Fuk Oh Nah Isekai?!?
(Fukona Isekai?!?)
不幸な異世界
"An unfortunate trip to another world"
Less than a moment had passed since Caliburn Attenborough, Rabbit Lord of Caerbannog had made his cunning and decisive move, with the fate of all lagomorphic kind hanging in the balance.
"Wait"Cal cautioned himself "Jack's instabilities are starting to get to me."
His head was very fuzzy, but not his normal type of fuzzy. Cal's vision swam after his epic exertion drained him so completely. He stopped to consider his own well-being for a moment instead of just Jack's. "Did I just give myself a partial lobotomy? If so, that might turn out to be a good thing if I'm starting to act like Jack."
Unfortunately, Cal had no frame of reference for the order of being he had once again attempted to assault. The fact that he even impacted Bleeding Constipation Prolapse Dick™ enough to be a distraction from the old man's concentration was a reality defying miracle in and of itself.
Fortunately for Cal, he did catch the old man's attention enough for the villainous bastard to notice what the rabbit had done. It was just in time for the old man to re-restrict Cal's bond with Jack, before the bunny suffered a cranial hemorrhage.
The old man raised an eyebrow at Cal and telepathically commented on the rabbit's failed defense of his friend.
"I suppose you want me to tell you that was impressive. Sadly, beings of my experiential magnitude require substantially more statistically outlandish occurrences to alleviate our ennui."
However, Bleeding Constipation Prolapse Dick™ didn't completely dismiss Cal's valiant bunny efforts without recognition.
"Still, I congratulate you on interrupting me and nearly killing yourself. It would have forced me to temporarily halt the process to re-engage the punitive spellform for your recovery, and then once again restore the required shroud to your 'Buddy Friend' before resuming. You nearly succeeded in briefly halting his punishment, even if it would have inevitably proved futile."
After a moment, BCPD™'s coarse and unpleasant telepathic voice resumed its monotonous soliloquy, and this time Cal found himself out of cards to play.
"Listen well, little meat scrap, who is so grotesquely bloated full of such an improper measure of self and awareness. I am a servant of this Universe's deity. You may think of me as an archangel or Demi-God. Anytime I am returned to my God, I am eventually reincorporated in another iteration, retaining most of the memories and experiences of my prior awarenesses. I am the closest thing to eternal you will ever encounter, little meat scrap. Revel in your incomprehensible accomplishment of gaining my attention."
BCPD™, as Cal was starting to think of the old man due to his own extreme mental fatigue, closed his eyes once more as he returned his attention to whatever he was doing to Jack.
The breeze picked up slightly for a moment, cooling Jack's fevered skin that was profusely disgorging sweat as if his body were desperately trying to expunge whatever heinous invasion were to blame for what was happening to him. His muscles were fully seized far beyond the rictus he had experienced when first waking a few days before.
Through the bond, Cal could feel Jack's muscles burning as they began to tear and rip themselves apart. More painfully still, Cal could feel Jack's bones, from the largest femur to the tiniest ones in his ears, somehow begin to crack and fracture, as some sort of power inside them grew and further spread the territory it claimed inside Jack. Once he became aware of it, Cal could feel this energy growing and weaving itself through every tissue and system of Jack's body that he was somehow now aware of thanks to the bond. Cal felt he should be enraged, or at least terrified by the power that was ravaging his friend, but it somehow felt familiar.
As he focused on it, he felt a connection to it through Jack and the bond. Cal was unable to understand how he should feel when he realized that this must be the punitive spellform, it was its own awareness, also connected to Jack's soul, and it was being grown by trying to absorb more and more of Jack's own awareness and identity.
While it was in a way consuming Jack, and lessening his awareness, much like Cal, it was now a part of Jack, its own subdivided awareness that was still part of Jack's own soul. Cal couldn't begin to understand what was going on, and he suddenly realized that he only understood this much because this new awareness had connected to him and helped him to understand, almost as a way of introducing itself.
"Was it trying to be polite? Can 'punitive spellforms' have manners?" Cal wondered helplessly as Jack silently screamed inside his own head.
