I'm Actually Quite Selfish

[Tearen Wover]

A small trickle of soft melody drew Nealaphh back to the realm of the waking. The first thing he realized was how warm he felt. The second thing he realized was that he was still alive, which was rather unexpected. The second before the world had gone dark, Nealaphh had been resigned to waking up somewhere else in this dreaded universe. At least, that was how he assumed things worked in the Underverse. The alternative was that it was just impossible to die, or, one ceased to exist completely. The final option was unlikely, since the Underverse was still Omni's domain, despite being cut off from the rest of the verses.

As Nealaphh first brought his awareness back to the visual level, he was slightly dazzled by the bright light that surrounded him. After a moment of adjustment, he realized that he was still in the primary reservoir of Grooota's bowels, and currently being held close to the soft, pulsating flesh of the queen weirdling. It was almost like he was being cradled up to suckle at her immense bosom, but there were many reasons why this wasn't the actual case. Still, the show of physical tenderness caught the shadow off-guard.

When she noticed him awake, the slimy monarch placed a pallid finger where his mouth would otherwise be, and smiled at him, her solid black eyes seeming to hold a genuine flicker of affection.

Shh, your brother will be here soon.

Brother? What do you-

There there, don't cry. Everything will be alright. Just trust Mother.

Impatient, Nealaphh tried to struggle free of the queen weirdling's stifling grasp, but found himself telekineticaly bound in place. He hadn't yet encountered a being in the Omniverse with more powerful psychic abilities than himself. The fact that he should encounter such an entity, here of all places, was a troubling omen. If this weirdling queen was the sort of biological experiment to be considered a failure, Nealaphh dreaded to learn what sort of living weapons hadn't been thrown in the gutter.

There came a faint, slurping, ripping sound from somewhere below Nealaphh and he was barely able to turn his head enough to see what was going on. Something was emerging from beneath the thick folds of halogen flesh that made up the bulk of the pulsating heart queen. The shadow did not wish to dwell on the implications of what was happening at the moment, and instead focused on the emerging figure itself. It was black and glistening, humanoid in form. As it finished crawling out from under the Queen's bulk, it stood up slowly, turning to look up at Nealaphh. Three burning green eyes stared keenly at Nealaphh, two in the normal place for a human, and one below the right.

It was a duplicate of his own body that had been spawned by the queen, and as the duplicate finished tearing a thick metal cord from its navel, the queen unceremoniously dropped Nealaphh to the corrugated metal floor far below. Still weakened, Nealaphh landed prone, creating a resounding bang, and raised his head to face the clone. The clone's three eyes narrowed, and suddenly Nealaphh felt himself picked up by sheer mental force before being flung far away from the black, metal plinth on which the queen and her clone-child resided.

Growing more cocient, Nealaphh caught himself mid air and slowed to a halt, roughly twenty feet above the surface of the white slime lake. Even from this distance, the acidic eyes of the copy seemed to burn into his mind. The duplicate spoke, via telepathy, in a voice exactly like his own.

Look at you, emaciated and broken like a whipped dog. The Master would surely die of laughter, if only he knew how far you had fallen.

Who are you? Nealaphh replied.

A pitiful question, and one you already know the answer to. The more pertinent question is; who are you?

Nealaphh maintained his position, hanging in the air, and crossed his arms in an outward display of confidence. Inside, however, he was in turmoil, and he had no doubt that the queen and the duplicate could feel it.

I am Nealaphh he said sternly. A mental chuckle resounded throughout the psychic medium, emanating from the mind of the green-eyed facsimile.

I beg to differ it crooned. Nealaphh is the name of the Premier Enigma, in service of the Master. The primordial caretaker of the universe. But you, trapped in your own head, stewing in self-doubt and existentialism...you are the human existence I endeavored to escape. I hesitate to even address you by name, Tearen Wover, for it is similar to the rooster giving a name to his eggshell.

