Lost & Found

I’m seriously lost down here now. I tried to find my stomachmarks in the wake of my recent cooking catastrophe and aerial adventure—still haven’t seen that helmet or any of my old supplies—but when I finally landed I was hopelessly disoriented. It doesn’t help that the only source of light I have in here is little bursts of static electricity I can create when I snap my fingers. Makes it hard to find my way around when I get tired of snapping. I’ve got to find another means of making light. I attempted to ignite a rag on a stick—okay, actually a dry piece of leather affixed to a femur—with my Volt spell to make a torch, but all I did was vaporize the hide and make the bone explode. Ouch. Probably shouldn’t’ve done that. Now I’ve got a small burn on my hand and a very blackened chunk of what was once a cow, I think. Anyway.

Being inside a dragon has given me a new angle to reflect on life. I hope you’ll pardon a minor dissertation on the matter: I shan’t go on too long, I promise. So here I am. In a dragon. I’m officially food. But I’m still alive, and so far I have no reason to think the dragon is able to obtain any kind of nourishment from me while I remain as such. After all, don’t you need to absorb the nutrients from things in order to count them as food? I mean, if you eat something and throw it up later, you didn’t really eat it did you? So anyway, with me still alive I can’t really be counted as food.

What does that make me, then? I’m an intruder here in the stomach. Not a willing one, sure, but still. Does that make me a parasite? I’ve been eating (or trying to eat) the food that’s supposed to be for the dragon. Parasites are one-way deals though. They don’t give anything back to the host. And while you can rest assured I won’t be sending this dragon a Christmas card in a few weeks or a Facebook post on it’s birthday, I still feel like the dragon get something out of this deal: namely, whatever nutrients it’s absorbing from my legs as I wander around in here. Also, I’ve taken the liberty of organizing the various dead livestock I come upon so they’re easier for the dragon to absorb. The fuller it feels, the less often it will take off and send me on wild journeys though the hot air like I’m on the business end of the gravity gun in Half-Life 2. Plus it looks way better in here now. Tidiness is important!

So we’re kind of symbiotic, in a weird way. I’m a living source of nutrition, and the dragon has the courtesy to keep eating stuff that I can eat. Plus there’s sweet loot in here. Seriously sweet loot. Even though I don’t know where I am anymore, I’ve been gathering what I can from around the area just in case I need it later. If I can find somewhere pretty stable, I might be able to build a hut or something. So far I’ve acquired a tattered messenger bag, a couple of throwing daggers, some gemstones, and a soggy copy of Every Day with Rachel Ray from August ’08. Who was keeping this magazine? Why? Whatever. Time to rummage through another pile of adventurer bones.

Oh hell yes! I found something super awesome in here: an Orb of Arching Bolts. I used to have one of these when I was a kid. It’s a baseball-sized glass sphere, cool white in color (okay, yes, it looks like a light bulb), and when it’s struck with electricity it lights up like one of those awesome plasma orbs. You ever play with one of those? They’re crazy. I always wondered what would happen if you broke the glass. I lived in perpetual fear of doing just that: what if when you broke it the little plasma spirit inside came out and latched onto you? You’d shock everyone you touched. Makes it hard to mack on the ladies, know what I’m sayin’?

Okay. Light source: got it. Any idea where I am: no. Baby steps. Baby steps. I think I’ll head toward the narrow section I saw a while ago. I thought I heard the sound of oars in water… must’ve been my imagination.

-Guy.IAD