Ooh, my head. It's pounding… Huh. I'm hurting… I guess that means I'm still alive. I wasn't expecting that.
I open my eyes and sit up… then lay right back down. OK. I am not ready to get up yet. So… the ceiling that shouldn't exist. I should only be five feet or so underground, this building didn’t show up in the satellite images, and that ceiling is thirty feet up. This isn’t possible. Let's examine that. Lots of concentric circles, with runes I can't interpret between each set. And they're… glowing faintly blue? Huh. I should get a picture of this… where's my camera… I take a few deep breaths, and risk sitting up again… which is when I notice I'm in a ten foot crater in the ground. And I'm naked now. Great. I ignore the pounding in my head as I take stock… ten toes… eight fingers… two thumbs… same scrawny arms and legs, same nearly hairless chest… same white to tan transition at my wrists and neck where I go from “regularly exposed” to “clothes cover me ninety-nine percent of the time"… same generous six inch rod and sack… okay, physically I'm intact. I don't see my stuff, though.
Pushing through the pain, I get up, climb out of the crater, and take a look around… oh, there's half my phone, wedged in a crack in a wall. My camera… ah, a small break in the pattern in the ceiling. Flashlight… opposite wall to the phone. Also, the pink lady is gone. I'm not sure if that's good or bad.
I walk over to the flashlight first, wrap my hands around it, and try to pull it free. Emphasis on “try”: It doesn't even wiggle. Inspecting it up close, it wouldn't work anyway. It's embedded a good six inches into the stone, there's no way I'm digging that out, and the batteries looks like they burst.
“What happened here?” I sigh in frustration.
“You ate me, then expelled the energy your body couldn't contain,” I didn't hear much of her, bit I recognize that voice.
I look around, but I'm alone. “Where are you?”
The voice promptly returns, “I'm inside you, because you ate me.” She seems… frustrated? Resigned?
… and she apparently responds to every question I ask and instruction I give. “Explain, please.”
I can hear her sigh… and now that I'm paying attention, I realize I'm not hearing her with my ears. “I tried to eat your soul and take over your body, because I needed a body to leave this place. But you have this weird cleft in your soul. There's the you that’s rational, logical, and civilized. The part of you that thinks, the part that recognizes yourself.”
So… my consciousness? I let her continue, “But that’s not all of you. There's also the you that is feral. The part that eats, that fights, that mates. The part that's always alert, looking for the thing that's out of place.”
My subconscious, maybe? She doesn't seem like she's done… and how do I know that? “I didn't see that part. I was expecting an easy meal, and you surrounded me and ate me. I'm a part of you now, subservient to your will, and I won't be free until your mutant soul passes out of the mortal planes for good. Then I'll finally be free to find a body. The damage to the room is because you simply could not contain my power, and threw away what you couldn't hold so it wouldn't kill you.”
And now she's done. And I know because she's part of me now, an extra mental limb. Huh. “What’s with my headache?”
“That's from the power you could barely contain. The savage you is quite greedy. The pain won't go away until you shape the power, which we will need to do anyway to survive where this place lets out.” Wait…
“I thought you wanted me dead so you'd be free?” Something seems off….
I get a chuckle back, “That is what it will take to free me, yes, but this is a soul deep subservience. I don't ‘want’ for myself, for the most part I want what you want, and you want to live, and desperately… or at least the savage part of your mutant unbalanced soul does. So yes, I am going to tell you how to focus to shape the power you took from me and build it into you properly, and I am going to tell you what's on the other side of that hallway so you can try to prepare. Because we want to live. Just like I answer any question you put to me.”
If she was breathing to speak, she'd take a breath here, “And the answer is nothing, for leagues and leagues and leagues. Or…” she pauses, “Seems I can access some of your knowledge… the exit is… in orbit around a star. Yes… distant orbit, like… Neptune? OK, this is strange.” You’re telling me? “With nothing to breathe, and nothing to stand on. It used to go somewhere, but… not anymore. An old enemy of mine destroyed the anchor on that side to trap me here.”
That gives me pause, “And… how do I deal with that?”
Is she smiling? I think she's smiling, so she probably is, “You shape the power that is now yours into yourself. It requires a strong familiarity with a mythos, and lucky for you…”
I game, “My gaming group's house rules. The games we play, and the build I use…” I think I'm starting to get it.
I suppose If she's part of me now, I'm getting a response when I talk to myself… “Correct,” she tells me, “Your sense of that mythos, those rules, are more than strong enough to work … much more… so you can shape power into yourself based on them: Starting at zero, at least. And as things perish around you, my … digestion, which is now yours… will gather more for you to layer on yourself. You'll know it's time when you feel full… like now.”
