From: simon leo barber Newsgroups: alt.sex.cthulhu Subject: Sideways to the Future (Repost, S.Barber) Date: Wed, 05 Jun 1996 19:19:05 GMT Sideways (and turn left at Rh'ley'h) To the Future.. Part of the "Get Wilbur Tag-Team Jam", written by Simon Barber for the Alt.sex.cthulhu newsgroup. WARNING: This contains scenes of explicit sex with Dimensionally Overachieving entities. If you object to such, I respectfully ask what are you subscribing to Alt.sex. cthulhu for anyway ? Moonlight shone corpse-pale over an island bleached to darkness and shadows. On the far rim of the Pacific, something stirred. Mortals were here. There was a place, outside the fishing docks and the airstrip, where many slept peacefully - or, on this night of the year, that had a name before human mouths learned to speak, some slept not at all. Kazuko Leclerc was a student at Toho Academy, in that august institution's fiftieth year. Well, she mused as she picked her way through the moonlit night, unable to rest - well, a fine evening for a walk. She glanced around on the pathway leading up to the hill - not a soul to be seen. In a puddle left by the afternoon's rain, she checked her reflection, grinning broadly. One in three Japanese humans these days, the mid 2030's, had a generous dollop of "Anime Genes". It showed up most clearly on women, she thought gratefully as she brushed back her bob of blonde hair, the light from the solitary satellite twinkling in huge nocturnal pools of eyes that spanned almost three inches across. Her figure was trim and athletic, legs inordinately long - with the stride length and relatively fragile skull, her sub-race had more successful track-and- field athletes than boxing champions. Checking her pocket calendar, she hurried up towards the rendevous. This was one "date" she had to prepare for, well in advance. On the far side of the island, down by a little-visited cove, something more than usually strange decided to happen. A door opened, and a man fell through it. It is well-known that most of the universe is empty space. But that is a lie: the void seethes and bubbles with half-realised potentials, as more or less likely things take their chances. Almost all of this happens like the famous tree falling unheard in the forest, on an atomic scale; pairs of particles and anti-particles borrow enough reality from the surroundings to live miniscule lives and then annihilate, total effect averaging out as zero. Opening a door big enough for a living mass of sixty-kilograms to emerge sourcelessly, probably takes as much energy than the traveller's weight in plutonium could provide. But it happened. "Ahhhhh...." came a tortured grunt, as Masinger fell to the wet ground. A tall, emaciated man, he lay for an instant like a tumbled pile of loose timbers, limbs askew in the sand. He raised a haunted face to the stars. "It looks ... Clean !" Standing, he stared around at the unremarkable vegetation, the salt- fresh breeze waving through his hair. A hand that was blistered and pocked like an addict's touched his face cautiously as he looked around. "The last Gate .... and I'm the last one out of it. This is Earth ... but what year is it ?" Staggering up a human-scale path from the beach through bamboo groves, he aimed for what seemed to be a structure on the hilltop, outlined in the rising moon. And though he had learned to fear such things, maybe here - maybe it was different. Maybe here, he was not the last man left alive on the planet. Something was happening, on the hilltop beneath the glare of the eldritch and fantastically gibbous moon. The soil of the very summit was stripped bare like the gleaming bone of a trepanned skull, a rounded dome of rock revealed, its smoothness broken by a ring of monoliths erupting out like daemonic horn buds. And there, over by the great central slab - something moved. It was a thing of roughly human shape, as seen from a distance - at least, from certain angles. Naked save for elaborately flowing tresses of tarnished golden hair bobbing down to waist length in vast bunches, it was only when it turned round that Masinger felt his few hard-earned Sanity points starting to suffer again. Humans did not have glistening, kangaroo-like tails, nor did they have tentacles sprouting from their shoulderblades like second sets of arms. And the skin - from belly to ankles, squamous flesh glittered dragon-like in the moonlight, with more of the scales visible on the inner arms, and on what of the creature's ridged back was visible between waving hair and writhing tentacles that moved in careful, deliberate