Chapter 1: Galacta Noms ! (1/5)
I do not know if you too, father exponentially dearest, experience dreams the way I do, when you descend into your deep post-meal slumbers. That comically oversized helmet feels as if it hides the ever-electrified equivalents to neurons and synapses in your cranium to even myself.
Well, here's the thing. I dream. Every agonizing night, I dream about the same events. The minor details differ, as if penned and inked by different creators, or adapted to multiple forms of media with moving pictures; but the events projected to me during REM stages of sleep always follow the same direction, always spiraling beyond my control, whether lucid or otherwise.
And yes, daddy eternally dearest, you may - in your oh-so-amazing wisdom - judge it laughably self-centered that I'm contacting you across galaxies to discuss simple hypotheticals, rather than a cataclysmic event befitting titles like "Wars", "Infinity", or "Crisis". This is a hoax. This is a dream. This is an imaginary story. It's a story that I've imagined in uncomfortably exhaustive detail, a "What If" I have asked myself far too often.
Every night is the same dream: I consume the Earth.
I live up to my heritage as Galacta, Daughter of the Planet Eater Galactus, and add the quadrilionfold, scrumptious inhabitants of my adopted homeworld to my stomach's contents - all estimated 975.196 Exacalories of them, right down to the smallest of Pym Particle-reduced Avengers, or the furthest of offworld Guardians.
Yes, eating is on my mind. There is no way it couldn't be. Even cloaked by the Power Cosmic, I am surrounded by food. Moving, talking, walking, working nourishment that greets me in public areas. Snacks that ramble on about their day, discuss the most recent Kree or Skrull movements peeking in, and ask me questions - while I remain busy drooling over every tasty pheromone they're exuding and every other bit of food they talk about. Proud chunks of juicy meat bragging about their mass, or trying to put on more, advertising their nutritious value and savory taste. From my couch, hundreds of television channels that are merely minuscule variations of food networks. In the relative calm of the outdoors, foodstuff that chirps and chatters and skitter about to be among trees. In the vastness of space, entire maps become cafeteria menus. On streets, wander food that makes remarks about my human disguise, its lips and glasses and long black hair from simulated follicles, inquiring among themselves (possibly for reproductive purposes?) whether I would spit, or swallow.
And the answer is, duh, I would swallow. Obviously. I would swallow this entire biosphere on a moment's notice. Everything. It would tingle so delicately, sliding past my lips, and into my throat, flushed by acids to the very core of my being, merging with my gurgling waveform. It takes every nanoangstrom of my being to NOT bite Latveria or Sokovia free from their underlying tectonic dinner plate! And this is even knowing, through Cosmic Awareness, the societal and ecological collapse that would follow, while still barely filling me.
Of course, daddy overwhelmingly dearest, you and I both know that the self-titled, proud apex hominids of this Earth only offer a negligible gain in gigacalories; and most of the "Homo Superior" or "Inhomo Supremis'' specimens would be comparably light snacks, less than a percentage of our recommended daily intake. Even the entirety of the species and its sub-species, to put it to humans' clumsy metaphors, are less than a particularly noisy and spicy grain of sesame on a jumbo cheeseburger. They're easily outmatched by tones and gigatons of domesticated livestock; the 70-times larger collections of deliciously lively insect colonies; tasty masses of underlying algae forming its lettuce... And still, spending most of my time among the conscious hominid fauna, and having most of my discussions with them, spending hours in secret protecting them from extraplanetary threats, these sentient lifeforms, worryingly, end up at the focus of many of my cravings. I wish I could control my hyperfixation, render it something relatively harmless as romance stories, figurine-collecting, skipping comets across uninhabited systems, or macrame; but no, my waveform is coded at the very basest level such that I keep coming back to the urge to devour.
There's so many rationalizations I go over, as do you, daddy disgustingly dearest. "We will one day give back far more to the universe." "We are higher beings beyond the spectrum of good and evil." "We must maintain the seal on Abraxas." "Celestials incubate inside planets, and we keep their population at manageable numbers." "The biomass won't live forever anyway, it's best to eat it before it goes bad." "They'd much prefer to be eaten by someone who knows them, and cares for their emotions, than some unfeeling intergalactic incarnation of entropy or by a mouse-based megacorp." "Just look at what happened to Earth-1610, it deserved better!" I repeatedly claw for proof that I'm more than a monster, more than an unfeeling engine of gluttony, more than my prying wants. But try as we may try to fool ourselves, give more meaning to our existence through fables and allegory, use technobabble to justify our behavior, we remain thralls to the most simple and gnawing biological urge: EAT.
Near universe-level knowledge bordering on omniscience, and somehow, every other discussion and argument we have boils down to "what do you want for dinner tonight?" If I had been birthed as a larva, or a flower, or Asgardian, I would have these exact same instincts, and none of the angst accompanying it. I do not recall asking to be spawned in this cursed form.
And so, the subject of my dreams are along a similar tune. Quietly lulled to sleep by unending gurgles, considering myself fortunate if I've snacked on a piddling fleet of bony Shi'ar invaders, or a piddling Living Planet-based bacterium. And in the subconscious realm, the thin boundary of conscience and pity gives way to my billionfold hunger pangs.
It begins differently night by night. Some nights, after my Power Cosmic slips, a set of civilians become conscious of my presence; consciousness quickly ascending to a sacrificial cult; and as they fling themselves at my mouth despite my protests, I lose control, and get accustomed to the taste of humans. Some nights, a team of super-humans led by a captain wearing nation-based sigils contacts me to help with a deadly threat to their precious planet; and in the heat of the battle, the borders between foe, friend, and finger-food dissolve. Some horrifying nights, my mind is disconnected from my starving body, looking in from a distance as my tongue automatically lathers the surface of New York City, in a despicable mix of burning shame, waveform-curdling terror, and famished jealousy. Some tantalizing nights, the leaders of the planet give me the accord to just hold them in my maw; and the temptation to flick my tongue back and let them fall grows too strong. And some rare and embarrassing nights, that irritating Canadian with red-and-black clothing has "chimichanga" appear in his yellowed textboxes with such alarming frequency that my painful hunger pangs gain the power of nuclear warheads.