Inheritance of Earth 1.1

Cold water lapping at my toes was my first hint that I wasn’t in my bed. That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Lots of fun things could happen outside one’s bed: you could have ended up at some lovely man’s, woman’s and/or enby’s place after a hot date, or perhaps passed out after a raging heartbreak induced bender in a comfortable looking ditch after they told you they didn’t want another. The possibilities were practically endless.

Cold water? The Donau, perhaps? I didn’t remember passing out near the river, but then again, my head was killing me – pulsing with weird… colour – and I couldn’t seem to remember much of anything. So, the bender was a distinct possibility, while someone else’s place was perhaps a slightly less likely scenario.

What? I’m an optimist. You’ve got to be, these days.

Although given that it felt that I was lying on cold stone, the prospect of being in the immediate proximity of a cute guy, gal, or enby was rapidly diminishing.

I opened my eyes and pushed myself upright, blinking blearily at the black and grey and orange smudges all around me. Then I pawed at my face. Right, no glasses. That was… bad. My prescription put me an inch over the line into the fun side of legal blindness, meaning that without my glasses or contacts I was definitely not to be trusted operating any kind of heavy machinery, driving, or holding your baby. That last one wasn’t related to my vision or paucity thereof – I was just a massive klutz.

I padded and pawed around on the cold stone for a few moments before letting out a cheer as I found the damp and cold spectacles. They were large, wire framed circles which a few rather fashion-consciousless philistines had declared made me look a bit like an owl. I wiped them on my damp-feeling hoodie, which might have made them a bit dirtier, before trying to slide them onto my ears.

Now, the operative word is tried. My first attempt saw one of them snag on something weird and sensitive and sticking out on the upper left side of my head. My second attempt got them stuck on the same kind of thing on my right, and my third attempt got them stuck on both. As I said, I was a klutz.

Finally, on my fifth go I managed to get them on, threading the needle between whatever was on the upper part of my head, and my ears.

The world snapped into focus, revealing that I was standing on slightly sloping dark brickwork at the edge of some kind of sluggishly flowing water. There was a low roof overhead, of similar looking brick work to the floor, and the only source of light seemed to be a pair of burning torches at the top of a small set of stone steps. It was quiet, eerily so, and the air was stale and damp.

I turned slowly on the spot, seeing that there was another, similar set of steps with twin flaming torches across the span, perhaps two dozen meters wide, of swiftly flowing water. Said water emerged from some kind of dark pipe that even I would have to stoop to walk through, and exited from the room via an identical tight tunnel on the other side.

Beyond that, the room was empty, and I made an educated guess that this probably wasn’t the Donau. Sorry, Danube for you, Englische Ausländer.

Then I looked down, and all thoughts about the naming conventions of major European waterways flew from my mind as I was confronted with my reflection in the inky, thimble-deep water around my bare feet.

Although the black-market hormones I’d managed to get – black market because the Austrian state refused to give me any because I was the wrong type of queer, had helped me come to enjoy my face a bit more, I’d never been really happy with my appearance. I’d always thought my nose was too long and my ears too big and my eyes too beady.

The face that stared back at me, however, was as if all of my wishes had come true, and with unlimited money and hormones and whatever else I had sculpted my face to be exactly as I wanted it to be.

Well, the two large, fluffy, rounded cat-like, or perhaps lion-like, ears hadn’t been part of my fantasy, nor had the change in hair colour of my long ponytail and flop of hair on the top of my head, where I didn’t keep it short with a buzzer, from boring brown to a kind of sandy colour. Although… it seemed thicker than I could remember it being – significantly so. My cupid teeth, too, seemed to be a bit longer pointier than I remembered, and my eyes had never been gold before. But still, I looked good.

Body wise, I might have been a bit slimmer, with my favourite hoodie even more baggy than usual, but nothing too majorly different; I was still small and thin, although I looked a bit more tanned than I had been, as if I’d spent the entire summer sunbathing in the park rather than studying until my brain had started to leak out of my ears. The long furry tail the same colour as my hair, and which ended in a large, slightly darker fluffy tuft, however, was new, and nearly made me jump out of my skin when I saw it swishing behind me.

With focus, I could bring it under control, which was a… novel experience. Imagine you had a third arm coming out of the base of your spine that was long enough to easily touch the ground, now imagine that it had dozens of sort-of elbows – it was something like that. The prehensile appendage could twist and coil and grasp in almost every direction. Although, me being me, I was just as clumsy with it as my other limbs.

Still, it was pretty cool, and I was still playing with it and trying to take my glasses off with it when I suddenly felt something… strange. It was difficult to really articulate in a way that made sense in terms that someone with the same sense as I now had. It was like I was feeling a colour coming up the flow of inky water, an aggressive mauve, streaked with bright green anticipation and focus. It was a bit like I’d always imagined synaesthesia might have been, musical notes that were linked to sense of colour, people giving an overwhelming sense of ‘purpleness,’ or whatever.