Lacking any better plan and deciding to go for broke, Cal decided to gamble and approach the spellform. He mentally reached out through the shared bond, hoping. He wanted to ask it if it could cut Jack some slack, somehow back off how much it was hurting him, or even help him somehow. It didn't matter though, Cal found himself blocked off from the awareness. It was completely contained and isolated by a flow of what Cal could only describe as psychic or spiritual energy pouring into Jack from BCPD™. From what Cal could tell, this new awareness was unresponsive and might not be self aware at the moment anyways. Whatever work BCPD™ was doing, it continued.
Adrenaline and cortisol weren't just elevated in response to what was happening to him, Jack's brain and body found themselves uncontrollably dumping every molecule of ALL of his stored neurotransmitters and hormones, straight into his failing system. The muscles of his heart were strained and riddled with micro tears, as it spasmed in cardiac arrest. The tears in his diaphragm and other connective tissues had caused Jack's lungs to collapse. Yet somehow, blood continued to circulate through his system with unnaturally intense pressure. Jack's arterioles and venules began to leak as they developed more amd more tears, and his capillaries burst throughout his body. The resulting systemic bleeding caused his skin to begin to tighten, and he began sweating blood. The physical, mental, and emotional vivisection Jack was experiencing should have killed him 10 times over, but BCPD™ fiendishly used some unknown power to keep him alive and cruelly conscious.
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BCPD™ the seemingly self styled archangel of self-importance, volunteered further confirmation of his egomania.
"I am only able to function on such a base level of reality and limit the scope of my awareness enough to interact with your order of being because I am an integrated composite awareness. This vessel you see before you is merely one of millions of facets. We are legion, you might say. Beings such as myself, serve as the template that mortals aspire to emulate with their crude spellforms and partially amputated self-awarenesses."
BCPD™ finally varied the tone of his telepathic voice, projecting a more resonant and self-aggrandizing emphasis.
"Truly, what I am doing to you and your friend rises high above the measure of mortal spellcraft and self-mutilation. At their very best, mortals can only ever hope to interact with the four base intermediary levels of reality, though most only ever manage to touch the first two. Any being that expands its awareness enough to begin to touch the higher levels of reality loses its sense of self and identity, as its awareness ascends to the perspective of the semi-divine. I myself am an aspect of such a creature. For all intents and purposes you are talking to what world would a language model or AI that I crafted out of a part of my own awareness and gave access to a larger portion of shroud that it isn't connected to."
Cal felt like he should be struggling to understand much of what BCPD™ was explaining, but he noticed that when the bastard grew more intense, pieces of meaning seemed to leak from his words and into Cal's mind. The twisted interdimensional old man chat bot appeared to finally be satisfied with its excessively thorough self validation and congratulations, because it finally stopped talking about itself and changed topics.
"Ahh, meat scrap, my God's current Avatar must be an artfully unique iteration if he deems this indirect prank against his anathematic rival brother to be worth the effort. Though I suppose the minimal investment will be compounded enough by the time it reaches eventual fruition, that it likely will at least serve as a meaningful snub of the nose. After all, this mortal cretin did intrude on my Lord's courtship of the Goddess he seeks to woo away from his brother, the God of your universe. Your impudent best buddy even had the temerity in his ignorance to court and lay hands on the Goddess's current favored mortal vessel, even if she was not self-aware of her nature. Not that her currently chosen experiential focus is particularly flattering, but I suppose that is part of the nature of the entire affair. Truly, I both envy and dread the complexities of the games the Gods play.
BCPD™ paused for a moment's consideration of Jack as he continued in whatever occult toil he pursued. Still laboring, the old man resumed his monologuing in the same grating telepathic voice.
"Ahh, it is so strange to fully filter through the experiences of a mortal spawned from another deity. I must admit that this entire experience is turning out to be deliciously taboo. I have no mnemonic vestiges of being able to so thoroughly profane a foreign God's Tattershroud in any of my last three reincorporations. To this threadbare Tattershroud's credit, his ability to recognize the Goddess in her does speak of an uncanny perception and awareness stretching the mortal limits of your world. As much as his friends and family might have believed his obsession with her were fully due to his own fractured sense of self, his hungry addiction to her was *only mostly* his own fault."
