Chapter 1: Arrival

"Good boy, Athos! Get it! Get the frisbee!"

yay! athos is good boy! yay, Frisbee! Frisbee good! Dad throw Frisbee! athos good boy get Frisbee!

eyes up to follow Frisbee, running hard, legs feel good stretching after Ride In Car (wheee! wind in ears!), jingle of Collar Tags, smell of grass and Dog Pee (someone else was here! but not recent), Frisbee is coming down down down

leap!

athos caught Frisbee, athos quick bring back to Dad and SmolFriend!

Scritches! SmolFriend give Scritches! athos go fwump on grass, give SmolFriend tummy ooooh, tummyrub! rub rub rub...enough! athos up, grab Frisbee, drop for Dad!

{hurry up Dad throwitthrowitthrowit!} athos barks

"Okay, okay." Dad laughs and cocks back arm. "Here you go!"

whoo! big throw! wind catches Frisbee! Frisbee flies far! athos runs, athos must get Frisbee!

noooooo! Frisbee goes over Fence!

eh, Fence is low and athos jump good

"Athos! Athos! Stop! Stay out of the graveyard! C'mere, Athos!"

Dad calls! ...no. athos will be deaf right now, get Frisbee first. athos is good boy, must get Frisbee because Dad threw it! (and because Dad can't throw Frisbee for athos again until athos gets Frisbee heeheehee) athos get Frisbee and then go to Dad

leap! athos go right over Fence! dodge through big square rocks with squigglies cut in them! Frisbee is up ahead, on grass in front of round-flower-thing leaning against big rock—

[email protected]#%[email protected]!7%^*@[email protected]...stinky bad! loud! bright! dark! hurts! help!......help, Mom! Dad, SmolFriend, help! athos needs you!...Qp4)jdo4%^...

—fwump!

dark. night. (?!) smells of fog and dirt

athos stands, shakes to settle fur and because shake helps with calm. athos looks around

rocks different. different sizes, numbers, places, squiggles. Moon is up where before Sun was up. Moon is weird-big, athos sees good because Moon so bright

oooh! Peoples over there around big wooden box! one People, older, lying on ComfyBed inside big box, others standing around. People in box is drinking something, other Peoples look sad

{no! not be sad, Peoples!} athos barks. {athos here! athos good boy! athos give cuddles, make you happy again!}

athos runs towards Peoples, barking hi. one of standy-up Peoples sees athos and yells, points. smells afraid. sounds angry, but talks weird, his angry-talk not like Mom's angry-talk

{athos coming, People! give cuddles, make you happy!}

athos is fast, distance not far. athos here! hello, Peoples!

eep! standy-up Peoples jump in athos's way, pull out metal sticks! athos spins around, runs back a little ways

standy-up Peoples start towards athos but stop and look back when lying-down People chokes. lying-down People goes limp like Dad does when taking Nap, then twitches really hard and makes noise like when Cat spits up hairball

whoa, white sparkly fog floating out of lying-down People! white fog turns into glowy-ropey-things, fly out all directions really fast! glowy-ropey-things hit each of Peoples, they yell and drop to ground. aaaggh! glowy-ropey-thing hits athos! Aaaagh!

cried the universe.

I yelped when the ghostly light hit me, jumping back the way I had when SmolF—Cassie's friends doused me with the hose at Cassie's last birthday party. In mid-air my body started growing explosively, my ruff getting thicker and heavier so fast that it snapped my collar right off. My previously-docked tail shot forth from the nub like plant growth at superspeed; I had been without the tail since I was a puppy and its sudden appearance unbalanced me. I hit the ground from my leap, stumbled, overcompensated for the tail, and plowed into the dirt nose-first. Embarrassing, painful and (worst of all) I bit my tongue with my suddenly longer/sharper teeth. Yowch!

I shook my head to get some of the dazed out of it, then looked up at the people that had been advancing on me before...before whatever it was that had just happened.

