“They’re already in the game.” Finn stated bluntly.
“In the game?” Adam replied as deep black scales began to spread out under his clothes, “I thought it we were doing it the basement?”
“Look around you,” Finn replied as the walls began to shimmer into thick wooden posts while a layer of sawdust spread out on the floor.
The basement around Adam melted away into what looked like a massive barn, all while Finn’s body seemed to grow more transparent.
“Whats… ugk!” Adam tried to ask what was going on, but a series of popping sensations in his rapidly lengthening neck announced the formation of new vertebra, and his question seemed to get caught in the back of his throat.
Bones stretched and cracked as more vertebrae grew in at the base of his spine, all while his hips morphed and widened, forcing his legs first to the side, then forward to make room for a thick tail that was growing against the back of his pants.
The entirety of his spine continued to grow, causing his body to lengthen and pushing his arms and legs further apart. Meanwhile, his ribs ballooned out as thick muscles grew out over them to help anchor his reforming arms and legs.
The room grew smaller around him as growing flesh stretched his clothes tight. The pressure across his body was intense, and Adam tried to reach up to unbutton his shirt with a clumsy, clawed paw, only to find that his front legs didn’t work that anymore.
But relief wasn’t long in coming as coarse black scales cut through the fabric of his clothes like millions of tiny knives, and with a load tearing noise, his shirt and pants simultaneously disintegrated into millions of tiny shreds of cloth.
He felt himself begin to lean forward as the increased length and weight of his upper body became too much to bare for his shortening hindlegs and altered hips. As soon as he began to lean forward, the soon to be riding lizard found itself suddenly lose balance, accelerating the fall down until it landed with thud on soft pads that lined the underside of its new front paws.
The riding lizard experimentally lifted a paw, feeling a significant amount of resistance as it did so, underneath stubby, black scaled digits topped with long, wicked claws, were squishy green pads that looked almost like tires. And from the feeling of resistance when it tried to lift its paws, it quickly became apparent that these pads would stick to any surface, letting the new lizard climb walls with ease.
The lizard felt its neck grow longer while its face widened and its hair melted away. Its ears vanished, leaving two small holes in its scales, all while its nose retreated into two vertical slits. Its teeth fell out as hundreds of small, needle like fangs grew into its mouth.
All the while, new vertebrae continued to be added to the end of its spine as new muscles and tendons grew into the space between. Foot by foot, a thick, reptilian tail was taking shape behind the lizard, eventually growing to out to at least half of its body length.
As its black scales finished growing in, dozens of small spines poked out across its body, giving it a rough, craggy look, The biggest of these spines ran along the sides of its neck and the back of its tail, though many were prominent on the lower parts of its legs as well.
Before long, the small human named Adam, who had walked into a seemingly ordinary suburban basement, had been replaced by a very confused, 25 foot long, 3 ton behemoth of lizard standing in the middle of a massive but empty barn.
The new lizard flicked a thin, long tongue out, experimentally tasting the air. It tasted like hay, metal, and lizards.
As if on cue, large metal crates began to solidify into existence around it in the same way that Finn had dematerialized out of existence just a few minutes ago. The new lizard peered out at its changing surroundings as yellow, slitted eyes confirmed what its mouth had told it just seconds ago – the barn was filled with large metal crates, each of which contained a riding lizard like itself.
The lizard turned to look behind itself, only to come face to face with the thick metal bars that were materializing around it, rapidly taking the shape of its own cage. Sensing that it could escape upwards, the new lizard tried to grab onto the bars and lift itself up, only to find that avenue of escape was also closed off by the cage’s steel ceiling.
Noises came from behind it, and the lizard turned around to see two small creatures staring out it from the other side of the bars. They looked kind of like humans, but the lizard found that it couldn’t tell either of them apart. It was like looking at two dogs of the same age and breed – even though the lizard knew that humans looked nothing alike, the two standing in front of it both just looked like generic tan blobs.
The lizard had crystal clear eyesight, but for some reason it couldn’t perceive any of the fine details that it was used to seeing when it looked at a person – the only way it could even tell them apart was that their chests were different colors.
