A Benevolent Evil Dragon

My body is weird. I know what I would normally do in this situation. I would stare at the crack in the wall. And yet I feel myself doing something more stupid, and not exactly consciously. It’s like when you see something falling and your hand shoots out to try and catch it. It happens even if it might actually end up hurting you and even if just letting the thing fall would have no negative impact. Well, at least I think that’s what’s happening because for some reason I am pushing my face into that crack. The annoying part is that I can’t even complain, because it works.

With a few more cracking sounds I feel my entire body shooting out of whatever was keeping me contained so tightly and I come to a stop as light forces my eyes to close. Alright, let’s take this slow because that hurt a bit. Now, with my eyes closed I start noticing a lot of things being wrong with me, with my body. All at once red flags are raised, both tiny and enormous. My body is different. Very different. It’s not behaving like it did... like it should!

Deep breath. Wait, no, ahhh, I can’t even breathe right! And now it’s manual and I don’t know how to do it and I am choking! In a panic I turn my brain off. Because apparently I can do that? Or at least I think I did that. I still feel loosely alive but like I am vegetating or maybe sleeping. I am back in my library, I can see it all again just like before, so I still have that going for me…

I think some time passed. Maybe a minute? Maybe a second. Well, for whatever reason the void doesn’t want me. So, let’s take stock of my body and see if I somehow survived being ripped in two. Spoiler alert: I didn’t. I am not in any amount of pain, but I am not numbed either. I open my eyes for a second, get blinded by the light again, close them. At least I managed to catch a faint, blurry glimpse of my surroundings and it doesn’t look like any of the hospitals I’ve been to. Too much space. Too much bright yellow and earthly brown, and I am not standing on a bed on my back or on my side, I am laying on my belly on extremely soft materials, which kind of remind me of that goat rug my grandma had.

I will leave the “where” for later, now time to see why I feel so strange. Starting small, I am not in pain. No joint pain, no pressure on my spine, my heart is loud but doesn’t feel like I am one bad day away from a heart attack and despite laying on my chest I do not feel pain in my rib cage and sternum. Really I feel brand new, which doesn’t bode well in its own way.

The next issue? I can feel and hear my body. “Ah, that’s normal!” you say, in your adorable innocence? Well, not in this case, because this isn’t me being able to feel that I have an arm, or hearing the air passing in and out of my nostrils, because that is normal, but rather it is the fact that my brain is picking up and translating literally every stimuli without having any tampering in place! I can hear and feel each beat of my heart, and not because it is going way above baseline, which it kind of probably is since I am panicking a bit, but because it doesn’t yet have a baseline. That’s going to take… two days if my memories are accurate. Oh would you look at that, I can remember things pretty fast now. Again, it only took me more than likely dying to get a useable memory!

Leaving my very justified anger aside, there’s more. My body has been still, aside from the automatic breathing moving my rib cage, which is stranger than you’d think. No finger twitching, no needing to shake myself a bit or else feel my joints locking, no background tremors or anxiety induced shaking. I am completely still, like a rock. I also have the urge to just keep doing this. I mean, I am laying on something soft and warm, and I still can’t really open my eyes without burning spots into them, so I could just continue doing this a while longer.

Right I should probably start focusing on that now, my senses. Firstly, my eyelids are weirdly thick, I think. I say that because despite being in a decently bright room and having looked at something that resembled a standing lamp, I am not seeing that red glow passing through. Even the spots from before are gone and now I am seeing darkness and nothing else. My nose is also strange. Well, firstly, I am actually breathing rather fast. Not hyperventilating kind of fast, but about twice as fast as I usually do when I am just laying down. And focusing on the actual smells, I am getting very weird vibes.

I think I am having a hard time translating this because my brain is trying to give me very complex feelings from scents that are pretty damn new. I feel crisp yet stagnant air with a tinge of vegetation. I feel the smell of dry dirt and dust and of old tasty things. My brain says that it smells like home. I say that it smells like a weird cave with above average ventilation and maybe some kind of mushrooms.

Another moment, I just need another second to just exist so I can try and dampen all this assault of information so that I can at least try and understand a bit more of what is even happening. I continue breathing, thankfully not falling into manual control, despite thinking so much of it.

