Morning in the sewers is a relative term.

  There’s no sunrise, just a slow shift in the rhythm of the city above: more footsteps, more wagon-rattle, more faint clank of harbor chains filtering through the stone. The water in the channel looks the same sickly gray as ever, only now moving with a bit more purpose after the night’s flush.

  The nest wakes in layers. First fresh sentries, off to their posts. Then the foragers, stretching, shaking out fur. Then the pups, who seem to go from asleep to chewing on someone’s tail without any real in-between state.

  Jim surfaces from the bedding, yawning a tiny, squeaky yawn he will never admit to if anyone ever casts speak with animals in his vicinity. His body feels mostly okay—no new bruises, inventory still humming quietly with Batch 7 in its pocket dimension, claws intact. He gives himself a quick groom—important rat business, plus a chance to get some of the dried flood-filth out of his fur—because “wake up” now includes “scrub sewage off your face,” followed by a Constitution save against Aftertaste, then peels away from the nest toward the open tunnel.

  Time to see what the neighborhood looks like with the lights “on.”

  He follows the higher ledge along the main line, nose going full investigative journalist. The air is thick with last night’s surge: fresh silt, a bit of straw, a sad mangled shoe, and too many things he chooses not to identify. The stone above the channel is slick where the water washed up, leaving a tideline crust of dried filth.

  A new scent cuts through the background rot—grease, bread, meat. Cooked food. His stomach tightens in hopeful nostalgia. He turns toward it, following the smell upstream until a narrow side tunnel branches off the main line—more of a drain pipe than a walkway. For a human, it’s “ignore and move on.” For a rat, it’s a cozy little side street.

  Jim ducks in. The pipe slopes upward at a shallow angle, slick with condensation. Every few rat-lengths there’s a little notch in the stone where others have paused or turned around. It’s just wide enough for him to walk with whiskers brushing both sides.

  The smell grows stronger. The pipe ends in a brick grille with small diamond-shaped gaps. Beyond it is a slit of light and a kitchen. He’s directly under someone’s stove or oven. From this angle he can see the underside of flagstones, a stray potato peel, the end of a bit of dropped sausage that rolled just far enough to escape the broom.

  He edges up to the grille, tests it with a paw. Too solid to push. Instead he does the rat thing: wriggles his paw through the largest gap and snares the sausage bit. It takes some undignified yanking, but eventually it comes free with a jerk. He scurries backward down the pipe, prize clamped in his jaws.

  He drops the sausage on the tunnel ledge near the main line and takes a bite. It’s greasy, salty, and about twelve levels above stale bread in terms of quality.

  Satisfied for the moment, he keeps moving, nose low, whiskers tasting the air for the next thread of interest. The tunnel curves, and soon a different vibration reaches him first—not smell, but the faint, controlled thump of boots on stone. Lighter than dockworkers, quieter than Watch plate. Deliberate.

  Jim hugs the wall, drops his profile, and waits. A figure appears out of the darkness ahead like the dungeon has decided to spawn a humanoid encounter.

  Human, hood up, cloak in dark browns and grays that blend into the grime. Soft boots, close-fitting leather. A short sword at the hip, a dagger reversed in one hand. The other hand holds a short, shuttered lantern pointed down at the walkway, just enough light to avoid stepping in anything that will ruin the boots.

  He smells of oil, steel, sweat, and the faint, sour edge of fear-management—adrenaline riding just under the surface. There’s also a faint trace of something chemical Jim doesn’t immediately place, and under that, a whiff of chalk and rope. Guild. Whether it’s “official” Xanathar’s crew or one of the other outfits doesn’t matter to Jim. The vibe is all over him: someone who uses these tunnels like an alley, not an adventure site.

  To the thief, this is just commute.

  He moves with the kind of practiced ease that says he’s done this run a hundred times: along the higher ledge, step-step-plant, eyes flicking briefly to each junction and grate. His lantern doesn’t swing; it tracks like it’s on rails.