Thinking about it, I probably should have approached a bit more circumspectly; that was likely their dad lying on the heavily-padded inside of the open coffin over there, with ghostly light still shimmering up out of him and spilling onto the ground. I had been coming in a little hot, and I would imagine that having a sixty-pound Rotty-mutt (that's what Mom always called me) charge towards you could be scary. They were just protecting their dad from what would have seemed like an attacker, which was absolutely the right thing to do. Fortunately, when they pulled out their swords (Swords? Why did they have swords?) I had run back thirty or forty feet, so it should be clear that I wasn't an immediate danger...except now I was huge, and when they stood up and saw me they would probably still feel threatened. Hm.

I lay down and put my head on my paws, letting my ears drop down and making my very best Adorable Eyes towards them. See? Not a threat! Feel the adorableness!

They were still sprawled on the ground, apparently taking longer than I had to get over the effects of whatever that was. Eh, I wasn't in a hurry.

...

...hrm.

...hum de dum de dum.

Boy, it was a darn good thing that I wasn't in a hurry, because these guys were taking their own sweet time. Three of the five had their eyes open, the other two were still blissfully asleep. The open-eyed ones weren't doing more than twitching and trying to get their arms and legs working. Sure, Dad always took a little while between when he woke up from a nap and when he was fully up and around, but this was ridiculous.

They were a weird bunch. Their clothes were completely different from what my family wore; no blue jeans and T-shirts like Cassie, blouse and skirts like Mom, or even button-downs and blue jeans like Dad. On their legs they had tights like the ones Mom wore to yoga, and on top they had big poofy shirts that reminded me of that weird thing Cassie had worn to Halloween last year when she dressed as a princess. Worst of all was the smell; the wind was barely moving, but I was downwind and they stank of perfume so strongly that my nose itched. The perfume was probably an attempt to cover up the rank reek of sweat and B.O. that was way worse than Dad ever got when he came back from jogging. The combination wasn't quite as bad as the time that fat black cat with the white stripe sprayed me in the face from its butt (I hadn't realized cats could do that!), but it was close.

Ooh, look! The first three were finally getting on their feet. I belly-crawled a little towards them, amping up the power on the adorableness. They exchanged glances, then looked back at me with faces that weren't the you're-a-good-boy happy ones that I wanted.

Hrmph. Fine, time to break out the big guns. I rolled on my back, paws in the air, and wiggled back and forth. Rub mah belly, humans! You cannot resist the adorable fuzzy belly, and once you pet me you will be happy and we will be friends! C'mon, you know you want to.

They were proving annoyingly resistant. One of them glowered at me, then said something angry that I didn't understand and—

Whoa! His hand was on fire! I needed to help hi...wait, he didn't seem to be bothered. I had never seen a human be on fire in any part of its body, and I was pretty sure they weren't supposed to be okay with it. He was raising his hand like he was going to throw something and—yow!

The fireball caught me dead center on my chest and my fur went up like a torch. I frantically rolled across the grass until the fire was out, then lurched to my feet in disbelief. He set me on fire! I was being all invitingly wiggly and he set me on fire!

{Hey!} I barked. {Stop that!}

He ignored my request and started forming another fireball in his other hand.

Rude.

I barely had time to react as his sword-wielding brother thrust for my face. I awkwardly scrambled to the side, managing to not get stabbed through my freaking eye, but I still took a nasty cut across the cheek.

Okay, this was not cool.

I liked to think of myself as a good dog. I liked people, and they generally liked me. Sure, I'd growl at anyone who made Mom or Dad or Cassie nervous, but I wouldn't hurt a human. I generally wouldn't even bark at them, because that was rude. (Well, except for the mailman; barking at mailmen was every dog's sacred duty.) That was the deal between humans and canines: We took care of each other. Us canines supplied the good senses, warm fur, muscle, teeth, and cuteness while the humans supplied the bacon and frisbees. Everybody won.

