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Do Entities Dream Of Crystal Sheep? (Endbringer Lewd Worm CYOA) Chapter 4
🕑 Added 2023-05-13 20:03:34 +0000 UTC-x-
CHAPTER 4
-x-
[ Worm : Earth Bet, Post GM (Evelyn) ]
It’s been a few hours since Evelyn managed to get rid of her pursuers.
A feat that was made considerably harder when you took in the fact that they included parahumans of various categories, and Dragon in particular, who seemed to have fully come back ‘online’ after Taylor had set her back during her rise as ‘Khepri’.
The movies made it look easy, but dodging the notice of literally everyone on the planet was hard. Especially so if the vast majority of the same people who were after you had superpowers. The fact that she was three times as tall as the average human didn't help much.
Evelyn eventually got tired of them constantly hounding her, so she decided to come up with a rather… unorthodox escape plan and jumped into the Atlantic as soon as she reached the eastern seaboard.
It was at that moment, Evelyn learnt a particularly interesting tidbit of information: Endbringers don’t float.
Unfortunately, it seemed that Leviathan was an exception to the rule rather than the norm, and was a cheating cheater who cheats, who used his OP hacks (hydrokinesis) to get around where he normally should have sunk like a particularly heavy rock… like Evelyn did.
Unlike Leviathan, she didn’t have hydrokinesis or any other oh so convenient method to get around her inability to swim right off the bat.
While she had no issue actually surviving underwater, she was forced to walk across the decidedly uneven seafloor.
While the view was stunning, breathtaking even, (almost as if she stepped into a different world entirely), it contributed to hindering her mobility more than anything.
This planet was already fucked, and Evelyn didn’t want to mess up its few functioning ecosystems it had even further by bowling through it like a wrecking ball.
She also didn’t want to leave anyone a super-easy trail to track her down with, especially when Dragon inevitably returned with her swim-suits.
Evelyn didn’t really have issues navigating undersea, since her senses didn’t suffer any noticeable change from what she could perceive above-ground, but she was getting tired of having to go through an obstacle course every time she wanted to move ten feet in any direction. Any attempt to manipulate her density or buoyancy only resulted in her running into issues with the ocean currents, or resulted in her floating around like a beach-ball, or even had her involuntarily performing her best anchor impressions.
After many failed attempts, she managed to keep herself about as buoyant as a human by modifying her wings to carry a lot of air pockets, and then flattened others to form a single large sheet-like stretch that connected to her (admittedly long) tail. It made her look like a manta-ray crossed with a mermaid… with legs.
It was a decidedly…unique look but it served to let her swim without too many issues.
"I always wanted to be a mermaid when I was little." She mused. "Dreams do come true after all. HA, take that mom, look who's silly now?"
As she swam towards the oceanic depths, only a single great white shark was curious enough to investigate the ‘strange not-fish-thing’. It was a visceral improvement over being ‘investigated’ by octopi, and the temptation that got her head muddled until she remembered that she could simply turn it the fuck off.
“I admit that I’m far more… curious than what ‘normal’ people would consider healthy, but [Tentacles] would have to wait until I manage to find someone that was more ‘person’ than an animal.”
While she wasn't one to kink-shame or call out someone else's preferences, she personally preferred to leave certain things be.
She was so far removed from humanity right now that she didn't really have the right to judge others based on social norms that may not even be consistent across the multiverse.
However, Evelyn still considered 'consent' important and she was fine with that. It made her feel like she retained a little bit of what used to make her human.
What she was not fine with, was how her new body was changing her perception of things.
Even now she wondered if her [Directives] had something to do with her fixation on 'consent' when the rest of her inhibitions had practically jumped off a cliff.
It was not a fun thing, doubting the very foundations of her existence.
“I Need to go through that list. Fast. I am not going to be happy if someone managed to disable me just because impalement turned me on or something.” Evelyn paused, floating in suspended animation as her face contorted in disbelief.
“Are you serious?” She asked out loud, her voice coming out warbled in the water.
“Wait, is that... NO. Just… no.”
“You know what?” I’m going to review that fucking list right this instant, and nothing will stop me.”
-x-
After having to shut down the sum total of the perversions of entire civilizations, Evelyn was left tired and exhausted and feeling like she had just lost a war.
