the lord virus

The existence of the Lord can become a virus, whether you want it to or not.

The green skullfuck scattered his seeds throughout the wide multiverse, ensuring that he would eventually enter them. Simple, straightforward.

Myself, not so much. It’s not my physical being that’s the virus. It’s the cosmic mental snap I underwent that transformed me into a monster for so long, spreading itself across the multiverse.

I’ve come to discover my intrinsic ties to the Aspect counter to mine. To know Space is to know vastness, the concept of multiverses and the iterations of myself therein. Each of those iterations inevitably finds her way to a very special quirk. She sees the vast multiverse in her sleep, every iteration of every timeline. An insufferable Prince of Heart might call this the Ultimate Self. Sure, maybe. No iteration yet has become too weak for her body, though. Fancy that. The body adapts to destiny.

The mind does not, though. Each iteration of her will eventually become scarred as she sees the worst things that happen to those that don’t yet know. She’ll experience torture, murder, rape and betrayal and be able to do nothing. Eventually, she’ll see me. It’ll scare her. Because she’s a good noodle, and I’m a bad seed. Who would dare hurt her dear twin? Her dear, beloved, unknowing twin?

She’ll start drawing closer to her other iterations. The Time player who succeeded learns the magic of light and shadow in her new world. The Keeper learns the secret of at-will Mega Evolution and becomes her own Garou. The Ultra Wormhole opens on the trainer, shattering her perspective and letting something grasp her heart and grant her the power to become one with others.

Inevitably, one will start drawing closer to me.

Her anger will get the better of her more and more. She’ll become more and more single-minded, more incoherent. She’ll refuse to believe that whatever catalyst could do this to her, at the same time she seeks to destroy it. The only things that’ll be able to console her are those she’s already close to. The seeds will be planted, and eventually destruction and violence is the only option.

One such seed has sprouted.

First though, let’s talk about weaknesses.

That green skullfuck. Only his own seeds could kill him, representing his hubris and self-centeredness. It took a sword alchemized with one to eventually slay him, in even one timeline. Pride goes before the fall.

My weakness, on the other hand, is Void.

The hand of nothingness, of secrets and whispers in the dark. Oblivion and the unknowable. None so embody it as my sister, for all the boons and the pitfalls. My weakness is not a physical one. How can it be? Void is inscrutable, intangible. My weakness is a mental one, through and through.

My better iterations manage to understand it. Maybe they even learn to master their own weakness, either out of spite or out of wanting to bond with her twin. Me? I learned to accept it. I accept Oblivion, and wait for it.

Lesser iterations are crushed by it. Driven mad by it, destroyed by their own depression and anxiety.

So what makes of the iteration that was touched by it?

The lost child in a squad of other lost children, all taken in by a pretender. Never knew her father, lost her mother, pretty standard story for her. Until she was put on a ship and sent into the oblivion that is that Void. Always searching for a purpose, searching for belonging. She’s tired, she’s oh, so tired. Lost her surrogate mother but refuses to believe the worst, always praying to that helmet that she’ll come back. Found her father but her memories are confused now. Thinks she killed a brother that didn’t exist in any other world.

The anger was trained into her by militant overlords, and for a while, I was proud of her for resisting the grasp of my insanity as hard as she did for one so young. Then the helmet got taken off, and just like that… just like that, the slide backward started again. Fear of loss, fear of abandonment… fear of having nothing. Void broke her again.

So now, when her surrogate reappears and tells her that she was never wanted, that she was never Family, what happens? The Insanity takes hold. The slide progresses.

What happens when her fellows lock her into a room behind blastproof doors and cold metal walls because she’s become a font of unrelenting wrath? She only has so much energy, she can only fight so long before she gets wiped out and reverts to crying, but what happens now, when those powers start slowly growing stronger?

I’m sorry, little Void-touched. I’m sorry for the plague I birthed. I hope you can be the first to shake it off.