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The story is a very long one, so to not make you have to scroll down to reach the comments section, I put the different sections in different spoilers. Each chapter is roughly 15 pages long on a google doc, so it'll be a lot to read. It would be nice to receive some criticism (hopefully constructive) but reading it is enough. Actually reading it is a very good thing; no one I know has ever read the entire thing besides me, the creator. So enjoy I guess!
Also, it'd be nice if you could point out any mistakes I make.
If you haven't read chapter one, you can find it here.
Chapter 3 can be found here!
Space is an interesting place. Not just because I accidentally make it rhyme every time I try to say the way I feel about space. If you look at the mass expanse of space you quickly realize how small and insignificant your own galaxy is. It seems to some that because of its massive expanse there is a high possibility of extraterrestrial life-forms. There are many extraterrestrial life-forms, however this is not because of the size of the universe but the abundance of nutrients and proper positioning.
The aliens we will focus on are not the ones you silly humans imagine. There are no green men, in actuality no men at all. There are no humanoid objects or creatures roaming the surface, the human body is an obsolete and rather inefficient body to copy. These creatures have adapted to the rough terrain of their environment, many resembling creatures pre-existing on earth. That is because some creatures here are very efficient bodies to have, this doesn’t include ourselves if you are wondering.
We’ll focus on the aliens of Excronite, Pilikijuia, Zorbing and its moon. Other aliens will be rather irrelevant to the story of the fall of the humans. Before we continue with the story, I’d like to ask you exactly what is mother nature? We see a force behind all living things here on earth, but this force seems to lack on any type of reading. We can’t detect mother nature, but many of us seem to think it exists somehow somewhere. Let’s pretend for a second that without a shadow of a doubt we know mother nature exists.
Would it then be possible that it existed on other planets? We tend to think of mother nature as an earth thing, probably due to the fact that we haven’t found extraterrestrial life yet in your time. However, is mother nature just the force that affects all life? Then it would still apply to extraterrestrial life. Humans seem to think mother nature isn’t acting upon them. But humans aren’t any more special than a cheetah is from a cat. Why do humans separate themselves if they are still affected unknowingly by mother nature herself? Humans are confusing creatures in all honesty, and many of them at your time are incredibly wrong to say the least.
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Claude and the crew went around the town, collecting dead bodies and piling them onto the cart. The mayor had been left alone in the main building, sending out the soldiers to find dead bodies to use the machine on. “So why was it a good idea to leave the mayor behind exactly?” Claude asked the soldiers around him. “There is no good reason we can answer to you,” Chester answered,”especially since none of us are paranoid Claude.”. “It’s a bad thing to be too reassured. One of those things could easily crawl out of those darkened tunnels and attack him inside the building without any of us noting.” Claude stated.
They found another body and hauled it into the already large pile of dead human beings. “Look, those things are Tafectorums. They are incredibly volatile to thermal and electrical malfunction. They’re like a pile of walking flammable corn flakes. A few volts would be enough to fry their cornflake existence into nothing but a buttery goop.” Leonard explained. “What are cornflakes and buttery?” Claude asked, causing the rest of the soldiers to also look at Leonard. “Not everyone’s dad was some rich guy who got daddy’s money Leonard. You have to remember that.” One of the soldiers reminded Leonard. After filling up the cart they lugged the entire primitive transportation vehicle down a few streets past the dog poop and into the domed building. Claude was still a bit concerned about the entire leaving the mayor behind business.
However, when they got there the mayor was still asleep, drooling onto the floor and becoming close to the REM stage. Claude pulled the first body into the machine, flipping the “human” switch on the side just to make sure he didn’t create another type of human. “Remember Claude, this guy might not remember whom he is if his brain is already rotted or suffered too much damage. If that happens-” Leonard began but was cut off by Claude.”I know I know. I tell him who he is and some of his relations and some events he had experienced.”. The machine activated, producing a bright glow and jolting the man into living existence. The man gasped, and began to stutter,”I w-was-s d-dead! H-he st-tabbed me! W-Why???”. He then sobbed for a while, all the while clutching Claude in such a way that deprived him of any oxygen whatsoever.
“Hank, we got you back alive. That wasn’t your son, it was the mimickers.” One of the soldiers said, reaching out his hand and pulling Hank up to his feet. The process continued with the rest of the bodies, each one having to be calmed by one of the soldiers. There are a few cases that are worth noting in which the revival did something erratic to their behavior. The first one occurred when Claude had revived 50 other people, whom had lugged carts and began to bring in people for Claude to revive. Two soldiers had been posted to protect Claude in case if one of the revived men became a zombie.
Claude put Frederick Douglas into the machine, whose corpse was beginning to rot away. After the entire revival process, Frederick woke up with half his frontal lobe reorientated. “Who am I? Where am I?” He first demanded, scrambling back up into the machine in a bad attempt to escape these strange beings around him. As Claude and the others tried to reassure him, he accidently unflipped the ‘human’ switch and reinitiated the machine upon himself accidently. He screamed as the machine redesigned his arms into wings, resembling those of a bat. The machine began to recreate the Frederick into a sort of flying mammal, but he lunged out of the machine, leaving parts of his face and arms distorted and burned.
He shrieked with his new vocal cords and attempted to fly out of the building, squawking in one of the most blood-curdling ways. Claude had backed up as he did so, fearing the hideous creature would harm him. The bird-thing was shot down by the soldiers within seconds of its flight, and it plummeted onto the ground, gasping for breath. Claude walked over to the thing and looked angrily at the two soldiers,”You killed a person!”. One of the soldiers gruffly replied,”He wasn’t a person anymore.”. “He was a person, we could’ve figured out how to change him back. He still had his same mind, he still had his same body. He was a person.”.
“Was he really? All I see is some disfigured monster.” The soldier responded, a bit agitated in the way Claude defended the hideous creature. “Monster? Just because he’s ugly he is a monster? ” Claude furiously told him, turning his back towards the dead creature. “Did it even matter? We still have this machine to turn him back alive, maybe even fix him. So what if he dies?” The soldier told him, still a bit angry at how Claude defended this ‘monster’. “It still isn’t morally right, and you know that.” Claude insisted. “Our moralities change depending on how our life is. It’s how the whole thing works. If we can revive people killing is no worry. It’s ok to kill him and revive him later.” The other soldier interposed.
Even though it didn’t feel right in Claude’s mind he continued working since he knew the future of the human species depended on Claude. However it kept in his mind all that day, he couldn’t help but ponder about the situation. Where would you draw the line, between human and non-human? If it had the same memories as you, the same thoughts but a different genetic makeup would it be considered human? What if Claude was put in the machine, would it still be him, the human? Would it be right to kill someone and then revive them later? He asked no one for answers, but he continued reviving people.
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The three beings were able to free themselves from the remnants of the collapse. Menace was weakened from all the bruises he bore from the collapsed cement ceiling. Seaborg was faring slightly better since his serpentine body was equipped with an iron framework on his left side. Both of these creatures weren’t too eager to try and tackle the dog and thus moved to another place where they could recuperate. The Black Hound as he was nicknamed by others pushed through all the cement and iron mesh to try and find the machine Claude had taken with him.
He finally managed to heave himself onto the sturdier ground beside the mess of cement and collapsed tunnels. He walked towards the vehicle he had seen Menace begin to pry at beforehand, only to find that there was no one inside. He checked the status report, seeing that Claude had gone to Aegbis, and attempted to go there as well, but the computer informed him that it required 50% of the system’s energy, but it only had 26.79%. The Black Hound obliterated the vehicle in his anger, for his ship also had very low energy levels.
As he neared the stairs where he first made his entry into this world there was a small disturbance to his right, so slight any human eye would have missed it. Anyone in his planet would have known what it was, for they were well acquainted with the law’s implication upon their case. He hurried along, telling everyone in charge of navigating the ship to head to the station. As the stairs unfolded, there was another disturbance, and within seconds an entire vessel had materialized.
The black hound hurriedly activated the ship he possessed, hoping to escape the trackers. The police of his planet had unleashed a massive amount of trackers in the recent years. The smaller vessels were designed to travel in the 5th dimension sleekly, able to pass any 3-dimensional object and able to follow any space vessel. The good thing was that going into the 5th dimension and back again was an experience no living thing could make it out of. That meant the police vessels had to still travel using the worm-hole creators, particularly heavy devices that not only cost a lot, but consumed a high amount of energy to create such a ripple.
The black hound summoned the ripple, damaging the nearby trackers for a few moments. That was enough time for the wormhole to be generated, sucking up the entire vessel into the depth of space and time. The sky returned to its black smoky self, and the trackers continued searching around the universe to make sure no fugitive would harm the main planet they came from. Every now and then they’d encounter a new creature and log it into their database, but they would never find the black hound ever again. That’s not because of how stealthy he was, but of an event that would injure the home planet.
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Cody walked the streets of Enroe exactly 12 minutes after the Officials had first interviewed him. To you it might seem like an incredibly fast time, but the beings of his planet were so medically advanced, 12 minutes was a long time to get out of a hospital. Cody walked around the streets, waiting for his friend to teleport him into his apartment. He kept waiting, wondering if Spot was still out there. He finally decided he needed to put some food into his stomach, and thus walked to the nearest Big Burger move thru. When Cody got there, he noticed a sign saying the move thru was out of function.
Cody walked into the store and up to the counter and asked the dog there why the move thru wasn’t open. “Haven’t you heard?” The maltese asked Cody, moving around several objects from one screen to another. He slid one displaying a dollar sign off the holographic screen and onto his main computer. ”Heard about what?” Cody asked, still a bit confused as to why his favorite part of this restaurant was closed. “The 5th dimension has completely leveled out. It is no longer operable. We can’t access it anymore.” The maltese dog said, hopping to the ground and walking out into the main part of the restaurant.
“That means our t-” Cody began, but was cut off by the maltese. “Yes, the teleportation, meetings, move thrus, anything that transports live beings fast is no longer working.” The maltese said, walking out of the store and into the streets. Cody also walked out of the store and headed for his home. He knew that the squashing of the 5th dimension wasn’t natural. What he didn’t know is that the black hound didn’t want to harm them, but wanted to save the planet he was attached to.
When he came alive, it was as if he was born with all the knowledge to maintain his adult body but with no knowledge of his past or experience. His wife was waiting on him just a few feet away, but he knew not whom she was, or who the strange men were. He asked the first person whom he had seen what he was doing here, who he was and most importantly who were they. Claude explained to him that he was born 20-ish years ago, the year was 3022, and he had lost most of his brain. “You could say you lost your mind.” Claude joked, causing a few soldiers to sigh. “Was this my home?” He asked. “It was your home, down the street. A creature of some sort damaged your brain. It was fixed with this machine, but you may not remember things right now, but eventually you will.” Claude told him, pulling him up to his feet.
The last of the interesting cases was the last revival; the revival of Will. When he opened his eyes, he immediately jolted straight up, walked to a corner and slunk down onto his knees. He was saying something inaudibly, shaking as he did. Claude was immediately interested in the person, in all the 1,361 revivals in the past week he had never seen such a case. As Claude approached Will the words he said became more audible. The soldiers surrounded Will, aiming their guns from 10 feet away in case if Will decided to be malevolent.
Will looked up at Claude, muttering,”It’s ok. I’m not a sheep anymore. I’m not one anymore.”. Claude asked Will,”What do you remember?”, hoping to be able to know what the heck was going on with Will and his shaking. “There was a ship. I drove it into the sun.” Will finally let out, still trembling a little,“I was a sheep, I finished the task. I finished it. I rescued them. I rescued them.”. “What ship? Who did you save?” Claude asked Will, now believing Will was receiving false memories from the machine. “The ship they drove in. It was a big one. It went really fast. I saved them all. I saved the people stuck in the dream.” Will told him.
“He’ll probably remember one of these days, just give him time.” One of the soldiers told Claude. Claude was still a bit concerned, but let the soldiers escort Will to where he’d be sleeping for the day. Claude began to pick up his things, putting them into the container which he had found. It was a small cube, roughly the size of a Rubik’s cube, however it could somehow store things that were 100 times bigger than it was. Claude didn’t know how it worked, but according to the soldiers it was very old, too old to be able to comprehend.