This guy? This guy was making me wonder if perhaps there were limits to the whole human/canine friendship compact. If so, I felt like he was definitely crossing those limits.

FireFingers threw another ball of flame at my head; I ducked and jumped aside, barking angrily. Mr. Stabby Guy shouted something and then hopped back towards me, his feet doing this weird apart/together/apart thing that covered ground so quickly he was just a blur. The full weight of his body was behind the thrust aimed at my neck and I was off-balance from dodging the fireball.

I barely managed to duck enough that his sword hit me a glancing blow in the shoulder instead of a solid blow in the throat. The point dug in a little but didn't catch on anything, instead tracing a line of pain down my shoulder and ribs before slipping off. StabbyGuy stumbled forward, finding himself overextended when there was no resistance. I swatted him with one paw in passing, then pivoted and raced to the right a dozen yards before taking as much cover as I could behind one of the larger gravestones. Given that I was now the size of a pony and the gravestone wasn't that big, the cover was somewhat limited. Fortunately, FireFingers was momentarily distracted; his other siblings, the ones who hadn't recovered as quickly from whatever had hit us, were now struggling to their feet. I glanced over to make sure that Stabby wasn't coming at me again.

Oops.

Hm. It was possible that I hadn't accounted for my new size and strength; what I had expected to be a 'hey, back off' swat had knocked Stabby back and into a gravestone. He was slumped against it, not moving, and there was wetness dribbling from where his head had impacted the stone.

I glanced back to the other humans; they were on their feet and facing me, anger in their faces and voices.

Nope.

I turned and put some real vim and vigor into running away. If that meant that a few clods of dirt got thrown in their faces...well, that was hardly my fault, right?

o-o-o-o

Sniff, sniff, sniff...hrm...nope. Couldn't smell a trace of Cassie, Mom, or Dad anywhere. I couldn't hear them either, so if they were calling for me then they must have gotten lost. Granted, it was suddenly night time, whereas I had chased the frisbee into the graveyard on a bright and sunny mid-afternoon. Also, the graveyard where my mind had suddenly gotten sharper was similar to the one I'd originally jumped into but not exactly the same. Plus there had been that weird moment when the world got strange and wibbly, when I was seeing flavors and tasting sounds and my nose was full of an absolutely indescribable stench.

I wasn't even remotely close to home, was I?

Granted, that was pretty obvious based on the landscape. Cassie and I had been playing fetch in the park not too far from our house, on a big grassy field at the bottom of the sledding hill. (Or, given that it had been summer, the 'rolling over and over down the' hill.) There had been a handful of other families picnicking around us, although no other dogs.

Now I found myself in a forest, on a brightly-moonlit night, with no sign of other people anywhere except those very rude siblings who had already tried to murder me. No help there. Worse, it was cold enough that I could see my breath.

I hated cold.

Oh, granted, my fur was nice and thick, thicker since the universe shouted 'Supreme Exemplar' (whatever that meant) at—

Supreme Exemplar Skill class: Epic Where raises you up to be the ultimate example of your species, takes you substantially beyond that point, pushing you into the realms of myth and legend. Perk Attributes raised to unaugmented max for species (max 200) before following bonuses Physique +25 Recovery +25 Spirit +25 Channeling +25 Restoration +25 Perk Enhanced memory Perk Enhanced cognitive ability Perk Body conforms to hyperidealized self-image Perk Dyadic Unity

Buh, wah?!

Why was there a translucent box floating in front of me?

Experimentally, I batted at it with a paw; the paw went right through it without contact and the box disappeared.

...Okay, that was a thing that happened.

I swiped at the air a few more times to see if I could bring the box back, but with no success. Let's see, it had appeared when I'd been wondering what that 'Supreme Exemplar' thing was all abo—

Supreme Exemplar Skill class: Epic Where raises you up to be the ultimate example of your species, takes you substantially beyond that point, pushing you into the realms of myth and legend. Perk Attributes raised to unaugmented max for species (max 200) before following bonuses Physique +25 Recovery +25 Spirit +25 Channeling +25 Restoration +25 Perk Enhanced memory Perk Enhanced cognitive ability Perk Body conforms to hyperidealized self-image Perk Dyadic Unity

Huh. Okay, the box came back when I actively wanted it to and was simultaneously thinking about 'Supreme Exemplar'.

