After swallowing down the sheer horror of being a rat (Which, he had to admit, was frighteningly easy), he had begun scrambling for something to ground him.
Some kind of touchstone to tie together choking to death on a creamer cup, waking up as a rat in a strange, backrooms-like village of wooden walkways too massive for him to find an exit, and the unknown future where he wasn’t freaking out and had his good old fashioned pyramid of needs.
“Hell yeah, Bed-blanket,” Rhett grinned gleefully, spotting a torn towel laying on the ground outside of a wooden trash bin.
One upside of this weird place, whoever lived here didn’t throw away anything remotely wet or perishable. The place itself, despite being so medieval in construction, was practically bone dry, which kept the worst of the ickies from shivering up and down Rhett’s spine.
Grabbing the ripped towel, he examined it carefully. It was dotted with hearts, and rimmed with plaid around the edges. The tear itself was strange, beaded with an almost bony, plastic-like material that reminded him of cigarette burns on synthetic clothing.
Despite this, he could somehow smell the wood on it, (oh, right, Rat) clearly marking it as a natural product.
Footsteps startled him, and in a flash, he managed to hide under his new quintuple-king-sized bed, the towel shoved over him in a flurry of motion.
Wood creaked, and step by step, he saw proof that this wasn’t some kind of other dimension of infinite peasant-hovels lacking sapient life.
‘Is that an Orc?’ he mused, quietly pumping his fist with victory. ‘Awesome, Isekai-get,’ he mentally exclaimed, watching the titanic-to-a-rat being walk by.
The man was green enough to warrant the species, with twin tusks jutting out from the corners of his lips. A horseshoe-like jaw protruded out from underneath, and above, he could see an almost pale flush on the person’s cheeks where the oversized teeth had kept some skin from tanning beneath it.
In their hands, a flail-like lantern dangled from a heavy wooden baton, and their clothing, rather than being period-accurate, seemed to be a mix of black pants and a heavy canvas jacket, mounted with pieces of broken planks like armor.
Additionally, Rhett proved himself unreliable in narration, when he realized the Orc was actually a woman, or something close to it, judging from their chest being a bit too large for even a caricature of pecs.
‘At least I hope those aren’t actually pecs. Not sure how I like the idea of Orcs having watermelon-crushing chesticles,’ the Rat mused, as the Orcess continued her plodding trip down the hall.
At his scarousal, a golden light suddenly blossomed into sound in his mind.
“I SENSE YOUR FEAR, YOUNG ONE. LET IT BEGONE. WITH HARD WORK AND STRENGTH OF WILL, YOU CAN CONQUER YET MIGHTIER FOES, FOR YOU ARE HERE TO BE A HERO.”
Rhett paused, having received the first indication of who or what or why he might have been shoved into a ratboy and that ratboy then having been shoved here in a mudcore arcology.
He thought about the fading words, and thought more when no extra information came to him. He thought even more when still, no additional information came to clear this longstanding and dramatic mystery of his origins up.
Finally, he shrugged.
‘Fuck that,’ he admitted.
There’s a reason he never wrote Self-Insert fanfiction after all.
He’s way too hyper-intelligent for it to be interesting.
–
It didn’t take long for the deities to observe his reaction to their sole command and quest. Zeus had long since gone to take a godly nap, exhausted from the day’s tribulations, leaving Ares and his ‘sister’ (more of a cousin, really) to observe the results.
“He is… Chewing the walls.” Ares noted.
Sure enough, the mirror displayed him picking a massive wooden beam, and, after several moments of contemplating the structure, thrusting his hands out and announcing “Activate Rat Skills! Menu! Status!”, and cursing several times, began to try and gnaw through the pillar.
“Well, I suppose we see why his soul chose that as its true form. Honestly, thinking to it, the only way it could have been more obvious is if he had been eating cheese when he died,” Eris remarked casually.
Ares stretched his shoulders, leaning back in the small throne he had dragged in to recline on. “A fine heroic trait. He is clearly either creating a fortified dwelling, or sapping the foundations of the village.”
He lifted a finger. “While the latter would require that our saint correct his morals a bit, a tendency towards grand defensive structures is perfectly heroic,” the god coped.
Eris rolled her eyes, hoping the champion would at least be a bit more chaotic than that.
“Hopefully this one is temporary. I’m sure he’ll be trying to communicate with the locals soon enough. He is surrounded by the friendliest, weakest people we could manage to find. He shouldn’t need a ‘fortress’ any time soon.”
Ares smirked. “Ah, but look, is he not preparing bedding fit for a Mortal king? Perhaps we should have told Athena of our plans. The boy is clearly going the route of slow and steady conquest.”
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Eris’s face scrunched up with a foil-like crinkle. “He’s napping, bozo.”
Ares’s smirk was undaunted. “Warriors do that. That’s not a non-warrior thing to do,” he coped again.
–
‘Man, I’d have killed for this back home. This is so fucking awesome. Cozymaxxing,’ Rhett’s brainrot thought for him as he folded the towel into a bed, pillows, and a blanket all in one.
His mouth tasted like sawdust and paper, but that was worth it as he managed to get the hang of chewing holes in wood.
At the very least, he had figured it out enough to burrow a tiny, cramped hole into the pillar of some sweet-smelling building’s corner. The speed, he realized, was actually not too shabby, considering it didn’t take hours like he was worried it might.
