NEW CTHONIC
I
Salem Cooper had too much energy to do anything. He was pent up, worried that he might explode into a massive ball of fire. It had happened before though not to him of course. But there had been that girl who turned into a giant mythical phoenix and burnt down the Mall of America.
He tapped his foot, refreshing the page again on his laptop. Consensus on this forum was that it was a government op, but what choice did he have at this point? Every few minutes a heartbeat would feel so violent and hot that he thought his blood would burst from his veins like red seafoam.
> Topic: [Help] [Urgent] Do I have superpowers or am I dying?
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> There’s something wrong with me. I feel feverish and I’m in pain, but I’m also wired. I didn’t sleep last night and I doubt I’ll be able to tonight.
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> For the past few days, I’ve been seeing different bizarre vistas when I close my eyes a lot. It used to be every few months or something, but now it’s almost more often than not. To me, my friends seem to be acting strange, but logically, when I think about it, considering that they all are being weird in the same way it seems more likely that actually I am the strange one. Although one of them has definitely changed – she went from courageous to acting like a 1930’s Adventure comic.
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> Also, I got sent home from school yesterday because I kept saying things to people that I couldn’t remember. No one would tell me what I said either, but the way they looked at me, they 100% think I’m cursed. This is the country so they’re prone to that way of thinking, but still.
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> I’m eighteen, so I know there’s a lot that it could be. Or I could just be going crazy? Anonymous 2007/03/04 11:00:43
The first post had been less than helpful and had almost brought him to tears.
> I’d hazard your going through a strong psuchic awakening. Gigahertz described something similar in his autobiography. You should probably isolate yourself from all people until you get your powers under control because iot kind of sounds like you did mind crimes.
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> Anonymous 2007/03/04 11:02:15
Had he mind-controlled Ginny Ennis to be bolder and slightly more manic, or was he being vain in thinking it was related to him? Maybe she had lost her mind on her own. Her father was the voice of the second most popular shortwave radio Appalachian news specialty station in the country. All that fame was sure to get to someone’s head.
Why did this have to happen to him now? He had just started to get consistent commissions for art. Granted, they were all, tasteful, fursona portraits, but it was reliable, paying work, the end goal of every artist.
Salem refreshed the page again, doing so every few seconds now. It was dawning on him, as the vertigo mounted and the visions of the spectacular began to linger after every blink, that things might not be okay, and that he might be, in fact, about to die.
He was saved. A verified user and a Licensed Special Responder had replied to his post.
> Hi, don’t panic. Lift-Off here, Stunt Actress, LSR, and Bridge to specifically the air part of the Elemental Plane. You are 1000% a Bridge. I don’t know to which Meta-Plane, but we all pretty much go through the same thing. You didn’t do any “mind crimes”, you were speaking a tongue local to your particular Plane – it can sound very jarring if you don’t speak the language, but it's not harmful. Also, that girl might just be going through it.
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> You don’t have to isolate from all people forever, but you should get clear for now. When I ‘Bridged’ I blew the roof of my parent’s house off, when the Satrap Nasramin ‘Bridged’, to the same Plane, she kicked up millions of tons of dust into the upper atmosphere.
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> You’re going to be fine, this happens to 1-6 people a year. You don’t usually hear about it because we’re rare among Supers, and don’t generally cause that much fuss. Last year a Bridge summoned a few million butterflies over Madrid and didn’t escape the local news cycle except to our small circle.
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> If you want to DM me some personal information, I can try to help as discretely as I can in case anything does go wrong though.
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> Welcome to the family!
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> Lift-Off (Verified, LSR) 2007/03/04 11:05:39
He was thirty minutes into the State Game Lands before he realized he didn’t need to be running full bore. Salem had never been an athletic youth; his body was meant for perching in front of a desk or hunching over a sketchbook. Yet he felt fine, if anything the half-hour sprint through uncleared bush had leveled out his other symptoms. His thoughts were clearer than they’d been for days.
The woods were quiet as he slowed to a walking pace apart from the crunching of dead leaves beneath his sneakers. With only two roadways in and out of Dudlin, Pennsylvania, the quiet came quick once you were in the woods proper, and the sounds of civilization were lost to the Appalachian wilderness.
