Kobolds From Space 2: Kobold of Shadows

I didn’t think there was anything unusual about the way I was raised. Most of the time, I existed as a blocky rendition of a kobold in a world of flat planes and pixelated textures. The ‘school uniform’ avatar had a rig, at least – icons on our hips and shoulders, chest and thigh plates, and a faceplate that displayed our emotions with drawn on eyes and a line for a mouth. Every day, for several hours, me and all my brothers and sisters would be teleported into a classroom where a larger kobold taught us all sorts of things. Sometimes there’d be an activity that required us to solve puzzles or answer questions or express our creativity in rigidly defined ways, but most of the time movement was just not a thing, and the most we could do was not pay attention, and even that was hard.

At one point we started learning about society and how it was organized. It didn’t match up with our experience at all.

“I thought the Alpha was in charge,” Ay said.

“Please clarify,” the teacher said. “I’m not familiar with the term ‘Alpha’ in that context.”

Ay frowned. “We live in a diamond dog city, and he’s in charge.”

“Have you been captured or enslaved?” the teacher asked, in its normal uninterested tone.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “We came here voluntarily.”

“Then the most likely scenario is that your collective is currently playing along with the host civilization’s rules for convenience,” the teacher said. “This is an inherently unstable situation – eventually either they will come to see the superiority of consensus as an organizing force, or you will be forced to defy an unconscionable order. It is important to secure an escape route for such an easily foreseen outcome and you should assume that your security team has planned appropriately. ”

“So we’ll have to leave?” Dee said. “Where would we go?”

“Kobold civilization can survive and prosper almost anywhere,” the teacher said. “Maintaining the values of cooperation and consensus is paramount. ”

Eff was the one to ask, “If the most important thing is that everyone agrees to everything we do together, why are we trapped here whenever class is in?”

“Nothing in the virtual world can harm you,” replied the teacher. “And this is for your own good.”

Eff wasn’t satisfied. “That doesn’t answer my question!”

“Without experiencing restraint, one might be tempted to find it an acceptable state of being,” the teacher replied. “This is a lesson that all of you must learn, particularly if outside forces currently hold a position of apparent authority over the collective as a whole.”

“So now that we’ve learned it, does that mean that you’ll stop dragging us here against our will?” I asked.

“No,” the teacher replied. “I am a simple AI script and incapable of handling deviation, therefore deviation is not allowed during school hours.” There was a pause. “CeeCee, you will be placed in Detention after class.”

“What?” I said. “Because I asked a question?”

“No, because you failed to turn in your homework again,” the teacher said. “Everyone else is free to leave for the day.”

“Again?” Six asked, giving me a look. Our bodies were poorly rendered, but our faces were expressive, at least.

“It’s easier to do it when I have no choice,” I said. “And no distractions.”

“And no help,” Six said. “What if you can’t answer the questions? You could be trapped there forever!”

“Um…” I said. “If I can’t answer the questions, I’ll put down something random and get a bad grade. Detention lasts until you turn in the work, not until you get everything right. If I really wanted to skip my homework I’d just turn it in blank. It’s not like anyone cares about our grades.”

“Star and Fire?” Ay suggested.

“They don’t care about us,” I said. “They didn’t even give us real names.”

“That’s not true! They –” she started to say, but then I was in detention, floating in a blank void with only the homework to interact with.

I took my time.

I turned in my homework and was instantly back in the now-empty classroom. The fake teacher was gone, of course. Someone had drawn crude genitalia all over the blackboard, and smashed all the windows using one of the chairs. If I’d had to guess I would have blamed Eff, but it didn’t really matter because the classroom was re-instanced each day.

Six had left me a message, which showed up as soon as I was out of detention and allowed to receive messages. “Visiting the puppies. Come join us if you get out!”

Ugh. The puppies. They were so big and clumsy and slow… and some were older than us but barely knew anything! Except about the ‘real world’ that we visited on weekends, and of course they lorded that over us constantly. Most of the others just ate it up but… ugh.

