I swung a golf club and a snarling white-eyed beast covered in bell-shaped growths and frothing mold was hurled several miles away. Landing with a distant thud...on the side of the canyon, I’d been aiming for instead of the actual canyon.
“Damn...Off by just that much…” I groused. Putting away the golf club and stepping back.
“Heh...Don’t sweat it, man. It’s hard to get a hole in one when the ball’s trying to tear your face off,” said the other player. Laughing. He was a tall gangly guy who looked a bit like what you’d get if a certain famous Wizard in White, had way too much fun in the 1960s to 1970s of the various alternate earths, and then eventually crash-landed to being a tenured university professor.
August Choudhury was a tall, almost gangly looking, guy with brown skin, a narrow face, angled lips, and an angular well-formed nose. His black eyes were sharp and framed by a set of bushy white brows. He had a long, but well-groomed, beard that still kind of looked like it could have something living in it. His hair was a long, thick, curly, waterfall of silver and white that went down to his knees. He dressed like a pensioner despite still being at the peak of human physical fitness. A pensioner who, as mentioned prior, still had some very fond memories of their time in the 1960s and 1970s. His clothes were always covered by bright swirling color and mind-bending geometry.
I might, or might not have mentioned him before, but August was a friend of ours. August was also the most powerful mortal practitioner of magic in the entire Sigfrid Galaxy, and “one” of the most powerful beings in his universe...including the gods, devils, and other native immortals. It’s kind of a funny story, how we got to meet the guy.
He’d somehow been flying below our radar despite his power, when suddenly he popped out again. When he popped up and the whole team reacted immediately, because he wasn’t the most powerful thing we’d ever seen, but he was definitely powerful enough that it raised alarms. I was seconds away from reducing the dude to nothing but unactualized sub-quantum particles, when the guy just sort of waved at us said, “Yo”.
Apparently, he’d been asleep for the last thirty years, or rather he’d been cultivating in seclusion, or something of that nature. Then when he came out he couldn’t help but notice that we were secretly controlling everything, so he figured he should probably come out and say “cheers”, feel us out, see if he’d need to fight us for the sake of the world and some such.
Yuval and Kian were a little put off by him at first, because from the vantage point of someone who’d been immortal, and basically just shy of omnipotent for the longest time, it probably feels a bit off to find some random mortal acting like they can take you on. The closest mortal equivalent would walking into your bathroom and finding a cocky spider, or centipede, and having it acknowledge you and then calmly carry on with its business-like not only does it have every right to be there, it’s somehow immune to squishing, or being caught beneath a cup and being removed from the premise.
As for those of us, who were more recently mortal, we were just very cautious of the guy. We didn’t think he could hurt us, but it was easy to see that he could maybe turn into a right pain in the ass, if he set his mind to it. I mean, look at what I’d done, in a short few thousand years?
Funnily enough, Ellison Scholar, the angel of the group, quite liked the odd little mage, which spoke worlds for his character. People think angels like everybody, but it couldn’t be the furthest thing from the truth. An illusion created by the angel’s culture, and the fact that their threshold for empathy and mentally acknowledging folk was much higher than most races. Angels were basically just very, very, polite, and were actually quite choosy about genuinely liking folk. Being “liked” by the angels was kind of a huge deal, because often it said something about who you were on a cosmic level.
Anyway, long story short, after the awkward first howdy, we kept bumping into each other. Then eventually, it turned out that he ended up being a pretty chill guy. A pretty likable guy for most of our group. He was mortal but not “fragile”. He’d been around long enough to have the big picture view, but he was one of the few who didn’t get up their own arseholes about it. Also, it was a bit refreshing that even if he did sometimes try to “casually” sneak secrets about the underlying nature of reality from us, he wasn’t one of those mortals who tried to befriend us for benefits.
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Fast Forward to the present, and August, Ms. Scholar, Kian, and myself were all gathered at a certain planet that was about to be overtaken by these alien, extradimensional, horrors that August called shroom-wolves. The planet was uninhabited, but the shroom-wolves needed to be wiped here, because if they were allowed to overtake the planet it would turn into a shroom-planet, and eventually explode spreading alien-shroom spores onto the much more populated planets that were near it.
Interestingly enough, this wasn’t a dark song orchestra created threats. Eldritch abominations like the shroom infestation popped up all the time. Especially, in moderately high-energy universes, like the Sigfrid Galaxy’s. If things were working properly then the immortals in charge of this region of space would have already wiped them out, but they clearly weren’t. Our Empty-Society could deal with it as well, but there was a certain threshold of things that we’d hold back on interfering on, because it’s supposed to be within the means and domain of the native immortals.
So, yeah...someone was probably gonna get yelled at after this. Since this eldritch mold situation could definitely turn into something catastrophic, and I was willing to bet that the beings in charge of this part of the Sigfrid Galaxy, were dragging their feet on actually doing something, because they figured a certain group of nearby blackholes would keep the shrooms from spreading outside this corner of the galaxy.
In the meantime, August was doing what he apparently always did. Quietly working in the background, to keep certain things from looming into view and becoming a threat for this universe’s more popular heroes and protectors. It kind of made sense, if this were a story, August would be the kind of OP character that could totally just resolve the main plot with a wave of their hands.
Hell, as far as I knew, this universe probably did have one or more critical-narratives that it was running for the sake of the universe’s progress and survival. Superhero worlds were especially susceptible to that kind of thing because their societies tended to have that dynamic naturally, so it was nothing big for the wills of the worlds, and the gods and devils, to place a few bets to make stuff happen.
Our Empty-Society could place limits on that sort of behavior to keep things from being taken too far, and creating a mess as big as the Dark Bell Collective created, but we couldn’t actually stop it for….cosmic reasons. Technically, speaking, there would probably come times when we’d be required to run our own critical-narratives because direct intervention wasn’t possible for some reason or the other.
Anyway, Ellison, Kian, and I were out here with August helping him take down the shroom-wolves. A million, or so, magical clones of us, were scattered across the planet, playing an extended game of golf using the shroom-wolves as balls. We’d opened up massive canyons inside the planet’s surface and we were smacking the shroom-wolves into those canyons. Then once most of the shroom-wolves were dead, we intended to detonate the planet. Turning it into a short-lived artificial sun, that August could send to the ill-mannered eldritch mushroom-lord that was so rudely allowing its spores to spread into our space.
Just in case that not-so-subtle signal to knock it the fuck off with it spore-spreading didn’t work, I’d sent a message to Jack and Kal, so they’d go and have words with this cheeky entity about respecting other people’s space. Kal and her Empty-Harvester sisters were still fond of mushroom soup after their time trapped on a rock in the middle of the Chaotic. And Jack could always be relied on when good old-fashioned gangsterism was needed to get a point across.
“Alright, my turn...I swear I am going to get one of these damned wolves into that bloody canyon,” I said. Mildly inebriated, and very determined to climb out of the bottom ranks for today’s round of monster-golf. Bringing out a wedge-club this time, in hopes, that it would help me finesse my hits a bit.