  Jim stays absolutely still, a small gray-brown lump on the edge where ledge meets wall. The lantern light rolls over him. For a heartbeat he’s perfectly framed: tiny black eyes, twitching nose, paws just barely lifted off the stone.

  The thief’s gaze flicks past. No reaction, no “ugh, rat”. Not even a moment of real focus. Jim is the sewer equivalent of wallpaper in the man’s world.

  He’s gone in seconds, swallowed by the next curve of the tunnel, footsteps already fading.

  Jim lets out a breath he didn’t realize he was holding. In his old life, that guy would’ve been a whole storyline—contacts, informants, side-quests. Down here, from this angle, he’s just another person using the same routes and not seeing who else lives in them.

  I could have been invisible, Jim thinks. He wouldn’t have noticed unless I was on fire.

  It’s frustrating and useful at the same time.

  He keeps moving, following the faint ghost of the thief’s boot-smell for a few paces before another scent pulls him sideways: incense, old candle smoke, polished wood, faint perfume.

  A narrow crack between stones leads not up to a drain, but out into a crawlspace under a different kind of building.

  The air changes the moment Jim noses into it—drier, cooler, less of the sewer’s wet rot and more of old wood, wax, and salt. The stonework is cleaner here, fitted tighter, like whoever built this place expected people to care what it rested on.

  He creeps forward on his belly, whiskers brushing dust, until he finds a sliver under a worn step.

  Beyond it: the edge of a tiled floor and the base of a wooden bench. The tiles are pale and scuffed, scrubbed often enough that the grout lines show. Someone has painted a faded blue wave motif along the border—dockside simple, not noble-house fancy.

  A snatch of hymn drifts down, muffled but recognizable in structure even if he can’t make out every word: sailors’ prayer music, the kind meant to be sung by tired voices and steady hands.

  This isn’t a grand temple. It feels like a dock shrine—one of those places sailors duck into before a voyage, to make an offering and ask the sea not to take them today.

  Jim listens… and the tone above makes his whiskers twitch.

  Something’s off.

  The voices carry a note of quiet agitation, the way people sound when they’re trying to keep panic from becoming public.

  A low mutter reaches him through the step:

  “…the Amulet of Sailor’s Return—gone since last night’s service. Not misplaced. Taken. Someone knew where it was kept; the undercroft door was still locked. Thieves. We can’t let word spread; the faithful are already uneasy after these storm signs.”

  Another voice answers—older, calmer, tired in that particular way long-serving clergy get, like they’ve spent decades mediating between frightened people and an indifferent sea.

  “Search the undercroft again. Timothy, go to the thief’s market and see if it is being sold there. If it’s one of the dock thieves looking for quick coin… we handle it quietly. We do not turn morning prayer into street panic.”

  A third voice, younger, tense: “But if the sailors hear the amulet’s gone—if they can’t touch it before they leave—”

  “They will still sail,” the older one says, softer now. “And they will be afraid. That is why we find it before rumor becomes truth.”

  Jim’s human brain does the math instantly.

  A blessed amulet sailors pay to touch before long voyages isn’t just religious. It’s morale. It’s commerce. It’s the kind of object that becomes a symbol whether it’s magic or not. If it goes missing when the docks are already whispering about storm signs, people start inventing problems.

  Jim freezes. Thieves. They’re already thinking human thieves—someone who could access the undercroft without being noticed by the congregation. He’s poked his nose under a place where people talk to gods, and they’re missing something valuable—something shiny, probably easy to fence if you’re quick and quiet.

  There’s something both thrilling and unnerving about it. In his old life, this would be the point in the campaign where someone rolls a Nat 1 on Stealth and the cleric gets to explain themselves to angry acolytes. In this life, the cleric is somewhere above him and he is the thing that breaks the mood if he appears.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  He pulls back carefully, not wanting to turn somebody’s morning prayer—or morning investigation—into “there’s a rat in the sanctuary.”

