It failed again, and the wizard screamed in frustration.
“Why?! Why can I not make another?!” the old man bellowed as he hurled his creation at the ground, gore splattering across his feet. He sneered down at the result of his own actions in disgust, then sniffed. “This room needs cleaning.”
With a swish of his tattered robes, he walked out the door, ignoring my squeaky protestations.
No! Feed me, you jerk!
Despair filled me as I watched the door slam shut. Was he going to come back and clean up? That didn’t seem in character for the madman, or he wouldn’t be throwing dead animals around and making a mess in the first place. The wizard had never come back into the room twice in one day thus far, so I might be on my own, alone and hungry, until then. If he didn’t feed me tomorrow, I would be in real trouble.
My salvation appeared in the form of a small boy in tattered clothes who quietly slipped through the door, mop and bucket in hand. The child was maybe eight years old, incredibly scrawny and visibly battered.
This poor child.
I didn’t know if the boy was the wizard’s son, an apprentice, a servant, or a slave, but whatever he was to the wizard, he was clearly not being treated well.
With nose scrunched in disgust, he began to mop up the sticky blood and viscera that had dried on and stained the stone floor and walls, and I watched him work for a while before I couldn’t take it anymore. I let out a loud squeak, and the boy’s head snapped up as he was startled from his chore.
“Ah!” he cried out, taking a step back when he saw me. Fortunately, I was mostly just a little rat in a cage, and when I dropped my tail to my back and sat up on my haunches, I looked pretty normal.
The boy took a tentative step towards my cage, and I reached up into the air, beckoning him closer.
“A rat?” he muttered, coming close to the cage. Then his eyes widened as he caught a glimpse of my tail.
Squeaking, I spun in place, then flopped onto my side. See? I’m harmless!
A small smile broke through the boy’s frown from my antics.
“You’re cute for an abomination.”
Hey, that’s uncalled for. I’m… not an abomination… right?
Thinking back to the spell I had seen the wizard cast, I wasn’t so sure. It was pretty obviously some kind of dark magic, and it bound souls. Technically, I probably was an abomination, though I was one of the good ones. At least, that’s what I told myself.
I stood and motioned towards the tank of grasshoppers, making cries of hunger, and the boy’s eyes darted between my cage and the insects.
“Oh, are you hungry?” he said, and walked over to the tank. The boy needed a stool in order to climb up to it, and could only shift the board a bit in order to reach an arm in and try to nab a few grasshoppers, but eventually, the kind and gracious hero brought me my meal.
My tail snapped down on a grasshopper’s head, killing it, then whipped over to a second, immobilizing it while I scooped up a third with my maw. Gleefully feasting, I almost didn’t notice the horror on the boy’s face at the immediate acts of slaughter that I had displayed.
Pausing between bites, I squeaked at the boy and put my head down on the floor, trying to look contrite. He shook his head. “Go ahead and eat. Just, uh, no stinging my hands, ok?”
I nodded at the boy and returned to my food, and he got back to his cleaning chores. It was a shame I couldn’t ask the boy to give me the dead animals he was cleaning up so I could try and gain the profiles, even if it meant stomaching some nasty rotting meat.
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Dismissing the experience notifications, I examined the boy more closely. His wavy brown hair was greasy and unwashed, but he had kind blue eyes and seemed to have a sharp mind. I wished I could talk to him, but unless he could decipher my squeaks, communication was far out of my reach.
When he finished cleaning, he came back over to my cage. “I’ll come visit you again,” he whispered. He gave me a grin before he dashed from the room.
The fourth day of my life was fairly similar to the others. The old wizard returned to the chamber, but this time, he selected another rat and a tarantula. It seemed that he was trying to replicate his previous success by limiting the variables and making another rat-insect hybrid.
Unfortunately, he again had no luck.
He exploded into a fit of rambling anger, shouting about the waste of core crystal and his time, and stomped on the rat-spider he had again failed to bring to life. Turning and sending me a withering glare, as if his past success was more a taunt than anything else, he stormed out of the room again with his hands thrown in the air.