Wait a second, the lizard tried to think, did human’s chests come in different colors? Weren’t they all the same? In fact, weren’t human bodies the same color all over? For some reason, both of these human’s legs were blue. And why were they so small? It made no sense.
And what made even less sense were the words coming out of their mouths:
“Tesylra nio mut nguth?” One asked as it pointed towards the riding lizard.
“Mi.” the other replied, before waving its hand towards a stack of nearby crates, “huy nguth? Yurn tesy wer distee.”
Why couldn’t the lizard understand what they were saying? Why was it referring to itself as just ‘the lizard’ or ‘it’? Why wasn’t it using its name?
It looked around the room and saw small wooden squares, covered in scratch marks on many of the other cages. Deep down inside it knew those scratch marks meant something, but to the lizard, they just looked like the kind of scratches that an animal would make in the dirt.
That’s when the lizard glanced over at the cages that one of the humans had gestured to earlier. Amber eyes peered out from between the bars of each cage, while thin red tongues flicked out, tasting the air. Tasting the new lizard in the nearby cage.
The lizard felt itself growing damp in a line that started at the vent between its legs and then ran up into the inside of its belly. It let its own tongue taste the air, and its mouth filled with a rich, pleasant aroma.
Pictures flooded into its mind. Pictures of other lizards, of the vents between their legs. It imagined two small red cocks slowly pushing their way out, before growing larger and firmer. It envisioned small teeth on the back of its neck, tenderly biting down into its scales. It could feel the weight of its companion pushing it down, forcing its way underneath it, between its legs, into its vent…
The lizard felt its vent pull up into its body as new muscles strained to grip an imaginary cock. A cock that its body wanted. A cock that its tongue told it was just a few feet away, but which its eyes were forced to gaze at through metal bars.
The lizard turned its back towards the other cages, used its back feet to grab onto the metal bars of its own cage, and raised the bottom of its stomach until it was pressing into the bars, giving the other lizards a full view of the beads of moisture dripping off the scales surrounding its vent.
It began to move its legs back and forth, slowly gyrating its stomach against the cold bars, when a loud noise filled its mind…
“STOP!”
The lizard’s body came to an immediate half.
“DOWN!”
Its feet let go of the bars as its body rushed to assume a laying position, and it wasn’t long before it could feel coarse straw pressing into the scales on its belly.
“BAD!”
The straw on the bottom of its cage wicked the moisture around its vent away as any thoughts of other lizards were immediately purged from its mind, only to be replaced by a profound sense of sadness and shame.
It had displeased its owner. It had been a bad lizard. It wasn’t allowed to breed, not yet at least. It wanted to be good. It wanted to please its owner. It wanted to run fast and carry small humans on its back.
It wanted to know what was going on.
As if to answer its question, its mind was filled with the image of a rolling dice. While the lizard couldn’t read the numbers of in its faces, as the dice came to a stop, it knew it hadn’t rolled well.
A sudden epiphany ran through the lizard’s small brain. Finn had just rolled a wisdom check for it. It had rolled low, but its wisdom was so high that it had passed always. Then its mind drew back to the character sheet.
Or more specifically, to the blank spaces on the character sheet. It couldn’t think of a name for itself because it had left that box blank. It couldn’t read, write, speak, or understand anything more than a few simple commands because it had left the language section blank – and riding lizards didn’t understand language by default. It obeyed the human’s command because it had written that it was tame and well trained.
Speaking of humans, they looked so small because it was so big. And they looked so weird because humans were complicated looking animals, and its lizard brain was simple by comparison. So while it had sharp, eagle like vision, its brain lacked the ability to perceive all of the fine details that its eyes could see.
And then there was the gender box – something that had held little relevance for an animal in a tabletop game, but which now held the utmost importance to a creature that was forced to live out the rest of its life stuck with the consequences of having left that box blank as well.
A blank box that may very well come back to bite it in the… well, it didn’t want to think of the feeling that it had just experienced between its legs. 9 charisma was a lot for a riding lizard, after all. And for a species that communicated mostly by scent, that meant that it smelled a hell of a lot better than it sounded.
