Alone.

Alone with his thoughts, Richter Douglas sighed as the last echoes of the seven mares' hoof-steps died out among the empty stone halls of the decaying castle.

As if to accentuate that last point, a chunk of stone fell from the ceiling and bounced off of the pauldron on his left shoulder, resulting in a loud 'CLANG' that would have startled anyone else.

After being turned into an Undead against his will and ending up in a world of technicolor ponies, however, Richter was not 'anyone else' and thus could not give less of a damn about the sudden loud noise.

What he did give a damn about was the fact that the castle was beginning to decay to the point of collapse, with potentially the only Bonfire in this world at risk if the castle DID collapse. That just wouldn't do, no sir; not for Richter, who wasn't sure if he was one death away or one kill's worth of souls away from going down the path of a Hollow.

So, despite the dull pounding in his head caused by simply moving his head, the Undead got off his armored ass and grabbed the rock that fell on him. He inspected it for a few moments, then looked up to find the spot in the ceiling where said rock had fallen from. Once he found it, he grabbed a handful of ash from the cooler outer perimeter of the Bonfire's ash pile and formed an X beneath the hole, placed the rock on top of it, and then left the room after securing his sword and shield to their respective spots on his person.

Renovations were in order, and if he was going to be stuck living in the same area as the (potentially) sole Bonfire in the entire world, then he was going to make sure that his damned home wasn't going to fall apart on him.

---{}---

Richter was very glad that he watched that Primitive Technology channel on YouTube so damn often prior to the convention, otherwise he'd never have known how to do half the stuff he was doing.

Shame that the videos never told him how to treat itchiness caused by some weird blue powder that had managed to fall through the gaps in his armor's joints and touch his skin. He wished that he'd just avoided that cluster of blue flowers he'd walked through, since the powder that was kicked up from the flowers was getting really distracting. Worse, he didn't know if it was the powder, the air or the fog in the air or what, but he'd been feeling weird since then. For some reason, he was feeling annoyed by some kind of resistance to something that he was doing, but he hadn't actually been having any problems with the stuff he'd been doing.

He'd knapped and put together a simple stone axe to chop some wood for a...more conventional and less powered-by-souls fire for creating a simple kiln made of mud. Once the kiln was done and the fire was restoked, he started cooking some limestone he found in a cave nearby, as well as a bunch of empty snail shells from around the forest, to a high enough heat to "activate" the lime/calcium carbonate in the respective materials.

All he had to do was wait for all of the shells and limestone to heat up, and once they cooled down and were completely white, he could throw some water on them in a bowl or something to turn them into lime putty, then mix the putty with some other crap to make the mortar that was used to glue bricks together.

He'd use that mortar to start repairing the stonework in and around the bonfire room, along with making some wooden structural reinforcements to keep the ceiling where it was - above him, and not crushing him into a meat pancake while he slept or something.

Since all of that was working out, he had no idea why the hell he was feeling so annoyed by what he felt was a lack of progress of some kind. If anything, he'd just been feeling like his body was fluctuating between feeling hot or cold as it...adapted to the new, alien environment he was currently in, he guessed. That was normal, since there was bound to be stuff in the air and his surroundings that he'd never been exposed to before, and as such his body would have to acclimatize.

He could easily ignore that, and so he did. It was actually easier than he thought it would be.

---{}---

Four hours of gathering limestone and other materials for making the lime putty and mortar, then making the putty/mortar, and then actually applying the mortar to the crumbling stonemasonry later...

The Bonfire Room was back in good condition. All the holes were plugged up, all the stonework was put back and reinforced with some logs that were acting as a grid of struts to keep the ceiling aloft, and he even boarded up one of the broken stained glass windows to keep any unwanted visitors from just coming in as they pleased.

In theory, at least. Magic or non-corporeal beings would be able to get in as easily as breathing, most likely, but he preferred not to think about that possibility.

With the ceiling no longer a hazard to his health, Richter...had nothing to do.

...That wasn't good, considering how restless humans could get when they had nothing to occupy themselves with.