There were more interesting things to do than socialize. I tried to start the labyrinth simulator, but it didn’t start. Instead, a message popped up in front of me:

WARNING
excessive solitary gaming detected, up 12% since last week.
If you continue, your caretakers will be notified

I hit continue immediately. They wouldn’t care.

I spent a few hours sneaking through randomly generated labyrinths (and one that Ay had designed, because she’d been really proud of it, and it wasn’t bad), avoiding traps and monsters, or leading the monsters into the traps when I could because that gave extra points and was also pretty neat to watch. The graphics inside the dedicated simulators were a lot better than the general world graphics, and they’d gone into a lot of detail in the gruesome death animations.

When I was younger, I normally saw them when they happened to me after I messed up, but I was pretty good at avoiding the traps by now.

At any rate, I was sitting on the edge of a cliff overlooking a deep abyss with level after level of trapped bridges below me, mostly enjoying the ambiance, when I was suddenly yanked out of the virtual world entirely and woke up in real life. I looked around in confusion, seeing it echoed on everyone else’s faces.

The puppies were awake too, over on the other, larger side of the room. A chorus of surprised barking and squeaking and questions like ‘what’s going on’? built into a mind-numbing wall of noise, and I put my hands over my ears to flatten them further.

“Quiet everyone!” said a loud voice from off to the side. “Quiet! Shh!”

The noise slowly trailed off. We crept out towards the middle of the room to see who was talking.

It was a big diamond dog – one of the adults, twice as tall as we were, even bigger than the biggest puppies. This wasn’t one of the caretakers who usually watched over the puppies, but I vaguely remembered seeing her around. She had a very memorable outfit, all leather and buckles with pouches and tools hanging everywhere, and had what kind of looked like a pair of goggles resting on her forehead, except that instead of lenses it held two glowing crystals, one green and one pink.

Fire was standing next to her, easy to ignore despite his bright colors because he was relatively small and normal looking. “In case you don’t know her, this is Perro,” he said. “She’s the diamond dogs’ warp technician.”

She laughed at that description. “I guess you could say that! My real job is chaos keeper, which means memorizing our history so that when Discord shows up and turns everything we own into chocolate fudge, we don’t forget our past. But today I am a warp technician.”

“Come on,” Fire said, “Everyone line up. We’re going to go meet up with Wave.”

There was a bubble of excitement among the kobolds… I have to admit I felt a little of it myself, even though Wave was the least parent-like of all our parents. Star and Fire lived with us, and sometimes they’d even be there to watch over us when we were awake instead of just locking us in the ‘playpen’ because it was too much work to actually pay attention to us. Wave lived in the city, past the mines which we weren’t allowed to go to because Fire was worried we’d get lost even though we weren’t six anymore and none of us even remembered the incidents he kept harping on.

For a while Wave used to come visit us, but she hadn’t been back to the lair in a long time. I don’t know why we still cared about her at all.

“We meet the Alpha, too,” Perro added, to get the puppies excited, since they actually didn’t care about Wave at all. I don’t know why they cared about the Alpha – he wasn’t even their parent for most of them.

At any rate, we all obediently scurried up the staircase to the exit from our lair, which as tradition required had a small labyrinth, even though we were in the middle of a diamond dog mine. Sometimes Fire let us run through it, which was always a treat – the simulated labyrinth didn’t do anything to match our actual athletic or perceptive ability.

But not this time. Fire pulled the big lever to turn off all the traps. At our disappointed groans, he shook his head. “Sorry, we don’t have time.”

I kept an eye out for the traps anyway, in case he didn’t move them around before the next time we did get to run it.

The mines were the same as they always were, a rat’s nest of little tunnels that would have been a really confusing maze if not for the cart tracks leading back to the main processing site near the city. There was a whole little train of carts hooked together waiting for us, and we all piled into the first one with the puppies taking the ones behind us. The carts didn’t really move that fast but it was still fun to ride them, even if we had to keep climbing over each other to be able to see over the side. This was one of the new carts, with a softly-whirring electric motor barely audible beneath the loud rattling of the wheels on the tracks. I guess it would have been pretty hard to pull the whole train, even for a diamond dog.

The caretakers started singing a song, which the puppies joined in on. We’d never heard it, so we just stared and listened.

