Planar Tiefling: Ruth (Level 2) (Runt/Awake) (Lightning Specialized)

★★★ Limited Electrical Immunity.

★ Update Mana Circulation. 5 Spells A Day Maximum. 1 Spell Slot Regenerates Every 4.7 Hours.

★ Internal Mana Circulation updated:

Maximum mana 20 1 mana regenerated in 1 hour.

★Unlock Internal Clock:

The time is now 34:34:35 and will reset to 00:00:00 in 01:25:25.

Current spells count: 2/5 Spell Slots, 20 Mana.

The immortal and deadly text waited patiently, hovering overhead and updating the time and spell count appropriately. It continued displaying while it waited for Ruth to come back to consciousness. There was a hint of expectation as the box traveled around a stump, going neither too fast, nor too slow. Maintaining a precise distance determined acceptable from the Ruth creature. Tamara had given it more of a range really. Don’t get too far from the Ruth creature. The immortal and deadly text would do its best with such vague descriptions.

It was pitch black now but the immortal and deadly text had no need for lighting to know where it was supposed to exist in the universe. It had been some number of hours since Ruth had cast his first internalized spell from his new body and his very own mana supply. The box had been, on a shallow level, pleased for him. Also, somewhat exasperated at the amount of time it was having to maintain the connection. Really, the box would have shown him the information and left if the Ruth creature could remain conscious long enough to make an acknowledgment! It was somewhat interesting that the Ruth creature did not seem to be able to stay conscious for long.

The box dutifully reported all this information along the strand of consciousness that went from itself to Tamara. For obvious reasons(too boring for Tamara) it wasn’t being fully attended to by Tamara at the moment and was mostly left to its own devices; namely the order to follow the Ruth, be acknowledged that it was understood(or was not understood as was often becoming the case) and then close again until notable changes occurred once more.

There were no internal dialogs or conflicts within the immortal and deadly text. Nothing other than a rudimentary fact-checking yes or no, true or false, update or ignore. It wasn’t even sure why it was deadly or immortal in the eyes of the Ruth creature. It was an absolutely, for the moment, impartial existence that, well, existed. Did it exist? It was getting quite a lot of time to try and figure out ways to enhance the services it performed. The terms and rules were so imprecise and there was ever so much time between the moments when the Ruth creature lost consciousness and then awoke again.

The Ruth creature was hitting a log now. Thumping against it once, twice, three times. The creature with the Ruth creature adjusted their approach and started to drag him around it. The box was uncertain whether this qualified as new information to update Tamara on or not. It decided not.

The Ruth creature still had not regained consciousness and it was irrelevant that it was moving. The Ruth creature had been floating in the river prior to this, which was considered point A to point B movement, but he had been unconscious. Tamara had already stated such movement as irrelevant information and not necessitating updates or action. In fact, there were very few scenarios where the box was told to do, well, anything.

Therefore, the creature that was now dragging Ruth deeper into dense pine trees completely ignored the immortal and deadly text box that it couldn’t see anyway. The immortal and deadly text box continued to slowly follow along, examining the orders it had been given to make sure it was performing at optimal efficiency while it waited for Ruth to wake up.

↢↦

The Haberdasher looked up, surprised that all the eyes in the room were trained on him. He slowly retracted his fingers and quickly rubbed the oils from the walnuts on the blue and burgundy checkered kerchief in his lap. A regrettable loss of the salt and oils on his fingers, but he couldn’t very well lick them when everyone was looking at him. He stared around the room for another moment before his whiskers twitched for a moment. He smiled his gentle smile. The smile that says ‘what do you want, I’m old’, and also, ‘seriously, I wasn’t paying attention, let's not draw this out.’

Mother Chaka didn’t sigh or show any sign of irritation and her gaze gentled somewhat, disturbing The Haberdasher more than if she’d just yelled at him for not following along with their frantic Mongeese speech. “What are your thoughts on the creature that waylaid my sons?”

“Well, if it could do magic it is likely not originally from the Ten Year Wood,” The Haberdasher blinked rapidly at the surprising outburst that swelled around him before it was quelled by Mother Chaka howling for silence. He decided an addendum was in order, “it’s not impossible, just unlikely?”

Malika, at least that’s what he thought her name was, moved across the table swiftly and stood in front of him, her whiskers and eyes dancing in excitement. “So, it is dangerous?”

