Post by Vipra on Feb 15, 2011 19:13:33 GMT -5
(OOC: This is the Intro of the Protocoal and will also be the event that sparks the quarantine. Just an FYI, but I have been told that the squeamish should not read this so you have been warned. PM for entry.)
It was warm, far too warm. Everyone had said space was cold, that it was damn cold. But she could only felt scorching, blistering, relentless heat as the star’s rays beat down upon the shell that surrounded her. She could feel her insides boiling, literally. Her flesh could barely contain the expanding steam. Yet it did not feel like her own skin that ripped as the steam escaped in gouts of white ether, yet she felt the rip and roar of pain as it cascaded through all her bones. But something was wrong, even as her primal brain ached from the torturous pain she could sense that it was not her own body that felt such suffering. That was when she opened her eyes.
Fifty nine eyes stared out at the void, blinking open to reveal irises of many colours, shapes, and sizes. They stared out from a bloated sphere of chitin and flesh, plates of black armour shifting over supple pink skin as the creature pulsated. Exposed skin was a bright fleshy pink, cracking open to unleash geysers of steam as they rose in bubbles to the surface only to seal shut just as fast as tendrils of flesh snapped across the rip and pulled it shut. The eyes frequently blinked, plates of chitinous armour clacking as the armour plated eyelids smacked together. Between blinks the eyes scanned in every direction, watching with keen interest as an asteroid seemed to slowly pass overhead.
The sphere spun, geysers of steam twisting it so that each eye got a good look at the asteroid. The mind inside saw it in ways a human could not imagine, each eye seeing multiple spectrums of light and even heat. She wanted to reach out and touch it, but it was too far away, the tendril that slipped from the confines of the flesh only stretching twenty lengths of the sphere. It was hardly enough to close even a tiny portion of the distance between the sphere and the gargantuan rock, the long and thin tongue sticking out like some feeble attempt to mock the asteroid as it passed. It was quickly withdrawn back into her body, or what felt like her body, wet slaps and the rush of water and blood reverberating through the ball of bone and flesh.
All at once something interesting came into view, something that unleashed a torrent of memories upon the soul that resides in the sphere as it hurtled through space. The blue and green marble brought tears to her eyes, not the many that covered the sphere, but the many held within. She wailed and screamed, laughed and giggled, roared with fury and moaned with ecstasy. Then the manifold memories were gone, millions of years there and gone again. Her name! For a moment she could feel it brushing up against her mind, like some forbidden fruit she reached for it. She could feel the word forming on the tip of her tongue. The letters began to reform in her mind, the thousand lips within the flesh cocoon she resided in parting to speak it.
Then she was on fire. That jogged her memory, in a bad way. Her name left her, instead pain replacing it as she screamed with all her might. She would have cried, but the many eyes covering the living sphere had burst while she was lost in the past. She could feel it though, the wind rushing passed her and blazing in streaks of brilliant colour as blood gushed from her many empty eye-sockets. Her primal cry would be heard though, far louder even than the sonic boom of the organic asteroid as it tore through the sky. It seemed to last the entire length of her seemingly long journey to ground, then it ended with a tumultuous thump as she collided with the side of a mountain.
---
She awoke in a haze, not sure how long she had been lying in the small lake of blood and mud that surrounded her. Out of instinct she slowly rose, her bones snapping and cracking as they reset themselves and mended under her ripped and torn flesh. Groaning as her body slowly took shape, she stood in the middle of the crash site. It was as though someone had put a cow through an industrial blender, piles of meat and blubber cast about randomly and the nearby trees knocked down by hunks of disembodied muscle large enough to choke a whale. Everywhere was blood, easily reaching halfway up the rest of the mountain and draining down it is gushing rivers of crimson.
The being that stood in the midst of this carnage was half-woman, all alien. Instead of legs a mess of over twenty pink and fleshy tentacles the size of tree trunks both great and small poured down from her thighs, each one ending in an elongated slavering fanged maw that could easily cut a man into several pieces with little effort. Dull spine ridges ran down the back of each tendril and up her spine until terminating at the top of her featureless and bald head. On either side of the spines upon her back and neck were thick chitin plates the same colour as the rest of her skin. Her face, if it could be called that, held no feature beyond a mouth, no ears, eyes, or even nostrils gracing the skin stretched across the dome. The only thing to denote that she was a ‘she’ were her breasts set above a concave stomach, yet even they lacked function as was apparent by their being just as devoid of features as her face.
She groaned as spines like those that rand down her spine shot out from the backs of her arms, replacing ones that had been lost. She purred lightly as the pain subsided, the tentacles slowly snapping to attention as their spines reconnected and clicked back into shape. She stared out at her surroundings with unseen eyes, dipping several of her clawed mouths to drink deeply from the lake of blood she rested in. Other mouths began to swallow whole the chunks of meat that were scattered here and there, choking down plates of chitin as their jaws disconnected to allow passage for the great gobs of meat. With a sigh another tendril burst from her thighs, mewling and crying like a newly hatched reptile as it grew from the infusion of flesh and ichor that she so readily devoured.
It was with the last mewl of the quickly tree-sized tentacle that she spotted movement in the trees. All her tentacles snapped about to point at the voyeur who dared to watch her uninvited. The creature, whatever it was, was spooked by this sudden attention and bolted. Something clicked in her mind, something primal and aching to be satisfied. With a flood of adrenalin she unleashed a roar, her many mouths gutturally letting all know her rage. She threw herself at the intruder after her war cry, giving him a headstart as she tore up the first in her effort to hunt him down. Trees were uprooted, others snapped apart by the diamond-like fangs, and any animals so unfortunate to get caught between her and her quarry were swallowed whole and alive.
She could feel his fear, the very scent driving her mad with lust for his blood as she followed his near deafening footfalls and pungent odour. It was like tracking a squealing and sweating pig as it trundled through the forest, there was no way she could possibly not find him. Yet he zigzagged, sprinting in odd directions in a futile attempt to throw her off his tail. It didn’t work, as the trail of roughly violated forest she left behind could attest. As she drew ever closer to the madly fleeing man, she could smell and hear ever more of his kind. Had they congregated into a pack or herd? The thought made her seventeen hearts flutter.
