I woke up coughing. Ugh. Important safety tip, if you fall asleep with too big a smile on your face, you might wake up with something nasty like a mosquito flying into your mouth.

I went completely silent. Fortunately, my coughing was very quiet, and I guess kobolds don’t snore very much, but I spat out something that had little wings and long legs. Yuck. Based on the light, the sun past the foliage was high in the sky, but what had awoken me was what set my teeth on edge. There was almost no breeze, but I had heard the telltale click of one of the little brass tabs rattling against a rock.

I pressed my hand against my chest, and my quarterstaff was in my hands. That had to be the coolest thing ever. I was in a bit of a bad spot, but whatever had tripped my alarm was on the other side of the lean-to. I carefully picked up my bedroll and frying pan and tucked them into my space. The only thing left at this point was the canvas, but yanking it down would possibly reveal me to whatever had tripped my alert system.

For a moment I saw something weird at the side of the branches, it looked like the last branch on the right was growing some kind of thick thorns, and then I realized that those were claws before the entire structure and my canvas was stripped away by a gigantic bearlike paw.

I dropped into my zone for a heartbeat to look at the creature. It was enormous and bearlike, but unlike most bears, it had horns, and gigantic thorny plates on its shoulders and hips and down its spine. It was roaring at me, little drops of spittle seeming like they were suspended in the air.

Dire Bear

Threat: Very Dangerous(8)

Dire Bears are bears that have been exposed to excessive amounts of nature magic. They are larger, stronger, faster, and far more aggressive than normal bears, and are more resistant to both normal and magical attacks. Dire bears are considered essence beasts and have a nature core.

I made my decisions and then dropped out of my zone, dropping below another swung paw and cracking my quarterstaff across its low-slung belly as I rolled with a [push] and [channel] of frost mana. I was in a decent mood despite the surprise attack, which was probably where I screwed up.

I saw a white spot develop on its belly as I rolled past, preparing to spring to my feet, but I never even got the chance, as a horrible pain erupted in my left side and I was suddenly flying. I looked down and saw my ribcage looked wrong, blood streaming from four ripped slashes in my shirt and through my armor. I landed badly, which would have probably been the case no matter how I landed when hurled like a baseball by a bear to the tune of popping bone I could feel more than hear, and rolled several times before coming to a stop.

The world was swimming, and I tried to get up before realizing that my right arm was in even worse shape than my ribcage. I screamed from the awful sensations of my right arm bone collapsing and sending me back to the forest floor with my arm twisted in a horrible direction behind my back and realized that the sound as the bear rushed over to me was less the sound of thudding footsteps, and more like the rap of a something heavy on wood.

No! I was not going to die here! I tried desperately to [push] the quintessence loop to heal my body and was entirely unsuccessful. I guess it isn’t very useful for self-healing, not to mention I was too distracted by the agony I was trying and failing, to minimize.

I know time stretches when you are dying, but this whole death thing was taking way longer than I expected. I mean, the damned bear should have already started chewing me to pieces, but all I kept hearing was thuds and a clank.

A clank?

I tried very hard to think about it, why would the bear clank? Before a whole bunch of nothing rushed at my face.

“You are an idiot, Bran”

I was kind of hoping to go to heaven when I died, but if my afterlife included a broadly-freckled face glaring down at me and calling me an idiot, then I probably was too much of a jerk.

I felt… weirdly okay. I remembered trying to put my weight on my arm only to watch it fold backward in that awkward way arms are never supposed to fold, and the left side of my ribs and the right side were way too close together to be a comfortable fit.

I was oddly cheerful. I didn’t actually hurt. I was pretty sure that I wasn’t dead, and if that was the case, I really WAS an idiot. I sorta thought that after Rik told his team to… you know… take me out, the next time I saw any of them would be the moment I had some great duel with them.

“I love you, Cassie. I want to get pregnant with your babies.” I remarked, simplistically. I felt a little weird but grinned at her. “Take me, you animal, take me like a tiger takes a rabbit. Rock me like a hurricane.”

Wow. Did you know that dwarves blush almost twice as red as anyone else, ever? Her face was so red that it almost looked purple. I was a little loopy from whatever chemicals my brain had released to ease me into dying like a champ, and I assumed I normally wouldn’t say something like that, but heck, I figured I owed her my life, and maybe she’d find it funny.

After a moment her face was replaced by another half-elven face. One I distinctly remembered fleeing from. “Sir?” she asked me, “Are you okay?”