patterns. A pattern that was almost - but not quite - one Masinger was terrifyingly familiar with. "Oh, no......" he whispered, throat dry. "It's the same here - THEY'VE broken through - maybe THEY haven't got so far, though ... maybe there's still folk around who can stop them....." His thoughts went back to the nightmare years, the nuclear Armageddon which had been only a foretaste to the true Hell spawned on Earth when the Old Ones had returned. Certain cities had been - prepared, he now knew: what had appeared to be road and autobahn bypasses had secretly been given a double function, their carefully planned shapes and materials binding the population within to act as foci for beings that awaited Outside. And when the bombs had fallen and the cities burned, on precisely the right night of the year - with an unstoppable rush of power drained from the death-agony of millions of unknowingly sacrificed victims - then the beginning of the End had arrived. On the hillside, something in the air seemed to congeal, as the writhing tentacles traced precise patterns and snatches of chanting came to him down the wind. As he moved closer, Masinger caught the pale glitter of skin on the central altar stone: long limbs stirred in the shadows, and Masinger winced at the all-too-familiar sacrificial scene before his unwilling eyes. For a second, he paused. In his pocket, he fingered the last working Elder Sign that humanity possessed - not enough to protect him against what regularly walked like rolling mountains around where he had just left, but ... here, he might just stand a chance. At any rate, if he had to go down fighting, it was better to do it on this world, where it might make a difference, than on his own which was even now being dragged off into a nameless space for utter destruction. "Charge!" Holding the protective charm high above his head, he summoned what strength he had remaining, and ran forwards while he entrusted his soul to any Good deities that still watched over here. He had eighty paces to go - maybe there was just time.... The humanoid's gesturing tentacles kept on working, while its - no, he corrected, Her head, turned round in alarm. She seemed wide- eyed in alarm, surprised more than anything. In the bright moonlight, he noticed with revulsion that where the frontal patch of glistening scales met human-looking flesh, the join was studded with a line of smaller bumps, graduating from mere bumps below the curve of her ribcage, to writhing finger-length tendrils at the pouting sea-anemone knot of her loins. She turned and looked at him, her mouth open - and then two things happened in the same instant. There came a tearing, ripping sensation in the air above the hilltop - and horror fell from the skies like steaming offal spilling from a suddenly slashed plastic bag. A shoggoth. Four tonnes of amorphous, writhing horror incarnate, its liquescent bulk boiling and seething in and out of spacetime. Eyes, teeth, unnameable protrusions and dozens of groping pseudopods flicked out, some of them reaching towards the long-legged girl tied to the altar. - I've only got one chance - Masinger's mind seethed in horror of its own. - I can save HER, whatever happens to me ... just hit that foulness square-on, it'll blast it right back to Hell...- . That he would be left without protection, the Elder Sign probably being lost in the sucking dimensional vortex, flashed across his mind for only an instant. He had to save the sacrifice, whatever the cost - her entire soul and body was instants away from being ravished and devoured, he knew from bitter experience. His arm went back to throw .... But in the instant all this happened, so did something else. With the touch of liquescence on her skin, the girl on the altar opened her eyes. Legs began to spread as a glistening black pseudopod slipped up her inner thighs - and then she caught sight of the figure racing towards her, Holy Symbol upraised and about to banish the Monster from three-dimensional existence. "Peeping Tom !" Kazuko yelled in outrage. Unsnapping the parachute harness that belayed her to the altar, she suddenly materialised a huge mallet, its hard rubber head the size of a gallon jar. Before the stranger could throw his symbol, hers was tumbling through the night, dead on target. There was a loud thump, and the tumble of a body falling. Mazinger hardly had time to know what hit him. "Humph." Kazuko checked the stranger's airways, setting him in the Recovery position as she and Toemi carried him outside the ring of stones and left him. "Serves him right. Why, this