Sam slowly woke, his mind and body feeling very fatigued. The first thing he realized upon waking was that he felt very wet. Remembering who he had fallen asleep with, and what age she was, made him have an idea of what this was. Feeling disgusted he immediately attempted to get up to go and wash himself. Once he attempted to move, though, he noticed one very scary thing.

  'I can't feel my legs! Or my arms!? Wh-what's happening?' Slightly panicking at his repeatedly failed attempts to feel his appendages, Sam started struggling around. It escaped his notice that he could feel significantly more of his torso than he was used to. After wiggling uselessly for a while, Sam felt something rip above his head, and suddenly a bright light flooded his vision. Confused, scared, and now blinded as well, Sam only struggled harder until his head burst out of the wetness he felt. What he saw once his vision acclimated to the light took his breath away.

  A neverending sky spread out before him, filled with light fluffy clouds and below it, an endless ocean. Sam had completely forgotten his fear, staring out into the beautiful sight that stretched before him. Never before had he seen something as breathtaking as the view in front of him. He sat there, dumbfounded, for what felt like hours before a small sound of movement behind him startled him out of his reverance. Quickly turning around, he caught sight of a black twisting shape - make that, shapes. In front of him was a pile of black snakes. Each one was seemingly the same height as Sam.

  Considering his height of nearly six feet, they were big ass snakes.

  Sam, startled at the veritable monsters before him, backpeddled towards the cliffs edge. As soon as he was at what he deemed an okay distance from the snakes, Sam turned around and ran as fast as he could away from the giant snakes of doom.

  A stupid idea, he realised, as he fell over the edge of the cliff he woke up next to. Blind terror filled his mind as he fell, unable to catch his breath to scream, he hit the ground.

  ~~~

  Blinking his eyes, Sam slowly regained conciousness. He looked around and noticed he was in a clearing, surounded on all sides by trees, with the cliff to his back. He looked at about half the clearing before remembering how he fell unconconcious in the first place, and so he quickly tried to stand.

  An intense pain quickly made itself apparent. Gritting his teeth in pain, he looked to where the pin was coming from.

  'Damn, I must have hit my leg when, I... fell...' Upon turning towards his lower body, Sam saw the same black shiny body which filed him with terror before he fell. Again, the sight of them filled his mind with fear, but for an entirely different reason. There was a wound on the scales, a wound he could feel.

  Sam quickly looked around, and spotting a large pond struggled over to it's side. Staring down into the water, a head nearly identical to the snakes he's seen before stared back at him. After staring at his reflection for a few minutes, Sam slowly started shaking his head in denial, he backed away from the pond. For hours, he sat there shaking his head, refusing to acknowledge his current situation. The sky grew dark and exhaustion set in for Sam, bringing him once again into the realm of unconciousness.

  He would wake, hours later, and find it was not a dream like he had so hoped.

  ~~~

  Three days.

  It had taken Sam three days to finally accept what he was going through, and even then he was on the verge of a breakdown at every given moment. The only reason it didn't take longer was because he was starving, and if he continued much longer without food he might be too weak to do anything but lie there and die. Upon finding out how to wal-slither around just a little bit, Sam moved towards the pond to hydrate. Ignoring his reflection, he thought a bit about his plan of action as he drank.

  'I have no idea how to move in this body like I was up top the cliff, and I'm not too sure what I can or can't eat. I guess bugs? No, ew. Maybe I could somehow catch a smal animal? No... bugs it is then. Now, where could I find bugs easily?' Spotting a rotting log at the edge of the clearing he had called his home for the past three days, a scene from a movie popped into his head. 'Good thing I watched Lion King a lot as a child!'

  He slithered rather clumsily towards the aforementioned log. Not easy with a healing gash in his side. After a few embarrasing minutes of figuring out how to move more than an inch at a time without hurting himself, Sam reached the log and found it was much too big for him to move on his own. Not much of a surprise; if the tree's sizes are the same here as they are at home, he was about ten inches long. Luckily though: the log was hollow. And what did he find inside? Bugs! A large number of beetles, worms, and other creepy crawlies filled the log. Picking a dull looking beetle close to him as his, Sam slowly moved closer. Soon he was within reach of the beetle, and it seemed the beetle wasn't aware of the cruel fate that was about to befall it. Sam struck, and he was able to get the beetle unawares. After a second of deliberation, he swallowed it down.