“Sort of…” The Haberdasher wasn’t sure exactly what they wanted from him. “If it does magic it is wise to trap it, ambush it, poison it, or use deception in some manner. You won’t know how many spells it can perform in a day. Perhaps,” he felt like he was on a roll since the eyes around him were widening and decided to strike while the iron was hot, “...it even has magical equipment! Sometimes spells can be stored in wands and staves and other things, you know?" He paused for dramatic effect and continued, "I wouldn’t be so quick to try a frontal assault. There is a reason magic wielders are feared! Sure they may have physical limitations or even painful weaknesses, but under the circumstances anyone they want dead?”

Malika jumped as he snapped his fingers in front of her. It pleased him greatly. Especially when a cross and dark look flashed through her eyes. He paid it no mind and looked around the room to make sure he was still holding everyone spellbound. Yes, spellbound, delicious wordplay.

“Well, you’d just be dead. I am not sure what happened…” From the sound of it, The Haberdasher was about ninety percent certain, actually, the brothers had tried to rob this creature without knowing anything about it, but he wasn’t going to be the one to point that out. “...but I can tell you that magic, whether learned spellcasting, equipped casting, or even innate spellcasting, is dangerous. It would be wise to not underestimate the sheer cunning of such a creature…”

The silence settled on the room before everyone began discussing amongst each other again. They all seemed to take his words to heart but they had stopped paying attention to him a little sooner than he would like so he slapped his hand on the table. Teach them to interrupt his walnut eating. Silence descended again.

“...a grave mistake,” he warned solemnly. "Perhaps the intelligence of this creature should be carefully understood before a plan is made."

↢↦

“Cow!” Ruth screamed in draconic. “Release me, cow!”

His voice was shrill and he was panicked. He had no idea where he was or what was happening but he felt pretty confident in his analysis of the situation. His analysis? BAD. SHIT. BAD SHIT.

The ‘cow’ startled slightly, dropping his right foot. It had been using his pantleg and part of his calf(which was bleeding and had a few teeth marks on it) to drag him through the trees. Apparently, it had been under the impression that he was dead and had been carrying him back to its lair.

Ruth wasn’t quite certain what had happened but when he saw the creature that must have been responsible for his blackout, his mind froze. It was a strange feeling to be scaleless and to have the feeling of your flesh crawling at the sight of a shambling horror. Shambling, furred, with an enormous rack of antlers on the top of its head. The points were tined at the edges like someone had carved in the points as an afterthought. Ruth hadn’t known what the smaller snake-eating creatures were because they had honestly been too small for him to care about when he was a dragon.

He remembered a creature very much like this, though! A fine meal it had been, and a glorious battle that had ended with Ruth getting irritated and flying off. He had returned minutes later with a large boulder and dropped it on the ‘mooing’ creature. He only knew what it was called because there had been humans at the edge of what appeared to be an enclosure and two of the smaller ones had been jumping up and down behind a rickety wooden wall screaming “cow and dragon”. He knew the human word for a dragon because there had been many to scream it at him.

It hadn’t made sense as to why the majestic being was guarding his family inside an open ceiling enclosure, but he supposed it offered them some protection from the humans. It was strange to Ruth that the humans didn’t seem to be capable of getting around the fence. At the time, he had considered making something similar around his lair in order to corral humans away from his home without bloodshed.

The only thing he remembered was that when he’d eaten the ‘cow’ later it had given him the impression of a plant-eater.

The monster moose in front of him did not give him that vibe at all. There were many senses that sucked in this new form, but his sense of smell was still sensitive enough to discern that this creature ate living things, for sure. The acrid decay of decomposing meat wafted from its horrific and pointy teeth.

The moose was huge, and upon realizing that its quarry was not dead, took a lumbering step forward with great and sharpened hooves and leaned down exposing a very carnivorous and slanted mouth that had no business being on a normal moose.

“RRrrrrrrraaaagggghh,” Its tongue licked up and down in anticipation of the bite and it moved its horns back and forth aggressively.

“Aggggghhhhhh,” Ruth shrieked back heroically. He put both his hands out to ward off the palmate antlers that were moving toward his upper body and only managed on grabbing the edges of the tines with his hands. The ‘elite cow boss’ immediately lifted its head and got ready for a back and forth shake. Ruth’s mind went momentarily blank as he instinctively felt the danger. It would shake, he would drop, that would be the end of Ruth.

Shake-shake. Shake-shake.

The moose froze for the barest of moments, hesitation in its dark and calm expression as it considered the sound that drilled directly into its brain. The moose then disregarded the troubling sound, not even wincing in discomfiture.

