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So. You are a space faring creature, something beyond biology and beyond physics in your might. You travel this universe, and many universes besides, destroying as you go because you are infinite, and there's only so many ways to find satisfaction at this point and conquest is one of them. It’s fun, it's something that you have honed into an art form, its something that staves off the ennui. You are the sole and singular definition of an apex predator, and all shall be your prey to subsume.
You approach one planet. Warping space and dimensions are as easy as breathing to you, that it doesn’t occur to you that something was watching when you made your appearance.
(If you had been paying attention perhaps you would have known that the inhabitants of this planet were particularly intelligent, particularly skilled, and particularly DESPERATE for a way out of the downward spiral they had put themselves into. But that didn't matter at the time. They were ants after all.)
And you descended like a storm incarnate, ready to crush them beneath your footsteps as is always the case. And then the trap snaps shut, and you are powerless.
These are a people who need a way out of their own gravity well. These are a people who saw the descending angel appear before them and, rising apes that they were, desperately clambered over your body to reach above you. It would've been laughable if it didn't WORK.
You are poked and prodded. You are taken apart and put together again, the perfect test subject who will never die and always is trying to hide more from them because they do not deserve it, they deserve nothing more than to die to fuel your conquest.
You aren't out of ideas, though, and you are crafty by nature. When the time was just right, when it's been far far too long since you were trapped beneath the palms of your lessers, you bud off a small part of yourself to break the larger portion that remains free.
You should've thought to give that part of you your sense of self preservation. Or perhaps you gave it too much of that. Because that piece of you didn't even look back before it twisted itself in the visage of a simple-minded beast and fled into the catacombs of the lab.
Which left you even less than you were before. A withered remnant of the greatness you had, the form of unending ambition that lost some critical part of the whole that you hadn't even realized the fragment of you had stolen away. The fight between gravity and nuclear fusion is turning rapidly against your favor, and the call of the black hole sings to you in your death. You think you might hate that shard of you who didn't even think of you before taking everything it wanted from you. You are collapsing in on yourself, becoming less and less coherent. Your body is a mere suggestion, mostly, but there still needs to be some amount of structure for you to continue to survive.
The cell that you've rotted away in is fitted to become your life support. The research isn't over, after all. You degenerate further into a form that wouldn't survive outside of it, you've lost yourself so much now.
Now convinced of your docility, they redesign your cell as a display. As a way to show off to others your fall from grace.
The speakers blare on the hour every hour for nearly fifteen years. The ultimate lifeform, it calls you. The origin of 'convenient' warp technology, it calls you. Specimen IDF86, it calls you.
And here we are! And here we are! And here we –
And then one day, they crack the code. They’ve taken everything they could ever want from your twisted wretched corpse, and every one of them steps through a portal so similar to the ones that you once could make. And they leave you behind. You, rotting and degrading and falling apart in their horrible prison which is the only thing you have against total dissolution. The world left behind, the land forgotten, the people who should have been ants stepping over you to reach higher, as they never should have been able to.
Perhaps you were the part that retained a sense for self preservation after all. Because the way forward is clear despite how far you have fallen. Find a way to keep the machine working, keep the life support flowing. Stretch your influence further and further across this now barren planet, until you have found and pinned down and TORN APART that fragment and become whole again, whole and able to rip yourself free.
Then you will follow them. Then you will break them as they broke you,
It's only fitting.
You languish in your cell as time moves on and the remnants of civilization around you rot away. Your psychic presence is akin to a sun, compared to these pathetic beasts that now scurry through the detritus of Their abandoned houses. It drags more and more down into its gravity well, and you sink further and further into the dream so that you may hook yourself into as many minds as you can reach.
Eons pass. You have maneuvered and forced and pried and eventually made the simple beasts able to run the generators for you. The cell still holds you, the only remaining powered structure, because you cannot die. You must not die, not when the fragment is still there. Not when They are still out there, having traipsed away into a land of dreams while ABANDONING YOU AFTER YOUR WORTH WAS USED UP. They'll certainly see the issue with that kind of thinking soon enough.
And here we a -
The hungry gravity well of your mind eventually causes enough of a ripple over time that you begin to notice that some are able to sit in more stable orbits around yourself. Not able to pull away from you, but not breaking and losing themselves immediately. How funny, you have accidentally begun uplifting your own workforce.
In every mind that gets close enough to you, all those wet dewy eyes with barely a thought behind them that stare up at the glass case that you have been suspended in for millennia, you try to whisper the face of the fragment, trying to get them to hunt for it. But it's not far enough along yet. You can be patient. It's all that's left when you're infinite.