Ugh. “This would be simpler if I had my laptop; I’m always using…” I trail off, because I see my laptop… sort of. It’s… not quite there? I know it’s there, and I can see it perfectly, but it also doesn’t block my vision of what’s behind it… or cast a shadow, and it's just kind of floating there in the air. “How…?” I’m having some trouble phrasing what I want to say…
… but the pink lady is in my mind. Part of it, now, so she understands anyway. “We’re imagining things. It’s not there, and all it’s hooked into is your memories of the games. Which, as it’s bypassing the steps in the weaker part of your soul,” I resent that … but it’s probably right, given that someone who thought they could eat my soul got eaten, instead… “means it has perfect recollection of every page you’ve seen.”
And I was always very obsessive about looking up new compatible stuff as they came out… or at least got published online in various places. Good. “So what are my limits?”
She hums a bit before answering, “They’re… mostly imposed by your familiarity with your Mythos. It both empowers and limits it, because it sets the form of your power, and controls what you’ll be able to pick. On a more fundamental level, you also need spilled life force to make the structures involved…”
That gives me pause, “You mean I need to kill people for power?” I really don’t want to be a mass murderer.
She chuckles, “Death is required… but no, not exactly. I was - and now, we are - an omnivore. We’re not limited to sentient creatures: Anything with some form of life force will work - be it a plant, bug, animal, zombie, construct, dragon, or whatever…"
Wait… “Zombies, constructs, and dragons? They’re real?”
She addresses the aside, “Within certain definitions of real; they exist in various layers of reality, yes, one of which is on the other side of this transition chamber, yes.” And then continues, “… and we don’t necessarily need to kill things ourselves. At the far end of pacifism, bugs dying nearby as they eat each other will do, as will grass being being chomped by cows or even the natural cycle of bacteria on our skin… but that kind of source will take a very long time for us to progress. If you’re willing to hunt down deer or something it’ll go a bit faster…. However, also yes. Powerful life forces are more ‘nutritious’, and those tend to have thinking souls attached. And of course, if we’re the focus of the slain, their energy is easier to ‘catch’ for us to eat. And I’m very efficient; we’ll only ‘hunt’ if you choose to do so. We don’t need to worry about ‘starving’ at all.”
Great… so I don’t need to become a serial killer, but there’s some pretty solid pressure to do so… wonderful. But I suppose there’s always something I want that I don’t have, a reason to steal and kill that I’ve ignored so far… I’m sure I can stay civilized. “So what’s my starting level?”
“We’re starting at first…”
Ooh, my head. It's pounding… Huh. I'm hurting… I guess that means I'm still alive. I wasn't expecting that.
I open my eyes and sit up… then lay right back down. OK. I am not ready to get up yet. So… the ceiling that shouldn't exist. I should only be five feet or so underground, this building didn’t show up in the satellite images, and that ceiling is thirty feet up. This isn’t possible. Let's examine that. Lots of concentric circles, with runes I can't interpret between each set. And they're… glowing faintly blue? Huh. I should get a picture of this… where's my camera… I take a few deep breaths, and risk sitting up again… which is when I notice I'm in a ten foot crater in the ground. And I'm naked now. Great. I ignore the pounding in my head as I take stock… ten toes… eight fingers… two thumbs… same scrawny arms and legs, same nearly hairless chest… same white to tan transition at my wrists and neck where I go from “regularly exposed” to “clothes cover me ninety-nine percent of the time"… same generous six inch rod and sack… okay, physically I'm intact. I don't see my stuff, though.
Pushing through the pain, I get up, climb out of the crater, and take a look around… oh, there's half my phone, wedged in a crack in a wall. My camera… ah, a small break in the pattern in the ceiling. Flashlight… opposite wall to the phone. Also, the pink lady is gone. I'm not sure if that's good or bad.
I walk over to the flashlight first, wrap my hands around it, and try to pull it free. Emphasis on “try”: It doesn't even wiggle. Inspecting it up close, it wouldn't work anyway. It's embedded a good six inches into the stone, there's no way I'm digging that out, and the batteries looks like they burst.
“What happened here?” I sigh in frustration.
“You ate me, then expelled the energy your body couldn't contain,” I didn't hear much of her, bit I recognize that voice.
I look around, but I'm alone. “Where are you?”
The voice promptly returns, “I'm inside you, because you ate me.” She seems… frustrated? Resigned?
… and she apparently responds to every question I ask and instruction I give. “Explain, please.”
I can hear her sigh… and now that I'm paying attention, I realize I'm not hearing her with my ears. “I tried to eat your soul and take over your body, because I needed a body to leave this place. But you have this weird cleft in your soul. There's the you that’s rational, logical, and civilized. The part of you that thinks, the part that recognizes yourself.”
So… my consciousness? I let her continue, “But that’s not all of you. There's also the you that is feral. The part that eats, that fights, that mates. The part that's always alert, looking for the thing that's out of place.”
