole (literally) was probably the filthiest locations in this horrid dungeon. There were squishy things underfoot that when stepped on convinced him the “humans” which inhabited this dank open sewer couldn’t be bothered to actually defecate in the hole in the floor. He knew animals more concerned about their bathroom locations then these creatures. The stench was on another level of hell. It was so bad he actually vomited when he caught a whiff of the place down wind. Of course the smell and taste of his stomach acid were huge improvements over the stench coming from the shithole. He tried to breathe through his mouth but all that managed was to make him TASTE the stench as well.

After doing his business he wondered why he even bothered to go to this shithole. Squatting in the corner of his room probably would have been more hygienic than entering this horrid room. It might even have given the crawling creatures something to eat, and keep them away from him.

Of course his hosts were quite sympathetic to his plight. He tried to mime to the filthy nude girl that he wanted someplace to clean up, and she misinterpreted it to think he was hungry. As if it was humanly possible to be hungry for anything with feet covered in human waste, and that stench clinging to him. He couldn’t keep himself from lingering on the horror of that bathroom.

After depositing him at the mess hall the slave girl saw the old man and left with him. With nothing better to do, and a nice and empty stomach he decided to force himself to eat though he didn’t really want to. The (possible) dinner was a thin stew of some vegetables, which he couldn’t quite place, likely nothing like it existed on earth. The vegetables were mostly flavorless, and while the portion was large and he was hungry the lack of spicing or really flavor combined with the fresh memory of his earlier ‘stop’ made it almost inedible. Served with dinner was some sort of fermented drink, which tasted sweet. It had a flavor similar to apples, though far sweeter, and unlike the stew he could drink as much as he wanted. Something he took advantage of. He used the alcoholic drink to wash his feet and hands in the corner of the mess hall. He was too young to legally drink back home, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t drank or been drunk before. The stress of the prior hour or three put him in the mood to see how drunk he could get.

After dinner(?) he strode a bit around the castle (at least it seemed like a castle, though he hadn’t seen any windows or ways out, no one seemed to restrict his wandering). Frankly the place was oppressive. The ceilings were too short, the walls too close together. The air was stale, though he had long ago stopped smelling the pitch torches, somehow he knew the smell was rancid no matter where he wandered. Worse his feet were hurting. The bare stone floor was not smooth enough for feet which had always wore shoes. The cold stone was making his toes ache and was giving him a chill.

He had been suppressing his panic at the situation rather well to this point, though he now had the assistance of the alcohol. He wanted to go home, nothing about this place was attractive to him. The people and smells were filthy, it was cold and stale, there were slaves everywhere, all of whom were naked, men and women, girls and boys, grandmothers and grandfathers, though very very few of those. Most of the humans had a dark moon tattoo on their foreheads. Only a handful did not. NONE of the slaves were missing the moon mark. So he began to wonder if it was a clan marking. ‘Maybe a losing clan?’ That wasn’t to say none of the freemen bore the mark. Many of them did as well. ‘Perhaps it was a religious marking?’

By moving around, noting the weird and new sights he didn’t have to think about home too much, and his worries of whether he could go back could be buried a bit. He really hoped there was a way back. But even if there was one, he couldn’t ask for it while he couldn’t talk to them.

One thing he didn’t miss was the eyes of EVERY human (TBD) he passed. They all looked at him like he was a rare and endangered animal in a zoo. There was curiosity, hope, fascination, even some fear in those gazes. The eyes of all of those filthy people on him made his skin crawl worse than the flees he thought he could see crawling and leaping on them.

Eventually his wandering brought him back to his “room”. One of the guards shot him an almost challenging glare. He almost was happy to see that; it was better than being stared at like a rare animal. No that man saw someone he didn’t like. ‘I don’t know what he doesn’t like’ but at least he wasn’t looking at him like some weird mythological treasure. In his alcohol enhanced mood he decided he liked this guardsman.

Stepping into the room, or maybe he should call it an open cell, he was a little upset that his memory of this place was still accurate. He imagined he could see things moving under the blanket on the bed. No amount of cleaning and beating on the mattress would ever make less filthy or infested. This place with too filthy. So he turned around and returning to the mess hall, passing the guardsman giving him the evil eye he grabbed a pitcher of the alcoholic drink, and brought it back to his room. No one stopped him. He was starting to muse that the lenient treatment meant that he was important to these people for some reason and not just a curio from a magic trick gone wrong. He sat down in his room at the small wood-like table and started to really try to get drunk. Hoping that if he was drunk enough perhaps he could ignore the bugs crawling on him when he went to bed.

Thinking darkly wasn’t really something he liked to do. He knew other students at his school that were “Emo”, and never quite could get where they were coming from. He realized he was focusing on the problem and not the solution. So he started to ponder some way to feel better about his situation. Thinking about those challenging eyes in the hallway, the pure loathing in them he found he had a bit of a smile start to form.