Hopefully whatever superpowers he was coming into would give him some means of finding his way, because he was very lost. Salem had made for the woods nearest his house, but that meant very little in Dudlin. The forest was making a concerted effort to reclaim the once-thriving rail town. He could’ve been anywhere this side of the river – there were even roads he could have crossed without noticing, ones so far gone to disrepair that entire sections had been washed away by torrential rains years ago.
He was shivering. While he may not have felt the strain, his body had still drenched itself in sweat and the early March chill was biting. After reading the post from Lift-Off, he had the forethought to make a pack before running off. Unfortunately, his panic meant that all he had brought was a single change of clothes and two granola bars – no water, no jacket, no boots.
With a sigh, he trod on. A powerful headache was beginning to crest up his temples where it weighed him down, forcing him to stare at the ground. He noticed his steps looked like they were stumbling.
A little valley between two hills or a crook between three would be perfect. The earth could soak up anything he might be about to do, like nature’s bomb shelter.
Yes, all he had to do was find a little nook and then he could rest.
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A bed of moss to lay down on.
Let it swallow him into the loam.
Down, into the ground.
Down.
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A six-foot cube cutout of the forest floated on its own in a vast dark expanse. He recognized the rocky ditch as where he had collapsed moments ago, though it was sans his body.
Salem was sans his body too. As far as he could tell, he was nothing but the total comprehension of this particular cube of space as it hung motionless in time. Beyond ‘moving’ the angle with which he was observing the space, he couldn’t seem to do anything at all. He hoped something would change soon because he could already feel the monotony of this current existence.
> [Tutorial 1/5]
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> 1. You have formed a Bridge to the Origin Axis, Ovum Mundi, the Egg from which all realities were born. Your mind has constructed this Game-like system to parse these new alien sensations.
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> In your parlance, you have become a Dungeon, a physical location through which the power of Creation and Change flows into this world. Within that broad constraint, you are free to design yourself as you see fit. This tutorial will teach you the basics of building yourself and maneuvering through life as a Living Location.
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> To do anything, you must expend energy. You will naturally draw in energy from the world around you over time. By affecting change in your surroundings and bringing the world more in alignment with the Origin Axis, you’ll be able to draw power directly from the other side as well. Anything that dies within you will also grant you whatever spiritual and physical power they may have possessed as well.
His world shifted in an instant to include a floating series of menus and information placards, the time of day, and a little map of the six-foot cube for example.
Without human hormones flowing through his brain, Salem was finding it hard to panic. He could feel his mind trying to click the switch on, however. Out of habit, he assumed.
> [Tutorial 2/5]
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> Let’s get started on making your new body. Don’t worry, you’ll be able to redesign and rearrange everything we’re about to do at any time you aren’t being observed by a sapient intelligence.
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> Start by making your entrance. This can be a cave, a root tunnel, an old mausoleum entrance, etc. Until you gain more power, this will determine what kinds of creatures and treasures you can create though, so choose carefully.
Salem felt the mental equivalent of a deep exhale. There were worse fates than playing a base-building sim for the rest of eternity. It killed him though, to know that he would forever be stuck less than an hour’s hike from his hometown. Maybe he could worm a tunnel out toward State College given time. Not exactly his idea of a destination town, but at this point, he’d take what he could get.
At least his powers afforded him a tremendous amount of creative freedom. As he flickered through designs in his head, they appeared instantaneously, translucent in place before him, like perfect 3-D models at the speed of thought.
The most energy-efficient entrance was a cave. The least was a root tunnel, but only because it suddenly expanded his awareness to include a copse of old growth trees that framed the opening.
He went with a cave entrance, modified to include an excavated entrance complete with enormous, carved stones keeping the way wide enough for the average man to pass with a comfortable stoop. Salem hoped they would transfer an element of mystery to what lay inside, make a visitor ask, ‘Who made this, and why?’. For the hell of it, he included thousands of differently sized eyes carved into the walls.
The moment he finalized it and made it real, another room appeared just beyond, empty save for a ten-foot-tall glowing, red crystal shard.
> [Tutorial 3/5]
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> Well done. You’ll notice that you automatically created a Heart Room. This contains the vital magics keeping you alive and is the only way through which to truly harm you.
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> Make a few rooms to put between your entrance and your Heart. Again, you can always rearrange these later.
