Some places exist as ideals rather than as real, physical locations. Surely every world, every combination of facts and factors, must exist somewhere, yes. Even just in somebody’s imagination. But some places are too absurd to really exist. Some worlds simply don’t make sense.

But damn if they don’t act as good fuel for dime-a-dozen wish-fulfillment novels

I’m trailing away - just a little! - from my point. So here’s an example of what I’m talking about. A cheap, dime-a-dozen setting for erotic visual novels or hentai is a world without men or a world where every woman of note exists to be broken on the protagonist's cock. If they have good art, I’ll give them a shot, and maybe even get something out of them. But such worlds, even with whatever contrived and quickly slapped on explanation or excuse they have for why generic faceless Japanese man #2022 can live out his most depraved fantasies without a hint of moral panic, invite at least a little world building based on that contrivance.

A setting where elves are all women and worship a tree which they use for reproduction? Well, the tree is a prison for their god; they all break to sex and are all women because that’s what the God’s domains are; and other nice, neat little details follow that invite me to further fill out a plot and character where none exists.

In the end it doesn’t matter. Such a place isn’t real. Even if I could travel to alternate times and other places, would I even want to find myself in a place like I described? Would I care when my quibbling and tendency for world building was placed into a real context and tested against whatever truth I find there?

Maybe. Maybe not.

But what if it was real?

I am dead. I think so, at least. I have grasped what is left of my soul and am holding it together with the memories and ideas that I could stop from leaking out of me and into the deep, dark place between real and not. I have seen many things out here.

Worlds that are real. Worlds where I am not dead but continue to dream and laugh and love and despair. Worlds that are not real, but the dreams of blind, dead, idiot gods realer than myself. I’ve seen a lot of Dreams, really.

Bubbling. Drifting. Popping. Just like what is left of me.

These dreams are shallow things. They last moments from my perspective and perhaps only a few years from the perspective of whatever lives in them. Sometimes they have stars. Gravity. A cosmology. Sometimes they are flat and sometimes they are endless. Sometimes they have a history and sometimes they have none.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

If I watch them closely then they become a good deal realer than they should be. They last past their intended demise. Maybe even survive past when they drift out of my sight because some other person has been placed into them.

Sometimes they are eaten.

Mostly they just go pop.

A lot of these worlds remind me of that sort of cheap porn I was talking about. A fading world where the logic of an all women or all male or all dog population can never be tested, where there is barely a history to support the fiction, is the only time and place where such worlds can exist as more than fiction.

It’s not all lewd. A lot of the tiny little bubbles I see drifting through the dark could be more in the same way those games I played could have had more depth. They can be childish, or aspirational, or epic. The only thing they share in common is that they don’t last long.

I want to save them all. I want to see them all. I don’t want anyone or anything to die without being forgotten, without ever even being heard at all! It’s.. it’s… it’s all I have left! My sole desire and drive out here in the dark where I talk to myself and hope no massive Leviathan’s shadow makes me go pop like all these worlds!

But there’s so many of them. I can’t save any of them. I can barely even remember all of them.

But I have to try at least once. Before I fade away. Before my words are just echoes and my soul a wisp floating through the dark, unseen, unheard, unremembered.

These bubbles, these temporary worlds, they can last more than a moment if a person like me calls them home. So I just have to do that. I just have to find a world I can call home and make better before I’m gone.

I can do it.

I can do it

I can do i t

I can d o i t

I can d o

I can

I c a n

I c a n

I c a

I c

I…

I find it. A place I can call home. A bubble that slowly inflates out of a chilling stygian sea of possibility, churning and effluent. It’s so familiar. It might be a piece of me I forgot. It reaches out to me and so I reach back.

Two atoms impossibly meeting after the universe’s heat death.

It is a world of monsters. More specifically, Monstergirls. There is no civilization. There are no gods but rough and primordial spirits, worshiped but not able to draw from that faith. There aren’t even men or humans.

It is just a wild, untamed wilderness, and the monstergirls who survive in it. The only history it possesses, the only history that its people know, is a bunch of shallow memories that prevents them from realizing that they all spontaneously began existing before my eyes.

I enter and say I’m here to stay;

Against all hope, the world bubble hardens.

Soul giving flesh so there in the dirt may

I lay amidst flowers, my new garden;

Making malformed rhymes.

I have hands again. I have feet again. I have flesh again. My skin burns as the flesh pulsates with power. I am a bit more than human.

Pollen tickles my nose. A breeze tickles my hair. My genitals are hard even though I wish they weren’t.

I refuse lose any of this again.

I think…

I think I’m going to start a farm.