could have ruined our whole evening." Picking up the Elder Sign, she put her frisbee skills to good use. Toemi felt her headache clear immediately. "I know there's a few bigots left, but I didn't know there were any around the island," she commented, eyes open in surprise. Like Kazuko's own, they were far wider than regular human size, though less than the "90 percent skull frontal" that was the ideal of beauty for Anime-gened folk. Indeed, her mother was entirely human herself. "Anyone'd think our Lord Cthulhu had done all those things those crazy arabs accused him of, not saved the world like he did." She waved a respectful gesture towards the open ocean. Kazuko nodded, then nudged the figure sprawled at her feet. "Anyway. He'll be awake in a couple of hours - I've had practice with this." She materialised the mallet again, grinning ferociously. It was a sorcerous skill given to most Anime girls, though generally it worked only involuntarily, in moments of ultimate annoyance. Her nocturnal eyes lost their narrowed glare. "Right ... now, before we were so rudely interrupted...." she turned hungrily back towards their guest. Toemi chuckled, as her friend sprang onto the altar with athletic grace, and prepared herself. The parachute harness would tie her securely to the planet, whatever happened - two solstices before, she and her mate had been surprised by sunrise, and sucked straight off to dread N'graath'yin, off in the primal plane. Which ordinarily was a popular place to go to on holidays, but due to the exchange rate on involuntarily temporal boundaries, she'd only got back an Earth month later, and had a lot of studies to catch up on..... "You've got five hours before sunrise.... better make the most of it ." Toemi reminded the pair, tapping her watch. She grinned, feeling her own love-tentacles becoming long and slippery at the sight. Turning away, she whistled a remade version of an old pre-Milennium song. "Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, Oh, no, no, I'm not a Juvenile Deliquescent...." Kazuko had better things to do than to listen to her room-mate: she could do that any time, and Tekel-Li had distinctly brief "visiting hours". Her brow furrowed in concentration, for a minute. Although she knew her lover as Tekil-Li, it was a fact that all Shoggoths called themselves that. The only way to reach a distinguishing symbol was from within - which needed MUCH closer contact..... "Ah ... there's nothing like a few millenia of experience, when it comes to pleasing folk..." she sighed, closing her eyes once more and letting the strong, marvellously viscid tendrils explore. One coiled over her breasts, then swelled and flattened, developing exquisite suckers and cat-like tongues that lapped at her nipples. The weight on her chest increased slightly, and she laughed as she opened her eyes. Looking down, she saw the versatile semi-fluid mass had encased her in a thin, body-hugging layer like a wetsuit- except where it had settled over her breasts. There, it had swollen and thickened, so she looked down over a huge (forty-eight inches, if they're an inch, she marvelled) set of jet-black globes, even capped with saucer- sized protruding nipples of their own. She bent her head - with her slim figure she had never been able to do anything remotely like this - and stretched an eager pink tongue out to touch the improbably round assets she seemed to have acquired. She gave a gasp of pleasure. Talk about feedback, she marvelled - the outer surface was mimicking every touch to the responsive layer against her own skin - what she touched, she felt. "Im-Pressive...." Kazuko lay back, and for a minute gently stroked and caressed her proxy's superhuman flesh, feeling the pleasures building up deep within her core. Eat your heard out, Virtual Reality, she grinned. "If there's ever a fancy-dress party we can both get to ..." she whispered, seeing an ear open up in the main mass "How's this - I'll plug in my ten-centimetre Portal, you can send a hundred kilos of mass through and leave the rest at home ... you can BE the costume. ALL over ..." Suddenly, she caught sight of the dipping moon. Time enough, they had - but they didn't have all night. Wriggling around, the top-heavy chest bouncing delightfully, she caressed Tekel-Li's nearest pseudopod, feeling it pulse and thicken with alien heat. Her hand was soon running with viscous fluids, and as she reached down to make one last check all was ready, discovered some of it was her own. Marvellously strong tendrils climbed up, wrapping her thighs like ivy on strong