The rat fell limply to the ground, its sides heaving. It was coated in a froth of saliva and blood. Jon felt at the rat’s mind over the link: rage, frustration, relief and a hint of disappointment came in quick succession from his new friend. It was not suicidal, but it seemed the rat wouldn’t mind dying to kill one of the bunnies.
Jon supposed he could not blame the little guy. He surmised the bunnies had slaughtered its whole family, though he had trouble parsing the exact relationships of the group who had died. Even the short burst he had seen of the rat’s world had revealed a complex family structure. There was a more fluid sense of family than would be considered normal normal in a human society. The blood relationships of siblings had felt similar, but the concept of mother/father seemed to be met with indifference. Another rat, an aunt involved in raising him, had seemed far more prominent in the visions.
He reflected on the fight as his friend recovered. It had nearly become a disaster.
He shifted, feeling a bolt of pain from his injured leg, and amended that thought. The fight had been a disaster, but it could have been worse. He turned his thoughts back to the fight to distract himself from the discomfort, ignoring the pain and his burgeoning hunger.
During the fight, Jon’s psionic attacks had given feedback from the smaller bunnies’ minds. They had given him one impression above all others: absolute confidence the large bunny would kill him. Thinking on it, he was pretty sure he would be dead right now, if it were not for his friend.
In the best case scenario, Jon would be seriously injured and on the run. His stunning attack had not done much, only momentarily making the big guy pause the first time and even less the second time. Jon could have poured more juice into his psionic attacks at the cost of efficiency, but he had an intuitive sense that would have been a losing choice. He likely would have died without a lucky break.
He wondered what level the big bunny was.
Jon had similar thoughts after the cherub had so thoroughly outclassed him earlier. In the cherub fight he had not dismissed the possibility it was just an innately strong species, like Herman had talked about in the class selection suite.
However, the bunny was different. Jon felt like it pretty much had to be a leveled up version of the little ones. It gave him many questions: among them, how many levels higher had it it been? Did the rabbits have multiple possible upgrade paths like he did? Were they locked into one path? Were there others like the big one, and how long did it take for them to improve? Did the level discrepancy cause the difficulty for his mental abilities, or was it something else?
He wondered if his friend the rat knew. The thought led Jon back to something which bothered him. He couldn’t just keep calling his friend “the rat,” especially after the creature had fought and nearly died with him. The rat needed a name.
Jon had a few in mind, but quickly ran the concept by the creature, checking to see if it already had one.
The rat answered quickly: it did have a name. It sent Jon a message laden with a combination of its scent and appearance. Jon did not catch the whole of the concepts, but there was a sense of his rat friend’s accomplishments and general reputation mixed into the name as well. He had been a young rat, regarded as something of a rising star. The rat was well loved and considered dependable, loyal. Jon acknowledged the creature’s foreign naming sensibility, then shared his own.
“Jon,” he thought at it.
He provided a mental image of himself as the spider to accompany the name.
The rat waited, as though expecting more, then looked at him, seeming a little perplexed.
“Short version,” Jon said to its confused look.
The rat nodded, accepting of this.
“May I give you a short version?” Jon asked the rat.
The rat lay there a few seconds on its side before sending an affirmative. Jon got a sense of indifference from the creature, as well as ongoing general exhaustion. The tunnel was silent for the moment. They did not have forever, but there were no immediate threats. At least, no more than there had been before they heard the quill bunnies coming.
Jon knew he was shit at names, and so he ran through some he knew from fiction. Going back to Redwall, he could go with Cluny the scourge: but he didn’t like the idea of naming the rat after a villain. He could also go with something from Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh, but he figured something like Jonathon would get far too confusing, and Brutus ran into the problem of sounding like a villain again. Mr. Ages was also just not right.
Jon considered names from the movie The Great Mouse Detective. Tommy loved that movie.
The main villain was a rat named “Radigan.” Radigan was essentially Moriarty from Sherlock Holmes, and the “Greatest rat in the world,” according to his intro song. The hero in the movie, the mouse equivalent of Sherlock Holmes, had been called Basil. Jon thought about the name, but it felt a little off. He also had no desire to tempt the lawyers at Disney, even from another universe. No one fucks with the mouse. Jon decided to go with a substitute he used for basil when cooking in his prior life: Oregano.
For one, he liked the name. For another, he liked the spice, which had a lovely smell. That was probably important to his friend. Finally, it would remind him of his son. It seemed like a winner.
“Oregano?” Jon posed to the creature.
Along with the message he gave an impression of the scent. Jon opted against sending a sense of the taste. It would be a bad message to suggest the rat would be tasty, and might erode their newly budding trust.
The rat considered a few moments, then gave a very tired mental shrug. Oregano it would be.
