I felt myself being drawn upwards, and saw my body, my head in Cindy’s lap.
When I tried speaking to them, no sound came from my mouth.
That made sense, when I looked down at myself I could see that I was a ghostly outline of person.
Too bad it would have been nice to lay some more in Cindy’s lap.
I floated slowly upwards into the light, which became stronger and stronger.
As it became unbearably bright, I could see I was going faster and faster upwards but felt no force of acceleration. It went so fast that I am sure that if I had a body I would have gotten carsick and thrown up.
After a few moments I could only see a blur to the sides, which suddenly changed from a white bluish blur to a complete black blur.
Again I felt the speed picking up, while not feeling acceleration. The sun was in front of me, and slightly to the left, very fast it moved to the side, and when it was almost perpendicular to my course, the light seemed to suddenly disappear, and I could only see darkness with small motes of light quickly streaming from front and out of my peripheral vision.
I was a animal so small that the world looked so very different from this perspective. As it got colder, I curled up and went into hibernation. Then it got warm again and I resumed my activities until I finally died from old age.
I was a shark swimming in icy waters, hunting eating and mating for what seemed like an eternity, until I clashed with a deep sea octopus. I think we both died, a case of mutual destruction.
I was an Ostrich walking across the savannah, found a lifemate, and got eaten by a predator before I had a chance to see my eggs hatch.
I was the dog of some English nobleman, hunting with him, and being pampered by servants, until I had an issue with my left hindleg, and was taken out an early morning and shot.
I was a citizen of the Soviet union, learning to be a spy, then sent to America and lived an obscure life as an Illegal, working in the IT industry until civilization as we know it, ceased to exist.
I think I zoned a bit out, not quite sleeping, but suddenly it felt like I had just woken up from a dream.
I was in some sort of space, a white space with simple geometry, the sky or ceiling was a bit whiter than the floor, and they both extended featureless into the horizon where they melded together.
“Took ya long enough” I heard a gruff voice say behind me.
The ghostly cloud that was me, slowly turned around, and a hobo looking gnarled dwarf was looking back at me.
“God ?” I asked it dubiously.
“Nah, I’m ye Divine Gallbladder, I'm a manifestation of yourself and a plethora of your accumulated bitterness through several reincarnations.”
“Where are we then ?” I asked.
“Actually we aren't anywhere, this is not the physical realm, and places and distances are more of a guideline in here. Suffice to say that almost no mortals from Earth have been here. If our human mind would feel better by putting a label on it, you can call this the Womb of Gods” the dwarf state cryptically.
“That doesn’t really tell me anything” I retorted.
“Oh please, try to apply your mind, Dumbo ! what could possibly be in the Womb of Gods ?”
“Uh oh” I answered dumbly.
“Oh well, I will spell it out for you, Divine Fetuses of course”
“I don’t think I am a fetus”
“Well you are, better get used to it, denying what you are in life has never been good for anyone in the long run” the dwarf answered philosophically.
“When will I be born ?”
“Oh in a moment, but time does not apply here, you know space and time are sort of interchangeable, you remove one of them, and the other sort of stops working.”
“But let's get on with it. We don’t have all day, or we do, but that doesn’t mean that we should just diddle the time away.
I made a confused shrug of my billowing cloud shoulders.
“Don’t you puff at me son” the dwarf intoned at me while wagging a finger. Then snapped his fingers with a loud click. At the first moment of the click, 2 masses came moving a high speed in opposite directions, one in front of me, and another behind me. At the last moment of the click they had come to a complete standstill. the one behind me looked like the wardrobe racks from nightclubs, if wardrobe racks came in a size called eternally long.
On the racks hang all sorts of costumes, “hmmm” well maybe not all sorts of costumes, each was like a complete suit complete with feet, legs, torso arms and a head. There were all sorts of humanoid creatures. A stocky dwarf costume, different kinds of elves, and a number of costumes which I would classify as Furries, part animal part human.
The one in front of me was an endless shelf of masks.
“Don’t just stand there, try one of them already” The Gallbladder dwarf motioned with his hands towards a one of the masks.
“These are your godheads, and I have tried to make this simple so our mind doesn’t explode. Each godhead represent a particular set of godly powers”.
The little hobo dwarf grabbed a mask which was a grinning skull rictus, with the forehead shaped as a golden sun with triangles jutting out from it.
“Take this for example, this is an atypical combination with a portfolio of Sun and Undeath, it grants powers themed within these two domains, try it on”
I shook my head, that sounded too much like Fentanyl zombies on a sunscorched California beach.
With my cloudy appendage, I grabbed a mask that found my interest. It was plain shape, but the surface had a mishmash of green paints which seemed to be still wet and actually boiled a bit. I tried putting it on my face.