Time was frozen, but Salem was curious to finish the Tutorial. For now, he focused on a framework he could fill in the details on later.
The first room was made of more stone, to be made into a little temple to some long-forgotten god, he was thinking. At the far end was a crack in the wall leading into a tall but narrow tunnel, tight enough to tear at clothing. That in turn ended in a natural cavern filled with stalactites and stalagmites. Amidst the spikes was hidden a sheer drop thirty feet down into his Heart Room. Just those two relatively small spaces used up a surprising chunk of his starting energy.
> [Tutorial 4/5]
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> Now it’s time to populate your halls with life. To do so, you must design a creature, and designate a space as its spawning area. Creatures will spawn at a rate that depends on how much energy is required for their creation.
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> There are many ways to increase the spawn rate for your creations. Granting them the ability to sexually reproduce, or to corrupt visitors into monsters, as examples.
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> Currently, you are limited to designs that could feasibly be found within the animal and plant kingdoms and can only imbue sub-sapient intelligence. But as you grow in power and your mind gets better acclimated with the alien extremes of the Origin Axis, you’ll be able to create truly fantastical beasts and servants.
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> If your creatures expand to fill your space completely, they will wander out into the world to fulfill their natural desires. This can be a great way to affect Change and gain energy from the Origin. However, they won’t naturally want to leave your expanse until they’ve filled the space.
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> The lives taken by your creations outside of your halls also go directly towards generating more power as well. Conversely, people who kill your creations gain a small amount of their energy, growing stronger – much like experience in an RPG.
Was he the bad guys? His powers sure seemed to incentivize havoc.
Well, if Salem ever wanted to amount to more than a hole in the ground, he would have to play the game.
Plus, before all his friends who played moved away, he’d spent most of ages nine through fourteen designing monsters for his favorite collectible card game. Some of the better later sketches were what had gotten him his first commissions.
Again, he marveled at the speed and ease with which he could freely develop his creations. He quickly translated an old monster of his into the game-like, mental library, the first of potential beasts he could start spawning, titled ‘Tunnel Wolf’. The concept had come from an old drawing in which a creature looking like a mix of a moray eel and a weasel was dragging a knight’s body into a crack along a cliff path. It was a long, lanky thing, capable of whipping itself around to attack at any angle with a long, viscous maw, or strangling its prey like a python.
Salem placed its spawning location amidst the stalagmites and watched in awe as two living creatures appeared in a bed of dead leaves and old bones. His menu system said they would spawn another every day, and two juveniles every week for every breeding pair of adults. The juveniles would grow into adults a week after spawning. In many ways, his creations were closer to video game summons than actual living organisms, but perhaps that could change in time.
> [Tutorial 5/5]
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> Almost done. Just three more basic fundamentals you’re capable of making. You don’t have to have all of them to be complete, but each can go a long way to making sure you’re successful in the long term.
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> First, Traps. Traps use energy to create, place, and to reset after being triggered. Currently, you’re limited to Traps that rely on mundane, terrestrial physics. Your own created beings won’t be in any danger of triggering your Traps.
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> Secondly, Lures. This broad category of additions increases the rate at which you draw attention to yourself and how much energy you passively draw from Ovum Mundi. These can be anything from a gold vein, rare herbs, salt licks, and more. Currently, your only limitations on Lures are your imagination and how much energy you have to spend.
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> Finally, Treasures. You have very little control over your independent Treasures to start. These are vessels or small areas that you’ve created to draw in various forms of metaphysical energies, Life, Lust, Ki, Magic, etc., and call on the Origin Axis to transform those energies into incredible, miraculous items and boons. A stronger one of these getting into the outer world is a guaranteed huge source of Change, and just the knowledge of their existence escaping could be monumental.
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> Place one of these three to finish your Tutorial.
Creating the Tunnel Wolves and their spawning location had used almost all of the energy he had remaining, leaving him little he could do. Anything that could be found in the local area normally seemed to cost him almost a negligible amount of energy though, so he settled for adding a salt lick at his entrance. He could also designate a crack of a certain size as a Black Widow spider hotspot Trap, which he added to both the tunnel going back into the Stalagmite Forest as well as interspersed between individual stone spikes.
And then time resumed, and Salem was alone, save for his two new tunnel wolves, contentedly grooming each other as though they hadn’t just popped into existence a second prior.