“That time I got Isekaid with level 100 Gnawing (OP)” he muttered, dozing off with a stupid grin.
As he slept, he dreamed, and as he dreamed, things got a bit odd…
The murky black rainbow of aphantasic sleep slowly gave way to a vast meadow, and his dream of piloting extremely floaty mecha, he realized, was at the bottom of a pit that curved not unlike what one imagined a black hole did in diagrams.
Looking up at the pinkish-green wall of turf that surrounded his murky dream, he knew somehow that something odd would happen, if he climbed it.
He heard a faint voice from high above, echoing over his head.
Anyone else would have been tempted, but he was a little busy trying to make his dream-mecha stop jumping dozens of meters in the air, drifting down like a balloon, to his growing frustration.
As lucid as he was, he had more important lucid-dreaming goals than investigating weird plains of adjective-breaking foliage.
Even more importantly than that, he was kind of offended that his subconscious, or worse, someone else’s, was trying to allude to him touching grass.
The night was spent to his satisfaction, when he figured out he could mime pushing down with his hand, to keep his robot firmly on the ground.
The next morning, late, late in the afternoon, a sunbeam struck him, somehow managing to perfectly weave between the scaffolding of the village like a ninja who uses the light, probably to kill robots.
Rhett hissed, thrashing around in his nest, stretching and groaning and generally waggling like a ball of tentacles filled with bones.
Once he felt sufficiently boneless, however, he finally flopped down on his belly, glaring at the sunlight.
“Nyeh,” he scowled, batting a paw at the beam, and sleepily not thinking too hard about the way it curved down in tandem with the act.
It was easier to not think about it, considering a few moments later, the beam crept back up, and into his eyes once more.
The act of somehow bending the beam repeated several times, but his mind discarded the anomaly as something more horrific and particularly mind-breaking struck his mind.
Sunlight, somehow, was even more insidious in this world.
“Oh what the hell,” he moaned in agony, as he studied the phenomena. His entire cubby was fully lit, as if someone turned on the lights, even though only a thin beam had actually entered it.
The sunlight, he realized, was less like light at all, and more like an evil laser, scintillating in all directions wherever it dared to strike.
Slowly coming to his senses, Rhett experimented with the thin ray.
Blocking it with a palm, less ethereal light bloomed to the sides, splashing out in bright, pastel waves, and while this was sufficient to prevent its unwanted incursion, provided he blocked enough of it, it was far from the humble directionality of the humble photon.
He thought for a moment and gave a small ‘huh’ when he considered what that meant. The sunlight in this world was more a source of radiation, rather than a mere radiation itself.
In practice, it seemed to mean anywhere the sun’s rays could reach was as visible as daylight, letting it peek around corners indoors that it never could have on Earth.
Rhett absolutely hated it.
His stomach was rumbling, yes, but this was a far greater evil.
He liked his dominion lit only by a controllable, dimmable lightbulb and a deafeningly bright monitor, not this snake-like hot gas ball that thought it could defy his desire for darkness.
“Sunglasses,” he muttered as darkly as his thoughts. This world was clearly evil, and he needed armor against its arrows and swords.
Scratching himself in all the places that existed outside of polite company, the little ratman poked his head out of his hole, whining in agony as he tried to squint through the bright lines darting through the structure, allowing natural, un-artificial ambience to brighten it during the day.
Eventually, he was forced to salvage a corner from his towel-nest. Dragging the whole thing out, he bundled up in the corner, using it to provide a shaded tunnel of white and pink to blot out most of the sun.
“We hates it,” he hissed in a funny tone, lips twitching up in good humor as he started to get awake properly.
Looking around, he saw things he hadn’t noticed in the night, signs, directions, dangling products and produce, hung from ropes to dry in the various sunbeams.
More, he saw people, a noisy static of all colors, mostly Orc green, peppered with dots of dark-skinned Elf (‘Hello!’ Rhett thought involuntarily) and…
“Oh my god,” he questioned, grimacing at the sight of one of the dark-skinned elves, practically melted into the surface of a horse that walked by, its muzzle poking out of her chest.
Likewise, her legs seamlessly melted into its own neck and torso, half-seated on it as if a chair were also melded into its form.
It looked like someone had described a centaur, but only had a whole person and horse to work with, simply overlapping the two together, and to hell with the clipping.
Despite the body horror, neither Elf nor horse seemed at all concerned, the pair clip-clopping down the wooden street, mostly keeping to a small tiled strip on the far side of the walkway, where thin, textured stones seemed almost glued into the wood, sunken in in a way he wasn’t quite sure of.
“Okay, upside, elves, double-upside, dark elves and some of them have bazonkas, downside, dark elves and some of them are Cronenberg Centaurs. We’re still in the black here,” he muttered.
Shaking his head, he looked around, trying to see any obvious routes to his goal of snuffing out the sun, or at least doing so in a very small area around his eyes.
Finally, his gaze landed on one option. A small sign nailed to the wall haphazardly, with paint on the front declaring ‘Lensmaster Joe’s; Light bent for a light price. Light broken for a bit extra.’
Whatever that meant, lenses could probably be darkened somehow, if he got some.
Very slowly, Rhett struggled and squinted his way out of the safety of Fort-Towelhole, slipping into what seemed to be a wooden, metal-grate-covered gutter.
Path secured, sign read, and goal in mind, he practiced his scurrying, drunkenly stumbling his way to the Lensmaster’s Domain…
–
