We wandered several hours away from the village, intending to keep the amount of time required to return to the village to a sane level since the goal was to kill several large creatures. As the sun began to set, we began to look for a place to set up camp. Only then did we realize that none of us had brought flint and steel. We’ve all been through some survival training, it’s a fairly common part of growing up, but this was our first time being allowed outside of the village fence. It’s somewhat expected that mistakes be made. It’s just… Not the mistake we’d want to make.

Swamps do a better job of retaining a stable temperature than, say, a desert. This is mostly because water has a specific heat of 4180, meaning that it takes 4180 joules of energy to heat 1 gram of water 1 degree Celsius. Or at least I think that’s the specific heat, I don’t exactly have a science book on hand to validate that against. For that matter, there are no guarantees that the physics I’m accustomed to work the same way here. This is a world where magic is real and where a mystical system butts its nose in every action. Who's to say that the rate of acceleration of gravity is still 9.8m/s^2. Maybe it’s a bit different and it’s just close enough that I haven’t noticed the difference? I should be mindful of my assumptions.

Regardless, lighting a fire using the friction from drilling one stick into another isn’t the most viable strategy for fire starting in a swamp. I’m not sure if Lizardfolk know that it’s an option, but it’s simply impractical with so much humidity at work, everything is always at least a little damp. Flint and steel might not be as easy as a lighter, but it’s orders of magnitude easier than trying to use sticks, and at the least it will get the job done if you’ve got good tender.

It’s worth pointing out part of why our error is so significant is that Lizard folk are cold blooded. When it gets cold, we get lethargic. We can theoretically get so lethargic, we can outright die. It’s not that there are no solutions, there are, and we use them extensively. Some of them I haven’t really seen; for instance cedar bark requires cedar trees, but grass and leaves are always viable for tender, as is cat tail down, and so on.

The big trick for steady heat is that we usually burn long lasting materials, like charcoal or peat. As I think about this, I realize a couple of things. First is that we might be in real danger if we can’t get a fire going. Predators are actually fairly common, and even if we don’t bump into a significant cold snap, even the regular temperature drops will be enough to make us slower and sleepier than we normally would be. Fighting under conditions like that is a bad idea. The second thing I realize is that I’m probably the best prepared to handle this situation out of our group.

This is it, this is my moment to prove to Roark and Slathric that their defense of me was justified! As I draw a breath, preparing to suggest the bow drill method (which is still extremely hard to start a fire in a swamp with, but would be better than trying to do it with sticks alone), someone beats me to the punch.

“Hey guys,” Krielziss says in a low voice, “I don’t think we’re alone. Look over there, I think someone else has already started a fire.”

We look over, and sure enough we spy the reflection of a light source that doesn’t align with the reflections of the late rays of sunset. One might wonder how you could tell the difference between a random fire and a setting sun, and there’s a few tricks to it, but probably the easiest way for us to tell is that this reflection is moving at a steady pace. It’s not a campfire, it's mobile. Someone has lit a torch, apparently with the intent to walk through the swamp. Through our territory. Quite a ways into our territory. And whoever it is, Krielziss and Roark intend to ensure that they’re either a stone tail, or they’re dead.

We each slide from the land into the nearby water, as stealthily as we can, and begin to swim through the choked water towards the walking person or people and get a better view, with nothing but our heads, shields, and spears above water: It wouldn’t due to try and launch your spear from surprise only to have it catch on duckweed instead. Well. They swim gracefully towards the fire light at least.

I swim just fine, but I seem to have a gift for getting my weapons and shields caught on everything under the dim red and purple sun. It’s good that I already know and accept that I suck at everything, that's going to be true until I pick a class and am allowed to start unlocking skills. At least I had the wherewithal to stay a solid 20 feet behind Roark, so I’m at least marginally less likely to be the one responsible for us getting noticed.

As we swim quietly and swiftly through the water (or at least they do, their lead is increasing steadily because I keep getting caught up in various forms of plant life), the targets come into sight. It appears to be a woman and 3 children; she keeps hushing them and trying to wrangle them deeper into the swamp.

I am further behind and don't see them as quickly as my clutch mates. Before I can process the circumstances, my clutch mates raise and launch their spears. It’s a near perfect surprise, a spear driving deep into all but one of the children, with 2 of them driving into the woman. As the targets collapse, Krielziss throws her shield at the last remaining boy, who release a piercing wail and began rushing towards his mother. The shield catches him in the head mere fractions of a second after his scream began, bringing his wail to a sudden end with a wet thud and a sharp "wumph".

Although I was able to see what happened, I’m still playing catchup, and this “battle” is already complete. I truly don’t know how they were able to pick out their targets so well, only repeating a single strike targeted at the sturdiest of the 4… As much as any of them could be considered sturdy, anyhow.

I cannot really explain exactly how I feel, but I'm feeling queasy and even a little sick. Killing is not new to me. It really does not bother me, and as Mental Me noted, I even enjoy it. But never once have I murdered someone. This feels an awful lot like I just participated in wanton murder. I was not close enough to even try and join in, but… So what if I didn’t throw my spear? I was here. I did not expect us to attack without hesitation. I should have, that is what we are taught, but never before in my lives have I been part of a group that would kill women and children without strong cause and certainty of their validity as a threat.