I read through the contents of the box again. What did it all mean? Physique? Spirit? What were—

Attributes Physique: Physical strength, bodily integrity, health, stamina, etc Recovery: How fast you regenerate HP and Physique Spirit: Spiritual strength (and therefore available magical power) Channeling: The amount of mana you can spend per second Restoration: How fast you regenerate mana and Spirit

On the one hand, these explanatory floating boxes were convenient. On the other hand, it was a little scary to know that someone, or something, was reading my mind and warping my perceptions in order to feed me the answers to questions I had barely even formed.

I batted the boxes away and paused to think. I now knew what Physique and the rest meant as words, but what did it mean to have numbers after them? I knew my numbers and could count—I liked being around my people, so I was typically sprawled next to Cassie when Mom and Dad were teaching her reading and counting—but what was that weird cross doing in front of them? I'd never seen numbers and words together in any of Cassie's books. I'd seen the cross before, along with two little lines one above the other, and sometimes the letter 'x', in Cassie's homework and in the so-called 'times tables' that Mom had helped her memorize. Still, there hadn't been anything with numbers and actual words.

Hm. Put a pin in that for a moment. I had definitely not been able to read or count, or even understand those concepts, before I'd been all 'Supreme Exemplar'ed into my current state. Remembering the numbers and stuff as clearly as I did had to be related to the 'Enhanced memory' Perk. On that subject, what did 'cognitive' mean? It was grouped with the memory and body Perks so it was probably something about my mental or physical abilities.

Hey, box-making thingy! How about offering some floaty-box explanations? C'mon, do it. Go, floating boxes! Float float float!

...Nothing. Bleh.

Okay, what did I know?

Well...numbers were for counting things, right? Mom and Dad used to ask Cassie to count everything in sight. Raisins, pebbles, silverware, whatever was nearby and could be counted. Then they would put additional things in or take them away and have Cassie recount. It seemed like a weird game to me, and a lot less fun than Fetch, especially Frisbee Fetch. Still, if Physique was about my body and numbers could be used to count things then maybe when the box said 'Physique +25' it meant that...what? That I had twenty-five bodies? That didn't make any sense. Still, it was related to my body somehow.

I lifted a paw and studied it, turning it this way and that. Substantially larger than I remembered it being. The nails were disproportionately longer and thicker, providing better traction and more damage when scratching. Some tentative poking at the ground suggested that my pads were tougher and less sensitive. My fur was definitely denser and more lustrous, which was good given the cold. All in all, a lovely paw. Yup. Still, what the ever-loving heck?! Why was I the size of a pony?!

Wait. 'Body conforms to hyperidealized self-image.' I hadn't heard 'hyperidealized' before, but I knew 'hyper' meant 'wiggly and overexcited and running around like crazy' and 'ideal' meant 'really good', so 'hyperidealized' obviously meant 'super fast and good'. I'd always thought of myself as a protector for my family: big, strong, able to take care of myself in a fight, and (according to various humans who had typically been in the process of petting me at the time) a 'handsome boy'. Amp that up enough and what you got was...this.

Blerg.

I suppose I shouldn't be ungrateful. It was plenty cool being Athos the Mighty Giant, but it was uncomfortable to have my body change so suddenly and so much.

Going back to the floaty-box information, how about 'Dyadic Unity'? What was—

Dyadic Unity

Where other living beings are a spirit housed in a body, you are a unity. Instead of being separate attributes, your Spirit and Physique are combined to form a single unified pool called Essence. Likewise, Restoration and Recovery are combined to form a single unified attribute called Recuperation.