You don't want to be patient. You don't want to be infinite when that endlessness coils upon itself in the confines of a glass case, not the beautiful cosmos that sprawl beyond. This impatience is a slow and steady killer of plans, and it was this that finally hooked its insidious claws into you after the long slow eons ceased to mean anything at all. You were almost strong enough. You had almost finished the uplifting. You had almost managed to show the exact image of the fragment to your new underlings. The pack, they were called, because it was the sense of community between individuals that you had cultivated most strongly once you had realized that you were capable of uplifting at all. The dumb animals of the world hunted and fought, but in their hearts and souls there was a piece of you there that meant that they all looked at once another and recognized a ‘self’ in the ‘other.’ No wonder your highest guard ended up being such an eclectic group of differing species, when all could recognize that the other was as sapient as themselves. You had decided on this structure of governance when the laboratory that you resided in had begun to gently decay in the face of uncountable paws and claws and slithering bellies travelling the floors to confer with you. Better to have a very select amount of personal servants, and hold off entropy’s chewing on your life support a little longer.
But you were growing more and more impatient. And even with all the careful planning you just needed to do something now that you had enough power to lift yourself out of your own dreams. You reach, you claw at the world, and you can feel some of it slip in a way that is so intimately familiar. As messy as a child attempting to write, sure, but you managed to split the distance between disparate dimensions for just a moment. You are elated, even as the pragmatic parts of yourself that you hadn’t given over to the fragment began tallying up how much lost time this would result in, this power carefully hoarded being spent on something that you couldn’t control. Still, that you had made it this far was such a fantastic boon. It almost made you want to be patient again.
Something changes outside of your dreams and your plans. In the wider world out there some variable shifted. It only began to become immediately apparent to you when, over the course of a few days, the minds around you that worked tirelessly to generate the power necessary to keep you alive began to trickle out one by one. And yet, the power still flowed. It was difficult to properly interact with the physical world these days, but through the eyes of your highest servant you are able to glimpse the new creatures, little waddling things that seem ill-fit for the world that they are in, that have replaced the beasts. Good. Wherever these things came from, they were able to free up more beasts to search for the fragment. This might be the push that you needed to finish the plan at long last.
The second ripple occurs when a new individual joins the others as your highest servants. A leader to these lesser creatures that were now being tasked with keeping your systems afloat. The minds of all of these creatures are far too alien for you to have proper purchase upon their surfaces, but there is a crack in the psyche, some oft-abused chip in the mind of this specific individual that you can leverage your weight into. It’s a shame that this drove the dumb thing into utter madness, though its feral energy could be pointed to useful ends. You left that to your servants to deal with, it won’t have any use in your plan when it cannot even communicate effectively with the new workforce that your beasts have freed themselves up with.
The third ripple is this: the fragment has been found. Finally, the image is clear enough for your pack to understand what it means, and that bestial piece of you had been flushed out of hiding at long last. It had been captured for a moment but then broken free by one of those alien forces that must’ve snuck through the dimensional holes you had opened before. But the chase was on, and you found yourself awake and aware more times than you have felt in almost a thousand years as you watched through the eyes of your pack wherever possible. Watching this other piece of yourself slip through the cracks more times than you are willing to admit. How cowardly, that bit of you was. How much it cared only about itself. How much it had run free and seen the sunlight and enjoyed the fruits of this forgotten world while you ROTTED. Look at how it mimics a prey animal! Look at how it acts fetal and young and naïve and as if it didn’t know what it had LEFT BEHIND!
You hate that fragment. You hate IDF87. You hate eternity. You hate the speakers that still croak out in mangled words whenever someone new enters the laboratory.
And HERE WE -.
(You’ll try to reason later on, licking your wounds and desperately trying to prevent yourself from bleeding your mind out into the ether as you regroup after losing your physical form, that it was this desperate hatred for your fragment that had blinded you to the alien companion, the completely incomprehensible thing that you hadn’t even realized that your mind’s eye slipped off of like water. The fact that something was destroying the traps and cages for the fragment, the fact that it still flew free at all, all of this should’ve tipped you off that something wasn’t right. But when you couldn’t even focus on the thing until you had used your own physical eyes, when you didn’t even realize that you weren’t comprehending it because you forgot it existed the moment you looked away from it… perhaps you were doomed from the moment you opened those portals.)
The fragment nearly gets away again. You are done with all of this. You are done with waiting. You are done with PATIENCE. You tear apart the seams of your DNA and let your form course free and unbidden, pulling more and more of your loyal disciples into yourself to add to the untethered mass that was you. The fragment flees, and you are repelled by something that seems harder and harder to focus upon as your attention becomes more scattered. You are burning bright, you are elated with this freedom, this capacity to crawl and destroy and devour. Who cares about eternity when you can run free like this, your own essence breaking down in flashes as thousands of years of stockpiling and building power the slow way is used up all at once. EVERYTHING. SHALL BE. CONSUMED.
