There is something weird about having a semi-literal “Bird’s Eye View” of a situation. At the moment that is my current predicament. I cannot move, and I am unsure of who I even am, but I can see into a single room and I can view it from a rather odd angle.
It is as if “I” am nothing more than a powerful camera positioned at the perfect angle for spying on the entirety of the one room I can see. The room is surprisingly plain and fairly empty but it is clearly supposed to be a vast and imposing bedroom of some sort.
The room’s furniture mostly lines the four walls of the place. I can see something approximating a vanity, numerous dressers, and a gargantuan bed all lining what I believe to be the southern wall of the room. Beside that bed rests a beautiful blonde woman who is wearing a rather distinctive and highly sexual outfit composed primarily of black straps and purple, short pants.
She seems beside herself as she stares at the silhouette of someone sleeping on the bed. The bed itself is a monstrous thing perhaps a tenth as large as the room it is placed in and there are gossamer veils that, I assume, serve to protect the modesty of whoever is sleeping on the bed.
I can see the figure on the bed thanks to my bird’s eye view of the room. He is a young man whose body is undergoing a series of powerful and rapid changes that are transforming him. I can physically see his muscles expanding, his face moving and restructuring as if being touched up by some sort of impossible, eldritch plastic surgeon.
The changes are all positive ones, he’s not becoming any less attractive if anything the opposite is true. He is becoming an odd, almost idealized-looking tribute to masculinity and rugged handsomeness.
The figure beside him is whispering something but as powerful as my vision is I cannot hear a thing. The woman beside the bed is tearfully saying something, and I can imagine that her voice is as soft and delicate as she appears to be.
For the next few minutes, I am forced to silently spy on this tearful woman and the comatose body she is watching over. I have to stoically observe the odd but attractive changes occurring to the mysterious sleeping figure and I am unable to provide any sort of comfort or solace to the woman who diligently rests beside someone who might well be her husband, boyfriend, or another sort of family member.
Eventually, after about a quarter of an hour, the blonde woman is joined by someone who enters from one of the two doors which lead in and out of this room. One door is located to the right of the bed, and the other door is located along what seems to be, from my perspective anyway, a northern wall. The visitor enters from the northern door and walks over to the side of the blonde woman.
The visitor is a blonde woman who is regally beautiful. Her beauty is more along the lines of the sort of beauty possessed by “Classic” nobility than the beauty of the woman who has been by the sleeping figure for what has been, in all likelihood, a few days. Truthfully though, I am not sure how I know what that means, or how I know what anything means. Somehow I have a knowledge base despite being… unable to recall anything.
Words make sense to me, I can intuitively understand what various words mean. But as handy as that is, I don’t consciously know why I know what any chosen word means. The knowledge is just available to me, sans any sort of meaningful context. I have no memories I can use to provide context to any of my knowledge, and the knowledge I have is pretty limited aside from what I am learning by watching this one room.
I “know” that I am from “Earth” and that this place is not “Earth”. Aside from that knowledge, and the basic definitions of words, what I knew when I first gained the ability to see what is happening here can be summed up pretty simply. It’s nothing. I knew nothing. It’s annoying honestly, since without any sort of context for what I am seeing I feel as though I am intruding on someone’s privacy by being “here”.
The new blonde woman immediately prostrates herself beside the bed. She quickly clasps her hands together in what I can logically intuit is some sort of position for prayer and begins to mutter something. And as she mutters something, something odd begins to occur… I begin to hear a voice. If I had eyes they’d be widening in shock, and if I had a heart I don’t doubt it’d be hammering in my chest!
“Oh great and mighty sovereign of Juttun, please deign to hear the voice of your servant and pious wife, Sophila Jur Jurnel.” The voice utters. It is the only thing I can hear, and the voice is resplendently beautiful. There is a level of genuine piety and sincere humility in the voice which is as clearly audible to me as the actual words the voice utters.
“I kneel beside you, and besides my dear friend and fellow mortal ‘Stool’, and we grieve your absence. Your family grieves your absence, as do all of the servants and officials who reside inside the imperial palace. You are the fire that warms this hearth, the voice that guides us all. Please come back to us.” The voice begs, still retaining that incredible piety and humility.
The fact that I can hear the voice of who I assume to be the blonde woman kneeling beside the sleeping figure when it prays to this mysterious sovereign is intriguing to me. That has several implications, all of which are incredibly interesting, but even as I ponder each of the implications no truths become apparent to me. I am left with more and more questions. Somehow it seems like everything I learn, however little it is, makes this feel like some sort of odd dream.
