Gans leaned against the back of the tub and closed his eyes for awhile, taking a moment to relax as he closed his eyes, mind drifting peacefully. A loud crash echoed from the house, and he twitched slightly, looking at the hallway door, his goblins were still at work. He frowned for a moment and tried closing his eyes again and resting is head against the back of the tub. After a moment, he felt himself relaxing again, despite everything else. An even loader crash of something being purposefully tipped over reached his ears and he could swear he head snickering afterwards.

“Those goddamn bastards” he murmured, as he started to shift his body upright again in the tub.

He felt a twitch in his arm, and rubbed it with his opposite hand, teasing out the soreness in it while sighing. Rubbing his neck he thought back to the past couple of days. Things had not gone well. He had always known that things were going to get worse. He knew had been surviving out of pure luck. If that patrol hadn't been there on his first day out of his apartment building he would have been killed then. He just didn't realize things would get this bad.

Looking down at his junior, he felt a sort of sadness. Greenskin halflings didn't get any perks in the fertility department either it seemed, he was short an inch ,and some girth as well.

This fucking sucks.

He slapped his cheeks together a few times, shocking some of his drowsiness out of his system. He really didn't have any right to complain. If anything, he was probably one of the luckiest people on the planet. He could only imagine the amount of people who had been caught flatfooted on the first day. Even the smart ones who ran home were probably ambushed the moment they tried to leave like he had. Not everyone was lucky enough to have run into a patrol of well armed solider remnants.

He rubbed his chin. Things outside looked pretty bad. Having a firearm was probably the only reason why things weren't even worse than they should be. He could only imagine other countries with their gun laws. The U.S was probably the only one who stood a chance with the ridiculous amount of fire arms inside the country.

That advantage wouldn't hold for to long however. After all, how useful were their weapons going to be when they ran out of ammo?

Rubbing the rest of his skin to get the majority of the dirt off he stood back up and walked out of the tub. Grabbing a towel from the wall he started to dry himself off. The sensation felt slightly numb to him due to his thicker skin. In fact he knew the water in that bathtub had to have been cold, but to him the temperature didn't seem register at all. Maybe there were advantages to being part Greenskin?

Looking at his body and smiling in relief he realized that for the most part, he was physically unchanged, besides his skin being an extremely dark shade of green. His toe nails were black and ended in points though, but he figured he could take take care of that with some trimming. It probably explained why his boots had felt so uncomfortable to him.

Taking a look at his face in the mirror he felt even more relieved. He was worried that the race change would have warped most of the bone structure in his face, but to his relief, he was able to retain most of his human characteristics. He had been worried that he would end up looking like one of the goblins he summoned. They were not a pretty bunch.

Looking at the bathroom mirror he gripped his face, turning his face from side to side. For the most part, it was his own face that looked back at him the in mirror.

Unlike the dark green of his body, his face took on a lighter shade. Oddly, His ears tapered back into points as well, he fingered the tips, the sensation making him feel as if they were roughly the same.

However, looking back at the mirror he realized the worst of the changes would have to be his eyes. His blue eyes had changed into a bright green, but the whites of his eyes had turned towards an unsettling dark crimson color. He opened his mouth to inspect his teeth. He had retained his smooth back teeth, but his front canines looked a little bit more threatening. He tried smiling in front of the mirror. It ended up looking slightly menacing instead.

Holy shit I look terrifying.

Better to keep his mouth closed and speak as little as possible when interacting with people. He definitely wasn't looking forward to being treated as a monster by the other races spawning into the world. A mask might work, but he didn't like the idea of trying to get past a guard with a suspicious looking mask on...something to think of later.

Noticing a smudge on his face he reached up slightly to grab water that was pooled in the sink sink...reached up? He stood there a moment as he took another look around him. The weird feeling about how the doors seemed larger and now the fact that he had to reach up slightly to grab water in the sink.

He had shrunk a little bit.

Trying to look around the room and getting a feel for it, he figured he was only about five feet now.