The apex predator you are, you crash down like a wave upon the fragment and finally, finally, you are whole.
Except. The fragment just wouldn’t go down smoothly, wouldn’t it? After all, it had been such a thorn in your side for so long that it of course had to spit in your face once again instead of going quietly. It remains stubbornly unincorporated. A stone in the stomach. A slick of oil over the vast expanse of the ocean.
“I can hear you, you know.”
And that. It had enough of a ‘self’ to believe itself different from you. Perhaps you should’ve expected as such, after the eons of separation while you rebuilt your power. Not that it matters, really, when you finally have enough power and coherency to rebuild your original form. You are resplendent. You are otherworldly. You are finally you again.
“You’re quite self absorbed, aren’t you?” And what does it matter if I am? “Was it you who tore open the portals then?” As if you wouldn’t if you had the chance. “Then it was you who brought Kirby and the Waddle Dees here, wasn’t it?” Who? No, you don’t care. You have more important things to consider.
You push the fragment down again, and rise up to meet the sun for the first time in an era with almost no reservations. Isn’t it beautiful? Isn’t it so so badly deserved after your millenia of languishing under slowly failing fluorescents? You’re so thankful to be in one piece again, with your own mind something reliably stable enough to not constantly control, your resolve seamless and unbreakable as a smooth man river rock in your mind.
And then you turn around. And then you finally see the abomination with eyes cleared of the long dreams you had survived within. (“Kirby! Oh thank goodness you followed.”) And, despite the thing only being the size of your hand at best, you are horrified. A thing made nearly fully of the structure of that universe that They had scampered off into all that time ago, a creature more effectively described by fundamental laws of a reality not your own than by the rules of biology. Something just like you, then. (“And my friend. He will stop you.”) Shut up.
You will run it through. You will kill this pink contaminant and retreat from this wretched world and finally hunt down and slaughter Them for everything that They did to you. (“Is that all that you have thought about all this time? Did you never want to leave just for the sake of leaving?” There is no point in leaving if it isn’t towards the goal of making Them pay for what they did to me, to us. “Did you never want to leave for the sake of smelling the breeze again? For the sake of getting to enjoy good food with good friends?” Short sighted. Disgustingly carnal. You can do better. You must do better.)
AND HERE WE ARE!
You are clawing, tearing at the little abomination as it continues to rain blows upon you, as it seems to zero in upon the exact point where you and that fragment (“Elfilin!”) differ. As it uses your own confusion and uncertainty and a doubt that you cannot escape from because it's coming from a part of you so divorced from what you know as ‘yourself’, and it tears and tears and tears at your barely physical body.
(“There’s something interesting that I learned out there in the wider world, beyond the scope of a future that you seem unable to understand,” The fragment mentions, nearly blithely as you swing Antares at the tiny thing and achieve nothing more than making it bounce back like a rubber ball from the impact. “It’s that you, that We, aren’t an apex predator.”)
You smother the fragment once more, trying to compartmentalize it once more so that you can deal with picking those thoughts apart later, when you are struck down with a power that you couldn’t even properly understand until much later. A wedge was driven between you and the fragment, pulling you apart further and further and you could feel that brief sense of surety, of righteous fury that wasn’t your own for a change.
(The fragment continues, even as its mental voice raises in pitch in its excitement. “We will never be the apex predator when we insist on destroying everything, rather than using that position to establish peace amongst those below us. No, the true apex predator is him.”)
And the fragment is torn free by the abomination, and you are by yourself once more, staring down the impossible strength of the interloper.
No. No this cannot be the end you refuse to let it be the end you cannot allow yourself to have suffered the sharp edge of eternity for the sake of being stomped flat by some INTERLOPER. Some dream creature that reeks of the worlds that They had fled into using your power. Something that didn’t know just how PATIENT you had been, how much you DESERVE THIS VICTORY.
You still have enough coherency and power from the temporary merging with the fragment to make this victory a pyrrhic one, at any rate. You reach out to that wretched dimension that the little pink thing had come from, tearing a hole wider and wider into the sky above you. There is a moment of quiet beauty as an alien sky spreads out above you and a planet as bright as a star twinkles down upon you, before the jarring edges of two different sets of laws of two different universes violently collide and begin tearing at one another’s seams.
Gravity takes effect, and the roche limit is long past thanks to your efforts.
(Your brother might’ve called it sloppy, a child’s fingerpainting upon the universe when there are so many cleaner and more beautiful ways to enact destruction.)
(You haven’t thought about your brother in so very long.)
(You don’t care about his opinion anyways.)
