Total pages in book: 60
Estimated words: 56021 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 280(@200wpm)___ 224(@250wpm)___ 187(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 56021 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 280(@200wpm)___ 224(@250wpm)___ 187(@300wpm)
FLUSH!
A rush of water comes at me suddenly. The deluge hits me face first and sends me spinning backward in a turbid flow that expels me not out of the original hole I crawled through, but out a different, narrower aperture with much more pressure.
I am blasted out of a pipe and into the lake I first saw when I arrived in the grass.
I do not know how to swim.
I barely know how to float.
There’s no time to learn. There’s no time to do anything besides desperately attempt to survive. I flail, splashing and coughing, legs kicking desperately as I try to propel myself to safety. I’m suddenly very glad for the fact that I’m barely wearing any clothing at all, though the boots on my feet are quickly getting saturated and feeling more like weights. I’ve never felt gravity as intensely as I do now, a force attempting to suck me down to a dark oblivion beneath the skeleton of a creature so much greater than I ever could be.
I try to cry out for help, but all I get is a mouthful of water. If the Mare was monitoring me, they could suck me up out of the lake, but I threw the transponder away. I am going to drown because I was mad at Lettie. There might be some kind of lesson in that, but I’m not going to be around to benefit from it, so I I don’t bother trying to learn it.
I kick and I flail and I bob up and down in the effort to stay alive until finally a big, clawed hand grabs me by the remnants of my suit and starts pulling me along.
“Look what I got!”
I am dragged from the water by a swimmer and tossed onto the bank like a piece of garbage.
“What is that?” Another saurian voice intones the question. I look up to see that these two saurians are both of a gold and green hue, and maybe one and a half times taller than I am. There’s something about the way they look and the way that they are talking that indicates to me they’re young saurians, late adolescents.
“Something from the water,” the one who saved me says.
“Gross! Step on it!” The other is not at all interested.
“I’m not going to stand on it, Filas! It’s far too large to squish.”
“It doesn’t have any scales. I bet it would squish real good.”
These are clearly young male saurians with an abundance of curiosity and a complete lack of empathy. I am going to be lucky if I get out of here without having my leg pulled off just to see what happens.
I prepare myself for something truly terrible to happen, but before it can, a shrill, authoritarian voice cuts through our little scene.
“Boys! Boys what are you doing!?”
“No! It’s Adaine!” The one who was about to poke me with the stick hurls it into the water and swings around to face his interlocutor, his tail whipping inches from my face as he does.
Adaine, as it turns out, is a very tall saurian female dressed in the coolest jacket I have ever seen in my entire life. It’s hard for saurians to look cooler in clothes than they do in their incredible skins, and most of the males only seem to wear pants as a result, but this golden hued female is billowing across the marshy ground with a determined gleam in her green eye, wearing a black tanned coat that looks like it was taken off a dragon. I instantly want to be her, though I know that will never happen because she is a seven-foot-tall saurian and I am a five-foot whatever human.
Both of my tormentors suddenly look very sheepish, and much less generally murderous.
“Now you listen to me,” she lectures them. “You’re out of the nursery now. You’re grown men. And that means you work. You do not leave the factory in the middle of the day to go and poke animals with sticks.”
“But it’s a weird fleshy one.”
“It’s probably sick. Scale disease can cause loss of scaling. You’ll catch it if you mess with it. Is that what you want? To lose your scales?”
“No, Madame Adaine.”
“Back to work. Now.”
They rush away without so much as a word of argument or complaint, seeming relieved that all they got was a tongue lashing.
“You,” she says.
“Me?” I point at myself, bedraggled and half-drowned and barely clad in the remnants of the suit that has come away from me in all sorts of strategic places.
“You are one of the human females, aren’t you.”
“Yes,” I say, not really seeing the point of lying about it. I don’t have the energy to attempt to run away, and much like the young saurian males who withered under her stare, I feel some of my very essence draining away under her gaze.