[Loop 2], Eltritch Lord Azithoth:
Eltritch Lord Azithoth kicked up his feet and dropped them on the desk, leaning back in his chair. Well, technically it belonged to the headmaster of the academy. But just as technically it was his, wasn’t it?
Because everything was his. Even what wasn’t. And most especially, those things that weren’t and never would be. Those were his favorite.
He laughed to himself, no to everyone! The whole of Creation was his unwitting audience! Ah, but he had work to do! WorK tOO dOO!
“WorK tOO dOO!” he cried out, leaning forward and drumming his fingers on the desk. He stayed like that, his very human shaped body contorting at that most acute angle of 43 degrees. Never mind the fact that degrees weren’t a unit of measurement where he currently was. He would probably never evolve beyond using and thinking in the measurement systems he learned in his youth. He reflected on this fundamental shortcoming and then he bent forward some more. There we were. 42. The answer to the most important question: Life. Ah. Perfect.
The horribly acute angle he was currently bent at was a great thinking posture that did strange things to his two twelve dimensional spines. Those were new. He was still getting used to them but he had SUCH plans to stretch and contort them in the future!
He laughed again. And cried. Maybe with joy. He didn’t really know. He knew he was a mess but honestly couldn’t help it. So what if he was a little irrational right then? Things had been going so well lately! And he was, in a mental and spiritual way, if not a bodily one, tired. He always got a little manic when he was tired, and a little mania never killed anyone in a boring way; that was what really, truly mattered. At least to him. Some people prioritized success, or money, or fame, or ishtroot in their lives. Azithoth? He prioritized fun. Always had, always would. It was hard, especially with the responsibilities he had accrued over the years, but that was okay. He hadn’t become a masochist for no reason.
“Fun. People really ought to have more of it,” he muttered to himself.
People called him “crazed”, “deranged”, and “the Mad Blue God”, but they were just flatterers. The truth was that Azithoth wasn’t insane (by his dubious standards), he was just someone who knew what it was like to get bored with life. Most people, he had found to his nigh infinite terror, lived their lives in cycles of wishful thinking and monotonous repetition. He had been like that too for what still felt like such a long time. It was his personal mission to act like an absolute loon, not solely for his own amusement, but for the sake of every other living person. It was, in his mind, the very best way to help other people keep their lives exciting.
Speaking again to himself and any invisible entities that may or may not have been spying on him at that exact moment in time, he said, “So, while I’m here, let’s stir the pot, shall we? See if we can kick up a little dust off the bottom, HmMm?”
As he thought about how to muddy the waters (needless and unsolicited obfuscation of other people’s lives was one of his favorite pastimes) something occurred to him. A lot of somethings actually. He was quite aware that a colony of upstart airborne bacteria was trying to colonize his scalp. It was a futile attempt, an expedition into a harsh tundra that would yield only DEATH for the little things. But Azithoth vowed they would not die in obscurity. He’d give them all names and reincarnate their souls in bodies that befitted their excellence as organisms. If only he knew what bodies those should be…
Oh! A thought!
He reached out and snatched the little jellyfish shaped THING out of the air and popped it in his mouth, chewed, and swallowed. Thoughts. He tried to make the best of the things when he saw them float on by since they happened to come his way so rarely.
Now he knew what he was thinking before he sat down: How to have fun with the business he needed to do during the rest of his day.
A vast and complicated plot unraveled in his mind as he sat there and stared into the middle distance for the unfathomably long period of 12 milliseconds. It wasn't without certain risks but… He did want to at least try it.
So, without further delay, he squinted and checked on where the cat was.
Throwing a main character almost immediately into mortal peril as a thin excuse to hand them phenomenal cosmic power in the fine print of a Faustian bargain was a cliche quite common on his home world. Nonetheless, cliches were cliches for a reason: people loved them and they worked. As his best friend once put it so long ago: “If it wasn’t broken, WHY DID YOU PUT PEANUT BUTTER IN MY GODDAMN WATCH, YOU UTTER SPASTIC?!”
They were words of wisdom that Azithoth took to the heart (along with a high caliber round fired from a ballistic weapon at point blank range) so long ago. That day, Azithoth had made a solemn vow to never again “fix” something that wasn’t broken.
Which was why he would have to take some time out of his day to derail a train. Because if he didn’t, people, and more importantly, Dogs, would die as a direct result of his earlier actions. Actions had consequences which was irritating, really, but something par for the course in this sort of universe. Perhaps he would vacation somewhere without causality for a while when all of this was done.
