The big thing about folks on the ‘autism spectrum’ is that normal folks have a system that lets them ‘space out’ their emotions and sensations over time, while we get the full impact of everything all at once. High function or ‘borderline’ cases like me, can build coping strategies at an early age. The biggest one, of course, is the ability to create a ‘zone’, or a wall. Because our feelings are not spaced out, we have to stop them in a hurry, but on the plus side, they tend to fade pretty quickly if we can keep going despite them.

I did not want to talk to that new voice in my head, because I was hanging onto my wall by a thread, and talking to her would make it real. That and the fact that apparently, I was dead was making inside me go a little bit crazy. I wasn’t afraid, because that fear was locked down hard, but the voice was not comforting like when Kozmina had appeared in my dream, and because of my dreamlike state I had never really gotten the opportunity to be afraid of her or even question her presence. I didn’t know which would be worse… Either the voice was created by my mind, which meant I was going crazy, or it was talking telepathically in my waking mind, which might be really crazy.

And now, just to make things even worse, there was a whole tribe of angry, smelly leprechauns hunting for me. I was looking for a place to spend the morning and deal with my hitch-hiker, maybe try and make sense of it and handle my disquiet, and had already set up a beautiful woven basket in the stream I was still following, looking for a fjord or something.

The cave had been a bad idea. Obviously, a conveniently located cave on the side of a small hill surrounded by concealing rocks was the perfect place to hide. For me, for an animal, or for two dozen little bastards screaming in a language that was similar to low kobold. Not the same, but close enough that I could understand two of them discussing whether or not it was better to roast me or just bite off strips. Apparently, they were fans of lizard meat, but would rather go raid the humans again because babies tasted better if I were not so conveniently close by.

I suppose kobolds were the local equivalent of a rabbit. We liked making caves, but when we were out in the world we were a potato chip to the local predators. More or less everything’s prey. Sure, we could defend ourselves in groups, but individually we were little more than a snack. I knew this, because the little green monsters could apparently recognize my smell, and started excitedly screaming about foodlizard. Being at the bottom of the food chain sucked, and like an idiot, I had gotten lazy and overconfident.

The nasty little creatures were wearing poorly tanned hides similar to mine, and their heads were enormous in comparison to their little humanoid bodies. Those heads were mostly teeth, and their mouths were gigantic… a fact I noticed because they kept screaming to each other while they hunted after me.

They had smelled me when I entered the cave, and I heard a loud, gleeful shrieking of dozens of voices at the same time that I noticed that the INSIDE of the cave had evidence of habitation that the outside carefully lacked. Namely piles of detritus and animal skins, and a clump of what looked like some kind of spears stacked halfway concealed by a large rock.

My first response was to take off running, and fortunately, they didn’t seem to be scent trackers like the bane wolf, even if they had noses keen enough to detect me from the inflow of air through the cave’s entrance.

Right now, I was huddled in the tossed dirt where a storm-struck tree had fallen over, the dirty roots overhead providing cover while I was half-covered in mud and hiding from the tribe. They were around my size, but there were a lot more of them than there were of me. I was confident that one on one I could probably take them, but two dozen on one was odds I wouldn’t take even if I had a firearm handy. Not from close range.

I wriggled a little, covering myself with more mud. That should do a pretty good job of disguising my smell, as well as the mixture of greens and browns of my scales and the muck and untanned hide covering me, should help to make me more difficult to detect. They seemed to be nearly as good in the darkness as I was, so I had to assume that if I could see them, they could see me.

One of the creatures farther away exclaimed in surprise and glee, trotting up the trail from the river carrying my trap with a single glistening trout inside. Dammit, that was my breakfast! Another, slightly larger creature wearing more leather grabbed it away from him to his displeasure, smashed the trap on the ground even though this version was capable of being opened and recycled, and swallowed the giant fish whole.

Bastard. Rude and wasteful. Maybe if I thinned them out a little they would give up on looking for me. If I didn’t, sooner or later one of them would spot me and yell and I’d be facing ALL of them. A few of the creatures had mouths possibly large enough to swallow my entire head.

I wiggled out from under the tree a little, still lying in the mud, and watched carefully as the one who snagged my trap and had it subsequently stolen drifted closer in his search. He seemed to have slightly better senses than the rest, as evidenced by his ability to find my well-hidden trap, and so he would be a priority target. Always take out the guy with the binoculars first on a quiet hunt.