Then she was on fire. Again. A field of pitch was suddenly set aflame, her rampant effort to tear the flee being apart setting her in the center of a field of the gooey stuff, clouds of acrid black smoke filling her nostrils as she flailed and screamed in panic. Terrified, angry, wailing and on fire, she was truly a sight to see. That is what the tribesmen must have though too, but unlike people that would normally let the fire run its course they decided that they need to be extra sure and shoot the thing that had just crashed into a mountain and then chased their fastest scout through the woods destroying everything in its path. So it was that they began to fire whatever they had at her, around eighty men getting old rifles and weapons.
The men that were rushing to gun down the towering beast were lupine humanoids, their grey fur coats thick and their yellow eyes set above a long muzzle filled with teeth that could easily rip a throat out if given half a chance. They wore rudimentary clothing more for protection than modesty, leather cloaks flowing from the shoulders of the tribe warriors as they sprinted to high ground. They were the most disciplined, while the old and the young fumbled with their weapons, the warriors readied theirs with practiced precision and crouched or used tree stumps to stabilize their rifles. Almost as one they unleashed a volley of fire upon the abomination that had beset their village, the other ragtag warriors firing or trying to unjam guns they were not familiar with.
Rattle and boom of rifles rose to a pitch along with her cries. To her it felt like being struck with a pin, a slight sting but nothing harmful, the fire is what hurt her. Eventually the pain began to fade away though, her nerves simply refusing to broadcast that much suffering to her brain. It was then that she struck back, a tentacle striking out and grabbing three men in its mouth, their legs left behind as the tendril recoiled. She struck out three more time, grabbing one man by his cloak and ripping him into the air. He spun like a ragdoll, almost comically pirouetting before another mouth caught him and cut his life short in a snap of bone and spurting blood.
The warriors began to fall back, not waiting to get devoured by the horrid beast that was still cloaked in fire. She followed after them, albeit slower than her pace before. After eating the lupines she felt ill, almost doubling over as she dragged herself along the backs of her many tentacles. It was as though the wolf-men she had eaten were indigestible, her insides turning in knots as she began to groan and cry out in pain. As she broke the clearing to the tribe center she threw up from all her mouth. She couldn’t see the look on the faces of the tribals as a tide of vomit poured from her mouths, but one could be sure that it was an odd one.
Yet it was not sputum that rode on a wave towards the villagers. As she coughed and retched more it was very clear that she was clearing herself of something other than rotten meat. A thick dark purple worm fell from her human mouth as she gave a final cough and fell to her side, the wriggling aberration joining the tide of annelids that slithered at record speed across the ground, pouncing several feet into the air and onto buildings. Most everyone ran, only a few men holding their ground to back. Fire belched out of a flamethrower wielded by a wolf with far lighter grey fur than the rest of the collected lupines as fifty calibre bullets belted out from a machinegun atop an old and rusty tank. The fire and bullets tore into the advancing wave of worms like they were Jell-O, small pockets of worms curling up and dying as they burned or exploding into giblets as the large bullets struck them.
Yet where they crumpled ever more filled their places, and soon the lupine men and women were overrun. The worms were a feral mess, overwhelming the tribals as they frantically tried to flee. The man with the flamethrower was overwhelmed, the worms pouring over, under, and into him and then continuing onwards unabated. The gunner in the tank, not feeling quite so heroic after watching another man get swarmed over by what seemed to be an endless swarm of worms, tried desperately to jump out of the vehicle. This was cut short by two worms, one colliding with his chest and knocking the air out of him, and the other launching into his now open maw and slipping down his throat. He didn’t have time to react before his eyes glazed over and he slumped forward over the machinegun he had been firing only moments earlier. Soon, all the cries and shouts of those fleeing fell silent, only the squelch and squeak of the worms filling the air as they slithered back to their mother.
---
She sighed, light beating down upon her face as water ran over her body. It was warm, she liked it. With a yawn she rose, rubbing her eyes with aching hands. She blinked, peering out of only two eyes, and saw the village around her. It had been a full day since she had fallen unconscious, and the events of the previous day were a blur to her. As she rose to her knees, she stumbled with her hands as though they were new. She blinked a few times as she looked at her fingers. They were. A sense of panic fired through her as she immediately glanced around, her eyes taking in what lay around her for the first time. The corpse of her old body was torn open and a ring of burst ribs cradled her where she stood in the center of all the bones and blood, the tentacles emaciated and drained of near all flesh.
“Wha, where am I?” Her words rang out from a tongue that felt alien in her mouth and in a language she had never heard before yet somehow understood perfectly. She moved her jaw around, getting a feel for her own teeth and licking her lips to get a sense of what her own body was like. In the end it was futile, and she resolved to leave the quickly stinking carcass to get a better view of this new world.
As she clambered over the ridged ribs she fell, slipped, and slammed her head on the ground. All at once the pain shot through her, and then she felt something else, another pain far worse. She recoiled, grabbing her aching forehead while tears streamed down her face. The pain was unearthly, and she could not feel the source anywhere on her body. As she peered down she identified the source, a purple worm crushed in the middle where she had collided with it. The annelid wriggled a little, turning into a full writhing as she stared at it. Her pain doubled until she couldn’t handle it, and crushed the worm’s head under her foot. The pain ended suddenly and she looked up from the bleeding remains with clouded eyes.
That was when she noticed all the other worms, and the small people. They stood or laid in a circle around her, all staring up at her. The small people only stood up to her knee. They were covered in fur, standing upon legs with three joints and looking at her from above muzzles. She also noticed that most had one of the purple worms on the back of their necks, moulded with the flesh down the back of their neck and growing the same greyish-black fur upon its far darker flesh. In a way they were pretty, cute even, those lovely little worms that wriggled all over each other and playfully tussled with one another around the feet of the ugly people. She smiled and bent down to stroke one, only she realized too late that it wasn’t her body that bent down, it was the lupines, all of them doing as she had told her own body to and cuddling the wormy creatures.
Her head throbbed once more, quite like the thump she had received earlier, only this time the pain didn’t cease. It grew more intense until she could practically feel her head wanting to explode. She grunted as unwanted tears fled her eyes once more. All at once she could see through all their eyes, not only the lupines’ but also the worms’. She could see through their own eyes all around for miles, even seeing into the deep forest through the vision of a boar many miles away that must have gobbled a stray worm. The cool breeze glided along her flesh and fur, the flesh and fur of all those assembled before acting as though they were part of one glorious whole. It was invigorating and empowering, her mind expanding and growing as she moaned at the dual pain and ecstasy.
