Ozzy still stood on the underside of his haven. His body was more of an afterthought to the battle that was still winding down topside. If someone were to stand on the topside and search the entirety they wouldn’t find any continued physical combat. Likewise only a tree speared halfway through a square and some scuffs in the dirt would indicate any altercation had even taken place. However, looking with his domain clearly showed the tree was also spearing the old membrane and also revealed the newly discarded one not far away. Both slashed and tattered extensively. His domain itself would also be revealed though even that wouldn’t hint at the mental combat still trudging on inside.
The voidling had abandoned the pointless wailing and returned to countering every thought he could conceive of even as it was being formed. Gearing itself entirely toward the mental struggle. To the point that there didn’t appear to be any physical energy dissipation at all. All of this hinting at the structure of whatever it was that made it up. It wasn’t an antiparticle, or a black hole, or just nothingness. The form it took wasn’t static or even fluid. It was more of a quantum superposition in an exact negation state of every possible waveform of all things physical and otherwise. which apparently included thoughts.
It wasn’t simply that it contained a waveform of an antiparticle in order to annihilate a counter particle into pure energy. There was an infinitesimal portion of the voidling, which also infused the whole, that contained exactly the needed energies to disrupt anything such that it reverted into its constituent parts, while also preventing the binding energy from simply reforming or converting into something new. The total energy of which was significantly lower than a simple antiparticle. Likewise another portion would break up any sub constituents until the only thing left was the energy, which it or another, could devour. It could apparently also alter this state such that it could counter specific groups of things depending on what scenario it found itself in.
For example when the voidling was faced with a battle in which it was repeatedly outmatched in novel physical and metaphysical ways, it could instead narrow the focus and counter his thoughts alone. Which is how he currently found himself slightly confused, disoriented, and yet slowly gaining ground in what felt like the strangest conversation he’d ever had. Mostly because it wasn’t so much a conversation as a roiling exchange of raw consciousness. The voidling was short circuiting his thoughts and attempting to supplant them with its own. The experience was not far off from a drug induced fugue state where each thought tumbled over the next cascading into confusion. The only thing that seemed to help buffer him from the onslaught was that the voidling was focusing all of its energies into his domain and it was able to act as a buffer for his brain. He was sure if it was a direct attack on his unaided faculties, he would have been left a drooling, babbling idiot nearly immediately.
There was also the massive size his domain had reached and the concentrated sphere he’d grouped it in which seemed to help buttress every part of it in countering the attack. The longer it hammered away at his resolve the slower and weaker each attack became. Strangely while the attacks were weaker and slower they also spread throughout his domain as they did so. As if the voidling was losing cohesion. There was also the possibility it was searching for some weakness, or trying to hide itself. Yet Ozzy didn’t think that was the case. It slowly dwindled down into something he might have assumed was simply a bit of morning grogginess if he had only just woken up like this. He sat his body down on the underside and let out a breath he wasn’t sure how long he’d been holding.
Over the next hour or so he slowly calmed himself down and relaxed muscles that had unwittingly knotted up despite not moving his body much at all over the whole ordeal. Ozzy couldn’t really keep from tensing up in dangerous situations. Back on earth he’d sometimes found himself biting his nails even while just watching a scary movie despite the fact that he would have preferred not to show such vulnerable reactions. Once his body had returned to something resembling a calm state he felt around inside his own skull, and then out into his domain. The reduction in attacks had followed an asymptotic path. Always approaching zero but never quite getting there. Even now as he got up to return topside he could feel hiccups in his thought process sporadically.
The implications of the way this attack had revealed that his domain and mind were connected changed the way he looked at it. So far he’d been operating under the assumption that his domain was essentially a limb, but it was clearly something more of an extension of his will. Things that affected it in turn affected his thoughts, though, thankfully, in a detached way, otherwise this encounter wouldn’t have played out the way it did. Pulling his domain back to himself he was relieved to find he wasn’t suddenly overcome with concentrated attacks directed at his brain. It appeared while still not dead yet the voidling was beyond the point of altering the target or method it used when attacking. Simply spreading out into the brain just as it had into the full domain, yet in the diminished state it wasn’t able to harm him anymore than being without a cup of coffee could.