“Umm… aren’t you supposed to be killing me instead of leaning over me and asking if I am okay?” I started to try and get up, and suddenly realized I was back on the ground again, and the back of my head was throbbing from where it had just hit a rock.

“No…” Shiana said, thoughtfully, reaching her hands forward to try and help me to sit up. My tail was starting to let me know that sitting straight up wasn’t going to work out too well, and I turned sideways. Ooh, nice boots! Didn’t I make them? Well, now I guess I made them twice because one of them was officially half-covered with what looked like bits of half-digested trail rations. They were not the best food going down, but they were even worse coming back up, and I kind of half gagged and half gasped.

I felt like I had a hangover. The body weirdness and weakness, but I didn’t have much of a headache or a body ache. To misquote Ford Prefect, it was a bit like being drunk, if you were the glass of water. I did have a headache, though, but it was probably from flopping my head on a rock.

“What happened?” I asked intelligently, bracing my right arm on a clear patch of ground. The same arm that had, just a short lifetime ago, been able to scratch between my shoulder blades without bending my elbow. I was on my left hip, and both Shiana and Cassie were standing over me, although I could see Shiana sort of scuffing her nice boot on a patch of grass to clean it off.

“You got attacked, sir.” Shiana offered helpfully, and then Cassie took over. “We were following your trail, and Shiana spotted a dire bear ripping up something. And then it half fell over, and you were flying through the air. I taunted it off you, and Shiana used some of her new arrows on it. I just barely got to you in time to use my lay on hands.”

I nodded, and instantly regretted it, almost adding to the recycled banquet on the ground. “I sort of assumed that I mean, what happened? Why did you rescue me?” I started scooting backward. I was very dizzy, but I managed to half crawl away from the mess, Shiana’s hand on my shoulder helping me. I realized that she could probably pretty easily pick me up with one hand and carry me over, but I appreciated her thoughtfulness in avoiding any more humiliation for the moment.

Cassie looked at Shiana, and Shiana looked like she was searching for the words. “You made me my new clothes. I realized that all Rik ever gave me were kobold heads and flowers. He told me to kill you, but you made me new clothes and tried to save my life. I realized I didn’t actually like him very much. And then I remembered that he stuck it in my butt and then in my mou…” and Cassie interrupted her.

“We are your friends. You have never been anything but nice to us, and you were staring that big guy down almost daring him to hit you, and then got into a fight with Rik. He kept acting like non-immortals were garbage, and I guess it affected all of us. When that big immortal left and Rik told Shiana to kill you, well, she just ditched on him. I did too. I don’t know what happened to Mae, but she seemed to have pretty strong opinions about right and wrong. She appeared just long enough to say something to him in a language I don’t understand and then disappeared again, so I don’t think she stayed with him either.”

I nodded slowly and was feeling a bit better, getting to my feet slowly. I was starting to ache all over, but I noticed that while my health was halfway full, both my mana and fatigue bottles were bottomed out. “I don’t understand, Shiana, I thought you were bound to him?” I asked curiously and noticed that even more weirdly, my armor and shirt were looking considerably less shredded. Oh, right, they were both self-repairing. I stared at it and could see the fiber rejoining each other while I watched. It was like watching a slow-motion rip in reverse. Cool.

Shiana shrugged, “I stopped being bound to him, I guess. I didn’t know how it works, but when I got really really mad, I was sort of ready to put an arrow into him, and I got a message that I was unbound. Aen said that I had to stay bound to him, and I didn’t object, I mean, there are lots of things you can do here that you cannot do in her realm, and she didn’t strike me down, so I guess she didn’t have a problem with it. The message screen? It said did I want to transfer my bond to Brantley Gallagher Winterborne, and I said yes, and then I knew I had to find you.”

Shiana sighed a little, “I can see you when I try, on my map, but it’s nothing like the bond I had with Rik. It’s more like… the bond YOU had with Rik. I mean, yes, I’d happily fight and kill and die to help you, but I don’t want to get naked. I don’t mean to offend you, I really don’t, but you are…”

“A Kobold.” I chuckled to her.

She smiled a little as she noticed I didn’t seem upset. “Yes. You are a kobold. I am not dreaming of having your babies, and when you asked Cassie to impregnate you, I didn’t get jealous at all. You know, I never really thought about it, but are you a girl kobold? Even when you were naked I didn’t see anything.”

