Andy was headbutting a grub out of a rotting log when he heard the footstep.

  Not felt it. Heard it. His rudimentary auditory system picked up the compression wave of something heavy striking the ground. Close. Getting closer. Heavier than anything that had walked past this log before.

  He froze. The grub, half-extracted from its burrow and dangling from the tip of his horn like a particularly unappetizing ornament, wiggled in the air between Andy's face and the log. His eyes, blurry but functional, oriented toward the source of the sound and resolved a shape that made his entire body go rigid with a recognition so deep, so instantaneous, so fundamentally human that it bypassed every intervening layer of amphibian biology and hit the consciousness underneath with the force of a truck at an intersection where the signal was green.

  A person.

  A person.

  Two legs. Two arms. Upright posture. Features arranged in the configuration that Andy's brain, despite three tiers of non-human existence, still recognized as "person." They wore clothing (clothing! Fabric! Artifacts of a culture that made things!), rough-woven and practical. They carried a fishing rod. A fishing rod meant society, and Andy had been living in their fishing hole his entire aquatic existence without knowing it.

  Hands.

  Andy stared at the hands with the desperate focus of a man in a desert staring at water. Five fingers on each. Articulated. Dexterous. Capable of all the thousand small manipulations he had not performed since dying. The person shifted their grip on the fishing rod and the fingers moved, flexed, adjusted with casual, thoughtless competence, and the sheer mundane miracle of it made something inside Andy's amphibian chest ache with a feeling his frog body was not equipped to process.

  He missed being a person.

  He had known, abstractly, since his first moments as a cell. But knowing it and seeing it were different animals (a phrase that landed differently when you were, yourself, a different animal). Seeing a real person made the loss concrete. The destination had been theoretical. Now he was seeing it. And the gap between a nine-centimeter frog with a grub on his horn and a person with hands and a voice and a place in the world had never felt wider.

  The person hadn't noticed him yet. From their perspective, the shoreline was rocks and moss and the occasional amphibian. Part of the scenery.

  Then the grub on Andy's horn wiggled, and the person's gaze dropped to the log, and they saw him.

  The reaction was immediate and, from Andy's perspective, mortifying. The person's eyes widened. They leaned closer. Their mouth moved, producing sounds too complex for Andy to decode. Speech. The person was speaking, and the sound of a human voice lit up regions of his consciousness that had been dormant since he died.

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  The person reached for him.

  Not with malice. With curiosity. The careful "let me pick that up" gesture that Andy had performed a thousand times at the vet clinic with patients who were scared and small and did not understand that the giant meant no harm.

  He was the patient now. The small, scared creature on the log. And the giant reaching for him had no idea that the small scared creature had a human consciousness, a rare horn chain, a complicated relationship with the concept of virginity, and a very strong preference for not being put in a jar.

  Andy bolted.

  The frog body was good at bolting. Whatever compromises had been made in the standing department had been compensated for in the explosive-leap department. His hind legs contracted and launched him four body-lengths in a single bound, depositing him in a patch of tall moss.

  The person made a surprised sound, then circled the log, trying to locate where the unusual frog had gone. Because of course the horn was glowing. Of course it was. His stealth-defeating, attention-grabbing, can't-turn-it-off horn, lighting up the moss like a beacon. He might as well have been carrying a sign that said UNUSUAL SPECIMEN, PLEASE COLLECT.

  He leaped again. And again. Bouncing through the moss with the panicked energy of a frog that really, really did not want to be picked up, because being picked up meant being examined, and being examined meant being a specimen, and Andy was not a thing. He was a person inside a frog and he refused to be collected.

  The person pursued for a few minutes, then gave up with a sound that was either resignation or amusement. The footsteps retreated. The person resumed fishing.

  Andy sat in the moss, breathing hard, his horn poking up through the fronds like a periscope, and processed what had just happened.

  This world had people. People with language and clothing and tools and the capacity to look at a frog and think "huh, that's interesting."

  Andy wanted what they had. He wanted it with a ferocity that surprised him. He didn't want the horn, or the mythic creature, or the rare trait chain. He wanted to stand in a room and say "I'm Andy Snodgrass" and have someone hear it and understand it and say "nice to meet you, Andy," and have the interaction be normal, unremarkable, the most basic and miraculous thing in the world.

  The unicorn path was the path. Mythic creatures sat at the top of the evolutionary tree. If the fisherman existed at whatever tier humanoids occupied, mythic creatures existed above that. More complex. More capable. More likely to include speech and hands and the ability to be recognized as a someone instead of a something.

  Every path he'd taken, every tier he'd climbed, came back to his weird, glowing, phallic, can't-turn-it-off, scares-away-other-frogs, nearly-got-him-collected-by-a-fisherman horn.

  [XP: 94/500]

  Andy watched the fisherman from behind the moss, nine centimeters of determination and longing and a glowing horn that would not, no matter how inconvenient, stop pointing the way forward.

  The fisherman caught a fish. Pulled it from the water. Examined it. Kept it.

  Andy thought: that fish was in the lake with me. That fish and I were neighbors. The difference between me and the fish is that I know what hands are and the fish doesn't, and that knowledge is either the greatest advantage or the greatest cruelty the System has given me.

  The fisherman fished. The frog sat in the moss and wanted and resolved, with every cell of his nine-centimeter body, to become something that could look a person in the eye. Something that could say hello. Something that could, someday, walk up to someone and introduce itself without the other party screaming or reaching for a jar.

  Eventually. Four hundred and six XP stood between him and the next evolution, and Andy Snodgrass, the most determined horny frog in the history of reincarnation, was going to get there.

  He turned away from the fisherman and began the slow, four-legged walk back to his territory.

  There was hunting to do. Four hundred and six XP worth of bugs to headbutt.

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