The other lizards could all smell it, and they all wanted it. As much as its current owners would keep them away, what about its next owners? What if they just put it up for the night in a normal stable, oblivious to the lust that it instilled in any lizard close enough to taste its scent.
The lizard was wise enough to be able to gain insight about the world around it, but not smart enough to make any sense of that insight. It had the misfortune of being trapped in a body that couldn’t understand the world around it, even though it could fully appreciate just how much of a world there to understand.
And perhaps most chillingly, it now had the wisdom to understand just how little wisdom it had in its previous life. Just how foolish it was to walk down into the basement and hand a dragon a blank character sheet. About how the dragon had tried to warn it, and how if it had just taken a few more seconds to think things through, it might not be stuck in this new life for… how long did Finn this campaign was going to last?
“Riding lizards can live for hundreds of years…” the dim memory of a unheeded warning caused a heavy stone to form in its stomach. Was Finn going to leave it like this even after the campaign was over?
The lizard’s mind returned to the gesture the humans had made earlier, where one had swept an arm over the nearby cages. For a brief moment, it became concerned that these humans intended to breed it, that the point of the gesture was to indicate potential mates. But then it remembered the last thing it had written on that piece of paper:
“Serves as the party’s well trained mount.”
Mounts didn’t get bred, at least not until they retired. The lizard knew the humans weren’t indicating potential mates, but rather to other lizards it was supposed to be kept away from.
Then it got the sense of another dice roll, of another wisdom check. Just like before, it could picture the dice in mind, but couldn’t read the numbers on its face. The dice came to a stop, and the sound of Finn faintly chuckling from a world away brought with it the realization of another poor roll.
But what was the roll? Given its high wisdom, the lizard was fully aware that a 2 could be a success, while a 1 could be a disaster. It cursed as its own body failed it in the most spectacular way possible.
The lizard’s eyes darted back to the other cages as another epiphany tore through its mind. How many of them were there?
One…
Two…
One…?
It lost track. It ran its eyes along the cages over and over again, each time trying to count the number of other lizards that were trying to get a greedy glance at its underside. But its eyes were moving too fast, there were too many cages, and each time it scanned the room, it felt itself getting hopelessly lost after counting to two. It knew there were more cages, more lizards, but it couldn’t, for the life of it, figure out how many there were.
And that was the most important thing to it right now. After all, it had just realized that the word “mount” had two very different meanings within the context of its new life. And it had no idea what forms it should expect to find the other party members in.
“There were supposed to be five other players, right?” the lizard thought to itself.
So just how many other lizards were in the room with it? And had those lizards always been lizards? Or were they like itself, trapped in a new body, with a future dictated entirely by the iron bars that surrounded them, and the two humans inspecting their livestock.?
Panic began to fill the lizard’s mind as it began to fear the consequences of the few words it had chosen to write on that fateful piece of paper. A slow mind began to race as fast as it could, struggling to figure out whether Finn had decided to be true to the intention of the lizard’s chosen words, or to twist them like a malevolent genie.
Its eye’s raced around the room. There were so many cages. So many lizards. So many smaller creatures. Its heart thumped, pounding through the straw pressed up against its chest, beating into the metal floor below it as its cage began to rattle.
Its eyes grew dry. It blinked, its eyes opening to a peaceful barn. Other lizards milled about their cages while workers carried buckets of food and water about. The weight in its stomach was gone, its heartbeat had returned to normal, and its mind was clear of the frightening thoughts that had filled it just an instant ago.
“Tame.” It had written that it was a tame riding lizard. It had been trained not to panic in frightening situations – to stay calm and remain still unless its rider ordered it to do otherwise. It was tame and obedient as it was stupid. A mount didn’t have use for its own will, it simply did whatever its rider told it to do. The lizard understood how Finn had twisted its own words into invisible shackles. And it understood that it was powerless to do anything about it.
As it looked around the barn, with no comprehension of where it was or what its new life would hold for it, the lizard knew that there was nothing more for it to do but wait. Maybe it would be a quest reward? It could only hope.