Rotgoriel was seriously beginning to regret his decision to allow the woman to assist him.

Not because she was bad at fighting, because she was pretty damned good at that. The few cave crustaceans that got in their way in the upper caves got skewered, splattered, and murdered with brutal efficiency. For his part, he gained a bit of agility and few levels of brawling, but she did most of the work there.

Nor did he find her objectionable because she was horrible at survival. She was great at survival, cleaning and dressing the dead dire shellfish with skill and speed. They packed along plenty of goopy meat for supplies, and that went a long way to keep his endurance topped off during the long journey.

No, what really made Rotgoriel regret his decision to work with the bothersome woman was the fact she talked.

She always talked.

She never stopped talking.

She talked to people who weren’t there, describing everything in ludicrous detail.

She over-reacted with shock and exclamations of amazement to every surprise or even half-way interesting bit of scenery and creature they encountered on the way.

And when some doglike things came oozing out of the corners and had a go at them, she screamed and pretended to be frightened out of her wits... even as she was raging around the battlefield, froth and blood spraying everywhere. She carved down the ones trying to flank them to the right while Rotgoriel casually burned the ones approaching from the left.

He’d gotten a bit more Burninate skill and unlocked the Fire Elementalist job from that one, but his heart wasn’t in it as she hyped the creatures up as a serious threat when clearly, they’d just been a speedbump. Oh sure, they might have given him a little cause for concern if he’d been alone, but between the two of them it just wasn’t a challenge.

At the end of it, LivingDeadGrrl leaned on her spear and shook her head. “Surprised we didn’t get a level out of that. They beat my sanity to hell and back. You doing okay there, Rotty?”

“Rotgoriel,” he corrected her for the fifth time.

She looked irritated and waved her hand in the air, fingers dancing in her glove. “Okay, I’m muted. Look, man. If you’re going to stick with this hardcore RP angle, can you jazz it up a bit? Maybe act more like a dragon?”

“What?” Rotgoriel wasn’t sure he’d heard her right. “I am a dragon! How can I act more like a dragon?”

“Right now I’ve got like six thousand people on my feed, and they’re laughing at you. They’re calling you grumpy boi. That’s boi like B, O, I, which is worse than B, O, Y. Do you want to be called grumpy boi?”

“No! I am Rotgoriel! Not Rotty, or grumpy boi, or anything else! Who is calling me that? I will eat them!”

She rolled her eyes, black pools of ink twitching and squirming. “Well you can’t. Most of them don’t even play. So what are you going to do? They’ll laugh at you and tell their friends, and then Rotgoriel the grumpy boi is going to be a joke forever. Is that what you want?”

Rotgoriel stared at the ground.

On the one hand, he didn’t normally care what non-dragons thought about him.

On the other hand, six thousand was a lot of people.

“No,” Rotgoriel told her. “I don’t know how to deal with people,” he admitted, even though it cost him to admit that. “Can you tell me how to not be a grumpy boi?”

WIS+1

It startled and shamed him that even the words that ran reality agreed with her.

She relaxed a bit, though, and shot him a grin. “Thanks for the charisma. Okay, let me think... you’re an awesome dragon, right?”

“Yes, obviously.”

“Right, it is obvious. Don’t try too hard to prove it. You have nothing to prove. You’ve been acting like you’ve got a chip on your shoulder, getting huffy and reminding me that you’re a dragon whenever I tell you to slow down, or watch my back, or carry me across gorges.”

“I can’t carry you across gorges, it would be undignified! I am—” he snapped his jaws shut, before he could finish the sentence.

“You are a dragon. See? Stuff like that! Act like you’ve got... oh, what’s that meme I read about once in the old meme file... act like you’ve got big dick energy. No, big drake energy!”

“A drake is a lesser kind of dragon! I am a high— nggggggh.....” Rotgoriel said. “Explain to me this big dick energy. Is it like stamina? Or fortune?”

“Some people would say both, especially the ones with really big dicks,” LivingDeadGrrl said, chuckling for no reason Rotgoriel could tell. “Big dick energy is where you walk around knowing you don’t have a goddamn thing to prove because your pants are full of awesome.”

“Are pants required?” Rotgoriel asked, and it came out a little plaintive.

He wasn’t prepared for LivingDeadGrrl’s howls of laughter. For a second he considered taking offense...

...but then, he’d been doing that this whole time, correcting her on little things she got wrong, and all it had gotten him was a stupid title with invisible people.

“No,” she snorted. “Pants aren’t required. Though if that was a clever-ass pickup line, I have to remind you I’m still not interested.”

“Very well. I shall have this big drake energy. You know I am a dragon. They know I am a dragon. All else is beside the point,” Rotgoriel concluded.

