Chapter 2: I dream of hopeful beginnings.
Have you ever felt like your travelling faster than light through a tunnel smaller than the pin of a needle? Me neither. It's uncomfortable.
|#| "Hello" |#|
What the hell! "Who is that!"
|#| "I'm the facsimile silly. I'm a partial merger between your and a tiny piece of your benefactors consciousness" |#|
... Okay. "Some questions, where are we going? What should I do when I get there? Do I just get a new body or what? How's it all gonna work?"
|#| "... 1: Don't know 2: Depends 3: You're taking over someone who is braindead but alive 4: Way to broad to answer. Listen. I am you. I know what you know, I know what you want to know. If you die I die too, you don't need to race to ask the right questions. Lemme tell you all I know about how this works" |#|
Oh thank goodness. "Tell me what I need to know"
|#| "Well, first things first. I know very little. I was made for one purpose and one purpose alone. To weave the powers of Fate, Causality and the Fundamental foundations of the universe to our benefit. This will allow me both to hopefully keep us alive and makes me the bridge from which you will send power back to your benefactor or if you manage to get really close to winning and need just a little bit of extra help I am also the bridge through which additional help can arrive." |#|
|#| "I don't actually have any memories or even an independent personality. I am a literal perfect reflection of you, I appear sentient but am in fact more accurately just a branch off the tree that is your sentience. I'm more akin to a part of your brain than a second entity. All that I can do, I do instinctively, even I do not know how it actually works." |#|
|#| "Right now your mind is being downloaded into most suitable vessel that our benefactor could find in this universe, someone close enough to death that their soul could be ripped out of their body and replaced with ours, but alive enough that it won't take too much energy to heal you on arrival. Most likely someone who took a hit to the head causing a localised fatal brain bleed; not much physical material that needs rearranging to restore viability. That's why they do it like this by the way, the effort required to send out 100,000 such souls to take over different universes is still less effort than using an avatar to directly invade just one. Even if 99% of us fail, its still much more efficient. And no before you ask I don't know anything else about the whats or whys, I just figured that part out based on how we are arriving." |#|
Okay fair enough. You said what we had to do when we got there 'depends'. Depends on what?
|#| "Well, soon after arrival is when most perish. You are literally jumping into a body that moments ago died from something. You might get lucky and arrive inside someone who had an unlucky fall or some kind of innocuous accident that won't make any witnesses ask how they survived. But in more than half of cases new arrivals enter a lose-lose scenario where they are either killed again or locked up or some other critical failure scenario that results in immediate seed recall, a.k.a death anyway." |#|
Oh.
|#| "To make matters worse, because our goal is to completely subvert and control every living being and physical law of the universe we are invading, it is necessary to inhabit a body that has not ever used or controlled any of these laws themselves, someone untrained in the use of any of the most powerful forces in their home universe. Bottom of the ladder. Fodder. Prey. If we survive I can change things several orders of magnitude faster than any other mortal, but I need time and safety, two things that could possibly be in short supply." |#|
So if we are unlucky and someone beat me to death for example. I'll just promptly die again when they realise I'm still breathing?
|#| "Hmm, not necessarily. I won't be able to transform anything about us initially. To do that I will need you to take actions that change the fate of individuals in this new plane, help them, harm them, it doesn't matter; I can take that shifting causality and weave it into permanent boons for us. On arrival we will not have caused any changes I can utilize. But..." |#|
...but what?
|#| "But that is not counting the changes that have been made in advance of our arrival. It takes an enormous amount of energy to enact even small changes from outside the planar barrier of the universe, hence the economy of our arrival in simply healing the body. But extensive alterations were made to our soul, to your consciousness, before we were sent on our way. A helpful voice in your head is only the beginning of what has been done to us." |#|
Well that is slightly disconcerting. Alright, what changes? What kinds of goodies have we got?
|#| "Okay, well literally thousands, it's probably easier if I just present you a practical summary of the capacities it grants us, rather than the actual underlying meta-spiritual modifications. I'll update the info after arrival to make it more relevant once we know what kind of place and what the natural laws of the universe actually are. The previous two never became strong enough to transmit intelligible intel back to the benefactor, so we are going in blind. Lots of modifications have been made to our soul that are only useful in very specific universes, chances are we are not showing up in one of those so there is no point going through a hundred different useless alterations; but here is what we can do that I think will likely be immediately useful..." |#|
| # # #| Capacity Summary | # # #|
:-: Soul Traits :-:
Time displacement: Our mind exists partly outside of time within the place between places, this allows us to choose the speed through which we advance through Causality. In practical terms this gives us a near limitless amount of time to react to any situation and consider its ramifications, to devise plans and to execute actions with painstaking precision. I'm also pretty sure I can use this to stop us from ever needing to sleep, I might need a few days to figure that one out though.
Dispersed Cognition: Our sentience remains housed fully within our soul rather than being dependent on our physical vessel. As such things like head trauma or pain will not impair our ability to concentrate or take action. This has its limits though, an injury destroying the part of our brain that controls our lungs would stop us from breathing, and we would likely die very quickly from the blood loss as well. Not to mention an injury that would normally knock us out would do so for good reason, continuing to move around rapidly just because we can could cause further brain damage that fainting was meant to prevent. A useful practical implication, we are immune to all natural torture, we can fake being able to feel pain though if required; I can split off a mirco-copy of our consciousness and allow it to authentically react to pain, it wouldn't even be pretending. Unless someone had the ability to detect multiple streams of consciousness it would be impossible for us to be discovered. Dispersed Cognition lets me modify just about anything about how we think as much as I want really; we don't have unlimited mental capacity, but the ability to concentrate on multiple things and slow down time means we might as well have. Speaking of which...
Maximum Mental Potential: We are still innately linked to the physical vessel we are inhabiting, as such its not possible to be infinitely intelligent. But we will be as smart as your vessel could have been with an ideal upbringing and fashioning of their mind. Perhaps a better description would be a perfectly trained mind. Either way unless we are really unlucky you will be smarter and more strategic than in your previous life, fingers crossed. If we encounter someone smarter than you that is cooperative or can be forced, I could modify us up to their level of intellect.
| # # #| End Capacity Summary | # # #|
Okay. Wow. How long do we have before we 'arrive'.
|#| "Oh we already have, I'm just stopping us from advancing through Causality until we were done talking. And I can tell you we have arrived in a quite unusual host. A young girl, about 14 years old. Something partially crushed her larynx causing her to only be able to breathe in blood coughing spurts. She got enough oxygen to prevent cell death everywhere except her brain, seems she willingly departed her body when we started pulling, didn't want to live anymore is my guess. Our benefactor actually took a liking to her, I felt her being pulled in for an audience, probably to be offered the same deal we were. She had no other injuries. This may be an unlucky arrival, she was probably assaulted, the damage is consistent with an adult punching her hard in the throat. The oxygen starvation means we won't be able to access her memories for a few hours, unfortunate, that will make blending in very difficult if there is anyone that knows her or asks questions. If you are ready, we can start the flow of time. Can't avoid beginning forever." |#|
Oh boy, yeah let's get this started. We can just pause again if we need more time to think anyway.
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