Finally, after a few minutes of calming down I manage to filter out most of the overwhelming feelings I’m getting, or at least I manage to ignore them so I can focus on my final one. Well, not exactly the final since I have yet to check out taste, but I am not about to start licking whatever’s nearby so instead I’ll check what I can touch. The answer is, frankly, not much. I am just a fleshy slug right now, covering as little surface as I can, and my consciousness still needs to adapt to what’s my leg and what’s my spine.

I guess it’s time to try and move? At least a bit, so I can figure out my body plan. I try to get this over with and I stretch, trying to use as many muscles as possible to feel them. Problem one: my muscles are weak and moving a little bit coupled with being awake for who knows how long just trying to withstand my own senses has started making me feel tired and tingly. Problem two: I feel too much and too little of my body at the same time. My hands and what I can only assume are my legs seemed to be placed under me, and now they stretched just a bit away. They are tiny and weak. Baby limbs. Baby god damned limbs.

Well, fine, brand new body, baby limbs, fine, I could live with that… But what is up with the rest? Because I think I have a second pair of arms jutting out of my back, and an absurdly long fifth arm, this one a bit more mobile and with two fingers that I can kind of press against each other, but I’m not getting back useful feedback. So, not human baby. Well, this plus the very obvious non-hospital kind of points to me, seemingly, being a baby. An alien baby. Well, alien by Earth standards since I am very clearly not human or even an animal. The fact that I have in total of 7 limbs, while being probably a vertebrate points to that at least… This should be mildly distressing, but I am calm.. More weirdness to unpack.

So… what now? It takes a few seconds to figure out the controls, so to speak, but I am able to place all my limbs under me again and I try, still blindly, to get myself off the ground at least. I might as well test the limits of my new flesh. I strain and push, my whole body trembling from this effort, yet I am only rewarded by pain and exhaustion. My muscles are too new to function, and it seems that whatever I am isn’t made to start behaving normally straight out of the egg. And I can only assume that I come from an egg because there is nobody else around even moving or prodding or existing, just me. That and also the whole “Breaking out” sequence.

Come to think of it, it’s pretty weird that I basically exploded out of a hardy egg but am now unable to even crawl a bit away. Maybe I just used up all my energy on that stunt and now my muscles are demanding a break? Guess I’ll find out at some point. For now I need to figure out a few things. Firstly, do I have a parent? Parenting does increase the chance of a viable baby but some animals can get by with just making a bunch of children and then leaving them to survive. I am not hungry or thirsty, probably won’t be for a day or so since I absorbed all the egg yolk (something obvious by the lack of wet, sticky sensation on my body), but is that enough time for my body to become hunt worthy or am I going to be protected and fed by an adult after that? Hard to tell.

…

I’m bored. Good to know adhd transcends lifetimes. I have so much to unpack but all I want is to do something! Anything! But instead I am trapped in a flesh prison. Actually, there is something I can do while trapped, exactly what I did in my last life when stuck in place against my will. Music. Just some good old calming music while I think about my shitty body. Well, maybe it’s a better one compared to my last body, what with me being at least a quadruped and all that. My spine at least won’t give me as much of a problem, hopefully. Ah, but will I have the dexterity to use tools? That might be a problem, because while a dog is arguably better built than a human, it’s still lower on the food chain because of tool use.

If I reincarnated and remember the past, does that mean that there’s more people from back home out here? Maybe mo-

Argh this is why I wanted to do something or think of something weird and tangential! The millisecond I am left with my thoughts it all turns back to bad things and now my heart hurts and I hate that I still feel that in this new life. Note to self, second body has embodied emotion too. Annoying.

I yawn, and I am actually glad for that. Babies tend to sleep a lot more than adults, this is just a general way of how growing works. My body is currently growing, probably at a rate that would be slightly visible if you only saw me every week or so. This burns through most of my energy reserve and complex thought coupled with physical exercise (if you can even call trying to get up an exercise) resulted in me being spent. Good, might as well nap through my adaptation-

The air rushes past me, feeling like the wind before a particularly nasty storm. Seeing as 1 and a half of my senses tell me I am inside an artificially illuminated cave, that is a very strange feeling. Stranger yet I hear and feel a thud, like something enormous fell. It sounds a bit farther away, clearly not inside the chamber I was in, but close enough to affect it and make a thousand sounds of clinking metal from the earth just shaking.

There goes my nap.

