The orb speaks up once more, distracting you from the green, flowing landscapes and all its strange people. "Now that you're actually bound to our plane, there's a few things I may have overlooked. You see, gathering souls from other planes is actually quite time-consuming and requires potent rituals or strong magic users. It is for this reason that I am generally hired by a community to collect for them."
You're initially confused, but when you take your focus off the orb, you realize there is no longer any lush landscape. In fact, you can only see vague shapes in pitch-black darkness. If you had to guess, you must be underground. "Where am I? What is this place?"
"Perhaps I should give more of a good news, bad news thing. The good news is that you will be reincarnated, and I only say this because some pay us to collect souls for their own machinations. Serra uses souls to power quite a few things, which is part of why souls being no longer renewable makes us rather high demand. The bad news is that you don't actually get a choice in where you go. You're going to be reincarnated as a kobold, which unfortunately isn't known as being one of the more...Acceptable... races? I think that's the kindest way to put it." Still confused, you remain in silence. "Right, you probably don't have those wherever you came from so it's not that bad of news for now."
This conversation is making you slightly uneasy. Unending solitude was boring, but this Serra place is able to destroy even souls? You decide to try not dwelling on it. "But where am I?"
"This would be a kobold warren, or very close to it." The shadows begin to move as you watch them, blurring and giving you a sense of vertigo. You realize the world around you is moving through a series of twisting tunnels, until the world around you re-emerges in torchlight. There sits a darker-skinned man in a circle with various materials strewn about, with his eyes closed. The orb floats directly above him. "This would be me. You're not quite born yet, but your egg is laid." Egg? "Since I know what you're thinking, ever since our god left us, a new plague has withered the world: the Lost. All those born without a soul being prepared or nearby become near-mindless creatures whom have a penchant for blood. They are little better than animals, using their intellect to destroy the world around them. The Lost physically look no different than others of their race, but they seek out and destroy those that are not one of them. Part of why the whole 'kobold' thing is a problem would be that there are virtually none of them left that aren't Lost. I'll admit that I'm doing this at a huge discount because morbid curiosity got the better of me. It's been many years since the last known tribe contacted the outside world, and that's caused myth and fact of their kind to meld into one."
"That wasn't what I was thinking about. I was confused about being in an egg."
"Oh." You could swear you saw the man under the orb shift during this long pause. "That's a little disappointing. Kobolds don't have live births. They lay eggs because they're reptiles."
"Kobolds are reptiles?"
The orb disappears into the man, and he awakens without moving from his position. You hear a garbled sentence spoken in chant, but you do not understand any of the words. You feel as if you're being pulled once more, but this time it's alarmingly different. Before, the world moved for you. Now, you felt as if chains were forcing you toward a transparent stone at the center of this circle. The chanting ceases, but you still inch ever closer to the rock. "I'm sorry but you're taking too much time. You'll be forgetting all of this anyways, but it's all common knowledge so I'm sure you'll get all of it and more from your tribe." The world grows larger, or perhaps you're shrinking to fit more completely into the stone. "I need to meet a rather large quota and you're only the first." The voice becomes harder to hear as the world you see becomes crystallized; you're fully within the crystal now. "Consider yourself fortunate."
Your new prison is shockingly similar to where you started out, though instead of a black void, you see a blurry world of giants. A massive earthen-hued blob surrounds you, then just as quickly disappears. Over an unknown period of time, your world slowly ceases to have any variety in color, instead being surrounded by more grey on all sides except one, which always remains brown. You try to focus, but this stone must have some sort of effect on you. Colors begin to reappear as the grey is removed in almost the same methodic manner at which it appeared, until the blob surrounds you once more. It pushes your gem toward some sort of white surface, and everything truly goes black.