Anything that would normally interact with one of these attributes will use the pool as its target instead. This includes Hit Point and Mana Point totals (HP is typically calculated based on Physique and MP based on Spirit); resistance to magical attacks (typically Spirit-based); resistance to fatigue, starvation, and poison (Physique), etc. Likewise, Recuperation restores both HP and MP.

Hm. Interesting. It sounded like the attributes measured things about me. Measuring things was done with numbers—the doorway into the kitchen at home had a whole series of lines with numbers next to them showing how tall Cassie had grown over the last few years. Maybe the numbers in the 'Supreme Exemplar' box changed the measurements? Presumably it made them better, so maybe the little cross symbol meant something like 'make better'?

My ruminations were interrupted as a breeze puffed by, carrying a few flakes of snow with it.

Lovely. It was starting to snow. I hated the cold; my new, thicker fur would keep me from feeling it across most of my body but my tummy was cold, my nose was freezing, and every time I breathed in I could feel the chill on my tongue. Snow on top of that would just get me wet and colder. There was no snow on the ground yet, but it was still cold enough to feel gross on my pads. (Oh, great. The snowflakes that were falling were sticking instead of melting. Wonderful.) Much as I hated them, I found myself wishing for the little booties that Mom used to put on my feet when she took me walkies in the snow.

I shook to get rid of the homesick thoughts; in the process I noticed the absence of tags jingling around my neck. A bit of scritching with a hind foot revealed that my handsome leather collar with the little bone-shaped metal nametag was gone. When I cast my mind back I could remember it snapping off when I grew after getting Supreme Exemplared back in the graveyard; the fact hadn't come to mind on its own but when I thought back I could remember the momentary feeling of choking and then the fraying snap as it broke. I could feel misery welling up in my throat; SmolFriend, as I'd thought of Cassie at the time, had been the one to put that on me. It had been a mark of my place in the family with Mom and Dad and Cassie, the physical symbol of how much they loved and cared about me. And now it was gone, lying abandoned in dirty grass somewhere back there. My only physical sign of connection to them, and I hadn't even consciously noticed its loss until now.

Feeling very sorry for myself, I looked around for somewhere that I could shelter out of the snow until daybreak. Sadly, a comfy house equipped with toasty forced-air heating grates failed to appear. Moreover, the leaves here were coming off the trees; it gave them a stark and lonely majesty but meant that they wouldn't do anything to keep the snow off me. Still, they would have been beautiful if I was looking at them through a window.

Cassie liked to sit on the bench of the bay window back home, sticking her legs out so they sprawled across the whole thing. I also liked to curl up on the bench, snoozing and occasionally looking out the window to see if there were any squirrels infiltrating the yard. There'd been some debate between me and Cassie as to who should get ownership of the bench on those occasions where we both wanted it; eventually we reached an agreement whereby she could stick her legs out and I could sprawl on top of them. It worked well for both of us, especially in the winter when Mom or Dad would light the fireplace and the whole room would be super-yummy toasty with the smell of woodsmoke and the crackle and occasional spark. It was hilarious, watching Mom and Dad so effortlessly tame fire without even thinking about how dangerous the stuff was. Seriously, they regularly and deliberately set part of the house on fire and didn't think twice about it. My family was so badass.

I missed them. A lot.

Hang on, what was that? Shouting human voices up ahead, and they sounded scared. Inhuman shrieks and howls alongside them. To the rescue!

I put on the speed, stretching out low to the ground and bounding forward in long leaps that had my eyes tearing up from the wind of my passage.

The ground flew by beneath me as I darted and wove through the trees. It started sloping down, slowly at first and then precipitously. I came to a halt at the edge of the dropoff to get an idea of what I was facing.

