《Dragon Hack》Part X

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Rotgoriel's world was pain. Pain and stink. A smell filled the air, pain rippled through his body, and he felt wrong.

Everything was blurred, the world filled with alien shapes and a brownish sunlight coming in through openings that definitely weren't holes in a cave wall. Rotgoriel let out a gasp...

...and stopped.

His voice was different too.

He rolled, trying to get his legs under him, trying to flex his wings and not feeling them, not feeling them,

And then there was nothing underneath him.

THUMP.

He felt his teeth clack together as he fell off what he definitely didn't recognize as a bed, and hit a fuzzy floor.

Rotgoriel lay there for a bit. Then he gathered his legs, all four of them, and tried to stand.

He made it, but everything bent the wrong way. Then his back flared with pain, and he collapsed to the ground with a grunt.

The dragon closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them. Everything was blurry, but it looked like he was in some sort of small cave. It was full of junk, and the ground was fuzzy. He'd fallen off of some sort of cloth-covered altar.

Where am I? What is wrong with me?

It took effort. It took a lot of work, and of course his neck felt wrong too, but he managed to roll to the side and take a look down at himself.

A moment passed, as he stared at the pink fleshiness, the stupid-looking anatomy, and the flab that was definitely not his body.

Then he shrieked. He raged and yelled and tried to claw at anything and everything he could reach. But he didn't have proper claws, and his weak muscles couldn't do more than pull cloth from the raised altar he'd fallen from.

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All too soon he tired. And as he did, he was forced to the conclusion that this was real, this was happening, this wasn't some sort of twisted nightmare.

“I am a human now,” he said to himself. Well he knew the shape of these dangerous prey. The ancestors had sung their image to him in the egg. And presumably he had seen them, if Geebo's account was accurate.

Rotgoriel felt tired now. But he managed to sit up, grunting and puffing, and studied his body as best he could.

“Weak,” was his final pronunciation.

And it was. Perhaps this was a newly hatched human body? Of course, it was only natural that a human would be weaker than a dragon.

But nothing about this situation was normal. “Perhaps I am cursed,” Rotgoriel said. “Status.”

Nothing.

He blinked and tried again. “Status.”

Still nothing.

“Scaly Wings?”

The nothing did not change.

“Burninate!”

A complete absence of anything but nothing.

“Well... shit.”

Maybe this was a dream.

Well, he had been shown the way of dreams by the ancestors. By his mother, who taught him how to fight nightmares, how to eat them.

So his body was weak?

He could fix that.

Rotgoriel had been well taught, learned the exercises in the egg to strengthen and grow. And technically since he didn't have wings or a tail to worry about now, it should be even simpler, right?

So he curled himself up, and got to work flexing, rolling, and pushing against every surface he could.

It took some work, but he figured out something that seemed to strain his muscles in a constructive fashion. It tired him quickly, and it seemed to be going in the right direction, but to his frustration he didn't see a single attribute boost appear. No words floated up to tell him his strength had increased, or his constitution had grown.

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Obviously I'm not trying hard enough, Rotgoriel thought, and threw himself into it until he was gasping with every breath.

Weirdly enough, water was pouring off of him now. Salty water. After a time he learned to ignore it.

The pain grew, but he kept going, resting as needed between exercises.

He was Rotgoriel! He would not give up! He would be strong.

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