  He’s not far from the shrine when a different cadence drifts toward him: voices and clanking gear, less controlled, more bureaucratic. City Watch.

  The lantern-glow comes first, warm and steady, sweeping the tunnel like a lazy searchlight.

  Jim flattens himself against the wall, fur blending into damp stone, and watches the City Watch patrol round the bend.

  Two guards this time, light armor dulled by grime, each with a lantern on a long pole—hooks and mirrored hoods meant to throw light into corners and down into the channel. They’re not tense. Not hunting. Just doing the slow, bored work of making sure the undercity hasn’t grown teeth overnight.

  Their boots echo down the tunnel, and their conversation carries the way gossip always does: louder than it should be, because nobody expects an audience down here.

  “…I’m telling you, I can still taste it,” the rear guard mutters. He keeps his lantern angled down, watching footing, but his face is pinched like he’s been sucking on pennies. “Green smoke. Right out the cellar window. Like somebody lit a swamp on fire.”

  The lead guard snorts. “At least it wasn’t the purple stuff. I’ll take ‘coughing my lungs out’ over ‘seeing my dead grandmother judging me’ any day.”

  “Don’t joke,” the rear guard says, then coughs once, sharp. “Captain says it was a black market alchemist’s lair. Not licensed. Not even the Guild’s usual ‘we pretend not to see it’ setup. Just… a whole basement full of glass and bad choices.”

  Jim’s whiskers twitch.

  He stays still, letting the light skim right over him. The lead guard glances down, sees “rat,” mentally shrugs, keeps walking.

  “Started spewing into the street around third bell,” the lead guard continues. “People thought it was a fire at first. Then half the block started choking and the corner whores went green like sick lanterns. We get there, and the whole place is a cloud of smoke.”

  “Yeah,” the rear guard says, voice sour. “We kicked the door and it comes out in a wave. I thought I was going to die in a puddle outside a spice shop.”

  Lead guard chuckles. “Could be worse ways to go.”

  “We went in anyway,” the rear guard says, and now there’s that grim pride that comes with surviving something stupid. “Me, Harlan, two from the dock detail, and one of those mages the city sends when it wants to punish someone.”

  “Watchful Order type?” the lead asks.

  “Apprentice, I think. Shaking like a leaf, but she had a countercharm ready. We get down there, and it’s chaos—beakers popping, chalk circles, a whole rack of barrels with the hoops eaten half through like something’s been chewing metal.”

  Jim’s tail goes rigid for half a second, then he forces it still.

  “Wizard woman’s there,” the rear guard says, “mask on, eyes red from fumes, still trying to act like she’s in control of it. Then she sees the mage and goes pale and does that little ‘oh I’ve made a miscalculation’ face.”

  Lead guard gives a low whistle. “And?”

  “And she says something dramatic—couldn’t hear it over the coughing—then vanishes. Not runs. Not hides. Just—gone.” He snaps his fingers.

  “Of course,” the lead guard mutters. “They always have a spell for escapes”

  The rear guard lifts his pole-lantern, checks a side crack, then keeps walking. “Her accomplice wasn’t so lucky. Guy in an apron with a dagger and too much confidence. Tried to shove past us with a sack of vials like we were furniture.”

  Lead guard laughs. “Let me guess: Harlan hit him.”

  “Harlan hit him,” the rear guard confirms, with the weary satisfaction of a story going exactly how you expected. “cracked him right in the forehead with that big club he hauls around. Guy went out like a light, Sack breaks. Vials everywhere. Green smoke gets worse. Captain’s screaming to back out, mage is yelling ‘don’t breathe that,’ and Harlan’s just laughing like a maniac. That is when I said to myself, Bill, it's sewer duty for you, because that guy is going to get you killed.’”

  They pass Jim’s perch. The lead guard’s lantern beam washes over him again. Jim doesn’t move. To them, he’s not even a thought.