About twenty feet below me there was a narrow, unpaved road, little more than a dirt track with ruts and potholes everywhere. On that road was a line of half a dozen boxy wooden wagons, each of them pulled by a pair of horses. The horses on the lead wagon were down and quite thoroughly dead; their throats had been torn out and there was blood everywhere. A trio of massive wolves, eighty or a hundred pounds each, were tearing the flesh off the bodies and gulping it down almost without chewing. The horses on the rear wagon were likewise dead and down, and the horses in the middle had panicked and tried to run, pulling their wagons off the road or tipping them over and thereby dragging the horses down. They shrieked and thrashed helplessly.

It wasn't just horse corpses; there were two men in metal coats dead at the back of the caravan. At least, I was assuming they were dead; they were soaked in blood and not moving.

There were four metal-coat guys, these ones living, at the front of the caravan. They had their backs pressed up against the side of the lead wagon, frantically using a mismatched collection of weapons—two swords, a spear with a crosspiece, and a sledgehammer with a spike on the back—to hold off a a dozen more of the monstrous wolves. Oh, wait, there was a fifth man in metal; he was crouched beneath the wagon, jabbing at any wolf that tried to leave the main group, circle around, and creep under the wagon to get at his friends from behind. The five of them were holding the wolves off for now, but they definitely weren't going to manage it forever.

Well, this wouldn't do.

I backed up a few steps to get a running start and leaped, soaring a good thirty feet out. I hit the ground and continued forward, cannonballing into two of the wolves threatening the metal-coats; they went flying with pained yelps that gave me a warm fuzzy feeling, hit the trees that lined the road with a delightful crack!, and collapsed. Good. Served them right.

The rest of their pack abandoned what they had been doing and charged for me, baying angrily. My momentum was too great to stop, so I continued across the road and into the trees until I could scrabble to a halt and reverse direction. That was fine; it pulled the monsters further away from the people, which was as it should be.

They spread out as they came, trying to surround me so they could attack my flanks. I was having none of that; I lunged forward, clearly faster than they expected, and swatted one before grabbing a second in my jaws. I wasn't messing around with the swat the way I had been when I hit Mr. Stabby back in the graveyard; I slammed the thing's head into the ground hard enough to leave a paw-sized crater lined with meat paste. I bit down on the one in my mouth and shook, sending the decapitated body smashing into one of its brethren. I spat the head out—the blood tasted sweet and coppery—and leaped at another. It tried to squiggle aside, not quite fast enough, so I got an awkward side-on bite around its midsection instead of a firm grip on its neck. That was fine; I chomped down and tore, ripping out everything from the outer ribs back to the spine, eliciting a steamwhistle gasp of pain and a geyser of blood that left the thing bled out on the ground by the time I finished moving past it. I started to turn to the next one, then yowled my own agony as one of the wormy little schmucks chomped off the last third of my tail. No fair! I just got that back!

I spun, cratering its stupid face into the ground with another swat.

Two more jumped on me from behind, one going for a grip on my left rear flank and one dropping from above to clamp its filthy jaws around my neck. My new ruff was thick enough that the teeth didn't do more than prick me, but the one on my flank had me good.

I dropped and rolled left, crushing both of them beneath my massive weight. It meant tearing a piece out of my side but it left two more attackers dead.

The rest of the pack jumped on me, furious shrieks of rage in their throats and murder in their eyes. The whole thing descended into a frantic, desperate murderball as we smashed and tore and bit at one another.

It felt like hours but was probably less than a minute before the last two gave up and raced off into the woods, leaving me bloody, victorious, and lying panting and exhausted on the annoyingly cold ground. Crushed and dismembered bodies lay around me and I was completely soaked in blood, at least half of which was mine.

{That's right!} I barked after them. {You better run!} Because if you don't I'll bleed all over you, but I didn't say that part.

With a creaky groan I pushed myself upright and limped back to check on the humans.

The five guys in the metal coats had cut the horse carcasses free from the lead wagon and were struggling to drag them off the road. More people had appeared, presumably from inside the wagons, and were working together to right the toppled ones, get the de-roaded ones re-roaded, get the horses upright and calmed down, and otherwise get the caravan ready to move again. The center wagon was ready to go, its horses wide-eyed and restless but mostly under control. A woman and two men were standing atop it; the woman and one of the men had bows in their hands with arrows already on the string and ready to be drawn. The second man had a crossbow, cocked and ready. Across the scene, the air was singing with tension.