Claude put everything into the small cube, and began to head towards his designated apartment. There were still a few questions running through his head, but he decided he would try and go to sleep anyway. The buildings around him were being rebuilt by some of those who had been revived. They were tall elegant towers, designed to not only be strong but also flexible. They resembled more of a licorice sticks, bending in and out of each other in a mass web of buildings. However, the beings inside the structures seemed to have their own gravity, one that made the base of the tower seem to be directly below them.
Claude found his apartment building and got inside, wiping his feet on the cleansing mat. He climbed the stairs that wound all the way inside the building. He only had to go up a few steps before he looked down and saw he had gone up to the very top of the tower. He opened a door that seemed to be located on an outer wall, but instead of leading outside as Claude had thought it would, it lead to his bedroom. Claude got inside his giant apartment, which resembled his sewer-home but yet bigger and better.
Claude laid down upon his bed, still thinking about those thoughts swimming in his head. He thought about Will, thinking upon how the machine might have altered his mind if they scanned him previously to find his brain 100% undamaged. Claude didn’t get it; they revived everyone, but no one but Will had gotten memories like his. Claude was also a bit disturbed by how the machine would alter a human being, and he thought about the soldier who wouldn’t let Claude turn poor Frederick back alive. As he was slowly drifting into a state of dormancy, there was a knock at his door. Claude got up sleepily and opened the door to find that a soldier was standing in front of him. “Claude, there is someone who wishes to speak to you. He still doesn’t remember anything.” The soldier told him. Neither of them knew that that person would cause the death of many people, but he was waiting for them anyway.
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I am an archivist for the planet in sector 65, from the home ‘planet’ in sector 1. My job here is to find the planet’s history after the year which you call 2000. I know not why they number it like that if humans existed for many more years. After that year, it was harder to approach you, more and more developments on your behalf made it harder for us to get close without being seen. In the end, by 2098 we couldn’t see what was going on in your planet. We instead used other devices from far away, but they weren’t very clear to understand, a garbled mess of mismatched numbers and codes.
Then your planet was wrapped in a blanket of thick gray material, and all communication was lost. It is now the year 4868 by your calender year, and I am exploring all that is left of your civilization. I have my rope, I record any events that happened between 2098 and 4868 that I can find. You may see what I see, and you may think there is no way I can figure out your history, but alas, there is many things I can find among the rubble. I walked down the pile of rocks that once used to be a mountain of sorts.
I checked my rope, seeing what I had logged so far; which wasn’t much, I’d only been here for a couple of days. I moved my hand over the piece of rope, seeing an event I had logged the first time I had gotten here. The event took place at about 2512 on your calendar year, somewhere on the planet that which you refer to as the coast. From the rocks I have found there and what lay in the ocean floor I was able to piece together this event.
A giant ‘hurricane’ had formed in the ocean, its winds hurling at higher speeds than any before. There were gases in the air that kept coming down with the storm, ones that your species couldn’t intake very well. It began to move over the land area, pulling up structures your species had designed, but only a save few which had been designed for the purpose of this storm were left behind. It traveled right through the country and onto the icier parts of the area, and faded into nothing but clouds. The thing left behind many ruins, broken walls and dead people.
I moved my hand along the rope and found the other major event that I had recorded; the event of 2845 as I called it. I still haven’t pieced together everything for the event, there are still some questions needing to be answered. However, in order to figure out how the entire event happened I have to travel on foot to the mountain in the larger chunk of land to my west and east. You may have figured it out by now, but that mountain is the largest mountain in the world, not Mt.Everest which had sunk back into the earth a while ago but a 31,206 ft tall monstrosity. It was going to be a while until that one was figured out.
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Mac and his other two friends, Chuck and Zacharias, were in the cafeteria of the facility, eating their lunches and engaging in conversation. Everyone called these guys Zach and Mac and Cheese, a group of the most intelligent people at the facility. Mac was a scientist who focused on designing chemicals to alter the body in ways that would help someone. He had recently created a neuro-stimulating chemical whose sole purpose was to trick your brain into thinking there was macaroni and cheese inside of your mouth.
He had done that just for the pleasure of it, since they were Zach and Mac and Cheese. Zacharias was an engineer, whose father and mother had died in the occurrences of 512. That is what they were called, but Zacharias didn’t feel comfortable referring it as that since it was still 2512, and they weren’t even near the end of the year. He designed the very first space-warping device, one that actually worked very well. Many other engineers had combined their intelligences to try and figure out how to make the thing, but every time the device would become too heavy to hold and so dense they had to be destroyed.
After their lunch they resumed their work on one of the greatest projects in the entire facility. They were still working on the project, but if it was finished they would be able to save the human race. Zach was still working on the machine, having only built the base platform which could do nothing but scan and launch the program still under development by Chuck. Mac was still trying to figure out how he could alter an inanimate object so that it would be able to be considered alive.
They worked on that machine for many days and nights on end. Weeks passed, months passed and finally in October of that year they accomplished what was previously only a dream. It would have been Mary Shelley’s nightmare if she was around, for they had created a machine that could bring back the dead. The program was able to scan and find what alterations would be best for whatever was inside the machine and using the chemicals that which Mac had discovered and created rebuilt the thing into a living creation. It had a special mode for humans, that which could be used to reanimate one. That was the day before the 6th occurrence of the year.
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Claude was drawing with his crayon on the roof of the his house, admiring the upside-down view that which it gave him. Granholi was the most secure fortress, but it isn’t the most advanced in its technology. Claude had heard stories about people who had tried to destroy the fortress, but he never really understood what banishment meant at the age of 6. All he knew was that daddy was going to be home in a few minutes after his day at work.
Claude really wanted to show his dad what he had drawn that day. His father was an electrician, and was currently fixing the faulty circuits that were causing glitches in the system’s software. His mother was walking below Claude, talking to someone telepathically. Claude accidently dropped one of his crayons on the floor above him, or rather below him. He jumped down, switching his gravity and picked up his crayon off of the floor.
He began to think about the color blue, but for some reason his crayon didn’t turn blue. Claude decided that that color must be broken, so he tried yellow. Every color possibly imaginable to humankind was thought in this 6 year old’s mind but the crayon wouldn’t change color. Claude decided to ask his father when he got home, but that would be a while until he had the chance. In the meantime he decided he would visit his friend’s house, which was just a few rooms next to him. Claude stepped out of the window and onto the outside of the building wall, walking along with the other commuters up the side of the building.
He found his friend’s window and stepped into it, coming out upright onto the floor. Claude was going to greet his friend, but at that moment there was a siren, and immediately part of the building collapsed. The tower that which Claude stood on began to lean, inclining the floor so that Claude had to grab onto some furniture to not fall out of the building so fast. He knew that if you ran out the window you could get out of the building’s gravitational range, causing you to plummet to your death below. His friend was knocked onto his feet and slid past Claude, who reached out his hand to grab his friend’s arm.
His friend grabbed Claude’s arm, but he was too fast for their own good. Claude was able to grab him but the force of his sliding had caused the table which Claude was grabbing onto to become misaligned with the magnetic force that held it in place. Claude his friend, table and the coffee mugs on top of the table all slid out of the collapsing building, screaming, shaking spilling and all. The magnetic system seemed to know what it had done and reactivated, swinging the table and children back into the building a few floors below where it was supposed to be. The commuters on the side of the wall were running down, trying to either get to the ground before the entire building collapsed or to their apartment to get their family out of the building.
The building was not regenerating as it usually did, this time it was slower, too slow for the city’s own sake. Claude began to get up, pulling his friend up as the table beside them was sucked up through the roof into its position. Claude recognized the apartment as his own and tried to locate his mother, and hopefully find his father. He went down a set of stairs at the side of the room, leading to a hallway that had doors that lead to other apartments. At the end of the hall he saw his parents running towards him, signalling that he should turn around and run as they did.
Then he saw just outside of the window at the end of the hall a giant figure thrust its claws into the building. It clambered up the side of the building, scaring the people already terrified by the falling building. It leaped into the floor above where Claude stood, smelling where his parents were running to. He scampered through the walls, knocking over all the furniture and books that lay in his path. He stopped just ahead of the two adult humans and beat on the floor. The floor collapsed underneath him, in between where Claude and his parents were.
Claude backed up a bit, but then quickly scrambled forwards and peaked through the pile of rubble that was a floor. Through the holes and gaps within the pile he was able to see the wretched beast consume the people that which Claude was begotten from. The software then kicked in, fixing the floor and leaving Claude exposed to the giant lizard. Menace finished eating the new victims he had acquired and turned his attention towards a new prey, a young piece of meat on legs. Fortunately the building tilted even more, so much that Menace slowly began to slip out the window despite how fast he moved his legs.
Claude held onto the stair rails, his feet beginning to lift into the air and the ground below him beginning to get closer and closer. The top of the building rammed into the side of another building near it, causing both Menace and Claude to lose their grips. Claude was desperately grabbing at the floor, trying to grip any surface that wasn’t parallel with his body, but with no avail. Menace fell out of the building and turned 180 degrees, preparing to burrow into the building beside him.
As Claude neared the window, only a few feet away, the system came back on. Menace’s body was now affected by gravity that made him feel as if the ground was a wall. He climbed up the building that which the original one he was in had rammed into. The original building began to lean upright, fixing every broken bit of itself on the outside and inside. The part of building that Claude was in was at a 45 degree angle when he went through the window’s glass.
Claude screamed, thinking he was going to plummet into his grave, but the building’s gravity was turned on. He only managed to go away from the building 4 feet before it sucked him back into the building in an upright position. As the building straightened itself and regenerated, several armed men entered the building in an attempt to annihilate the creatures that had caused it. Claude sat there, shuddering from the entire experience and crying for he did not know what to do.
It was just him, sobbing in that mostly empty building, and it was him that was found by the soldiers. They did all they could to comfort him, but it was too much for a 6 year old child to feel and understand. They told him it would be ok, they told him all sorts of helpful lies, but none would cease the river flowing from inside. Maybe it was sheer chance, maybe someone had planned it, for this child’s now scarred mind would now be capable of surviving the next years. It was thanks to this event and many others that which Claude was able to live for the next 21 years. However in the year of 2987 that child stood at the gates of the city, banished for the rest of his living years.
[spoiler='Monsters' From Below (Next 2 Sections)]
Claude approached the man, he was at the edge of the dome’s field holding a few powerful grenades in his hands. The soldiers stationed themselves around the man, but they knew that if they shot he might drop the grenades and blow up despite what they did. Claude began to say something but was interrupted by the man,”What did you do to me?”. “I turned you back alive, but you suffered too much brain loss.” Claude told him, hoping to avoid the man drop his grenades. “Who am I?” He asked Claude, shaking the grenades as if to threaten Claude.
“Calm down, just lay down your grenades.” Claude said, trying to make him lay down his weapons. “So you can trick me? I want to know the truth!” He said, raising his voice. “It is that, you are Jeremy the botanist. Do you not remember? You were here, you loved this city, now lay down the grenades.” Claude said, becoming slightly agitated by this man’s stubbornness. “You are lying! You are lying!” The man began to scream, being very confused and stubborn. With that he dropped both grenades.
The grenades were only the size of a gumball, covered in a pattern that resembled circuitry on a circuit board. As soon as they dropped their black and yellow appearance quickly turned to one of blue, and despite the shots fired, expanded into a whirling mass of blue flames. Claude leaped to safety, with the soldiers attempting to do the same. There were only 12 unfortunate who were burned in the explosion, of which all perished. The field was eradicated in that area, allowing for the gases of the outside to contaminate the inside of the city.
Claude peeped out from the side of the licorice-like building he was hiding behind and saw the worst possible thing that could’ve happened at the moment. There, squirming just outside the city walls was a fat tornado worm. Claude recognized the creature by the spikes protruding its skin and the elongated body of a brown worm thing. The creature was a minor, only about 100 feet long, its spikes weren’t fully developed but it was still nonetheless lethal. It had a long brown body, that felt more like a caterpillar's skin than a worm’s skin. Tornado worms were more common in the center of the western land, but they tunneled around everywhere so finding one wasn’t much of a surprise. They usually had long unspiked lower bodies, which they used to root themselves into the ground.