Great

Grabbing his backpack, he walked out in the hall way in the buff. Taking a long stretch out into the hall he realized he was more comfortable naked than with clothes. He heard a tiny snicker out around the corner of the hallway and smirked in spite of him self. He was a five foot tall green naked wild man standing out in the middle of the hallway amongst a bunch of green shark toothed idiot raiders. He almost laughed at the ridiculousness of it. It was like a bad mad max film but with in a fantasy universe. Speaking of which, where the hell were the hot girls supposed to be?

He pondered that as he walked into the master bedroom and tried on clothing, before cursing and walking into the kids room. After rifling through the clothing he found some clothing that fit him. It really didn't help that the kid living in the house must have been a goth's goth. Most of the clothing seemed to be right out of the hot topic store.

It was to his extreme embarrassment that he ended up pulling on the kids Punisher shirt. That was one of the more normal articles of clothing. It was hard to find anything that hadn't been purposefully ripped or slashed.

Fuck it

After a quick walk around the house, hopping over piles of garbage that the goblins were throwing all over the place Alex...Gans picked up some basic supplies. Water bottles, food and more important, whoever lived a in the house loved hunting ducks. He picked up several boxes of twelve gauge and grinned as he thought of the shotgun in the shed. He might have not known much about rifles and pistols, but he was intimately acquainted with Beretta xtrema in the shed. He could drill just about anything with that shotgun.

Even better, in his opinion anyway, he found what he had been looking for. Backpacks! There were no bags of holding that he had seen, and he could summon creatures with two hands. Why not have them carry their own loot. ?

As much as he hated goblins by now, he was going to enjoy seeing them carry everything back to the army base for him.

That's what you get for making a shit ton of noise you bastards.

He grinned as he imagined the overburdened four following him back to base, then frowned slightly as he imagined himself approaching the base and getting gunned down by nervous sentries.

Maybe as long as he did it really slowly and cautiously they wouldn't shoot him on site. He would definitely have to keep his quasi fangs from showing. Green or not, maybe he could cut a deal? Hopefully someone from the patrol group could vouch for him.

After awhile of scrounging around the house while his goblin conjures switched from looting things to breaking things he stopped by master bedroom again and looked at the bedroom mirror attached to the door. He posed there in his punisher shirt, and smiled, letting his canines out into open air. It was hard for him not to laugh at first, but after awhile he was able to smile in a way that looked slightly terrifying. Magnum!

He chuckled, before adopting a serious look, touching his face as he examined the changes the beta patch had brought. It was almost meditative, besides the loud crashes.

After the bath and new clothes he stood there and simply enjoying the feeling of being clean again. He hadn't felt that in days. It seemed as if survival had quashed every feeling of any sort of life. He might have changed in race, but after everything he had seen, he actually felt pretty good.

Things are going to be different he vowed to himself, still looking at himself in the mirror, as if holding his reflection to the pledge.

He didn't summon a bunch of rats any more, now he could conjure a bunch of goblins to protect him. Maybe he could even try attacking some things? Part of him stiffened as he felt his excitement rising. He looked down at his offending article.

That's different. He thought, looking at it. Why was the idea of killing things arousing him? Belting it, he walked back into the family room, whistling for the goblins. They all came eventually, their faces holding the look of kids of excited kids on the day of Christmas. They each knuckled their foreheads.

“Boss?”

He looked at them, each holding their knuckles on their foreheads.

Morale seemed to be pretty high.

After a moment of thinking he pointed towards the first goblin to his left.

“Your name is Red” he said to the goblin that had red tattoos splotched all over his body. A blue screen tried to pop up into his face but he grabbed it and tossed it aside. The blue window expoded into a burst of silent pixels before fading away.

Then he pointed at the second goblin, it looked at him pensively, it was much more muscular than the others and he could see numerous veins covering its arm.

“Your name is arm.”

A second prompt appeared but he repeated the process, crumpling the window and tossing it aside as garbage.

“Fuck this shitty system” he said out loud.

He pointed at the third goblin who had shrunk back slightly from the others. It seemed a lot leaner than the others and had constantly been looking around its surroundings

“Your name is slim”

He pointed to the final goblin, who actually had a thoughtful expression on his face as Gans addressed them. Unlike the others, with their green pupils, this one had golden eyes. Gans looked at the goblin, realizing how that he had missed those details before.