If the other kobold bodies I had seen were any indication, my eyes were a huge and very visible giveaway. They were vibrant and huge, and could probably be spotted from a great distance. As a result, I had them lidded so that I could barely make out my surroundings, but the little creature’s feet were still visible as he walked past above me.

Being especially careful of that tail, I slipped up the slope of my hole after him, looking around to see if any other green-skinned whatever was looking in this direction. Not spotting any, I matched my footfalls to his own, and quietly stepped up behind him.

Under the circumstances, it was probably worth the fatigue. I had no silent weapons and very little time in which to act, so I lifted my hand and slipped into the zone.

He seemed to stop moving, and I slowly moved my hand towards him. Something must have alerted him, and he started to turn his head in my direction as my hand ever so slowly moved. I almost gently wrapped my claws around the front of his throat, beneath the giant maw that was starting to open, and then dropped out of the zone as I closed my hand and yanked backward toward myself.

Blood spurted sideways, and I spun, getting my tail into the action. He barely made any noise as I took away his larynx with my clawtips, and he was so startled that the tail slapped him sideways and into the hole. He tried to cry out, but he couldn’t make any noises and just managed to slap the mud a few times before he slumped and died. Cannibal bastard. Maybe he wasn’t the same species as me, but we both talked. Eating things that can talk is pure evil, evil I felt no guilt about ending.

Some noise had happened, but it wasn’t much louder than the entirely non-stealthy stampings of big green feet on the ground, and I slipped back into my hole with its new company, quickly rolling the thing over in the mud and pushing it back to bury it in the muck under the lower half of the roots. One down, twenty-some left to go.

Now, if I were a really stupid green hobbit with a dental problem, where would I ASSUME my prey would hide? Other than under a big fallen tree, of course. I would assume that I was working my way outwards, to run away, or towards the stream because I could swim well. Assuming that these gremlins or goblins or whatever knew what kobolds were, a pretty firm assumption based on the way they were describing how I’d taste and who gets the tail, they had to know that I could swim well.

So their searching should be heading outwards, around the camp. So where should I go right now? Inwards, towards their cave. Most of their searchers had already left the near vicinity, and this group looked more like a raiding party, rather than a settlement. No females that I could see, although I was not sure if I could tell the difference between males and females.

I snuck back towards the cave, and noted that there was no yelling or screaming the closer I got. The idea that this was a raiding group became stronger as I snuck into the cave, and realized it was empty. Okay, a very stupid raiding party that doesn’t understand how to leave a simple guard in case their prey doubled back like I just did.

I quickly raided their belongings, scoring two poorly tanned hides and a pile of some sort of string, as well as a weird human-sized pouch that looked almost big enough for me to use as a day pack, that only contained a small rag doll and a ball of orange-dyed yarn.

I inspected the spears, but they were absolutely the worst of shoddy workmanship. They were probably mostly used as javelins because they would break the first time they hit anything, and their fire-hardened tips were more like charred and scraped against a rock until they resembled a charcoal point.

I found three smaller rabbit skins and a nest. Hides and nasty piles of vegetation and a reek that would haunt me for a while discouraged both further exploration or taking trophies. That and a conviction that just trying to use their bedding would reward me with several kinds of infestation and probably a major disease.

I snuck back out, with my treasure rolled under my arm, tucked into my new satchel, and proudly clutched in my hand. Sure, Bear Grylls would probably consider swiping raw materials to be cheating, but he generally had a wrecked airplane or something to work with. I slid out of the cave and back towards my hole.

Suddenly, I felt a wrenching pain in my left leg. I dropped almost instantly into my zone and realized that there was another one of those bane wolf things. This one had decided to be quiet, and its face was still in one piece, but it must have been a pet because it had a nasty little leather collar with a bronze ring attached. It had gotten a good bite on my left thigh without my even detecting it, and now I was stuck.

I couldn’t tell if it was a better biter or a grab and hold, but considering its sleek, if diseased appearance, I had to assume it would try to get a better or more deadly grasp if I gave it the chance. Right now, it was chewing over some of the strongest of my scales on the calf, and its teeth hadn’t penetrated very deep, but the blood flowing down my leg assured me that I would need to do something about the wound, especially if the creature was as foul as it looked.

The problem with a creature like that is, it is not used to fighting other creatures that have training in close-in fighting. Sure, it is dangerous to a creature of my size, but have you ever seen what someone who knows a bit of the arts can do to some numbskull that goes for the low grab?