All at once it came back to her, the millions of years of subconscious training flying back into her mind like muscle memory as she flexed her brain. She immediately set about testing these newly rediscovered abilities.
“We are all one, we are all Sefi Viegmrrchun.” All the lupines spoke as one, their words a chorus that echoed a short way through the woods.
She blinked, she didn’t know where that had come from, though the first part was intended. Perhaps they still held a small part of their old selves? She opened their minds like a can of worms, rooting around in their noggins with her own mind and digging out everything she could find. The meaning of the words, their past lives, all of their deepest and darkest secrets came pouring into her as though a floodgate had just been opened. She barely had time to react before an aftershock hit her, their fear, their terror, their complete and utter panic rocketing into her mind. She nearly collapsed as the emotions overtook her.
“GET OUT OF MY HEAD!” Her screams nearly burst their eardrums, and their thoughts responded with more fear and pain. She groaned and cried as she slowly regained control, their thoughts quickly becoming secondary and subliminal compared to her own. Yet they were always there, nagging at her. She cast the thought aside, more concerned over a far more pressing matter that nagged at her very soul. She leaned down, sitting on her knees and looking into the eyes of the lupine chieftain. He knew who he was, he had been the one that had burned so many of her precious little wormies.
“So, my name is Sefi Viegmrrchun?” The chieftain was broken from the spell that she seemed to have cast over the assembled natives, he quickly leapt back from her but not fast enough to escape the hands of his former brothers as they grabbed him and held him steady while she continued to speak, “You know, I like it, I think the meaning speaks for itself, ‘child from the mountain of flesh’ or ‘child-bringer of death’. Although, the name is a bit long don’t you think? I mean, it’s sort of a mouthful, ‘Sefi Viegmrrchun’, couldn’t we shorten it?” her voice was soft and gentle, only booming because of her size.
She glanced down at the chieftain, a smile spread across her face as though she wasn’t sitting in front of her old rotting corpse and surrounded by worms and her mental slaves, “Oh! I know! How about Sefimrr? That’s a good name isn’t it?” She didn’t wait for his response, “Yes! It is a lovely name, in fact I think it just may be the best one possible. I mean, I can’t think of a better one so it has to be the best right? Right?”
“Y-Yes,” His voice was choked, his words guttural and sharp “I agree, now let us go.”
It wasn’t just her ears that picked up the fear in his voice, she could sense it running its course through the very fibre of his being, “Well, I guess I’ll have to take your word for it then,” The newly named Sefimrr beamed down at him, her canines elongated and deadly sharp in proportion to the rest of her teeth, “I don’t need to ask you how I look though, I’ll just take a peek through your eyes.” All at once she was both looking at the chieftain and herself, the sensation disconcerting for a moment as she leaned back her far larger body from the comparatively tiny lupine.
She was easily twenty two feet tall, this fact driven home as Sefimrr rose to her feet and did a little spin for her own benefit. Her pale body was almost entirely like that of a gorgeous human woman, curvaceous and buxom, limbs well muscled yet sleek. Deadly sharp talons the colour of obsidian extended from Sefimrr’s fingers and toes. She raised one of these pitch black claws to her lips, nibbling on it absentmindedly while she stared into her eyes. Seifmrr had full heterochromia, her left eye baby blue and her right ruby red. Above those two eyes that so entranced her hung black hair, the strands of silky straight hair falling to frame her face and partially hide a bony shell that covered her cranium. Projecting out from this grey shell were two large light purple horns, curling back like a ram’s but ending in point more reminiscent of a bull’s.
“Well, I certainly am gorgeous aren’t I? Yes, yes I am,” She smiled, then frowned, “But I could use something, something exciting yet simple!” She looked around, her mind running through manifold idea before settling on one. Dark red circles and swirls began to form on Sefimrr’s outer right hip, forming a large natural tattoo that touched her stomach and her back while extending down the back of her leg to the inside of her knee.
“That’s it!” the chieftain recoiled at her words, far too loud for his sensitive ears, the pain and fear of her drawing her attention back to him, “But why are you afraid? What have I done to hurt you? I mean, you set me on fire and then shot me. If anyone should be angry or afraid here it should be me. I understand that we are not the same, that is why I will make this all better.”
She leaned down once more, this time drawing a talon to the chieftain’s forehead. He didn’t have time to protest before she jammed the organic blade into his cranium, a short cry exiting his lungs before his eyes went blank and his breathing slowed. She twisted and turned, sticking her tongue out and holding it between her teeth as she concentrated. The chieftain grunted and groaned as a thick sap-like fluid flowed into his cranial cavity from a tiny hole in the tip of the talon. Sefimrr hummed a little ditty to herself as she began to psychically manoeuvre the liquid within his brain, changing the lupines brain functions and chemical glands as she explored his genetic and anatomical makeup.
With a loud ‘huzzah’ she yanked her talon from the man’s skull, the hole quickly filling shut as flesh leapt across the empty expanse and bone crystallized under the stretching muscle and skin, “There we go, now you will always be happy! In fact, that was pretty easy. I don’t think I need to do it manually anymore, so everyone can be happy.” She instantly began to work her powers upon all the lupines present, and even the boar that sat patiently staring at a tree some mile or so away. In under five seconds all were happy, the feelings of joy and bliss lifting Sefimrr’s spirits.
“Now, let’s go and make everyone else happy! Or at the very least eat something, I am starving.” With that the lupines sprinted away, but not before the worms flowed into their bodies through any available openings. The remaining annelids burrowed into the ground and began to tunnel outwards. The boar also began to plod away, snorting and chuffing at leaves and eating a stray snail. In the end, Sefimrr was sitting alone in the clearing with the rotting corpse of her old form resting behind her. Yet she was not alone, she saw through all their eyes and guided their every movement like a puppet master.
---
Three Hours Later
“I am telling you, something is just fucking wrong about this place,” Jules Hanverg, the only Accallian in the scouting party sent south of the border to investigate the ‘anomalous meteor-like object’ spoke in a fairly even tone as the IFV sped through the underbrush, “We have been going through this damn jungle for over an hour now. Where the hell are all the animals?” He spoke to the soldiers under his command and his fellow officer, his voice reverberating off the innards of the vehicle they sat inside.
