The City Of Smog

Eager as I was to be free of this place, I did not rush. Not this time, anyway. Plummeting towards a fiery death has a way of tempering one’s haste.

I had no desire to once more fail at the eleventh hour.

My caution was such that even the slow spreading Blight outpaced me, stretching out before me for several feet all the way until my cracked and jagged claws crested the lip of the pit. Dragging myself over the edge and onto relatively solid ground was made slightly harder by the edge of the pit holding the consistency of oddly thick mud, but I managed to keep myself from slipping and plummeting back down through a combination of brute force and speed. My paws dug deep into the mud and I more threw myself over than crawled.

As I flopped over on my side, breathing heavily and taking no small amount of comfort in how soft the spreading existential threat to all life was compared to normal stone, I vaguely pondered what exactly I intended to do now that I was within spitting distance of the surface.

Literally, as the glob of what I desperately hoped was only saliva that fell through the grate that spilled sunlight into the tunnel I had hauled myself out of so eloquently elucidated.

I stared at the light leaking grate for a long while, watching dust and assorted filth dance amongst the beams of light that met the flowing river of tainted water and bounced around the tunnel. Based on the lack of the overwhelming odor of rotting shit, I guessed this was a storm drain more than a proper sewer.

I had never really considered what I was actually going to do when I got out of that pit; rather like a dog chasing a car, I had never planned for success. All I had known was that I wanted, needed, to get out and that the surface was the very definition of “out”. Now, with my goal closer than the bleakest corners of my mind had ever truly thought it would be, I needed to plan for what came next.

What was I going to do when I actually breached the surface and stepped out into the light?

A stream of golden liquid flowing through the grate I was watching and splashing down uncomfortably close to me gave me pretty solid plan for step one anyway: murder whoever just almost pissed on me.

As tempting as huddling in a corner and sleeping for a century was, I knew there was no way the spreading Blight would go unnoticed forever; my best bet would be to leg it as quick and far as I can. However… I never was good at resisting temptation…

Besides, adding a corpse or two will just make the distraction all the more distracting. It’s not like leaving a witness alive to potentially report on a rat escaping from a Blighted storm drain was a wise decision anyway; as unlikely as it is that someone would find a singular rat important enough to either remember or hunt down, I have no idea how these (presumably) people’s minds work, nor their priorities.

Paranoia +1

I grimaced, but wasn’t deterred. Whoever was up there wasn’t just an opportunity to see how much experience a human(oid) grants, but also a potential danger if left alive. Even if they themself somehow don’t present a threat at all, the possibility of them informing someone that definitely is a threat of my presence is too great a risk. Had I a conscience, I’m sure killing someone under the loose justification that they might cause problems in the future would bother me.

Fortunately, I don’t.

To that end, I began scaling the wall once more even as my muscles and mind groaned in misery at the mere thought. The walls were covered in a thick layer of soft moss that made climbing slightly easier; I'm sure a human would have found the slick material much harder to climb, but it was soft and pliable enough to get a grip on more easily than sheer stone with my claws. That didn’t make climbing a slick wall while half exhausted any less of a wretched experience.

At this point I'm concerned I'll develop some sort of climbing related psychosis, or perhaps just claustrophobia.

Coming snout to bar with the grate brought up the brief annoyance of trying to chew through fast enough that my potential prey wouldn’t have fucked off before I get through (and before the Blight spreads out onto the surface) while also being quiet enough to not tip them off that something is going very wrong. Not to mention desperately trying not to touch it with my tongue…

Fortunately, rats are experts at slipping through things. I'm not sure if it's because I'm some sort of vaguely magical species unique to this nightmare world or if it’s just something about rats, but I only had to widen the grate a few millimeters before I could squeeze through.

The first thing that met my eyes was sunlight nearly burning them out. Once I had managed to recover from the consequences I probably should have expected for being in direct sunlight for the first time in my new life, my recovered eyes bore witness to a city of stone… and smog.

The air was thick with it, obscuring vision over a hundred feet and making every breath taste of pollution and death. The light that spilled into the tunnel had been so weak because it had to punch through meters of diffusing particulates and gas to reach me.

Given that what little of the city I could see screamed "medieval fantasy city", the presence of pollution on this level seemed downright bizarre. Smog this thick, let alone existing at all, only tends to happen in very much post-industrial societies and even then only those with a remarkable disdain for the lives of their citizens. The fact that the walls appear to be made of roughly soldered stone seems rather incongruous with a society capable of pumping out this much smoke.

I shook my head, whatever this hanging mist of toxins is, it’s slightly lighter than air and rises slowly rather than sinking to settle in my fucking lungs like a proper chemical weapon. I’ll just have to figure this shit out once I’ve found somewhere halfway safe to wait out whatever purge will come from Kurzebald’s monster’s flooding out from his lab and the attention the grey that is even now beginning to creep up the walls of the pipe beneath me will generate.

Given the coughing derelict curled up in a pile of slightly damp rags, I can confirm Kurzebald wasn’t a fluke and this place is definitely occupied by humans. I looked him over, noting the filthy and damaged state of his seemingly burlap clothes, the plethora of infected wounds on every portion of exposed skin, the filth that coated his long hair to such an extent I couldn’t tell what colour it had once been, and the feverish look in his bloodshot blue eyes as they stared hungrily at me.

Apparently I hadn’t been as stealthy as I thought.