I felt myself in my body again, mostly. My knee and hip did not hurt, but my lower back definitely did. My eyelids slowly scraped open, and for a moment I was utterly dazzled… more information than I expected, my peripheral vision was far wider than I was used to, but everything was blurry.

I could feel something squishy underneath me, gooey and crumbly at the same time, and my lower back still hurt… as did my left arm. I couldn’t move around much, but the third thing I noticed was the absolute STENCH of this place. It smelled like the worst sort of fetid slaughterhouse filled with rotten meat mixed with fecal matter I could imagine, and I finally got off my butt to roll slightly and vomit.

Right onto the pile of rotting bodies, I was laying on top of. I couldn’t tell what they were, but there had to be dozens of them, and I quickly rolled even farther, hit by arms and legs and other unidentifiable bits, as well as rolling another body off of where it was lying on top of me. I rolled again, releasing the pain in my lower back, and then was suddenly falling.

I must have only fallen a foot or less because I suddenly splashed into a disgusting ooze underneath me which TWITCHED. I felt a burning in my arm where I had splashed and got to my feet with a speed I probably hadn’t had since I was a kid, scooting back until I crunched up against a ledge behind my back.

In front of there was a pile of bodies. The color was slightly washed out, but they seemed to be green, and lizardlike, and at the bottom, in the same shallow trench with a few inches of fetid water where I was standing, there was a glistening pile of… something, wiggling slightly as it curled it’s way up the bodies. Beneath it was bones, and it seemed to be slowly EATING the pile, like that creature from ‘the Blob’.

I held up my arm and looked at it where I had rolled on the...thing, and the scales were slightly damaged from whatever acid it was emitting to dissolve the bodies. The sharp claws at the tips of my 3 fingers recoiled as I inspected the damage, and I nearly panicked as I realized. Scales. Claws. Blue. Crap.

I dropped into the zone sheerly out of a stress response, and everything seemed to slow down, almost to a stop. I was standing in a shallow stream of disgusting water that looked like an old sewage line had burst. There was a pile of dead… things in front of me, maybe I was one of those dead things? I had scales and claws.

I hurt. I had a tail, just like those lizard things, and that was probably bent out of whack from the way I was laying. One arm was partially burned by that slime thing. The other one hurt and looked like it had a half-healed break. Maybe I was actually alive? Why was I in a pile of bodies? The body that had been lying atop me was the freshest, and looked like its skull had been split… maybe on impact? Maybe I was supposed to die when I hit the bottom, but I hadn’t, and now I was here?

I was in the middle of a foul path, red-lit walls illuminating messy stonework covered in many places with nasty-looking patches of moss. There was the… slime thing, and a short distance away barely-visible chittering things, reacting to my movements, fled.

The odor of various foulness that was spilled into the sewer was obvious, but far more tolerable than I expect I would have found it in my natural form. I knew that there was no light down here, but somehow I could still see reddish masses of the tunnel walls, and the thin, ichor-spattered path on both sides of a nearly six-foot-wide river of foulness.

I was hungry and thirsty, but it was best not to even think about consuming anything in the stench and unsanitary conditions. That and the aching from my bruised and possibly broken ribs competed successfully with any concept of filling my belly, although some of the rodentlike creatures occasionally scampering away in terror at my appearance started to look like a potential food source.

I dropped into and out of the zone and was reminded again of how much my arms hurt. There was a bit of a pain-blocking to being in the zone, and I sort of ‘thought’ the pain away… Do you know how you can just think about pain for a while, intellectualize it until eventually, it feels like something apart from you, an interesting sensation that doesn’t really have anything to do with you? Okay, maybe that’s just something people like me do. And pregnant women, I remember hearing a story about how some Lamaze teachers taught expectant mothers how to do it instead of an epidural. I hoped it worked for them. I know it worked for me.

I checked myself over carefully. I was very humanoid, fairly normal proportion of limbs, but my legs were weird. My three toes, topped with stubby claws, and a fourth toe that pointed backward, as well as an ‘ankle’ that seemed to be about where a knee should be, as well as tiny little thighs and actual knees up near my belly. I think the term for it was ‘digitigrade’ as opposed to the ‘plantigrade’ that normal style feet would have. Not completely quadrupedal, though, since clearly I was supposed to walk upright, with a heavy, long tail behind me for balance. More of a humanoid belly and ribcage, in decent shape, with just a hint of a potbelly. Someone had been eating well, but not recently, it seemed.

