Chapter Nine:

Something that the young Blood Mage known as Elizabeth Potter had always had an interest in, it was the stories of the past. Regardless of where the location of the stories were from. Which included the village in the middle of nowhere known as Lordran. According to Lordran's library, the existence of magic was something that was common knowledge in the town of Lordran. Even if most residents couldn't use it. But reading the various books in the library wasn't the only thing Elizabeth enjoyed doing in her free time, though she did enjoy the fact that both she and her teacher enjoyed reading a good book (occasionally together, which on some occasions resulted in Elizabeth falling asleep with her head either on Maria's shoulder or in the Hunter's lap), she also enjoyed simply joining the local kids and listening to the adults sharing the tales of both noble and not-so-noble knights fighting monsters and going on quests. Occasionally saving a beautiful woman along the way, some with more noble reasons than others.

Of course, everyone in Lordran wasn't a good person. One such example was the one known as Patches the Trickster. A rather shady man who could be friendly and helpful one moment, before kicking someone into a pit with a painful but not necessarily deadly landing guaranteed in the next. Many people of Lordran avoided the man for that reason as a result. And unfortunately for Elizabeth, she fell victim to the man's tricks at the age of eight, ending up at the bottom of a pit with a tunnel connected to it.

While she was rather upset regarding the circumstances that led her into the situation, she did walk away from it with a weird… thing as a pet… once she managed to convince her teacher to let her keep the creature, which wasn't particularly difficult considering that she argued that it could be a kind of therapy. That and the creature seemed to think that Elizabeth was its mommy. And weird thing was definitely the best, if not only, way to describe the creature that Elizabeth named Ripley. It was about the size of a fully grown bulldog and had a shape that mostly resembles that of a feline. Unlike actual felines however, Ripley lacked furr, sporting a very dark brown (almost black) carapace instead. Something that it also lacked was eyes, meaning that Ripley was technically blind. While Elizabeth couldn't initially see them, due to the lack of light in the tunnel, but Ripley had a set of gill-like things on its face where one would assume where the eyes would be instead. But the trait that gave Ripley its name was the fact that it had two mouths. One where it was expected and the other on the end of its tail, unlike the xenomorphs of the movies Ripley's name came from, which had the secondary jaws inside the primary mouth. The primary function of Ripley's tail appeared to be as a weapon of sorts, swallowing and later regurgitating rocks with great velocity as projectiles. Quite disgusting, but the young Blood Mage thought it was kind of cool… in a kind of macabre way.