And it was getting closer, rapidly swimming up the channel of water. And now that I’d noticed it, homed in on the colours and identified it, I could feel colours all around me, emotions all around me. Rolling outward in all directions, extending downwards underneath me for hundreds of meters, and, although there was a very large gap with little to nothing, there were a few dozen more bursts of colour high above me. I could, if I turned my attention inward, feel colours swirling within me too: a yellowish colour that felt like fear, an inquisitive shade of green, and quite a lot of orange that felt vaguely uneasy.

Minds, I realised. Or better, emotions. That was what I was sensing. Somehow, I had been transformed into some kind of empathic lion-person?

That was… cool, I guessed? Although also very worrying. Either this was the strangest trip I had ever had, or… well, I didn’t know what else it might be. Everything felt real, and there was none of the weird dream-logic or confusion I normally felt while tripping. I felt clear minded.

I’d read stories about people waking up in different bodies, or in different places. I’d quite enjoyed them, even. But I didn’t remember climbing through a wardrobe or stepping through some kind of portal, I had been…

What had I been doing, actually? My memories of the events before coming here were all jumbled and mixed: snippets of sound, flashes of colour, the taste of copper on my tongue…

But that was all. Nothing concrete. Nothing definite. I couldn’t even remember when my last solid memory was. I knew who I was, that I was a medical student in my last year at University, that I had placement at Allgemeines Krankenhaus Wien, that I had a cat I shared with three roommates, and I was in a ‘situationship’ with a cute philosophy student who I desperately liked by who I was pretty sure was emotionally unavailable. But what I had been doing before waking up here?

Nothing.

I was pulled from my confused rumination by the incoming mind flashing with hungry crimson, and I turned to see a shape burst from the water. Large and bulbous, its bright red flesh shone in the light of the torches, reflecting off its merciless golden, side-ways slitted eyes and the dozens of glistening tentacles that shot forward towards me.

I reacted in an understandable way. I screamed and fell over, landing painfully on my rear as tentacles wrapped around my arms and legs and yanked me into the freezing water. Black terror blossomed in my mind, as dark as the cold water that gnawed and bit at my body.

Now, I wasn’t the fittest of people. Even before my new, liony body I’d more than once or twice accused of being a poster child for ‘heroine-chic.’ It wasn’t like I was unhealthy, like any good fifth year medical student I subsisted on large quantities of instant ramen and strong coffee and not enough sleep, but I probably could have exercised a bit more in the copious amount of time I had been lectures and assignments and placements. Har har.

But I feel that even if I’d become whatever the gender neutral for ‘gym-bro’ was, and scarfed protein shakes and did steroids and spent my evenings pumping iron it wouldn’t have done me much good as I struggled and screamed my lungs out.

The creature pulled me fully under, and my scream became a stream of bubbles as it dragged me into the lightless depths. Even that was cut off as another tentacle closed around my neck, and spots began to appear in my vision as the monster dragged me towards its massive, vaguely yonic maw lined with teeth.

Was this it? I thought as I was dragged towards the wickedly sharp, undulating mass of teeth. Wake up in a weird dungeon as some kind of strange lion creature, only to immediately be devoured by some kind of mega-octopus?

If this were a story, I should have been destined to go on adventures, meet friends and make enemies, overcome great and terrible foes, and depending on the age rating of said piece, seduce princes and/or princesses. Although that might have been harder, since I despised monarchs. Shouldn’t I have gotten some kind of power? Some kind of ability?

Well, I supposed that I did have an ability. I could sense emotions as colours like some kind of technicolour Dianna Troi from Star Trek. But that wasn’t going to help me here-

Hold on, if I could sense emotions, then could I affect them? Sure, it wasn’t as good as being able to teleport or bend steel or shoot lasers from my eyes might have been, but if I could make the creature even half as afraid as I felt, then it might release me.

The glimmering darkness of the firelight from the torches above me vanished as I passed into the creatures’ mouth and, very much hoping that this would work, I sort of mentally ‘reached’ for the creature’s emotions and tried to pour just a modicum of the deep, sticky terror from my heart into its.

A.N. I have been writing this story for a while but I am just putting it up on Scribblehub now. As of writing there are twenty two chapters up on my Patreon. I will be catching this story up here on Scribblehub to where it is elsewhere over the next week, and like all my original work it is released four chapters ahead on my Patreon.

I also have a finished fantasy novel that can be read on Scribblehub, Shattered Moon, and an episodic space-fantasy/horror/doctor-who-esque series, Mishka the Great and Powerful, that updates every Saturday.

Wow. Much stories. So writing.

</shameless self promotion.>