Kinverse: Volume One

PATH OF THE EMERALD MAIDEN

A naive young monster’s tale by Moros, aka KinverseWriter

Legal Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. The author is in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of any media franchise herein mentioned. No copyright infringement is intended. All characters and events in this story are entirely fictional. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental. This work of fiction contains disturbing content.

Reader discretion is advised.

Description:

A young woman from a pre-neolithic society is accidentally whisked away to another world entirely during a raid on a research lab run by alien invaders. Stranded with no friends, badly injured, and no idea where home even is, she’s forced to live off the land and learn how to survive in this strange and hostile world.

There’s only one slight problem, though.

She’s not trapped in this world with them. They’re trapped in this world with her.

Categories:

Adventure, Coming-of-Age, Isekai, Erotica.

Disclaimers:

This story contains sexual elements and disturbing themes. The contents aren’t purely intended to be pornographic, but some scenes objectively are. This is about a giant monster that eats people, so reader discretion is advised. This story contains vorarephilic themes.

This story will have a very slow and intermittent pace to begin with. True stakes don’t really show up until halfway through, though the build-up is always there in the background. This is ultimately not a story of grand adventure and defeating one’s enemies to rise to the top, it is the tale of a lost and naive young woman growing as a person and learning new things. It is a personal one concerning her, and thus this story will be told in present-tense first-person.

Chapter 45: Space Invader

---

Her further examples shifted with my feedback, revealing two trends: soft-spoken and smooth, or powerful and flowing. The former I find calming in a way I’ve never felt before and the latter gives me a sense of power, though the words are completely incomprehensible despite the slow clarity at which they’re sang; what interests me most is how they’re able to keep singing so loud for so long and with such control.

Carey laughs and snorts. “You’re a rather fancy lady of refined taste, Em. It’s called ‘opera’ singing, and it isn’t very popular these days.”

I can’t imagine why people wouldn’t like it. In a way, it’s like my people turned to music: power mastered with control, endurance tempered by experience. But, I guess it speaks on the difference between our peoples if these things aren’t as respected now.

“I could look into hooking up an old stereo in the lounge for you to listen to music with. How’s that sound?”

I give her an enthusiastic nod. It has gotten rather boring being holed up all day; doing this for the rest of my life would be horrible, let alone the half a year I likely would spend in a den back home.

“Grayon. Layzerrr. Mehgnet. Puh-lugs. How did you get these things?” I ask her.

Her absurdly common confusion expression remains something I will never mistake. “Uhh... at stores? I bought them, why?”

It occurs to me as well that I’ve never seen her hunt, and everything I have seen has indicated that she would be terrible at it. So where does she get food? From these ‘stores’ too?

“Food too?” I press.

She slowly nods. “Yeeeaaah... okay, I think I may have seriously underestimated how pri- uh, few things your people has.”

She and Sam share a look. Despite their inability to smell each others’ intentions, something passes between them during their silence.

“I went to Campbell River, Emeral,” she starts to slowly explain. “That’s the town we passed by. It’s way bigger than Gold River and you can buy more things there. I give them my money, and they give me what I want. I get my money from doing things for people.”

I give her an equally slow nod. It sounds like barter; back home it’s common to trade different meats for other meats, and also for fruits, so everyone gets what they want. The larger and older Kin aren’t able to climb trees as well--though they can simply reach into the smaller ones--and thus the young trade their deftly gained fruits for the succulent kills of the old. But this ‘money,’ is it a type of fruit? I recall it being used as a measure of how well you were doing in that ‘board game’ we played. The money was taken to do things or given sometimes, but I never did actually learn what it is.

“What money?” I ask. Carey promptly dips her head and slaps herself in the face for some silly, human reason.

“Ugh,” she groans. “One of these days we need to introduce you to Frank and make you his problem instead.”

I grin and nod excitedly! “Yes, Frank. In-tro-duce me, yes?”

“Sure, Emeral,” Sam chuckles. “One of these days. I think we need to make you a bit more presentable first, and a bit less bad mannered.”

“So money?” I remind Carey. I hope that it’s something edible...

“Give me a moment to think,” she states. I expectantly glare at her with all four of my eyes and she slightly withers under it for some reason. “Okay, uh, look at it like this. If I had money, I could give it to someone and they would give me something in return. I get money by doing things for people or giving them things they want from me. Does that make sense?”

I give her a reluctant nod. “Yes. But what is money?”

“Emeral, give me a break please,” she groans. “I suck at this. Money is an idea. It doesn’t really exist. Instead we have special pieces of paper or metal that are meant to represent money like your drawing was meant to represent your family. We trade these papers and metals as money, but these days our computers let us trade money without having to actually give each other anything ourselves, it just happens. Does that make any sense, at all? Please?”