“Also, I’m going to save this conversation for the behind-the-scenes bloopers. That ought to be good for some higher tier patrons. You mind?”

“Not at all,” Rotgoriel said. She’d babbled nonsense again, and he had found it was better to nod and agree than fuss over it.

CHA+1

“Big drake energy!” Rotgoriel said, as he let her hang from his tail as he flew across a chasm.

“Big drake energy!” He reminded himself as she took the heart from some kind of blind wolf-thing with long legs and devoured it even though he had clearly done the bulk of the fighting.

“BIG DRAKE ENERGY!” he roared, sending a skulking pack of those corner-walking hounds fleeing as he chased them, waggling his wings in a manner that he thought was entirely scary, but that she informed him was like a farmer scaring off crows.

But it didn’t matter. In his mind he had pants, and they were full. Full of what, precisely, he was still a little fuzzy about, but it didn’t matter. And for her part, the Berserker woman seemed to be a little more respectful.

They reached the place where he had found the Whisperer in the darkness and saw only a cracked obsidian wall. “Whatever it was, it has fled,” Rotgoriel concluded.

Then they found the hole.

Perfectly round, so deep that his Dragonseye couldn’t see the bottom, and filled with cold mist, it descended deep into the rock below. A series of pitons and ropes led down into it.

Something tugged at Rotgoriel’s memory, and he chased it. Searing blue light behind him, the sound of rock disintegrating, a great black and bronze figure with a smashed head... the images were so near, yet so far.

“This has to be the griefers,” LivingDeadGrrl glared at the climbing rigs. “They found a shortcut. What do you think, audience? Should we cut their ropes?”

Evidently the answer was yes, because she grinned a sharp-toothed grin and hauled out a knife.

She lost some of that grin as Rotgoriel stepped in between her and the hole. “No. We should not cut the ropes.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Because we should burn them instead!” He turned and roared his anger down the hole, spraying fire until the flaming remnants of the harness dropped into the mist below.

Your Burninate skill is now level 9!

That made her laugh more. “They like it when you showboat like that,” she muttered to him as they resumed their search for the path he’d taken before. “Don’t overdo it but look for other opportunities like that. What kind of energy does it use? Are you likely to run out?”

“Moxie,” he said, smiling. “And I have enough there to suffice.”

More or less. He was down to about six or seven more shots, barring a nap. Or a level, but that didn’t seem like it would happen anytime soon. There were few things in here that could challenge a dragon, even a very young one.

That thought lasted up until they descended into a shallow underground lake, and the pressure built against their brains.

“Oh man,” LivingDeadGrrl said, as she tried to explain it to her unseen audience. “So basically, take the worst ice cream headache you’ve ever had, combined with one of those weed buzzes where you can feel like everything is connected and add in a noise that sort of sounds like a flute being played very badly in a melody that you think might make sense if you listened more closely but doesn’t actually.”

Rotgoriel snorted. Or maybe one of him snorted. He had no idea how many of him he was right now. Between the noise in his brain and the unexpected ability to feel the sensations of the lichens encrusting the rocks of the cavern around him, he was somewhat out of his depth.

But it felt familiar. He chased the memory, to no avail.

“Agh!” LivingDeadGrrl grunted as a blue ’4’ slipped skyward. “There goes some sanity. Listen, Rotgoriel, we’re gonna have to find another way through. This way is going to give me some crazy debuff if we keep going. Literally.”

“This is the way,” Rotgoriel insisted, knowing he was right and not knowing how he knew. Perhaps an Echo in the madness that filled this place?

“Well if you go this way you’re going alone,” LivingDeadGrrl said. “Besides, what about the little guy? We haven’t run into him yet. No way he’d be able to pass this.”

“Except he did,” Rotgoriel said, softly. Memories of wings, of a roaring whirlpool, of Geebo on his back, babbling.

Geebo. On his back.

He had come this way before, Rotgoriel knew. But he had been the other then.

That decided it! If the invader who had usurped his body could do it, then he could do it.

And his memories had to do with flying, so why not look at things from above?

INT+1

“Wait here,” he told LivingDeadGrrl. “Scaly Wings.”

It took effort to fly with the pressure of unseen madness beating against his brain. Fortunately, he was a dragon.

Your Fly skill is now level 11!

Above the water, above the slowly-shifting stalagmites, Rotgoriel looked down upon the cavern and tried to think, tried to remember.

But all that fled when he caught the gleam of gold.

He didn’t care that the pressure grew as he flew toward it, barely registered the words that followed.

The LDAP sign communicates with you! You take 19 points of sanity damage!

