[Dave]

Yessir, yessir. Another chapter, sir!

I wrote it in hopes it could be used in a witch's brew.

Chapter 19
I wanted to savor this, the thrill of killing my own meat, but the scrab in me instantly swallowed it. It wasn’t bad, but I think it would’ve been better if it was free of rocks and it wasn’t soggy from the rain. But hey, meat is meat.
After I ate, I allowed my scrab’s natural instincts to catch up with me; I had instantly gone into fight mode when I transformed. But now, I realized that, when unthreatened, a scrab is actually a pretty gentle beast. I’m sure you’ve all heard that they’d shred you to pieces as soon as look at you, but it is only because they think everything that isn’t a female scrab is a threat to their territory. So, they fight.
Scrabs enjoy the world around them uninhibited; they’re tough and they know it. They are usually very picky about their own territory, I learned, although they do not care who they kill to gain new land. They are usually content to just patrol around their land, uninterrupted. But may Odd help anyone they caught in their land uninvited (and that’s everyone).
Anyhow, I just sort of let the scrab do my thinking for a while. I was too exhausted to do anything in my mudokon body, and at least the scrab wasn’t bothered by the rain. So instead of controlling the scrab’s motion, I dug through the vault of instinct that lay in its mind (It didn’t occur to me until later that the paramite body likely had a trove of information of his own, much like this … but I couldn’t remember there be one). Specifically, I was trying to find out why there was a pack of scrabs meeting here in the middle of a thunderstorm …

Scrabs have an ingrained need to prove who is the grandest of them all, to see who is a true champion among them.
Thus, every fifty years, scrabs gather amongst themselves to fight it out. The time and place that the scrabs meet has always been different. Scrabs always know on their own when it is time to go and challenge other scrabs, and where they have to go.
There is not only one place where scrabs meet: there’s no way that every alpha male scrab on the planet can meet in one place.
The winning scrab claims his territory from all the slain scrabs, including the land and female scrabs.

… and that kinda explained it. I was satisfied, anyhow.
I took the reins again and tried to decide what was around me. The scrab in me had wandered quite a way while I was thinking.
The scrab had the same quasi-psychic sonar I found in the paramite, so I had to piece the pictures together. I had passed through the rainstorm (literally; the rain only fell up to a certain spot, and wouldn’t go past some invisible barrier), and was now headed toward some canyon-like trench. It was void of vegetation, but full of boulders. There were things that were probably tents scattered in the far corner.
Civilization! I could rest up a bit. I decided to return to my natural body. It took about three seconds of concentration before I popped back to mudokon. I clattered down the slope and into the canyon.
I was about halfway to the tents when I realized that it wasn’t a mudokon camp. I slowed down to a jog.
I was creeping around the first tent I had seen when I noticed it.
Let me point something out to you. Have you ever noticed that when you are living with something for a very long time, you start to ignore it? Well, I had one of those things: a constant whirr-whirr-whirring sound. I had grown up hearing that sound nearly all day, every day. So I had tuned it out after a while, taking it in as part of the background of life.
So when I heard this sound again, I had suddenly realized that it had been missing. And it reminded me of things I had put out of mind when I came to Rotag and started my quest. They were things I didn’t want to think about.
But I was on a quest. And if this was a part of it, then so be it.
Seriously, though. How could I have mistaken a slig camp for a mudokon village?