James

In the desert Dryst a young boy in ragged cloth which barely qualified as clothes laid unmoving and unconscious on the hot desert sands. With burns all over his body from both the sun's rays and the heat he had never felt before, the child was sure of his death before he collapsed.

Against all his expectations, the boy woke once more. Slowly slipping out of slumber, the boy looked around in a daze, but he couldn't understand what he saw so his mind remained in a haze. The boy found himself in a room with weird walls and an odd floor on top of something startlingly... what was this feeling he felt on his back?

Jumping to his feet, the malnourished and badly burnt boy quickly falls onto his back once more—this time with a full view of the room he is in and the thing he was on. What he saw could only be described as foreign. The floor was cold but felt different than stone and appeared to be some solid brown material with a mattern broken into multiple boards. The roof appeared to be made of the same material, yet the roof wasn't flat. The roof was triangular and appeared to be made up of boards similar to the floor but also thick beams for which he could not derive a purpose. The walls, however, looked extremely smooth and... what was that color again? Hmmm... green, was it? Well, it's not like colors are all that important anyways—there's only four or five of them in total.

What shocked the boy most was what he had previously rested upon. It felt like it was slowly absorbing him as he laid on it and he wasn't sure he'd be able to get out of that monster's grasp if he stayed a moment longer. The boy thought that this structure must have been made up of the corpses of other similar creatures since the legs and wings of the creature appeared to be made of the same material. How would those wings work? I don't think wings with that many rectangular holes in them would be able to lift anything off the ground regardless of how hard the wings were flapped. Besides, if that brown stuff is the same as the floor and the roof and the walls, the wings would be rigid and unable to flap, right?

Anyways, the boy was scared in an unknown place with a creature he had never encountered before right in front of him. If he wasn't already on the brink of death, the kid might've stayed to try to fight the creature.

Since he was on the brink of death, the boy tried to crawl his way to the door. Just as the boy was standing to grab the doorknob, the door opened outward and, because his outstretched hand grabbed only air when the boy thought he was about to grab a stable object with which to help himself stand, the boy fell face-first into the creature in front of him.

"PLEASE DON'T EAT ME!"

"Why would anyone eat someone like you? You're all skin an' bones!"

"B-but, the, the monster..."

"What monster? You're just pointing at a bed."

"Yes! That! The bed! Sir, it tried to eat me!"

"What?"

"It tried to eat me. Please kill it."

"Uh, sonny, you do know what a bed is, right?"

"Yes, it's a monster that absorbs its prey through that white organ on top, makes shelter out of the legs and wings of its kinsmen, and uses magic to create a light film around its wings so it can fly, and it's currently asleep and vulnerable!"

"Kiddo, you can't come to conclusions on purely haiperthetical reasonin' an' circumstanshial evidance."

"If this "bed" is not a monster, then how can you explain it trying to eat me?"

"It wasn't trying to eat ya. It's a bed. A bed is a comfortable thing ya use for sleepin'!"

"Could you speak more properly, please? I find it hard to understand you. Also, what does comfortable mean?"

"Whaddaya mean wha' does comfortable mean? It means comfortable, yeah?"

"Defining a term with any form of the term itself is pointless and helps no one."

"Staph talkin' like that. You're younger than me by far, ya shouldn't be talkin' like a professoar!"

"Sir, do you or that creature mean me any harm?"

"No? An' how could a bed mean harm when it don't have feelings?"

"I have found that it is far easier to mean harm once feelings are obsolete."

"Jeez kiddo, that's dark... do ya... have a family?"

"My family? Oh, are you referring to the Wandering Warlocks? Their pursuers finally fooled them by utilizing a non-magical trap and an antimagic field. By the time they realized their folly, they knew they could only sent a single person away with their powers and knowledge combined: The second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth would convert all of their stamina to mana at once to overload the antimagic artifact while the first used spatial magic. They... they... hHh... hh... snNNN..."

After the boy finished speaking he began to whimper softly without tears as no matter how much the child wanted to cry, he didn't have enough water in his body to do so. Seeing this, the old man finally let go of his forced smile...

...and the dagger he held in his pocket.