Richter paced around the Bonfire, contemplating what to do to avoid going stir-crazy as he idly twirled his Broadsword in his right hand.

...Bed.

He'd need a bed if he was going to be practically living in that damned room for any considerable length of time, and sleeping on cold, hard stone while decked out in full Elite Knight armor was out of the question.

But then that meant he'd have to do even more work...

But sleeping on a somewhat decent bed...

But more tedious work...

But kinda comfortable sleeping place...

But physical exertion...

Ugh. Sometimes, he wondered how he had even survived up 'til then when the thought of doing work was as repulsive to him as the idea of sleeping on a bed was wonderful. He was at least thankful that he'd managed to hide his rather strong propensity for laziness from everyone else in his life by acting the exact opposite, otherwise he'd have never been able to trick himself into getting as far in life as he had.

Decisions, decisions...which seemed more palatable to Richter and his innate sense of laziness?

...Wait. He figured it out!

Making a bed meant he could sleep in as much as he wanted, when he didn't have to do stuff!

It was the perfect compromise!

With all of that in mind, Richter turned on his heels and marched back through the ruined castle, and made his way into the surrounding forest once more. As he trudged through dense and barely-illuminated undergrowth, he idly wondered why the forest was so dark. The castle’s roof - decayed, precarious and death trap as it was - had seen broad daylight not even a few hours before, and his internal clock told him it was roughly 2 or 3 in the afternoon.

Yet it was as dark as night-time less than five minutes away from the castle.

Magic? Curse? Some bullcrap reason only comprehensible to dolphins?

Whatever the case, he had no idea.

Regardless of his possession of an idea or lack thereof, the Undead had a mission: Making himself a damn bed, because sleeping on a stone floor sucked ass.

Wood, lashings, bedding, etcetera etcetera.

And perhaps burning all of those blue powder flowers in the forest, because that odd feeling of annoyance that started up after being exposed to it earlier today was starting to grate on him to the point he wanted to bash his own head in with the rather sharp tips of his sword’s hand guard.

Cross-guard.

Whatever the hell it was.

Richter shook his head and gave the side of his helmet a solid whack to see if that’d fix his irrational and unwanted annoyance.

The ringing in his ears and the resulting headache certainly succeeded in distracting him, at any rate.

---{}---

Wood: Chopped.

Lashings: Acquired.

Bedding: Gathered from a massive pile of discarded fur and fuzz outside of some cave.

Purge and fiery cleansing of all powdery blue flower: No dice, because he didn’t have a flamethrower to burn the whole forest down out of spite.

Eh, three out of four wasn’t bad.

As the Undead dropped the massive bundle of fur on his back to the floor in his little room, he arched his back with his hands pushing on the small of said back. The sensation and sounds of joints popping and vertebrae snapping back into place was music to his ears.

Now all he had to do was make the bed.

Simple enough.

Rectangular frame, lash it together...add support for his weight with wood bars and ‘cross beams’ and other carpentry/construction jargon...cover with bedding...

Aaand that was it. Bed done.

...Except he didn’t feel sleepy, and now (A) he had nothing to do again and (B) he was still feeling lazy and somehow even more irritated for whatever god/gods-forsaken reason.

“UuuugggGGGGHHHHH...” Richter let out an exasperated groan, which only intensified when his vocal cords burned an reminded him that speaking was a rather bad idea at this juncture.

So, that left him with some options.

Find the weird and garishly-colored equines from before, go out and find something else of interest, or go on a bit of a genocide of the local wildlife.

Considering his lack of actual combat experience, he doubted the third option would end in any way but tears, terror and/or death.

Which left consorting with the locals, or wandering around like an idiot in some dark forest containing gods-knew-what.

Hmm...

...Eh. Exercise was exercise, and it wouldn’t hurt to start making a map or whatever of the locale.

Plus if he found something cool on the way, all the more power to him.