If these had turned out to be what I considered to be viable targets and I was close enough, I would have been throwing my spear without hesitation, too. I would probably miss because I’m too weak and too slow and too uncoordinated and insufficiently well trained in the use of the weapons prevalent in this life, but I would’ve at least tried before moving somewhere I’d be able to use my sling. IF they met my standards of being viable targets. But I would have hesitated when I saw that the targets were nonmilitant, and I would have tried talking to them, seeing why they were here. Maybe we would have found out about a new threat. Maybe they just got horribly lost and could've just been directed out of the swamp.

Maybe I misjudged the situation and they were a group of assassins whose goal was to infiltrate our tribe and slit our throats while we slept. But… I just don’t think that last one was likely to be the case. Especially considering how easily they went down. When you get levels, you get health, and that health quickly results in a staggering amount of punishment being required to kill a person. Even if you hit them in vulnerable locations like stabbing them in the eye, someone who has a couple levels under their belt will probably be able to survive that and keep fighting. If they *were* assassins, they were very weak ones. No, I’m pretty sure we just killed a generally helpless and probably innocuous family. And that sits poorly with me.

I guess it’s not always easy to remember that I’m a monster now. Despite the tail and the dull scales and the too flat mouth and the wide set of my eyes… I do not feel like I’m a monster. No more so than I felt like I was old when I was old. But I am a monster, and that is the perception that this world would have of me. Most worlds, probably.

It’s just that I long ago became accustomed to being surrounded by lizardfolk. Over the last decade I've become used to their thought patterns, their idiosyncrasies, and their appearance. They do not feel like monsters to me anymore either. They are a bit on the stupid side, and they are prone to excessive tempers and violent outbursts and so on, but I have also seen plenty of humans over the years that were not significantly different. That didn’t make them not human, it just meant that they had mental problems or trauma or hadn’t developed adequate coping mechanisms or whatever. Very few of them would have willingly participated in what just happened. None that I know with certainty would have participated without requiring some additional justification.

I'm not a good man. I even became comfortable with the perpetual imprisonment of the Mage and the Priest. That's something good people wouldn't be ok with. The human captives might get smacked around from time to time for looking at the wrong person or something, but there’s no real chance of them being killed unless they actually attack a lizardfolk. I can deal with that. I even requested it, and feel as though in the end it worked out to their benefit, because otherwise they would be dead.

It’s not nearly as hard for me to wrap my mind around their imprisonment and subsequent effective enslavement as it is for me to wrap my mind around this family getting slaughtered without so much as a chance to see who attacked them, much less understand why. Note to self: You are not a human anymore, and neither are your people. I am not sure how to reconcile what I am experiencing right now with my own sense of morality, and I don’t think that I will even try. I am ok with this having not been ok.

But I won’t say anything. Not now. This is how it is. Humans do it to lizardfolk, lizardfolk do it to humans. I don’t plan to let this be the norm forever. I’m not sure how I’m going to fix it. I’m not sure it can be fixed; look at how bad racism was in a world where everyone who hated each other was part of the same race in the first place. In this world even that commonality is broken apart, and the differences between races are even further divided and enforced by the enormous biological, psychological, and cultural differences between us.

I don’t have a solution. I didn't have a solution in the last world, and I don’t have a solution now. But I won’t allow my new people to go extinct for the convenience of my old people, and I won’t allow my new people to wantonly slaughter women and children without cause, either.

Elliot, don't be dumb. There's a system. Killing women is fine; they are just as potentially lethal as the men, here. Killing children though… That's really, really not ok with me. From what I learned from the Mage and the Priest, most children are classless, and consequently helpless. It's only the "monstrous" species that have those weird racial classes and so on allowing their children to be killing machines. And killing those who have done me no wrong and who are helpless… There will never be a day where I'm ok with that. Even in cases where I see the death of innocents as being necessary for some other purpose, it's not something I am ever comfortable with.

Well, the torch solved the fire problem, and we started moving back to the village, traveling a couple hours into the evening before setting up a camp and getting some sleep. The next day, I put my sling to work and kill a small water moccasin on the way back to the village. We are greeted with cheers, and the meat from our hunt is prepared in an aboriginal barbeque.

I ate my water moccasin raw. Whole, alone, and in silence. Its venom must not be as effective after having had the better part of a day to deteriorate. I get a bit of a migraine and I feel a bit short of breath for a bit, but that's it. Maybe my inhumanely high toughness played a role there.

Other villagers believed my foul expression and generally anti-social attitude was because I was ashamed of my poor catch, when all the rest of my clutch mates were able to hunt humans. An exceptional feat for a first hunt, humans are known to be dangerous after all. Sometimes you get lucky and they are weak, but it isn’t easy to tell ahead of time. In the eyes of my tribe, this was dangerous game, worthy of great honor.

Remember Elliot, these aren't humans. They can see the kids are young and small, but human rogues and assassins tend to be on the petite side too, and telling particular features apart is a whole lot harder when you're of a completely different race. In TV significant characters from other races are given easy to distinguish differential features, like being different colors, but in life? It took me years to get good enough at telling lizardfolk apart well enough to be able to pick out my own mom from a group. For them, it's the same.

Even with the slaves having been in the village for several years, most of the villagers still have trouble telling the difference between the priest and the mage. It's not their fault; this really is just the world I live in now; lizardfolk and humans almost always kill each other on sight. But my frustration bleeds out into my attitude. They think I am jealous that my clutch mates had so much more success in their hunt. The truth is more complicated. I’m angry, and I don’t know who to be angry at.

Happy birthday to me.