10-02-2015, 05:56 PM
Bilgewater was a relatively simple place. Far removed from the idyllic and pleasant streets of Costa Del Sol, the main port city on Blue Flame Island was primarily comprised of simple wooden building and the occasional old stone fort, or mill. The local populace avoided any sort of ostentatious overtones in their dress and daily activities...partly because revelry was an expensive habit, and partly because it was usually not a good idea to draw attention to one's self on the island that was notorious for piracy and questionable business. Still, some of these people were more than willing to flaunt their success. Most of them were owners of lucrative brewing or 'shipping' trades that brought a majority of Blue Flame's income in to Bilgewater. One such lord was not, in fact, a lord, but a Lady. In fact, her name was, indeed Lady. Lady Jereson. The cosmic circumstances that had led a woman of her name to her current status were as inscrutable as Omni's stare, but she didn't question it. After all, having been summoned into the Omniverse alongside the rest of much of the population of Blue Flame island as a simple street urchin of nine years, one had to be quite sure of themselves to be able to progress into the echelons of underworld bourgeoisie. But that was a story for another time.
Currently, Lady had a problem. In the cut-throat world that was large-scale piracy, it was easy to hit large roadblocks, and very few were larger than Leto Notrian. Aside from the fact that he was a corpulent mass of quivering skin folds and stinking recesses, he was also the island's richest smuggling lord. Lady had been trying her own hand at the smuggling trade for quite some time now, but every time she thought she had a good route or system in place, Leto somehow cut her off or stole the business. She didn't know what his secret was, but all attempts to surveil his place of operations had ended in dead two-bit spies, that is, if they didn't disappear completely.
What Lady did know was Leto's business; he specialized in smuggling people. One might think that the issue of cheap and willing labor would be a problem in the Omniverse, given that most of the people in power could summon servants on a whim. As time had gone on, however, many Secondaries had risen to such places of prominence within their relative spheres of influence that they did require this kind of easily acquired labor. The second question one might have on the matter, was a question of why Secondaries needed to be smuggled at all. The Omniverse was largely a lawless land and outside the scrutiny of any sort of organization that might care. This was actually a question that Lady did not have an answer to, and she wanted one badly. What was clear, however, was the fact that Leto managed to pull a hefty profit from it and his clients always apparently paid in Omnilium. She needed someone to figure all of this out and, if possible, put Leto out of business. Permanently.
Unfortunately, as the sun set over the glistening waters of the Vasty Deep and the gulls sang their nightly dirge, there was little chance of finding help any time soon. The small wooden balcony looking over a private inlet on the north side of the island hung precariously over the side of a five hundred foot drop, and heavy shadows laid upon the sea of rippling palm leaves that surrounded the two adjacent hills. The gray, sandy beach far below was rimmed with the white froth of a rising tide, with large boulders born from the aging granite bluffs above peeking just barely above the perpetual kneading motion of the slow waves. Lady to the final sip of her evening's drink and headed back into her luxury manor, ready for an early bedtime.
...
It was night. Beneath the inky waters that surrounded Blue Flame Island like an oppressive veil, Nealaphh brooded from within its submersible tetrahedron. Finding an appropriate disguise to keep attention away from itself while on the island would be difficult, as it would require the shadow to have its face covered at all time. The God-Mind had been browsing through pictures of the local populace, posted to the Dataverse from erstwhile visitors, in order to get an idea of how to accomplish this first step in its discovery of an illicit portal to Coruscant. Headwear was common for residents of the island, which was a good start, as well as certain fineries such as gloves and clothing that concealed a majority of a humanoid's body. The only trouble that persisted was the matter of finding a method of covering its luminescent eyes while still allowing itself to see with an appreciable degree of clarity. The shadow often wondered if it was The Smiling One who had chosen its current form, or if it had been as a result of some inner inability to reconcile between many of the different bodies it inhabited in the timeline of its old Multiverse. There was no point in speculating about it at this point, though. There was a problem that needed to be solved. Furthermore Nealaphh could not communicate verbally, which would also prove to be conspicuous. Perhaps it would behoove the shadow to work on the creation of a blank Secondary shell which it could inhabit indefinitely. It had worked well with Rebecca, so Nealaphh had no reason to suspect it wouldn't work with a body of its own creation. With no better recourse, the shadow willed its submarine polygon towards the shoreline.