“I won… but at what cost?” She said, trying to raise her own mood but failing miserably. “My sanity, most likely.”
At least the ones that were left were… relatively tame.
‘And until the event comes where they become relevant, it will stay that way.’ Evelyn sighed.
Evelyn eventually settled on a particularly flat stretch of the deep-ocean floor.
There was very little in terms of light but her eyes could see her environment clearly all the same. As her feet touched the expanse of smooth sand interspersed with only the occasional boulder, she decided that it was as good a place as any to set up base.
Evelyn activated her [Domain], spreading the dreamlike haze to cover a sphere around a hundred meters across. Then she created a dome made of the same graphene-borophene composition that she had used to take Lung out of the fight. This version of it, though, was arranged in a three dimensional matrix that was considerably more ‘solid’, and with the meters of layers she used to reinforce it, it would act as a sufficient barrier for her purposes.
“If I didn’t know about the kind of bullshit parahumans were capable of, I would have considered this excessive. I really need to get my hands on some wonder-material to protect against ‘exotic’ effects.”
Then she paused, a curious expression on her face. "I wonder if they got Lung out of his 'bondage suit' yet?" She snickered "He can't get any bigger using his powers without turning into chunky salsa with all the pressure it would cause, but he should escape if he was smart enough to wait things out and shrink down." A frown crossed her face at the thought.
"I should have just killed him outright but I didn't want to make a mess of my first meeting with the people of this world... well, more that what I already did." She shook her head. For all that Evelyn was succumbing to 'the dark side', and even with her sense of morality noticeably deteriorating, the pointlessness and senseless cruelty of the things people like Lung did bothered her. Evelyn knew she couldn't impose her (questionable) morality on others who did not share the same origins as herself, but she found few cases where things like 'rape' and 'sex-slavery' were acceptable rather than not.
While she didn't mind some kinky role-play (loved it even), she generally agreed to disagree on how she should personally treat people who did shit like that for real.
Sighing, she switched out the water for breathable air. Evelyn wondered where all the extra mass from the water went, considering that she didn’t really destroy any of it. Then she figured that she was probably dumping it all somewhere in her most-likely infinite pocket dimension.
“I need to take the time to check that out sometime soon.”
Evelyn then detached one of her ‘smallest’ wings and took her time unfolding the defensive layering until she had a large, flat pane of crystal that nearly covered an entire half of the dome. She then sent a [Ready] to Queen Administrator, telling her that it was safe to send Taylor over.
A short few moments later, Evelyn saw the limp form of a one-armed girl passing through the wall of crystal, her [Domain] allowing the crystalline expanse to act as a temporary bridge between her current location and the shardspace.
Evelyn gently picked up the unconscious young woman, and sat down on the ground with her legs crossed, Taylor in her arms.
While it wasn’t strictly necessary, the next part worked better in the presence of intimate contact. Evelyn wanted to have a better control over what happened next, so the arrangement was enough for now.
She brought two of her unused powers to the forefront. [Life link] and [Resurrection]. The former was an ability that allowed her to connect her ‘life’ with that of someone else, something that would kill everyone connected to it in the case of her own death, or increased her own durability by adding theirs in the case of the ‘victim’s’ demise. It was a complex bit of quantum entanglement that made her want to scream out that ‘physics didn’t work that way!’.
The second ability, as its name suggested, was the ability to ‘resurrect’ the dead. It was a powerful ‘secondary expression’ of two power interactions, namely the [Life link], along with [Sexual healing], the ability to heal anyone so long as she had sex, or 'intimate' contact with them. As par for the course, the entities took liberties as to what 'intimate contact' actually meant. It was complete bullshit in how it worked, and the effect was powerful enough that if she took the effort to kill someone personally (with her bare hands or such), she could bring them back in a state of undeath through the same 'intimate contact' that killed them.
"This is such bullshit. Though, I don’t think either of us would like it if I took liberties with [Sexual healing], even if it was to fix her.” Evelyn sighed. “So that means going through loopholes. I can feel the headache already.”
[Resurrection] was an ability that resulted from a power interaction between two other abilities, and the most Evelyn could find words to describe the process was that she essentially restored reality's save file of a particular person. Instead of linking the victim to herself, the life link would essentially connect itself to a version of the 'victim' before whatever injured or killed them, and then the connection would synchronize the two, essentially restoring them to whatever state the victim was in the past when the life link managed to connect to them.