Most of me was covered in sort of blue skin, but the fronts of my long ankled calves, my knees, the tops of my feet, and the backs of my hands and forearms had scales. I was naked, not even a bracelet, but I was still male… although everything seemed to be tucked away differently. It didn’t matter that much, since I was a monster, but it was nice to still be male.

I was definitely some sort of lizardman, but when I lifted my hands I realized that past my blunted snout I had a crest of white feathers? I saw feathers on a lot of the other bodies as well and realized that this seemed to be normal for the species, feather patches on the head and down the nack, down the back, and on the backs of the elbows looked normal.

My eyes were much larger and farther apart than usual. Heck, they covered a good third of my face! And I had a short little almost-snout, more like a fennec than a lizard. I had forechoppers, enlarged canines apparently for attacking, and molars so I was clearly some kind of omnivore. Good to know. My head was almost a broad triangle, with the tip of my snout and two little nostrils on either side being the point, and a pair of long, sharp ears as the upper points. I had a small stubby pair of horns as well, above my eyeridges, and my eyes were set far enough to the sides of my head that I had a huge peripheral vision, but directly to the front things got a little blurry… Not invisible, like if they were set fully to the sides, but not my best angle for vision.

But there were no bandages here. Just a pile of rotting bodies and a slime. The slime itself didn’t react to my presence, so I crept a little closer, noting the bones that it left behind as it dissolved the bodies slowly. The translucent jelly seemed to notice and start to flow towards me when I got closer than a foot or two but ignored me when I moved back again.

It moved quite slowly and didn’t appear to have any eyes or other sensory apparatus. Maybe it detected heat? I should not be in any real danger unless I fell asleep near it and didn’t notice when it started to dissolve me, but for right now it seemed content just to feed on the pile of decaying forms.

Based on the stink and the decay, the bodies at the bottom of the pile had been here for at least three days. I was not particularly proud of the fact that I could guess how long a body had been dead, another legacy of my time in, but despite the cold damp, the bodies themselves were stacked into a sort of runoff leading to the trench in the middle of the passage. Apparently whatever fell from the hole in the roof was supposed to land in the trench and flow into the disgusting stream in the middle, but the pile of corruption was seriously overloading the system. Maybe the slime was one of the ways that such things were cleaned out of this sewer?

I knew that in New York bodies regularly clogged the sewer systems, and corpse removal was practically a full-time job for some sewer workers. If you didn’t care about your citizens, a monster like that that… ate bodies would save a lot of effort on the part of whoever ran this place. So again I was left with the question of whether this was a sewer or some kind of dungeon it was convenient to dump lizardman corpses into. From a coldly logical viewpoint, either would be a convenient place to dispose of bodies.

I couldn’t stay here. I had no clothes or weapons, except maybe my claws, no food, and I wasn’t going to start dining on the rotting forms of my own technical species, and the slime didn’t look edible… and I wouldn’t eat anything from a place that smelled like this anyway, I’d be dead of disease in less than a day. Starving was better.

I speculated on the pile of bones left behind by the slime as it digested, and then leaned forward and snatched a relatively decent-sized femur from the pile the monster left behind before it could react to my presence. It was nasty, slimy, and still sort of wet, but it gave me almost an extra foot of reach and would do for a sort-of club until I could find something better.

Looking at my surroundings better, the tunnel stretched off ahead of me, past the pile of bodies and the slime, while behind me it also stretched out. The weird part was that I could see a fair distance before visibility shut off abruptly, despite the lack of anything resembling lights. Maybe I had some kind of dark vision that had a range? Past about 50 feet or so the tunnels just...darkened. Everything was washed-out and kind of reddish, but I could still see colors, sort of… unless the reds I saw were some sort of artifact of this vision rather than actual colors? The blood liberally spattered over everything was a dark reddish-purple, and I could see the decaying bodies more clearly than the walls, while the water-sewage appeared much darker. Maybe my eyesight was higher into the infrared and I was seeing heat as light?

I turned around, disliking turning my back on that corpse-eating sludge, but I wasn’t getting around both it and the bodies, and based on the way it moved, my makeshift club or claws wouldn’t do anything other than getting bits of me hurt if I tried to smash or scratch at it. It had a VERY acidic surface, and my arm still stung where I had landed on it for only a few moments.