Azithoth reconstructed the entire chain of most probable events in his mind’s eye for the 14th time that morning just to be sure he had it right. If his calculations were correct then Jax would, in the next few minutes, try to offload the cat (which was really Headmaster Aladraim) off onto Izel. Jax couldn’t take care of it himself because he and Janisse were duty-bound to run off to fight a horrible soul torturing monster in just a few hours. Which, incidentally, was another even he had a small hand in orchestrating.
In actuality, the headmaster being turned into a cat wasn’t important. What was important was that Jax and Janisse stopped by Izel’s residence and spoke just cryptically enough to her to catch her interest before they rushed off to do battle against the aforementioned nasty monster. This action would, in most futures, lead to Izel following along and ending up in mortal peril. That peril, in turn, would be the catalyst that coerced her to accept a magical contract with the Companion assigned to her and thereby become a Guardian of Hope.
It was a textbook setup. Except the cat part. That had been for fun.
The issue Azithoth now faced was that putting Izel in the path of danger resulting in a completely different monster being at the local Transit station later on. Naturally, this resulted in many eventualities in which there would be a regrettable loss of test subjects. Living ones at least. And they WERE test subjects. This entire world was one of his experiments.
Azithoth twitched as a painful shock raced through his insides.
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“FiNE! FinE! RegreTable loSs of liveS! Lives! Not TEst suBJests! HappY noW?” he amended for the benefit of Sigil, the entity responsible for administering his “gentle” behavioral correction. Sigil was one of those beings he was quite sure kept tabs on him on a rolling basis.
The pain, mercifully, stopped before the involuntary giggles came on like a persistent coughing fit. He hated pain. Hated it. Despite all his power and all his battles he still couldn’t stomach certain kinds of pain. Probably the reason why he had a tendency to adjust the physical forms he took to make those kinds of pain impossible. Alas, at some point of arguable lucidity in his past, he had seen fit to have pain controls grafted to a vital portion of his nonlocal anatomy in an effort to keep his unfortunate tendency to marginalize “lesser life forms” in check. It was all his conscience’s fault. Anyway, it wasn’t that he was racist, or a narcissist. He just had to pretend to be the latter to keep his public image how he liked it. That meant that sometimes, he needed to be shocked out of his act. Literally.
Actions. Consequences. Be immoral --> get shocked. Grrrr.
At any rate, Azithoth would need to be at that Transit station or else pass that knowledge on to someone else who would be and who could take care of the problem quietly.
After a moment's debate, Azithoth decided he would go himself. He always did love taking a short break in the morning to stop and smell the roses. (But never Roses. Sniffing women at close range usually got him stabbed.)
Or, in this case, body check a train.
****
Izel:
Izel knew she’d been had. Her carefully cultivated plan would simply no longer work, not with witnesses who could clearly see where she was going. The odds of them missing the two-step teleportation escape were so low as to be pointless, even with Jax’s supernaturally bad luck accounted for. If they saw her leave via Transit spell, there would be nothing stopping them from following after her using Transit and cornering her in the train station. (She wasn’t sure it was even general bad luck, necessarily, so much as some psuedo-lethal dose of fate magic.)
Indeed, no plan survived first contact with Jax. However, the last few moments gave her two things to think about: First, Zayne was not with them. She had apparently misjudged the situation, unless he was hiding somewhere. Still, Izel thought he had more respect for himself than to try to hide from his friends, even under these circumstances. At least, she was fairly certain of that. Mostly. It briefly occurred to her that she would never know if he was willing to conceal himself, given the nature of concealment, and him being quite good at it. Illegally so, actually. She knew for a fact he knew invisibility magic and there was no way Zayne had gotten an exemption on his magic license for casting that. Invisibility was a highly restricted set of spells… for obvious reasons.
The second thing she had to think about was an unrelated mystery. Unless he had jumped from a balcony, Jax had just descended three flights of steps and rounded the building, a journey of some 40 yards at least, and he’d been hammering on her door just moments earlier. Jax was a respectable athlete and user of melee weaponry, but that kind of traversal went beyond physical ability. He’d have needed some new magic to pull off something like that. There was no way she was going to outrun him, let alone Janisse who could fly.
So, with her hopes of a clean escape dashed, and the impetus for fleeing likely a misunderstanding, Izel decided to try and figure out what new trick Jax had picked up while listening to whatever it was they actually wanted.
Outside. Away from her apartment.
It would probably end in some minor disaster, but what didn't with Jax? She was way ahead in the classes she had scheduled for today anyway.