With a whir the havenite of the group, one Riko Morgan, turned to his human companion, “Frankly I am glad we haven’t encountered anything. The things that live in these forests are beyond crazy,” The IFV jolted over a log, thumping back down upon earth with a shudder and continuing unabated, “Besides, the sooner we get here and identify that it is, in fact, nothing at all the sooner we can get home. So quit worrying and start thinking about how great it is going to be to finally be able to have a mission where nothing happened.”
In the same compartment of the IFV were the researchers sent along with the scouting team to study whatever had landed. Their leader was artificer apprentice J'tara, a vulpine scientist that had studied some of the rather ‘odd’ creatures and flora of her homeland. She turned to the two chatting officers, peering with green eyes down her muzzle at them, “I sincerely doubt it was nothing. A meteor the size of a sky scraper hits and there isn’t so much as a shockwave? I hate to be a downer here, but no matter what we find there will be something. There can’t not be.”
“Something up ahead and- Oh my god, what the fuck?” The IFV skidded to a halt, the driver’s voice quickly overridden by the sound of the chaingun mounted of the vehicle ripping to life. Likewise the clatter and boom of the tankettes grenade launchers and machine guns added to the cacophony. Then there was a roar, a primal guttural roar that shook the loose bolts in the IFV and rung the ears. The tires squealed something fierce, the engines screaming to life as the armoured vehicle reversed as quick as it could. It wasn’t quick enough. Something slammed into the side, concaving the metal wall and breaking the back of yelping lupine as the IFV was flipped over.
Riko clunked against the roof, quickly rising to a kneeling position as he clung to his howdah pistol, “Squad, move out! One of you geeks see to Tira, she was the medic damnit.” With those quick commands he kicked open the partially seized door to the IFV, his eyes and mind quickly having to adjust to an alien scene.
Outside, just beyond the open door, was a veritable sea of quivering flesh. Not animals, insects, or normal life, but actual flesh stretched across the ground like some sickening tarp of muscle and skin. From the splotched surface, oddly unsullied by the tires of the IFV, spilled forth great barbed tendrils over fifty meters long and one tenth twelfth as thick. They swayed in the air, massive scorpion-tail tipped ends slamming into the ground with spurts of blood as they attempted to spear the evasive tankettes. One of the small tanks got the idea to speed away as fast as it could, and Riko thought for a moment it would make it, but then the tentacle whipped out. It extended to over twice its length, rammed through the armoured tankette and into a tree, and then recoiled back down into the recesses of its fleshy domain tree, tank, and all.
With no more time to lose, and another tendril rising from an orifice in the ground, Riko sprinted from the IFV and took cover behind it as his fellows poured out to join him. Riko would have been satisfied with trying to sprint, but whatever had knocked over his ride was back. The tip of a tail whipped around the corner of the vehicle, wrapping around one of his soldiers and slamming him against the undercarriage of the IFV before snaking him screaming through the air and down into a snapping gullet. The screams ended very quick.
“Get out there and kill that thing! Now!” Riko turned around the corner of the overturned IFV, bringing the sights of his gun up as he did so, and caught sight of the creature. It was a worm, or possibly a snake, sixty feet long and ten feet thick. Its head was eyeless, a wide jaw hanging open with red muscle and white serrated teeth exposed. The creature’s entire body was a sleek and slippery grey, reflective and looking deceivingly thin. Without so much as a second thought he fired into its open jaw, still distended where the leg of the vulpine was hanging out and the rest of him clogging the monster’s greedy throat.
The bang was deafening, thankfully Riko’s hearing was adjustable, and so he only heard a moderately ear shattering boom. The bullet, a massive monster of a round, tore through the air and into the upper jaw of the creature. It roared, flailed, and then fell on its side twitching. Then all went silent. The massive tentacle stopped its attack upon the tankette and retreated into its fleshy home, and the soldiers quickly advanced to the still twitching creature. Jules unloaded five rounds from his needler assault rifle into the inside of abomination’s head before it stopped moving.
“Sir, we need to get the fuck out of here and get a hold of the deep patrols or something. This is officially no longer a scouting mission,” Jules waved the scientists out of the IFV, two of them carrying Tira, “C’mon, before whatever the hell this is gets its shit together.”
Riko stared at Jules, “Right. Move out before that tentacle comes back, on the double,” noticing the look from the science team he shook his head, “The dead thing stays.” He turned to look at where they were while moving. The mountain above them was scarred with a great red stain, indented where the meteor had collided with it. His thoughts were rather dour, at least we know where all this alien crap came from.
Then the sound of weeping filled the air, an unabashed cry pouring from every direction and even the very earth itself. It rose to a pitch, growing ever louder until the lupines were clutching at their ears as they jogged away. Then it spoke, a great feminine voice pervading the flesh covered expanse, “My baby! YOU MONSTERS!”
The flesh that covered the ground rippled, then tore in half. A chasm, how deep Riko could not see, formed. And from it came a tidal wave of the living. They did not flow like a river, nor come like a wave, instead they gushed like a geyser of blood, ooze, and squirming flesh. Riko and Jules, even the scientists that had come expecting the extraordinary could do nothing but run or stand in shock and awe. Most ran, Riko could not tear himself from staring for what seemed the longest time as the swarm of annelids flowed towards him, needler and high calibre rounds flying past him and into the wave with little effect. The tankette was overcome quickly, its grenade launcher silencing as the wave of wriggling worms overcame it and with concerted effort quickly chipped a hole into it.
Jules was already running, not because he was a coward but because he believed in living to fight another day. He didn’t turn around when his commanding officer was overcome by the wave, nor did he let up when the scientists carrying Tira began to scream then gargle as the wave flowed over and into them. He simply ran until his legs could carry him no farther, until his breath felt as fire in his lungs, and his vision was flooded with the withdrawal of his adrenalin. He coughed, wheezed, and continued to jog as best he could. The thought of those things getting to him gave him a consistent supply of energy. Then he saw the first actual animal since the mission began. A boar, innocent enough.
It oinked, then looked at him while tendrils snaked out of its mouth and its eyes plopped out on stalks for a better look. Jules cursed and reached for his pistol. It wasn’t there, it must have fallen out while he was running or gotten snagged on something. Whatever the reason, it was simply gone, and the boar was squealing and charging. Jules tried his best to fend it off, but in the end the boar won out. Jules, last survivor of the scout team, was boared to death as Sefimrr rallied her slithering hordes to move towards the border of Aatuylva, the many forms of her growing ecosystem slithering and marching through corrupted wilderness.