  “Dragged the accomplice out,” the rear guard continues. “Wizard’s gone. Basement’s still smoking. Mage says ‘do not go back in’ like that’s a thing I was thinking of doing. Captain seals the place, sends for Dungsweepers and the Order.”

  Lead guard’s tone shifts, less joking. “And the street?”

  “ total chaos, until the order showed up and sealed it off.”

  They walk on, lanterns bobbing, boots clanking softly. Their voices fade into the tunnel’s curve.

  Jim stays frozen until the light is gone and the echoes thin.

  Then he lets out a slow breath through his nose.

  Green smoke. Barrels with hoops eaten through. A wizard who teleports away, leaving an accomplice to take the fall.

  He doesn’t have proof yet that it’s the same outfit as Dock Ward Distillations—“black market lair” could be anyone in Waterdeep—but it rhymes hard enough to make his instincts itch.

  A few paces later he nearly steps on something that makes him freeze.

  A small, sodden body—gray-brown fur matted flat, eyes dull and open, tail limp in the shallow water at the edge of the channel. One of the nest’s foragers, or maybe a stray from another group. The surge last night must have caught it too far from high ground. The current carried it here and left it like discarded trash.

  Jim pauses, whiskers still. No breath, no twitch. Just another casualty of the flush. He doesn’t have words in rat for mourning, but the sight sits heavy anyway. Another reminder: the dungeon doesn’t care about long rests or clever plays. It just keeps moving.

  He pulls the body gently out of the main flow a small gesture, probably meaningless—then keeps going, ears tuned to the echoes.

  He doesn’t have to travel far before the air ahead picks up a new note: lamp oil and cheap soap, overlaid with a faint ozone prickle of magic. Under that, the sour tang of nervous sweat.

  He slows, hugs the wall, ears forward.

  Around the next bend, the tunnel widens just enough to make room for a small drama.

  A young human is crouched by a crack low on the wall peering into it with a wand of light held in one hand. The wand’s tip glows a steady pale yellow, throwing a circle of illumination over the stone. His other hand grips a small wire cage.

  There are three rats inside. Sewer rats, like Jim: gray-brown, hunched, eyes too-bright in the wand light. They’re pressed against the back of the cage, whiskers quivering. One has a notch in its ear; another’s tail is kinked near the end.

  The human is muttering under his breath in that special tone reserved for chores that technically count as “wizard training” but feel like hazing.

  “…‘Go catch me specimens,’ he says,” the apprentice grumbles. “‘They have to be local,’ he says. ‘Dock Ward rats show more interesting mutations.’ ‘Don’t come back with street vermin.’ Gods, I’m going to smell like this for a week…”

  He lifts the cage slightly, scowling at its occupants.

  “You lot could at least look grateful,” he tells them. One of the rats hisses softly. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

  He sets the cage down beside him with a clink, then leans closer to the wall crack, wand-tip practically jammed into it, trying to see if anything is hiding just out of reach.

  Jim is maybe ten rat-lengths away, half in shadow, half in the spill of yellow light.

  The apprentice shifts, sweeping the wand’s glow across the floor and the immediate area around the hole. For a moment the light washes over Jim, picking him out in sharp chiaroscuro: whiskers, eyes, tense little body.

  The kid’s gaze skims right past.

  In his head, Jim can practically hear the system saying, You are successfully blending into “generic sewer terrain.”

  The human’s attention returns to the crack.

  “Come on,” the apprentice mutters, tapping the wand against the stone near the crack. “Master Rulath wants a dozen for this ‘behavioral series.’ You think I want to be down here again tomorrow?”

  He pulls a small twist of something from a pocket—crumbly, pungent—and crumbles it near the crack.

  “Smell that, you little disease vectors,” he says. “Free meal, then off to the nice, warm lab where you help advance the cause of arcane knowledge and probably explode.”

  The caged rats bunch closer together, whiskers trembling. One of them, the notched-eared one, stares at Jim through the bars for a long, dark moment.