Cassie was back to her more-vibrant-than-reality coloration, and I chuckled a little bit. “I was sort of teasing her. She, and I guess you, saved my life. I am definitely a boy kobold, I am just kind of trapped in a child’s body, and frankly, if you dreamed of getting me naked it would be bad, and weird, on a bunch of levels.”

Shiana’s eyes opened wide, and she nodded quickly, “Right. Juvenile lock. Oh, I am sorry, I didn’t mean to imply… I mean, if someone is a juvenile, we are not supposed to talk about anything having to do with boys or girls, and we cannot swear. Oh, I am so sorry! Am I going to get deleted?”

I shook my head at her half-panic. “No. I may come from another world originally, but I am a local like you. And I am over twenty in human years, which means an adult, even if my current form is juvenile. Technically, from what I understand, female kobolds my age would already be ready for reproduction, but I think male kobolds take longer to mature, I guess because you only need one to repopulate a tribe or something. Age doesn’t come into play, really, except that right now I am about as… masculine as a rock.”

Cassie looked interested for a moment in the conversation. “Wait, so when you mature Shiana might change her type of bond?”

I shook my head, “I don’t think so. I am not taking the typical road to maturing. As they get older, most kobolds get bigger and more monstrous. But I have it on reasonable authority that if I choose my evolutions carefully, someday I might be able to return to something resembling human. Kobolds have kobold instincts and minds, even if they get polymorphed into a human, and I am human underneath it all.”

I was reassuring them, but I was starting to wonder. Was I really human underneath it all? My adventure had surely changed me, and I got more and more used to the kobold body. Obviously, I didn’t want to be a monster forever, but did I want to go back to just being Bran the giant weirdo? I would have to think about that a bit. I think so, yes, but I had found Mae strangely attractive, even though I was not what one would call a ‘furry’. Sure, I liked anime catgirls, what red-blooded male wouldn’t? And girls with wings were just hot, angels and fairies both, but Mae looked a lot more like an ‘anthro’ than an Anime-style foxgirl.

Then again, I don’t think I have ever met a teenage boy that didn’t fantasize about a particular gadgeteer mouse or a Cheetah girl from weekday cartoons. Mae was also a mistress of illusions of all kinds, and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if she could boost the empathy of males towards her, and incline them to see her as attractive regardless of their personal preferences.

“Well Shiana, if you are bound to me, I officially free you. I don’t do the slavery thing. I appreciate your saving my life, and if I can I will be happy to repay you both someday, but I am going to take a little downtime to get my evolution in order, and then I have to head to the Winnowrill, which is full of lizard people and probably dangerous as hell. Mae got ahead of me and left me a note to meet her, which I intend to do, but I am not planning to crawl dungeons or do a whole lot of quests.” I said, standing on my feet and shaking my tail a little. I noticed that Cassie’s new shield lay on the ground, or at least a few pieces of it did, near the truly momentous corpse of the bear. “I can certainly hold off long enough to help make Cassie a new shield, though.”

Cassie has used her band to extend a party invitation. Would you like me to return the magical handshake? I can not guarantee the illusion will hold completely, but it should be enough to share essence.

I sighed deeply, looking at Cassie, “You know where I am going we will probably all die, I have a city full of mages that probably want to kill me and I am sworn to a mission that will probably chew me and everyone close to me up and spit us out, right?”

Cassie was grinning at me and nodding her head, “Of course you do! That’s what being a hero is always about! Do you think I signed up as an adventurer in order to learn to cook stew, make beds, and pray for my clan? Hell no! So far you have taught me to cook stew, make beds, and pray for my teammates! So count me in.”

Yes, I thought loudly to Mnemosyne.

In a moment I got a very weird image in that odd space halfway between my soulspace and my mind, where Mnemosyne left messages for me. It showed a picture of Cassie, and three little bottles just like mine. Just below it was a picture of Shiana, with the same bottles.

Shiana shrugged at me, “We are bound. Where you go I go. I am not too worried about it, as I am safe in Aen’s arms whatever happens. And being a hero also sounds pretty cool.”

I sighed, nodded to both of them, and started to collect my savaged tarp and look into looting the gigantic bear. I was on this quest because I needed to do it, I knew the stakes, and I was willing to do whatever it takes for the reward. I was not even close to gaslighting when I thought that they were with me because they both had a couple of dozen screws loose, but I wasn’t about to tell them no since they would just follow me anyway.

Now all we had to do was survive long enough to get to the City of the Winnowrill.