It was warm, far too warm. Everyone had said space was cold, that it was damn cold. But she could only felt scorching, blistering, relentless heat as the star’s rays beat down upon the shell that surrounded her. She could feel her insides boiling, literally. Her flesh could barely contain the expanding steam. Yet it did not feel like her own skin that ripped as the steam escaped in gouts of white ether, yet she felt the rip and roar of pain as it cascaded through all her bones. But something was wrong, even as her primal brain ached from the torturous pain she could sense that it was not her own body that felt such suffering. That was when she opened her eyes.
Fifty nine eyes stared out at the void, blinking open to reveal irises of many colours, shapes, and sizes. They stared out from a bloated sphere of chitin and flesh, plates of black armour shifting over supple pink skin as the creature pulsated. Exposed skin was a bright fleshy pink, cracking open to unleash geysers of steam as they rose in bubbles to the surface only to seal shut just as fast as tendrils of flesh snapped across the rip and pulled it shut. The eyes frequently blinked, plates of chitinous armour clacking as the armour plated eyelids smacked together. Between blinks the eyes scanned in every direction, watching with keen interest as an asteroid seemed to slowly pass overhead.
The sphere spun, geysers of steam twisting it so that each eye got a good look at the asteroid. The mind inside saw it in ways a human could not imagine, each eye seeing multiple spectrums of light and even heat. She wanted to reach out and touch it, but it was too far away, the tendril that slipped from the confines of the flesh only stretching twenty lengths of the sphere. It was hardly enough to close even a tiny portion of the distance between the sphere and the gargantuan rock, the long and thin tongue sticking out like some feeble attempt to mock the asteroid as it passed. It was quickly withdrawn back into her body, or what felt like her body, wet slaps and the rush of water and blood reverberating through the ball of bone and flesh.
All at once something interesting came into view, something that unleashed a torrent of memories upon the soul that resides in the sphere as it hurtled through space. The blue and green marble brought tears to her eyes, not the many that covered the sphere, but the many held within. She wailed and screamed, laughed and giggled, roared with fury and moaned with ecstasy. Then the manifold memories were gone, millions of years there and gone again. Her name! For a moment she could feel it brushing up against her mind, like some forbidden fruit she reached for it. She could feel the word forming on the tip of her tongue. The letters began to reform in her mind, the thousand lips within the flesh cocoon she resided in parting to speak it.
Then she was on fire. That jogged her memory, in a bad way. Her name left her, instead pain replacing it as she screamed with all her might. She would have cried, but the many eyes covering the living sphere had burst while she was lost in the past. She could feel it though, the wind rushing passed her and blazing in streaks of brilliant colour as blood gushed from her many empty eye-sockets. Her primal cry would be heard though, far louder even than the sonic boom of the organic asteroid as it tore through the sky. It seemed to last the entire length of her seemingly long journey to ground, then it ended with a tumultuous thump as she collided with the side of a mountain.
---
She awoke in a haze, not sure how long she had been lying in the small lake of blood and mud that surrounded her. Out of instinct she slowly rose, her bones snapping and cracking as they reset themselves and mended under her ripped and torn flesh. Groaning as her body slowly took shape, she stood in the middle of the crash site. It was as though someone had put a cow through an industrial blender, piles of meat and blubber cast about randomly and the nearby trees knocked down by hunks of disembodied muscle large enough to choke a whale. Everywhere was blood, easily reaching halfway up the rest of the mountain and draining down it is gushing rivers of crimson.
The being that stood in the midst of this carnage was half-woman, all alien. Instead of legs a mess of over twenty pink and fleshy tentacles the size of tree trunks both great and small poured down from her thighs, each one ending in an elongated slavering fanged maw that could easily cut a man into several pieces with little effort. Dull spine ridges ran down the back of each tendril and up her spine until terminating at the top of her featureless and bald head. On either side of the spines upon her back and neck were thick chitin plates the same colour as the rest of her skin. Her face, if it could be called that, held no feature beyond a mouth, no ears, eyes, or even nostrils gracing the skin stretched across the dome. The only thing to denote that she was a ‘she’ were her breasts set above a concave stomach, yet even they lacked function as was apparent by their being just as devoid of features as her face.
She groaned as spines like those that rand down her spine shot out from the backs of her arms, replacing ones that had been lost. She purred lightly as the pain subsided, the tentacles slowly snapping to attention as their spines reconnected and clicked back into shape. She stared out at her surroundings with unseen eyes, dipping several of her clawed mouths to drink deeply from the lake of blood she rested in. Other mouths began to swallow whole the chunks of meat that were scattered here and there, choking down plates of chitin as their jaws disconnected to allow passage for the great gobs of meat. With a sigh another tendril burst from her thighs, mewling and crying like a newly hatched reptile as it grew from the infusion of flesh and ichor that she so readily devoured.
It was with the last mewl of the quickly tree-sized tentacle that she spotted movement in the trees. All her tentacles snapped about to point at the voyeur who dared to watch her uninvited. The creature, whatever it was, was spooked by this sudden attention and bolted. Something clicked in her mind, something primal and aching to be satisfied. With a flood of adrenalin she unleashed a roar, her many mouths gutturally letting all know her rage. She threw herself at the intruder after her war cry, giving him a headstart as she tore up the first in her effort to hunt him down. Trees were uprooted, others snapped apart by the diamond-like fangs, and any animals so unfortunate to get caught between her and her quarry were swallowed whole and alive.
She could feel his fear, the very scent driving her mad with lust for his blood as she followed his near deafening footfalls and pungent odour. It was like tracking a squealing and sweating pig as it trundled through the forest, there was no way she could possibly not find him. Yet he zigzagged, sprinting in odd directions in a futile attempt to throw her off his tail. It didn’t work, as the trail of roughly violated forest she left behind could attest. As she drew ever closer to the madly fleeing man, she could smell and hear ever more of his kind. Had they congregated into a pack or herd? The thought made her seventeen hearts flutter.