So money itself is useless, but you can get things with it. But how do you actually get it, then?

I recall my new drawing ability. “Can I make money with paper and crayons?” I ask.

Sam bursts out laughing and Carey just groans again, dropping her head in her hands. “No, Emeral. You cannot just make money like that. We get money by working at ‘jobs.’ That’s why me and Sam aren’t here for most of the day, most of the week; we’re off working. We can’t make food for ourselves so we do what we can do, get paid in money for it, and pay others with that money to get us food... and especially you, you glutton. It’s why we had you start hunting more for yourself and us in the first place.”

Ah. It all makes sense now. So the money itself doesn’t really have a use unless people agree it does, and it acts as a thing that everyone always wants. You wouldn’t need to find someone who has the snaptrap bud you want and also wants the greathorned grazer legs you have; you would only need to find one person who wants the legs, and another person who has the bud. This is a very interesting idea that I could definitely see being useful in a complicated place like where I am now.

As for back home... well, we would need to figure out something to use as money. Skywar captives would be traded for favors and given as gifts, but while they’re very valuable that value is only there so long as they’re uneaten and that value exists from eating them.

“Everyone needs money, Em,” she continues. “We need it just to live where we do; we ‘rent’ from the actual owner of this house. Lots of people rent too because owning your own house is expensive, as is having babies. So if people want to have nice things, they have to work to get money to pay for them.”

I nod along to her words; everything makes sense now. It also happens to answer a question I’ve had for a long time: how humans define a good mate. It also answers why those two humans I found near the lake were having sex but not allowing the female to be impregnated! They didn’t have the money to support babies but they still wanted to have sex despite her being fertile.

“So now do you get it?” she asks.

“Yes,” I agree. “Thank you, Carey. I like learning.”

She smiles and fishes a shining object from her pocket. “Then here. This is a spare quarter I got in Campbell River. You can have it as a keepsake.”

She does something with her fingers and flicks it up into the air towards me. Reflexively I snap it up with my jaws before realizing my actions, and then fish it out with two now-soggy earplugged claws. The two sisters give me their usual looks of disgust... which I can’t help but mirror thanks to the unappetizing taste of the coin.

“Thank you Carey!” I tuck it under a crease between two plates on my head for now. “I like food, so I like money.”

With the knowledge of these stores in mind, I think that it’s time I pay another visit to the part of Gold River which must have them. But that will have to be tonight, and after a snooze or two first.

“Right... yeah...” Carey mumbles. “Just remember that money isn’t food...”

---

Consciousness slowly returns to me after a rather lovely nap. I yawn and stretch, opening my eyes to find no light streaming in from the windows. I must have slept for a good while then, which is all the better for my plans tonight. I think I slept through dinner but that will only help things.

But first I must finish waking myself up.

I grasp for my fruit bowl in the darkness and pull out an apple. I toss it towards my jaws and snap them shut over the crunchy treat before beginning to chew and enjoy the juices gushing out over my tongue. I swallow, grab another two I quickly get to savoring and--with my snack finished--uncurl from my mattress to leave.

A light glows through the gap under the door so Sam must still be awake. I leave my room and find her door open as the source of the light. Creeping over I find her at her computer with her ear things on as usual, completely oblivious to my entrance. A tiny unfed instinct in the back of my mind lets me know that she would make for a fast and silent meal, but I squash the thought.

She still doesn’t notice me even though I’m right behind her. Her eyes have a rather wide field of view and she should have been able to see me enter so she must be completely hyper-focused on whatever she’s doing.

From this close I can hear a multitude of sounds coming from her headset. Her keyboard and mouse are a storm of clacking and clicking as she manipulates the screen’s events. On it is a mishmash of colors and patterns that I can’t particularly make any sense of. I focus on trying to recognize and establish what exactly is going on and finally settle on some semblance of what is being depicted.

The ‘view’ is from high in the air! Perhaps from an aerial vehicle? Or is it just there to better see what is being shown? On the ground are large static objects and smaller moving ones, all on a strange and unreal landscape. The view pans away from the area she kept looking at and the small objects follow as she clicks, clearly ordering them around.

She goes back to her actions around the large objects--which are very strange structures, I think--and only returns to her small ones when something flashes on a small square in the monitor’s corner. She clicks again on the screen and the view changes to what must be the site of the flash.

Different objects are revealed to be doing things near hers, which are similarly acting. One by one they begin dropping and I quickly realize that they are somehow destroying each other, as they’re falling apart or exploding into red--they’re creatures and vehicles. Soldiers. An army.