  A fierce pain struck him, and a flood of information buffeted his mind until for the third in the past week, he passed out.

  ~~~

  Once again, Sam slowly awoke.

  'This whole passing out thing is getting old quick.' Sam thought to himself in irritation. He was by and far getting tired of having himself fall completely helpless with no warning. He was lucky enough to have not been eaten at this point, and he would like to keep it that way.

  Grumbling to himself as he once more opened his eyes, he was startled to see something other than the inside of a rotting log like he was expecting. Hovering in the air, in front of him, were five blue windows.

  Sam spent a few minutes looking over the windows, before thinking back to the time when he had just falen asleep, He remembered the dream with perfect clarity. During it, he atttributed it to being just that; a dream. Now that he's been in this body for almost four days, feeling the wound on his side for most of, how could he not know this is real? Thinking back to just before he fell asleep, he hoped that Little Raven and his mum were both going to be okay without him. Thinking of them, his eyes teared up. He didn't blame the god he spoke to for taking him away from them, but he was angry that he may never see them again.

  Sam shook his head to get him out of his funk. 'It won't do any good to cry about what's already gone. I can only hope they can move on too. Mom, Raven, I love you...' Moving back to the windows, he noticed that God had said these blue windows were like the systems in the stories Sam would sometimes read. Thinking of that, he made a gesture with his nose to dismiss the windows he had already read. Continuing on, he read the windows about the skill.

  Once finished, he felt dumbfounded. He could hypnotize dumb creatures? Wouldn't most ordinary animals be pretty dumb? After having these thought, he realized the window said that him gaining the beetles skill was a result of his own. And remembering God mentioning it in his message, he grew curios.

  "Status." Sam said aloud; something that he wasn't sure was possible as he was a snake, but he heard his voice as his and he assumed that's what mattered. He was proven correct as a blue window popped into existence in front of his eyes.

  Reading the window for a bit, Sam realized that the God was correct in saying the ability was cliche, but it didn't change the fact that it would be immensely useful in the future. Disregarding that for the moment, Sam was more intersted in the SP counter at the bottom of the status plate. Thinking that there may be a help option, Sam thought to himself, 'SP help.' And sure enough, another square came into existence.

  Sam's eyes widened: gain skills? Learning an entirely new thing just like that? Awesome!

  Sam was impatient to see what he may be able to get with his three SP, and so thinking on what the command might be, he chanted a few things.

  "Spend SP."

  "SP store."

  "Use Skill Points."

  "Skill List."

  At his last words, he was glad to see another window come to him. It was a list labeled as Skill List, matching the activation command, and it was a very expansive one: it would take hours to search through all of these! Luckily, though, he was only interested in ones with the cost below three SP. Finding a small tab below the window name, labelled as "Filter" Sam quickly made the maximum cost equal to the SP in his posession before getting to the browsing. After a bit of diliberation, Sam had narrowed it down to between two skills:

  The second one was indeed pretty useless, especially for most humans (which Sam assumed was the majority of beings able to understand the skill description) seeing as they didn't have the best sense of smell. But Sam decided to pick this one anyway, as right now he was just a small defensless snake begging to be eaten by a predator. With this skill, he could perfectly hide his scent from all other creatures. He also had some... other ideas for later down the road. But for right now, this skill would help ensure his survival much more than something he can't even use yet. Upon getting the skill, he eliminated his scent. After he had done so, Sam just rested his head, processing the day. Apparently he had been here six days... he must have been out for two after falling from the cliff, it's a miracle he didn't die in his sleep.

  Feeling exhaustion set in from all that's happened, Sam first found a nice spot in his log to rest before closing his eyes and letting sleep take him