“Oi thats the spirit son, now grab a racial skin, and lets get your to the fitting room to try it out.”
I looked at the costume rack, and pulled a green skinned godzilla lookalike out, it had a zipper in the back, which I unzipped. Instead crawling into it, which can be awkward if they are a bit too small, I sort of just billowed into it, like smoke sucked through a ventilator.
“Oh yes capital, let us proceed to the fitting room” The dwarf snapped his fingers.
If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
And suddenly it was no longer a costume, I was flesh again, but in the shape of a mansized godzilla, maybe a lizardman. Several other lizardmen danced wildly around a campfire, it was almost dusk, and I couldn’t see much further than the the small camp, as a dense fog was around us.
I joined them as that seemed appropriate, and we danced around for a while.
Then we sat down and a dried vegetable gourd filled with some unknown liquid was passed around. I also tasted, and not 10 seconds after, I had drunk the liquid the world started to shimmer with colours, and I saw smoky dragons and snakes slither around in the campfire.
One of the other lizardmen got up and with drunken slow movements raised his arms to the sky. The others followed, so I thought I better do the same.
We stood there with our arms raised, for a long time, and I saw the fog curl up and turn into cartoonish shapes. I then realised that whatever I had and the others had drunk had gotten us very high.
Each lizardman was reacting a bit differently, one was just completely still eyes agape, arms in the air. Another was spasming and standing with difficulty.
Several shapes came from the fog, and got into focus when they got closer, it looked like Orcs from some video game, big and green and armed to the teeth.
Me and my lizardmen homies, got in a line, and then we all spewed bile from our mouths at the Orcs. The bile hissed and burned the Orcs, and they fell to the ground trashing around as their faces melted off, and the acid ate holes trough their bodies.
The lizardmen went back to standing with arms in the air, and I knew that we would be standing like this for several days, communing with the spirits, drinking the intoxicant and acid spraying any interlopers.
The fog crept in and everything became black, and I felt myself forming into an insubstantial cloud shape again as the whitespace reappeared..
“That looked like a fun camping party, teenagers getting all high” the dwarf raised an eyebrow at me.
“Anyway the our innate compatibility for this godhead is too low, preferably we want something above 80%, the lower the compatibility the higher the chance of developing divine deficiencies. ”
“Unless you are in love with dwarf-godzilla, try both new race and new godhead”
I shaked my head at my gallbladder incarnation in dwarf form.
Then a special costume took my fancy, I took down a 8 tentacled octopus costume, and went on to select a blue glittery mask with stars on it.
I got into the costume and my cloud form adapted and filled it out, I immediately got queasy as I struggled to put on the mask with my newly 8 tentacles, which all felt like they were coming out of my head. Then the dwarf-me snapped his fingers and it went black.
As I blinked my giant eyelids, across bulbous eyespheres, I saw and mostly felt myself as a cephalopod with other friendly cephalopods, munching out on a small school of fish. We communicated with a combination of beak sound vibrations, and tentacle body language.
During a spectacular nightlit sky, we swam close to the surface and then started a dervish octopus dance for several hours, while gazing at the skies. After several hours, the other dervishes started to communicate prophetic statements to each other. Warning of low cod population and possible war in the southern shoals.
A solitary shark approached us. The whole cephalopod group reacted, changing places immediately, the closest squirting ink at it, and the making wild evasive maneouvers away from the ink blot. , the middle tensing up for launching into a melee grapple, and the back starting to glow with mana.
As the shark came out of the ink cloud, hot and presumably radioactive stardust rained down on the shark, as many seers used their Starfall ability on it.
Suddenly the ink cloud enveloped me, and I could no longer see anything, until I saw a system message hanging in a window. It was the only feature in this blackness.
I quickly chose no, and got out of the costume, while the dwarf slapped his thigh laughing at me.
“It really bumps you out with all the limbs right, it's far easier for us to adapt to another bipedal species, than for example being a fish or an insect. Go on and try something more human traditional, it will probably suit us more.”
I was already examining the racks, I discarded a costume of a flying insectoid. Another was a chipmunk outfit, discarded as that was simply too Disney.
Penguin people, and Owl people were also discarded. But then a Hippopotamus costume took my fancy, and I got into it. When I got into it, I felt that there was something stuck in the costume.
My gallbladder dwarf looked at me sharply “what ye fiddling with ?” he asked. He walked closer while looking at my Hippo costume clad foot. “Why is there a godhead in your shoe ?”
I had no good answers to that. So I just tried to do the thing where you take off your boot and shaking something out of it, but found it a bit harder to do in cloudy form.
My gallbladder dwarf became excited and agitated as we was now jumping up and down while shouting “Secret Godhead”.
I struggled through and some little folded up shape came out of the costume. As I bent over to pick it up, the gallbladder dwarf snatched it just before me.
