Downtown Druid

Book 2 Chapter 20: I'll Need a Coat to Carry You In

Dantes spent the next two days recovering. He focused on improving and expanding his gardens, talking to the local flora and fauna, and monitoring the reactions to the sacking of Mondego’s storehouse.

The guard was furious, with both Gavain and Pacha. The adventurer’s guild struck some kind of deal to have Gavain released, and he was promptly sent on a quest in Viscent to explore some kind of magical maze that had sprouted up in that region. Pacha was privately reprimanded by his superiors for every single choice he made. They were furious that he’d done the raid, though they were impressed that he’d arrested Gavain. Publicly, most people were furious that Gavain was arrested for doing what the Guard should have been doing. In general, Dantes felt that everything had gone very well considering what limited resources he’d been working with.

In spite of his overall positive feelings, one day while he slept he found himself stricken with strange and inhuman dreams in which helived an entire short and miserable life. He was hatched from an egg, and from that moment on he never stopped moving. He had to be quicker than his brothers and sisters to reach food before they did, but not so quick that something larger than himself found him first and ate him. He scuttled between small cracks in doors and walls, climbed up drainpipes, shook himself free of spider’s webs and avoided the massive feet of those creatures which seemed to extend into the sky above him. He never questioned his lot, he never felt fear in the same way he had before, he simply moved and lived and struggled, siring thousands of children of his own, crunching vile refuse between his mandibles, all that existed was the moment he was in and in times of great success, the next few seconds afterward.

Dantes awoke from his uneasy dreams to find himself halfway transformed into a hideous insect. His limbs were splitting along the middle to form additional appendages, his teeth merging and protruding from his mouth, and his eyebrow ridges flattening back as his eyes widened and darkened into pitch black pools. He let out a noise somewhere between a scream and a screech as his body slowly compressed down into the size of a copper piece.

He had an awareness of what was happening, his roach mark had filled while he was sleeping, and just as had happened when he’d filled the ratmark, he was gaining a new form. Being aware of what was happening however, did not make the experience any less painful or horrifying. After several agonizing minutes, he had fully become a roach, his antennae twitching and the hairs on his legs picking up movements nearby.

Jacopo stood over him, regarding him with a twitch of his whiskers.

Dantes felt distinctly uncomfortable seeing and sensing him from this perspective. He much preferred being the larger of them.

“Hmmm, I’ll need a coat to carry you in…”

Dantes laughed, which manifested as a clicking of mandibles, and then forced himself to become human again. The process was just as horrifying in the opposite direction. His antennae shrank back into his skull, his non-functional wings slowly slid back into his body as his spine reformed, and he could feel the reorganizing of his internal organs back into their original places. He found himself panting on all fours, and brought his arm up to look at his roachmark. It was filled in completely with gold now, and in spite of the pain he’d just experienced Dantes made a brief thank you to the Roach God for his blessing.

Jacopo nodded with the assurance of someone with absolute confidence and no hint that they were surprised at the compliment.

Dantes gritted his teeth, and began the transformation again. This time it was quicker, and the pain diminished. He repeated the process several more times, each time better understanding a portion of the changes he was experiencing and going through them with greater ease. Eventually, he was making the change almost as quickly as he became a rat.

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Jacopo watched all this unfold while nibbling on the core of an apple.

“That seems painful.”

“It is.”

“Will becoming a roach truly be useful? You can already become the greatest of creatures. What can a roach do that a rat can’t?”

“Fit in smaller places, survive great falls, sense vibrations in the air, walk up completely flat and vertical surfaces–”

“No fur though. An unfortunate type of creature. Even two-legs are blessed with some fur.”

Dantes had the image of a roach covered in fur briefly enter his mind and shuddered a bit. “I think it’s better that they are as they are.”

Jacopo shrugged, and returned his attention to his apple.

Dantes flexed his hands, and swept his hand through his overgrown hair to subtly make sure that there were no longer antennae sticking out of his forehead. He cleaned himself with some fresh water, soap, and a damp cloth before getting dressed and sliding on his green jacket. As he moved, he realized he could feel changes around him. Subtle movements of the bats nearby, the pigeons shuffling along a nearby rooftop, and the footsteps of a cat moving just outside the garden, likely sensing the potential prey within it. Just as becoming a rat had granted him a greater understanding of where paths were underground, becoming a roach seemed to have imbued him with some additional abilities even outside of roachform.

Dantes let Jacopo leap up and onto his jacket, then climbed out of his garden, landing in an alley across from an old gray tabby cat that was busily licking his crotch.

“Morning,” said Dantes as he pulled up his hood.

The cat looked up at him, but left his leg in the air. He regarded him for a moment, then returned to what he was doing. Dantes’ experiences with cats had been… mixed so far. Many simply ignored him, others made immediate demands, and one of them called him a nutless invalid. It would likely take a fair amount of time before he was able to meet the Cat God.

Dantes moved south, away from midtown and the docks and toward the southern gate. The streets were active, and it took him some time to tune out all of the extra sensory information he was receiving. He didn’t need to worry too much about hiding his identity. Most of those who were out and about were working, or moving goods into the city, too busy to pay him any attention, and largely not locals. Still, he kept his hood up and stayed wary.

He walked through the gate with no trouble, the few guards there not paying attention to anything leaving the inner part of the city so much as what was moving into it. He saw a few horse drawn carts and sent the beasts of burden a hello. The area outside the inner city was largely the same as the one within it, only changing gradually as one got further away. The tall buildings and warehouses started to give way to smaller buildings made less of cement and brick and more of wood, or in some particularly unfortunate cases wattle and daub. There were fewer mutts, and more Kobolds, Dwarves, and Halflings in this part of the city. The old blood of Rendhold was largely Elves, Humans, Orcs, and Gnomes with a few exceptions here and there, but in the outer city things were more varied. He saw a number of Gatemen, those gangsters that controlled the smuggling flowing into the city from the southwestern gate.

Dantes had never really spent much time in the outer city. He preferred the heavy impact of cobblestone and concrete against his boots to the muddy paths further out. There was also less opportunity out there for the most part. Most of the people there had moved to work as loggers, miners, construction workers, and other hard labor. They lacked connections, and while you could screw them out of a few copper here and there, the people they worked for were already squeezing them for everything they were worth. The people in Midtown often had just as little, but they were better at using it, more able to turn things to their own advantage, and more corrupt. Dantes felt much more at home with them.

Dantes found a small set of shops and started looking through them. He found a number of herbalists, but none were the particular one he was looking for. They were run by men, or kobolds, but eventually he found one named ‘Hema’s Herbs’ and he walked inside.

The shop smelled richly of herbs, and Dantes took a moment to enjoy their scent before looking around the rest of the shop. There were dried plants hanging in the windows tied by short strings, jars full of strange powdered goods, and even a few potions scattered around. A dwarven woman with thick dark curls throughout which he saw small mushrooms sprouting.

“Smelling is free, but if you want to do anything else you’ll need to buy it.”