But first find out: can we burp at will?
Hmm. Burping. A release of air from your stomach. You wonder if you could trigger such a thing. Well, to do that you'd need some air in your stomach to release. And to get air in your stomach... You start swallowing air and suddenly there's the feeling of a burp coming. But there's no burn, less unpleasantness and more... a weird feeling. You flex your abdomen and throat and sure enough a burp does come out, though it is less potent than the one produced naturally. Still, this proves you can burp at will. You think you could even speak while burping. You have no idea why you'd want to do that, but it's definitely a possibility. Maybe once you know what the alphabet is.
Try to find some small creature to eat. Not a metal one, something made of meat.
+1 better to sate our hunger and get a bit bigger before taking on bigger prey.
You head deeper into the tunnel, hoping you'll come across something you can hunt and eat. You keep going, choosing a direction at random every time you come across a junction, but making sure you remember the path you took so you can find your way home.
You start hearing a distant noise unlike the usual rumbling machines that populate these tunnels or the human echoes coming from tunnel exits. It is the sound of metal being struck, of tumbling. As you get closer you start smelling a horrible stench, you don't know what it is but it is immensely repulsive. Yet curiosity pushes you towards it. You suddenly hear a commotion, something running, then falling to the ground with a thud. This could be prey! Finally! You run towards the noise and come face to face with another hunter, one that appears to have been more successful than you.
The creature is a quadruped, much smaller than you. It has purple fur, pointy ears that seem to move independently to track noises, a huge mouth that seems to take up most of its head and vertical slit-pupil eyes very much like yours, except they're a light green color. It was in the process of eating a small feathery quadruped green thing it had caught, but is now looking at you. You take an experimental step forward. The creature lowers its ears and hisses. You bend your legs, trying to judge the distance you need to leap. Then you pounce, but immediately the creature starts running sideways. You extend your foreleg to reach it but it's already too far away. It keeps running, not pausing for one second. By the time you've landed, turned around and caught sight of it again, it's already disappearing inside a small hole too narrow for you to fit in. You chase it regardless and use your claws to dig at the hole, but the effort is futile. You slam your forelegs on the ground and roar. Damn it!
Frustrated, you check out the dead thing it left behind. This little half-eaten thing isn't enough to fill your empty stomach, it's even smaller than the fake-meat you usually eat. And while that furry thing looks more filling and you're certain you could kill it in a straight fight, it's much faster than the bipeds and it can hide a lot better. You should either keep searching for something better or change tactics. You wonder how that furry thing caught its prey.
You keep following the stench until it leads you to a tunnel exit. The tunnel exit is near the ceiling of a metal room that is filled with all sorts of junk and rotten, decomposing things, islands of trash rising out of a murky liquid. The only illumination is provided by dim red lights above a door half-buried in trash. As you watch, you hear something tumbling and a second later a dented box comes out of a small metal shaft and joins the trash heap below it. You can see more such shafts above the other heaps of trash. Liquid is slowly dripping out of one of them, creating a constant noise as the drops hit the things below it.
This place doesn't smell like anything you'd want to eat. And yet there might be some food buried in all that trash. Or maybe some of those small feathery creatures. Or maybe some credits. You could search around and hope you come across something good.
Age: a few weeks (hatchling)
Size: about the size of a large dog
Status: hungry
Health: fine
Weapons: claws and teeth
Armor: soft scales
Abilities:
- Glide: You can glide in order to survive falls and quickly move great distances, though your wings are too weak to allow you true flight. However you can use favorable winds and updrafts to increase your glide time.
- Rudimentary Human Language: You are able to understand human language to a very basic degree. You won't understand everything though and there will likely be misunderstandings. You can also attempt to speak, but you can only form simple, short sentences and it's very hard for others to understand you.