They usually rooted themselves into the ground and stood straight up, beginning to spin a little. They would then extend their spikes and spin as fast as they could, creating a massive tornado, which was not only effective but a highly rewarding technique of attack. Such a tornado would cause the gases which the worm was immune to to come down and kill the victims below. Anything sucked into the tornado would then travel somehow up its body and into the mouth of the creature. Claude never really payed attention to those classes, he enjoyed the technology classes more than he did the survival 101s.
There it was, the thing from his nightmares, beginning to stand straight up into the sky. Claude urged the men to get away from the hole and contact everyone to let them know they needed to wear a gas mask or stay inside the buildings. Claude was only able to get a few steps away from the site when the tornado worm began to suck him into its tornado. Claude knew that the spikes would grind him into a mush, and that was one thing he didn’t want to happen. Claude tried to grab onto a building, but missed the only chance he had at grabbing at it.
The soldiers turned around and began to either grab Claude or shoot at the tornado worm. Claude could see the gases already beginning to go down, most of them although invisible carried a sort of vapor with them that Claude was able to see. “We need to get inside somewhere!” Claude told them,”Or fix the field at this side!”. One of the soldiers told Claude he would try to re-run the field, but it wasn’t guaranteed to regenerate. He ran off, going into the center of the city. The soldiers were able to pull Claude and themselves past more licorice towers, enough for Claude to begin to walk on the ground by himself.
As long as the creature was spinning the gases would stay near it, but once it decided to stop the gases would begin to spread around, slowly rising but nonetheless lethal. Claude told the soldiers to go and make sure everyone was inside or wearing a gas mask. As they left, Claude took out his pen-gun and went back into the tunnels he had first came out from. He finally found himself in the office, and there was the soldier going around and typing things into the 3D hologram computers. Behind Claude was the only door out, in front were three rows of computers facing perpendicularly from Claude. Each row had about 7 ish computers, each having holograms of different colors. Claude asked the soldier how it was going with the regeneration.
“Nothing good. All the systems are a bit corrupted, the virus got into them.” He told Claude. “What virus?” Claude asked, not being very well aware what was sneaking up behind him. “He is talking about me Claude.” The tafectorum said, grabbing Claude’s right arm. The soldier fired from his pen-gun-thing, but it only killed one cell of this tafectorum’s hide. The creature moved to the left side of Claude, turning into a bunch of cells and reforming next to the soldier in a human form. The tafectorum knocked the pen-gun-thing out of his hands and told him,”You know who I am?”.
Claude took this time to finish regenerating the field around the city, moving a few floating hologram objects into different places and causing the field to begin to regenerate. The tafectorum moved its ‘eyes’ to the side of its head, staring straight at Claude. It lunged at him just as he had expected, but Claude stepped to the side. The tafectorum fell on top of a computer, its program was being opened by the hologram itself. The tafectorum knew what was going to happen, but it was detained by both the people in the room. It began to try and turn into the flakes it was, but the flakes were being magnetized to the computer’s weak magnetic field.
It reformed, missing a leg and half of its head, a very strange sight to see. Claude flinged around a few holographic items floating in the blue glow, attempting to erase all of the creature’s files. It writhed around, but as soon as its main program was erased it quit moving at all, and after a few more erases the cloak around it vanished, revealing the flakes it was really made of. Claude erased the last file, and the entire cluster of flakes collapsed, no longer forming a sort of creature but a pile of flakes.
“That was a close one.” Claude said, sighing a bit. The soldier was still a bit out of breath, but the majority of his consciousness was still intact. They left the room, heading for the outside area of the giant domed city in hopes of doing all that was to be done, and to escape the tunnels one infested by tafectorums. As soon as they left one flake still on top of the computer shivered and turned golden. A file appeared, a cube floating in the holographic screen that was turning and moving, bouncing along the sides of the 3 dimensional computer workspace. It was then that it sent a signal, a signal to a wide range of things, and it was that that would bring to life multiple species in the future.
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It was the year 1912, it was a safe place for the black hound to stop at. The dogs of Excronite weren’t in favor of going back in time, thinking they would accidently cause some sort of catastrophe just by touching a leaf. To the black hound it was hilarious that they were all convinced that would happen, they didn’t understand time travel like he did. When you go back in time and you do something it doesn’t change a single thing, all it does is makes sure that what will happen happens. Every time exists at the same moment you are in, the thing is that some creatures can only live in one time. However the you from 5 years back exists right now, so does the future you. So doing anything back in time has already happened, but in your time you haven’t done it yet.
The black hound understood this principle very well, so he had set off to make sure the things that happened would happen. Turns out thanks to the black hound’s mistakes many things have happened in the past. However that isn’t the focus, right now he is in his submarine, which is disguised as an iceberg. The black hound steered the ship, which was moving very slowly in order to look like an actual iceberg. It was deep into the night, around 2 o’clock A.M. and already his crew was beginning to waken.
They had prepared for this in relative time for about 2 years, but using a clock to measure the time they took would give you roughly 2 minutes or so. The building of the entire submarine was very time-consuming, especially the special panels that gave the submarine the ability to disguise itself. Creating the thing was just the hard part, everything else was already bound to happen, so they had to get into position and whatever would happen would happen.
The black hound had set the course to get in front of the giant ship, and it’s mission was to prove that it was sinkable. Fortunately it was dark, so any chances of them being seen were at a minimal. The crew never really minded getting up early or spending years on one project, they were dedicated to this job, and it was a high-paying one indeed. A lost great sphinx nose was auctioned for very high price in the market, so did lost trains, gold rooms and art.
A few minutes later the captain of the ship announced they should brace for impact, the iceberg was about to take the lives of many. There was an eerie silence for a few seconds, everyone holding their breaths for the impact that would make history. They deployed the submarines, which circled underneath the ship like sharks. Everyone stood still, the black hound waiting and holding his paws in the air, signalling for no one to move any of the controls on the ship. Everyone was wondering when the ship would hit the iceberg, and at around 2:20 A.M. it hit them.
The shock jolted the submarine, sending a few unbraced dogs flying back and landing on their fellow employees. “Go, Go Go!!!” The black hound yelled, and everyone began to maneuver the submarine to the sides, splitting it into a few distinct pieces. The submarines were ready to collect the items that fell below, they were incredibly valuable since they would be the last items onboard the Titanic. As the main ship began to come to a stop it deployed dogs with transparent swimming suits to run in through the titanic and eject all that was not shaken off or taken off by the humans.
The black hound was already halting his piece, making sure the three pieces only moved a few inches to the side, just enough to seem realistic to the men aboard the titanic. As he did that, he saw the creature that he was hoping wouldn’t be there swim to the side of the Titanic. These creatures didn’t usually come out from their deep-water homes, but it was at this time of day, this time of year that they came out. Spring was their breeding season, and every now and then they’d come out to inhabit the pieces of habitat that man still had not yet captured.
Eventually the ningen died out, somewhere in the 2500’s after the occurrences of the year. By that time there were only a few tribes left of them, due to the humans hunting them down to claim more territory below the ocean. However, in 1912 there were plenty of other creatures that man had yet to find deep below the ocean. The black hound had been to the deepest part of the ocean, he’d walked on the seafloor, and the creatures there were some of the strangest things he had ever seen, most of which had tried to chomp a few limbs off of him.
As terrifying as the ningen were, they were not the most advanced of all species, so they couldn’t do very much harm to them. The ningen were a species of whale-human hybrids that were able to survive in the cold areas of the world. They did get stuck in the mediterranean sea for a while along with the ayia napa sea monster, but they managed to find the uninhabited atlantic ocean seafloor as a convenient place to live. They’d gotten so used to the cold water down below, the only places they could come to the surface at were near the poles and extremely cold. There were different classes of ningen, ranging from the walkers, to the hunters, all of which were the creepiest things you could ever lay eyes on. Well, that is next to anything located in the uncanny valley.
“Charles, you are in charge of making sure this operation goes to plan.” The black hound said, putting on a diver suit and stepping on the platform that would eject him into the water. “What are you going to do sir?” Charles asked. “I’m going to go ningen hunting.” The black hound said, and with that was ejected into the ocean below. The black hound could hear the calls of the ningen as they began to locate the people falling into the ocean. He began to swim, but he didn’t notice the other submarine pull up behind him, nor did he notice that another creature was stirring below, smelling the ningen above.
[/spoiler]
[spoiler=The Marshamals (Last 3 Sections)]
When I woke up . . . wait a second. Can there be two narrators in this story? I’ll ask the archivist. [i]“Hey archivist! Can I be the narrator?” I asked him.[/i] He says it’s ok as long as every transition we make makes sense. Ok, so it was a strange. . . quit it Arnold! Can I start again? Everyone is messing me up. They say it’s ok for me to start again, so I guess that is what I’ll do!
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Life is a very strange thing for a being like me to comprehend. I guess that is why all the events in this story happened, I mean we are pretty important! You may be wondering what does Area 51, an archivist, Cody and Claude have anything to do with us. We’ll just keep adding people actually, however they are all connected to us in some sort of way. We have to tell their backstories in order for you to understand why they do the things they do. If we don’t tell you how they got here into the story, then any decision they make will either look evil or irrational. I wasn’t talking about you Puddles. Hey back off! It’s my turn to tell the story! Give it back!!!
[ERR: SYSTEM DIAGNOSIS: UNABLE TO CONNECT TO MIC_1
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I didn’t know what exactly was happening. I was wondering what the voice inside my head was doing inside my head wondering the exact same things I was wondering. It’s as if it spoke for me, which I wasn’t able to dwell upon after a whirl of sensation lit my nerves (or whatever a living marshmallow had for nerves). A sort of veil was removed, and tons of bright light burst into my vision. It was too much, there were sounds reverberating in the air, feels on my feet. Beside me were 10 others who looked all similar to each other, and then I realized they looked like me.
I asked my voice thingy to tell them somehow how they were like me, but at the same time the voice copied me. I tried again, but that stupid voice in my head kept copying me, mocking me to the very last tone. It got me very angry, so angry I decided to just not think anything to it. That was harder than it looked, or harder than you think it is; I didn’t last anymore than 2 seconds. I looked around the landscape before me, and as I was looking around I spotted a face so unrecognizably ugly it had to be an ogre! I don’t know how I knew it was an ogre, but I did know that, and suddenly I found that my grunts became words inside my head.
“OGGER!!!” I screamed, raising . . . whatever that thing was that I was raising. The others looked up to it and began to react in different ways. Some of them screamed, some began to threat and yet others just pointed at the ogre. We all learned a valuable lesson that day, when a machine gives you a life, but not legs, your life is going to throw lemons at you. I fell flat on my face, and began to do barrel rolls all over the platform, bumping into others of my type.
The ogre began to laugh, he was making fun of us! I grew my legs and pulled myself up into an upright position, fuming mad at the ogre making fun of us and the voice in my head mocking me in 38 different languages. We all ran to him, screaming “OGGER!!”, but then the ogre slammed down his hand above us, and we all curled up in defense. But his hand was floating in the air above my head, how was that possible? I ran away from below his hand, but all of a sudden I slammed into the air, squishing my marshmallow body into a pancake.
How did I run into the air? I could move through it a while ago, but now there was something stopping me. There could only be one answer, the only reason his hand was floating above, and why the air around us didn’t let us pass. I pulled my body away from that piece of air, reforming my body long enough to formulate this idea and speak it aloud,”HE’S A WIZZAD OGGER!!!!”. I’m not sure if that really helped much, all it did was cause everyone to splat into the air walls, pull themselves off and run around again.
I noticed there was a disturbance in the air, there was something there, and it was now moving. I began to run away from the advancing wall, but I soon realized where it led to; it was leading to the edge of the plateau. I hadn’t paid attention a lot to the landscape around me, the main focus had been the wizard ogre and the voice in my head which was still taunting me. It was a sort of plateau, glowing a strange white, and above me was another plateau of the same type. There were cylindrical objects sticking out of the bottom platform, leading to the area around the place.