Jon looked around and took stock of the situation. Four more dead bunnies, one of them bigger than the others combined several times over. Three little bunnies that Jon had executed. One web with multiple damaged sections, one spider with a damaged back-left limb, and one rat who had been nearly squished by its suicidal attack on the larger foe. This was not likely to remain a safe space for long. Jon very much wanted out of these tunnels. He wanted to collect whatever he could get from the bunnies, then get out of here. He was surprised when Zach’s voice intruded on his thoughts:
“Spider facts!
Category: Silk/Behavior
Subcategory: Metabolism and Energy Conservation
Spiders frequently recycle their webbing. Silk production is an energy-intensive process requiring the synthesis of numerous protein and carbohydrate moieties. To mitigate the loss of energy, spiders will eat the web before remaking it. Rebuilding webs is necessary even for fairly sedentary spiders due to environmental damage, moisture, and rot which would set in without reconstruction. Even considering these limitations though, webs are surprisingly resilient, with strength far beyond their weight, antimicrobial properties, water resistance and numerous other traits. But nothing lasts forever.”
Before, Jon had needed to concentrate on a topic or an area of his body to prompt a spiderfact. That one had come seemingly unbidden. He thought on the message, and considered how to best go about taking down the web, before settling on the simple path Zach suggested.
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He walked around, lifting his injured leg towards his center and surprising himself with the ease of walking on seven legs. The partially severed limb didn’t hurt as much when he held the leg this way. Jon balled up the tendrils of silk like he would wrap up Christmas lights at the end of the season. He looped them over two of the joints on his right foreleg, then neatly folded them in half when he was finished. He saved the sticky bits for last, rolling his new little wad of webbing along the strands as he went. Small bits of dirt did get caught up in the webbing, but it was surprisingly little.
Oregano had curled up in a ball near the hole that led to his prior home, falling fast asleep during the handful of minutes it took Jon to complete the task. When Jon finished gathering the web, he held a ball of webbing a bit larger than a basketball. With no other solution in mind, he looked at the ball dubiously. The hunger that drove him earlier was still there, but it was almost solely directed at the dead rabbits he had laid near the front of the tunnel.
Jon hesitantly took a bite of the webbing, and to his relief there was no real taste to it. Jon’s saliva immediately went to work, and it felt like he was eating a bland bit of cotton candy. The web rapidly dissolved. Jon did not have to use his weird shoulder jaws to mash it, his webbing liquefied as he sucked it down, and the comb-like hairs in his gullet sorted out the occasional bits of dirt or debris he took in along with the webbing. He gathered these at the side of his mouth before spitting them onto the ground. Jon was fairly sure spiders from earth did not have the musculature to actually spit things in most cases, but he decided to ignore this bit of inconsistency before he prompted another spiderfact.
As he finished eating the webbing, Jon felt some of the energy he expended on the fight returning to him, and he no longer felt so tired.
Jon spared a thought for his invisible, silent audience once more. If he was so boring he could knock out his rat friend, who should be pretty damn invested in the current goings-on, he could only hope he was similarly boring to the audience. Admittedly, a rabbit’s gullet had probably not just constricted the audience half to death, but still. He had a feeling capturing the universe’s attention would be an extremely mixed bag, with many more downsides than upsides.
Breaking out of his musing, he looked at the over-sized rabbit corpse. Jon felt an instinctive rejection of the remains. It was similar to what he felt with the wooden bear. Thinking of the other bunnies set his stomach to rumbling, but just considering the large bunny made him gag.
When he sampled a bit of each small rabbit’s flesh he had gotten the same system prompt with the same label and “fresh game” prefix. Jon felt it was likely he would not be able to eat the larger bunny, but he would butcher it to save parts for Oregano. He decided to pursue confirmatory testing before he chose how much of the remains to take.
Walking over to the largest bunny’s corpse, he cut into it. He removed each of the hind legs and the surrounding muscle, as they had the most meat. He also took some additional flesh from the area of the back between the forelegs. The dissection took considerably longer than the bear from earlier. Cutting through the dense muscle was difficult, even with the substantial loss of resistance that came with the rabitt’s death.
Jon experimentally took a fraction of meat from the end of the limb, and raised it to his jaws. He immediately gagged, with the system prompt rolling in as expected:
“Carrion. Alpha Cuniculus spina”
He was not sure if it was a coincidence or not, but Oregano awoke just as he completed his test feed. The look Oregano was giving Jon was an odd combination of confusion and betrayal. It was like he just caught Jon banging his wife, but they were wearing scuba gear and playing polka. Jon sent a summary of his findings to the rat over the mental link. Oregano stopped looking so betrayed, but instead became a bit pissy.
