"My gracious goodness, girl! We've nailed down the marker to a T! One thousand miles and we arrive," exclaims a spiffily suited fellow, a small figure in tow behind by a heartfelt bond of hands. Situated squarely atop a boxy backpack strapped to her shoulders is a fancifully crafted barometer-thermometer-hygrometer device. It works away with a silent intensity, providing a quality of guidance to the familiar pair.
Fixated on the Library's floor - interrupting the flow of shelves - before them is a colossal, efficiently arranged artifact bleeding a bountiful airglow onto every surface in the vicinity - one of brilliant blue, green, red and exceptional UV purple, scaling as each uniquely shaded wave ascends into the perceptibly infinite ceiling.
The foundational structure is a pair of upraised palms akin to the enlightening extremities of Athene. These uplift and maintain a gyrating, generously etched icosahedron keenly cascading the tides of airglow down, around, up and away.
The gracious hands are mahogany. The geometric instrument of wonderment composed of kaleidoscopically combining fractals of copper.
Encircling this spectacle are the fearsome Docents - six to each side, unwavering in supporting the security of their designated angle. Their lanterns flicker, but no flame - not of candlelight nor of spirit - will find rest.
At the apex of the eternally erected structure sits a singular, sober Archivist, posed at a table consisting of iridescent, multifaceted mirrors.
"It radiates splendorous vibrancy of the self, doesn't it, dear?" speaks the man, gesturing with a certainly invigorated attitude at the sight of their well-met destination. He looks back, crouching beside the aisle's book-stacked tower and coaxing his tiny companion to observe the entirety of glory in this momentous viewing. "You can feel it - same as I! The atmosphere is… teeming. It's fuller here, so close to the source! A source so splendid. Our every hour, you'll find, is supported by these pieces of the fathomless puzzle. One every thousandth mile."
He plucks a spyglass from his pocket and points it fondly at the scene ahead.
"Within that geometric beauty is a genesis. A facet of creation itself. The wealth of worldmaking - embodied in an articulated shell for the benefit of our multiverse."
"It… makes life?" asks the girl in a small, baffled voice, posing her intrigue unto the soothing atmosphere of dense delight.
He chuckles. "In the sense of exceedingly planetary measures, it is what promotes and persists life. This-" he points prominently to the icosahedron. "gives us breath. The Library cultivates the minds of the worthy masses from all manner of worlds, dimensions, universes! We each, each species, have a differing atmospheric need. My theory? This outstanding, animated shape knows us and our necessities for continual, flourishing health by means of the Archivist. They bestow us with… guided clouds to fill our lungs for the eons we may spend absorbing the ecstasy of information. This is a paradise, daughter. We are blessed by the oversight of the Librarians… and whatever overarching conscious may persist and generously instill certainty in our evolution of self."
He eases himself onto the sleek, lengthily spanning surface that the Wanderers daily tread. "Remember our virtues, yes, sweetness?"
The girl nods. "The Archivists, though eyeless, see and I should be the best me.
"The Pages climb and bestow us illumination sublime, owing them the utmost respects for all time.
"The Docents are a dire reminder - never behave as you shouldn't, lest you are cocooned in the crucible of silent pyre."
"Good lass!" the fellow exclaims, ruffling her joyous red locks. "Now, why don't we set up our picnic and revel in the moment, hm?"
"Yes sir!"
There is a man in the hall.
He has been there for 12 hours, 2 minutes and 22 seconds.
How do you know this? There’s a clock on your wrist. A miniature grandfather that waves from its belly. This is your only indicator that time has transpired.
The sun stopped moving outside your window 13 hours, 3 minutes and 33 seconds ago. Rays glare at you as they snake past the blinds. They are not warm. Each is brilliantly bright - and luminous intensity makes for frigid blades.
You cut yourself on one earlier, but your blood is shy. It won’t peek out, won’t paint your face. It boarded up the gash. You felt the planks.
Huddled in the corner, you contemplate. The world vibrates, but you are as still as death. Are you… dead? No. You feel your arteries. They are kissing beneath the covers of your ribcage. You are alive.
