《Dungeonborn - Double Down》The Fool
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I wake up in blackness, my limbs are numb, my chest is still, even the soft sounds of blood in my ears is gone. Blood? Why would I have blood? What is blood? Can you eat it? Sounds I never realized I listened to, deafening in their sudden absence. What sounds? I can't remember what they are, but I know they aren't here anymore. I try to turn something, try to open something else so some other something can look at the world, but I don't have any of those things. I know what to do and how to do it but I know I don't have any of the necessary parts, nor do I remember ever having them. I must have had them though... why else would I know?
Conflicting thoughts clash in my... come to think of it I don't have one of those either. The thinker bits where thoughts normally go, what was it called? My thoughts are somewhere on account of I am thinking them, or they are thinking themselves, or some combination of the two. There is one thing which I am sure of. I am absolutely, indescribably famished. If I had one of those things where food goes it would be gnawing on that other thing that keeps top halves of living things from wandering off their bottom halves. I'm pretty sure all of those things are important, not as important as the thinking bit, but still something I wish I had. Maybe that's why I'm so hungry? First order of business then is to find all of my bits.
Actually no, first order of business is to figure out how to see things. Have to get that figured before I can find anything. Hard to think when I'm so hungry though. As I contemplate my new existence the first thing I've ever seen becomes visible. A tiny speck of white-blue light drifts past my viewpoint. Absently I snag it and shove it into myself, thereby learning three things in quick succession. The first is that I'm not blind, it is simply very dark where I am. The second is that other things are around and I can touch them. The last is that I have a something to touch and put those things in. All very exciting developments in my short life opening a world of new possibilities. The speck I snagged doesn't do much to fill the gaping emptiness in my center but as it settles in my gullet my perception of the world expands every so slightly.
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Two more specks are visible now and I snatch them both without a second thought. Once again my reach increases, and far more specks become visible. The cycle rapidly increases in volume and speed, for each speck I absorb the amount of specks I can grab at once increases. I shovel them greedily into myself until my view becomes too wide and the specks become a faint glow, too small to make out each particle. The glow coming from me starts to pull at the surrounding glow until I don't have to grab at it anymore to keep it flowing into me, though I continue grabbing at it as I am still very hungry.
Now that consuming glow stuff no longer requires my immediate attention I am able to see a number of new things. This brown scratchy stuff is sand, and that hard gray thing is a rock. I am clearly very clever and I know a lot about the world, I'm doing fantastic for only being alive for however long I've been alive. I don't have anything else to compare myself too but I'm going to assume I'm above average. My view swivels around the vast cavern in which my body resides. Over there we have sand and rocks, on this side it's sand and rocks, and of course below me is rocks and sand. Wow, the world has three things in it and I already know all of them, this is great. I notice that some of the rocks are more brown and some of them are more gray, this is exciting because it means there might in fact be at least four things in the world, the possibilities are endless.
By this point I begin to notice light, which is how I am able to see the sand and rocks, is coming from somewhere behind me. No amount of swiveling my view allows me to find this mysterious light so I realize the light is coming from me. The light is a very pale yellow color and illuminates the world around me, increasing in brightness slowly as the specks continue to flow into me. I begin to become aware of the materials touching my surface, and that I have a surface. The light coming from my body seems to change something about the things it touches and then flows through those things to touch other things which are touching the first things. Behind the sand and rocks I find more sand and rocks which I can't see because of all the sand in the way.
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Well that's frustrating, I'm discovering all this new stuff I didn't know about but I can't see it with all the old stuff here. I wish the sand would move out of the way so I could see the other sand. To my immense surprise the sandy wall in front of my view draws apart, leaving a hollow space with even more visible sand. Some of my hoarded light vanishes and a painful pang of hunger passes through my body. The new sand hollow is incredibly huge, far bigger than the space I was in before. Even though it hurt to give up my precious light specks this new world of sand is far too exciting to stop now. I think at all the sand and rocks under my control and send it outward, the walls and floor of my first home shoot away at incredible speed, dropping my body to the sandy floor far below. I (silently) scream in terror at the unexpected motion as my viewpoint spins, falling through vast space. Coming to a rest in the soft sand at the bottom of my domain I find I can still feel all the sand and rocks I touched before and the new walls I made by pushing it all apart. I also find that the space isn't empty, it has something in it that is different from sand and rock which is air, but no amount of wishing gets it to do anything interesting. Once more I make an exciting discovery about the world, I am a brave explorer indeed.
My sense of the world continue to expand around me as light cycles in and out of my body. Underneath the sand I find dirt, and in that dirt, water, and as I explore the exciting uses of water and dirt I meet something strange. There is a massive wall of light in the dirt under me. It's so bright and so full of specks I can hardly believe I couldn't see it from where I was before. No matter how I grab at it the light refuses to come to me, stubbornly sticking together and rudely moving past me without stopping for a chat. I think for a moment that this might be what I am, but it isn't giving off the weird un-light stuff that I am using to change the dirt and sand. Light specks that aren't inside me are food, so that thing is just big food. My poor starving self quivers at the thought of big food, the specks of light are far too small to satisfy me.
I push out my senses around the sides of the light wall, eventually finding a massive light cylinder, or perhaps tube, it is very long and moving very quickly. I'm lucky that it has only just started moving past me when I first saw it or it might have gotten away before I saw it, even though it is so ridiculously long that it will take a long time for it to go by. Grabbing rocks in the surrounding soil I push them together on either side of the light thing and push all the dirt away from it. The huge light creature wiggles in my stony grip but can't pull free. It takes a great deal of effort but I valiantly squeeze the stones into the creature until it breaks apart, releasing a flood of delicious specks. I gather more stones and keep squashing the bits of it that try to wriggle away after it breaks in my grip. As the light creatures suddenly breaks apart completely and floods into my center information crashes into my mind.
Earthworm. That was an earthworm, and I killed it and took its' lights. Earthworms are very small. I consider whether it was a very large earthworm, but the lights wouldn't lie to me so I must instead be a great deal smaller than I thought. I nearly choke with excitement as the worms' light compounds my vision and I see a dozen more of the delicious snacks in the dirt near me. I deal with them the same as the first and find myself full to bursting with light. This feeling of uncomfortable fullness overcomes me and I feel my awareness of the world slip away into the comfortable blackness of dreamless sleep.
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