white pillars, and her eyes widened still further at the sight of her pale pink belly exposed and framed by the glossy mass like some expensive rubberware garment. Her blonde-curled loins were damp with purely mortal excitement as she looked deep into one of the huge eyes her star-spawned stud turned to bear on her. With a delicious liquid noise, she heard a huge phallic tentacle pull loose from the main mass, and glisten as it swayed towards her. "Oh, you've been thinking about this one, I can see..." she growled, her voice husky as she ran an approving finger along what of its length she hoped to manage. "Suckers, bumps in all the right places, and ...... well, well. You HAVE had some interesting playfriends over the years." The pseudophallus was deeply grooved, rather than the usual mammalian design - from her Natural and Unnatural history classes Kazuko recognised it as a Hectococylus, the mating organ of octopi and squids, and their various intelligent relatives. Shivering in delight, she ran a slim finger down the firm-fleshed groove, the adaptable tissue now of perfect texture... "All right - let's see if you remember this from Last solstice, eh ?" She relaxed, and let her body slip into autopilot mode as the tentacle gently pushed itself inside. Looking down, Kazuko marvelled at the sight- her own pink little body, penetrated by the massive jet- black entity that had come all the way from Outside, just to come all the way Inside .... She determined that it would be a trip it would remember millenia hence. Not only her body was on offer, tonight. Her mouth opened, and a slender tentacle slipped inside, its well-planned secretions inhibiting the gagging reflex as she welcomed him. [I'm ready as I'll ever be ... ] she broadcast. Telepathy was not one of her skills, but the biogenic field of the shoggoth pulsating within and without, picked it up by induction from her brain. An inquiring mental tendril probed - found a ready welcome within - and plunged inside like a torrent of oil, mingling with the very essence of what made Kazuko herself. Toemi looked up from her pocket pop-up Necronomicon, and grinned. The mental splash that ultimate mating created, could be felt by folk like herself, who HAD inherited telepathy, all over the island. Her tail and tentacles swished in amusement. "Typical Kazuko," she chuckled to herself, watching her friend's eyes literally light up as a greater energy than the usual owner possessed them. "When she goes all the way, she goes ALL the way." Three hours later, a tinge of light shone in Pacific the skies to the East. Toemi yawned, and went to check their interloper. He was still out cold - thanks to one of the anaesthetic patches she carried in the first aid kit of her cycle, parked a hundred metres down the hill. "Saves having to tie him up," she commented to herself, as she dressed. "And he'll have slept off some of his headache - though he doesn't deserve to." Then she looked back towards the altar, still a writhing mass of pink and black. [Come in number Sixty-Nine, your Time is up], she broadcast. From somewhere in the tangled web of thoughts and limbs, a reluctant acknowledgement came drifting back. Gradually, Kazuko was uncovered, her entire body glistening with frictionless lubricants no erotic engineer would ever synthesize. Her eyes still glowed - and in the pale pre-dawn light, her slightly bulging belly shone a healthy green with the kirlian interference pattern of immortal seed taking root in mortal flesh. For a few minutes longer the last pseudopod pumped and writhed within Kazuko's body, before pulling out with a delightful sucking plop. Gasping, the human girl fell back on the flattened part of her lover it had kindly spread over the stone altar like a waterbed. "Waky waky, time to come home." Toemi gently shook her friend's slippery shoulder. "Things to do, before dawn." As she watched, the glow faded from those blue eyes, and a tired-looking anime girl was back in place, her face a weary study in utter repletion. "Ooooooh ... haven't I just burned a few calories tonight," Kazuko gave a wicked smile, spoiling the effect by winking. "It was lovely - Tekke-Li just sucked me right off my soul was sucked right out of me , just like that." She gave a delicious shiver. " I was swimming around in his consciousness like a software virus in the biggest megaframe ever built, feeling everything mixing ... that's quite something. And I could tell he was pumping every bit that'd fit into my head - talk about broadening your experiences." She shook her yellow mop experimentally, as