The silence is stricken by a thudding, thundering knock at your door. It’s a heavy door, built of finely tuned ores and the craftsmanship of the most paranoid men on the planet. This door could tank a warhead and shrug it off. This door has seen more insult than God Himself, and it holds fast regardless.
Is it resolute? Is it spiteful?
These ponderings are dissipated as another KNOCK resonates through the aperture’s guardian. The man has large hands - and knuckles that could gore a cow. You don’t remember his name. No one remembers his name.
You shouldn’t have asked for his name.
“G… go away!” You plead, clutching your abdomen. It is swollen.
The voice that rises from your dry lips is slow, structured, a latticework of anxiety personified. You hate hearing your own voice. You wish your secretary was still here. Here to tell the man to pack up, seek another injury on the face of eternity.
Your legs tremble. They are moving again, for the first time in 14 hours, 4 minutes and 44 seconds. Why do they burn so bad? Sore. Awfully sore. Could you even stand anymore?
If you choose to rise, you’ll need to mind your headspace. The tendrils of light poke over the objects of your desk and make themselves cozy above your noggin, where further fracturing of skin they threaten.
A writhing is present now within your stomach. Something shifts, striving to say hello. It pushes your organs around, but none of them burst. You whine and bite your lower lip, stifling a horrid scream. Don’t scream.
Don’t let him hear you scream.
A ghastly THUD collapses against the door, rattling the furniture throughout the room. A lamp falls from its perch and fragments as it impacts the floor, spreading glass seeds.
You need to stand. You need to.
Your legs won’t give rise to an upright posture. They quake beneath the weight of your womb, which stirs only increasingly with the substance of the name.
“F… fuck…” You murmur, terrified at the hill holding you down. You have to remove it.
A double-barreled shotgun is at your side. It is sawed-off. You grasp it firmly, pressing the barrels against the right side of your raised abdomen.
The steel is cold upon your skin.
CRACK.
The shells explode outwards, piercing your surface and penetrating your person deftly. Pellets lodge themselves in your organs and over the growth manifesting among your midsection. But you do not bleed.
Your blood is shy. Your organs can’t be bothered.
You won’t die. Even as your figure quivers and the pain grinds your innards, there is no relief.
Another KNOCK. The door shivers, relaying shimmers of dust as it is disturbed worse than at any point in a history without dates and without births.
The presence that took residence in your interior of fleshy denizens wobbles and subsequently, gradually liquifies, deflating your stomach. Then your pores burn like so many bonfires on the hills of the lake on July 4th, licking at the darkened sky as so many signals of liveliness.
A pasty, pale material slips out of your every pore and maneuvers into the shape of a frightfully fabricated figure. An entity. A sickly-sweet-smelling… wax mimicry of…
YOU.
Your entire body ought to be gushing blood at this moment, but none dribbles forth. Instead you are filled with holes, top to bottom, exposing your dancing interior in all its functional fondness.
“Pl… pplaaa…” You venture to speak, but your throat is pockmarked. Too airy to form proper syllables, much less express the true measure of the malevolence you desperately desire to escape.
The belly swings still, true to the progress of existence - despite the blinding blades and their ill temperament. 15 hours, 55 minutes and 55 seconds.
What came of your womb forms a jagged smile, inching down to meet your face. You are unable to shift your weight. You are unable to look away. Your holey orbs gaze back at the product of the name.
You shouldn’t have asked his name.
KNOCK.
KNOCK.
KNOCK.
The glue of the aperture maintains its stance, permitting no persona to creep on this interaction. The impacts of hands rend not the ore.
The writhing mass of pasty you pecks your forehead prettily. You experience a lightning of sensation, your whole person collapsing finally into a state of destabilization.
Your heart nearly pumps out of your chest as it catches up to the injury, and your pores become spouts of bubbling red. Your form shrinks and your consciousness wanes, while you unravel - undressing inside out to greet your end of days.
A single, signature sight graces your fading being:
The paste is now a person…
and that person is fleeting.
Guenivere Grandulus clenches her jaw and dives forward, body slamming a 7-foot-tall behemoth into a brick wall. Both are yelling at the top of their lungs all the while, but the big guy gets the wind knocked out of him as soon as his spine contacts the coarse surface.