Images came through his mind, images of a vast sea of darkness, with flashing lights moving in lines that made up patterns that made up bigger patterns, that went on into eternity. Jellyfish? Stranger things in the deep? Impossible to say, but they were the tiniest parts of an ocean that was a being that was a world unto itself.

And if Rotgoriel had been a deeper creature, or more disposed toward imaginative thought, he might have been undone there. Might have frozen in awe at the majesty of the whole thing, perched upon some jutting stalagmite that wasn’t a stalagmite until the sanity burned out of his skull.

But he was a dragon, and there was gold, and it really was that simple.

He could scarcely think by the time he landed on the skull-shaped altar at the center of the cave and kicked aside soggy, rotting bones to reach his prize.

It wasn’t until he was hoisting the strange, squiggly golden symbol up in his claws that the thought crossed his mind that this might be a really, really big mistake...

...but it wasn’t.

LUCK+1

Immediately, the pressure on his mind, the images of a vaster being, all of that snapped away like a catapult releasing its tension and sending a rock into the sky.

Rotgoriel turned his new treasure over in his claws, enjoying the feel of it. Real gold! It was in the shape of a twisty lock, with a five-pointed star keyhole. Eyes and tentacles were engraved in it, but that didn’t matter. So much heavy gold!

He was rudely interrupted by words passing in front of his eyes.

QUEST WAYPOINT COMPLETE: You have obtained the Sea Gold seal!

“I have to give this up later for the quest?” Rotgoriel liked the idea not at all.

...but then he remembered that he liked the idea of being enslaved even less.

Still, it was such a beautiful thing. And when he licked it, it was almost like his mind was buzzing again, only without the pain this time.

“Hey!” LivingDeadGrrl called from far back in the cavern. “Did you do something? I can think clearly now, the mad is gone!” She said the last bit in a sing-song voice.

“Yes,” he said. “I did something. But I need to keep a hold on it, or it will come back.”

That was a bit of a lie, but he didn’t want her getting ideas about his gold.

He needn’t have worried. She took one look at it and shook her head. “Cursed artifact? Cute. Want a thong to wear it around your neck?”

That was a lot better than relying on his horrible dexterity, so he agreed without hesitation. And the weight felt good against his neck, the metal warm against his chest.

It improved his mood toward the mostly-human woman, so much so that he happily carried LivingDeadGrrl down the whirlpool and into the lava caves. They sped through the room with the bridges before the bats could react, but he was pretty sure he hit the wrong lava tube.

Which turned out fine, as they found the hole again, the one that pierced all through the upper part of the mountain. There were more ropes spiked into the wall here, and he growled to see that his fire hadn’t burned all the way down.

The bottom was a pool of solid mist. Strain as he might, he couldn’t see through it, and it was quiet and white down below.

“I’m thinking we might want to bite the bullet and climb down after them,” LivingDeadGrrl said. “Can we do your quest without running into those assholes, do you think?”

“What’s a bullet?” he asked without thinking. “Is it tasty?”

She gave him an odd look. Rotgoriel stared back. Then he remembered his usual trick for dealing with her when she got weird and smiled and nodded.

“Your quest?” she prompted.

“Still secret,” he told her. “But it doesn’t require confronting them below. Just finding two more things.”

“Are they things the bad guys might grab?”

“Yes, very much so,” Rotgoriel admitted. “They’re like this,” he tapped the gold around his neck.

“That’s gonna be tricky,” she said. “I don’t know what else they’re after, but they’ve been looting like vacuums every time they raid us. No way they’ll leave treasure alone, cursed or not.”

“Then we must find it first,” he said and eyed the ropes. “Are you good to climb?”

“Yep. Better than you, probably. I’d recommend flying down, Mister Scaly.”

He studied her for a second to figure out if she was mocking him but couldn’t tell. Humans just didn’t use their bodies to say things enough. They relied on their faces and that was tricky to read sometimes.

Finally he muttered “Scaly Wings” and tried to glide down as silently as possible.

Which was why he managed to avoid skewering himself on the massive spear of ice just below the mist.

AGL+1

Your Fly skill is now level 12!

The ice was thick, opaque, and had something black in the center of it. Rotgoriel steered past and followed the ropes down. They stopped here, and scuffmarks showed where several people had obviously walked around for a while before heading off towards one of the waterfalls in the distance.

Behind him, bone-reinforced boots tapped against ice as his human descended.

My human? Rotgoriel thought.

It did seem to fit. She was helping him, had been quite helpful through all of this. Even if she had insulted him several times, really, that was only to be expected. Not everyone could have the manners of a dragon. Yes, he was feeling gratitude towards her.

“I shall watch over your descendants for two generations and make sure they prosper and breed far and wide,” he told her as she came up to join him.

