I walk up to the little reception. Seeing this, the receptionist greets me in Danish. “Hello, what can I help you with?”

I reply in english. “Do you have any vacant rooms for one night?”

After a shower, I lay down on the bed. The soft, soft bed. My body hurts all over. Mostly my core muscles, but also my feet, because walking for hours. Oh, and my hands and wrists. Quite a bit of force is applied to those when flying. In the birdkin form they’re just a part of my wings, but still. I usually write pretty quickly on a computer keyboard, but if I tried to write now the result would probably be a mess. And more pain.

…my list of aspects is getting pretty long. Just today I got that of Bears, Boars, Foxes and more. More than that, however, it turned out they had an aviary. A really big one, for eagles. I didn’t get a good affinity for it, but simply unlocking the aspect is a good start. Dang, I really should have noticed that they had eagles, it’s right on the front of their webpage. Happy surprise, I guess.

I ate a somewhat late dinner when I arrived here in Randers, but there’s still time before I need to sleep. Not like I don’t have anything to do; I got several ideas when flying here. Let’s see, the easiest things to do in this room would be to make the power armbands. Oh, and the experiments on applying enchantments and inscriptions and the like directly on my body. Let’s make the armband first.

I look at the final results. The armbands are quite simple. I made some silk and wove it into a thin, two centimeter wide band. I then attached a mana crystal the size of my thumbnail onto it, as well as two smaller mana stones. It can’t store that much mana, and the flow is somewhat poor, but that’s fine. I made them with [Water Bending] in mind, to work as a sort of focus for the more kung-fu like magic.

Where a wand is fine for most magic, aiming with a wand is awkward if you use punches and kicks to focus the magic. I remember a game where one of the weapons for mages were rings that go around the lower arms. They were used for quick attacks, and gave a bit of mobility stats. These aren’t quite the same, and it’s not like I can properly test them inside, but I can test them tomorrow.

I also made some ankle bands while I was at it. Considering I’m not wearing any footwear lately, I bet they look kinda silly on me, but I think they fit my brownish gray wolfkin form. Both bands can also be worn in most other forms, as well. In human form I already wear my watch, and sometimes the air storage band, and as opposed to games, there doesn’t seem to be any limit to how much you can wear. That said, using both armbands on one arm has a diminished effect.

And then there’s the fox puppet… The word puppet fits the seemingly mindless bodies I make with shapechanger, but are they really mindless? Sigh. They raise a bunch of philosophical and ethical questions. I’ve chosen not to think too hard about it -It’s magic after all- but they are hardly the only questions raised by the New World, and we better find answers sooner rather than later.

The fox itself is a pale brown, made with the [Aspect of Air]. Being small and extremely light, I can fly with the form, at least in this enclosed room. My additions today were the tattoos around the body. The ink is a mix I found by accident when messing around with the various New World herbs, trying to get [Alchemy], or something like it. I didn’t get it, but found that several herbs make an ink like substance when dried, ground and mixed with water.

I also found a mildly hallucinogenic salve. Either that or a way to communicate with spirits. The elemental kind, and they were rather annoying, just floating around and occasionally making sounds. At least I think those were sounds… That, like so many other things, was added to my quickly growing ‘should probably learn more about’ list.

One ink, light blue in color, is made from [Fog-Sea Grass] and [Dew-drinker Pine Needles], and imbued with the [Aspect of Mist]. With it I inscribed a swirly pattern on the shoulders, to make the puppet harder to notice. A stealth tattoo, in other words. I also made a swirly line around the legs, just above the paws, which in theory should work with the main stealth tattoo and muffle sounds. No idea whether it’ll work, though, unless I purposely make sound the form is pretty silent already.

The other ink is pink like a fresh scar. How I got that from mixing crushed [Daybloom Petals], which are more yellow than orange, and [Windwhistle Weeds], which are light gray, I have no idea. The latter make an annoying whistling sound when it blows, which is how I found them, just today. Since they identify as weeds hadn’t planned on harvesting them, but then a gust of wind came and I pulled them out by the roots to make them stop.

With it I made lines under the eyes and over the middle of the head, merging behind the ears and drawing a line all the way to the tip of the tail. I imbued it with the [Aspect of Air] and inscribed it with the intention of increasing the puppet’s agility and mobility. It increased the lightening effect already present when I finished the form, and when I tried to test the speed I was dazed from the feedback of hitting a wall head first.

…maybe I should go out and test the new things? Ehh, why not. It’s just half past nine. I leave my bag in the room. Just me, what I’m wearing and all the things in my various subspaces. Which I should organize. Hah, another thing on the To-Do list. On the way out I check with the reception, then take on the wolfkin form.