“Let your elders look first” he said with a smirk, and then studied the little wrinkled shape, folding it out, in his good time.
Meanwhile I got into my Hippo costume, and then looked back at what the dwarf was unfolding.
It was a leather mask, shaped as some beast, a wolf possibly with great incisor fangs, shaped as lightning bolts.
“I will have that now” I said as I snatched it back from him, and put it on.
“Why you” then he stopped his sentence and snapped his fingers.
Everything went black, and I was suddenly near a wide river, fertile jungle behind it.
6 Hipponians were crouched near rocks at the beach.
A great sabertooth tiger walked down the beach, and then raised it muzzle to air and sniffed.
2 Hipponians in very simple reed tunics, came out and danced with elegance while singing a deep melody and offering treats to the cat, which gulped them down. Oh it wasn’t almost like in Disney’s Fantasia. What the hell where they doing ?
The Hipponians stopped singing and tensed up, but then the sabertooth tiger snuck forward nearly tripping one of the Hipponians, when it nuzzled against his thighs.
When the Hipponians were attacked by ugly little swamp monsters, goblins I would reckon.
The sabertooth tiger roared and the smaller goblins fled, then came their brethren orcs and ogres. And the Hipponians stood in a line with the tiger, fighting them. 2 Hipponians, clad in very simple but garishly coloured blue tunics unleashed Lightning Bolts at the ogres, and turned the tide of the battle.
The last 2 Hipponians smacked the orcs, and even though they were bloodied, both took down an orc with a single hit, the orc almost exploding from the blunt weapon attack.
The fog came in heavy from the river and obscured everything, then all went black.
I Immediately pressed yes to both prompts.
“You can’t be serious, Hippo people ?” The dwarf stared at me, as his features were slowly reformed to a Hippoman, and I felt myself also gain a more defined shape, also Hippoman.
Sparks flew from his feet, when he stomped, and he got interested in that and stomped again. “Okay the electricity, lightning stuff I can go with that. Its very Thor.”
The hippodwarf gave a thumbsup and grin to me.
I was not having any of that shit though, and thought back to some of the time spent on wikipedia, reading about all kinds of stuff. Then I selected Perun as my name, after a slavic god of lightning and thunder.
My hippodwarf companion didn’t seem to like that, but he seemed to take a great deal of pleasure in what he now had to say.
“Now unfortunately, there is now a good news and bad news situation.” The me who had just been a dwarf and who was now a Hippoman said to me.
“Good news, is that we are almost finished, bad news is that this last bit is the part where our soul gets a 3’rd cut and we will have a further individual manifestation of ourselves.
We will be you on the corporeal plane, fighting this arena game out. I will work on the dream plan to tip the scales, and our third party will be our divine aspect. I know this will not make that much sense, but this is how it is.
“But you should just relax, the cosmic beings that does this soul cutting, are near very powerful and precise so even though it is unpleasant everything should be good.
It wasn’t that the hippodwarf was hollering to get this done, he just seemed very enthusiastic about delivering bad news.
I gulped, and then he snapped his big leathery fingers, and the lights went out.
Glimmers of a dream. A large Cthulhu monster looking at a receipt. and pouring out a fidgeting billowing mass of cloud into a bowl.
A brief eye contact giving understanding.
Cthulhu monster PoV
It repeated the order for itself as it was a very old monster, “1 female cup, 1 male cup”
It did this often when it was making these adjustments throughout the multiverse, but it did not know the idiocy of mankind, as its innocent sentence echoed through a psionic strand to a vast manmade artificact in the ethereal realm.
The size of the echo returning to it caused it do the one of the cups it had just filled billowing cloud stuff.
“Two Girls one Cup” the echo came back.
And the creature was for an instant overwhelmed by the mass of emotions and limitless stupidity of making. Then it got itself together and scraped up the billowing cloud stuff from the floor. Removed the largest impurities which had been on the floor and was now in the cup with the little godling embryos. And then it put the cups in the outgoing lane of souls.
MC PoV
I felt all shaky, it was like a bad dream of looking at some gigantic snail, and then falling while melting, and oh my god that was maybe what happened.
Some incredibly powerful being, was in his realm just another incompetent employee botching up customer orders.
My Hipponian gnarly hobo was forming next to me, I guess that was still the Gallbladder.
Then a new cloud came into existence, it formed into a Hipponian, but clearly a female Hipponian.
As she formed, we had only a brief instant to look at each other, a small smile, and then light itself stretched out, and suddenly we seemed million miles apart, out of sight of each other within a blink of an eye.
I felt myself geting tired, and everything going black again. Wonder where I will wake up now I thought to myself as I passed out.
What do you think of the Ethereal aspect of Perun, the Divine Scrotum ?
