This is crossposted from Spacebattles. The fic posted here is mine however
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Things like SI stories were always some kind of guilty pleasure of mine. I'd never take their place though. I was content with my life.
And then I woke up as an abomination with way too many limbs. Hope he didn't graft those to compensate for something.
Prologue
Do you remember your first hangover? The first time you went out drinking with your buddies (or alone, I wouldn't fault you), got completely hammered, and then woke up the next day and felt as if your own body wasn't yours? Well, I had that kind of feeling right now, my head throbbing as if I had just taken more than a few shots too many. The strange thing is that I didn't even drink something yesterday.
My hand came up to my face, my six fingers rubbing my forehead to at least lessen the pain. I froze up.
Six fingers?
I opened my eyes, bright sunlight, blinding me slightly. I used my hand to cover the sun and give me some shade. And then I realized that it wasn't my hand. It had felt heavy before, heavier than my right arm. And now I could see why.
My "arm" wasn't one thing that grew from my body. It was mismatched, long, and bent at an unnatural angle, not in an alien way but something you immediately noticed.
The six fingers also were a giveaway.
All of this took me perhaps less than a second to realize and I recoiled, trying to get away from the monstrous limb. It followed me, it was attached to my shoulder after all. My look wandered higher up and when my eyes got to the upper arm I saw yet another arm stick out of it. My eyes wandered to my shoulder, and yet another two arms, much smaller than my own, greeted me. All of them were bent wrong as if someone had ripped them off and just stuck them to my frame.
As if they sensed my feelings the arms reacted, curling into themselves and trashing a bit. I also felt strange movements in my lower regions and looked down. The strange clothes, a mixture of various tapestry and some metal, couldn't hide the things that were my legs.
My "legs" consisted of many different legs being glued or stuck together, forming a fleshy lump that ended in my "feet", a collection of sewed-together feet. My toes wiggled and trashed, also responding to my emotions. My entire body made cracking sounds, flesh wiggling and trashing in a way that was wrong.
I couldn't control my stomach anymore and threw up.
******
After I had emptied my stomach on the strange stone tiles I had woken on, I sat down and collected my thoughts.
"Perhaps I did drink something yesterday. No way in hell I would be able to dream something like this sober." My stressed face relaxed a bit before I chuckled.
"Yeah, must have been some of the strong stuff." I had calmed down now and just sat there, waiting to wake up. That was the first stage of acceptance, denial.
Anger followed soon after.
******
My arm destroyed a tombstone next to me, effortlessly crushing stone, as I rose to my feet, screaming at the top of my lungs. My voice was old and had a strange accent, but it was also much louder than my normal one
"What the fuck?! Was I really this fucking wasted that I can't wake up?!" I looked around, searching for something, anything that could get me out of this place. It was beginning to suck.
But after my anger subsided, I tried to bargain
*******
I could feel tears on my wrinkled face, and I was kneeling, my head staring into the sky.
"Come on, I've been stuck in this thing for hours! Please, let me out!" I looked at the beautiful sky with its many stars.
"If there is a god, please help me. Please let this just be a dream!" No one answered and then it started raining. The stone tile grew wet and the golden flowers around me got watered.
******
I spent the next few hours staring into the sky, waiting for something, anything to happen. The situation had already set in, however. I knew where I was. I also knew who I was. And I hated it.
"Of all the fuckers I could have been, why him?" I stared at my hand, the long, ugly nails nearly looking like claws.
I stared at my hand a bit longer and then let it drop to the ground, staring into the sky again.
Why me?
******
I think it was the third hour when I got moving. My lumbering, mismatched body stood on its two feet as well as it could and I looked at the walls of the castle around me. They were damaged, heavily so. The amount of sieges this castle must have withstood must have been legendary. Though the mistakes were glaring, something that I had decided to fix.
Just sitting around and crying wouldn't help me, especially not because I was a shardbearer. Tarnished could come to the castle in just a few days, all of them gunning for me. And even if I didn't choose the get thrown into the body of a deranged psychopath, I wouldn't just die.
And perhaps, only perhaps, gathering the other Great Runes and assembling the Elden Ring would help me get home. The Elden Ring dictates important aspects of the world, such as life and death. And even if the chances that the Elden Ring would help me were slim, I would at least fucking try to get home.
I looked around my arena, strangely enough not spotting the dragon yet, and took my first step towards the exit, intent on exploring the castle and seeing if there were any glaring mistakes.
I then promptly fell on my face, my many legs and arms trashing in place, refusing to follow my commands. I groaned and tried to use my arms to lie on my back. Once again, the arms refused to obey correctly, flexing and trashing instead. I sighed and let my head rest on the cool ground.
This would take a while to get used to.
Author note: Hey there, the author here. I hope all those of you who read this chapter enjoyed it. I have to admit, starting chapters are always a pain to write, at least for me. As the tags say, I'm happy if discussions are created and please give me critiscm if you have any, I will try to follow it and improve the story that way. You can also bring up ideas if you have any. I can't promise that I will be able to follow all of them but what I can promise is that I will read the comments and try to see if it's possible. Thanks for reading this.