I would probably have stormed out were it not for the surprised scream from the receptionist. Woops, forgot this isn’t home, and people haven't gotten used to a werewolf dude running around. Come to think of it, I probably caused a good few scares back home, too, but people mostly had subdued reactions to me. Did an image of me show up on the news or something?

Now I’m definitely gonna be on the news. Some minor (I think) news site, but still. Apparently they were gonna interview some of the people who work there, but I was distracting said people with questions and requests. When I shifted forms to demonstrate why I want closer contact with animals, the news woman took notice, and convinced me to be interviewed. I won’t say whether or not the free meal had anything to do with it.

New aspects today: A whole lot. Notably some fishes, like piranha, and also parrot, bat, ape, monkey, butterfly, and last but definitely not least: Jaguar. I also increased my affinity with some of my existing aspects: Lizard, serpent, spider and ant. Seeing more examples of an aspect really seem to help, which I halfway expected, but didn’t know for sure until now. I feel kinda like cheating for getting all these aspects so easily and quickly, but it’s not like I can instantly make use of them, and some of the are of… questionable use. Ahem -tapir- Ahem

My affinity with [Aspect of the Eagle] isn’t high enough to use it to remake the birdkin form, but after Eagle World, it should be. The aspects I got also aren’t ideal for making an aquatic form - I’d prefer an aquatic mammal like a seal or possibly whale for that. Not quite a mermaid, what with blubber instead of fish scales, but then again I’d be a merman.

Hmm, what’s going on down there? A bunch of people and what is obviously monster corpses. I lower my altitude. I have good eyes with the improvements from aspects, but not that good. I can recognize people, and as for the monsters, there are absolutely no insects that big, and unless I have severely misunderstood how anatomy works, shouldn’t ever be. I fish out the phone and check the time. Ehh, I can detour for a couple hours.

Okay, screw this. Lowering my altitude the normal way takes too long. I fold my wings and enter a direct dive. Someone must’ve spotted me, because people have started pointing at me. I focus on flying, since unless I pull out of this dive I’m gonna have problems breaking my fall. Speaking of which, now would probably be a good time to start slowing my descent.

I spread my wings, slowly levelling my dive. When at a roughly forty-five degree angle, I turn hard to bleed off speed, a trick I learned in everyone’s favorite ‘Press space to go to space’ simulator, Kerbal Space Program. And people who say you can’t learn from games are either stupid, haven’t thought about it, or are too stuck on whatever ‘(activity teenagers do) melt your brain’ crap to even consider anything else.

With my speed on a more manageable level, and altitude only a couple hundred meters up, I note a flat area (not that Denmark has anything resembling rugged terrain) with no people in the way of a possibly failed landing. I then enter a downwards spiral over it. With what I estimate to be around sixty meters left, I stop my forward momentum and hold my wings in a Y shape, dropping towards the ground.

With gravity only fighting against the drag of my quite large wings, I fall at a manageable speed. It might be a good idea to fly lower, because while I can time my descent to land at a given spot, I don’t have a good way to land quickly. The ‘let gravity take over’ tactic for lowering my altitude is less than ideal.

There’s police here, as well as three ambulances. Someone got injured, then? I’m getting deja vu here. What’s that policeman- “OhshitdONTSHOOT!” I create a burst of wind at my right, pushing me to the left and hopefully getting his aim away from me long enough to process what I panickedly yelled.

I glance in his direction only to find one guy shouting and one more person aiming in my direction. I turn ninety degrees away from them, and with another gust of wind, gain enough speed for controlled flight. With my heart still hammering, but mind less shocked, I try again: “Please don’t shoot!”

One of the two gets the message, and the guy who shouted is running up to the other. I don’t wait, and do a crash dive, fall stopped only by a blast of air and my other magic cushioning my fall. Grounded, I crouch down to lower my profile. I raise my magical defences, just in case. So landing still needs work, but at least learning to crash land came in handy.

After reverting to my normal form and explaining my case, I’m doing some minor healing while inquiring about the dungeon. I also had to endure a joke about this not being america suggesting I’d be repeatedly shot if it were. Don’t get me wrong, the joke was pretty good, but not the kinda joke I wanna hear after almost getting shot. As with the previous time something like this happened, I teach those who wants to know how to use [Healing Touch]. Also like then, I plan on entering the dungeon, but this time I will do so before the police possibly empty it.

At first they were sceptical of me playing monster hunter, considering a group of six people had tried the same, but when I pointed out my level is over 170, and demonstrated some abilities and the magic gun, they agreed that, yeah, I have enough power to at least run away if I need to. Before I head in, I’d like to [Dismantle] one of the monsters and see what I can learn.