I did not belong here. I did not belong like this. Maybe I could find some way to get home, but I’d have to find a way to turn back into a human first, or I’d be a freak. I always think more clearly when I am in the zone, so I kinda let my mind roam free.

There was something absolutely different about going into the zone. It sort of reminded me of the meditation exercises I had learned when I was a kid when my folks had tried martial arts. In the end, they had helped, but the discipline instilled in Kung Fu classes paled compared to what I had learned in basic training, and the mystical stuff, especially when the sensei started trying to teach ‘chi channeling’ had alienated me enough that I had dropped it when I was 13.

Kung Fu was decent for discipline and body training, but compared to more focused martial arts it failed in real-world applications. Boxing, Capoeira, and Krav Maga were considerably more my speed while I was in, but Kung Fu styles and training were still a remarkably good way to help maintain focus and discipline as well as a reasonable style for sparring without risking serious damage to a sparring partner.

But there was definitely something odd about my zone, though… usually, it was just a state where I could look at myself, sort of from the outside looking in, and quickly decide and set up what actions I was going to take. It helped me think quickly and clearly, and set aside the pain and inconvenient emotions that could interfere with what I had to do. I could even sort of turn off nerves in a way, damaging myself in ways that few could match if it were necessary.

There! That was the thing that was tugging at the edge of my awareness! a strange little dot, inside my mind, that had never been there before. I could see it even with my eyes closed, and it was inside, not outside! I tried to peer more closely at it, and suddenly it rushed towards me, and I was inside a... place.

I could still feel the rest of my body sitting on the cold stone, with the mists cooling my front and a persistent ache in my belly, but I could also see what looked like an enormous bubble that I was inside of. It still felt like me, but to my perceptions, it felt like there was a cascading flow of colors swirling around me, with a tiny glowing dot right in the middle that the swirls were orbiting chaotically.

Every color of the rainbow seemed to ebb through the mists, and they seemed to move at different speeds based on the color. The majority of the fog seemed to be a pale blue, but as I lost focus I realized that there were patterns to the movement, the veins of mist were almost like strands of chromatic illumination in their movement, like broad constantly-changing ribbons coiling around the speck in the middle.

Was this magic? If it was, it was utterly chaotic and uncontrollable. I did notice that as I concentrated on each section, I seemed to be able to influence it slightly, almost like pushing water with a broom.

In addition, there seemed to be tiny, structured blobs moving through the flow, although they seemed to exist in closer proximity to the outer edge of the orb. Their colors were a riot, but I could see that they tended towards the primary spectrum.

I examined one of the reddish-orange ones closely, and suddenly remembered all the work I had gone through to learn rigging, from learning to tie my shoes to the advanced knot-tying skills I had had to learn and practice to pass my 3rd class boatswain mate's exam.

The little knot was very complicated, but in a way, it reminded me of object-oriented programming. I nudged the knot out of the colors and closer to the outside of the bubble, and it responded readily to my mental push. Organizing my mind was something I was readily able to do, so I examined each of those, in turn, creating a ROYGBIV array of skills as I mentally labeled each one and learned what it was.

The ones toward the bottom of the spectrum were purely physical abilities, such as lifting weights, running, swimming, and...eating food without choking. As they shifted towards yellow they moved from skills that involved mental and physical effort together, such as typing or kendo, and the more yellow skills were almost purely mental, like a large clump of techniques to do mathematical problems quickly in my head, translating from binary to whole numbers.

A couple of big clumps that were connected together included English, American sign language, and a tiny little set of sparkles orbiting them that contained the smattering of foreign languages I had picked up... a little Russian from high school, some Spanish from visiting Mexico and working in a fast-food joint, and a weirdly pulsing greenish clump that was connected to the rest.

Looking at the pulsing clump, I realized that that was NOT me. It was not a language I had ever learned, but every whispy memory I had of learning the meaning of a new word connected to it in some way. The clump itself was an unintelligible mess of points, but each word I said to myself, even while I was thinking like this, had an echo of the memory associated with that word in English. I started to say one of the words ‘out loud’ while moving my real lips, but something felt like it slammed into me.