The spot that Nealaphh chose to come ashore was secluded, but also near enough to the town of Bilgewater that traveling to the port city once the body was completed would not be unduly arduous. Within a small marine cave that had, over the course of millennia, been carved into the dense rock of the island, the God-Mind set to work with its Omnillium. Creating a human body to inhabit was, in and of itself, simple, though creating the facial features to be generic enough to forget was a tad difficult. More Dataverse reference was required. No, the most difficult part of making the body was giving it a mind and a will to live, without actually giving it proper sentience. Nealaphh could not simply give the corpus a token intelligence and expect it to function flawlessly. Rebecca had been different; her mind had been conditioned to be totally accepting of every decision the god-mind made, so inhabiting her small frame had been relatively easy. This body needed to be entirely owned by Nealaphh...with a mind that did not require the shadow to take a backseat to its host's whim.
Nealaphh pondered on this subject for some time longer, before suddenly realizing that it had been approaching the problem from the completely wrong angle. Creating a body without a mind was, obviously, impossible. Even sentient creatures that were comatose, that had no mental activity whatsoever, still had information stored inside of their brains that dictated the habitual function of their bodies. The answer, in this case, was simple. The god-mind did what it had done many times before, and copied its entire intellect into the pulsing gray matter of the flesh-bound frame. Nealaphh could not make a 'blank slate', but it could easily ingrain its own motives, knowledge, and tactics into the memories of this nameless Secondary. As the rainbow scintillation of the Omnilium faded, the god-mind watched with glowing green glee as its biological double hoisted itself from the ground. It...or rather, he blinked a few times in the inky blackness, staring into the viridian glower that served as the cave's only illumination. A moment passed, before Nealaphh's Prime body evaporated into a thick black smog which Nealaphh's Secondary body inhaled deeply. Upon doing so, shivers ran down the body's skin and it shrugged its shoulders back, as if waking from a deep sleep for the first time. The Nealaphhs looked down at their hand and suddenly realized a critical oversight; the had neglected to make clothing for the body to wear. Normally they could have simply constructed some as necessary, but the body's ears picked up the sound of muted voices...
...
Hendrick and Palomay clambered over the salty, soaking rocks that loomed like ineffectual bastions at the mouth of the cave. The pair had been coming back from an evening's fishing trip when they had caught a glimpse of light from inside the old Honey Pot cavern, South East of Bilgewater. Now, normally they might just assume it was some smugglers or unsavory types conducting a midnight rendezvous, but it was not torchlight they had spotted from their dingy; it was the rainbow blast of color that heralded the presence of Omnilium. Judging by the intensity of the glow, there was quite a lot of it being used, too. Something valuable was in there.
"Wotcha figgur den Pally? Sum kinda Prime treasure?" Hendrick said, in a hushed yet excited whisper. Palomay remained silent, save for a few grunts as he scaled the final few handholds into the water-slick geological orifice.
"Crimey 'sdarker 'en yer mums buttcrack in 'ere." Hendrick continued, brushing a few strands of some unidentifiable ocean weed from his blazer. That was okay though, Hendrick had no need to worry about getting the beige overcoat dirty; it was his usual garb when dealing with dirty business like rock climbing or fishing. With this he wore a simple button down shirt that used to be a deep blue, and some black breeches. Palomay continued to say nothing, but simply pulled out one of his pitch covered torches and lit it up with a spark from his flintlock. That was Pally, thought Hendrick, silent and sharp. At times, Hendrick honestly thought that Pally was slow, considering he wasn't really given to sharing his mind all that much. Still, was good company on a fishing trip. Quiet enough to keep the fish calm and a good listener. Patient too, if Hendrick had to be honest. He knew he wasn't always the most savvy to the ways of good company-keeping, but he didn't need to be with a best friend like Palomay. Finally the quiescent Secondary spoke.
"I think I just saw sum thin'." he said, his voice deep. The torchlight illuminated the dark-skinned man's face with a spooky flickering gloam. His fashionable tricorn kept the man's eyes in shade as he peered into the damp darkness beyond, trying to spy whatever it was that was moving around back there. His black overalls went well with the ebon setting. Hendrick approached from behind with his loud, heavy footfalls.