My subconscious, maybe? She doesn't seem like she's done… and how do I know that? “I didn't see that part. I was expecting an easy meal, and you surrounded me and ate me. I'm a part of you now, subservient to your will, and I won't be free until your mutant soul passes out of the mortal planes for good. Then I'll finally be free to find a body. The damage to the room is because you simply could not contain my power, and threw away what you couldn't hold so it wouldn't kill you.”
And now she's done. And I know because she's part of me now, an extra mental limb. Huh. “What’s with my headache?”
“That's from the power you could barely contain. The savage you is quite greedy. The pain won't go away until you shape the power, which we will need to do anyway to survive where this place lets out.” Wait…
“I thought you wanted me dead so you'd be free?” Something seems off….
I get a chuckle back, “That is what it will take to free me, yes, but this is a soul deep subservience. I don't ‘want’ for myself, for the most part I want what you want, and you want to live, and desperately… or at least the savage part of your mutant unbalanced soul does. So yes, I am going to tell you how to focus to shape the power you took from me and build it into you properly, and I am going to tell you what's on the other side of that hallway so you can try to prepare. Because we want to live. Just like I answer any question you put to me.”
If she was breathing to speak, she'd take a breath here, “And the answer is nothing, for leagues and leagues and leagues. Or…” she pauses, “Seems I can access some of your knowledge… the exit is… in orbit around a star. Yes… distant orbit, like… Neptune? OK, this is strange.” You’re telling me? “With nothing to breathe, and nothing to stand on. It used to go somewhere, but… not anymore. An old enemy of mine destroyed the anchor on that side to trap me here.”
That gives me pause, “And… how do I deal with that?”
Is she smiling? I think she's smiling, so she probably is, “You shape the power that is now yours into yourself. It requires a strong familiarity with a mythos, and lucky for you…”
I game, “My gaming group's house rules. The games we play, and the build I use…” I think I'm starting to get it.
I suppose If she's part of me now, I'm getting a response when I talk to myself… “Correct,” she tells me, “Your sense of that mythos, those rules, are more than strong enough to work … much more… so you can shape power into yourself based on them: Starting at zero, at least. And as things perish around you, my … digestion, which is now yours… will gather more for you to layer on yourself. You'll know it's time when you feel full… like now.”
Ugh. “This would be simpler if I had my laptop; I’m always using…” I trail off, because I see my laptop… sort of. It’s… not quite there? I know it’s there, and I can see it perfectly, but it also doesn’t block my vision of what’s behind it… or cast a shadow, and it's just kind of floating there in the air. “How…?” I’m having some trouble phrasing what I want to say…
… but the pink lady is in my mind. Part of it, now, so she understands anyway. “We’re imagining things. It’s not there, and all it’s hooked into is your memories of the games. Which, as it’s bypassing the steps in the weaker part of your soul,” I resent that … but it’s probably right, given that someone who thought they could eat my soul got eaten, instead… “means it has perfect recollection of every page you’ve seen.”
And I was always very obsessive about looking up new compatible stuff as they came out… or at least got published online in various places. Good. “So what are my limits?”
She hums a bit before answering, “They’re… mostly imposed by your familiarity with your Mythos. It both empowers and limits it, because it sets the form of your power, and controls what you’ll be able to pick. On a more fundamental level, you also need spilled life force to make the structures involved…”
That gives me pause, “You mean I need to kill people for power?” I really don’t want to be a mass murderer.
She chuckles, “Death is required… but no, not exactly. I was - and now, we are - an omnivore. We’re not limited to sentient creatures: Anything with some form of life force will work - be it a plant, bug, animal, zombie, construct, dragon, or whatever…"
Wait… “Zombies, constructs, and dragons? They’re real?”
She addresses the aside, “Within certain definitions of real; they exist in various layers of reality, yes, one of which is on the other side of this transition chamber, yes.” And then continues, “… and we don’t necessarily need to kill things ourselves. At the far end of pacifism, bugs dying nearby as they eat each other will do, as will grass being being chomped by cows or even the natural cycle of bacteria on our skin… but that kind of source will take a very long time for us to progress. If you’re willing to hunt down deer or something it’ll go a bit faster…. However, also yes. Powerful life forces are more ‘nutritious’, and those tend to have thinking souls attached. And of course, if we’re the focus of the slain, their energy is easier to ‘catch’ for us to eat. And I’m very efficient; we’ll only ‘hunt’ if you choose to do so. We don’t need to worry about ‘starving’ at all.”
Great… so I don’t need to become a serial killer, but there’s some pretty solid pressure to do so… wonderful. But I suppose there’s always something I want that I don’t have, a reason to steal and kill that I’ve ignored so far… I’m sure I can stay civilized. “So what’s my starting level?”
“We’re starting at first…”