I spun in its teeth, accepting a worse gouge on my thigh, and then dropped a hammer, a full-strength, full-weight downwards heel kick with the other leg, bent knee, with a rapidly straightening knee that drove its head down my leg, dragging those tooth gashes downwards, but also breaking the fool animal’s neck between my heel and the ground.

God that hurt. Hurt or not though, I needed to cover my tracks. I started dragging, with a limp, the creature towards the stump and pitched it in beside the goblin. Oddly enough my leg had stopped bleeding already, although the wounds were savage, and that fact worried me more… bleeding helps clean out infections, and the monster was a walking infection.

I had an idea and ducked down into the hole again, trying to keep my leg clear of the mud. It took several minutes, but I managed to get both the bodies out of the hole. They were heavy, but the creatures were still looking for me, and possibly even following my path to get here, and I managed to drag both of them into the water.

Wading with the things was difficult but much easier than trying to drag both of the bodies over open ground. I imagined that they were actually probably pretty light, but between my size and the fact that I was also trying to hold two rolled pelts under my arm, it felt like a true achievement getting to the water. Yes, everything was now soaked, but survival had a higher priority than dry right now. Both of the bodies were light enough to float, so I started using them as a makeshift support and slowly kicked my way across the stream.

About halfway across I felt a jerk, and the Wolf was no longer part of the supports, something had bit most of it cleanly off below the leg where I was holding it. I kicked into emergency swim speed, my fatigue building hugely, as I finally managed to push to the other side of the stream from where I started.

I dived sideways as I felt a hint of water pressure coming up beneath me, as well as a deep shadow under my swimming form, and I let go of the leg. A gigantic form, nearly as big as I am, broke the water with clashing teeth. The snout was long and much thinner than a crocodile, and the razor-sharp teeth on its edge made it clear what had happened to the bane wolf’s body I had been using for a makeshift flotation device.

With another burst of speed, I realized that between my swift swimming and the stream’s current, I could see mud beneath me. I put down my feet when it got shallow enough, digging my toes into the muck to help move me along, and finally crawled out of the water, dragging the one corpse I had left along behind me exhaustedly.

I had made it across mostly intact! The bane wolf hadn’t, and the goblin thing corpse, now washed clean by the water, had lost a foot as well, but I was alive and in one piece! I had an idea, but it was going to be… kind of gross, and hopefully, the little green monsters couldn’t make it across the stream here… I had drifted several miles downstream while trying to cross with the bodies.

Okay. The things had screamed about raiding a nearby human settlement and bragged about eating babies. Humans don’t generally appreciate monsters eating their babies, so if I could bring the whereabouts of the goblins and some kind of proof that they were my enemy as well, maybe it could be sort of an enemy of my enemy is my friend type of situation.

The gremlin’s corpse would be pretty good proof, but dragging it across potentially miles of woodland, leaving a trail even a child could follow, would likely prove to be an unfortunate choice. I inspected the thing thoughtfully and finally got to work with my knife.

I had cleaned the clothing off the creature, soaked from the river, and now I was the proud possessor of a juicy little green monster’s head, a wet, crappy hide chest piece, some badly sewn but well-woven clothing, a shoddy bone knife, and a small bag that had previously contained the dried skull of some kind of large bird. My reeds were gone, but I had seen several patches on both sides of the creek I was following, and back towards the main river seemed the most likely place to find a human settlement, so I should be able to replace them and the trap before the sun came up.

Yes, I was going to go hungry tonight, but it was warm enough and didn’t look like rain. Given enough time and a somewhat secure place, I should be able to get everything dry. I slipped down the stream with my burdens and tucked the head into the bag before tying it by its pulls to my satchel.

Eventually, I found another patch of reeds, taking advantage of the rising moonlight to cut several nicely sized ones. I moved away from the stream and was very glad not to encounter any monsters before finding a nice little patch of blackberries, only this time the bushes were picked clean.

That didn’t bother me any, so I spread the large skins over the thorny brambles to dry, wiggled underneath and through the branches to the middle of the bush, and then spread the rest of my new loot around me among the thorn branches to dry as well. I needed to go into my zone. I didn’t want to, but the wounds in my leg seemed to be healing at an abnormally fast rate, and I needed to figure out what the voice was.

I braced one foot against the ground, the other on a vine between two large thorns, sat on my tail in the modified horse stance that seemed to work best for meditating in this form, and dove deeply into my zone.