"You thinkin' we oughtta scarper?" he said in a mere whisper, trying to look at whatever Pally was pointing his eyes at. Wordlessly, Palomay began to walk deeper into the black granite tube. The walls reflected the warmth of the torchlight in great sheets of orange glimmering, as if they rejected the offer of illumination outright. The footing was rather unsteady, as a small, trickling stream made sure that no surface underfoot remained dry and tractive. Just then, a shadow from behind a sleeping boulder warped. It was hard to tell with the distended features cast by the firelight, but it appeared to be human...to some degree.
"Oi! Rock monkey! Whyn't ya come out an' hand over yeh 'nilium? If yeh do then you k'n get back to yeh scampering un'armed." Hendrick said, taking his gutting knife out from the drawn cord belt that held his breeches in place. The bilious blade still stank with the blood of slain fish, and the corrosion that lingered on its thick faces belied the implement's age. In kind, Palomay powdered up his pistol and dropped a ball into the muzzle. There was no response from whoever it was that was hiding back there. The adventurous duo looked at each other for a moment then offered bemused grins. With a surge of motion, they lunged around the large, oblong boulder and discovered...
...nothing. There was nothing back here. Hendrick scratched at his bushy-haired head as Palomay turned around and resumed scanning the darkness. There had to be someone in here! Hendrick was no mad-man, and Palomay had eyes sharp enough to dig holes into a mainmast.
"Rrrroight. Well. Yeh can't sneak past us, bucko. We've got the upper 'and, see?" Hendrick said, brandishing his servile blade into the umbral trappings beyond the reach of the flame's light. It was at that moment that the world seemed to...go all funny. There came a bending sensation in Hendrick's ear, like he was being sucked down some kind of hole.
"Whhuuu..." he groaned, looked down at his hands, which seemed to be tracing long, white skinned lines into the horizon that...didn't exist. Palomay also appeared to be affected, as he lost his balance. Before the man could fall over backwards, however, both Secondaries were blasted almost seven feet deeper into the bowels of the cave. A thunderous explosion shook the entire cavern, and small chunks of heavy stone rained down from the ceiling. Hendrick clutched at his head and looked around for Palomay, who was barely illuminated by the torch which had rolled perilously close to its demise at the edge of the trickling brook between them. Palomay seemed to shout something, but Hendrick couldn't hear the words.
"Wot?
"-aid we've got taget the 'ell outta here!" the dark skinned man said, trying to heft himself to his feet. Whatever had happened, it had been loud enough to momentarily blast Hendrick's hearing out of his head for a few moments. The fishing aficionado began to sit up too, but all of a sudden, there was...something between them. It appeared to have the makings of a man, but...it was back lit but the dying light of the torch. Hendrick could only see as Palomay's eyes rose to greet the face of whatever it was, only to adopt a look of shock and anger on his warped features. Hendrick could only think to do one thing; run. As the torch finally gave out, Hendrick pelted towards the mouth of the cave, nary giving a thought to the fate of his long time companion behind him. Fear was a powerful disincentive for valiance, in that regard. Hendrick could only hear, only shiver, as he heard a long, drawn out scream from his friend. A scream which reverberated in a ghastly timbre within the walls of the cave, and seemed eager to force Hendrick's retreat even faster.
The fisherman climbed desperately down the rock face of Honey Hole cave, his skin getting flayed and torn by the sharp edges of the sea-washed stone. When his feet finally his the loose, shifting gravel of the beach, he looked back at the mouth of the cave, high above. A moment passed, where the only sound was his fevered gasping and the incessant whisper of the waves. Then, a figure loomed tall at the mouth of the cave, barely lit by the sliver of moon which glared reproachfully down at the sordid scene. It was not Palomay. It was a...a man. Some sort of man, bare as the day he was born. The nude figure looked around for a moment, as if searching for something. Only too late did Hendrick realized what the enigmatic figure's quarry was. Though the fisherman could no see the man's eyes per se, he knew that their gazes locked. He also knew that the figure's eyes suddenly flashed a bright green and he felt like he was being sucked down a drain again.
