Plain Brown

I woke in my new hollow high in the tree, and the first thing I did was listen. Birds. Insects. The stream. No silence anywhere. The big creature was somewhere else, or asleep, or far to the north where it came from. Good.

Hunger Clock: 72%

I'd decided something during the night. I'd been hunting the same stretch of stream for days, the same bank and the same shallows, and that stretch was its drinking spot. I didn't want to spend every morning there anymore. So today I followed the water downstream, the other direction, away from the north.

It took most of the morning. The stream got wider and slower, and the trees opened up, and finally it spread out into a pond. The water was dark and still, with reeds around the edges and lily pads floating in the middle. It smelled like mud and green things. Dragonflies were hanging over the water, and the reeds were full of movement.

The first thing I saw there was a frog.

It was sitting on a lily pad near the edge, small and perfectly still, and it was the brightest thing I'd seen since I woke up in this forest. Red, like a fire truck, with black spots. It didn't hide. It didn't even look worried. It just sat there in the open and let me look at it.

I knew what that meant. I'd seen frogs like that in documentaries, back in my old life, lying on the couch on a Sunday. Bright colors meant poison. An animal that didn't bother hiding was an animal that didn't need to.

"Not you," I thought, and moved on. I was a little pleased with myself. My old life had been good for something after all.

I went around the pond slowly, staying in the reeds. There were plenty of small things, but I wanted something worth the walk, and near the far side I found it. A toad, sitting half in the mud at the water's edge. It was big, bigger than me, wide and squat and lumpy, and it was the most boring color in the world. Plain brown, with darker brown blotches, like a lump of mud that had decided to sit up.

[Sense]
Target: Mottled Toad ~ Lv.5
Threat: Moderate

A level above me. Plain, slow-looking, and a lot of meat. Nothing about it said danger to me. It looked like dinner.

I came at it through the reeds from the side, low, and it didn't notice me until I was close. Then its eye swiveled toward me, and its mouth opened, and something shot out at me so fast I barely saw it. Its tongue. It slapped into my left scythe and stuck, and the toad yanked, and suddenly I was being pulled forward through the mud toward that wide open mouth.

I dug my back feet in, the way I'd learned on the tree, and stopped myself. The tongue let go with a wet snap and whipped back in. The toad blinked at me, slowly. Then it puffed itself up, swelling until it was nearly twice its size and round as a ball.

I struck at it, and my hook slid right off its side. There was nothing to catch. It was like trying to hook a balloon. The tongue shot out again and missed, barely, and I scrambled back.

I took a moment to think. A puffed-up toad was round, and round things had no edges. But it couldn't stay puffed forever. And every time it shot that tongue, its mouth had to open.

So I waited for the mouth. I stood just at the edge of its reach and made myself look like an easy target, and when the tongue came again, I didn't dodge it. I let it hit my right scythe, and then, as it started to pull back, I hooked my left scythe into the corner of its mouth, where the lips met, and held on.

The toad couldn't close its mouth. It deflated in a rush of air, trying to pull away, and as it did, its sides went soft and loose, and my right scythe tore free of the tongue and found a place to hook. Then I had it.

It was a long fight after that, a rolling, muddy wrestling match in the shallows, and by the end of it I was covered in pond mud from head to tail and clicking like an idiot. It had been ridiculous, and it had been great.

[Kill] Mottled Toad ~ Lv.5
XP gained.

I dragged it up onto the bank and started eating. The skin was thick and lumpy and tasted bitter, so bitter my mouthparts tingled, but the meat underneath was good, and there was so much of it. I ate until I was full.

Hunger Clock: 72% → 89%

I was cleaning the mud off my scythes when my mouth went numb.

It started at the edges, the tingle from the bitter skin, and it spread. My mouthparts stopped feeling like mine. Then the numbness slid down into my front legs. When I tried to lift my right scythe, it came up slow, the way it had in my first days in this body, as if there were a delay between me and it.

[Status] Poisoned
Source: Mottled Toad (skin toxin)
Severity: Moderate
Effects: Agility -50%, Sense -30%, hunger drain increased

I stared at the notice. Then I looked at the red frog, still sitting on its lily pad across the water, bright and calm and completely harmless to me as long as I left it alone.

I'd been so pleased with myself for knowing about bright colors. I'd assumed that anything plain must be safe. But this wasn't my old world, and this forest hadn't watched the same documentaries I had. Its poison didn't have to wear red.

My legs were starting to shake. The hollow was a whole morning's walk upstream, right above the drinking spot of something I couldn't fight even at full strength. Down here, I didn't know anything. Where things hid, what hunted at night, where it was safe to rest.

I had to choose, and fast, while I could still move at all. I made myself think it through, slowly, the way I always did. If I collapsed on the ground, anything could have me. Something like the shrew wouldn't even wait for me to die. Walking home meant hours on shaking legs through the open. But up in the thin branches, almost nothing small would bother looking for me, and nothing big could follow.

So I turned my back on the pond and started climbing the nearest tall tree, one shaking leg at a time.