Your kind call me a monster as if that were an insult, something hideous and repulsive to be despised by all. Yet for all the slander you laud upon my kin, it is you who have worshiped and revered monsters throughout the ages. You, who could never reject monsters out of hand like you pretended to. There was always an interest in monsters, a certain perverseness you were incapable of denying. Monsters were great powers in their time, a force that ordinary mortals couldn’t defeat until united or championed by one who was often a monster in their own right.
Monsters, it was certainly a better title than most you humans have branded my kind with. Dimensional Interlopers, Angels, Cosmic Gods, Extra-Dimensional Extraterrestrials, Devils, Outsiders; none of them captured our essence in the same way as Monsters. Just as you changed our name, you too have changed. You humans were always changing yet never truly evolving— you’re a puzzling paradox like that. So set in the certainty of your ways, your 'Manifest Destiny' of racial dominance, that you never question why our dimensions were separated. Just as you can’t deny your interest in monsters, I can’t deny my interest in you flesh-bound slaves of time.
Time, what a peculiar concept. A single stream moving from one point to another that drags an entire dimension along with it. Experiencing time might be unpleasant in equal to being educational, I’ve weighed the risks and found the potential to be worth the expenditure. Elders of my kind have hinted that this vein of inquiry will be a regression of being, knowledge too abstract and backwards to be rationalized into useful experience. I disagree. All knowledge is useful, it's merely a matter of context.
To term it as a human mind would comprehend I moved to a known point, something that registered as a place of communion across the thinning veil. In truth I had no body with which to move, there was no physical place to go, nothing in my realm had a form you humans could understand as shape or mass. Just as time is a novel idea to me, you ponder on what a plane of six non-linear dimensions would look like on a two-dimensional surface. To grasp the truth of it you would need senses you lack and references I cannot provide in a manner you will understand while retaining what passes for sanity among your kind.
The end result was a telepathic link to a human reaching blindly across and beyond the cosmos with its mind. You humans break so easily, I sever a portion of my own thoughts and bridge the connection. It asks and I offer, observing all the while. You humans think in odd patterns, the ceaseless march of time clouding the truth of the universe from your mortal shells. You might say I found its infantile floundering cute, though the term lacked the full scope of my thoughts. I’ve met enough humans to have an adept pool of knowledge of your kind, too few of you can bridge the void and pierce the veil, most retreat at the first touch of my kind. To study you properly I have no choice, I must go to your dimension and mingle with the locals as the linked one would say.
My folly, too much attention was driven at the human in communion. The link was severed, it resumed again but it was maddened and enraptured with the vast concept of me. I knew enough about time to know it was a fundamentally different state of existence than that of my own. What had time done to the human on the other side of the veil? Time, what a novel concept but back to the task at hand.
The thought pulses over the bridge faintly, slow but incessant.
You humans break so easily, I must be more careful… Mortals were calling out, and with as much of my psyche as I dared sacrifice, I answered.
This material realm is so undeniably fragile.
It was a fitting first impression given the state of the space the unwoman was greeted by. Her vessel was something she'd pulled from the screaming thoughts of the now-dead summoning team that had been calling out to an old enemy. The unfortunate mortals had no way of knowing that Y̴̥̗͈̋́͐̄͝u̴̩̞̽͗̅̽u̸̞̻̫͛̈́̉͒̌͝ş̴̀̄̄͌̊͆o̴͎̰̼̚ͅ'̴̢͇̤̯͙̾̽͂͐̐̕G̴̘̰͎̮̼̽͊̃r̶̘͂͐ǎ̵̧̝̥̫̇̒ͅa̴̳̫͖̅̾̚͝w̸̧̬̳̓a̷̢͇̲̙̙͋͑̑̀͗ţ̸̹̰̭̾̇̓̚h̵̨̖̜̩͔̔̏̕͠͝y̵̛̖͛̎͝ͅẻ̷̘̖͍͈͍̓ as they thought to call him had perished, in-so-much-as any pseudo-creature from beyond these cosmos could perish. In the most rudimentary terms, the unwoman might be inferred as the devil's daughter considering that much of her strength was born from his death.
