Inspired a bit by D&D, weirdly enough.

Just a little silly thing I put together for practice. I wanted to practice writing in general, but found myself in the kind of mood for this sort of story. Go figure.

(Copy-pasting the story here in case the file causes issues, but do try the .pdf. It looks nicer. FA can't open it natively, but "Download" should open it in-browser.)
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Blasted Kobolds

Rorek breathed a sigh of relief as the last of the scaly kobolds fell. The blade was still tense in his grip, smattered with the blood of the pitiful lizardfolk. Besides the one by his boots, two more lay limp against the rocks and mushrooms of the cave. Each one was battered and broken by sword and shield.

Sheathing his sword, Rorek took in a deep breath. Perhaps if they hadn’t jumped him as they did, he would have been able to make it through this little adventure without quite so much, shall we say, ‘excitement’. But it was over for now, the enemy defeated. They hadn’t even put up much of a fight. Outside the lingering tension, Rorek was none worse for wear.

He smiled at that fact. It wasn’t often that an adventurer’s life went so smoothly.

Still, he had a job to finish. Rorek retrieved a small, folded piece of paper from a pouch upon his belt. By torchlight, he re-read the list of stolen items: mostly alchemical ingredients, a few pieces of jewelry, and a rather impressive sum of gold coins. Rorek read the list a few more times, just to be sure, then packed it away.

A quick scan of this cavern affirmed what he already knew; the kobolds barely carried weapons and armor, much less valuables, and there wasn’t anywhere to hide the rest in here. Just to be sure, Rorek checked around some of the looser rocks he could find, but to no avail. If these were in fact the thieving cretins, he would have to look elsewhere.

As Rorek made his way through to the next chamber, he gave one last, pitying look upon the dead kobolds. “Wretched creatures,” he thought aloud.

The next tunnel was a short but winding journey. Rorek led with his torch, one hand on the hilt of his sword. Before the end, he had to hunch down just to fit through. “Typical,” he muttered. “Of course, I should have expected they’d only burrow tall enough for their own kind.”

With a pained grunt, he managed to push through the cramped mouth of the tunnel, though only by throwing his torch through first; the flame was soon snuffed by a howling wind drifting through the cave. Then the man himself stumbled through and caught his bearings.

What he saw was surreal compared to the rest of the jagged cave system. While the walls were coarse and rough as was natural, and the ceiling was covered in wicked fang-like stalactites, in the center of this chamber was a finely-sculpted dais, carved with rings of strange characters. The sound of trickling water danced in the air as twin canals curled around the edges of the dais in dug-out channels. A smaller platform rose in the center, and upon that lay a humble chest.

Rorek’s green eyes lit up at the sight. He may have been new to the adventuring world, but he knew treasure when he saw it.

“Hmm,” he said to himself, eagerly jogging up to the chest, “maybe I’ll see some items on my ‘shopping list’ while I’m here.”

He gave the cave another quick look-around, remembering himself for a moment, but found no danger in sight. The only things he could hear were the rushing water and a distant wind.

Satisfied, he knelt down before the chest and started searching for a latch. “Come on, come on,” he mumbled. “There’s gotta be a— gotcha!” With a light double-click, the latches were undone without a fight.

Rorek stopped a moment, frowning. Something about this didn’t quite seem right. This chest was unguarded and unlocked. Now why would that be?

“Unless I killed the guards,” he said aloud. By his tone, he clearly wasn’t convinced. Just to be safe, he stood up, took a step back, and tried to pry open the lid of the chest with the tip of his sword. This was easier said than done, of course, as he was now starting to shake in anticipation.

Then the chest snapped open completely. Rorek winced. For a moment, nothing happened. But then he opened his eyes.

On the inside of the chest lid, a word was written in sloppy common-tongue letters.

“Ga… go…” Rorek struggled to read the lizard-scratch. “Gote… Gotcha?”

Something else in the chest clicked, and suddenly a large glob was flung at Rorek’s face. What he previously mistook for the glow of gold coinage had instead become a viscous slime, propelled by some sort of spring-loaded mechanism, and slammed him right in the chest. He began flailing against the ooze in a panic, dropping his weapon and stumbling about the dais. Then his boot snagged on a carving, and he fell down backwards.