She stared at him for a few seconds, then waved her hands in the air. “What did you just say?”

“I am grateful for your help, and will ensure your descendants prosper.” he blinked. “Did I stutter?”

“Okay, there’s RP and there’s RP, but this isn’t some weird way to try to get me into dragon sex to make those descendants, is it? Because number one, ew, number two, hell no.”

“What? No! The idea is vomitous!” Rotgoriel shook his head so fast his gold beat a rhythm on his chest. “Forget it. The offer is withdrawn. I don’t want any of your offspring getting that idea again in a century or three.”

She waved her hands again, and cleared her throat. “Thanks for the offer! Sorry I can’t take you up on it. I don’t think pregnancy’s in this game—”

Then she stopped. “Wait, what? Are you kidding me?”

“What?” Rotgoriel asked.

“Not you. Hang on.” She looked away. “Okay, sorry viewers. I’ve just been informed that pregnancy is a thing. Holy shit, guess I’ll have to start using protection—” She clammed up, and immediately her face turned bright red.

Rotgoriel opened his mouth... then shut it again.

Some inner sense told him this wasn’t the time to draw her ire.

WIS+1

After a few minutes she laughed. “Haha! You got me, stream. And yeah, I was going to wait a few episodes before showing the lucky guy. So, I tell you what, we’ll postpone this discussion for a few days, and in the meantime, I’ll whip up a poll! Place your bets, people, and guess who I’ve been making snow Cthulhus with!” Another laugh, and then she angrily waved at him and stomped off toward the direction the tracks followed.

“Another eight hundred people joined the stream, just like that, and fuck me running who cares about the adventure, they just wanna know who I’ve been banging.” She was muttering, as she went. “And god help me I’ll have to play it for the ratings now, and Grace is gonna laugh her fucking ass off.”

“What?” Rotgoriel felt it safe to ask.

“Never mind. I’m gonna activate audio again. Don’t. Get. Weird. Okay? Once is enough. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome?” Rotgoriel tried, but that didn’t seem to make her any happier.

After a brief discussion, his human drew a paintbrush and went on ahead. She actually had halfway decent stealth skills. Rotgoriel followed as best he could, following tracks where he could, and yellow paint on the walls where she’d left a mark.

The rocky caves turned to mud here, sediments washed down from above and filling tunnels. It DID make tracking easier, but he grimaced at the thought of cleaning his scales later.

Then, shouting from up ahead. The sound of a spear hitting stone, and Rotgoriel abandoned all stealth, charging as best he could. His stomach growled, and he realized he hadn’t eaten in hours. Foolish! He’d remedy that with the flesh of whoever they were fighting.

“Come back!” LivingDeadGrrl yelled, as a tiny form burst out of a muddy tunnel, bounced off the opposite wall and lay unmoving. “I’m sorry! You spooked me!”

“Run!” shouted a very familiar voice, as the draggit-sized lump of mud struggled to its feet. “It’s coming!”

“She is on our side!” Rotgoriel said, moving in front of Geebo and spreading his wings to shield his re-found minion. “Human! Do not strike my minion!”

“No!” Geebo screamed. “Not her! THAT!”

Something with entirely too many arms and multiple heads burst from the muddy wall.

It paused when it saw Rotgoriel. Rotgoriel glared back at it—

—a glare that turned into shock as words appeared in front of his eyes.

WELCOME BACK!

“No!” Rotgoriel yelled.

And then he was screaming through an all-too human throat.

RUTGER'S CHARACTER SHEET

Spoiler: Spoiler

Name: Rutger Royal

Age: 1 Day

Jobs:

Cultist 1, High Dragon Hatchling 4

Attributes Pools Defenses

Strength: 156 Constitution: 153 Hit Points: 309 Armor: 75

Intelligence: 41 Wisdom: 39 Sanity: 80 Mental Fortitude: 75

Dexterity: 14 Agility: 37 Stamina: 51 Endurance: 0

Charisma: 37 Willpower: 151 Moxie: 188 Cool: 75

Perception: 151 Luck: 34 Fortune: 185 Fate: 4

General Skills

Brawling – Level 13

Dodge – Level 6

Fly – Level 12

Ride – Level 1

Stealth – Level 2

Swim – Level 1

High Dragon Hatchling Skills

Burninate – Level 9

Chomp – Level 7

Draconic Tongue – Level N/A

Dragonseye – Level 15

Limited Equipment – Level N/A

No Thumbs – Level N/A

Scaly Wings – Level N/A

Slow to Age – Level N/A

Cultist Skills

Unlocked Jobs

Conjuror, Fire Elementalist, Grifter, Knight

Gear:

LDAP Sign