This must be one of those computer games which had been mentioned, meant for expression. She is leading a pack into battle and giving them orders with extreme haste which they instantly follow perfectly. This army is a well-drilled team of warriors who swiftly destroy their smaller enemy and take minimal losses in the doing. Perhaps I was too hasty to judge her people as weaklings if this is the sort of thing that they do for enjoyment.

My turn!

I grab her rolling chair and push it aside. Sam jumps and nearly falls out of it as I take her place, laying a hand on the keyboard and taking the mouse from her flailing hand. I’ll have to do without the headset as there’s no point trying to get it to fit on my far larger head.

“Emeral! What the hell?” she blurts. I ignore her and return to studying this ‘game’ with a more hands-on approach. With what I learned in my previous experiments with computers and my new tipped claws it should be far easier to use this thing.

Click click click. I order around whatever it was that was actively being told what to do, the thing moving and shifting to accommodate. Focusing my eyes on the tiny little pointer I move it over to one of the structures and click again. The creature moves over to it. I click again with the other button and instead it appears as if I am now ordering the entire building what to do.

The flashing happens again and Sam tries to regain control in vain. I do as she did and click on the box where the flashing is coming from and find her army attacking some sort of other collection of structures and entities, these like nothing I’ve seen before.

“Damnit, Emeral! Give it here!” she demands. I wonder if Mother would like this game? She leads packs and armies, though not for simple fun.

So: one of these clicks makes the ordered thing move and the other changes what I’m ordering. I click on and one-by-one tell my soldiers to focus on specific enemies but there are too many and I’m too slow in giving the orders, no matter how quickly they’re followed. The army is annihilated and the area goes dim, the enemies disappearing.

Sam impotently pounds at my side. I give her an acknowledging grunt.

Noticing the square in the square which seems to portray where I’m looking, I click to move it back to my own structures. I play around with them for a bit to see what they do but the enemy army arrives and begins to destroy everything. For some reason a string of colored text appears along with two letters: ‘GG’. This notification is unlike the rest so I have no idea what it could possibly mean.

Its previous user watches on, as much able to prevent this destruction as I am. The last structure disappears and everything goes dim as a new box with text appears in the middle, prompting a sigh.

“That was a ranked match...” she mutters.

---

“This one is for actual expression and is a lot simpler and more casual,” Sam explains from her reclaimed spot.

I’ve parked myself behind her with my arms wrapped around the chair and her belly, holding both to me possessively. My head hangs above hers to watch whatever this new game is.

A dark brown background with a regular pattern to it gives way to a bright collage of greens, browns, and blues, with other colors dripped around. I’m left wondering what exactly this is until the view shifts and I realize: it’s like a view of the world from the eyes of a being, except... everything consists of harsh angles. Even the clouds in the sky are perfectly exact corners.

My Sam approaches what is probably a very short and very angular tree and another block in the corner of her view begins to flail around as cracks consisting of squares appear on the tree’s bark. When they’ve spread enough to fill the surface the entire thing disappears, a miniature spinning version of it floating in its place. After but a moment it shoots toward the screen and a representation of it appears in one of the boxes at the bottom.

Okay, so she... took... a piece of a tree. Which is still just sort of hanging there, defying any need to hold itself upright.

A large grey box appears, itself filled with many smaller, greyer boxes. In the corner is what looks like a human just as blocky as everything else. Everything is a square or a rectangle in this game--even the squares are made up of tinier squares of color which act together to depict something larger.

The mouse pointer goes to and hovers over the bit of tree she displaced. She clicks, moves the pointer to a tiny arrangement of squares, and the wood follows. She clicks again to place it in and something just happens with it, earning her instead a different lighter-brown cube with a ‘four’ number at its corner. She moves these back into the grid--placing one in each of the four boxes--and takes out a far more detailed cube.

The entire thing closes and she looks to the ground with the block in hand, placing it down with a click.

This... appears to be about humans reshaping a world around them to their whims. I continue to watch as she takes the rest of the tree, turning it into crude brown tools which she then uses to harvest more trees and even dig up some of the ground with the speed of an elder Kin. She finds stone, takes it as well, and begins to swiftly fashion a small structure for herself.

It’s rather boring, in all honesty. I swiftly lose interest and release her, giving her hair a parting ruffle which earns an annoyed squawk. This was an interesting diversion which has served to kill most of my interest in anything related to these computers.

I have my own bit of shopping to do.

---

A/N:

This was originally all going to be a part of Chapter 44 but while I was going to make it a longer chapter, it simply got too long. As a result this one is on the shorter side. While it’s also something of a transitionary chapter, just like the last one it still contains quite a bit of substance (and lessons) for Emeral. Oh, and headaches for Carey; in Chapter 43 Sam mentioned that Emeral was difficult to live with, and uhhh... yeah, here are some examples why.