if to see if anything rattled. "I feel like a Shetland pony come back from a month's holiday at a Shire horse stud farm - mind expanding ? A tonne of LSD wouldn't come close. And talking of coming....." She ran her fingers over the gentle glow of her womb, now filled to satiation. "I know it's not perfect, from his timing point, but .... I think I'm in with a chance this time." She looked up at her friend, anxious expectation written on her pretty face. Toemi shrugged. "Father was a bit higher-level than Tekkil-li, you know. But it's always tricky to predict - I'm an only child even so, and I guarantee Mother tries as often as she can. Of course, this setup's pretty new, it might need some fine-tuning....." Her squamous tail slapped the drenched altar-stone. Although literally hundreds of thousands of matings took place every year these days between three- dimensional mortals and rather better equipped beings, the birth-rate was sadly low. Or at least, she mused, from a mortal viewpoint - Folk outside are delighted with their children, but they've been used to an aeon-long life cycle. We only have a century or so to live, but our breeding urges make up for it, and we've developed pleasure centres to match..... Just then, there came a groan from outside the circle, and Tekkil-Li gave an outraged whistle. Kazuko looked over, startled. Then her face fell as less pleasant memories returned. Another, disturbed whistle came from the Shoggoth. Toemi glanced round: the stranger was stirring, visible in the growing light. "Oh. Say goodbye - Tekkil-Li says it's time to go home." She watched as Kazuko dived into his embrace one last time like a child onto an inflatable play-castle, and then the two girls were standing alone on the hilltop. Kazuko waved goodbye in the general direction of Space, and sighed. "There he goes. Still, next time I'll have a little surprise for him, if I .... what's up ?" She caught Toemi's gaze, and her face fell. "Oh, no. Not again." Toemi sadly nodded. Even in the growing dawn, she saw the distinct greed glow of her friend's sated belly fading rapidly, as the biogenic field failed to find a haven within her. It was a little- understood subject, she reflected glumly - things don't work the same way as with two mortals. The parent's energy fields have to combine just right, like two interfacing computers needing more than the physical connection - which is why there are so few like me. Technical fixes like Artificial Insemination are plain non-starters. Kazuko ground her teeth frustratedly. "Damn. Just maybe, if I'd had a little more time with him ..... if I hadn't been INTERRUPTED..." She looked at the stirring figure outside the circle, and a huge sledgehammer appeared in her hand. She swung off the altar with the gleam of battle in her eyes. Toemi was just deciding whether to let her friend pound the peeping tom into as amorphous pulp as Tekkili, or not, when the second unusual thing happened that night. Another human suddenly appeared from nowhere, standing in Kazuko's path. He wore a long brightly-patched coat and scarf, despite the warm dawn of Summer solstice in the mid-Pacific dawn. He raised his hat politely. "I wouldn't DO that, if I were you." Half an hour later, the first rays of sunlight were bathing the hilltop as four sat down for breakfast. Toemi had brought a light snack and fruit juice in the sidecar of her Cthulhu Mythos Cycle, but the second stranger had materialised a large hamper stuffed with provisions. "Introductions are in order, I believe," he said politely. "This is Torm Mazinger, who is the victim of a misunderstanding - and of rather worse than that. He is the last human left alive from his world." He nodded towards the scarred, emaciated man who was ravenously eating out of the hamper. Oddly, it did not seem to be growing emptier. "Where's he from ?" Toemi asked cautiously, making a Sanity Roll and spreading it with butter. "I hadn't heard there were any colonies in trouble - we've got folk who were carried off on holiday and never came back, but ... I've not herd anything bad of them." Mazinger almost choked, food scattering messily. "YOU can say that ? To get as far as something like you, able to exist in daylight, things must have gone .... FAR. How many millions died here to summon YOU ?" "As I said, a little misunderstanding." The older human's face was a creased roadmap of uncertain age. "Mazinger is from Earth - but a parallel one. And yes, it is 36 years after the Millenium for him - but things did not go at all well, on his timeline." Kazuko snorted. "I don't think