Tearen’s mind flared at the implication, raging and screaming internally that it wasn’t true. He could not have regressed fully to his human state, not when he still had the fundamental forces of reality at his command. Yet, the fact remained that he had been rejecting his status as an Enigma right before entering this hallowed chamber. The clone, a fake or not, was correct; if he did not claim to be an Enigma, he should not be named as one. His identity crisis was punctuated further by Nealaphh’s chiding words.

But, I have The Mother to thank for finally ridding me of you. I no longer feel the polyp of your ego scratching at the back of my skull. A shame she could not keep me in my Prime body, but this can be easily rectified.

As Nealaphh said this, Tearen observed as the countless diode-eyes of the weirdlings once again began to descend from the lofty rafters of the reservoir. Nealaphh himself floated upwards from the Heart Queen’s platform, slowly approaching Tearen. Thinking fast, Tearen warped his body into the shape of a crow and surged up into the blackness, just as the first few strains of the Queen’s song beckoned a volley of gunfire. The avian form quickly and gracefully navigated the web of black support struts looming in the darkness, trying to find a place to hide.

Running away Tearen? After trying to take control for so long?

The fabric of space a few feet in front of Tearen bubbled inwards, and he was forced to mentally pull himself away from his flight path, just as the warp burst exploded. Heavy metal beams plummeted past him as he dove for the lake below. As his feathered body breached the surface of the goo, he shifted back into his humanoid body.

Despite your stunted mental capacity, surely you can calculate that you have no hope of winning.

It was true. Against this many opponents, Tearen most likely did not stand a chance. He did, however, have a hypothesis. Right on cue, the leviathan which had nearly blown him to smithereens once again rose from the depths of the main tank. Tearen balanced precariously on the black flesh, deflecting incoming gunfire with adroit ripples in spacetime. As the missile hatches on the black giant’s back opened again, he abruptly surged forward through the air, heading straight for the Heart Queen. As he did so, Tearen mimicked Nealaphh’s maneuver and blasted a heap of metal fragments from the ceiling, directly above the bloated mass of the weirdling queen. As expected, Tearen felt himself firmly caught mid air by the force of the Heart Queen’s own telekinesis. Nealaphh, in an effort to defend his newfound Mother, caught the falling, razor sharp beams of metal. The Enigma turned to face Tearen as he hung, helpless, in the air.

All or nothing attack. Typical human bravado, but I should thank you for saving me unnecessary effort. Nealaphh said, raising a brightly gleaming finger at Tearen’s body.

If you say so. Tearen replied. It was at that moment that the missile-laden giant fired his salvo at Tearen. But, unlike last time, Tearen knew what was coming, and quickly forced his body to become out of phase with the material world. The twelve or so explosive warheads cruised through his torso harmlessly, and did not have time to maneuver away from the overgrown, sentient heart on the other side. Tearen was quite sure he heard Nealaphh shriek in protest as the missiles struck home, sending wobbling chunks of white flesh flying in every direction. Nealaphh was knocked out of his concentration on the metal beams, and so the tangled mess of scrap proceeded to impale anything left of the psychic monarch. The entire reservoir went dark as the Heart Queen’s light was extinguished, the flickering eyes of the weirdlings making it appear as though a starry sky hung overhead.

There was a pause, and then untold cacophony as every single weirdling in the immense chamber began turning on one another. Amid the flashes of gunfire and explosions, Tearen saw Nealaphh stand up among the smoking remains of his Mother.

You humans are monsters… Nealaphh whispered, his psychic voice carrying the hiss of deep anger. You claim to have morals and yet...it is so easy for you to kill something so...pure.

Now it was Tearen’s turn to laugh, even as body parts and sparks flew around him, the white fluid frothing and spewing from the frenzied movement of a thousand misshapen mistakes.

You’re a joke, Nealaphh. First of all, just because something is a victim of evil, that doesn’t automatically mean that it must be something good.

As Tearen said this, he saw Nealaphh summon a flock of Aspects from the aether. The twirling polygons each shimmered with an internal light, ready to blast anything threatening their creator. Tearen summoned his own, in kind, and began to slowly float towards his doppleganger.