As he writhed on the stone, the golden slime slithered and melded all over his body. He desperately tore away at the slime over his face with a free hand, but that only let it spread to his extremity. Then for a moment, he couldn’t breathe. The slime covered his mouth and nose, and he began to feel himself fading, lightheaded and dazed.

But then, strangely, the feeling itself faded away. Rorek gasped for breath, sitting up with a start. He could breathe, and for that his heart was relieved, but something didn’t quite feel right still. His face was nearly numb, his vision blurry. In fact, a lot of him felt that same sort of not-quite-numb tingle. Those same parts were also starting to feel cold and damp, however muted that sense was.

Rorek looked down at himself and promptly tried to scream. What came out was a high-pitched, whining squeal, but that just made him try harder.

The golden ooze began melding into him and his armor, melting and remolding Rorek’s body into something new. His torso was completely reformed into a smooth, glossy surface. Down his front, this strange material was colored a mossy green, or perhaps slightly blue. It was hard to tell in the light of his fallen torch. His sides had turned a rusty brown-orange hue, or something to that effect. The man’s body was also changing shape before his eyes, becoming smoother and more rounded at the edges, not to mention much thicker than before.

His legs were coated in the strange slime, and so Rorek could only watch in horror as boot, strap, and skin melded together before his eyes. These too changed form, although much more drastically. His hips and shins swelled, while his lower legs and feet widened and merged into large, vaguely-reptilian feet, each capped with three large, but harmless-looking rounded claws. To Rorek’s horror, his left arm was beginning to suffer a similar fate, though without as drastic of a swell. His right hand, that he’d attempted to clear his face with before, had already converted into a three-clawed hand of similar proportion.

With a shudder, felt throughout his tingling form, he felt at his face. His nose and mouth had been drawn out into some sort of muzzle, though he was surprised by the feel. It was wider and softer than what he would expect of a kobold. Much, much softer. He found it strangely amusing just to test how far it would squeeze under his touch. This soon turned to more panic as he realized the full extent; it was hollow.

As the slime vanished, seeping and absorbing into his strange new form, Rorek felt three more points of contention and distortion, all along his back. He could hear an odd noise, indescribable to his ears, but that he only recognized as the sound of his body’s glossy material rubbed against itself.

He felt propped up from where he lay, as new sensation twinkled through to his mind. Two new appendages sprouted from his back, and a longer, thicker one stretched out from his spine. Wings and a tail, he surmised with a mental groan. Down past his feet, he saw that tail and tried willing it to sway; it did, with more of that infernal noise accompanying it. Modeled after a dragon. Typical kobolds, I swear…

After waiting for a moment with bated breath, Rorek dared to try standing. It was awkward, at first. He kept expecting to have weight beneath him, especially given the width of his hips, midsection, and newfound tail. What weight he found was far, far less than expected, however, and he tended to overcompensate. It ended up easier to simply drag his tail over and lean upon that, as big as the thing was.

No matter what he did, he would have to hear that blasted noise unless he stood completely still. In fact, once standing, he did just that; stopped moving entirely so he could hear himself think.

“Well, I should have seen this coming,” he mumbled; his voice was an octave or two too high, but he tried to ignore that. “I hope I don’t look particularly fearsome. I’d hate to be attacked on my way back to town in search of a healer. I’m… I-I’m sure there’s a cure for this. Whatever this is…”

“Thief!!” screeched a raspy voice from deeper in the cave.

Rorek gasped, looking around for the source.

A small shadow darted by beside him. He tried to track its movement, but his movements were too sluggish. When he turned around, he saw a kobold perched atop the open chest. In its claw, it held his sword, waving it back and forth tantalizingly.

“Hey!” said Rorek. He tried to lunge for the lizard, only to once again lose his balance. The fall was slow and, in the face of the cackling creature before him, humiliating. It ended with a gentle bounce and a whining growl from the newly-made dragon.