Then she was on fire. Again. A field of pitch was suddenly set aflame, her rampant effort to tear the flee being apart setting her in the center of a field of the gooey stuff, clouds of acrid black smoke filling her nostrils as she flailed and screamed in panic. Terrified, angry, wailing and on fire, she was truly a sight to see. That is what the tribesmen must have though too, but unlike people that would normally let the fire run its course they decided that they need to be extra sure and shoot the thing that had just crashed into a mountain and then chased their fastest scout through the woods destroying everything in its path. So it was that they began to fire whatever they had at her, around eighty men getting old rifles and weapons.
The men that were rushing to gun down the towering beast were lupine humanoids, their grey fur coats thick and their yellow eyes set above a long muzzle filled with teeth that could easily rip a throat out if given half a chance. They wore rudimentary clothing more for protection than modesty, leather cloaks flowing from the shoulders of the tribe warriors as they sprinted to high ground. They were the most disciplined, while the old and the young fumbled with their weapons, the warriors readied theirs with practiced precision and crouched or used tree stumps to stabilize their rifles. Almost as one they unleashed a volley of fire upon the abomination that had beset their village, the other ragtag warriors firing or trying to unjam guns they were not familiar with.
Rattle and boom of rifles rose to a pitch along with her cries. To her it felt like being struck with a pin, a slight sting but nothing harmful, the fire is what hurt her. Eventually the pain began to fade away though, her nerves simply refusing to broadcast that much suffering to her brain. It was then that she struck back, a tentacle striking out and grabbing three men in its mouth, their legs left behind as the tendril recoiled. She struck out three more time, grabbing one man by his cloak and ripping him into the air. He spun like a ragdoll, almost comically pirouetting before another mouth caught him and cut his life short in a snap of bone and spurting blood.
The warriors began to fall back, not waiting to get devoured by the horrid beast that was still cloaked in fire. She followed after them, albeit slower than her pace before. After eating the lupines she felt ill, almost doubling over as she dragged herself along the backs of her many tentacles. It was as though the wolf-men she had eaten were indigestible, her insides turning in knots as she began to groan and cry out in pain. As she broke the clearing to the tribe center she threw up from all her mouth. She couldn’t see the look on the faces of the tribals as a tide of vomit poured from her mouths, but one could be sure that it was an odd one.
Yet it was not sputum that rode on a wave towards the villagers. As she coughed and retched more it was very clear that she was clearing herself of something other than rotten meat. A thick dark purple worm fell from her human mouth as she gave a final cough and fell to her side, the wriggling aberration joining the tide of annelids that slithered at record speed across the ground, pouncing several feet into the air and onto buildings. Most everyone ran, only a few men holding their ground to back. Fire belched out of a flamethrower wielded by a wolf with far lighter grey fur than the rest of the collected lupines as fifty calibre bullets belted out from a machinegun atop an old and rusty tank. The fire and bullets tore into the advancing wave of worms like they were Jell-O, small pockets of worms curling up and dying as they burned or exploding into giblets as the large bullets struck them.
Yet where they crumpled ever more filled their places, and soon the lupine men and women were overrun. The worms were a feral mess, overwhelming the tribals as they frantically tried to flee. The man with the flamethrower was overwhelmed, the worms pouring over, under, and into him and then continuing onwards unabated. The gunner in the tank, not feeling quite so heroic after watching another man get swarmed over by what seemed to be an endless swarm of worms, tried desperately to jump out of the vehicle. This was cut short by two worms, one colliding with his chest and knocking the air out of him, and the other launching into his now open maw and slipping down his throat. He didn’t have time to react before his eyes glazed over and he slumped forward over the machinegun he had been firing only moments earlier. Soon, all the cries and shouts of those fleeing fell silent, only the squelch and squeak of the worms filling the air as they slithered back to their mother.
---
She sighed, light beating down upon her face as water ran over her body. It was warm, she liked it. With a yawn she rose, rubbing her eyes with aching hands. She blinked, peering out of only two eyes, and saw the village around her. It had been a full day since she had fallen unconscious, and the events of the previous day were a blur to her. As she rose to her knees, she stumbled with her hands as though they were new. She blinked a few times as she looked at her fingers. They were. A sense of panic fired through her as she immediately glanced around, her eyes taking in what lay around her for the first time. The corpse of her old body was torn open and a ring of burst ribs cradled her where she stood in the center of all the bones and blood, the tentacles emaciated and drained of near all flesh.
“Wha, where am I?” Her words rang out from a tongue that felt alien in her mouth and in a language she had never heard before yet somehow understood perfectly. She moved her jaw around, getting a feel for her own teeth and licking her lips to get a sense of what her own body was like. In the end it was futile, and she resolved to leave the quickly stinking carcass to get a better view of this new world.
As she clambered over the ridged ribs she fell, slipped, and slammed her head on the ground. All at once the pain shot through her, and then she felt something else, another pain far worse. She recoiled, grabbing her aching forehead while tears streamed down her face. The pain was unearthly, and she could not feel the source anywhere on her body. As she peered down she identified the source, a purple worm crushed in the middle where she had collided with it. The annelid wriggled a little, turning into a full writhing as she stared at it. Her pain doubled until she couldn’t handle it, and crushed the worm’s head under her foot. The pain ended suddenly and she looked up from the bleeding remains with clouded eyes.
That was when she noticed all the other worms, and the small people. They stood or laid in a circle around her, all staring up at her. The small people only stood up to her knee. They were covered in fur, standing upon legs with three joints and looking at her from above muzzles. She also noticed that most had one of the purple worms on the back of their necks, moulded with the flesh down the back of their neck and growing the same greyish-black fur upon its far darker flesh. In a way they were pretty, cute even, those lovely little worms that wriggled all over each other and playfully tussled with one another around the feet of the ugly people. She smiled and bent down to stroke one, only she realized too late that it wasn’t her body that bent down, it was the lupines, all of them doing as she had told her own body to and cuddling the wormy creatures.
Her head throbbed once more, quite like the thump she had received earlier, only this time the pain didn’t cease. It grew more intense until she could practically feel her head wanting to explode. She grunted as unwanted tears fled her eyes once more. All at once she could see through all their eyes, not only the lupines’ but also the worms’. She could see through their own eyes all around for miles, even seeing into the deep forest through the vision of a boar many miles away that must have gobbled a stray worm. The cool breeze glided along her flesh and fur, the flesh and fur of all those assembled before acting as though they were part of one glorious whole. It was invigorating and empowering, her mind expanding and growing as she moaned at the dual pain and ecstasy.