The walk out of the ruins was so uneventful and as same as the other times that he didn’t even register he was out of the castle until he was halfway across the rickety-ass bridge across a seemingly bottomless ravine and noticed a rather large winged lion with a massive scorpion tail staring at him from the other side of the bridge with a gaze that suggested it was thinking of making fillets out of his torso.

Welp. That thing was too big and almost certainly too heavy for its wings to lift off of the ground, so Richter decided that the best course of action was to turn around and go back inside the castle where it was nice, warm, only partially falling apart, and didn’t have a giant lion-scorpion with wings that wanted to munch on him.

The Undead swiftly turned on his heel and calmly walked back in the direction of the castle.

He was a quarter of the way along the path up to the weird not-constellation sculpture-thing room - also known as the entrance foyer thing to the castle - when he heard wings flapping behind him, and then the sound of something landing roughly twenty meters behind him.

Richter did the sensible thing and hauled ass as fast as his legs could carry him, with the giant forest predator roaring loud enough to rattle his bones and hot on his heels.

A quick crunching of the numbers yielded the horrifying realization that the thing would catch up to him before he could reach the entrance to the ruins.

So, with the ‘Leoscorpius’ or whatever it was supposed to be called rapidly closing the distance and safe haven too far away to reach in time, the man had to make a decision.

His decision?

Turn around again and charge towards the hangry Leoscorpius in the hopes that he’d be able to pull off a classic Dark Souls dodge under whatever attack it chose to make.

Apparently, the damned thing wasn’t expecting its prey to suddenly run at it, as it missed a step and tripped over its own paws. Mometum carried it tumbling head over heels, and the Undead only just had enough time to roll rather clumsily out of the way before he was crushed under several tons of angry animal.

With an opportunity to run the fuck away so generously presented to him, Richter took it and booked it towards the bridge with the clankety-clank of decently heavy armor moving at a dead sprint.

The Undead then glanced behind him to see if the Leoscorpius had recovered from its little tumble.

It had.

It was not even ten meters behind him and getting closer by the second.

Shit.

He made it to the bridge and crossed five slats of wood when he felt something big, heavy and deadly just barely nick the back of his neck.

Good news, he wasn’t a head tumbling down into the ravine after been knocked clean off his shoulders.

Bad news, the asshole’s swipe apparently destroyed the moorings keeping the bridge secured to the castle side of the ravine, since the sound of splintering wood rang out a second before he experienced a rather unwanted and unneeded sense of vertigo and weightlessness that could only mean he was plummetting to a rather messy death.

‘Not like this. I don’t want to die like this,’ Richter thought to himself as wind rushed past his head with a dull roar, and as he fell through copiuous amounts of fog or whatever the hell it was.

If he had to guess, based on what his gut was telling him? Maybe twenty-five seconds until he hit the bottom and popped like an overripe melon in a rather large tin can.

Worst of all, he didn’t know if he’d respawn at the Bonfire like Undead did in the games. For all he knew, Bonfires in this world worked completely differently and only healed him rather than full-on bringing him back to life upon death.

Actually, no, scratch that, the worst gods-damned thing about this was that now he was itching like a motherfucker where that blue powder flower shit got on his flesh.

‘Oh, RUB IT IN, why don’t you?! Make me get the worst itch of my life as I’m falling to my death! WHY DON’T WE MAKE IT EVEN MORE INTERESTING BY THROWING ME INTO YET ANOTHER FUCKING WORLD LIKE SOME SHITTY ANIME?! That’d be greeeat!’ Richter shouted in his head, feeling rather cross with the universe fucking him over like this.

Then his Darksign ignited, he ignited, the fog ignited like it was methane, everything was burning-

And then he was on top of something, and - mercifully - not on fire anymore.

Something soft, warm...

Fuzzy?

And...also...breathing.

He glanced down.

A raccoon-looking woman with one silver and one icy blue eye was staring up at him in alarm, anger and a fair bit of mortification.

‘What.’

Author's Note

I’m back. Next (few) chapters will be a crossover with one of Timeless Celestial’s stories, though his version of the chapter(s) won’t be published for a while.

Ciao~