The unwoman felt an unconscious delight as she recalled the duel which was far closer to a calamity from the perspectives of mortals. As novel as the concept of time was, she was all too familiar with the trifecta of cause-effect-consequence. Experiencing the forces of time, gravity and space upon her vessel was something of a heady experience for her freshly created body and the vast portion of her mind within. Though as vast as said portion may be, the unwoman had the entirely displeasurable sensation of severance from the remainder of her being. This vessel of flesh was only a singular portion of her— a lesser aspect of all that she was. Such an incomplete reflection of herself was unworthy of bearing her true name.
With only the fleeting souls of the dead around her, she'd yet to take an accurate gauge on how durable the dimensional denizens in her proximity were. Querying said souls was altogether unhelpful; rampant thoughts, fleeting memories and absurd dying requests only served to further her current dysphoria. The chaos of a dying human mind thrust into ethereal being was intoxicatingly vibrant, the maddening array of conflicting beliefs for what she understood to be a universal human condition was almost endearing. Of course, it was endearing in the way that a human might view a mentally deficient puppy's attempt to climb stairs while repeatedly falling down them, but endearing none the less.
The only other prominent thoughts were of things left undone and a general bemoaning of their lack of recent gratification with various or specific partners. It seemed that humans valued such things rather highly. While she was familiar with the dichotomy of humanity, what they termed as masculine and feminine, this omnipresent fixation of uniting the two was fascinating. In her brief time on this plane of existence she'd already been presented with enough information to pursue indefinitely.
Her reflection was interrupted by a quartet of living humans of sturdy composition. In her initial excitement to meet the locals, the unwoman's greeting was delivered with the full force her surrogate vessel could offer. Based on their reaction, something had been lost in empathic translation.
The sudden and unexpected violence that followed further reinforced the unwoman's initial impression of this dimension. Her own vessel was no exception, the weak one's inversely inclined blade had scraped her wing in the scuffle. The unwoman was no stranger to conflict, but the material limitations of this dimension were entirely foreign— as was being physically wounded. Minor though it was, the wound surged with the anathema of her very being.
Pain, real physical tangible pain slammed into her consciousness. The alien sensation was enough to shock her momentarily. Aided by a superior understanding of this dimension's rules, the other humans counterattacked while she was reeling.
The power conjured next was several magnitudes greater, but the unwoman was wary now that her initial surprise had worn off. The attack was an explosive discharge of energy. Had her assailants been subtler about accumulating the raw power needed, they might have caught her by surprise once again. However they'd made the mistake of showing her how the power was gathered, converted and inevitably, released.
She directed the gullible current of negatively charged ions into a more agreeable direction, briefly altering the composition of her vessel to prevent it from being damaged by the extreme heat, electrical charge and psionic thorns that all hurtled towards the unwoman faster than anything she'd seen in this fragile existence as of yet. What she hadn't spared a thought for, was where all that energy went after she'd deflected it.
The rift between realities, already a dangerously unstable and temperamental anomaly in this material dimension, fell into itself and vanished. The severance she'd experienced from her native realm savagely worsened into a near-crippling sensation of incalculable isolation. This place had no energy, no waves of power, no currents of thought except those made by these humans around her. There was so much nothing surrounding her it was suffocating. The vastness of her mind rebelled at the simple fact of this dimension. There was Nothing and it was everywhere.
The unwoman fell to the ground, her vessel's strength failing her. How anything could exist in such an empty and desolate dimension was incomprehensible. The portion of her mind trapped within the prison of flesh she'd unwittingly made subdivided further, each tendril of thought searching for anything amidst all that nothing. Her search faltered, some limitation of this reality kept her mind from spanning any distance it pleased. She had never experienced something like this, there was simply a distance she could not bypass or penetrate. The sensation was immediately likened to that under her vessel, a flat surface that stopped whatever touched it.
Shifting her attention from a desperate outward expansion, the unwoman ceased throwing her will against the confines of this dimension, focusing within its boundaries instead. The lingering specters of human psyche had vanished, leaving her alone with only her assailants in this haunting place.
She repeated her empathic greeting under a great deal of care, matching the voice of her soul to the strength of the humans around her.