All at once it came back to her, the millions of years of subconscious training flying back into her mind like muscle memory as she flexed her brain. She immediately set about testing these newly rediscovered abilities.
“We are all one, we are all Sefi Viegmrrchun.” All the lupines spoke as one, their words a chorus that echoed a short way through the woods.
She blinked, she didn’t know where that had come from, though the first part was intended. Perhaps they still held a small part of their old selves? She opened their minds like a can of worms, rooting around in their noggins with her own mind and digging out everything she could find. The meaning of the words, their past lives, all of their deepest and darkest secrets came pouring into her as though a floodgate had just been opened. She barely had time to react before an aftershock hit her, their fear, their terror, their complete and utter panic rocketing into her mind. She nearly collapsed as the emotions overtook her.
“GET OUT OF MY HEAD!” Her screams nearly burst their eardrums, and their thoughts responded with more fear and pain. She groaned and cried as she slowly regained control, their thoughts quickly becoming secondary and subliminal compared to her own. Yet they were always there, nagging at her. She cast the thought aside, more concerned over a far more pressing matter that nagged at her very soul. She leaned down, sitting on her knees and looking into the eyes of the lupine chieftain. He knew who he was, he had been the one that had burned so many of her precious little wormies.
“So, my name is Sefi Viegmrrchun?” The chieftain was broken from the spell that she seemed to have cast over the assembled natives, he quickly leapt back from her but not fast enough to escape the hands of his former brothers as they grabbed him and held him steady while she continued to speak, “You know, I like it, I think the meaning speaks for itself, ‘child from the mountain of flesh’ or ‘child-bringer of death’. Although, the name is a bit long don’t you think? I mean, it’s sort of a mouthful, ‘Sefi Viegmrrchun’, couldn’t we shorten it?” her voice was soft and gentle, only booming because of her size.
She glanced down at the chieftain, a smile spread across her face as though she wasn’t sitting in front of her old rotting corpse and surrounded by worms and her mental slaves, “Oh! I know! How about Sefimrr? That’s a good name isn’t it?” She didn’t wait for his response, “Yes! It is a lovely name, in fact I think it just may be the best one possible. I mean, I can’t think of a better one so it has to be the best right? Right?”
“Y-Yes,” His voice was choked, his words guttural and sharp “I agree, now let us go.”
It wasn’t just her ears that picked up the fear in his voice, she could sense it running its course through the very fibre of his being, “Well, I guess I’ll have to take your word for it then,” The newly named Sefimrr beamed down at him, her canines elongated and deadly sharp in proportion to the rest of her teeth, “I don’t need to ask you how I look though, I’ll just take a peek through your eyes.” All at once she was both looking at the chieftain and herself, the sensation disconcerting for a moment as she leaned back her far larger body from the comparatively tiny lupine.
She was easily twenty two feet tall, this fact driven home as Sefimrr rose to her feet and did a little spin for her own benefit. Her pale body was almost entirely like that of a gorgeous human woman, curvaceous and buxom, limbs well muscled yet sleek. Deadly sharp talons the colour of obsidian extended from Sefimrr’s fingers and toes. She raised one of these pitch black claws to her lips, nibbling on it absentmindedly while she stared into her eyes. Seifmrr had full heterochromia, her left eye baby blue and her right ruby red. Above those two eyes that so entranced her hung black hair, the strands of silky straight hair falling to frame her face and partially hide a bony shell that covered her cranium. Projecting out from this grey shell were two large light purple horns, curling back like a ram’s but ending in point more reminiscent of a bull’s.
“Well, I certainly am gorgeous aren’t I? Yes, yes I am,” She smiled, then frowned, “But I could use something, something exciting yet simple!” She looked around, her mind running through manifold idea before settling on one. Dark red circles and swirls began to form on Sefimrr’s outer right hip, forming a large natural tattoo that touched her stomach and her back while extending down the back of her leg to the inside of her knee.
“That’s it!” the chieftain recoiled at her words, far too loud for his sensitive ears, the pain and fear of her drawing her attention back to him, “But why are you afraid? What have I done to hurt you? I mean, you set me on fire and then shot me. If anyone should be angry or afraid here it should be me. I understand that we are not the same, that is why I will make this all better.”
She leaned down once more, this time drawing a talon to the chieftain’s forehead. He didn’t have time to protest before she jammed the organic blade into his cranium, a short cry exiting his lungs before his eyes went blank and his breathing slowed. She twisted and turned, sticking her tongue out and holding it between her teeth as she concentrated. The chieftain grunted and groaned as a thick sap-like fluid flowed into his cranial cavity from a tiny hole in the tip of the talon. Sefimrr hummed a little ditty to herself as she began to psychically manoeuvre the liquid within his brain, changing the lupines brain functions and chemical glands as she explored his genetic and anatomical makeup.
With a loud ‘huzzah’ she yanked her talon from the man’s skull, the hole quickly filling shut as flesh leapt across the empty expanse and bone crystallized under the stretching muscle and skin, “There we go, now you will always be happy! In fact, that was pretty easy. I don’t think I need to do it manually anymore, so everyone can be happy.” She instantly began to work her powers upon all the lupines present, and even the boar that sat patiently staring at a tree some mile or so away. In under five seconds all were happy, the feelings of joy and bliss lifting Sefimrr’s spirits.
“Now, let’s go and make everyone else happy! Or at the very least eat something, I am starving.” With that the lupines sprinted away, but not before the worms flowed into their bodies through any available openings. The remaining annelids burrowed into the ground and began to tunnel outwards. The boar also began to plod away, snorting and chuffing at leaves and eating a stray snail. In the end, Sefimrr was sitting alone in the clearing with the rotting corpse of her old form resting behind her. Yet she was not alone, she saw through all their eyes and guided their every movement like a puppet master.
---
Three Hours Later
“I am telling you, something is just fucking wrong about this place,” Jules Hanverg, the only Accallian in the scouting party sent south of the border to investigate the ‘anomalous meteor-like object’ spoke in a fairly even tone as the IFV sped through the underbrush, “We have been going through this damn jungle for over an hour now. Where the hell are all the animals?” He spoke to the soldiers under his command and his fellow officer, his voice reverberating off the innards of the vehicle they sat inside.
