He had emerged out of the gayfication cocoon in the middle of the night, thirsty and craving married man ass. Now Cutbastra was covered in a viscous and white fluid that, judging by its flavor, couldn’t be cum, or otherwise oral sex would have been outlawed long ago. The room that slowly appeared around him as his eyes got used to the darkness was the kind of chaos that slowly distresses one out because it ought to showcase a pangolin somewhere, yet the curious mammal is nowhere to be found. Whenever he thought he had made out one of the objects in the room, he saw a wrong line, a wrong angle that made the chair not-quite-a-chair and sent his brain reeling.
The more he saw the heavier his breath got. Nothing in that room made sense, except the cocoon. A pang of angst welled from the depths of his essence, devoid of any trace of olin.
“Faren? Where are you, Faren?,” he called for his friend, unsure of where the exit door was located.
“I am everywhere where I am not not,” His friend’s voice echoed through the room, its source as unrecognizable as the images his brain constantly struggled to make heads or tails and Knuckles of.
“What kind of place is this, you nincompoop, which deviant room did you stash me into this time?”
“That’s my closet. You have to come out of it.”
Cutbastra Joined his hands in a gesture of utmost worry for his friend’s mental health. “Since how long ago were you waiting for the day I come to you to become bisexual?”
“Years, Cutbastra friend, years!”
“Just to make the joke of me coming out of a closet?”
“Er… yes. Any problem with that?”
Cutbastra sat on the floor, over an image of a flattened not-cat-not-chair-not-jacket. “You ask, like I didn’t know you, old bastard. I expected a prank of this… caliber.” Cutbastra looked around, taking in the impossible objects that drifted across the dark space. “What are these supposed to be, anyway?”
“Arcagnostic’s Catalog of Unrecognizable Objects to do a Little Trolling, Volumes 3 to 8,” Faren’s voice noted, almost robotically.
“Your people are a menace to this world and its inhabitants,” Cutbastra jokingly paraphrased something Faren had told him long ago, on the day they had met in the heat of the battle.
To this Faren, who waited outside the closet—not immediately next to it but rather anywhere else but in the closet— laughed heartily. “Well, you are going to be a menace To the world’s chastity now.”
Cutbastra glowered at a random spot in the deranged room. “How dare you. To cultivate, I only fuck married wo—“ a smile grew on his face. “Married people.” He hopped a bit in place, feeling lighter than ever at the realization that the cravings were there. “I can feel it: Full-fledged bisexuality courses through my veins. I don’t even feel odd thinking about doing husbands now.” Then, he lowered his gaze to the floor and fell on his ass. “But I still have to seduce them or the world ends. What a chore.”
“I sometimes forget you don’t like going around having sex, friend.”
“Of course I don’t like it! I am like the nine-to-five homewrecker of the world. And if I changed my road I’d need to start all over. It was fun the first few years, and only the first few years.”
Light carved a path through the darkness, a crack of brightness widening as Faren opened the door slowly, fearing for the integrity of his ass. He could fend for himself against Cutbastra, and had preemptively casted his own anus out of existence for the following hour, but the primal fear remained.
In a fraction of a second, the Cultivator rushed in front of Faren’s face, pulled a permanent marker out of his pocket dimension, and wrote something on his forehead.Then he exited the closet, passing by the Arcagnostic, who was staring at him with bleary and incredulous eyes.
“You drew a dick up there, didn’t you?”
Cutbastra stared at his friend’s goatee. “Maybe. See you later, where’s the exit?”
Faren shrugged, smiling. “Hell if I know.”
Three hours later, Faren, home alone save for the hierophant he refused to ever address, would pass in front of a mirror and remember to check his friend’s work of art.He frowned at the word written there, punctuated by a heart “thanks”. Cutbastra knew there was nothing to thank him for. Faren wasn’t doing this only out of appreciation for his friend or out the goodness of his heart; he was facilitating Cutbastra’s suicidal mission to save the world from one of the most powerful intradimensional beings they knew. And he wouldn’t help: to face Chalazarian was to die, there was no way around it. And he wanted to live. He wanted to persist even in a world full of suffering, in a landscape turned to the dragon’s hellish domain. He wasn’t going to seek death after having strived for so long to become immortal. Decades turned to centuries of reading and experimenting with his spirit and the world as he found his way, unique for every Arcagnostic, to bribe away death.