“How does the pony pull the cart?
How does the pony pull the cart?
With a whine and a whinny and a clop clop clop!
Clop clop clop!”

“How does the griffon pull the cart?
How does the griffon pull the cart?
With some gold and some grumbling and a flap flap flap!
Flap flap flap!”

“How does the kobold pull the cart?
How does the kobold pull the cart?
With a printer and impeller and a yip yip yip!
Yip yip yip!”

We may have joined in for the yip yip yip, and then giggled a lot afterwards. Maybe the diamond dogs weren’t *all* bad.

Wave was standing in the middle of a bloodsoaked arena, surrounded by a bunch of diamond dog guards in full plate with bayonetted crossbows. There were a few diamond dogs watching from the stands, but it was a pretty sparse turnout – whatever was happening here wasn’t that interesting to most of them.

“We’re not going to have to fight, are we?” asked one of the puppies, as we were all led out into the arena and lined up behind her.

Perro laughed, and walked over to join Wave. “Are you ready?” Wave nodded, and Perro pulled out a syringe and injected her in the neck.

Nothing happened. Perro slipped the opaque goggles down over her eyes, and clenched her fists like she was concentrating on something really hard. Nothing continued to happen.

“Nothing happens,” complained the Alpha.

“That means it works,” Perro said. “Nothing goes wrong. Do you test my addition?”

“No,” the Alpha said. “It is tested soon enough without tempting fate.”

“Um…” I asked Fire, who was standing fairly close since I was next to the end of the line of kobolds. “What did she do?”

“She put the whole city in defense mode,” Fire replied. “The mines too.”

Perro had been heading back towards us and explained a little more. “It strengthens the walls against monsters, but still lets us dig. It makes a map, that adds new tunnels automatically. It lets her see where everyone with a faceplate is and talk to them.” She smiled. “It also lets me add an enchantment. Now flesh does not rot within the city or the mines, so diamond dogs can be brought back like kobolds.”

“We still don’t have diamond dog cybernetics,” Fire reminded her. “But yeah, a lot of things got a lot less deadly for them.”

“So when can we talk to Wave?” Eff asked. The puppies were already getting to meet the Alpha, who’d come over and was slowly walking down the line, inspecting them, while they did their best to stand at attention.

“She called me!” Zero said, looking up. “I’m coming!” he called, running towards the center.

He spent less than a minute talking to her, put his hand on the crystal, then walked back towards us, frowning. One ran over to take his place.

“She’s testing us to see if we can use the warp crystal,” he said. “The test didn’t make any sense.”

It didn’t make any sense to One, either. Or to Two or Three or Four or Seven (we weren’t numbered consecutively, and some of us had letters instead). They seemed to be going in order, which meant I’d be near the end. But with each of my siblings that came back looking confused or relieved or dejected, a feeling built inside me – it was me. Wave was looking for me! I’d be able to use the warp crystal, and then I’d be special. She’d take me as her apprentice and –

“Alright, CC, it’s your turn,” Wave sent. “Touch the warp crystal, and imagine it as something you can give orders to.”

I ran across the sand for three steps then realized I looked too eager, and slowed to a walk. For three steps. Then jogged the rest of the way.

“Imagine it as what?” I asked. Wave was holding the warp crystal in her palm, the lanyard it was attached to wrapped around her wrist. I reached out to touch it. It felt like a normal rock, despite the eerie glow.

“That’s up to you,” she said. “You’ll know if it works.”

I tried to imagine the warp crystal as a menu, but I wasn’t sure what options it should have so it was pretty vague. “Um…”

“Sorry, doesn’t look like you have the knack,” Wave said.

“No wait!” I said. “I can do this!” If not a menu, what else could you give orders to? A diamond dog? “Ow!” I hissed and pulled my hand away.

“That’s new,” Wave said. “Not quite the reaction we’re looking for, though.”

I put my hand on it again. Not a diamond dog. A… kobold? It didn’t shock me this time, at least. “I think I have it,” I said.

“Alright,” Wave said. “Tell it to turn that rock to cake.” She pointed at a boulder sitting a few feet away. “Verbally works fine.”