With a whir the havenite of the group, one Riko Morgan, turned to his human companion, “Frankly I am glad we haven’t encountered anything. The things that live in these forests are beyond crazy,” The IFV jolted over a log, thumping back down upon earth with a shudder and continuing unabated, “Besides, the sooner we get here and identify that it is, in fact, nothing at all the sooner we can get home. So quit worrying and start thinking about how great it is going to be to finally be able to have a mission where nothing happened.”
In the same compartment of the IFV were the researchers sent along with the scouting team to study whatever had landed. Their leader was artificer apprentice J'tara, a vulpine scientist that had studied some of the rather ‘odd’ creatures and flora of her homeland. She turned to the two chatting officers, peering with green eyes down her muzzle at them, “I sincerely doubt it was nothing. A meteor the size of a sky scraper hits and there isn’t so much as a shockwave? I hate to be a downer here, but no matter what we find there will be something. There can’t not be.”
“Something up ahead and- Oh my god, what the fuck?” The IFV skidded to a halt, the driver’s voice quickly overridden by the sound of the chaingun mounted of the vehicle ripping to life. Likewise the clatter and boom of the tankettes grenade launchers and machine guns added to the cacophony. Then there was a roar, a primal guttural roar that shook the loose bolts in the IFV and rung the ears. The tires squealed something fierce, the engines screaming to life as the armoured vehicle reversed as quick as it could. It wasn’t quick enough. Something slammed into the side, concaving the metal wall and breaking the back of yelping lupine as the IFV was flipped over.
Riko clunked against the roof, quickly rising to a kneeling position as he clung to his howdah pistol, “Squad, move out! One of you geeks see to Tira, she was the medic damnit.” With those quick commands he kicked open the partially seized door to the IFV, his eyes and mind quickly having to adjust to an alien scene.
Outside, just beyond the open door, was a veritable sea of quivering flesh. Not animals, insects, or normal life, but actual flesh stretched across the ground like some sickening tarp of muscle and skin. From the splotched surface, oddly unsullied by the tires of the IFV, spilled forth great barbed tendrils over fifty meters long and one tenth twelfth as thick. They swayed in the air, massive scorpion-tail tipped ends slamming into the ground with spurts of blood as they attempted to spear the evasive tankettes. One of the small tanks got the idea to speed away as fast as it could, and Riko thought for a moment it would make it, but then the tentacle whipped out. It extended to over twice its length, rammed through the armoured tankette and into a tree, and then recoiled back down into the recesses of its fleshy domain tree, tank, and all.
With no more time to lose, and another tendril rising from an orifice in the ground, Riko sprinted from the IFV and took cover behind it as his fellows poured out to join him. Riko would have been satisfied with trying to sprint, but whatever had knocked over his ride was back. The tip of a tail whipped around the corner of the vehicle, wrapping around one of his soldiers and slamming him against the undercarriage of the IFV before snaking him screaming through the air and down into a snapping gullet. The screams ended very quick.
“Get out there and kill that thing! Now!” Riko turned around the corner of the overturned IFV, bringing the sights of his gun up as he did so, and caught sight of the creature. It was a worm, or possibly a snake, sixty feet long and ten feet thick. Its head was eyeless, a wide jaw hanging open with red muscle and white serrated teeth exposed. The creature’s entire body was a sleek and slippery grey, reflective and looking deceivingly thin. Without so much as a second thought he fired into its open jaw, still distended where the leg of the vulpine was hanging out and the rest of him clogging the monster’s greedy throat.
The bang was deafening, thankfully Riko’s hearing was adjustable, and so he only heard a moderately ear shattering boom. The bullet, a massive monster of a round, tore through the air and into the upper jaw of the creature. It roared, flailed, and then fell on its side twitching. Then all went silent. The massive tentacle stopped its attack upon the tankette and retreated into its fleshy home, and the soldiers quickly advanced to the still twitching creature. Jules unloaded five rounds from his needler assault rifle into the inside of abomination’s head before it stopped moving.
“Sir, we need to get the fuck out of here and get a hold of the deep patrols or something. This is officially no longer a scouting mission,” Jules waved the scientists out of the IFV, two of them carrying Tira, “C’mon, before whatever the hell this is gets its shit together.”
Riko stared at Jules, “Right. Move out before that tentacle comes back, on the double,” noticing the look from the science team he shook his head, “The dead thing stays.” He turned to look at where they were while moving. The mountain above them was scarred with a great red stain, indented where the meteor had collided with it. His thoughts were rather dour, at least we know where all this alien crap came from.
Then the sound of weeping filled the air, an unabashed cry pouring from every direction and even the very earth itself. It rose to a pitch, growing ever louder until the lupines were clutching at their ears as they jogged away. Then it spoke, a great feminine voice pervading the flesh covered expanse, “My baby! YOU MONSTERS!”
The flesh that covered the ground rippled, then tore in half. A chasm, how deep Riko could not see, formed. And from it came a tidal wave of the living. They did not flow like a river, nor come like a wave, instead they gushed like a geyser of blood, ooze, and squirming flesh. Riko and Jules, even the scientists that had come expecting the extraordinary could do nothing but run or stand in shock and awe. Most ran, Riko could not tear himself from staring for what seemed the longest time as the swarm of annelids flowed towards him, needler and high calibre rounds flying past him and into the wave with little effect. The tankette was overcome quickly, its grenade launcher silencing as the wave of wriggling worms overcame it and with concerted effort quickly chipped a hole into it.
Jules was already running, not because he was a coward but because he believed in living to fight another day. He didn’t turn around when his commanding officer was overcome by the wave, nor did he let up when the scientists carrying Tira began to scream then gargle as the wave flowed over and into them. He simply ran until his legs could carry him no farther, until his breath felt as fire in his lungs, and his vision was flooded with the withdrawal of his adrenalin. He coughed, wheezed, and continued to jog as best he could. The thought of those things getting to him gave him a consistent supply of energy. Then he saw the first actual animal since the mission began. A boar, innocent enough.
It oinked, then looked at him while tendrils snaked out of its mouth and its eyes plopped out on stalks for a better look. Jules cursed and reached for his pistol. It wasn’t there, it must have fallen out while he was running or gotten snagged on something. Whatever the reason, it was simply gone, and the boar was squealing and charging. Jules tried his best to fend it off, but in the end the boar won out. Jules, last survivor of the scout team, was boared to death as Sefimrr rallied her slithering hordes to move towards the border of Aatuylva, the many forms of her growing ecosystem slithering and marching through corrupted wilderness.