With crazed huffs and whines, Hendrick wobbled towards the refuge of the trees until the world seemed to be sitting upright again. There came another thunderous bang, and a hail of salty pebbles and gravel bombarded Hendrick's sweat drenched back. Hendrick ran. He kept running and would keep running all the way back to Bilgewater. The people in the town needed to be warned: there was a killer prime on the loose. The memory of his horror seemed to beg Hendrick that he look back the way he had come, to ensure that he was not being stalked by the human monstrosity that had...done something horrible to Palomay. Hendrick could barely see the beach through the palm grove he now dashed through, and saw no sign of pursuit. A less intelligent secondary might assume they could stop running at this point, but Hendrick knew better. A Prime never gave up. It was this baleful overconfidence that doomed the fisherman, as, when he turned back to face his direction of travel, he ran straight into the damnably warm, bare chest of a human man. Hendrick looked up into the face of the Prime. It was a face...that...it was indescribable. Not because it was terrifying, or was a visage that words could not find...it was just so...plain. Even as he stared at the horrible face, it seemed to shift and jog at the edges, as if his mind couldn't quite settle on just what the features of this stalker looked like.
It didn't matter though.
Hendrick wailed as he felt his body leave the earth, lifted up into the air by an unseen hand, like a kitten plucked from a litter. His gaze leveled with that of the Prime's, both of them wide eyed and panting hard.
"Puh-please. Oh please, oh please. Don't, I...I-I-I Oooh Omni, help meeeaaaAAAAUAUUGGGHHAHAUGHGAAAHHAA!"
Hendrick's noises grew inhuman as he felt his body rapidly plucked apart...as limbs were torn from their sockets and ribs flayed outwards from their normal, orderly array like dog tails whipping in frenetic glee...and all the while, he was forced to stare into those eyes. Those wide, human eyes that held a green evil in them. It was a terrible sight to go out on.
...
Regrettable. Nealaphh had hoped not to have to kill the men who had happened upon it within the cave, but when they withdrew their weapons, there was nothing that could be left to risk. The Secondary body did not have the consistency of stone, like its own, normal corpus. Such lowly tools of death now posed a very real risk that the god-mind would prefer to be left unrealized. It was also regrettable that the man had elected to call upon the name of The Smiling One in a time of need. Normally, the shadow may have given the man a much less painful death, but the amygdala of this human frame bade the god-mind into an angry outburst. It was something that Nealaphh would have to make sure didn't become habitual.
After a few minutes, Nealaphh finished dressing itself with the human's garb and wicking the last of his breeze chilled blood from the body's hands. Pulling the other human's hat over its head, Nealaphh turned on its heel and completed Hendricks forlorn sojourn back to Bilgewater, albeit at a much more relaxed pace...
Currently, Lady had a problem. In the cut-throat world that was large-scale piracy, it was easy to hit large roadblocks, and very few were larger than Leto Notrian. Aside from the fact that he was a corpulent mass of quivering skin folds and stinking recesses, he was also the island's richest smuggling lord. Lady had been trying her own hand at the smuggling trade for quite some time now, but every time she thought she had a good route or system in place, Leto somehow cut her off or stole the business. She didn't know what his secret was, but all attempts to surveil his place of operations had ended in dead two-bit spies, that is, if they didn't disappear completely.
What Lady did know was Leto's business; he specialized in smuggling people. One might think that the issue of cheap and willing labor would be a problem in the Omniverse, given that most of the people in power could summon servants on a whim. As time had gone on, however, many Secondaries had risen to such places of prominence within their relative spheres of influence that they did require this kind of easily acquired labor. The second question one might have on the matter, was a question of why Secondaries needed to be smuggled at all. The Omniverse was largely a lawless land and outside the scrutiny of any sort of organization that might care. This was actually a question that Lady did not have an answer to, and she wanted one badly. What was clear, however, was the fact that Leto managed to pull a hefty profit from it and his clients always apparently paid in Omnilium. She needed someone to figure all of this out and, if possible, put Leto out of business. Permanently.
Unfortunately, as the sun set over the glistening waters of the Vasty Deep and the gulls sang their nightly dirge, there was little chance of finding help any time soon. The small wooden balcony looking over a private inlet on the north side of the island hung precariously over the side of a five hundred foot drop, and heavy shadows laid upon the sea of rippling palm leaves that surrounded the two adjacent hills. The gray, sandy beach far below was rimmed with the white froth of a rising tide, with large boulders born from the aging granite bluffs above peeking just barely above the perpetual kneading motion of the slow waves. Lady to the final sip of her evening's drink and headed back into her luxury manor, ready for an early bedtime.