The unwoman allowed a similar sentiment to radiated from her being, carefully maintaining a low-level output of peaceful intentions. The message would have been delivered much faster had she been for forceful, but seeing as how that would likely been viewed with hostility she refrained; allowing herself a small measure of bemusement as time passed.
The unwoman very gently began informing the humans that she possessed great sums of information. The humans stopped communicating with their minds, shifting to a series of sounds emanating from their upper bodies. Intentions and empathic states still originated from them as the sounds grew louder and faster, the weak one and sharp one seemingly in discourse with their opposites.
The display was educational, the unwoman found several similarities to these humans and her own, newly forged vessel. As it sat, her body was bordering on identical to that of a human, externally that was. She did have distinctly non-human growths protruding from her back, while their function remained unclear she explored their composition and discovered that they were pleasantly soft to the touch. Touch, she decided, was a marvelous thing.
Internally she was composed of geometrics and pseudo-protoplasm that appeared to be entirely unlike anything in her vessel's proximity. She contemplated altering her constitute being, but remained uncertain that doing so would not be perceived as hostile, despite her assurances that they were. There was also the distinct possibility that altering her vessel could have adverse effects on its capacity to sustain her presence in this dimension. That fact brought prominence to another more distressing fact, her severance from the remainder of her being. In essence, she was alone without even herself for guidance or wisdom. Without a rift there was no way of knowing if the fraction of her mind stuck within her vessel would be able to rejoin with her primary consciousness, potentially rendering everything it learned moot. There was also the question of what exactly would happen to her fractal consciousness in the event of her vessel's destruction or compromise. The unwoman found that thought uniquely disquieting.
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There was simply too much she didn't understand about her current foolhardy endeavor for her to blunder about making discoveries along the way. A guide or tutelary would expedite her comprehension of the unprecedented situation the unwoman found herself in. Communication with such fragile beings was a barrier she must overcome in order to attain forward progress. Fortunately her vessel was highly intuitive, she desired to make sounds as the humans did and the unwoman's flesh obliged. Unfortunately the sounds she was making seemed to be most displeasing to the humans.
The unwoman obliged. The virile human seemed disproportionately surprised by this development.
She mimicked the affirmative motion she had seen several times during the human's debate.
The unwoman struggled to decipher the human's meaning. Empathic communication was effective at conveying general sentiments and impressions but specific ideas tended to get lost in translation. Ultimately, she needed to make a choice in the affirmative or negative. She neither particularly desired unpleasant things or cooperation, yet it seemed they were necessary.
Virile human expressed disbelief and general animosity, a sentiment that was quickly emulated by the others. The unwoman was uncertain if she'd conveyed a contrary state, though it seemed improbable. Virile human directed more face noises to the others for a time. As novel as the sensation was, the unwoman was beginning to realize how limiting time was. She could only exist in one anchored state, something that seemed preposterous prior to her arrival. The inability to be present in multiple states at once was a hindrance that felt entirely artificial to her; it was pointlessly counterproductive to the acquisition of knowledge, and as the unwoman promptly decided, existence as a whole.
New humans were created. No that wasn't right, more accurately the space around her grew drastically and she realized that the material dimension was much larger than she'd initially detected. Amidst the nothingness that surrounded her there were stars and mass and souls and minds. Thousands of human minds were exposed to her for a measure of seconds before that new space was concealed from her detection once more. Curiously, she probed outwards with her mind once more, searching for the opening secreted in her dimension's solid edges, yet she could not find it. Which in turn, raised a great many queries in the unwoman's vast yet fractal mind. She was so enthralled pondering these internal queries she'd entirely failed to notice the new humans which had actually arrived.
There were thirteen of them—a good number—the strength of their beings all paled in comparison to the four sturdy ones she'd been greeted by. Indeed these new humans were so incredibly fragile that two of their number witnessed her glorious vessel and allowed their sanity to depart. The radiant unwoman did her utmost to further dampen her presence while the sturdy humans terminally dispatched the broken pair.
The remaining eleven presented the unwoman with a plethora of new sounds, physical mediums and written markings. While she was able to mimic most effortlessly, it was painfully obvious there was no true comprehension behind her actions. Of all the methods employed to reach her, the one she was most fascinated by was an elaborate series of hand and finger movements.