Around us were glowing rectangles, ogres and 4 walls, each just as tall and menacing as . . . well, a wall. The edge of the plateau was coming in fast, some of us had already fallen off the giant plateau. It might not have been as far down as it sounds like, but considering our creator decided to use normal marshmallows instead of the bulky giant jet-puffed ones, that 2-foot fall was incredibly intimidating. I tried to go back, but the wall of energy or whatever it was kept push- oh wait, they told me it’s called glass. So it kept pushing me, and down below was another cage of glass.
It didn’t matter that I was the best karate marshmallow in the world, that glass is on another entirely different level of hardness. The wall pushed me into the cage below, and on top of another marshmallow, which I just floated on top of. He was very soft, I could lay there all day, but the ogre just shook us around, landing my face into a marshmallow's bottom. He put some sort of material as a sort of roof, but it had holes, so it didn’t provide any protection from rain at all.
The ogre held us up very high, and we were very sure he would slam us down onto the floor below. But he just held us right there, letting us all feel the fear of falling, and he laughed! He put us down on top of some sort of flat pancake-thing that had several white pancakes inside of it. Below two of those strange pancake things was a giant box made out of some material that was still foreign to us in the glass cage. The other ogres got close to us, pointing and shaking the cage we were in, making fun of every aspect of our marshmallow bodies. They did this for a very long time, and finally they all left the room after a long while. They used their magic to make all the light to disappear around us, but they decided to keep the light glowing inside of our cage.
It was arguably one of the worst birthdays any creature had ever experienced, born to terror and enslaved in a glass cage for the very first day I had lived. However, the time in the cage wasn’t all that bad, there was a pile of sugar and a bowl of water in our cage, so we didn’t die hunger or thirst. It was warm, it had all my fellow creatures alive in the cage, and most importantly it allowed us to figure out what our bodies were capable of doing.
Several of us had moved on from getting angry at that stupid voice in our head to trying to figure out how to get the person we wanted. I first tried pointing, saying “Here I want!” but that didn’t seem to do the trick. Several of us finally decided that we should associate a sound with a creature, that is to say we decided to name each other. We weren’t exactly the best at figuring out what names we should each have, we just made random noises as our names. Within a few seconds we figured out that not only was ish-jab-gun-kah-ooh-bauoe-tokilikitihabble-troo-gibbi-tam too hard to pronounce but just as equally hard to remember.
So we named ourselves differently, there was rock, glass, sugar, water, wizad, lizad, porridge, oatmeal, fly and unk. We began to utilize our names, mine being ‘rat’, but it quickly got confusing. I wanted to eat some sugar, so I told the group to let me through,”Path make to sugar.” I told them. But I was quickly guided to the marshmallow named sugar, and I said,”No, the one type next to water.” unaware that water was standing next to sugar. After a while of this we all decided to get names that weren’t grunts or objects, which is harder than you might imagine, but eventually we were named. I was Henry, and the others were named as followed; George, Malley, Edward, Charles, Charley, Edmund, Harry, Phil, Matt and David.
After that we kind of all became concerned with our own problems, each having a unique thing we kept worrying about. I was having a hard time living with the voice in my head mocking me, and George couldn’t see the glass, so he kept running face-first into it. Malley was running around the place after realizing there was something crawling around in his mouth, screaming,”It’s in my mouth! Help! Help!”. Edward was trying to figure out what the heck fingers were for, attempting everything from eating them to tryingto be a gecko. Charles was scared since he kept inflating and deflating for an unknown reason, Charley was next to him attempting to not breathe to stop the inflation. Edmund decided switch to two words in the sentence that was describing him.
Harry kept his eyes closed, trying to find his way to the water without opening them and experiencing the light around him. Phil, well Phil was jumping all over the glass cage, crawling up the walls, around the marshmallows below and on the roof. Matt was closing his eyes, but unlike Harry seemed calmer than anyone in the room. A few of us circled Matt, curiously watching him as he was laid down and breathing deeply. He seemed so calm, and yet so unaware of the many marshmallows surrounding him.
Also, it'd be nice if you could point out any mistakes I make.
If you haven't read chapter one, you can find it here.
Chapter 3 can be found here!
Is This A Life? (First 4 Sections)
Space is an interesting place. Not just because I accidentally make it rhyme every time I try to say the way I feel about space. If you look at the mass expanse of space you quickly realize how small and insignificant your own galaxy is. It seems to some that because of its massive expanse there is a high possibility of extraterrestrial life-forms. There are many extraterrestrial life-forms, however this is not because of the size of the universe but the abundance of nutrients and proper positioning.
The aliens we will focus on are not the ones you silly humans imagine. There are no green men, in actuality no men at all. There are no humanoid objects or creatures roaming the surface, the human body is an obsolete and rather inefficient body to copy. These creatures have adapted to the rough terrain of their environment, many resembling creatures pre-existing on earth. That is because some creatures here are very efficient bodies to have, this doesn’t include ourselves if you are wondering.
We’ll focus on the aliens of Excronite, Pilikijuia, Zorbing and its moon. Other aliens will be rather irrelevant to the story of the fall of the humans. Before we continue with the story, I’d like to ask you exactly what is mother nature? We see a force behind all living things here on earth, but this force seems to lack on any type of reading. We can’t detect mother nature, but many of us seem to think it exists somehow somewhere. Let’s pretend for a second that without a shadow of a doubt we know mother nature exists.
Would it then be possible that it existed on other planets? We tend to think of mother nature as an earth thing, probably due to the fact that we haven’t found extraterrestrial life yet in your time. However, is mother nature just the force that affects all life? Then it would still apply to extraterrestrial life. Humans seem to think mother nature isn’t acting upon them. But humans aren’t any more special than a cheetah is from a cat. Why do humans separate themselves if they are still affected unknowingly by mother nature herself? Humans are confusing creatures in all honesty, and many of them at your time are incredibly wrong to say the least.
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Claude and the crew went around the town, collecting dead bodies and piling them onto the cart. The mayor had been left alone in the main building, sending out the soldiers to find dead bodies to use the machine on. “So why was it a good idea to leave the mayor behind exactly?” Claude asked the soldiers around him. “There is no good reason we can answer to you,” Chester answered,”especially since none of us are paranoid Claude.”. “It’s a bad thing to be too reassured. One of those things could easily crawl out of those darkened tunnels and attack him inside the building without any of us noting.” Claude stated.
They found another body and hauled it into the already large pile of dead human beings. “Look, those things are Tafectorums. They are incredibly volatile to thermal and electrical malfunction. They’re like a pile of walking flammable corn flakes. A few volts would be enough to fry their cornflake existence into nothing but a buttery goop.” Leonard explained. “What are cornflakes and buttery?” Claude asked, causing the rest of the soldiers to also look at Leonard. “Not everyone’s dad was some rich guy who got daddy’s money Leonard. You have to remember that.” One of the soldiers reminded Leonard. After filling up the cart they lugged the entire primitive transportation vehicle down a few streets past the dog poop and into the domed building. Claude was still a bit concerned about the entire leaving the mayor behind business.
However, when they got there the mayor was still asleep, drooling onto the floor and becoming close to the REM stage. Claude pulled the first body into the machine, flipping the “human” switch on the side just to make sure he didn’t create another type of human. “Remember Claude, this guy might not remember whom he is if his brain is already rotted or suffered too much damage. If that happens-” Leonard began but was cut off by Claude.”I know I know. I tell him who he is and some of his relations and some events he had experienced.”. The machine activated, producing a bright glow and jolting the man into living existence. The man gasped, and began to stutter,”I w-was-s d-dead! H-he st-tabbed me! W-Why???”. He then sobbed for a while, all the while clutching Claude in such a way that deprived him of any oxygen whatsoever.
“Hank, we got you back alive. That wasn’t your son, it was the mimickers.” One of the soldiers said, reaching out his hand and pulling Hank up to his feet. The process continued with the rest of the bodies, each one having to be calmed by one of the soldiers. There are a few cases that are worth noting in which the revival did something erratic to their behavior. The first one occurred when Claude had revived 50 other people, whom had lugged carts and began to bring in people for Claude to revive. Two soldiers had been posted to protect Claude in case if one of the revived men became a zombie.
Claude put Frederick Douglas into the machine, whose corpse was beginning to rot away. After the entire revival process, Frederick woke up with half his frontal lobe reorientated. “Who am I? Where am I?” He first demanded, scrambling back up into the machine in a bad attempt to escape these strange beings around him. As Claude and the others tried to reassure him, he accidently unflipped the ‘human’ switch and reinitiated the machine upon himself accidently. He screamed as the machine redesigned his arms into wings, resembling those of a bat. The machine began to recreate the Frederick into a sort of flying mammal, but he lunged out of the machine, leaving parts of his face and arms distorted and burned.
He shrieked with his new vocal cords and attempted to fly out of the building, squawking in one of the most blood-curdling ways. Claude had backed up as he did so, fearing the hideous creature would harm him. The bird-thing was shot down by the soldiers within seconds of its flight, and it plummeted onto the ground, gasping for breath. Claude walked over to the thing and looked angrily at the two soldiers,”You killed a person!”. One of the soldiers gruffly replied,”He wasn’t a person anymore.”. “He was a person, we could’ve figured out how to change him back. He still had his same mind, he still had his same body. He was a person.”.
“Was he really? All I see is some disfigured monster.” The soldier responded, a bit agitated in the way Claude defended the hideous creature. “Monster? Just because he’s ugly he is a monster? ” Claude furiously told him, turning his back towards the dead creature. “Did it even matter? We still have this machine to turn him back alive, maybe even fix him. So what if he dies?” The soldier told him, still a bit angry at how Claude defended this ‘monster’. “It still isn’t morally right, and you know that.” Claude insisted. “Our moralities change depending on how our life is. It’s how the whole thing works. If we can revive people killing is no worry. It’s ok to kill him and revive him later.” The other soldier interposed.
Even though it didn’t feel right in Claude’s mind he continued working since he knew the future of the human species depended on Claude. However it kept in his mind all that day, he couldn’t help but ponder about the situation. Where would you draw the line, between human and non-human? If it had the same memories as you, the same thoughts but a different genetic makeup would it be considered human? What if Claude was put in the machine, would it still be him, the human? Would it be right to kill someone and then revive them later? He asked no one for answers, but he continued reviving people.
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The three beings were able to free themselves from the remnants of the collapse. Menace was weakened from all the bruises he bore from the collapsed cement ceiling. Seaborg was faring slightly better since his serpentine body was equipped with an iron framework on his left side. Both of these creatures weren’t too eager to try and tackle the dog and thus moved to another place where they could recuperate. The Black Hound as he was nicknamed by others pushed through all the cement and iron mesh to try and find the machine Claude had taken with him.
He finally managed to heave himself onto the sturdier ground beside the mess of cement and collapsed tunnels. He walked towards the vehicle he had seen Menace begin to pry at beforehand, only to find that there was no one inside. He checked the status report, seeing that Claude had gone to Aegbis, and attempted to go there as well, but the computer informed him that it required 50% of the system’s energy, but it only had 26.79%. The Black Hound obliterated the vehicle in his anger, for his ship also had very low energy levels.
As he neared the stairs where he first made his entry into this world there was a small disturbance to his right, so slight any human eye would have missed it. Anyone in his planet would have known what it was, for they were well acquainted with the law’s implication upon their case. He hurried along, telling everyone in charge of navigating the ship to head to the station. As the stairs unfolded, there was another disturbance, and within seconds an entire vessel had materialized.
The black hound hurriedly activated the ship he possessed, hoping to escape the trackers. The police of his planet had unleashed a massive amount of trackers in the recent years. The smaller vessels were designed to travel in the 5th dimension sleekly, able to pass any 3-dimensional object and able to follow any space vessel. The good thing was that going into the 5th dimension and back again was an experience no living thing could make it out of. That meant the police vessels had to still travel using the worm-hole creators, particularly heavy devices that not only cost a lot, but consumed a high amount of energy to create such a ripple.