...
It was night. Beneath the inky waters that surrounded Blue Flame Island like an oppressive veil, Nealaphh brooded from within its submersible tetrahedron. Finding an appropriate disguise to keep attention away from itself while on the island would be difficult, as it would require the shadow to have its face covered at all time. The God-Mind had been browsing through pictures of the local populace, posted to the Dataverse from erstwhile visitors, in order to get an idea of how to accomplish this first step in its discovery of an illicit portal to Coruscant. Headwear was common for residents of the island, which was a good start, as well as certain fineries such as gloves and clothing that concealed a majority of a humanoid's body. The only trouble that persisted was the matter of finding a method of covering its luminescent eyes while still allowing itself to see with an appreciable degree of clarity. The shadow often wondered if it was The Smiling One who had chosen its current form, or if it had been as a result of some inner inability to reconcile between many of the different bodies it inhabited in the timeline of its old Multiverse. There was no point in speculating about it at this point, though. There was a problem that needed to be solved. Furthermore Nealaphh could not communicate verbally, which would also prove to be conspicuous. Perhaps it would behoove the shadow to work on the creation of a blank Secondary shell which it could inhabit indefinitely. It had worked well with Rebecca, so Nealaphh had no reason to suspect it wouldn't work with a body of its own creation. With no better recourse, the shadow willed its submarine polygon towards the shoreline.
The spot that Nealaphh chose to come ashore was secluded, but also near enough to the town of Bilgewater that traveling to the port city once the body was completed would not be unduly arduous. Within a small marine cave that had, over the course of millennia, been carved into the dense rock of the island, the God-Mind set to work with its Omnillium. Creating a human body to inhabit was, in and of itself, simple, though creating the facial features to be generic enough to forget was a tad difficult. More Dataverse reference was required. No, the most difficult part of making the body was giving it a mind and a will to live, without actually giving it proper sentience. Nealaphh could not simply give the corpus a token intelligence and expect it to function flawlessly. Rebecca had been different; her mind had been conditioned to be totally accepting of every decision the god-mind made, so inhabiting her small frame had been relatively easy. This body needed to be entirely owned by Nealaphh...with a mind that did not require the shadow to take a backseat to its host's whim.
Nealaphh pondered on this subject for some time longer, before suddenly realizing that it had been approaching the problem from the completely wrong angle. Creating a body without a mind was, obviously, impossible. Even sentient creatures that were comatose, that had no mental activity whatsoever, still had information stored inside of their brains that dictated the habitual function of their bodies. The answer, in this case, was simple. The god-mind did what it had done many times before, and copied its entire intellect into the pulsing gray matter of the flesh-bound frame. Nealaphh could not make a 'blank slate', but it could easily ingrain its own motives, knowledge, and tactics into the memories of this nameless Secondary. As the rainbow scintillation of the Omnilium faded, the god-mind watched with glowing green glee as its biological double hoisted itself from the ground. It...or rather, he blinked a few times in the inky blackness, staring into the viridian glower that served as the cave's only illumination. A moment passed, before Nealaphh's Prime body evaporated into a thick black smog which Nealaphh's Secondary body inhaled deeply. Upon doing so, shivers ran down the body's skin and it shrugged its shoulders back, as if waking from a deep sleep for the first time. The Nealaphhs looked down at their hand and suddenly realized a critical oversight; the had neglected to make clothing for the body to wear. Normally they could have simply constructed some as necessary, but the body's ears picked up the sound of muted voices...
...
Hendrick and Palomay clambered over the salty, soaking rocks that loomed like ineffectual bastions at the mouth of the cave. The pair had been coming back from an evening's fishing trip when they had caught a glimpse of light from inside the old Honey Pot cavern, South East of Bilgewater. Now, normally they might just assume it was some smugglers or unsavory types conducting a midnight rendezvous, but it was not torchlight they had spotted from their dingy; it was the rainbow blast of color that heralded the presence of Omnilium. Judging by the intensity of the glow, there was quite a lot of it being used, too. Something valuable was in there.
"Wotcha figgur den Pally? Sum kinda Prime treasure?" Hendrick said, in a hushed yet excited whisper. Palomay remained silent, save for a few grunts as he scaled the final few handholds into the water-slick geological orifice.