they went too "well" here, to be honest. JHVH and Lucifer coming back in person, collecting up all their worshippers' souls and running off with them - why the world hardly survived Armageddon ! If it hadn't been for Buddha, Ameritsu and Lord Cthulhu, the place wouldn't BE here now." "Mazinger's world no longer is." The older man stood up, stretching. "And as for myself ? Let us say, I am a traveller. I have - authority - in many spaces and in many times, and have been known by many names. Osiris, Odin, All-Father, All-Healer - indeed, I have been a doctor to many wounds of the worlds." "Doctor ? Doctor who ?" Kazuko queried sharply. The old man just smiled . "I have not needed to visit your world in your lifetime, Kazuko Leclerc. The natural forces are not imbalanced, and others are more than capable of looking after them. So you might call me the Wanderer." Mazinger was shaking his head; his forehead was a mass of sweat. "I can't believe I'm hearing this," he growled. "I've seen my world destroyed by - things - like her, and the thing I saw tonight - and you're saying it's all right ? That unnatural things like THAT " he gestured towards Toemi " are part of any sane or natural existence ?" "Hey, she's perfectly natural," Kazuko grinned, putting an arm around her friend. "What goes up, must come down - beat that for "Natural"." She stroked the strong, slightly viscid tentacle longingly. The Wanderer raised a bushy eyebrow. "In his world, you would not be," he said quietly. "But in his world, mortals were simply fodder, their flesh and souls a tradeable commodity. Your - partner, tonight, Miss Leclerc, would have torn you to pieces slowly, and bound your soul in undying torment had it the power. And yet, both your world's histories spring from the same route - one where you can agreeably let an Elder Entity take full use of your pleasure centres, knowing that any damage you take, it will feel - and one where things were - unfriendly." Toemi's tentacles waved. "When you've lived Strange Aeons, you develop a strong sense of self-preservation," she stared at The Wanderer "Masochism, isn't part of that." Kazuko's face fell. "You mean, nobody's ever .... and liked it ... and ..." she looked Mazinger in the eye. "Are - were - there any folk like me, proper sized eyes and that ?" He shook his head helplessly. "Never. I've seen cartoon characters, but real live ones like you just don't exist. Never did." There was a dead silence, broken only by the screech of seabirds and the distant roar of surf from the beach a kilometre and more below them. At last, the Wanderer spoke. "There is a figure, one man, who changed many histories. In Torm's timeline, he brought about Armageddon in the way Torm recalls it - and indeed, the living envied the dead." Kazuko shrugged, pulling out a charity "Undead-Aid" shirt from her friend's Mythos cycle. "We've got vampires and such, they unlive and let unlive. Bloodletting's good for some heart conditions." "Not for Torm." Wiry eyebrows raised again. "There is, indeed, one man. More than a man, I fear - one who was raised to become a demigod, raised on the ravished souls and spilled blood of others. He slew a world - Torm's world. That one, you are close enough to aid, leaving others to help in other timelines. " Toemi shrugged. "My Dad's an Elder God. He takes me back home in the holidays - it's a scene I'm used to." "If you go back, you will see things you're NOT used to," The Wanderer's voice was steel-hard. "And if you dare, you can pit yourself against him, who will destroy you utterly if you make the tiniest of errors." Kazuko stood up, stretching. Worlds were destroyed, off in spacetime, she knew. Most of it was the fault of cosmic collisions, or the cosmically proportioned stupidity of politicians given cobalt bombs to play around with. But a world where nobody had even one friend like Toemi, like Tekkil-Li .... she grimaced. "I don't think you'd have picked us if you knew we'd NO chance of doing the job," she said evenly. "There's folk on this very island, who've got fighting skills to beat us any day of the week - and mental powers ? Toemi's pretty hot, but I'm a psychic brick. Still - it's a thing that needs doing. " She gave a worried smile. "Hell, never mind Toemi, even I wouldn't exist on Torm's timeline. So I've a vested interest in, like, self-preservation." The Wanderer looked from one face to another, and slowly nodded. "I will tell you, then. The year you must return to, is in the late twentieth century. And the name of your foe, is Wilbur Whately." ***** End of Part One ************