“What the fuuuuUUUuuuUUUUUUUcK!?” Vaile yelled as everything around where he was fell away and he found himself tumbling end over end through a reality fit more for a bad acid trip than anything else. He was flung about in this wacky realm, going this way and that with seemingly no rhyme or reason behind the sensations he was feeling.

Eventually, though, this nasty time passed, as all things inevitably do. Vaile was flung towards a kaleidoscope of geometric symbols and rapidly shifting colors that would easily be enough to trigger an epileptic seizure before a hole appeared in his path and he found himself tossed out onto the surface of good old terra firma.

He honestly expected that he would have hit the ground with a bit more force than he had, as he had landed in such a way that was more akin to having one’s shirt collar and the seat of one’s pants grabbed and used as handles for throwing one out a door. As if he had been merely kicked out of a bar in an old cartoon, he landed with his back and legs forming a triangle as his face and chin (along with the upper part of his arms and the front part of his lower legs) slowed his slide across the surface to a standstill in moments.

He blinked a few times as he processed exactly what had happened before slowly standing up and dusting himself off.

“Well!” he said as he patted a bit of dirt off of his clothes, “That was something!”

He looked back the way he had come, but as he suspected would be the case, the hole leading to that bad acid trip of a ‘gateway’ realm was gone, as if it never had existed in the first place. With his method getting back from whence he had come gone, he turned his attention to more pressing matters, of which included finding out where the hell he was.

He took a few moments to study the lay of the land and reviewed the obvious signs of something being relatively nearby aloud as a way to further drive those features into his mind. This was a useful strategy, as the mind does tend to forget things rather easily and can fail to make meaningful connections in times of stress when no verbal cues are used beforehand and during that time of stress to anchor certain facts into a person’s memory.

“Tribal totems made of scrap materials and dangling scaled leather… No, not merely scaled leather, that is shed skin… Next up we have some rather pathetic traps that only a total n00b would fall for, along with a few letters and other symbols in the Draconic language… Finally, over there,” Vaile said as he focused his attention in one direction while not looking that way, “are a few kobolds that can’t decide what to do with the person who they have in their sights.”

Vaile reached into his Inventory and pulled out something he was initially surprised that he still had. Against higher leveled foes, it would be utterly useless, but given that the kobolds around him were in the high teens in terms of levels, he didn’t feel like he needed to worry about this not working.

A small gray ball fit neatly into Vaile’s hand, and with a simple swing of that hand towards the ground, the ball flew and hit said ground and produced an obscuring cloud of smoke and dust. While it did make that area a target, it also applied a low-leveled ‘Stealth’ buff to the person who used it, and as such Vaile was, to the kobolds, at least, utterly invisible even after he stepped out of the small, gray cloud that was fading rather quickly.

While he could have certainly initiated first contact and likely started some series of events that would no doubt have led to some influential and possibly powerful female kobold trying to woo him, Vaile was fed up with that whole song and dance. Rather than stick around or spook the little guys, he chose to make tracks and see if he could find somewhere, anywhere that he would be able to stay for a time without running into a person who wanted him in their bed.

And no, that did not just include the female gender, either. He was straighter than most would have believed, but despite that, he was damn sure that eventually some guy would try and either make him their top or, possibly, force him to be their bottom.

And, while he certainly ‘appreciated’ that some would have that sentiment, he wasn’t interested in any of that, either from girls, boys, or all the other incalculable numbers of possible and impossible gender and sexual preference combinations. Besides, he already had enough crazy people wanting his meat to deal with. He really, really didn’t need any more.

…

“Hmph.”

A deep rumbling flooded an ancient carved-out cavern with a deafening sound that billowed out and erupted forth from the depths like a pressure wave from a multi-ton thermobaric bomb. The living creatures nearby and even those for at least a few miles down the numerous wide and tall tunnels all popped as if they were overfilled water balloons as the grumble washed over them, its sheer pressure doing to their bodies what happens to a person’s ears as they climb towards the sky in an airplane, but to a much more potent and violent degree.

Obscured from sight despite issuing that huff, a pair of massive reptilian lips curled upwards at their edges to eventually reveal teeth large enough to dwarf three or even four fully grown humans standing on each other’s shoulders. This smile would have allowed the incalculable pieces of gold, silver, and other treasures piled around its bearer’s body to pour in and touch the massive entity’s teeth, but the lips had done more than merely keep those teeth from touching the mountain of treasure that their owner had been resting under.

A force unlike any that had been seen in ages rushed out of the smiling reptilian mouth and through the teeth now that there were no lips in the way and rather than merely melting the treasures before them they instead almost atomized them and the treasures that were beyond them as well. Another deep grumble, this time one of annoyance, issued from the colossal dragon as he forcibly sealed his mouth again.

He was about to meet someone very important, after all, and he would need to remember how to exert more discipline over his own body to avoid reducing that person to a pile of gore at best or mere scattered dust at worst. Also, it would pay to learn that again for other reasons, as well.

He had just atomized around just under a billionth of this horde, after all, and reduced much more than that to melted metal. Lord Vaile may be durable, sure, but something told him that he would not be too happy with being set on fire merely due to being close together.

As for the atomized and generally destroyed treasure? Well, this horde still had a metric fuckton of stuff left in it, his destructive grunt and smile had only taken that number out of this little bastion of his wealth.

This place wasn’t the only place where he stored vast quantities of his personal possessions, and as he was who and what he was, all of his kin’s possessions belonged to him as well, along with those other owners themselves.

Still, though, he had made a dent in his blanket, and it was high time he actually leave this place and make a few rounds. It had been an age since he did that, and now that Lord Vaile was here, what kind of asshole would he be if he wasn’t the first of his people to meet him?

Those little ones should have considered themselves especially lucky, he thought as the vast quantities of gold and other things were pushed aside as he rose from his ages-old rest. Had they been the first to actually contact Lord Vaile, he would have had to wipe their entire species from existence and start their kind all over again, and that would be a pain in the ass for him, his kin, and the hypothetically doomed species that was the current iteration of the kobolds as well.