"Crimey 'sdarker 'en yer mums buttcrack in 'ere." Hendrick continued, brushing a few strands of some unidentifiable ocean weed from his blazer. That was okay though, Hendrick had no need to worry about getting the beige overcoat dirty; it was his usual garb when dealing with dirty business like rock climbing or fishing. With this he wore a simple button down shirt that used to be a deep blue, and some black breeches. Palomay continued to say nothing, but simply pulled out one of his pitch covered torches and lit it up with a spark from his flintlock. That was Pally, thought Hendrick, silent and sharp. At times, Hendrick honestly thought that Pally was slow, considering he wasn't really given to sharing his mind all that much. Still, was good company on a fishing trip. Quiet enough to keep the fish calm and a good listener. Patient too, if Hendrick had to be honest. He knew he wasn't always the most savvy to the ways of good company-keeping, but he didn't need to be with a best friend like Palomay. Finally the quiescent Secondary spoke.
"I think I just saw sum thin'." he said, his voice deep. The torchlight illuminated the dark-skinned man's face with a spooky flickering gloam. His fashionable tricorn kept the man's eyes in shade as he peered into the damp darkness beyond, trying to spy whatever it was that was moving around back there. His black overalls went well with the ebon setting. Hendrick approached from behind with his loud, heavy footfalls.
"You thinkin' we oughtta scarper?" he said in a mere whisper, trying to look at whatever Pally was pointing his eyes at. Wordlessly, Palomay began to walk deeper into the black granite tube. The walls reflected the warmth of the torchlight in great sheets of orange glimmering, as if they rejected the offer of illumination outright. The footing was rather unsteady, as a small, trickling stream made sure that no surface underfoot remained dry and tractive. Just then, a shadow from behind a sleeping boulder warped. It was hard to tell with the distended features cast by the firelight, but it appeared to be human...to some degree.
"Oi! Rock monkey! Whyn't ya come out an' hand over yeh 'nilium? If yeh do then you k'n get back to yeh scampering un'armed." Hendrick said, taking his gutting knife out from the drawn cord belt that held his breeches in place. The bilious blade still stank with the blood of slain fish, and the corrosion that lingered on its thick faces belied the implement's age. In kind, Palomay powdered up his pistol and dropped a ball into the muzzle. There was no response from whoever it was that was hiding back there. The adventurous duo looked at each other for a moment then offered bemused grins. With a surge of motion, they lunged around the large, oblong boulder and discovered...
...nothing. There was nothing back here. Hendrick scratched at his bushy-haired head as Palomay turned around and resumed scanning the darkness. There had to be someone in here! Hendrick was no mad-man, and Palomay had eyes sharp enough to dig holes into a mainmast.
"Rrrroight. Well. Yeh can't sneak past us, bucko. We've got the upper 'and, see?" Hendrick said, brandishing his servile blade into the umbral trappings beyond the reach of the flame's light. It was at that moment that the world seemed to...go all funny. There came a bending sensation in Hendrick's ear, like he was being sucked down some kind of hole.
"Whhuuu..." he groaned, looked down at his hands, which seemed to be tracing long, white skinned lines into the horizon that...didn't exist. Palomay also appeared to be affected, as he lost his balance. Before the man could fall over backwards, however, both Secondaries were blasted almost seven feet deeper into the bowels of the cave. A thunderous explosion shook the entire cavern, and small chunks of heavy stone rained down from the ceiling. Hendrick clutched at his head and looked around for Palomay, who was barely illuminated by the torch which had rolled perilously close to its demise at the edge of the trickling brook between them. Palomay seemed to shout something, but Hendrick couldn't hear the words.
"Wot?
"-aid we've got taget the 'ell outta here!" the dark skinned man said, trying to heft himself to his feet. Whatever had happened, it had been loud enough to momentarily blast Hendrick's hearing out of his head for a few moments. The fishing aficionado began to sit up too, but all of a sudden, there was...something between them. It appeared to have the makings of a man, but...it was back lit but the dying light of the torch. Hendrick could only see as Palomay's eyes rose to greet the face of whatever it was, only to adopt a look of shock and anger on his warped features. Hendrick could only think to do one thing; run. As the torch finally gave out, Hendrick pelted towards the mouth of the cave, nary giving a thought to the fate of his long time companion behind him. Fear was a powerful disincentive for valiance, in that regard. Hendrick could only hear, only shiver, as he heard a long, drawn out scream from his friend. A scream which reverberated in a ghastly timbre within the walls of the cave, and seemed eager to force Hendrick's retreat even faster.