He grunted and stomped on the floor. “Moron.” And the comment wasn’t directed necessarily at Custbastra, but to himself, because he had let a friendship with a cultivator grow on him, and now he would pay the toll every one of his friendships with non-Arcagnostics costed him in the end: unassailable grief.
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Lino opened his eyes. This action alone was unfathomably painful. His whole body ached as he floated adrift on the mating chamber. The most distressing aspect of it wasn’t the distorted dimensions, the walls of pulsing purple flesh, or the libraries full of —and only of— copies of Ready Player One. It wasn’t even the giant, metallic mates —the Gaucho Messi Tango Default variety— that ambled at the corners of his vision, which disappeared whenever he tried to fix his gaze on them. No, it was Abba’s greatest hits being sung by a voice that could be attributed to a follower of the Road of Gonads that crossed paths with a follower of the Road of Torsion. That, and the fact the System communicated in English, but it, somehow, felt like devious French to him.
Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.
You are awake.
If you do the skyrim bit again I swear…
“Can I drink some mate?” Nothoracopteris argentinica asked rudely, still active inside his head.
You are a fossil without a mouth!
“My matrix is porous enough.”
He imagined a pack of yerba, floated it over his avatar, mentally poured it over the fossil, and then he imagined a kettle, and with it he soaked his avatar in near-boiling water.
“Wiiiiiiiii!” the pteridosperm shouted, prey to absolute, steaming bliss.
Great, she is a masochist too.
Were you expecting something different from the dead, lithified remains of a long extinct plant? diagenesis changes people. Besides flattening them, I mean.
Lino half-closed his eyes. There was nothing he could do in there, waiting for his new wife to… waiting for his new wife to do something. Anything. She hadn’t been particularly active, besides taking him to this impossible place, telling him to stay there in his own voice and closing the door in her way out.
He fell into deep introspection. Floating here he didn’t feel hunger, nor thirst, nor pain, nor lacks of any sort. What was the dream of the sentient mind, except having the entirety of time to appreciate itself? It was not like Parkinson’s, Parkinson’s made you a prisoner of an achy jail that conspired against you, and it took your clarity of mind away to boot. Here, he was a guest. Deprived of all freedom but he one to think and speak, sure, but why would he need them. A body without wants was a body without a need to run, jump, swim or climb. A body that floated around didn’t need to rest its legs, to change position when sleeping, or to even, go to the bathroom. He still had a body, but it was merely ornamental to his mind now.
He was taken out of his ruminations when a group of small animals, mostly varied marine invertebrates, and fewly a single minuscule cow, floated by in front of his face. He turned his head to follow them with his eyes.
“Hey, a new one,” commented the bigger of them, a flat creature covered in a multipartite shell.
“Mood eternal evening,” the cow greeted Lino.
“We are going to die, die, die!” kept repeating one of the smaller invertebrates, a tiny creature with a single-piece shell on its back.
“Hello, do you have names?” Lino decided to start with the right foot.
“My name is Shelly,” the cow answered, clearly used to the concept of names.
“I am Shelly,” said the flat one, the leader.
“I, too, am Shelly,” said the fatalist one.
“Pleasure to meet you, Shelly,” a lilliputian creature resembling a crustacean somewhat extended a leg in a salute.
“And I am…” began something resembling a mollusk.
“Let me guess: Shelly?” Lino interrupted the slow thing.
“… Pancracio.”
Lino pulled his head back in confusion. This was very anticlimactic.
“He’s a surrogate,” the cow explained, “for Shelly.”
Something clicked inside Lino’s head. Metaphorically, I mean, as he hadn’t been inserted a mechanism, a mouse for example, in the brain. That would be silly.
The system felt a foreboding sensation: something mightily stupid was about to happen.
“Wait, you are small, correct?” he asked, a smile finding it’s way into Lino’s face, bit by bit.
“Yes,” said the possible crustacean.
“And you are… fauna, correct?”
