The pain she felt as everything returned to black was beyond extreme, but she, no, Lyrhea felt something more than simple pain right now. She felt as if her entire body was being remade, her organs being altered along with her bones, nervous system, eyes, senses, and more, and what made all of that even more painful was a rather simple, yet terrifying, fact.

She was liking it.

No, she did by no means like the pain, but the fact that she was aware that her humanity was literally being removed and replaced with something that was far from human was, while terrifying and unnerving, also something that she could not help but find to be enjoyable and welcome.

Mind you, she knew that she should have, by all rights, not felt this way about her metamorphosis, but for some unnatural reason she was giddy beyond belief that she was having more and more of what made her human whittled away and replaced by something decidedly not human.

However, what made her upset was when this pain and change ended, she was not completely inhuman. A decent portion of her inner biology had changed, but she still was a bipedal human-looking being, or at least she felt that way.

And while she was left for a time to contemplate and hate her new condition, only hating it for not being totally complete, she eventually realized that the infinite darkness she was in was not all that there was any more. In fact, she was even able to feel things again, which was a far cry from the void that the snake had been in and the realm of pain and transformation she had been in after that.

She then realized that the reason she was still surrounded by darkness was because her eyes were closed, and so she fought hard to open them, ultimately getting her lids to open and reveal that she was back inside the cabin in the woods. But while the cabin was, for the most part, completely the same as it had been previously, the world outside was not.

And the cabin had obviously seen better days, as had the world outside, and the reason one could tell that to be true was that the cabin was not merely ransacked but also had some of its walls and a decent portion of both the floor and ceiling either removed or damaged enough to reveal a completely alien world outside of it.

Lyrhea sighed and tried to relax. There was no point in getting too excited too quickly, as that would, potentially, expose her to hostile forces, though she didn’t know why she expected that to be the case.

She then noticed two other things, both of which were rather alarming.

One was that her wrists were still bound. While the gag in her mouth was gone, the bindings were still in place, although Lyrhea could tell that she only needed to wriggle her wrists a bit to get them free, which she of course did.

The other, potentially even worse thing was that her asshole ‘host’ was missing. Now, while she normally would not have been upset that he was gone due to his actions and words that he had delivered unto her and others, the fact that she didn’t know where he was or what he was up to was a cause for alarm as well.

For all she knew he could be out there right now, fucking people over for shits and giggles, and she didn’t want anyone to put him down like the rabid dog that he was before she could. With that thought in her mind, she got up from where she was seated and began to slowly creep her way out of the ruined cabin and into what appeared to be a mash-up of various biomes.

She didn't get more than a few meters outside before a ringing in her head along with a massive surging headache dropped her to the ground, only for both of those things to vanish as quickly as they came. She opened her eyes again, and this time beheld something she had honestly never expected to see.

Just before her face, and just within the reach of her hands, was a screen that looked like that which one might find in a video game, and its contents were both welcome and yet also dreaded.

Primary Quest:

Tutorial Part 1

Objective:

Accept Your New Existence

Reward(s):

Access to Racial Features

Start of Tutorial Part 2

Lyrhea continued to look at the floating semi-transparent screen for a bit before trying to dismiss it. She had read enough fiction to know that doing so was possible, but she instead found herself unable to.

Before she could try much else, though, a rock hit her from behind, thrown from an unseen hand. She turned around with a gaze that could kill and saw a group of humans looking at her with faces full of disgust and hate.

“What was that for?!” she snarled, but more rocks just kept coming.

“Monster! Kill it!”

She pulled away from the group of five people and began to dodge the hurled stones.

“I’m not a monster!” she yelled back, but this was to no avail as more and more stones were sent her way.

“Not a monster?” one of the people balked. “You damn well aren’t human!”

“Yeah!” screamed a woman among the five. “Give us back our planet! This is all your fault!”

“I’m not-” another stone hit her, and this was enough to get her to give up. Rather than risk getting stoned to death, Lyrhea ran off into the hodgepodge of various biomes and ran until she could not hear or see the people that had assaulted her.

Eventually, though, she was forced to run once more, and eventually escaped the pursuing gang of five when she ducked into a very out-of-place building that was half-buried in the ground and at a sloped angle in the ground at that.

While she knew that she was not fully human, and that she liked that, she had not fully come to grips with that fact. This all changed for the better/ worse when she slinked her way into a damaged bathroom and accidentally locked eyes with her reflection in a mirror.

“What. The. Fuck.” she mumbled as she focused more on her visible features. “I’m…”

The screen she had forgotten existed popped up once again, this time with a message that she found unwelcome.

Tutorial Part 1 Complete

You have come to terms with your new lot in life, or at least a part of it. Now you must embrace your new state fully, and take a part of this world for your own. But first, you’ll need to get stronger, and what better way to get stronger than by killing and eating?

Reward(s):

Access to Racial Features Granted

Starting Tutorial Part 2