Yeah, restoring a save sounded accurate. Reviving the dead wasn't an issue. No, that was easy since there was little chance of ‘data corruption’. The issue came with the fact that in living subjects, the 'revival' erased the memories of whatever came 'after' the 'save'.
At least, that would be the case if she used the ability as intended. She could perform the process on a living target and cancel it halfway through. While there was significant risk of something going wrong, this would allow her to control ‘how much’ of something she wanted restored, or reverted.
“Would you still be you, if your current self was erased so an older version, or something else, could take its place? I guess, others wouldn't be able to tell the difference, but I can sympathize with that. After all, I have to embrace it every waking moment. I have to stare at that question every moment I see my own reflection. I guess… I don’t want someone else to have to live with that fear.”
The ability will work on nearly everything, and the only limiting factor was the amount of strain it would put on her own powers since they weren’t being used as intended.
Evelyn drew a tether, ethereal and static, unseen by anything and everything except by the caster and the recipient. She attached one end to Taylor. But then instead of attaching the other end to herself, she threw it into chaos of uncertainty where time and space blurred together into one. It eventually found a target. It was Taylor, moments before she asked Panacea to remove the boundary that separated herself from her ‘passenger’. Evelyn started to reel the tether in, and as if by a miracle, any and all damage that had taken hold of the ‘current’ Taylor’s body started to vanish without any explanation as to ‘why’ and ‘how’. Just as the process was about to be completed, Evelyn released the tether, and the link faded into nothingness.
Taylor was healed, her mind and body restored to the same condition they were in on that fateful moment. Since she had released the tether before the process could completely overwrite her current self, her memories and some of her powers from her time as Khepri were still there. They were muddled, but that was for the better though, all things considered.
However, the issue remained that for all that Taylor’s brain was mostly restored, she was still saddled with a Queen Administrator without a limiter to separate their egos. Thankfully, Queenie had learnt how to control the bleed-over to an extent while Taylor was unconscious, so while it wasn’t as overwhelming as when she was still Khepri, it was still there.
It was simply not something that could be undone anymore.
[Concern : Data] came the confirmation from Queen Administrator.
Indeed, it couldn’t be undone, but Taylor could learn to adjust to the strain. She could still control her insects without issue, but the more she exerted herself while trying to control other humans, the more Queen Administrator had to push through to assert control. Which meant putting Taylor near other humans (or anything else similar enough to count) was a horrible idea until she managed to get some semblance of control over her powers.
That meant Evelyn needed to take Taylor to a place where she would be safe, a place where she wouldn’t be able to master the locals.
Evelyn needed a place where Taylor could recover.
Fortunately, she had an idea of where to start. It also helped that the place had people who would be more than happy to help with Earth Bet’s problems, and solve Defiant’s rather… unique problem.
“Well then, time to figure out how to create a portal”
After sending Taylor back to QA, Evelyn turned on her [Portal] module and twisted the space in front of her with a target in mind.
It promptly exploded in her face.
"...This is going to take some time."
-x-
[ Nier Automata (Evelyn) ]
It was the second time Evelyn had entered the orbit of a planet that was supposed to exist only in fiction, but Evelyn quickly figured out that this particular world was an entirely different beast when compared to Earth Bet.
Evelyn never knew a planet could look so fundamentally wrong before. It was tidally locked, the world had stopped spinning entirely, and it floated in the void of space slightly outside of Earth’s natural orbit, with an eerie stillness she never knew could be used to describe Earth. The fact that the planet wasn’t a frozen/burning hellscape already was a testament to the fact that some sort of weird shenanigans was afoot.
Evelyn felt a massive echo bursting from the crystalline portal to the shard space she had made using a spare ‘wing’. It took a few moments for Evelyn to realize that it was Queenie taking a scan of the planet.
[Warning] A cautious broadcast from QA had Evelyn straighten herself in surprise.
[Cyclical Temporal Singularities Detected] Evelyn didn’t understand a vast majority of what the message said, but the simplest translation she could infer went something along the lines of : “This world is fucked, it’s so riddled of extra-dimensional holes and space-time anomalies that I’m surprised that it’s still in one piece. And then someone had the bright idea of tying the planet’s progression of causality into a circular loop so convoluted that it might as well be called a knot. All without having the place implode on itself… somehow. This place is a fucking minefield and if you’re not careful, you might blow the entire thing up.”