Reviewing her options from her position hanging from the window, Izel surveilled her options before settling on one of her favorite spells. Her only Graviturgy magic, and of second threshold; one of several useful abilities she’d learned with the academy’s resources. She couldn’t reach her flute without letting go of the windowsill, so instead she called the runic inscription to mind, and pushed some of her magic into it as she spoke her practiced incantation, and fingered the band of leather she wore around her left wrist for this purpose. It didn’t really matter what she said, as long as she used a good cadence, but it wasn’t good to change the incantation too much or you could get confused. So, she stuck with the old and reliable one she knew:
“On th’ wind I fly,
Float, a butterfly.”
As Levitate settled into effect on her, she focused her mind on keeping the thaumophane she’d spent from spilling out of the sequence of runes in her mind, sustaining the spell. As she felt the runes appear on the surface of her arms, glowing with the purple light of Graviturgy, her weight became negligible and she released her death grip on the windowsill. She reveled in the feeling of weightlessness for a moment, and tucked her legs underneath her, pushing off from the wall like a swimmer in a pool. She floated away from the building and over Jax and Janisse, who looked up at her as she caught herself on a nearby lamp post.
“Sooo… what’s up?”
“You are,” Janisse noted without missing a beat, just as Jax, annoyed, asked: “Can you come down?”
“Nooo. Why would you want me to do something like that?” Izel replied happily, turning herself upside down and looking… er, up, at them where they stood on the ground. She fluttered her wings a few times as she gave the earthbound pair a smile. Then she looked closer at Jax, or more specifically, at the orange, fuzzy thing he was holding. “What have you got there, Jax?”
“It’s the Hea– I mean! It’s a cat.”
The orange fuzzball uncurled slightly and looked up at Izel, it's eyes gazing at her through tiny wireframe glasses of all things. Somehow it seemed highly grumpy without conveying any wish to be set down. No meowing or scratching to get free, as cats tended to when held so uncomfortably; instead, the orange tabby simply hung over Jax’s arms as though resigned to its fate.
The dragon-like Janisse rumbled, “It’s important though, isn’t it, Jax?” The leading question sounded rather pointed, and perhaps a little peeved. It was clear to Izel that Jax had something to be quite ashamed for. Again.
Jax nodded firmly, and Janisse continued her prompting. “Why don’t you tell Izel about why it’s important?” This time, Jax shook his head firmly in the negative, and was rewarded by a THWACK! in his back with Janisse’s thick, oversized crocodilian tail. Izel blinked as Jax simply kind of staggered under the impact, but wasn’t even knocked over, let alone sent flying through the air. Janisse was a giant draconic being whose torso alone was a yard across. Izel had seen her once kill a horse-sized monster (smaller than herself, just slightly) with a well-placed smack from her tail. To see Jax still standing after such an impact was stunning, almost unbelievable. It was clear from the sound that she hadn’t even been holding back, like one would expect from a reprimanding slap. Whatever had happened with Jax, it clearly went beyond some simple speed magic. He'd been durable before, but that smack should have sent him sprawling. Durability wasn't generally the same as inertia.
At this moment, the cat made a face that should have been adorable, pouty and grumpy and very cat-like. But to Izel, who had seen the exact expression on the face of her headmaster (in a context of dismay and poorly-contained amusement, often in reaction to a student’s foolish antics), well… Let us say, she finally recognized who those glasses belonged to. The High-Elf Headmaster of the Royal First Academy of Cyluria was never seen without these wireframe glasses. It was quietly joked in some small circles that he’d been born wearing the tiny lenses, and would be buried with them one day.
As it turned out, even being turned into a small cat wasn’t enough to separate the man from his even smaller glasses.
The Headmaster looked up at Izel’s horrified face, and Izel looked “up” at the upside-down cat wearing glasses.
“Oh,” Izel said.
“Meeeeow…” The Headmaster replied.
A few moments passed of Izel staring into the eyes of the cat--the Headmaster, and she found herself compelled to reach out and scratch the top of its head. A small voice inside her insisted there were a number of things wrong with doing this, but this voice was quickly determined to be the faction in rebellion. The rebel state within was quickly brought to heel by the armies of cuteness, and Izel felt fuzzy fur underneath her fingers. Jax was looking at her hand as if similarly transfixed in some dull state of horror at what she was doing. Slowly… reluctantly… the Headmaster began to rumble with a soft purring. His grumpy expression intensified, but this served only to amplify the cuteness.
…