The passive air radiating from the humans changed in response to sourceless face sounds. The emotive states surrounding her fractured into conflicting views of appeal and revulsion undertoned by minutia of lesser feelings. The closet reality opened once again and a new soul was added. This soul was different, human in substance yet ripened by suffering. A strong soul left unchecked by a weak mind and sabotaged by circumstance. This human was little more than a resource, a sentiment the unwoman confirmed from the forlorn noises it made.
<"Observe."> Virile human commanded in noise and mind. He repeated the command in a slow, insistent pulse until the unwoman comprehended his desire.
A single probe of consciousness expanded from virile human, entrapping the mind before her. The contest of wills was short-lived, little more than token resistance before a single mind dominated the two bodies. The probe of consciousness frayed into millions of psionic threads, each split end combing through the flesh puppet's psyche then plunging into its brain. Signals of soul-light raced back up the threads, combining and compiling into scattered sensation captured in times past. The process was laborious, each core sampling targeted clusters of something so small they escaped even her unnatural perceptions. After the ninth repetition, the demonstrations stopped.
<"Emulate.">
Creating the probe and splitting her will was trivial, little more than a variation of autonomous action. Her efforts were steered towards a specific region of the forlorn man's physical brain. With due care, she bored into his mind and took her first sampling.
Noise paired with meaning flooded into the bottomless chasm of her mind. The information reshaped her understanding of human speech on a conceptual level, forcing her to reevaluate everything she thought she knew to be fundamental of physical communication. Words shaped understanding which altered perception which fostered interpretation and molded the human experience. These slaves of flesh and time could do nothing without the word to describe or articulate or simple be beyond an animalistic state of primal impressions.
She was an eldritch facsimile of the human form but she had truly captured nothing of their complexity. Words were knowledge, immortal without being invulnerable. Knowledge she could rationalize, contextualize and most importantly, she could devour. A single thread of consciousness became a hundred, then a thousand and like a swarm in frenzied bloodlust every single one bored into her target to feed upon its decadent mind.
The light of a human soul winked out in an instant under the uncontrolled force of her passionate gluttony. A moment later the dormant husk left behind erupted in a hail storm of bone and flesh, the strain of her undivided attentions too much for the human form to endure. Frantically she scattered her mental probe and its thousand duplicates after the fleshly chunks of mangled, charred brain matter. Useless meat, the connections were broken. Knowledge lost in a moment of weakness. Fleshlings break so easily, such a fragile vessel for so much knowledge. This dimension was maddening in its weakness.
Physical pain forced her questing mind back into its transitory vessel. This time there was no anathema secreted within, no soul-blazing agony, only two crushing steely grips tensed to tear her vessel in uneven halves in an instant. Tension began spreading the hands until the raw agony centered her mind upon nothing but the sensation. Reluctantly, she cloistered her mind and dampened her radiant soul.
The relief was as heady as the isolation was smothering. She had almost felt like herself, a mind always in transit, hunting for knowledge and power as she battle rivals and fed on lesser minds. Yet this dimension had no infinite depths of information to plumb, no bottomless wellsprings of energy to sustain her native being. There were only vessels of flesh traversing great expanses of lethal nothing. The unwoman found herself looking not with her mind but though her fleshling eyes to the weak souled giant poised to tear her vessel apart. These beings and their reality were so fragile, she must be more careful…
"Good, put it down Rookie. Now, You, talk."
"And what do you wish me to say, Virile Fleshling?" She replied, marveling at her newfound comprehension of linguistics. Her voice was pleasing to her ears, yet the mortals around her recoiled.
"Why are you here?"
"Your dimension is remarkably fragile, as are you fleshling creatures. I would cut back the secrets of time, materia and all this reality has to offer so as to further my knowledge, thus becoming as a god. I need to be here to accomplish my objective"
All eyes in the room turned to the leader among abhumans. Dampened though her senses were, she sensed their souls whelming into readiness. From her lopsided understanding of conversation, the unwoman suspected that she'd have to let this silence run its course. Without a word, the unwoman faintly pulsed two emotive states. The first was unfamiliar to her, cooperation. The second she knew and despised, submission.
"Rookie, kick this upstairs." Virile fleshling commanded.