The black hound summoned the ripple, damaging the nearby trackers for a few moments. That was enough time for the wormhole to be generated, sucking up the entire vessel into the depth of space and time. The sky returned to its black smoky self, and the trackers continued searching around the universe to make sure no fugitive would harm the main planet they came from. Every now and then they’d encounter a new creature and log it into their database, but they would never find the black hound ever again. That’s not because of how stealthy he was, but of an event that would injure the home planet.
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Cody walked the streets of Enroe exactly 12 minutes after the Officials had first interviewed him. To you it might seem like an incredibly fast time, but the beings of his planet were so medically advanced, 12 minutes was a long time to get out of a hospital. Cody walked around the streets, waiting for his friend to teleport him into his apartment. He kept waiting, wondering if Spot was still out there. He finally decided he needed to put some food into his stomach, and thus walked to the nearest Big Burger move thru. When Cody got there, he noticed a sign saying the move thru was out of function.
Cody walked into the store and up to the counter and asked the dog there why the move thru wasn’t open. “Haven’t you heard?” The maltese asked Cody, moving around several objects from one screen to another. He slid one displaying a dollar sign off the holographic screen and onto his main computer. ”Heard about what?” Cody asked, still a bit confused as to why his favorite part of this restaurant was closed. “The 5th dimension has completely leveled out. It is no longer operable. We can’t access it anymore.” The maltese dog said, hopping to the ground and walking out into the main part of the restaurant.
“That means our t-” Cody began, but was cut off by the maltese. “Yes, the teleportation, meetings, move thrus, anything that transports live beings fast is no longer working.” The maltese said, walking out of the store and into the streets. Cody also walked out of the store and headed for his home. He knew that the squashing of the 5th dimension wasn’t natural. What he didn’t know is that the black hound didn’t want to harm them, but wanted to save the planet he was attached to.
Relive and Revive (Next 4 Sections)
When he came alive, it was as if he was born with all the knowledge to maintain his adult body but with no knowledge of his past or experience. His wife was waiting on him just a few feet away, but he knew not whom she was, or who the strange men were. He asked the first person whom he had seen what he was doing here, who he was and most importantly who were they. Claude explained to him that he was born 20-ish years ago, the year was 3022, and he had lost most of his brain. “You could say you lost your mind.” Claude joked, causing a few soldiers to sigh. “Was this my home?” He asked. “It was your home, down the street. A creature of some sort damaged your brain. It was fixed with this machine, but you may not remember things right now, but eventually you will.” Claude told him, pulling him up to his feet.
The last of the interesting cases was the last revival; the revival of Will. When he opened his eyes, he immediately jolted straight up, walked to a corner and slunk down onto his knees. He was saying something inaudibly, shaking as he did. Claude was immediately interested in the person, in all the 1,361 revivals in the past week he had never seen such a case. As Claude approached Will the words he said became more audible. The soldiers surrounded Will, aiming their guns from 10 feet away in case if Will decided to be malevolent.
Will looked up at Claude, muttering,”It’s ok. I’m not a sheep anymore. I’m not one anymore.”. Claude asked Will,”What do you remember?”, hoping to be able to know what the heck was going on with Will and his shaking. “There was a ship. I drove it into the sun.” Will finally let out, still trembling a little,“I was a sheep, I finished the task. I finished it. I rescued them. I rescued them.”. “What ship? Who did you save?” Claude asked Will, now believing Will was receiving false memories from the machine. “The ship they drove in. It was a big one. It went really fast. I saved them all. I saved the people stuck in the dream.” Will told him.
“He’ll probably remember one of these days, just give him time.” One of the soldiers told Claude. Claude was still a bit concerned, but let the soldiers escort Will to where he’d be sleeping for the day. Claude began to pick up his things, putting them into the container which he had found. It was a small cube, roughly the size of a Rubik’s cube, however it could somehow store things that were 100 times bigger than it was. Claude didn’t know how it worked, but according to the soldiers it was very old, too old to be able to comprehend.
Claude put everything into the small cube, and began to head towards his designated apartment. There were still a few questions running through his head, but he decided he would try and go to sleep anyway. The buildings around him were being rebuilt by some of those who had been revived. They were tall elegant towers, designed to not only be strong but also flexible. They resembled more of a licorice sticks, bending in and out of each other in a mass web of buildings. However, the beings inside the structures seemed to have their own gravity, one that made the base of the tower seem to be directly below them.
Claude found his apartment building and got inside, wiping his feet on the cleansing mat. He climbed the stairs that wound all the way inside the building. He only had to go up a few steps before he looked down and saw he had gone up to the very top of the tower. He opened a door that seemed to be located on an outer wall, but instead of leading outside as Claude had thought it would, it lead to his bedroom. Claude got inside his giant apartment, which resembled his sewer-home but yet bigger and better.
Claude laid down upon his bed, still thinking about those thoughts swimming in his head. He thought about Will, thinking upon how the machine might have altered his mind if they scanned him previously to find his brain 100% undamaged. Claude didn’t get it; they revived everyone, but no one but Will had gotten memories like his. Claude was also a bit disturbed by how the machine would alter a human being, and he thought about the soldier who wouldn’t let Claude turn poor Frederick back alive. As he was slowly drifting into a state of dormancy, there was a knock at his door. Claude got up sleepily and opened the door to find that a soldier was standing in front of him. “Claude, there is someone who wishes to speak to you. He still doesn’t remember anything.” The soldier told him. Neither of them knew that that person would cause the death of many people, but he was waiting for them anyway.
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I am an archivist for the planet in sector 65, from the home ‘planet’ in sector 1. My job here is to find the planet’s history after the year which you call 2000. I know not why they number it like that if humans existed for many more years. After that year, it was harder to approach you, more and more developments on your behalf made it harder for us to get close without being seen. In the end, by 2098 we couldn’t see what was going on in your planet. We instead used other devices from far away, but they weren’t very clear to understand, a garbled mess of mismatched numbers and codes.
Then your planet was wrapped in a blanket of thick gray material, and all communication was lost. It is now the year 4868 by your calender year, and I am exploring all that is left of your civilization. I have my rope, I record any events that happened between 2098 and 4868 that I can find. You may see what I see, and you may think there is no way I can figure out your history, but alas, there is many things I can find among the rubble. I walked down the pile of rocks that once used to be a mountain of sorts.
I checked my rope, seeing what I had logged so far; which wasn’t much, I’d only been here for a couple of days. I moved my hand over the piece of rope, seeing an event I had logged the first time I had gotten here. The event took place at about 2512 on your calendar year, somewhere on the planet that which you refer to as the coast. From the rocks I have found there and what lay in the ocean floor I was able to piece together this event.
A giant ‘hurricane’ had formed in the ocean, its winds hurling at higher speeds than any before. There were gases in the air that kept coming down with the storm, ones that your species couldn’t intake very well. It began to move over the land area, pulling up structures your species had designed, but only a save few which had been designed for the purpose of this storm were left behind. It traveled right through the country and onto the icier parts of the area, and faded into nothing but clouds. The thing left behind many ruins, broken walls and dead people.
I moved my hand along the rope and found the other major event that I had recorded; the event of 2845 as I called it. I still haven’t pieced together everything for the event, there are still some questions needing to be answered. However, in order to figure out how the entire event happened I have to travel on foot to the mountain in the larger chunk of land to my west and east. You may have figured it out by now, but that mountain is the largest mountain in the world, not Mt.Everest which had sunk back into the earth a while ago but a 31,206 ft tall monstrosity. It was going to be a while until that one was figured out.
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Mac and his other two friends, Chuck and Zacharias, were in the cafeteria of the facility, eating their lunches and engaging in conversation. Everyone called these guys Zach and Mac and Cheese, a group of the most intelligent people at the facility. Mac was a scientist who focused on designing chemicals to alter the body in ways that would help someone. He had recently created a neuro-stimulating chemical whose sole purpose was to trick your brain into thinking there was macaroni and cheese inside of your mouth.
He had done that just for the pleasure of it, since they were Zach and Mac and Cheese. Zacharias was an engineer, whose father and mother had died in the occurrences of 512. That is what they were called, but Zacharias didn’t feel comfortable referring it as that since it was still 2512, and they weren’t even near the end of the year. He designed the very first space-warping device, one that actually worked very well. Many other engineers had combined their intelligences to try and figure out how to make the thing, but every time the device would become too heavy to hold and so dense they had to be destroyed.
After their lunch they resumed their work on one of the greatest projects in the entire facility. They were still working on the project, but if it was finished they would be able to save the human race. Zach was still working on the machine, having only built the base platform which could do nothing but scan and launch the program still under development by Chuck. Mac was still trying to figure out how he could alter an inanimate object so that it would be able to be considered alive.
They worked on that machine for many days and nights on end. Weeks passed, months passed and finally in October of that year they accomplished what was previously only a dream. It would have been Mary Shelley’s nightmare if she was around, for they had created a machine that could bring back the dead. The program was able to scan and find what alterations would be best for whatever was inside the machine and using the chemicals that which Mac had discovered and created rebuilt the thing into a living creation. It had a special mode for humans, that which could be used to reanimate one. That was the day before the 6th occurrence of the year.
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Claude was drawing with his crayon on the roof of the his house, admiring the upside-down view that which it gave him. Granholi was the most secure fortress, but it isn’t the most advanced in its technology. Claude had heard stories about people who had tried to destroy the fortress, but he never really understood what banishment meant at the age of 6. All he knew was that daddy was going to be home in a few minutes after his day at work.
Claude really wanted to show his dad what he had drawn that day. His father was an electrician, and was currently fixing the faulty circuits that were causing glitches in the system’s software. His mother was walking below Claude, talking to someone telepathically. Claude accidently dropped one of his crayons on the floor above him, or rather below him. He jumped down, switching his gravity and picked up his crayon off of the floor.
He began to think about the color blue, but for some reason his crayon didn’t turn blue. Claude decided that that color must be broken, so he tried yellow. Every color possibly imaginable to humankind was thought in this 6 year old’s mind but the crayon wouldn’t change color. Claude decided to ask his father when he got home, but that would be a while until he had the chance. In the meantime he decided he would visit his friend’s house, which was just a few rooms next to him. Claude stepped out of the window and onto the outside of the building wall, walking along with the other commuters up the side of the building.
He found his friend’s window and stepped into it, coming out upright onto the floor. Claude was going to greet his friend, but at that moment there was a siren, and immediately part of the building collapsed. The tower that which Claude stood on began to lean, inclining the floor so that Claude had to grab onto some furniture to not fall out of the building so fast. He knew that if you ran out the window you could get out of the building’s gravitational range, causing you to plummet to your death below. His friend was knocked onto his feet and slid past Claude, who reached out his hand to grab his friend’s arm.
His friend grabbed Claude’s arm, but he was too fast for their own good. Claude was able to grab him but the force of his sliding had caused the table which Claude was grabbing onto to become misaligned with the magnetic force that held it in place. Claude his friend, table and the coffee mugs on top of the table all slid out of the collapsing building, screaming, shaking spilling and all. The magnetic system seemed to know what it had done and reactivated, swinging the table and children back into the building a few floors below where it was supposed to be. The commuters on the side of the wall were running down, trying to either get to the ground before the entire building collapsed or to their apartment to get their family out of the building.
The building was not regenerating as it usually did, this time it was slower, too slow for the city’s own sake. Claude began to get up, pulling his friend up as the table beside them was sucked up through the roof into its position. Claude recognized the apartment as his own and tried to locate his mother, and hopefully find his father. He went down a set of stairs at the side of the room, leading to a hallway that had doors that lead to other apartments. At the end of the hall he saw his parents running towards him, signalling that he should turn around and run as they did.
Then he saw just outside of the window at the end of the hall a giant figure thrust its claws into the building. It clambered up the side of the building, scaring the people already terrified by the falling building. It leaped into the floor above where Claude stood, smelling where his parents were running to. He scampered through the walls, knocking over all the furniture and books that lay in his path. He stopped just ahead of the two adult humans and beat on the floor. The floor collapsed underneath him, in between where Claude and his parents were.