I wait, quietly, still as a rock. Or at least, I try, but it seems that while my little limbs can’t hold up my weight, the arm that’s almost as long as the rest of my body is muscular enough to be able and move, and from the nervousness I am feeling, I have apparently swayed it enough to hit something hard pretty strongly, which hurt a bit and made sound that traveled easily through the enclosed space. In response I hear weaker thuds, not like a whole building falling, like before, but more like a car dropping to the ground, over and over. It’s getting louder, closer. I am actually starting to be afraid.

I am still very much tired and my body is urging me to just nap, but that same body has understood my feelings of fear and decided that adrenaline was the best option for me. New to the world as I may be, the muscles I have should still allow me to drag myself away if my life depended on it. Adrenaline is a hell of a drug after all, and even if I don’t have the strength of my adult human body this time around, I should still be able to give a mean hit with this giant fifth arm of mine.

I wait in darkness until I hear the thuds coming from within the room. Whatever it is, it’s enormous. Like Jurassic Park type of enormous. I stay still, waiting, hoping for it to mistake me for a rock or something. I would try to see it, if not for knowing that my eyes are somehow worse than my grandma’s for how blurry and sensitive they are. So, instead I try to hear it. And hear I do, because not only do I know it’s in the room by its heavy steps, but it seems to vocalize. It’s not a bark, or a hiss (not that I was expecting a massive cat, mind you), hell it’s not really any sound that I heard an animal make. It sounds like rocks being crushed together, like electricity zapping the air, like somebody trying to scream while whispering and speaking in slow motion. What’s worse, being taken by surprise by that sound made me pause just long enough for the being to somehow appear in front of me.

I can feel its massive presence. I can feel a hot breath wash over me as it sniffs me then exhales enough air to lift up a weather balloon. Now I am actually hyperventilating, my body tensing as I try to make it move but it refuses. I am terrified and petrified and I am actually going to die minutes after defying all logic and reincarnating.

Man do I suck at living.

…

The moment passes. I am not dead. I am however very wet right now. I think I got my answer to the parent question. I have a parent and they’re enormous. Well, really I should have thought that a possibility… I mean, human babies are born a quarter the size of an adult human, and that’s only in height. Other species have even bigger differences, like puppies being able to fit in your palm while the adult being bigger than a person. Kangaroos and pandas literally make tiny jelly beans that somehow turn into massive beasts, of course my parent, be it mother or father, is big enough to make me feel like the earth is shaking… Or at least I hope that I was just being overly sensitive and that my parent isn’t actually the size of a building. The only reference of their size I have currently is the tongue being able to easily wrap around me. Which is normal I think? At least in animals. I’ve seen enough cat and dog videos to know that.

It makes those sounds again, different ones, actually. Language, hopefully. I am sapient, but I don’t know if that is a property of me or of my species. For all I know my parent could be just be trying to make me used to their calls so I know to approach when they make it.

My musings are cut short however, as I realize the downside with my body being put into fight or flight right before I wanted to nap. I am exhausted. I don’t even get to yawn again I just fall, and I find myself back in my library. I can still feel the outside, but barely. Like trying to hear the toaster going off in the kitchen while you’re listening to music on headphones in your room kind of faint. Well that was certainly a first day of being alive again. I am not a human, my mom is kind of big and I live in a cave that now that I think about it I am not sure if it is artificially lit up or if it just has some kind of glow in the dark function, like a special moss or something.

I hope it’s artificial, as freeing as it would be to live as a beast, I know I wouldn’t be able to just enjoy that for too long. Especially with me having knowledge of science and technology just swimming through here. Honestly, even with it being a bit under 30 years of life, I still know more than most people just by virtue of remembering every little fun fact and rabbit hole that I followed every single time I hyper-fixated on something. I remember every single class of biology, of chemistry, of physics that I have ever been to, even those I did not even pay attention to, because I still heard the teacher talk, or glanced over at drawings. I know history, geography, economy, politics, science, literature, and most importantly I know how to survive and build primitive tools and shelter based on the many guides I watched. I have a lot of junk too, but with all this… I could live a pretty damn good life, no matter the situation. Of course most of it will be useless if I am part of just a mundane beastly species and have my one giant arm as the only one with opposable thumbs, and even that only has two of them in the first place. Let’s just hope tomorrow brings more good news than bad.