“Pretty mooch,” answered the only one there who would moo so carelessly.
“And you are all Shelly, or filling in for Shelly.”
“Yes, yes, you are correct,” answered Shelly.
Lino’s face was that of a child in the interval between discovering petards and their first lost finger, “Then you are Small Shelly Fauna! But… why the cow?”
“Do you have a problem with me?”
“There weren’t cows in the Cambrian. There weren’t tetrapods in the Cambrian. I mean, the flat one is a Halkieria I believe, and the others possibly fit too. But you are a goddamn cow!”
The bovine scowled, and the force of the gesture sent her spinning over her axis. “Yes, I am. And yes, there were cows in the Cambrian. There was me.”
“No, there weren’t.” The scientist discussed with the empirical evidence. “There was no way for a cow to survive in the Cambrian, as land plants didn’t even exist. Our first records of bryophytes are from the Ordovician.” He picked the cow up from its tiny tail and examined her up close, the cow’s angry eyes glinting like shards of glass among the sand-
“I ate algae, of course. Cows can eat algae.” The cow’s eyes went wide as she reminisced the trauma. “And some algae can eat cows.”
“Oh no, she remembered Lola,” lamented Pancracio.
Shelly the Cow began whining as some of the invertebrates tried to console her.
“Are you happy now? You made her think about her sister, that got eaten by The Horrid Devourer,” the Halkieria chastised Lino , curling its body into an s shape, as if it were taking its fists to its inexistent waist.
Lino was going to complain, but decided to use his ample experience as a paleobotanist to escape this conundrum.
“The fossil record is both imperfect and incomplete. Not everything that lived had a chance to fossilize, not everything that fossilized will ever be found, and part of what has been found, is being found, or will be found won’t preserve the characteristics we would like to study,” he pronounced like one would a mantra. Oh, how many times he had explained it to first year students. “So maybe there was some animal that resembled algae in the Cambrian, and—”
“No, no: it was a monster made purely out of carnivorous, multicellular algae. What do you think caused the Cambrian explosion? Do you think Ediacaran fauna wasn’t happy with their simple life, resting on bacterial mats, getting casts made out of them when they died, huh? Why would they leave this life of lazy abundance if not because an algae-based predator hunted them to extinction?”
Lino wanted to point out there were several theories to explain it, without resorting to logic, defying ghosts, feared by a mad cow.
“Lola! I will avenge you! I will eat all algae on the seas! Moo!”
Shelly (crustacean) noticed Lino staring at Shelly (cow) with a bit of amused disbelief about her claims. “The explanation for Shelly and Lola being cows swimming in Cambrian seas is that they are Size-Travelling, Time-shrunk cows.”
Shelly made a respectful pause, and Shelly cowtinued.
“Moo, it is true. Moo. We were normal, Holocene cows living on a Holocene farm managed by Holocene farmer, in the Holocene.”
Lino nodded, lips pursed, like one would when listening to a stupid little sister.
“And then, moo, one day, they invented time travelling, moo, and we wanted to go to the future, moo, to eat new variants of grass, moo.”
Lino was willing to take the cow’s story at face value. Stranger things had happened to him as of late. “Aha, go on, go on.”
“And, and… the time machine polarity had been inverted, moo. So when we entered it, instead of being sent to the future, we were shrunk!”
Riveting. Most heartrending. A tragedy.
Shut up, let shelly finish her deranged tale. I have nothing better to entertain myself with.
“My genocidal, unicellular ancestors will one day smile upon me,” the seed fern inside Lino’s head said as it tried to remember how to do photosynthesis.
“… and after days and days of tiring travel through dangerous fields where praying mantises tried to eat us, we arrived to the scientist’s size-changing laboratory. And we stepped onto the Deshrinking-ray, hoping to be normal cows again. But the de-shrinking ray polarity had been reversed, so it sent us back in time to the Cambrian! Mooo! Moooo!” she cried disconsolately. “The Devourer ate Lola on day two, mooo!”
“Then we found her, and adopted her, because she looks funny,” a Shelly concluded Shelly’s tragic tale.
Lino sighed. It would be a long, long stay in the mating chamber.