Claude backed up a bit, but then quickly scrambled forwards and peaked through the pile of rubble that was a floor. Through the holes and gaps within the pile he was able to see the wretched beast consume the people that which Claude was begotten from. The software then kicked in, fixing the floor and leaving Claude exposed to the giant lizard. Menace finished eating the new victims he had acquired and turned his attention towards a new prey, a young piece of meat on legs. Fortunately the building tilted even more, so much that Menace slowly began to slip out the window despite how fast he moved his legs.
Claude held onto the stair rails, his feet beginning to lift into the air and the ground below him beginning to get closer and closer. The top of the building rammed into the side of another building near it, causing both Menace and Claude to lose their grips. Claude was desperately grabbing at the floor, trying to grip any surface that wasn’t parallel with his body, but with no avail. Menace fell out of the building and turned 180 degrees, preparing to burrow into the building beside him.
As Claude neared the window, only a few feet away, the system came back on. Menace’s body was now affected by gravity that made him feel as if the ground was a wall. He climbed up the building that which the original one he was in had rammed into. The original building began to lean upright, fixing every broken bit of itself on the outside and inside. The part of building that Claude was in was at a 45 degree angle when he went through the window’s glass.
Claude screamed, thinking he was going to plummet into his grave, but the building’s gravity was turned on. He only managed to go away from the building 4 feet before it sucked him back into the building in an upright position. As the building straightened itself and regenerated, several armed men entered the building in an attempt to annihilate the creatures that had caused it. Claude sat there, shuddering from the entire experience and crying for he did not know what to do.
It was just him, sobbing in that mostly empty building, and it was him that was found by the soldiers. They did all they could to comfort him, but it was too much for a 6 year old child to feel and understand. They told him it would be ok, they told him all sorts of helpful lies, but none would cease the river flowing from inside. Maybe it was sheer chance, maybe someone had planned it, for this child’s now scarred mind would now be capable of surviving the next years. It was thanks to this event and many others that which Claude was able to live for the next 21 years. However in the year of 2987 that child stood at the gates of the city, banished for the rest of his living years.
To The Future! (Next 3 sections)
Cody didn’t exactly like the idea of time-travelling, much less with a toaster-like hat on his head that supposedly was able to protect Cody from any harm in the wormhole. The suit not only provided time-travelling, but also included 3 years supply of food, water, air and entertainment. Cody had nagged on the officials to get him better weapons, especially after Cody watched the new Planeterror movie. Cody now wished he hadn’t bought the ticket for the high-resolution and sensitivity rate and instead just gotten the ticket for virtual reality.
Cody put on his shoes, or rather the shoes that he was supposed to wear, and began to trot at a slow pace. As he began to run faster movement around him seemed to slow down, which thus made him faster. He kept trotting even though it seemed that all he was doing was slow movement around him and not go any faster. Regardless of any of that Cody had a speedometer with him, which right now was taking forever to update Cody’s knowledge of his current time. As he got faster and faster the world began to grow dimmer and dimmer, the photons no longer able to travel fast enough to enter his eyes. The world became a textured field of darkness, unrecognizable to sight itself.
The helmet projected a meter into his head, showing him that he had only gone forward in time 1.00000000000000000000000000000019 seconds. He began to run faster and faster relatively, causing the suit to make him no longer physical nor visible. The meter reached 4 minutes, and within a second of relative time he had gone forwards for 5 hours. Hours became days, days to weeks, and when Cody thought he was no longer able to run any more the meter reached exactly the year that which he had hoped for; 4392. But Cody missed his mark, stopping as the meter hit 4868 and he blacked out with the knowledge that he had missed the only chance he had to save his world from the black hound.
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Mac sighed, he wished he could save these projects. Zacharias was already packing up what he could save, anxiously awaiting the arrival of the rescue department. Mac had picked two vials, jammed them in his suitcase, and switched the emergency call lever. He knew that they were approaching, but he just had to take one long look.The roof shook, powder falling to the ground, chemicals spewed along the floor, as if trying to save themselves in vain. Mac leaned against a wall, trying to keep his breath normal, they could sense hyperventilating.
There was a knock at the door, Zacharias eagerly opened the door, smiling and began to say “Hello, I-” . He was greeted by a man in a brown overcoat, so long it seemed to be his only garment. He had a brown hat, tipped so only his eyes were visible. There was a loud flash and Zacharias appeared a few feet in front of Zacharias. The original Zacharias backed away from the door, seeing a much dirtier himself standing behind the man who was pointing a gun at him.
The dirtier Zacharias took out a gun, one that was glowing a strange color. Zacharias blasted the man with the gun, vaporizing the life out of the man’s body. Or as you might recall, vaporizing his circuits, memory and all that held the very existence of his consciousness. The Zacharias holding the suitcase backed up a bit, noticing a hideous beast beginning to scramble at the dirtier Zacharias. It resembled a human, but its face was hideously deformed with multiple scales, eyes and lumps of flesh. It was wearing the normal uniform, white pants shirt, belt of purple and black and pockets on his shirt that held a random assortment of utile things.
The creature pulled up its deformed right arm, being the only arm that wasn’t recognizably human. It was scaled at the top and instead of fingers bore 5 hideous claws filled with all sorts of fluids that came from the human body, however it was dominantly covered by the red type of fluids. The dirtier Zacharias simply turned his gun backwards and blasted the foul beast, splattering ooze of some sort onto the walls and both Zachariases.
“What-” Mac tried to utter something, but words seemed to fail him. The roof began to shake as a hydraulic crawler drilled into the room they were in. The dirtier Zacharias told them that it was a crawler that would save them. Mac trusted the dirtier Zacharias a lot less than he did Zacharias with a suitcase. Mac and Zach were greeted with the site’s soldiers who pulled them into the crawler, but the dirtier Zach wasn’t greeted as well. The soldiers were a bit unnerved by the site of two Zacharias, mainly because 1 Zacharias was already enough of an annoyance.
They still nonetheless got them all into the crawler, a giant titanium-tungsten-graphene bug which could hold up to 20 passengers. The dirtier Zacharias was the first to speak,”Whatever you do, don’t go to the fourth stop. The third is full of D-87’s but do not go into the fourth stop, it will kill us all.”. Zacharias (the one with the suitcase) asked,”What is at the fourth stop?”. The dirtier Zacharias (because there is no other thing to call him) responded by simply saying,”D-7”. Mac knew exactly what that was, and he didn’t like that sludge anymore than he did enjoy- well getting eaten by spores of an overgrown slime mold.
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I found myself at the bottom of the mountain, a whopping 31,206 feet up in the sky. The first thing I needed was to find myself a home to raid. You may be thinking don’t raid a human home! That's evil! But the problem is that from sometime in the 4500’s and 5000’s there is a period in which humans no longer inhabit the planet. There was admittedly another time spanning only 2 years in which the entire world population of humans turned to 2, but after that period the population reverted back to 8 ish thousand. However right now there is not a single human being on the earth, and what you call the night is a hard thing to come alive out from.
Many species here have adapted to the nighttime, they are as one might imagine, not one of the friendliest creatures around. They have adapted much larger eyes, longer snouts, bigger teeth and everything that would make you afraid. If you looked at the earth it might seem not so bad at the day. There was no longer smoke, it was usually always very hot, something you might enjoy. Human constructions are no longer available to look at, your species has washed off the face of the earth. The entire place is one desolate land, full of insects and small patches of shrubbery that at this time are no longer green.
I don’t know how else to tell you what I saw when I stood there at the mountain, your world is probably drastically different from the one I am seeing, but I was never in the 2000’s. They never allowed us to get too near to the humans during the ancient years of 2020. However, now was now, even though I could go back, I chose to follow my planet’s strict guidelines to not travel back in time to interfere with an alien race. I was able to find one of the abandoned shacks the new citizens of the planet had created. It was made of some sort of material, bendy, burnable but at the same time it was alive somehow.
I got inside of it, even though it wouldn’t hold against the creatures, but then again the creatures were easy to hide from. This shack would be enough to not be noticed by even the Shrilew,a winged terror that literally killed you from a heart attack. However, the shack wasn’t empty, there was a sort of organism in the place, it was what you would call furry. I patted the thing’s head, knowing that to be a very effective way of waking any creature up.
However, when I did, I recieved a time-shock, jolting forward into time for about 2 seconds. I then noticed that the creature was actually wearing things on his body, one near his brain and 4 things on his feet. The creature stirred, waking up a bit surprised at the fact that an alien being was in his crudely built abode. I tried to inform him why I was here, but my language wasn’t recognized by the poor creature. So I tried another language, one of the planet’s former languages,”Como estas?”. That didn’t work either, it simply made the poor thing want to escape the shack as soon as he could.
“nEutíkají přijdou pro mě, budeme zastavit tento bídu” I told him, but apparently he didn’t speak that language either. So I tried to copy what the creature said, however I think I terrified him because he began to snarl and emit sounds which I do not understand. I drew a picture on the ground, a mix of sand and dirt, one of my planet and his planet. I pointed to my planet and then myself, and signalled for him to show me his. The creature was a bit confused and after a while indented the earth a bit away from the drawings I had done, he pointed to the planet and then himself, however it was one I did not recognize.
He made more noises, and finally pulled an item I later found to be a collar from his hat-thing. He put it on his throat and began to talk in my language. “That’s my planet.” The creature told me, signalling towards his strange indent. I told him,”How can you understand me now?”. He responded with a bit of confusion,”I don’t know what you are saying. Can you speak english? I can’t speak english but I can understand it very well.”. I began to speak english in his words, otherwise known as common earth speak to us. He explained to me how he had used the toaster-hat and boots to go to the future, but he misaimed and hit this time period.
“You live here right? Th-” I began to tell him, but was interrupted by the rude thing. “I’m from Excronite, not the Dirt.” He told me, beginning to walk around the shack’s inside. “Well, it is the year 4868 by the human calendar year. This is the planet which they were in, that which you call the Dirt. It is low time, we should stay here for the next hours, we don’t want the Shrilew to get us.” I informed the poor thing that which was now heavily alarmed. Before the creature could say anything, there was a loud shriek; the Shrilew was stirring. “We need to stay here, close your eyes. Go into REM for a bit, it shouldn’t be able to see us.”. I leaned against the shack’s walls, entering the deepest part of the realm, and as you would call, I fell asleep.
Cody put on his shoes, or rather the shoes that he was supposed to wear, and began to trot at a slow pace. As he began to run faster movement around him seemed to slow down, which thus made him faster. He kept trotting even though it seemed that all he was doing was slow movement around him and not go any faster. Regardless of any of that Cody had a speedometer with him, which right now was taking forever to update Cody’s knowledge of his current time. As he got faster and faster the world began to grow dimmer and dimmer, the photons no longer able to travel fast enough to enter his eyes. The world became a textured field of darkness, unrecognizable to sight itself.
The helmet projected a meter into his head, showing him that he had only gone forward in time 1.00000000000000000000000000000019 seconds. He began to run faster and faster relatively, causing the suit to make him no longer physical nor visible. The meter reached 4 minutes, and within a second of relative time he had gone forwards for 5 hours. Hours became days, days to weeks, and when Cody thought he was no longer able to run any more the meter reached exactly the year that which he had hoped for; 4392. But Cody missed his mark, stopping as the meter hit 4868 and he blacked out with the knowledge that he had missed the only chance he had to save his world from the black hound.
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Mac sighed, he wished he could save these projects. Zacharias was already packing up what he could save, anxiously awaiting the arrival of the rescue department. Mac had picked two vials, jammed them in his suitcase, and switched the emergency call lever. He knew that they were approaching, but he just had to take one long look.The roof shook, powder falling to the ground, chemicals spewed along the floor, as if trying to save themselves in vain. Mac leaned against a wall, trying to keep his breath normal, they could sense hyperventilating.