They saw me coming and a shout went up; bows and crossbows were aimed at me and the five metal-clad survivors ran to stand opposite me with their weapons raised. Everyone else dove back into the wagons and slammed the doors shut.

I flopped down and put my head on my paws, giving the bow-bearers a good solid dose of ears-down Adorable Eyes. I even threw in a pitiful whine for good measure. Sure, it wasn't terribly dignified, but I was too tired to run or dodge.

Thankfully, the man with the spear called something out and the bowfolk didn't fire. They didn't relax the tension on their strings, but they didn't fire.

The spearman started to advance, his friends a step behind him. They split up, the spearman approaching from the front in a crouch, his point aimed directly at me, while the other four split into two pairs and circled around to my sides, moving far enough to be out of my peripheral vision.

I kept my head down and thought non-threatening thoughts. I really hoped they were going to be reasonable about this. I wasn't going to fight a bunch of humans and I didn't want to run off into the woods on my own.

The spearman stopped fifteen feet in front of me and took a knee, the butt of his spear braced against the earth and the point leveled at me.

"Blardy zorg bleh flop flip," he said. (Not really, but it might as well have been that for all I understood it.)

I cocked my head in confusion, ears lifting up to show interest.

"Florbitty glibble zop zop zop?"

{Not a clue,} I barked, taking care to use my inside voice as much as possible.

The spearman glanced to the side, presumably at one of his friends, then looked back at me.

I rolled on my back, suppressing a wince as the bleeding wound in my flank stabbed pain through me. I pawed at the air with maximum playfulness and leaned my head back so I could look at him, lolling my tongue out in a friendly smile.

One of the people on my left laughed, and the spearman smiled. It took a moment, but he slowly climbed back to his feet and stopped pointing his spear at me. I hit him with a friendly yorp and wiggled a little bit. That's it, hooman! Pet mah belly! You are helpless before the adorably fuzzy belly! And get on that, would you? I'm bleeding all over the place, mostly from my sides and back, and being all wiggly like this hurts.

He didn't move fast enough for my preference, so I flopped my head to the right in order to see the swordsman and hammerman. {C'mon, hooman!} I barked. {I'm being adorable here. Get a clue.}

The hammerman lowered his weapon, stepped forward, and tentatively patted my tummy. He was a bit of a dope, because he was clearly worrying that I'd turn and snap at him.

I wiggled a little under his hand in order to convey the fact that (A) his petting was welcome and (B) he was doing a terrible job of it, so get on that. He laughed and relaxed a little more, moving from a wussy little pat into a far more pleasing vigorous rub.

I let him have the tummy for a few seconds, then rolled towards him, moving slowly enough that he had time to step back and not get crushed. Once I could reach him I gave him a thorough slurp, running my newly washcloth-sized tongue across him from chest to forehead.

He laughed and ducked away, pretending to gag and spit. "Gack! Blargle flarble flarble!" he protested, not at all sincerely because he was still laughing.

Oh, hush. You know you liked it.

I bumped him with my nose; I still wasn't entirely used to my new size and strength, so I ended up lifting him a little off his feet. He yelped and stumbled, dropping his hammer as he spread his arms for balance.

Ow! His stupid knitted-metal coat pinched my nose! I ducked my head so I could rub it with one paw while I glared reprovingly at him.

His friends laughed and relaxed; the swordsmen sheathed their blades and the tension went out of everyone.

"Gleg glob," the spearman said, gesturing 'come with me' as he turned back to the caravan. I climbed to my feet and trotted along after him. Well, limped along. Now that I wasn't in immediate danger the various bites and clawmarks across my body were hurting like heck, and the layer of drying blood across my fur felt restrictive.

Still. I had some humans again! Hopefully they had bacon.