With a start, I dropped out of my zone again, panting heavily as I felt a wave of exhaustion flowing through me like I had been running but without the muscular soreness after a good sprint. Usually, the zone never lasted long enough for me to actually move, this had been… enlightening.

I rested, taking another handful of water and drinking it. I could taste an earthiness in the water, much like any unfiltered source, but I didn’t taste any putrescence in the fall and hoped that it didn’t have any parasites and wouldn’t cause dysentery

After a few minutes, with the water’s help, I felt much better, the fatigue lifting faster than normal if I had been working out. I needed to try that meditation thing again, but this body didn’t seem particularly well designed for sitting Zen. Instead, I crouched and realized that with my knees bent and my tail supporting my backside, the position was surprisingly comfortable and natural. The whole point of zen was to detach yourself from your body without being relaxed enough for sleeping, and the 3 point horse stance seemed like it would be a decent compromise.

I dropped back into my zone again, sliding away the sensation of cool spray, my hunger, and slowly letting any other discomforts fade. I could certainly build up my endurance, and this form, while quite durable, also felt sort of soft… like it had much more physical potential but had lived a very easy life up until this point.

Did this body come from someplace? Was I reborn as someone else? I had no idea where I was, but I knew MY world didn’t have creatures like this. Was I dead? I remembered seeing my body on the water like they say happens when you die, but I was still IN my aching, sore, and injured body and I remembered seeing my real arms flashing by as I headed through the hole in the water.

I didn’t move, but I could see that there was almost a barrier around me, like a globe that surrounded my body by a few inches. Within that globe was a mistiness, and an almost rainbow hue that intensified under my skin but was utterly translucent in the mist. Concentrating on it almost made it disappear, but fuzzing out a little, refusing to actually concentrate but just passively observing and distancing it like I did when I was trying to block out pain, made it strengthen and become more visible.

There seemed to be little glowing bits in it as well, but I realized that the glowing bits were visible in the air outside of my bubble as well. They were not as concentrated, but I noticed that when one of them touched the edge of my bubble, it hovered there for a few moments before sinking inside, and once inside, the little glowing motes didn’t leave. They touched the outside edge and then changed direction to pass into me again.

Maybe I was detecting magic bits or air or something, so I tested it by ever-so-slowly breathing in deeply like I was in a meditation exercise. More of the little motes sank through the barrier and into me around my mouth, but they didn’t seem to obey the physics of the air itself, more like both my inhalations and exhalations created a path for more motes to flow in. It actually looked a lot like the way that long-ago mentor described chi flows.

Feeling quite a bit rested and with my empty tummy protesting quite a bit less with the water filling it, I got back to my feet and started stalking onward, searching for an exit or a tool or...well.. anything that could help me. The usual heel-toe method of ensuring near-perfect silence was hard to mimic with these feet, but after a little, while I was able to find an alternative, a tiptoe that almost felt natural, where I maintained my balance with my tail, crouched forward, and my backward-facing claw never touched the ground. I couldn’t hear myself walking once I discovered the technique and guessed that whatever kind of lizardman I inhabited was probably naturally stealthy, and likely dangerous despite their somewhat comical appearance.

I passed another pile of detritus beneath another one of those holes, and while it had a few small twigs and leaves and a tiny scrap of wood in it, none of it seemed to be of use. I used one of the twigs to nudge the pile apart, but could not find anything useful over the human refuse and half-rotted food scraps.

The third such pile was covered by another slime, but I snuck past it… it moved slightly towards me as I slipped by, so apparently whatever senses it used were not fooled much by my sneakiness, but it moved slowly enough that getting past it was not much of a challenge.

The fourth pile though… I was watching so carefully for ANYTHING I could use that I instantly noticed a tiny flash of, what looked like bronze half-buried in the foulness. With my salvaged bone, I managed to tug at it and pull it onto the walkway, and discovered what looked like a leather bag. The bronze was a bit of a buckle, and it looked like the straps and the bottom had been cut wide open before the bag was discarded.

It was somewhat decayed, but the cut marks were clean enough that I realized that this was probably stolen by someone, cut open to get at the valuables, and discarded quickly. I pushed the leather around a little and a small, lumpy object fell out. At first, I thought it was just another piece of nastiness, but when it hit the ground with a clunk I realized it was some kind of tool. It had fallen out of a second pocket, and I quickly grabbed it.