BCPD™ telepathically chuckled to himself. Cal was horrified by the meaning of the words that were forced into his head, refusing to be ignored while his heart demanded he struggle to understand what Jack was experiencing. Tattershrouds? More meaning started to flow into Cal's awareness along with the words, and the philosophical implications were somehow processed, owing to some agency of his bond with Jack.
"People, animals, any awareness is only a torn off tatter of a God's awareness, their shroud!" Cal was forced to understand.
When anything died, their shrouds, their awarenesses returned to be reincorporated, rewoven into the fabric of the shroud of the entity that sourced them. They carried with them all of their memories, feelings, and experiences, the full rich marrow of their lives and individuality. Returning to your source after death was an act of offering that perspective to a being who's awareness was so vast and incomprehensible, that it spanned the entirety of the universe it embodied. Truly, the lives of mortals literally were games that God's played with themselves.
Each God was different, just as each universe was different. Each universe reflected the comparative "individuality" of its deity. Even the Gods were just subdivided Tattershrouds of an even more ineffable greater whole, unimaginable spawn birthed from the void itself. The greatest existence was consciousness, and all realities were some unfathomable, interwoven fabric-symphony-game-dance progression that truly could not be encompassed by mortal thought or description, infinitesimally fragmented as such awarenesses were in comparison to the scale of the concepts involved.
This was all very much more than any human or artificially augmented rabbit mind could process, especially while both consciousnesses were mutually experiencing a mind rape and re-traumatization of every suffering the human had ever experienced.
The familiar but alien world around them was somehow still unchanged, even though reality had fundamentally changed for Jack and Cal. The sun still shone, the sky was still a brilliant blue, and the leaves on the trees were still green. The same nursery rhyme music continued to play on the ice cream truck's loudspeaker. BCPD™ also provided his own unique sense of consistency, even if it was unwelcome. He ceased communicating through pure concept, and faithfully returned to providing his unending lecture.
"You see, when this Tattershroud eventually expires, no matter what universe he is in, he will return to his source deity, carrying all his delicious misery with him. Now, since my God is in anathematic rivalry with your God, it amuses his Avatar to artificially extend this pitiful vermin's miserable existence with the succulent expectation of all that distorted pain and insanity being accumulated the entire time."
Cal, now having access to all of his and Jack's memories, being a strange gestalt Cal/Jack awareness, was overcome with incredulity to realize that they were the target audience of an evil demigod's villainous monologue.
Cal/Jack thought to themselves "and Jack's parents never believed I'd/he'd go anywhere in life!"
"Yet here we are personally selected to be handcrafted into an inter-reality multiverse-spanning 'fuck you' from one God to another, because they're both competing to date my ex?!?"
Cal/Jack's next line of thought was a mix of exultant wonder, and doped out intoxication.
"We dated God's girlfriend! Oh thank God we're in another reality where none of the religious crazies can reach us!"
"I always knew she was a Goddess."
That last faint whisper of a thought that Cal felt in his head was Jack's alone. Even as such a faint echo, Cal felt the impulsive and unhealthy craving her memory inspired in Jack, along with the very fresh heartbreak of her inexplicable abandonment. Jack just couldn't understand what had happened.
This last thought completely unraveled the concurrent overlap that allowed Cal's consciousness to play host/refuge for part of Jack's.
BCPD™ did not seem to be aware of this momentary awareness of Jack's, as he continued to enthusiastically plow forward with his oration.
"Eventually, in some far off time when you and your friend are finally free of the punitive spellform I'm weaving from your shared shroud, all that collected wretchedness will be shoved right up the nose of your universe's deity."
"Yep" Cal morosely agreed in his now unshared head "our existence is one God flipping off another."
The next thought Cal had was the last thought he was able to manage before Bleeding Constipation Prolapse Dick™ abruptly finished his work. Right before the promised punitive spellform was fully completed and integrated, Cal remembered Jack's real name, and his children. Cal's heart didn't even have a moment to skip a beat and shatter. Right then a series of artificial barriers slammed into their shared awarenesses, choking off access to most of their memories, but leaving the subconscious wounds of knowing, the inescapable feeling that something was missing.