There was a knock at the door, Zacharias eagerly opened the door, smiling and began to say “Hello, I-” . He was greeted by a man in a brown overcoat, so long it seemed to be his only garment. He had a brown hat, tipped so only his eyes were visible. There was a loud flash and Zacharias appeared a few feet in front of Zacharias. The original Zacharias backed away from the door, seeing a much dirtier himself standing behind the man who was pointing a gun at him.
The dirtier Zacharias took out a gun, one that was glowing a strange color. Zacharias blasted the man with the gun, vaporizing the life out of the man’s body. Or as you might recall, vaporizing his circuits, memory and all that held the very existence of his consciousness. The Zacharias holding the suitcase backed up a bit, noticing a hideous beast beginning to scramble at the dirtier Zacharias. It resembled a human, but its face was hideously deformed with multiple scales, eyes and lumps of flesh. It was wearing the normal uniform, white pants shirt, belt of purple and black and pockets on his shirt that held a random assortment of utile things.
The creature pulled up its deformed right arm, being the only arm that wasn’t recognizably human. It was scaled at the top and instead of fingers bore 5 hideous claws filled with all sorts of fluids that came from the human body, however it was dominantly covered by the red type of fluids. The dirtier Zacharias simply turned his gun backwards and blasted the foul beast, splattering ooze of some sort onto the walls and both Zachariases.
“What-” Mac tried to utter something, but words seemed to fail him. The roof began to shake as a hydraulic crawler drilled into the room they were in. The dirtier Zacharias told them that it was a crawler that would save them. Mac trusted the dirtier Zacharias a lot less than he did Zacharias with a suitcase. Mac and Zach were greeted with the site’s soldiers who pulled them into the crawler, but the dirtier Zach wasn’t greeted as well. The soldiers were a bit unnerved by the site of two Zacharias, mainly because 1 Zacharias was already enough of an annoyance.
They still nonetheless got them all into the crawler, a giant titanium-tungsten-graphene bug which could hold up to 20 passengers. The dirtier Zacharias was the first to speak,”Whatever you do, don’t go to the fourth stop. The third is full of D-87’s but do not go into the fourth stop, it will kill us all.”. Zacharias (the one with the suitcase) asked,”What is at the fourth stop?”. The dirtier Zacharias (because there is no other thing to call him) responded by simply saying,”D-7”. Mac knew exactly what that was, and he didn’t like that sludge anymore than he did enjoy- well getting eaten by spores of an overgrown slime mold.
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I found myself at the bottom of the mountain, a whopping 31,206 feet up in the sky. The first thing I needed was to find myself a home to raid. You may be thinking don’t raid a human home! That's evil! But the problem is that from sometime in the 4500’s and 5000’s there is a period in which humans no longer inhabit the planet. There was admittedly another time spanning only 2 years in which the entire world population of humans turned to 2, but after that period the population reverted back to 8 ish thousand. However right now there is not a single human being on the earth, and what you call the night is a hard thing to come alive out from.
Many species here have adapted to the nighttime, they are as one might imagine, not one of the friendliest creatures around. They have adapted much larger eyes, longer snouts, bigger teeth and everything that would make you afraid. If you looked at the earth it might seem not so bad at the day. There was no longer smoke, it was usually always very hot, something you might enjoy. Human constructions are no longer available to look at, your species has washed off the face of the earth. The entire place is one desolate land, full of insects and small patches of shrubbery that at this time are no longer green.
I don’t know how else to tell you what I saw when I stood there at the mountain, your world is probably drastically different from the one I am seeing, but I was never in the 2000’s. They never allowed us to get too near to the humans during the ancient years of 2020. However, now was now, even though I could go back, I chose to follow my planet’s strict guidelines to not travel back in time to interfere with an alien race. I was able to find one of the abandoned shacks the new citizens of the planet had created. It was made of some sort of material, bendy, burnable but at the same time it was alive somehow.
I got inside of it, even though it wouldn’t hold against the creatures, but then again the creatures were easy to hide from. This shack would be enough to not be noticed by even the Shrilew,a winged terror that literally killed you from a heart attack. However, the shack wasn’t empty, there was a sort of organism in the place, it was what you would call furry. I patted the thing’s head, knowing that to be a very effective way of waking any creature up.
However, when I did, I recieved a time-shock, jolting forward into time for about 2 seconds. I then noticed that the creature was actually wearing things on his body, one near his brain and 4 things on his feet. The creature stirred, waking up a bit surprised at the fact that an alien being was in his crudely built abode. I tried to inform him why I was here, but my language wasn’t recognized by the poor creature. So I tried another language, one of the planet’s former languages,”Como estas?”. That didn’t work either, it simply made the poor thing want to escape the shack as soon as he could.
“nEutíkají přijdou pro mě, budeme zastavit tento bídu” I told him, but apparently he didn’t speak that language either. So I tried to copy what the creature said, however I think I terrified him because he began to snarl and emit sounds which I do not understand. I drew a picture on the ground, a mix of sand and dirt, one of my planet and his planet. I pointed to my planet and then myself, and signalled for him to show me his. The creature was a bit confused and after a while indented the earth a bit away from the drawings I had done, he pointed to the planet and then himself, however it was one I did not recognize.
He made more noises, and finally pulled an item I later found to be a collar from his hat-thing. He put it on his throat and began to talk in my language. “That’s my planet.” The creature told me, signalling towards his strange indent. I told him,”How can you understand me now?”. He responded with a bit of confusion,”I don’t know what you are saying. Can you speak english? I can’t speak english but I can understand it very well.”. I began to speak english in his words, otherwise known as common earth speak to us. He explained to me how he had used the toaster-hat and boots to go to the future, but he misaimed and hit this time period.
“You live here right? Th-” I began to tell him, but was interrupted by the rude thing. “I’m from Excronite, not the Dirt.” He told me, beginning to walk around the shack’s inside. “Well, it is the year 4868 by the human calendar year. This is the planet which they were in, that which you call the Dirt. It is low time, we should stay here for the next hours, we don’t want the Shrilew to get us.” I informed the poor thing that which was now heavily alarmed. Before the creature could say anything, there was a loud shriek; the Shrilew was stirring. “We need to stay here, close your eyes. Go into REM for a bit, it shouldn’t be able to see us.”. I leaned against the shack’s walls, entering the deepest part of the realm, and as you would call, I fell asleep.
[spoiler='Monsters' From Below (Next 2 Sections)]
Claude approached the man, he was at the edge of the dome’s field holding a few powerful grenades in his hands. The soldiers stationed themselves around the man, but they knew that if they shot he might drop the grenades and blow up despite what they did. Claude began to say something but was interrupted by the man,”What did you do to me?”. “I turned you back alive, but you suffered too much brain loss.” Claude told him, hoping to avoid the man drop his grenades. “Who am I?” He asked Claude, shaking the grenades as if to threaten Claude.
“Calm down, just lay down your grenades.” Claude said, trying to make him lay down his weapons. “So you can trick me? I want to know the truth!” He said, raising his voice. “It is that, you are Jeremy the botanist. Do you not remember? You were here, you loved this city, now lay down the grenades.” Claude said, becoming slightly agitated by this man’s stubbornness. “You are lying! You are lying!” The man began to scream, being very confused and stubborn. With that he dropped both grenades.
The grenades were only the size of a gumball, covered in a pattern that resembled circuitry on a circuit board. As soon as they dropped their black and yellow appearance quickly turned to one of blue, and despite the shots fired, expanded into a whirling mass of blue flames. Claude leaped to safety, with the soldiers attempting to do the same. There were only 12 unfortunate who were burned in the explosion, of which all perished. The field was eradicated in that area, allowing for the gases of the outside to contaminate the inside of the city.
Claude peeped out from the side of the licorice-like building he was hiding behind and saw the worst possible thing that could’ve happened at the moment. There, squirming just outside the city walls was a fat tornado worm. Claude recognized the creature by the spikes protruding its skin and the elongated body of a brown worm thing. The creature was a minor, only about 100 feet long, its spikes weren’t fully developed but it was still nonetheless lethal. It had a long brown body, that felt more like a caterpillar's skin than a worm’s skin. Tornado worms were more common in the center of the western land, but they tunneled around everywhere so finding one wasn’t much of a surprise. They usually had long unspiked lower bodies, which they used to root themselves into the ground.
They usually rooted themselves into the ground and stood straight up, beginning to spin a little. They would then extend their spikes and spin as fast as they could, creating a massive tornado, which was not only effective but a highly rewarding technique of attack. Such a tornado would cause the gases which the worm was immune to to come down and kill the victims below. Anything sucked into the tornado would then travel somehow up its body and into the mouth of the creature. Claude never really payed attention to those classes, he enjoyed the technology classes more than he did the survival 101s.
There it was, the thing from his nightmares, beginning to stand straight up into the sky. Claude urged the men to get away from the hole and contact everyone to let them know they needed to wear a gas mask or stay inside the buildings. Claude was only able to get a few steps away from the site when the tornado worm began to suck him into its tornado. Claude knew that the spikes would grind him into a mush, and that was one thing he didn’t want to happen. Claude tried to grab onto a building, but missed the only chance he had at grabbing at it.
The soldiers turned around and began to either grab Claude or shoot at the tornado worm. Claude could see the gases already beginning to go down, most of them although invisible carried a sort of vapor with them that Claude was able to see. “We need to get inside somewhere!” Claude told them,”Or fix the field at this side!”. One of the soldiers told Claude he would try to re-run the field, but it wasn’t guaranteed to regenerate. He ran off, going into the center of the city. The soldiers were able to pull Claude and themselves past more licorice towers, enough for Claude to begin to walk on the ground by himself.
As long as the creature was spinning the gases would stay near it, but once it decided to stop the gases would begin to spread around, slowly rising but nonetheless lethal. Claude told the soldiers to go and make sure everyone was inside or wearing a gas mask. As they left, Claude took out his pen-gun and went back into the tunnels he had first came out from. He finally found himself in the office, and there was the soldier going around and typing things into the 3D hologram computers. Behind Claude was the only door out, in front were three rows of computers facing perpendicularly from Claude. Each row had about 7 ish computers, each having holograms of different colors. Claude asked the soldier how it was going with the regeneration.
“Nothing good. All the systems are a bit corrupted, the virus got into them.” He told Claude. “What virus?” Claude asked, not being very well aware what was sneaking up behind him. “He is talking about me Claude.” The tafectorum said, grabbing Claude’s right arm. The soldier fired from his pen-gun-thing, but it only killed one cell of this tafectorum’s hide. The creature moved to the left side of Claude, turning into a bunch of cells and reforming next to the soldier in a human form. The tafectorum knocked the pen-gun-thing out of his hands and told him,”You know who I am?”.
Claude took this time to finish regenerating the field around the city, moving a few floating hologram objects into different places and causing the field to begin to regenerate. The tafectorum moved its ‘eyes’ to the side of its head, staring straight at Claude. It lunged at him just as he had expected, but Claude stepped to the side. The tafectorum fell on top of a computer, its program was being opened by the hologram itself. The tafectorum knew what was going to happen, but it was detained by both the people in the room. It began to try and turn into the flakes it was, but the flakes were being magnetized to the computer’s weak magnetic field.
It reformed, missing a leg and half of its head, a very strange sight to see. Claude flinged around a few holographic items floating in the blue glow, attempting to erase all of the creature’s files. It writhed around, but as soon as its main program was erased it quit moving at all, and after a few more erases the cloak around it vanished, revealing the flakes it was really made of. Claude erased the last file, and the entire cluster of flakes collapsed, no longer forming a sort of creature but a pile of flakes.
“That was a close one.” Claude said, sighing a bit. The soldier was still a bit out of breath, but the majority of his consciousness was still intact. They left the room, heading for the outside area of the giant domed city in hopes of doing all that was to be done, and to escape the tunnels one infested by tafectorums. As soon as they left one flake still on top of the computer shivered and turned golden. A file appeared, a cube floating in the holographic screen that was turning and moving, bouncing along the sides of the 3 dimensional computer workspace. It was then that it sent a signal, a signal to a wide range of things, and it was that that would bring to life multiple species in the future.