Evelyn had the sudden urge to groan.
“I didn’t know what I was expecting when I came to this world, but finding the entire dimension perforated with inter-dimensional anomalies is…not that surprising in hindsight. Considering what their magic and technology is based on, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at all.”
“Hoping for things to work out without a bump is just going to be an exercise in futility, isn’t it?” Evelyn asked herself.
Evelyn went through the detailed reports QA had made of the place, and brought up the things she considered ‘important’
[Gratitude] she sent back, before diving in. She noticed many things but the key things Evelyn identified was the presence of only twelve satellite bases and the ruins of a thirteenth floating in space. It seemed like that last one had detonated very recently, though. And then she came across scans of a great white spiraling mega-structure that seemed to be collapsing in on itself. Just like that, Evelyn felt that her suspicions were all but confirmed.
Evelyn had a rough idea of where in the timeline she managed to find herself in, and she was thankful for it.
“At least I won’t have to deal with the machine network anymore if things turned out right. Though, this is the second time I found myself in a setting post-canon. Is this going to be a pattern? Wait. Oh”
Evelyn stared blankly as she noticed literally everything on the planet's surface scrambling around like a kicked anthill. It took certain parties a bit longer but it seemed everyone was aware of her by now, a fact that was made all the more obvious with how all the various flight units swiveled around in midair to face her general direction.
“Wh- what set them off?” She wondered. Then her eyes widened in realization, and the urge to facepalm intensified. “It was QA’s scan wasn’t it?
...how?
“In hindsight, a sentient hyper-dense mass of inter-dimensional doorways might be noticeable when your entire tech base was bolstered with extra dimensional magic, and alien technology.
What worried her weren't the androids, or the even the remaining machine life forms… no, it was the Swarm of gigantic skull shaped spheres (or sphere shaped skulls) rolling around in the desert.
"Emil."
Or at least the clones of him that replicated ex-nihilo during the initial alien invasion.
The issue was that they were staring at her, every single one of them. They were staring at her, who was out in orbit, From Earth.
“Okaaay… this is going to really troublesome, isn't it?”
-x-
“I think I should have played more bullet hell while I still had the chance” Evelyn grumbled as she weaved through massive crimson lasers and a seemingly endless wave of Emil heads screaming at the top of their (non-existent) lungs as she proceeded into atmospheric entry.
Evelyn could have chosen another spot to land, but the desert was in fact the best place she could find to reduce collateral damage. She suspected that neither the androids, nor the machines would appreciate her destroying what little they had left of the humanity of this Earth. The ocean was excluded for similar purposes since it was practically infested with machine life forms. In the desert, she only had to worry about avoiding a sentient magical entity that was considered mankind's 'ultimate weapon'.
"I worry about my decisions sometimes."
She took one look at the dark side of the planet, and decided to err on caution and stick with landing in the desert. There were dragons there. Dragons. Evelyn had never played Drakengard, or the other associated titles Yoko Taro weaved into an interconnected universe.
So while she knew they existed and had a very basic idea of what happened in the lore, she had little idea what the dragons of this world were actually capable of, or what they were even doing in the ‘grim darkness of the far future’, in a continent that was positively swarming with machines.
Evelyn however, had no intention to stick around and find out until she knew what the fuck was going on over there. At least they didn’t seem to plan on flying over to the ‘bright’ side of the planet anytime soon, so she’ll leave them alone for now.
That left dealing with a hyper aggressive, immortal, traumatized teenager who obviously had a bone to pick with alien invaders… a teen with access to eldritch, extra-dimensional magic, and was capable of replicating himself endlessly.
Facing him directly, she could understand what inspired the Aliens to create the machine life-forms. Flying towards this barrage was intimidating, if nothing else.
Evelyn had gotten clipped by a beam once, and panicked when it went through her defensive layering like butter. It reminded her of [Sting] so much that she nearly retreated immediately. It only took her a few moments to realize that it didn’t even manage to penetrate halfway through her defensive layers, having fizzled out by the time it got to the denser parts.
It seems like the sheer amount of mass it had to destroy stopped it eventually. Still, the amount gouged out was substantial, and it only took her a single look at the damage reports to decide that it was better to dodge the beams rather than tanking them directly.