The fisherman climbed desperately down the rock face of Honey Hole cave, his skin getting flayed and torn by the sharp edges of the sea-washed stone. When his feet finally his the loose, shifting gravel of the beach, he looked back at the mouth of the cave, high above. A moment passed, where the only sound was his fevered gasping and the incessant whisper of the waves. Then, a figure loomed tall at the mouth of the cave, barely lit by the sliver of moon which glared reproachfully down at the sordid scene. It was not Palomay. It was a...a man. Some sort of man, bare as the day he was born. The nude figure looked around for a moment, as if searching for something. Only too late did Hendrick realized what the enigmatic figure's quarry was. Though the fisherman could no see the man's eyes per se, he knew that their gazes locked. He also knew that the figure's eyes suddenly flashed a bright green and he felt like he was being sucked down a drain again.
With crazed huffs and whines, Hendrick wobbled towards the refuge of the trees until the world seemed to be sitting upright again. There came another thunderous bang, and a hail of salty pebbles and gravel bombarded Hendrick's sweat drenched back. Hendrick ran. He kept running and would keep running all the way back to Bilgewater. The people in the town needed to be warned: there was a killer prime on the loose. The memory of his horror seemed to beg Hendrick that he look back the way he had come, to ensure that he was not being stalked by the human monstrosity that had...done something horrible to Palomay. Hendrick could barely see the beach through the palm grove he now dashed through, and saw no sign of pursuit. A less intelligent secondary might assume they could stop running at this point, but Hendrick knew better. A Prime never gave up. It was this baleful overconfidence that doomed the fisherman, as, when he turned back to face his direction of travel, he ran straight into the damnably warm, bare chest of a human man. Hendrick looked up into the face of the Prime. It was a face...that...it was indescribable. Not because it was terrifying, or was a visage that words could not find...it was just so...plain. Even as he stared at the horrible face, it seemed to shift and jog at the edges, as if his mind couldn't quite settle on just what the features of this stalker looked like.
It didn't matter though.
Hendrick wailed as he felt his body leave the earth, lifted up into the air by an unseen hand, like a kitten plucked from a litter. His gaze leveled with that of the Prime's, both of them wide eyed and panting hard.
"Puh-please. Oh please, oh please. Don't, I...I-I-I Oooh Omni, help meeeaaaAAAAUAUUGGGHHAHAUGHGAAAHHAA!"
Hendrick's noises grew inhuman as he felt his body rapidly plucked apart...as limbs were torn from their sockets and ribs flayed outwards from their normal, orderly array like dog tails whipping in frenetic glee...and all the while, he was forced to stare into those eyes. Those wide, human eyes that held a green evil in them. It was a terrible sight to go out on.
...
Regrettable. Nealaphh had hoped not to have to kill the men who had happened upon it within the cave, but when they withdrew their weapons, there was nothing that could be left to risk. The Secondary body did not have the consistency of stone, like its own, normal corpus. Such lowly tools of death now posed a very real risk that the god-mind would prefer to be left unrealized. It was also regrettable that the man had elected to call upon the name of The Smiling One in a time of need. Normally, the shadow may have given the man a much less painful death, but the amygdala of this human frame bade the god-mind into an angry outburst. It was something that Nealaphh would have to make sure didn't become habitual.
After a few minutes, Nealaphh finished dressing itself with the human's garb and wicking the last of his breeze chilled blood from the body's hands. Pulling the other human's hat over its head, Nealaphh turned on its heel and completed Hendricks forlorn sojourn back to Bilgewater, albeit at a much more relaxed pace...
And, we dream of home I dream of life out of here Their dreams are small My dreams don't know fear I got my heart full of hope I will change everything No matter what I'm told How impossible it seems We did it before And we'll do it again We're indestructible Even when we're tired And we've been here before Just you and I
Don't try to rescue me I don't need to be rescued
Don't try to rescue me I don't need to be rescued