I'm Actually Quite Selfish

[Tearen Wover]

Nealaphh wandered through the dank, tubular hallways of Grooota's Basement, once again blending in quite well with the scenery. His slow, measured strides pulled great strands of the damnable, sloshing ichor around his ankles, as if the Basement itself was trying to integrate him. Or maybe digest him. Nealaphh had been pondering on the nature of the Factory City, Grooota. Nealaphh had assumed that the incorporeal overlord of this iron realm was just a simple artificial intelligence, but the more he thought about it, the less sense it made. Though there few certain facts that Nealaphh knew about Diablo, he was aware that the Lord of Horror was an absolute tyrant. Artificial Intelligence, no matter how deep and complex, is always inherently fallible. More importantly, despite anyone's best attempts, artificial intelligence was capable of working against it operator. Nealaphh doubted that Diablo had the technical wherewithal to create such a being, so the more likely conclusion was that Grooota was neither a demon, nor an AI. Through whatever arcane means had been woven, Grooota was a disembodied spirit capable of integrating seamlessly with electronics and mechanics. It hearkened of a poltergeist; a spirit capable of causing disturbances both physical and electronic. The bigger question that this invoked was whether or not Grooota had lived in an organic body in the first place...

...though, as he was, Grooota most certainly could be described as 'living'. The entire Factory City was his body, and these winding halls only reinforced that, despite the metal and wires, Nealaphh was inside something's body. Something odd happened, that Nealaphh had not physically experienced in the span of relative infinity: a shiver ran down his spine. A purely psychosomatic reaction such as this was the kind of thing he hated about an organic, mortal body. Previously the latent humanity within this form had bothered Nealaphh, but now he felt like he was riding a wild steed, barely in control of where he was going.

Movement snapped Nealaphh out of his introspection. It was low to the ground, squatting in the pale muck, but just outside the acrid illumination of one of the nearby lanterns. He could barely make out an obese, almost child-like body, weighed down by an array of large guns and artillery on his back. Curious, Nealaphh reached out to try and tap the Weirdling's mind, but found almost nothing but the bare minimum instincts for survival. The moment he did this, however, the wretched squatter wheeled towards him without a single noise and took a lunging, shaky step forward. Nealaphh could see the being's face better now; bald headed, with black bags on pale flesh, hanging beneath eyeless sockets. With a voiceless roar, the Weirdling surged forwards, despite the ridiculous bulk on its back. Rather than actually fire the battery of five inch guns grafted onto its back, it used the barrel of the weapons like a battering ram, slamming into Nealaphh and sending him flying. There was a great splash of slime, and for a moment, the weirdling lost sight of Nealaphh. That was all he needed to be able to teleport directly behind the cyborg wretch. The confused gun-child stalked forward slowly, searching for the Prime, while Nealaphh himself was sublimating just a fraction of matter from his right index finger into raw energy. He scanned the structure of the guns slowly, trying to discern where the magazines might be stored, in an attempt to detonate the weirdling on the spot.

Nealaphh never got the chance, as he was suddenly seized by a fusillade of grimy hands, yanking and tugging at his naked, obsidian body like a drowning man clawing for life. He hadn't even noticed the new comers, having been focused on his aim, but the energy was still built up, and Nealaphh pointed his index finger behind him, into whatever mob was assailing him. The fiery flash illuminated the entire tube for a moment, revealing that Nealaphh was not, in fact, fighting against many, but against one weirdling with eight arms, arrayed around its torso in a circle. The beam drove itself directly through the forehead of this multi-limbed horror, and the mutant shuddered into the grime. Nealaphh heard rhythmic splashing in the direction of the other weirdling, and was soon greeted with a full-on tackle from the gun-child. Despite his actual body being diminutive, the weight of the guns on his back was more than enough to pin Nealaphh to the floor of the tube. It was a saving grace that he didn't require air to breathe as the weirdling runt pressed Nealaphh's head under the surface with all of his might.

It was at this point that Nealaphh did something that it though it would never do again in the span of its existence; it slammed a balled fist into the side of the gun-child's face. Such was the force of the blow that it fully snapped the child's neck with a crack that even Nealaphh could hear, submerged as he was. Apparently, however, unlike the spider-armed weirdling that Nealaphh had dispatched so easily, the broken spinal column did not seem to deter the gun-child from trying to drown him. The sheer impossibility of how this weirdling was put together vexed Nealaphh to the point of anger. The emotion compelled him to blast the child away from him with a concussive burst of telekinetic force. The gun child teetered backwards, losing its precarious balance in the slime and fell onto its back. Trapped like an upended tortoise, the gun-child mouthed more voiceless screams as it thrashed, trying to right itself despite the weight of the weapons on its back. Nealaphh slowly stood up from where it had been pinned and took tentative steps towards the animalistic weirdling. If snapping its neck hadn't done the mutant cyborg in, what would?

With grim purpose driving his actions, Nealaphh stepped up onto the gun battery and grabbed the child fully by its torso. With a mental grunt of effort, slowly, deliberately, he yanked the child free from his gunmetal mooring. As Nealaphh did so, an array of wires and tubes twanged and snapped in protest, as black, oily blood oozed from the expunged biological component. With an almost effortless heave, Nealaphh flung the now limp, organic body behind him and stared into the core of the mechanical half of the weirdling. Interior diodes seemed to wink and fizzle angrily. The structure of the guns themselves may have been resistant to the destructive force Nealaphh could produce, but the Underverse was still a three dimensional space. With a fleeting moment of mental strain, Nealaphh contracted the space inside of the gun deck before snapping it back with explosive force. The entire structure rumbled violently as the more delicate inner workings were shredded in an instant. One by one, the angry diodes blinked off, and Nealaphh knew that the weirdling was now truly dead.

So that was two. But how many of these failed amalgamations lurked in The Basement? Nealaphh sat down in a splash of goo and took rest for a few minutes, hanging its head low. He stared with dull focus into the occluding mire that filled the tubes, and it was after a dawning moment of realization that Nealaphh came noticed that the runoff was moving, with a current. Based on the movement of the slime, Nealaphh had been travelling upstream since entering The Basement. Nealaphh suspected that if it found the headwaters of this grime that it would also find many answers to his questions. He stood up without a sound, save for the dripping, slopping ichor that sloughed off of his onyxian body, and proceeded further up the stream...