The rat began sending him a mental explanation of the world. There were pictures of Jon, the various corpses, the bunnies, the bear from earlier, and a number of creatures fighting and eating in different circumstances.
It was a polite explanation, but the subtext which accompanied the images was the tone of a person who was speaking slower and louder to someone they thought was especially dense. Jon felt like the combination of extreme frustration and faint amusement was an emotional comfort-zone for the rat. A well-worn path it took every day on the way home.
The short version of Oregano’s explanation was that Jon could not expect to eat carrion. It was simply not in his nature. Jon was a predator, who ate fresh kills when possible, and less fresh ones when needed. Eating other’s kills was possible, but would have a far lower yield in most circumstances. If something was killed by the environment or by a scavenger class creature, it was considered carrion. Trying to eat carrion, when he was a predator class monster, was a bit like trying to become a duck. It made no sense, and might cause him some harm if he kept trying.
Having completed its explanation, the rat turned to the sections of the corpse Jon had not cut up, and began eating ravenously. Jon had explained his plan to butcher up the remaining rabbits to ease transport. Oregano had enthusiastically approved the idea.
Jon finished butchering the smaller rabbits to make them more compact. He cut away the few inedible sections and buried them. This also made it so he would not need to find a new burial ground later for the offal. The spider web made for excellent packaging. It also had the side benefit of absorbing any remaining blood.
His gruesome task completed, Jon turned to the larger corpse Oregano was still working on. Though the rat had made significant progress, there was no way Oregano had time to eat much more of the remains before they had to move on.
Jon wrapped what was left of the corpse in silk and hung it from the ceiling where he had laid his ambush. He had no doubt the area would be discovered, but hopefully the exact nature of the attack could be somewhat obscured. Jon did not know how smart the bunny species really was: his impressions of them thus far put them in line highly intelligent animals like crows. This was mostly based on fragmented thoughts he got as feedback from the echos when he stunned them though, and he was uncertain how reliable his new abilities were.
As he began moving back down to Oregano, who was polishing down a forelimb Jon had lopped off for him, Jon heard rustling above.
The Alpha bunny’s head had come loose from the sac of web on the ceiling, but one of its long ears had caught on the way down. The head now hung there, suspended by its left ear, slowly twirling like the world’s most fucked up infant mobile.
Jon noticed something he hadn’t in his hurry before: Oregano had taken the time to carve out this rabbit’s eyes. Whether they were especially energy dense, or the little guy was just still exacting his vengeance, Jon wasn’t sure. He decided against bringing it up with Oregano. He did not feel like it was going to change anything he did in the immediate future, so there was little utility. Jon intended to keep eating everything he could from the other bunnies, and he had invaded the private thoughts of the rat enough as it was.
Jon communicated with the rat about their next moves. Oregano was already getting agitated about remaining here so long after the fight, but it also seemed unsure on where to go. Oregano’s thoughts were dominated by the empty nest he had shared with Jon earlier, and the feeling from those thoughts was a mix of dread at leaving its former home, and dread at returning to the unnatural chill of the nest. The rat’s mind settled, and Jon got an impression of relief. Oregano finally had an excuse to move on.
Jon sent an impression of warmth and companionship to the rat in support, then decided to change the subject.
He stopped, unsure how to explain the guide Herman had given him to find the way.
“I have a guide I received after my class selection,” Jon said.
He sent an image of the light from the I.O.U. that only he could see.
Jon expected to engage in a lengthier explanation of how he received the I.O.U., but Oregano accepted the presence of his guidance system pretty easily. The rat seemed happy to trust Jon on where to go next.
“No doubts?” Jon questioned.
The little rat gave another stilted explanation. It was a picture of the light Jon had just sent to it, accompanied by the feeling that system prompted guidance was always good. It was never bad. The next picture was of a path along a shear cliff, which Jon interpreted to mean the system guidance was not always safe, but always offered a path that could be completed. The next picture was of a large animal dead at the bottom of the cliff. Apparently, Oregano also knew the guidance could lead to substantial rewards, which it expected from Jon’s guiding light.
Oregano had gleaned from Jon’s thoughts that this was some sort of reward, and the rat seemed a little envious again. The wee bastard was nothing if not greedy. However, this time the rat was also gleeful the possibility of sharing in his loot.
With this discussion cleared, Jon turned to the food. He had neatly packed his fresh game, and the portions of the Alpha bunny carrion that he could carry. He created several threads and bound them to his back with the help of his new friend.
Oregano’s assistance was welcome, the rat’s paws were surprisingly dextrous, and with its help the knots were much more stable than last time, and the bundles made less noise. Jon barely felt the weight.
With this sorted, they began walking down the tunnel, following the path provided by the I.O.U.