It was wrapped in a decayed bit of leather that disintegrated as I tugged it out, but I was overjoyed! It was a knife! The handle was made out of some sort of bone, and the blade was made of cheap bronze that looked like it had been sharpened hundreds of times until the edge was almost concave. The blade was only a little longer than my fingers, and it was probably used for whittling or eating or something, although the handle was clearly meant for some kind of creature vastly bigger than I was, as the handle was longer than my entire hand.

Still, a knife. The single most useful tool ever created after a stick! My survivability had just doubled. The thing obviously wasn’t a weapon, but dreams of whittled bone spears or larger weapons filled my head for a moment. Now all I had to do would be to find a stick and a pair of underwear and I would be set.

Speaking of underwear, I realized that I had another pressing need, one which I accomplished quickly by adding to the general foulness in the trench. Fortunately, it seemed that I was healthy, and my earlier handfuls of water hadn’t given me dysentery or any other form of Diarrhea-causing pathogens. That would have been too much. Not to be too descriptive, but whatever sort of lizard I was seemed to eliminate more cleanly and efficiently than humans, as I didn’t really require any clean up afterward, although when I came to another open area with water falling I still took advantage of the chance to wash myself off.

Anyone who has ever lived in a city knows what rats look like, and as I splashed myself off in the fall, I definitely noticed one of them looking at me from right on the edge of my visible distance. The problem was, it was not one of the scary rats you would get in a place like New York, it was almost as high as my knee at the shoulder! Definitely a giant rat of some kind. I started to step backward slowly, to get out of range of it, when I felt a tremendous pain at the tip of my tail.

A very large, nasty-looking rat had his teeth clamped onto the tip of my tail. I lashed out at it with my hand, but I had forgotten to form a fist, but this was fortunate, as the short claws at the ends of my fingers hit the rat right behind its head, catching ahold of the thick fur and stabbing into it before slamming it into the wall behind me. I had been concentrating on my own stealth so much that I had forgotten that other things here could be as sneaky as me.

The pain in my tail tip intensified as the Rat's mouth was ripped off of it, but I was able to hop to my feet, angrily glaring at the hissing monstrosity crouched near the wall. It glared at me, and I realized that the damned thing was nearly the height of my waist. A number of hisses and chitters sounded from around me, as I noticed several smaller rats scattering along the pathway away from me.

Well, my claws, such as they were, seemed to work, and the open-handed slap didn't seem to hurt my fingers very much, which probably meant that this lizard body had extra-strong fingers designed for actually clawing things. The rat leaped at me, and I swung around defensively to protect my vitals from its nasty teeth and claws. I hoped I would be in a position to get a much better swing with the claws once it hit, but my entire backside shuddered as my forgotten tail, that thick, heavy bit of flesh, impacted the rat heavily.

I turned my head to watch, and the rat, flying through the air, impacted head-first with a screech into the wall. It impacted with a squelching, cracking sound, and then collapsed on the floor, either dead or unconscious. There was a large bloodstain on the wall where its head had impacted. I looked around for more opponents, but the rest had vacated as quickly as they could. There was some blood on the end of my tail, but it was not flowing freely at the moment.

I washed my tail off in the stream and inspected the bite. It was not very deep, but I had neither bandages nor antibiotics, so I was going to have to let it bleed freely for a few moments. It was painful, but not dangerous-looking, but it made it clear that my tail was not disposable like some lizards.

I looked at the rat again, laying in a pool of blood on the floor, and carefully stepped forwards, placing my broad toes over the back of its head and leaning forwards until I could hear its neck crunch. If it was not dead before, it certainly was now. For a sewer-dwelling creature, it was in surprisingly good shape, a healthy-looking specimen with a decent pelt. It was shaped a little oddly, with heavier shoulders and a broader nose than the rats I was used to, more like a Nutria, but it was still clearly some kind of rat based on its body and brow shape.

Well, this was going to be disgusting, but I had to eat and it didn’t need its pelt anymore, and I had survived off of worse.