That...Mother of yours. She saw something in me, something she liked. She saw you. So she made you her baby, and so you revere her, while at the same time, espousing yourself to be in total control.

The first few blasts of raw energy ricocheted between them, each iteration of the same person bending the fabric of space on a whim to turn the flashes of light away, into the twinkling darkness. Tearen suddenly became aware of a large shape surging through the fluid towards him. He turned to face the threat, coming face to face with the humanoid leviathan that had tried twice now to kill him. The missile hatches on its back were open, but nothing launched. Instead, its entire head, which was a long, striated cone, split open vertically to reveal pulpy red flesh inset with a fusillade of gruesome fangs. The leviathan surged towards him, almost like a crocodile, to try and snap Tearen up in its jaws. The shadow flipped himself up into the air just in time to avoid the fanged fate, but in the moment of distraction, Nealaphh had teleported high above the seething carnage. Tearen felt the gravity beginning to surge beneath him as he hung in the air, and so he quickly created a warp surge directly on top of the Enigma. The telekinetic riposte failed to affect Nealaphh, who quickly dropped away from the blast zone, but it had also served the purpose of preventing Nealaphh from pulling shut the gravitic trap.

The thing is, Nealaphh, you’re still a part of me. I can’t erase who I was or what I did. But I can learn to accept and move on from it. That is something that a wind-up toy like you cannot do.

Nealaphh responded by sending an entire wave of piercing energy beams careening through the darkness. Tearen quickly grabbed a nearby weirdling with the force of his telekinesis and used the writhing thing as a living shield. The beams failed to bore all the way through its doomed flesh, and as such, the carcass became a convenient projectile to throw at his airborne nemesis. Nealaphh slapped the expired wretch away with his own mental blast before speaking again.

You betray The Master. You betray yourself. How can you put such safety at risk? All you accomplish with your emotions is vulnerability.

Tearen, in the meantime, had been closing rapidly on Nealaphh, and drove a hard fist directly into the green-eyed duplicate's face. Nealaphh did nothing to defend itself; its stilted inferences about how the world operated were it's downfall. It could not have predicted that Tearen would willingly attack with physical violence. Nealaphh reeled backwards in the air, but as Tearen rushed forwards for another, he felt Nealaphh hijack his temporal aspect and accelerate Tearen far past itself. Nonetheless, Tearen followed up on the attempted blow with a telepathic jab.

Allowing myself to feel emotions can make me vulnerable, yes. But it also connects me with the world. It keeps me grounded, instead of living in my head all the time, like you.

Tearen’s train of thought was brought to a crashing halt as a hail of gunfire ripped open the obsidian flesh on his back. The reservoir was still very much a war zone, and in those few moments, he had lost track of Nealaphh. After searching for a moment, Tearen spotted the Enigma in the middle of the fray, a dour light spilling forth from his three eyes. Tearen could feel the power welling up inside the duplicate's body, and he knew what was coming.

Just to save himself, Tearen began charging his own mental might, letting the will of the physical universe flow into his dark body. The cosmos sang it's own music, and just as Nealaphh finally collapsed into a black hole, so did Tearen. The twin singularities quickly began pulling weirdlings in by the dozens, their ultraviolet accretion jets vaporizing anything that wasn’t devoured. As the howling tears in spacetime grew, they drifted towards each-other, ripping apart countless demonic experiments as they vied for gravitational supremacy.

As their event horizons touched, a gravitational wave exploded outwards from the quantum conjunction, adding a final layer of decimation to the vast underground structure. Falling metal and scrap was also devoured by the new gestalt singularity, so that when the power of the black holes finally began to wane, there was a large crater of empty, damp rubble around the lone figure that emerged.

He fell to the ground, spent, and rolled over on to his back. Two green eyes stared up at the orange sky, now visible far, far up through the ravaged superstructure. There were few applicable thoughts he could apply to the situation, and simply lay there, dazed, for some time. If anything, one mantra repeated itself over and over, in a small voice in the back of his mind.

You are Tearen.

And you are doomed.