A little later, the boy returned to clean up the mess, and he again gave me some grasshoppers to eat. This time, he stuck around a bit longer, talking to me as I ate.
“Master seems frustrated that he’s not making any progress with soul magic,” he whispered. “I hope he stops. Mother always told me that soul magic is a wicked, evil art. Master had been making so much progress with time magic before, too. Do you think he’ll go back to studying that?”
I squeaked, which was all I really could do to contribute to the conversation, and the boy nodded, filling in the conversation on his own with his child’s imagination.
“I think so too. It might be dangerous, but at least it isn’t so evil.” He shuddered, then shook his head before looking me over more closely. “You’re nice though. Do you have a name?”
Not that I remember. Squeaking sadly, the boy made a pensive expression.
“...Could I give you a name?” he asked.
Squeaking, I stood on my hind legs and waved my front paws in the air.
The boy giggled. “Hmm. How about… Stingyrat?”
I silently glared at the boy. Are you kidding me?
“No? Hmm. Okay. Maybe… Stabby?”
Flopping onto my back dramatically, I feigned my own death. The boy studied me, mulling it over.
“What about… Fuse?”
Fuse. That’s… not awful. I wasn’t sure what good a name would do me as a monster, but I squeaked, raising my front paws in affirmation.
“Okay, I’ll call you Fuse. By the way, my name’s Timothy.”
Well, nice to meet you Timothy. It was comforting to have a friend.
Over the following days, the wizard continued to make sporadic appearances, performing more failed experiments and growing increasingly furious from the poor results. The growing number of empty cages in the room seemed to fuel his fury, and he started visiting the room less and less. Timothy only seemed sent to clean up after a failed experiment, which meant that I was also being left hungry. The wizard barely acknowledged my existence at all, and I worried what would happen to me if he moved on like Timothy had hoped he would.
Every time Timothy did come to visit, he would feed me a few grasshoppers. Seeming to realized my predicament, he started to offer me more when he could, but I could see him looking nervous as the number of grasshoppers in the tank started to noticeably drop.
Then, after another failed experiment fusing a cat and a bat, something about the wizard changed. He didn’t rage; he expressed practically no emotion at all. He simply left the room, and I knew he wouldn’t be coming back.
Timothy seemed to understand this as well. After cleaning the room, he passed me a bunch of grasshoppers. I killed them quickly, but only ate a few, keeping the rest for the coming days.
After almost a week alone, I began to despair. My heart leapt when I heard the muffled clink of the door latch and Timothy tiptoed into the chamber with something clutched in his hands. I had never felt so grateful to see a person before. “Here you go, Fuse,” he whispered, pushing a piece of bread into the cage for me.
I glanced at the bread, then back to the boy. I hoped he wasn’t feeding me from his own plate—the boy needed every calorie he could get—but nonetheless I started to eat. The bread was pretty tasty, but it wasn’t going to give me experience towards a level and I couldn’t learn a profile from it. Squeaking and motioning towards the grasshopper tank, I saw Timothy frown.
“You’d rather eat bugs? Yuck,” he said, but thankfully, he brought me another handful of grasshoppers to kill and consume.
More days passed, and Timothy, my lifeline, continued to visit and feed me scraps and the occasional grasshopper.
“Master has made a breakthrough in his time magic,” he told me as I ate. I heard him, and was interested in what he had said, but my attention was drawn away as I finally got a different notification after crunching down on and killing a grasshopper.
(Level 0) defeated. Experience gained.
Level up! You have reached Level 2.
You have earned an attribute upgrade and a skill point.
Choose an attribute to upgrade:
[Amalgamation]
[Bound Soul]
[Chimaeric Core]
I let out the best cackle a rat could make, startling Timothy a bit, who eyed me warily before shrugging and returning to his chores.
Left alone, I settled in to debate my options and make a decision.