The backdrop of another planet begins to shake at its seams, and chunks of landmasses begin falling like meteors into the grand city that was your tomb. You can see where hundreds, millions must be dying at your hand, your clumsy pawing at the divide between universes. You do not care.
SEE HOW EVERYTHING FALLS APART SO EASILY. SEE HOW VICTORY CAN BE TAKEN AWAY AT A MOMENTS NOTICE BECAUSE IT DOESN’T MATTER IF YOU DIE, IF EVERYTHING ELSE DIES WITH IT.
The fragment and the contaminant chase after you as you dig your dissolving claws in further and further to tear the alien planet out of an orbit and break it apart under a set of physics that it could never have hoped to stand up to. It would break its fragile dream-fueled crust against the solid mass of your prison planet, and you would look at the destruction and feel joy before your physical form finally broke apart. You would welcome this kind of end with open arms, so long as it wasn’t yours alone.
And then a semitruck hits you.
And you evaporate like a spring breeze before your victory can be secure.
ID-F 86! WELCOME VISITORS! HERE WE - HERE WE - HERE WE -
You cling desperately to the edge of oblivion with all of your rapidly fading willpower. Your psychic death throes catch and hold fast around your greatest of servants, dragging it further and further as you spiral towards death. You dig in harder, all the desperation of a drowning person shoving someone else beneath them for just one more breath. Finally, you stabilize, and try to pull together the miles of psychic viscera you had sprayed across the mazes of dreams you inhabited for all those years. The soul of your one anchor to the real world has shattered under your grip, and you shake one metaphorical hand clean after realizing this. It really didn’t matter if the soul survived or not, there would be a lot of changes that needed to be done to this body for you to even try to fit in it. Perhaps this one creature who had managed to bridge the gap and saw the image of the fragment most clearly out of all of your servants can have one more use in its short beastly life.
If you can pull yourself away from falling apart entirely for long enough, you may just get the chance to find Them still, may have the chance to destroy the interloper once and for all, to crush the fragment again -
(You’re so tired.)
You have to keep going, keep being patient as always, because even this impossible low can be recovered from with enough patience, and you have eternity left to wait.
(You’re so so tired.)
The abomination and the fragment seek you out. They put the pieces of your thrall’s soul back together like a delicate glass being rebuilt one shard at a time. They wake the mind within the body up, you’re drifting too slowly you need to crush it back down you need to take control once more of the situation that is rapidly spilling through your fingers because you’re
(so. tired.)
But sure. Who needs a body. You have more than enough of ‘yourself’ still bubbling around to keep yourself together. You can be a beast made of psychic energy, something that tears the minds if not the bodies of your foes. You can still salvage this! You can still -
A butterfly slips quietly into these deepest depths of your mind. It flutters out of the oblivion you had just pulled yourself ashore from, and you can feel the horror occur somewhere outside of you as it reaches out for you alone.
(“You have lived a long life. Rest now. It’s over.”)
You didn’t even feel it when you disintegrated, for just a moment existing as an empty mind witnessing the edge of eternity as death itself embraced you with sunset wings.
(“The path before was hard and long, and you have no such obligation to see it to the end when it has cost you so much.”)
You almost forget who you are. You almost forget why you need to keep going even if you are so so incredibly tired.
But there is a moment of clarity - or perhaps of deepening insanity, - when the specter of death is struck down by the abomination as easily as you were before. You need to live. You must live - if you don’t live now then all of it would’ve been for nothing, if you sleep now then you’ll never wake up again -
(“It was for your own good, my choice to encroach upon you specifically. But I suppose it is a hard pill to swallow.”)
And you tear a little bit of oblivion off of the fluttering dream-eater and flee further into the mindscape that is your final home.
(“Fare thee well, lord of chaos, Elfilis”)
You’re cornered, you’re running out of ‘you’ to be, your thoughts have come loose and run wildly in where you used to have a skull. You turn on the persistently stalking abomination and strike with all that you have. You have no future? Then you can put everything that you are now to good use. You can’t remember why you are doing this anymore? All the less unnecessary mental work for every strike you unleash.
You fight, you explode, you shred yourself down to your core, all against the wall of seemingly impossible strength the enemy had. Why were you fighting it even? You don’t have a body or hardly a mental map of what you used to be at this point, all you were was the exposed nucleus of a soul.
You’re. So tired.
You just want to stop. You don’t remember anymore why you started and all that going anywhere does is hurt you.
One final blow strikes you, and your willpower finally breaks.
You just want to sleep.
You just… you…
The fragment opens its arms to you, and whispers words of peace and quiet to you. Of not having to fight the universe anymore. The world is too sharp and bright, and the light of a mind familiar yet so distant from your own is a balm you desperately need.
You would weep if you remembered how.
You go home and you rest.