“Take a BREATHER, boi!” she exclaims vehemently, shoving herself backwards and away from the gasping giant. The girl in latex and liquid armor ends up in the arms of a foe at her rear. Her gaze turns back to glance at him, smirking enthusiastically as she hops off her feet, slams his knees in and somersaults him over her head. “Up ‘n away!”
The lad thusly crashes headlong into his fellow at the solid wall, face colliding with abs like iron.
Both groan generously, bewildered by this series of events. They’d ventured to nab a quick buck from an oddly dressed little lass - and swiftly found that size doesn’t necessarily equal vulnerability.
The aforementioned “victim” nods approvingly at the pile of precariously met pals. “Would you fancy a round two? My engine is only now escalating to a purring fullness!”
Situations like this are taken oh so lightheartedly by the lavishly shiny lady. Encounters of crime are the norm, a facet of everyday freakiness.
Because of course, this is Eurtec.
I dreamt a dream of enclosure. Of no more slices in the yawning space. No more peril pouring itself from maws that bridge the fabrics of forsaken dimension.
Of fading.
Of the Holders shifting their weight as such that the clouds close, allowing not one more man or machination of ungodly design into our limbo.
My father bore the consequences of overpopulation through and through his frail form. He was a cultivator before home hollowed out. Sowed the seeds to feed needs. His every pore accommodated itself as fertile soil, as such that we would not starve. Ours was a withering world.
We made it out lucky.
But the lottery only pays out once. You strike big - then probability pummels you from then on.
Father was swooped up by the knights twelve breaths ago. Twelve times have the giants of ever exercised salvation gasped into the luminous blanket of fog. They said they needed him. That stocks of food were falling dangerously fragile. So he went.
Our family are ‘shifters. We become what others around us need. Our society served one-another every hour of every day. We are more flexible than any clay.
He went where he was needed most. Has certainly become what they require to endure.
I was left alone. I have no one to imprint off of.
Only myself to serve. My survival to situate.
That fact may save me.
—
When I woke, there was no bed beneath me. The pool of the below, the unseen foundation that the Holders rest their soles upon, stared at me hungrily. I jolted upright and stood, levitating above the abyss by some grace of gods.
Our small island had partially disintegrated while I slept.
In the same way an animal stares unavoidable death in the face in the moments before their brutalizing demise, I gazed onwards past my unfounded feet, bewildered. Expecting a high-velocity ticket to oblivion.
Eventually, breaking the mold of mesmerized fright, I notice that my right foot is halfway disseminated. My toes waft in the wind as a shaped blanket of particles. See-through. Like a patchwork of fleshy circles slowly ground into microscopic meals for annihilation itself.
I scramble back, seeking a solid surface to save me from the snapping teeth of nothing. I cartwheel backwards out of our door - a construction of wood and sheet metal - which is bleeding off splinters and alloy dust into the below.
My soles brush against grass as I topple over onto my rear. The wavy, fractured section of my foot dislodges and floats over the somehow serene blades of green. I curse and shudder violently at the sensation.
I clumsily get on hands and knees to retrieve it. The flakes of my extremity are bound to one-another still and give off the appearance of a meager swarm of insects. I handle it with as much care as I can muster in my shaking palms.
The largest vein at my wrist severs and forms a needle. The rest of it becomes a string.
My body knows what I need before I can comprehend what’s happening.
The cottage sags towards a high-velocity collapse into the clouds as I rearrange my pose, setting to work at once. I jab my unaffected flesh through and through with the needle and my teeth grind together in pain as they transition into a piece of bark to stifle what would otherwise be expressive screams.
I bring the pockmarked part to align with it and begin weaving the two halves together. No blood leaves my body. Likely because my biological structure temporarily altered to a photosynthetic metabolism to prevent letting any lifeblood.
Mass is means.
And lesser mass at this second is a means to escalate my entrance into nothingness.
As I’m finishing the terrific endeavor of stitching a faltering piece of my existence back into proper position, I notice my vision becoming misshapen. Once the thread is secured, I lift my finally-free hand to my cheek.
Half of my head at a diagonal direction is beginning to slide down, choosing gravity as its new ally.
