06 - Pssst, you cool?

David blanketed the forest with Echolocation as he glided past a few more times, carefully examining the entire area closely. His anxiety spiked during the last swoop as he passed low to the ground and realized that things tend to look smaller from the air. What he’d originally thought was a ‘large scaly something’, was a ‘worryingly large scaly something’. The damn thing was probably the size of a horse and stood on ostrich-like legs that ended in large sturdy claws. David’s Echolocation allowed him to cheat a bit, and he got a peek behind the thing as well, seeing the long whiplike tail it had tucked behind itself.

It looks like someone got blackout drunk and tried to describe a dinosaur to someone who had never seen one, hehe…Okay, that was mean, I’m probably ugly too. Don't lie to yourself, David.

–Health: 30/30–

–Stamina: 56/130–

David huffed in irritation at gravity's inevitable victory and swung around in a tight loop, more than a little proud of himself as he powered into the turn and burned a bit of stamina. He stretched his huge leathery wings forward, scooping almost too much air as he slowed drastically and drifted to the ground with a quiet thump. He froze, crouching down deep into the shadows of the pines as his ears locked onto the creature with laser focus, eyes wide and staring as he held his breath. Within seconds David felt a little stupid, not only did the creature not notice him or the sound in the slightest, but he began to understand as he watched it work that it was groping around almost blindly with its withered little clawed arms to find the rocks it was searching for. His lips wrinkled up in a vicious little grin and he was suddenly very glad he could see in the dark.

“Hey, are you a person?”

David tried to sound cool when he yelled the awkward greeting and sighed internally when all it did was make him sound like a very large, very aggressive chipmunk. The reptile's chunky crocodilian head snapped in his direction as its nostrils flared open and it sucked in huge breaths of air, certainly smelling him. It swung its snout slowly from left to right, trying to pinpoint exactly where he was as David hopped a few times and put some more distance between them, maneuvering towards its side. He began to get a little nervous as the relatively large creature remained silent for a few more moments before he noticed that it was furiously wringing its tiny little claws in distress, curling its tail up under its body as it stood stock still.

“Are you a person or a monster? I haven’t seen anyone else the last few days.” David called again and decided to ignore how awful he sounded every time he spoke.

“Yes. Oh my god, yes! Where are you? I can’t see anything, I’ve just been hiding. Do you know what’s going on?! I was on my way home when I heard the emergency sirens and pulled over! Then…everything…I think I might be crazy, I keep seeing things that don’t make sense and…”

David almost jumped out of his skin and flew away as a skeleton when the giant reptile finally responded in a booming, raspy voice that seemed incredibly loud to him. The voice was feminine, somehow, he wasn’t sure how he could tell, and she seemed increasingly desperate for any sort of explanation. He listened for a few more moments as she danced around the topic of the System and…you know…being a horse-sized lizard thing, without actually saying it in plain terms.

“You’re talking about your Status and the different menus?” David barked back when she finally calmed down a bit, “Greetings Earth inhabitants, yadda yadda, then they turned you into some sort of monster and sent you to weirdo-land with a bunch of spreadsheets that make no sense?”

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The lizard stiffened before jerking its thick neck back, head rearing into the air in surprise, “...Oh no, you’re crazy too! Get away! Don’t hurt me!”

“I wish, I spent like the whole first day pretty sure I was crazy though. What’s your name?”

“Claire…I’m not really…a monster am I?” Her voice was confused and defeated when she eventually replied. She shifted uneasily from foot to foot, almost knocking down her little wall of rocks with her fidgeting before she froze and carefully inched away from it.

David hopped closer and upped his volume a bit, “Nah, you look more like a…uh…Crocogater Ostrich thing? Honestly, you lucked out. The only other thing I’ve seen that might have been a person was a little weasel critter.”

“You’re not…wait, everyone is different? What happened to you then?”

David bounced a bit closer, pausing just far enough away he was sure he could escape if he had to, intent on demonstrating how relatively small and harmless he was compared to her. He was so busy performing the mental estimations of exactly how far away that would need to be that he failed to notice the moon creep out from behind the clouds and shed a thin light down through the branches of the thick trees. Claire’s maw dropped open, pulling her head back in the same shocked motion as before, stumbling backward and tripping over her tail in her haste. She roared as she fell heavily, small rocks blasted loose off the outcropping by her weight as she smote the ground, feet clawing the earth and sending her little stone wall flying in her terror.

“NO! DON’T HURT ME! PLEASE!”

What the fu–

–Unnerving Mutagen B has leveled up!–

–Gained 3xp–

Unnerving Mutagen?

David was reading the entry before he even realized he could pull them up for a single thing at a time.

|Unnerving Mutagen B: Your appearance is unnerving. May cause enemies to reconsider aggressing you.|

He ground his fangs together in frustration, cursing mentally in a steady litany as he waited for Claire to calm down a bit. He sat, very slowly and nonthreateningly and tried his best to look fluffy and harmless. To her credit, Claire did calm down fairly quickly, though her body language was still extremely defensive as she got her powerful legs under her and slowly stood up. It seemed like more of a momentary shock than anything, and David was fairly sure that was entirely the doing of the Mutagen. He hadn’t thought about it before, but B was pretty high wasn’t it?

‘Reconsider aggressing you’ seems more like ‘may cause enemies to need new pants’. Wait, oh no. Am I squeaky and ugly? Okay, let's rip the bandaid off and just ask her, to clear this up right now.

“So, am I that ugly or what? I can’t see myself, you know. That was kinda rude by the way.” It sounded lame even to David, but the entire situation was awkward enough, and he needed a straight answer.

Claire stared unblinkingly at him for a few long heartbeats before she cocked her head to the side in an almost birdlike motion to turn her eye towards him more fully before she spoke, “Yes and no? You’re kinda spooky lookin’ and you scared me to death when you just came outta the dark like that. I’m sorry I screamed. I’ve just always been scared of rats.”

“RAT?! WHAT?! I’M NOT A RAT, LOOK!” David screeched in outrage as he flared his wings to demonstrate that he was not, in fact, a rat.

–Unnerving Mutagen B has leveled up!–

–Gained 3xp!–

“AAAAAAAAAAHHHH!!!!”

“WAIT, SHIT, MY BAD!”