  Jim stays absolutely still.

  He doesn’t need to be told twice what happens if you get too close to a wizard’s plans. He’s literally carrying one of those plans in his inventory right now.

  The apprentice sighs, sits back on his heels, and waits, wand resting across his knees, light still glowing. The cage rattles once as one of the prisoners tests a bar with their teeth.

  “Yeah, yeah,” the kid says. “You’re all very scary.”

  Jim backs away as slowly as his nerves will allow, keeping his profile low, letting the darkness swallow him one paw step at a time.

  No stun wands. No new cage. No becoming “Specimen Four” in a lab report.

  When he’s around the curve again and the yellow light is just a faint glow, Jim finally lets out the breath he’s been holding and thinks, dryly:

  Add “kid with rat-cage” to the random encounter table. Fantastic.

  Then he keeps moving, ears tuned to the echoes, very sure now that his new life sits at the intersection of “ignored background noise” and “highly collectible resource,” and that both of those can get him killed in interesting ways.

  Jim slips back into the nest chamber and stops so hard his paws skid on damp stone.

  The nest is still there—scattered in the rubble where it was dragged by the flood. Bedding, shredded cloth, chewed rope… all there.

  But the chamber is quiet.

  No pups. No sentries. No little fights over crumbs.

  Just water gurgling past and the cold, echoing emptiness of a place everyone left at once.

  Jim lowers his head and lets his nose do what it does best.

  At first it’s only the expected: a thick, fresh river of rat scent flowing out of the chamber—dozens of bodies, recent panic, the hot stink of “move now.”

  Then he catches the other layer and his body goes rigid.

  Not a different species, exactly. Not cat or human. It’s rat-scent with a wrong smell to it: too clean in places, carrying traces of leather oil and metal and soap under the fur. Like a rat that has been… handled by humans.

  Wererat.

  He tracks the braid of scent across the stone and it doesn’t read like violence. No blood spikes. No sharp terror-flash of “predator grabbed me.” This isn’t a raid.

  It reads like a current—rats moving because something in their instincts told them the route was safe. Like a flock following a lead bird.

  And wererats are exactly the kind of creature that can do that.

  He pads to the low side pipe and pauses at the mouth.

  There are scuff marks, lots of small bodies funneling through a bottleneck, plus occasional heavier pawfalls that pressed grit into the stone.

  Dire rats. Big ones. The kind that anchor a crowd: living walls that keep the smaller ones moving the right direction.

  Jim leans closer and the scent resolves into a clearer story:

  Food scent layered into the trail—crumbs, rendered fat, something smoky. Somebody baited this route on purpose.

  Calm scent too, in a weird way—less panic as the trail goes into the pipe, more “follow, follow, follow.” The shape of fear changes from “we’re fleeing” to “we’re relocating.”

  Dominance markers placed like signposts: not random rat territory, but deliberate, spaced, confident. This is what a wererat does when it claims a tunnel.

  Down the pipe, the air tastes like a company.

  Not just a few wererats passing through. A whole moving ecosystem: ordinary rats, dire rats, and the wererat “shepherds” threading through them—rat minds responding to rat cues, because the leaders can literally speak that language.

  Jim’s whiskers twitch.

  So the nest didn’t get kidnapped, not in the crude sense.

  Offered a safer route. Offered protection from floods and slime and cats. Possibly offered regular food and warmer dens—things a sewer colony would trade almost anything for.

  And the price is obvious if you’ve ever played the setting from the underworld side:

  Protection means belonging.

  Belonging means owing.

  Jim stands at the mouth of the pipe, staring into the dark, and feels the implications settle into his gut like a cold stone.

  His nest didn’t vanish.

  It got folded into someone else’s territory—with wererats at the center of it, the kind of power that doesn’t need chains because it can move a crowd with scent and instinct.

  He has the trail. He has the direction.

  Now he has a new question that matters more than “where did they go”:

  Was it a conscription… or a recruitment drive?