The kobold casually tossed his sword aside and out of reach. When it spoke, it glared down upon Rorek with a condescending, toothy grin. “You thief,” it said. “Try steal dragon treasure. Now are dragon treasure.” It cackled a raspy laugh. Rorek felt larger ears he didn’t even realize he had droop back against his neck.

The kobold spat near Rorek’s face. “You kill friends. You be punish-de.” It scowled down at him; he felt helpless to even move. “You hollow. Squish squish. But pop pop on sharp.” It pointed up at the ceiling, and the jagged spines there. Rorek followed its gaze, only for the kobold to hop back in his face once more. “You live? Me impress-de. Heh! Good luck.”

In a flash of yellow light, the kobold vanished, and Rorek was left alone and puzzled. “But I’m down here,” he said. “Unless—”

His first instinct was to roll, in case of falling rock spikes. Not only was this short-sighted, as he soon realized (“I’m just a real genius today, aren’t I?”), but it also didn’t work. The most he could do was wobble over closer to his side, but then his body automatically wobbled back the other way.

This hollowness was concerning for many reasons, but every reminder of it sent weirder and weirder tingling sensations coursing through him. Surely, this was more magic at work. Why else would his mind interpret these alien sensations as ‘good’?

Relative silence filled the cave, save again for the wind and the water. With a huff, Rorek used the chest to help him stand once more, then turned for the exit. Whatever that crazy kobold was on about, he wasn’t about to lay there just to find out.

Every step was awkward and off-balance, and he dragged his new tail behind as his wings flopped limply against his back. The feeling of the wings, he could handle, but feeling the his tail sliding against the cold rock floor was as irritating as it was distracting. He growled and huffed to try to brush that aside, along with the cacophony of his body rubbing up against itself.

But when he got to the exit tunnel and tried to squeeze back through, he could not. Try as he might, even willingly compressing his hollowed head (a horrifying concept he tried not to think too hard about), he just could not squeeze through. Whatever was inside him, presumably the air he was breathing, pushed back with too much pressure.

Wait, pressure. Rorek looked down at himself, as reluctant as he was to do so.

Was my torso that wide before?

Yet he knew the answer to this question. For before his eyes, he could see his belly widening. He could feel himself widening with a deepening tingle over the surface of his form. His belly before had been only the size of a large pumpkin at best. Now the glossy, noisy material stretched out far beyond, in all directions. Soon, he was sure he would have been large enough to fit a healthy cow inside.

His belly bloated out before him, throwing off what pitiful center of balance he had before. There was barely enough time to spin around and land the wide ball of himself on the dais, though this was hardly helped by his limbs. They, too, had begun to bloat and distort. Pressure from within pushed them out further and further from the rest of his body, and try as he might, he was helpless to fight it off.

Even his tail widened and expanded behind him. Between the massive swell of his front that he now rested against, the growing tail he had already used for support, he found his feet pushed up off of the floor.

Rorek flailed his limbs helplessly, filling the air with that damnable noise. The more the pressure rose within him, the louder it seemed to get. And the pressure rose at a steady rate now; he could feel his form growing taut and stretched, hear it groaning from the strain. If only he could find the source of this.

Deep down, he knew it was hopeless. That flash of light when the kobold left did more than just dazzle the man-turned-dragon. What’s more, his ears twitched at another noise filling the chamber; the howl of the wind had increased tenfold.

Rorek could not move, but he would not stop swelling, filling with the cursed wind. His body was as an enormous ball with fatly bloated limbs by the sides. His neck had swollen against his head, pinning it and his puffed-out cheeks in place; he could barely see anything but shiny orange and teal. He could feel his limbs locked in place by the pressure, yet just barely able to move and squish up against the rest of him enough to give him that cruel false hope. Even his wings were swollen to the point of uselessness, and in fact only his tail had any hope of still moving, though it was so bloated it could barely swish without bumping against the walls or dipping into the cool streams.

There was one thing Rorek could see clearly, however. And that was the spiked ceiling, the wicked fangs of rock reaching ever closer. Or was he reaching closer and closer? It didn’t matter.

“Pop pop on sharp.” Gods have mercy…

FIN