He stood there for awhile pointing at the small goblin who examined him. Gans hesitated as he thought of a proper name.

The goblin stood there for a while and then dropped its salute, looking back at Gans.

“Chopper” it rasped out.

Gans looked at him askance.

“Chopper?” He asked

It nodded in reply, a slight look of reproach in its eyes.

“Chopper?” he asked. The little goblin looked, back, gold eyes shining brightly

“Yes boss” it answered with a smile. Gans looked back at it, momentarily stupefied again as he looked back at the goblin. He had never really paid attention to them before, and this one was close to talking back to him intelligently.

Thinking of the movies he had seen Gans stood up taller and straighter before looking down on the four looking at him

“I don't know what you were thinking” he pointed his finger at each goblin, to his surprise each one looked bashfully, even chopper, as he pass his finger over them.

“I mean, good job taking all of their valuables,” he started, the goblins smiled as he spoke the words. “BUT” he said, viciously bobbing his finger up and down in the air as if a lash, “you are going to need to carry it!” he ended with a big toothy grin, his canines reaching over his lip when he finished.

He then tossed the backpacks he had collected from the house into the middle of the goblins.

A look of excitement entered the eyes of the goblins before they looked at each other and started to frantically scoop handfuls of shiny items into their the backpacks Gans winced slightly as they broke a few of the more expensive looking things in their haste.

Arms started punching the other goblins, but its muscled fists mostly hitting air as the other goblins dodged away from him while still taking valuables off the ground. After awhile, of jamming what they could into the backpacks their eyes bulged comically as they realized there was no change they could carry everything. Red had even manged to pick up a second backup and doubled them up over its shoulders. Alex whistled at the sight, the small creatures determination showing clear through its face as it sweated, the second backpack weighting it down. Its peers looked enviously at him.

A thought crossed Gan's mind What am I actually going to do with any of that stuff?

He waved it away as unimportant, it wasn't as if he was carrying any of that junk. His own backpack was filled with actual supplies that he had taken from the house.

After waiting for them to scoop up as much as they could he waved at them.

“Lets go” he said, walking to the door and swinging it open. He marched out of the house feeling feeling his blood stir with excitement.

Reaching the backyard he felt himself hissing slightly. There was not going to be any more the the shit that had been suffered the past few days. Things were going to be different. He headed towards the shed.

Entering the shed he found old man Albert still sitting where he had left him. The shotgun was still still clutched into his cold dead fingers. Gans slowly pried the fingers away before lifting the gun and inspecting it with reverence.

He might have not known pistols and rifles that well, but one thing he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt was his ability with a shotgun. He grinned openly in front of the other goblins as he picked up the weapon and then dipped his hand into the side pocket of his backpack, taking the twelve gauge rounds out.

He found, to his pleasant surprise, that the old man had wisely taken out the capacity limiter on the weapon and was able to load a few extra shells in it. He loved the grip of the gun in his hands, the rubber underside resting against his hands.

Smiling as he grabbed its strap, he slipped it over his shoulder and headed out to door and around the house. More cautious now that he was approaching the street, he slowed up and looked around. Everything seemed clear to him. The house across the street where he had been fighting had been stripped clean of all the bodies. After cautiously approaching the battle site, he found all the signs of the battle that had taken place.

Old blood stains were still covering the old spots of the dead. And he still saw spent ammunition littering the ground where some the soldiers fired from. He looked around but couldn't find any obvious signs what had happened to the bodies and then he thought back to the troll eating the dead.

He whistled slightly as he imagined how many dead bodies the troll would have eaten. Either it followed some sort of magical game rules, or there had to have been more than one troll in the area. Either scenario slightly terrified him.

He glanced briefly at his goblins. Red and Arm were looking around, disinterested. Thin was actually standing back from the others, crouched up against a ruined car. Chopper looked back at him, a cruel grin slowly growing on his face.

He shrugged slightly, then poked a finger towards the road that he was taking with the soldiers before. Fortunately he knew where the base was, having driven near by for work every day, he should be able to make it before it grew dark again.