He had other things to address anyway. The haven still had two gashes to repair and he needed to explore outside its domain to evaluate what might have caused this attack, and the one before. The gashes had been left unprotected as he instinctively pulled back every bit of domain and membrane he had access to. Examining them he found the haven was already at work itself, to restore them to their previous membranous state. Prior to this engagement and his short jaunt into the nothing outside he had no idea if he would be able to return there. Even now he wasn’t certain he could properly express what he wanted to the haven, and might simply end up in another haven or somewhere else entirely instead of just outside. To prevent that he quickly sent out a small portion of his domain surrounded by membrane through the quickly healing gash.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
He had to slice an incredibly thin film that already closed over the entirety of the hole to start the healing process. From the haven he felt an impression of someone looking at him with the unimpressed look of someone entirely done with his shit. The exchange felt more natural than it had before. The extensive mental warfare with the voidling having given him a crash course in direct exchange of thought. In reply he impressed upon the haven the feeling of a parent forcing their children to eat vegetables. An uncomfortable but necessary course of action. In return an image was impressed upon him of someone jumping through a closed window instead of using the door, with a follow-up indicating the pore sitting right next to the gash he’d used.
Feeling sheepish he touched the pore and requested going outside as he now understood it to be. Reaching through he was relieved to find that he had indeed been let out next to the other glob of domain he’d brutishly forced through the wound. Pulling the second bit of domain back the pore closed behind it and he sent back an apology along with the feeling of raising his hands to express no ill intent. What he got back was a harrumph, an eye roll, and a turn to ignore him as the haven got back to repairing its now thrice damaged membrane.
From outside the haven he watched as it worked. Knitting the newly stretched thin membrane back together before returning to thickening it back to the state the rest was in. As it progressed he watched the gush of air, light, and space all reduce to a trickle then a drip and finally stop. Each at their own pace. The air was first to stop with the completion of the first layer. The space took a few more layers and the light was the last. Though even as they all finally stopped the haven didn’t disappear or stop. His domain still saw an avalanche of energy still flowing from where the gashes had closed up in every other sense. Those multiple tsunamis of energy also became slack and stopped as the haven continued to add layer after layer to the membrane. Different layers to stop or reflect different energies until all that was left was the lowest of waste energies.
This energy never stopped flowing. It continued radiating into the void long after the haven finished repairing the membrane and returned to a dormant state. With all of the other energies finally contained and the lighthouse that announced his haven stopped he could finally see beyond it. While it wasn’t that the beam from the lighthouse hid a metropolis there was a wash of waste energies. Prickling against his membrane he could feel there was not only energies exiting his domain but from any and all directions, even internal. Along with that energy came more than just the direction. He could actually detect some hint of the origin from the energy itself.
There was a talk he’d listened to about information theory. That it wasn’t only energy, but information as well that couldn’t be destroyed. That even an object obliterated by a black hole would leave an imprint of the source upon the event horizon. Which was then encoded upon the hawking radiation that escaped. Here he could detect the faintest bit of intent from his haven leaking along with the energy that escaped and revealed its location. On other portions of his membrane he could feel the same from other sources out there. Some havens, and many others he hadn’t yet learned to decipher. From directly ahead he could also feel two others. The first of both the rat and imp havens were also periodically giving of their location, but not quite like his haven. They were a drip that intermittently alerted him to their existence while his own haven was a faucet or flashlight compared to the previous torrent, or lighthouse.
Which also answered a question he’d had since he first arrived here. How had he gone to the first rat haven first, why not the second, or third, or some other random rat haven. The same seemed to be true for Cederick, and the intelligent rat he’d killed. Yet he’d seen those haven’s exchange waste energies while exchanging connections to rats they caught them. It made sense that if a long line of havens exchanged energy the one with only one connection rather than two would be the one to have the most leakage. At least it was the intuitive answer from everything he’d seen.
While it was satisfying to get a glimpse behind the curtain at another mechanism of how this universe, or whatever this was, functioned, it didn’t exactly help him with his problem regarding random uninvited guests showing up. Likewise he didn’t want to leave this portion of his domain outside as despite being smaller than his haven he also noticed the waste coming from inside was relatively much more dense. Pulling it back through the pore into his haven he turned to contemplate his predicament.
There was an obvious way he could avert this problem. The only issue being he had no idea if the solution to this symptom would simply create a different or even larger problem further down the line. That being to adjust the membrane he’d added to the connection to the rat and imp havens to also pump all the excess waste energy there. It might simply cause the first rat haven to shine a bit brighter. Yet. he had no idea what was happening on the other end of that line of havens. There very well could be something or someone using this line to reel in rats like a void fisherman. Who knew what strengths or capabilities such an entity had and how he could protect himself if he brought even more attention to himself.
No, the solution couldn’t simply be dump the energy into another direction and hope for the best. He needed to dispose of it responsibly and reliably in a way that wouldn’t unintentionally change the way this delicate ecosystem worked, and in turn wake him up another day with a new and even worse problem to solve.