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It was the year 1912, it was a safe place for the black hound to stop at. The dogs of Excronite weren’t in favor of going back in time, thinking they would accidently cause some sort of catastrophe just by touching a leaf. To the black hound it was hilarious that they were all convinced that would happen, they didn’t understand time travel like he did. When you go back in time and you do something it doesn’t change a single thing, all it does is makes sure that what will happen happens. Every time exists at the same moment you are in, the thing is that some creatures can only live in one time. However the you from 5 years back exists right now, so does the future you. So doing anything back in time has already happened, but in your time you haven’t done it yet.
The black hound understood this principle very well, so he had set off to make sure the things that happened would happen. Turns out thanks to the black hound’s mistakes many things have happened in the past. However that isn’t the focus, right now he is in his submarine, which is disguised as an iceberg. The black hound steered the ship, which was moving very slowly in order to look like an actual iceberg. It was deep into the night, around 2 o’clock A.M. and already his crew was beginning to waken.
They had prepared for this in relative time for about 2 years, but using a clock to measure the time they took would give you roughly 2 minutes or so. The building of the entire submarine was very time-consuming, especially the special panels that gave the submarine the ability to disguise itself. Creating the thing was just the hard part, everything else was already bound to happen, so they had to get into position and whatever would happen would happen.
The black hound had set the course to get in front of the giant ship, and it’s mission was to prove that it was sinkable. Fortunately it was dark, so any chances of them being seen were at a minimal. The crew never really minded getting up early or spending years on one project, they were dedicated to this job, and it was a high-paying one indeed. A lost great sphinx nose was auctioned for very high price in the market, so did lost trains, gold rooms and art.
A few minutes later the captain of the ship announced they should brace for impact, the iceberg was about to take the lives of many. There was an eerie silence for a few seconds, everyone holding their breaths for the impact that would make history. They deployed the submarines, which circled underneath the ship like sharks. Everyone stood still, the black hound waiting and holding his paws in the air, signalling for no one to move any of the controls on the ship. Everyone was wondering when the ship would hit the iceberg, and at around 2:20 A.M. it hit them.
The shock jolted the submarine, sending a few unbraced dogs flying back and landing on their fellow employees. “Go, Go Go!!!” The black hound yelled, and everyone began to maneuver the submarine to the sides, splitting it into a few distinct pieces. The submarines were ready to collect the items that fell below, they were incredibly valuable since they would be the last items onboard the Titanic. As the main ship began to come to a stop it deployed dogs with transparent swimming suits to run in through the titanic and eject all that was not shaken off or taken off by the humans.
The black hound was already halting his piece, making sure the three pieces only moved a few inches to the side, just enough to seem realistic to the men aboard the titanic. As he did that, he saw the creature that he was hoping wouldn’t be there swim to the side of the Titanic. These creatures didn’t usually come out from their deep-water homes, but it was at this time of day, this time of year that they came out. Spring was their breeding season, and every now and then they’d come out to inhabit the pieces of habitat that man still had not yet captured.
Eventually the ningen died out, somewhere in the 2500’s after the occurrences of the year. By that time there were only a few tribes left of them, due to the humans hunting them down to claim more territory below the ocean. However, in 1912 there were plenty of other creatures that man had yet to find deep below the ocean. The black hound had been to the deepest part of the ocean, he’d walked on the seafloor, and the creatures there were some of the strangest things he had ever seen, most of which had tried to chomp a few limbs off of him.
As terrifying as the ningen were, they were not the most advanced of all species, so they couldn’t do very much harm to them. The ningen were a species of whale-human hybrids that were able to survive in the cold areas of the world. They did get stuck in the mediterranean sea for a while along with the ayia napa sea monster, but they managed to find the uninhabited atlantic ocean seafloor as a convenient place to live. They’d gotten so used to the cold water down below, the only places they could come to the surface at were near the poles and extremely cold. There were different classes of ningen, ranging from the walkers, to the hunters, all of which were the creepiest things you could ever lay eyes on. Well, that is next to anything located in the uncanny valley.
“Charles, you are in charge of making sure this operation goes to plan.” The black hound said, putting on a diver suit and stepping on the platform that would eject him into the water. “What are you going to do sir?” Charles asked. “I’m going to go ningen hunting.” The black hound said, and with that was ejected into the ocean below. The black hound could hear the calls of the ningen as they began to locate the people falling into the ocean. He began to swim, but he didn’t notice the other submarine pull up behind him, nor did he notice that another creature was stirring below, smelling the ningen above.
[/spoiler]
[spoiler=The Marshamals (Last 3 Sections)]
When I woke up . . . wait a second. Can there be two narrators in this story? I’ll ask the archivist. [i]“Hey archivist! Can I be the narrator?” I asked him.[/i] He says it’s ok as long as every transition we make makes sense. Ok, so it was a strange. . . quit it Arnold! Can I start again? Everyone is messing me up. They say it’s ok for me to start again, so I guess that is what I’ll do!
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Life is a very strange thing for a being like me to comprehend. I guess that is why all the events in this story happened, I mean we are pretty important! You may be wondering what does Area 51, an archivist, Cody and Claude have anything to do with us. We’ll just keep adding people actually, however they are all connected to us in some sort of way. We have to tell their backstories in order for you to understand why they do the things they do. If we don’t tell you how they got here into the story, then any decision they make will either look evil or irrational. I wasn’t talking about you Puddles. Hey back off! It’s my turn to tell the story! Give it back!!!
[ERR: SYSTEM DIAGNOSIS: UNABLE TO CONNECT TO MIC_1
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I didn’t know what exactly was happening. I was wondering what the voice inside my head was doing inside my head wondering the exact same things I was wondering. It’s as if it spoke for me, which I wasn’t able to dwell upon after a whirl of sensation lit my nerves (or whatever a living marshmallow had for nerves). A sort of veil was removed, and tons of bright light burst into my vision. It was too much, there were sounds reverberating in the air, feels on my feet. Beside me were 10 others who looked all similar to each other, and then I realized they looked like me.
I asked my voice thingy to tell them somehow how they were like me, but at the same time the voice copied me. I tried again, but that stupid voice in my head kept copying me, mocking me to the very last tone. It got me very angry, so angry I decided to just not think anything to it. That was harder than it looked, or harder than you think it is; I didn’t last anymore than 2 seconds. I looked around the landscape before me, and as I was looking around I spotted a face so unrecognizably ugly it had to be an ogre! I don’t know how I knew it was an ogre, but I did know that, and suddenly I found that my grunts became words inside my head.
“OGGER!!!” I screamed, raising . . . whatever that thing was that I was raising. The others looked up to it and began to react in different ways. Some of them screamed, some began to threat and yet others just pointed at the ogre. We all learned a valuable lesson that day, when a machine gives you a life, but not legs, your life is going to throw lemons at you. I fell flat on my face, and began to do barrel rolls all over the platform, bumping into others of my type.
The ogre began to laugh, he was making fun of us! I grew my legs and pulled myself up into an upright position, fuming mad at the ogre making fun of us and the voice in my head mocking me in 38 different languages. We all ran to him, screaming “OGGER!!”, but then the ogre slammed down his hand above us, and we all curled up in defense. But his hand was floating in the air above my head, how was that possible? I ran away from below his hand, but all of a sudden I slammed into the air, squishing my marshmallow body into a pancake.
How did I run into the air? I could move through it a while ago, but now there was something stopping me. There could only be one answer, the only reason his hand was floating above, and why the air around us didn’t let us pass. I pulled my body away from that piece of air, reforming my body long enough to formulate this idea and speak it aloud,”HE’S A WIZZAD OGGER!!!!”. I’m not sure if that really helped much, all it did was cause everyone to splat into the air walls, pull themselves off and run around again.
I noticed there was a disturbance in the air, there was something there, and it was now moving. I began to run away from the advancing wall, but I soon realized where it led to; it was leading to the edge of the plateau. I hadn’t paid attention a lot to the landscape around me, the main focus had been the wizard ogre and the voice in my head which was still taunting me. It was a sort of plateau, glowing a strange white, and above me was another plateau of the same type. There were cylindrical objects sticking out of the bottom platform, leading to the area around the place.
Around us were glowing rectangles, ogres and 4 walls, each just as tall and menacing as . . . well, a wall. The edge of the plateau was coming in fast, some of us had already fallen off the giant plateau. It might not have been as far down as it sounds like, but considering our creator decided to use normal marshmallows instead of the bulky giant jet-puffed ones, that 2-foot fall was incredibly intimidating. I tried to go back, but the wall of energy or whatever it was kept push- oh wait, they told me it’s called glass. So it kept pushing me, and down below was another cage of glass.
It didn’t matter that I was the best karate marshmallow in the world, that glass is on another entirely different level of hardness. The wall pushed me into the cage below, and on top of another marshmallow, which I just floated on top of. He was very soft, I could lay there all day, but the ogre just shook us around, landing my face into a marshmallow's bottom. He put some sort of material as a sort of roof, but it had holes, so it didn’t provide any protection from rain at all.
The ogre held us up very high, and we were very sure he would slam us down onto the floor below. But he just held us right there, letting us all feel the fear of falling, and he laughed! He put us down on top of some sort of flat pancake-thing that had several white pancakes inside of it. Below two of those strange pancake things was a giant box made out of some material that was still foreign to us in the glass cage. The other ogres got close to us, pointing and shaking the cage we were in, making fun of every aspect of our marshmallow bodies. They did this for a very long time, and finally they all left the room after a long while. They used their magic to make all the light to disappear around us, but they decided to keep the light glowing inside of our cage.
It was arguably one of the worst birthdays any creature had ever experienced, born to terror and enslaved in a glass cage for the very first day I had lived. However, the time in the cage wasn’t all that bad, there was a pile of sugar and a bowl of water in our cage, so we didn’t die hunger or thirst. It was warm, it had all my fellow creatures alive in the cage, and most importantly it allowed us to figure out what our bodies were capable of doing.
Several of us had moved on from getting angry at that stupid voice in our head to trying to figure out how to get the person we wanted. I first tried pointing, saying “Here I want!” but that didn’t seem to do the trick. Several of us finally decided that we should associate a sound with a creature, that is to say we decided to name each other. We weren’t exactly the best at figuring out what names we should each have, we just made random noises as our names. Within a few seconds we figured out that not only was ish-jab-gun-kah-ooh-bauoe-tokilikitihabble-troo-gibbi-tam too hard to pronounce but just as equally hard to remember.
So we named ourselves differently, there was rock, glass, sugar, water, wizad, lizad, porridge, oatmeal, fly and unk. We began to utilize our names, mine being ‘rat’, but it quickly got confusing. I wanted to eat some sugar, so I told the group to let me through,”Path make to sugar.” I told them. But I was quickly guided to the marshmallow named sugar, and I said,”No, the one type next to water.” unaware that water was standing next to sugar. After a while of this we all decided to get names that weren’t grunts or objects, which is harder than you might imagine, but eventually we were named. I was Henry, and the others were named as followed; George, Malley, Edward, Charles, Charley, Edmund, Harry, Phil, Matt and David.
After that we kind of all became concerned with our own problems, each having a unique thing we kept worrying about. I was having a hard time living with the voice in my head mocking me, and George couldn’t see the glass, so he kept running face-first into it. Malley was running around the place after realizing there was something crawling around in his mouth, screaming,”It’s in my mouth! Help! Help!”. Edward was trying to figure out what the heck fingers were for, attempting everything from eating them to tryingto be a gecko. Charles was scared since he kept inflating and deflating for an unknown reason, Charley was next to him attempting to not breathe to stop the inflation. Edmund decided switch to two words in the sentence that was describing him.
Harry kept his eyes closed, trying to find his way to the water without opening them and experiencing the light around him. Phil, well Phil was jumping all over the glass cage, crawling up the walls, around the marshmallows below and on the roof. Matt was closing his eyes, but unlike Harry seemed calmer than anyone in the room. A few of us circled Matt, curiously watching him as he was laid down and breathing deeply. He seemed so calm, and yet so unaware of the many marshmallows surrounding him.
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