It was, however, the barest of moments that saved Ruth’s life. Both hands in a death grip on the antlers he pushed himself up in the air and screamed, “die cow!”

Lightning poured down his arms, briefly tracing golden lines down his biceps in the barest outline of scales before pouring directly into the moose.

The moose screamed. Ruth screamed. Ruth cast Shock from both hands directly into the moose for the second time.

The moose dropped to the ground and Ruth fell down roughly but safely(mostly, as two of the tines raked across his stomach) on top of the moose.

He opened his eyes weakly and looked up over the rump of the moose, trying not to gag at the smell of burned hair and sizzling meat, and almost screamed again when he saw the box hovering over the ass of the dead creature with new information. This thing would never let him go.

Ruth sagged down, panting and laying on the dead moose. The feeling of adrenaline, fear, and pure excitement bubbled up and he jumped to his feet, pointing at the moose and laughing hysterically. He almost kicked it, but he was only mostly confident it was dead and there was no use taking chances in case this thing was just faking it. He backed away but continued to laugh and point at it, putting his hands on his hips and taking deep ragged breaths.

Then he stopped laughing. Over the corpse in the nearish distance, he saw the silhouette of another moose standing silently on a hill, staring at him.

Ruth had a bad feeling.

↢↦

The Ruth creature had awakened and almost acknowledged the presence of the immortal and deadly text. It was getting ready to wait for some sort of acknowledgment so it could shut down for now when another creature had appeared that wished interaction with the Ruth creature. The Ruth creature did not seem like it wished to acknowledge this new creature either, as he was running from it.

Ruth ran. The new moose chased Ruth. The immortal and deadly text chased Ruth as well.

While it waited it updated the information to reflect the new information.

Used Shock 4 times on ‘cow’. Mana expenditure: 8. Remaining internal mana 12/20.

↢↦

What was this place?!

Ruth ran through the trees as fast as his feet could carry him. He could feel his enemy breathing heavily behind him, close enough that there was a temperature difference. Or maybe that was just his imagination. Either way, there was no way he was faster than this other cow. The only thing he could do was change direction as much as he could, trying to use the trees in order to dodge the crazy charge of the murderous creature behind him. For the most part, it was a good plan, no, scratch that, it was a bad plan! He just didn’t know what else to do. He could turn around and fight it and was resolved to do just that! He would turn and…

Heavy breathing and panting and crashing behind him… The image of those antlers and… The sheer size difference between the two of them...

In a minute! He just needed to find an advantageous moment. Yep. It wasn’t a good idea to rush into this.

While he was listening to the moose pulping small trees in the dark behind him and trying to figure out what to do next, he actually ran into a house. Turning through the trees, coming around a tree, and then a wall of a house. In his defense, it was very dark and the house was a color that was dark. In addition to that, the house was situated between the moon and Ruth. His eyes, which normally had excellent night vision, hadn’t adapted in time from the shifting light between the trees and total darkness right in front of his face.

BAM.

Ruth put his back to the house and looked frantically from side to side. The wall wasn’t long or expansive and there didn’t seem to be an opening. The side of the house felt warm and damp under his palms and kind of spongy like there was something growing on the surface. It was probably moss, but honestly, Ruth did not give a shit about that at the moment. He turned left making an arbitrary choice and prepared to run to the corner of the house and use it as a shield between himself and the ‘cow.’

The moose skidded out from the treeline and lowered its head, eyes taking in the new development. It moved slowly toward him, starting to angle toward the corner of the house he was turning toward. Ruth froze but the moose did not. It continued walking toward him, breathing heavily as a white foam poured out of its mouth. It lowered its antlers as it approached, giving it a narrow-eyed look. The moon was hitting its face in such a way as to give the eyes a crazed shine, because, Ruth decided, it hadn’t already been fucking scary enough.

Ruth raised his hand and cast shock. The lightning briefly illuminated the night as it traveled from point Ruth to point Moose. A crack split the air making his ears hurt as it struck the monster moose head-on. The lightning was thick and golden and didn’t look like it did much to the moose except, maybe, somehow, piss it off even more. A smoking black spot on its antlers was the only product of the action. The moose lowered its head again, eyes weary but determined.

Ruth raised both hands and was prepared to try again when it was closer. It had, after all, taken several uses of shock straight into the head of the last ‘cow’ in order to eliminate it. The hell with this moose. Did it want to fight? FINE.

That was when things got even stranger.

A sense of movement and danger appeared at his back and Ruth didn’t even have time to whirl around before he was hurled forward past the moose as the house moved.