Magic in this world was eldritch, almost lovecraftian in origin. The older variants of it even more so due to its potency and lower degree of separation from the cosmic horror that started this whole mess.
The ‘maso’ particles Emil used in his attacks existed in multiple dimensions at the same time, and even if it was partially blocked in one, it would still move forward in the others and leave similar trails of damage anyways. It gave any attacks made using the material insane penetrative capabilities, and unless you used the same particles for defense, or exhausted them out with obstacles, any hope of surviving a direct shot as a 'normal' human was… not that great.
With some tuning, Evelyn could maybe replicate the feat, and even generate ‘maso’ of her own with her [Domain], but she couldn't use ‘magic’ itself unless she had access to an actual database on how to use the stuff. It was sort of like knowing that hydrogen was a viable source of energy, but all you had to work with were a pair of hydrogen canisters and not much else… On its own, it wasn't that helpful really.
Her ‘shard brain’ ran an analysis, cross referencing her various memories of the ‘Nier magic’ she had stored with the real thing.
[Conclusion] : Dimensions accessed by particles are ‘spiritual’ in nature. The particles themselves are analogous to 'Reishi' or 'True Ether', Exhibiting properties of both. The current reality cluster is not capable of naturally producing the particles. The particles are naturally capable of warping space and are capable of creating pocket dimensions, crossing dimensional barriers and even distort time with sufficient effort. Being spiritual in nature. Beings with powerful ‘souls’, or with enough ‘maso’ of their own could endure attacks made using the above substance with reduced damage.
“Huh, so having my [Domain] produce it anyways might have some use after all, if only to defend against this universe’s bullshit. I want to learn how to actually use it though, something to ask the andr-”
Evelyn nearly screamed in surprise when a burst of pleasure assaulted her mind, as another crimson beam slammed into her torso. It ate all the way through a multitude of layers in the wings that covered her body until the magical laser fizzled out. Evelyn tumbled through the air in an uncontrolled descent, harassed by even more lasers and screaming Emil heads until she crashed-landed into a sand dune, kicking up a massive cloud of sand with the impact.
Evelyn twitched as pleasure ran havoc across her body, even as her [Domain] generated more mass to regenerate what little was lost and damaged.
"Damnit Evelyn, stop getting distracted in enemy territory!"
As she stumbled to her feet, Evelyn cursed in flustered embarrassment. “Why do all my landings have to be so utterly shit? This is the second time!” Evelyn ducked as a laser swept overhead, distorting the air in its passing. “Okay, I admit it might be my fault this time.”
Just as Evelyn was about to reorient herself towards the direction where QA marked the most probable ‘resistance camp’ to be at, something big crashed into her.
The last thing Evelyn saw before she was run over, was a large, white sphere the size of a school bus.
She was sent tumbling into another sand dune entirely as the sphere made a U turn to crash back into her. She rolled over, and stared blankly at the yellow sky that was clouded by a dust-storm, a result of the disturbance caused by the altercation between two super-weapons.
“WE WILL KILL THEM ALL!” A chorus of young voices screamed in a delirious rage as they rolled towards her in a tidal wave of skulls and lasers.
“... I think it’s about time I left. I feel like I've overstayed my welcome here.” Evelyn said.
She took one look at the approaching tide, and came to a decision.
"Nope." She affirmed, popping the 'p' as she said it. Evelyn flexed her [Domain] to remove the ground directly beneath her, and then fill it back in after she had passed. Evelyn quickly dug her way through the Earth like a fish in water as she approached her destination cautiously. She paused every now and then to check if the Emil heads were still following her. It was such a convenient method of escape that-
Evelyn froze.
"Why the fuck, did I not do this while I was trying to escape back on Earth Bet?" She cursed. "Dammit Evelyn, you got to play smarter than this."
She sighed, exasperated. “Now, how do I go about approaching a bunch of traumatized, angry androids about the prospect of helping out their not-so-extinct creators?” She paused. “Is everyone traumatized in this thrice-damn universe? Damn it Yoko Taro."
It was about time she put her 'alien ambassador' gloves on.
“Well then, let’s get started.”
-x-
Worlds visited :
- Worm : Post GM, Earth Bet
- Nier Automata : Post Ending