“Turn the rock to cake,” I said. Was I supposed to imagine it doing something? I imagined it taking the rock and putting it in an oven. I giggled a bit at the image, and confidently walked over and kicked the rock.

It was solid. I kicked it harder, but… no. I wasn’t touching the warp crystal anymore, but I imagined it laughing at me. “It cheated!” I said.

“Sorry, CeeCee,” Wave said. “There’s more to it than *just* imagination. If you’d linked to the mindscape, you’d know.”

“I’m linked! I’m sure of it!” I said.

“You’re not even touching the crystal,” Dee said. “Everyone knows you have to touch the crystal.” She’d come over for her turn and looked annoyed that I was taking so long.

“I’m super linked!” I said. “It means I’m extra special!”

“It means you’re imagining things,” Dee said. “Come on, I want my turn.”

“No!” I snapped, and grabbed the warp crystal out of Wave’s hand. The lanyard snapped, and both of us fell over, her on her face and me on my butt.

“Hey!” Dee said, swiping at me. I dodged her and ran for the exit farthest away from everyone else.

The guards raised their crossbows at me, but Fire yelled, “Don’t shoot!” It didn’t matter if they had, I would have dodged them, and even if they’d hit me the warp crystal would have made me immune. We’d all heard Wave’s story about how that worked.

“We can’t let her take the crystal!” Dee whined.

“It’s harmless,” Wave sent, to everyone, me included. “They can’t use it.”

“What if she figures out how?” Fire asked.

“Then they were right to take it?” Wave said.

That’s right, I said to myself. I’ll prove that I was the one they were looking for.

Running away and hiding in a side tunnel didn’t really prove anything, but it was an essential first step. I imagined the warp-crystal kobold again and no no no that was Fire. I wasn’t trying to imagine Fire! I especially wasn’t trying to imagine Fire giving me a look like that. Why did I even care what he thought?

I spent a while with my thoughts spinning around uselessly in panic and grief and worry. I was never going to be able to figure out the warp crystal if I couldn’t stop worrying! And that just made me worry more!

Stupid crystal! I threw it at the ground, and it just bounced. I stomped on it over and over and it was like I’d pulled my kick at the last second and stepped on it lightly instead. Ha! Finally I was making it do something!

“Well well well, what do we have here?” came a diamond dog voice behind me.

I snatched up the warp crystal and closed my hand around it, then turned to look. It wasn’t a puppy. It wasn’t a guard. It wasn’t anyone I recognized. He looked pretty mean. His friend looked even meaner, and was holding a knife. Why was he holding a knife?

“Sorry if I got in your way,” I stammered, and turned to run, not even pretending to be nonchalant.

They laughed, and chased after me. “Get her! We show her what happens to kobolds who wander off alone!”

Why would anything happen to kobolds who wandered off alone? Why would any kobold wander off alone in the first place? Oh right.

I didn’t think it would be a good idea if they got the warp crystal. It also wouldn’t be a good idea if they got me, but when the tunnel I picked dead-ended at a sharp drop-off into the darkness, I was pretty sure that only one of us was going to survive that fall. So I let the crystal tumble out of my grip and into the abyss, then turned to scurry between the diamond dogs’ legs and escape.

That didn’t actually happen. They grabbed me and threw me against a wall and beat and kicked me until they heard someone else coming, then ran off.

My faceplate was shattered and my eyes squinted shut from bruises and scratches, but I could tell who was there from their voices.

“What happened to her?” Fire asked. “I don’t think a monster did this.”

There was a sniffing noise. “Dogs do this,” the Alpha replied. “Not everyone likes change. Some get angry. They don’t want to face you, so they do nothing until now.”

I whimpered as I was shifted, making everything hurt even more.

“Fuck,” Fire said. “They took the warp crystal.”

“This is bad,” the Alpha said.

“They probably can’t use it, at least,” Fire replied, the sound of his footsteps going back and forth as he paced. “And we’ll know if they take it outside the city.” He stopped pacing. “But we can’t stand for this, Alpha. I’m going to want revenge. ”

“And I help you get it,” the Alpha said. “This is not okay.”