The tunnels were quite spacious, nearly three times my height, and the slimy stone blocks making up the tunnel seemed to be nearly the same dimensions as each other, and a uniform reddish-gray color, almost like they were manufactured out of concrete before they were placed. Every twenty paces or so there was an arch of the same red-gray stone, made smoothly out of one whole piece, reinforcing the arched tunnel, and the trench down the middle was waist-deep with a few inches of slowing foulness going down the center. The elevated paths on either side were comfortably wide, I could probably sit down against the wall without my feet poking over the edge of the ledge, and the entire tunnel was probably three times my height.

Here and there some of the bricks were damaged, and one of the arches had broken partway through, exposing a trickling line of mud from between two displaced bricks in the wall behind it. The rock of the arch had not broken cleanly along any sort of geological lines, lending more credence to the idea that the stonework in here was not natural stone. It wasn’t concrete either, since it was uniform and didn’t seem to contain any sand or pebbles for reinforcement, it was almost like it was completely poured cement but poured cement would not possibly be strong enough to create a tunnel like this without some kind of strengthening agent. Was it some kind of technology or magic that had created this place?

I was moving through the sewer dungeon place as quietly as I could which, I found with my broad feet, was pretty quiet. The disgustingness squelched between my bare toes, but I would have to deal with it, as I didn’t see a pair of Reeboks anywhere nearby. The bottoms of my feet were thick and scaly, though, and I didn’t feel the coolness through them nearly as much as I would expect from bare feet.

The tunnel I was in finally opened up into a slightly larger area, where it looked like the sewage was mixed with a stream of relatively-clean water descended from a masonwork ramp in a short waterfall under which the path passed. The room was more spacious than the tunnels had been, but clearly, the water was added to the goo to keep the mess flowing towards whatever eventual destination it was flowing towards.

I snuck around the edge of the room, staying on the path until I could finally reach the clear water flowing from above. Reaching out my hand, I tentatively washed it off and cupped a handful of water, drawing it back and sniffing it carefully, and it smelled a little like city, and horses that probably drank from it before it wound up down here. I knew what horses smelled like, but had never smelled that odor as clearly as I did off this water

Well, if the water was good enough to keep horses healthy, it was likely good enough for me... I took a careful sip and then held out my cupped, now-clean hands to pull back more of the refreshing liquid.

After drinking my fill, leaned over to clean myself off as much as possible, especially my wide, clawed, unshod feet that had been pushing me through obstacles I didn’t even want to think about down here. Luckily the soles of my feet seemed to be quite a bit tougher than human feet, so I didn’t notice any cuts or cracks that could lead to an infection.

Basics taken care of, I curled up under the overhang channeling the waterfall and relaxed my disciplined semi-zone state to allow myself a good, long panic. Well, at least I wasn’t cold, despite the dark stone sewers and misty spray from the falling water, I still felt comfortably warm. Maybe, despite the lizardlike look, I was still warm-blooded? That should help.

My mind felt... Odd. Like there was something I should be remembering, but right now I simply could not. Getting into the zone was difficult when I was not stressed, but not impossible, and I was reasonably unstressed right now. I had a couple of big problems, but maybe I should focus on the small ones first.

Humans could last for a couple of weeks without food, but who knows how long I could last? I needed food, I needed an ally, and I needed to figure out how the heck to get out of here, the sewer, the dungeon, or this world.

Usually, when I went into the zone, I did it to come up with an optimal solution instantly. This time, though, I did it to try and brainstorm. I always think more clearly when I am in the zone, so I kinda let my mind roam free.

When I was growing up, I had had dozens of diagnoses for what was supposedly ‘wrong’ with me. School was boring because the teachers were barely able to keep ahead of their students. Sure, I was a little smarter than average, but that didn’t excuse teachers for being stupid. I never had to study, because just looking at some sort of a test made it obvious what answers were expected, and even the textbooks handed out at the beginning of each class (which I always did within a few days of receiving them) usually revealed tons of errors or ‘facts’ that two minutes on gobaby could show were obsolete before the book was ever printed.

I visited my relatives out in the Appalachian Mountains half of every year since I was 6, and learned to shoot, fight, build a fire, clean and cook wild animals, and survive in the outdoors before I turned 10.

Training that served me in great stead in the military. The only place where I had truly felt at home since I left home at 17. I could survive almost anything if I put my mind to it, I was as at home naked in the woods as I would be naked at home in my own bathroom…

If I were in the damned woods. Instead of in a sewer or dungeon God only knows where.