Our house, that quaint structure, finally buckles and careens violently in a descending spiral. The roof clips our doomed island on the way out and causes the dissipating landmass to swivel on its axis.
The catastrophic motion threatens to launch my detached portion of noggin away. I barely keep hold.
It begins folding on itself - with me on top. In less than a fraction of a breath, I’d be free falling.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck…”
Rising to my feet rapidly, albeit clumsily, I make a last-ditch leap for our nearby junkjet. It’s a rickety assemblage of scrap that utilizes compacted humes to defy a certain law of physics. That law being the same one that would’ve easily ended me - if not for narrowly grappling onto the edge of the aforementioned vehicle.
I hoisted myself into the open-top cockpit and was elated to see that my makeshift stitches held. My foot stays with.
The island is now in a decaying spin, chunks beginning to separate, casting heavy projectiles into the surrounding sky. I key the junker for locomotion while feverishly squeezing the slices of my cranium against one-another, begging the powers that be to not let me lose myself.
It fails to revv. It chokes. A blob of sediment misses the chassis by an inch, hurtling itself against a signpost behind me.
My good foot and part of my leg become a crankshaft. I look under the dash to realize that the formerly intact component was consumed by the crucible of crumbling reality.
I jam my altered appendage into the housing and growl fiercely as the mechanism begins turning - twisting my immediately attached mass over and over as it achieves a prime rotation.
The agony is bloody palpable, akin to any semblance of hell. But it would save me from the latter.
My vessel of final opportunity for survival jolts forward and attains steady acceleration. The fringe of the breakneck broken island clips the rear housing and sends the junkjet soaring. My scrap of defiance somersaults high upon the winds of Last Place and abruptly resumes equilibrium, rocketing onwards and away from the teeming trauma of that diced abode.
The threatened side of my skull and associated skin came fully apart from their concretely cohesive counterpart and was harrowingly a mere heartbeat distant from leaving me forever.
If not for my body’s hasty adhesive reaction, I’d be missing that monumentally meaningful part of me. Prayers do get due attention when they’re so earnest, hm?
While the ‘jet maneuvers for the nearest friendly population center, I spend the most grueling minutes of my existence stitching up the rest of my cosmic injury.
But it is my existence
and I get to keep it.
Notes by: Private Eye Marsellen Vickers.
_
Bubbly Buoy (BB), otherwise labeled “sym-safe chem 01-100” is a twilight-violet substance suspected to originate from Nx-51 Eventide. It comes in tablets, capsules or - most commonly - liquid injectors.
Anomalous properties, as ascertained by Parapharmacodynamics, include:
1. Erratic, uncontrollable bouts of giggling for the duration of the substance’s effective half-life. Endorphins are released as normal during expressions of joy, but achieve greater volume and intensity (without damaging the brain) while under the effect of BB.
2. Floating/levitating for the duration of the substance's effective half-life, with the maximum achievable height ceiling being in equal measure to x1 milligram = 3 meters. Suspended speed is equal to the user’s walking/jogging/running pace (as is applicable), but in some strains is averaged by x1 milligram = 1.60934km/h.
3. Users are incapable of touching the ground with their feet while affected, as though buffered by an invisible barrier, and must consequently “glide” everywhere.
4. An affinity for and inability to injure airborne wildlife (paranormal or otherwise) that persists through the half-life and sometimes presents itself as a longer-lasting psychological change.
Notables:
Average half-life for “sym-safe chem 01-100” is 3 hours (single dose).
Overdoses (typically in the 500+mg range for the average human) can result in the user’s collective blood content flowing into their blood-brain barrier, depriving the majority of the body of oxygen and subsequently, explosively full-fracturing their cranium.
Street names for BB include: “Levjab”, “True High” and “Wing-Kin”
__
Packaging for the product is painterly abstract art, with the label “mamo’s bb”. Unintelligible, highly-stylized text is present across the packaging, contrasted by a “happy” swarm of orange glow. Underground advertising asserts to potential users that “Nothing is Beyond Your Reach!”
“mamo” is theorized to be the chemist behind the parapharmaceutical, but their identity has not yet been ascertained.