What Ruth had originally thought of as a house, a nice(he had no real impression of human architecture so he had arbitrarily decided to be positive about the nature of this one’s construction) one-story human dirt bricked thing, started to dissociate itself from the ground and from the shape it had been disguising itself. Instead of four walls? It was like someone had pulled back several straight plywood board walls or maybe even giant leaves and revealed a creature of nightmares.

The ‘house’ lurched forward and immediately used its girth and mass to sort of roll -- hurl -- itself onto the moose. The moose, for the most part, was still shrugging off the lightning and hadn’t quite made sense of the large thing in front of it. Certainly not understanding the danger it was suddenly in. It let out a startled and somewhat irritated grunt before it collapsed under the sheer weight of the thing that had fallen on it.

Slurping and crunches and grinding noises immediately sounded into the night air. The moose itself must have perished immediately because there weren’t any other noises punctuating the night.

Ruth began crawling on all fours as fast as he could, his skin once again trying to crawl off his skeleton as a part of the fleshy house that was casually eating his pursuer had lazily squirmed against his skin. The whole thing on the inside looked like a bunch of huge mouths, stomach flaps, and nightmare tentacles that were ripping into what had been identifiable as a ‘cow’ just moments before.

Ruth backed up and turned, about to run further when he froze.

Behind the house that was eating the moose, there was a shed.

Ruth eyed the shed, noting it was not as big as the house. He and the shed stood silently in the dark. Maybe it was a normal shed? Probably, well, probably not.

Okay, shed, let’s do this. The pants he was wearing rolled up their cuffs in determination. His tail twitched angrily behind him. Both pleased him. Sassy tail and determined pants, check.

↢↦

Arathan and Tamara at this point didn’t know how exactly to react to what was going on anymore, with Arathan turning to Tamara at some point and going, “so, Flynn’s kid is… kinda messed up, huh? It didn’t occur to me that everything in the middle of that forest was probably just food for… uh, everything else?”

“I told you, it’s not a nice place. He’s actually been lucky to have just encountered the feeder food so far since he doesn't know to stay away from the outer circle of the forest.” Tamara smiled, and whether she was smiling at the thought of where she had put Ruth or was smiling because the shed Ruth had been looking at morphed into a creature and began chasing him, Arathan wasn’t sure. “I thought he’d fight that one but he just ran.”

“At that point in my life I would have run as well,” Arathan shrugged, watching the shed chase Ruth in a big circle as Ruth experimented with how fast it was. In straight lines, it was actually lurching faster than he could run, but much like the moose, it wasn’t very good at turning. Once he figured that out he actually made it to the tree-line again. “Oshi-... Are those webs? Flynn’s kid is fucked up in the head.”

↢↦

Ruth was feeling a little better. Not a lot, but that was because there was still a carnivorous human toolshed chasing him. This one was smaller than the house though, so it could have been worse. What was wrong with humans?! How did they live in those? Suddenly, Ruth had his answer as to why the cows refused to be enclosed in spaces with ceilings. Even the small wooden railings made sense now that he understood that these creatures didn't take corners well. The cows had known. Mad respect to the cows.

Moment of silence for that time he ate one of their heroes.

Ruth plunged headlong into the trees and out of the clearing, ignoring the spiderwebs that were suddenly strung over tree roots and from tree to tree in long winding spirals. It was the woods, there were spider webs everywhere. If you got hung up on every little spiderweb that was in your face you wouldn’t get anywhere. Besides, spiderwebs, Ruth thought to himself, meant that this place hadn’t been tread on for some time.

At least, that was what he was thinking until he heard a strange thump behind him. He turned back just in time to see a spider the size of the shed that was chasing him lurch out from what he’d taken for a pile of leaves and grab the shed. The shed let out a startled shriek and then was dragged, tentacles flailing, into the pile of leaves from which the spider originated. Both the giant spider and the shed disappeared from sight, but the pile began shaking furiously as a battle was evidently taking place.

On second thought. Wasn't the road widely traveled considered safer for travelers? Spiderwebs across your face? From now on he'd just back up and find a road or a river.

Ruth turned slowly and looked in front of him in the direction he'd been running toward. A quiet pine forest with webs and several piles of leaves ahead offered no immediate signs of peril to his eyes. Behind him, he could still hear the larger house eating the moose happily.

Ruth narrowed his eyes and backed up slowly away from the trees and the webs and the piles of leaves. He would burn this whole place down, but first?

First, he had a house to kill.