Nobody's Servant 1.0

Effectively The Beginning [vore]

Let's go over what I know right now. My home is gone.

When the sky starts to ripple like that, it doesn't matter what planet you're on, you can almost always take that as a bad sign.

The decaying aether from our stand-in for a sun fell from the sky and blasted my island off the map. That's pretty bad too.

I've got no idea if my folks are alright. And right now I've got no means of finding out. That's the item I get to when I offhandedly discover that the pit of my stomach is much lower than I've previously known it to be.

And here I am, on some shore at the farthest tip of the island chain, useless lungs waterlogged until I collect the wherewithal to attempt a sigh. It's a small comfort that I don't depend on oxygen like that. A living thing's record would have ended not far from the sun's point of impact.

I shouldn't be this calm. I should be sobbing on my knees on the ashen beach. Crying hasn't come so easily since I died, and that should scare me. I wish it scared me. I try to tell myself that now is not the time for a personal crisis, but quickly correct myself; it is the perfect time for a personal crisis. My dad and my friends are potentially dead, and I'm an indeterminate distance away, so I can't even know. The rest of my family travels further down the archipelago for their day-to-day, I hope the damage wasn't widespread enough to have gotten them too.

...What if it was?

All the tears finally hit at once, and I grieve for a while; I'll spare you the details but I let it get ugly. I manage to eventually tear myself out of it and make an effort to get my bearings. Though I lift my head, I still wallow in the aftermath of my quiet despair for several minutes, the gentle gray tide's chill permeating me in my entirety.

There shouldn't be tides at all. The usually stagnant, lifeless, poison sea only stirs up like this during a storm, and the sun has long passed by. The clouds haven't. They continue to roil, fallout from the rotting satellite still active and deadly. Lightning in sickly shades runs a jagged circuit through the perfectly circular bite out of the sky. It's only going to get worse. I think of my mother and sister. Even if they found adequate shelter on the island they'd have been on at the time, they won't be able to stay for long; the air will turn poisonous too.

Regardless of the advantages my altered body confers, I also need shelter, so I begin to pick myself up out of the water. I can think of a plan of action after I've secured survival in the short term. I turn and regard the island, a maze of bluffs and sheer drops. It'll be hard to navigate.

There are some pieces missing, forgive me.

I am, and for now continue to be, Merion, a 27-year-old morph. My represented animal is a black-backed jackal. Jackals aren't an uncommon sight on Paliputra. Neither are aberrated individuals, among whom I also count myself. Coming back from the dead is a pretty well-understood clinical process, nowadays.

I am, until officially counted among the casualties and the missing, a Maxim citizen. My specific situation didn't come with a death certificate, you see, so they'll be looking for me. At least, I hope they'll be looking for me.

I was, until just this morning, a full-time necrotech operator but the likelihood of any part of that campus continuing to exist in recognizable form is, shall we say, suboptimal. Atoms, maybe.

>>>>>>>>>

Fingers dive in and my captor lifts me by my midriff out of her canine jaws. The steam in her breath is quickly lost in the air outside. I dangle in her grip, meeting her unamused gaze and holding it long enough for the chilly breeze to bite through my saliva-damp fur. Finally, she speaks.