The unwoman observed no kicking, yet a palpable air of excitement radiated off the lesser humans around her. She swiftly learned that these humans were educators and with her newfound informational foundation of physical communication, her knowledge pool was plumbed with shallow inquiries. She discovered their purpose was to create a dossier on her, and once the lesser human began asking of her aspects, domains of expertise and past history with mortals, she became progressively less cooperative and more transactional.
Once the dialog was little more than the exchange of questions for questions, the lesser human ceased probing for the unwoman's identity and resumed educating her on methods of communication. In time, this too because a subtle line of investigation into who she was and, as she had before, the unwoman began withholding information until she had received knowledge of equal worth. When it was abundantly clear that she would offer no more, the lesser mortals began parsing her words to ensure nothing was lost in the subtleties of language. Once the educators were satisfied that they had interpreted her will correctly they all departed, leaving her with the sturdy guards.
The concept of guarding was familiar to her, what she was less certain of was what these mere mortals were supposed to be guarding her from. She'd attempted to query the weak one about this, but no comprehensible answer was forthcoming. The wait this time wasn't nearly as long.
A human man entered the chamber she now knew to be sealed off from the rest of the material universe. The man was unimpressive in body and soul, although what she could sense of him mind was calculating and cunning. Idly, the unwoman played her mind and eyes over the man as he drew nearer, then she felt a terribly potent presence looming over the man.
This new human wasn't sturdy in soul like her guards, yet there was a massive and almost fraternal awareness following him. Another being such as the unwoman was watching over this human, yet unlike her this being was an ancient demigod in both power and mind. Old instincts pressed to the fore and the unwoman swiftly withdrew her reaching mind, hoping to avoid drawing the attention of the titanic presence. She was too late.
The fleshling reality she was still acclimating too faded into oblivion as the demigod turned a sliver of its prescience unto her vessel. To be held under this being scrutiny made even time's ceaseless march halt, its omnipresence filled her perception so completely that there was nothing but the demigod. No thought, no light, not even time. It was the pinnacle of our existence, and she was all too aware that it was weighing her continuation with an air of idle boredom. Dimensional normality reasserted itself as the demigod's attention moved elsewhere, her fleeting existence dismissed as nothing of note. Everything was as it had been, all was seemingly oblivious to the demigod's momentary, eternal oversight.
"So you're our latest guest? Have you got you reality-legs steady yet?" The warded man inquired.
The question had her glancing to her guards for confirmation. The questions were both moot as far as she could tell. Was she still expected to answer what any being with functional eyes or the faintest capacity for soul sight would already know? The virile guard gave an affirmative nod, the essence of his soul masked by the omnipresent fraternal presence. The unwoman took two steady steps towards the warded man by way of confirmation.
"I am indeed your guest." She answered factually. "I also have steadied legs."
The warded human bared his teeth. The unwoman understood this was how humans showed pleasure, though this was the first time she'd seen the expression in practice with her own eyes. She returned the expression identically, making the warded human's smile crumble which she also copied flawlessly.
"You'll need to work on that. Anyway, on to the meat and potatoes. My super-freaks here seem to think that you and I can work out a little business arrangement. One where you don't get poofed and no more of my staff get turned into gibbering idiots. All we've got to do is scratch each other's backs and everyone gets what they want. How's that sound?"
In truth, she'd understood little of the exchange. The sound of the mortal's words and his voice was irritating, though she suspected that was not the true essence of his question.
"You wish to form a covenant of mutual benefit?" She summarized.
"Of a sorts, but before we get into the nitty-gritty details we should both make sure we know what we're looking to get out of this. Do you know what that is?"
"I wish to study your fragile dimension of existence and…" She attempted to collocate a past communion with her present self for the precise terminology unmuddied by empathic translation, and failed utterly to bypass time's ceaseless march. Secondarily, she was forced to recall the events from her eidetic but entirely underdeveloped memory— the process was entirely displeasing. "Mingle with the locals."
The warded man smiled a wide and unwelcoming smile before sticking out a hand.
"I do believe we can do business."
The unwoman tentatively allowed the warded man's dainty fist to clasp her hand and shake it.
"Welcome to Titan's Crest. Miss…"
"You may address this vessel as Bim."