“You can answer the prayer… You just have to want to do so.” A voice that is not Sophila’s tells me. It doesn’t introduce itself or offer any concrete advice on how to answer the prayer, it simply tells me that doing so is possible if that’s what I want. I do not attempt to respond to either of the voices for the moment and instead, I continue to watch the room.
If “I” can respond to the prayer then that strongly suggests I am either the emperor who is supposedly married to Sophila or I am someone on that being’s level. My apparent ability to “hear” and “answer” prayers does not make sense to me on any level, but as I think about what to do I can hear something approximating whispers and quiet utterances in the background.
After I first identify the odd sounds they begin to grow louder with every passing moment. I “silently” pause for a beat and allow myself to just listen to the increasingly bold noises. It takes a few seconds of waiting for me to become reasonably certain, but after listening for a few moments I grow confident that I know what I am hearing… I am hearing prayers.
An avalanche of noise is becoming audible to me, growing both louder and clearer with every passing second. At first, I believed these noises to be prayers directed to the “Emperor of Juttun” but I quickly realize not all of the prayers I can overhear are directed at him. I can hear prayers dedicated to three other beings, “The Creator”, “The Devil”, and “Perandor” as easily as I can hear prayers intended for the emperor of Juttun.
Questions fill my mind. How can I hear these prayers intended for seemingly separate entities? Am I all of them? Am I none of them and possessing the ability to hear prayers just allows for any being with this power to hear all prayers? Have I somehow tapped into seemingly secure connections between those who pray and those to whom those prayers are directed? It’s all so weird.
Regardless of the truth of the matter, I can hear countless prayers. The prayers I overhear range from requests as mundane as a homemaker asking what to make for dinner tonight, to people begging to be healed of deadly diseases. Some prayers are even things other than requests for aid but are similar to spies providing reports on the activities of targets of espionage or warriors informing “Perandor” of their latest victories in battle.
The fact that I can hear prayers that do not originate from Sophila or “Stool” is also interesting because it means that my senses are not tied to any singular location. That in and of itself has incredible implications that I can logically recognize and contemplate.
After thoughtful consideration of what I am learning just by idly soaking up prayers, I wonder if there is a way for me to clearly identify myself, especially if I am indeed the emperor of Juttun. I believe I am this mysterious emperor, but I do not have concrete proof of that just yet.
“If you seek confirmation of a suspicion you believe to be true… Open your eyes.” The lone voice from earlier quietly whispers into the back of my mind. Despite the quietness of the voice, it cuts through the “louder” prayers with ease, and I suspect that is because my mind craves answers and the voice is offering me one pertinent to my situation.
I do the mental equivalent of taking a quiet breath before I focus on the sleeping figure I can see still gradually growing more and more idealized looking. I will “my” eyes open and I am both shocked and delighted to watch the figure on the bed slowly open his eyes.
As soon as the figure’s eyes are fully open my perspective shifts from the weird bird’s eye view I have grown somewhat accustomed to, to a new, first-person perspective that I can intuitively tell belongs to the sole male in the room. The sudden shift is a bit disorienting, and that is only compounded by the fact that the two women in the room react almost superhumanly swiftly to my awakening and quietly gasp in both surprise and delight at me waking up.
“My Emperor! You’re… You’re awake?!” The woman who has been here longer quietly utters and half asks the second part of her statement. Her voice is as delicate as I imagined it to be, sounding terribly fragile and filled with concern and confusion. I gaze at her through the veil which separates us and I opt to quietly nod before I say anything.
“Oh, Sovereign of Juttun… I am so delighted I could be here when you first awoke. I am deeply moved that you answered my prayer.” Sophila tells me, her voice as radiantly beautiful and pious now that I am awake as it was when I was in that odd liminal state I have only just escaped. I pause for a moment and wait to see if either woman has more they want to say but neither speaks, both clearly waiting for me to say something.
I remain silent as I study the figures on the other side of the veil. As I peer at them I sense my eyesight growing stronger somehow and before long the veil seems to lose some of its solidity and opaqueness somehow, just enough for me to see through it as though it were see through.
I recognize, through a method that is unclear to me, that the veil that separates “Stool” and Sophila from me has not actually lost its opacity but that my sharpening senses are simply strong enough for me to easily see what lies on the other side of the veil. Regardless of how I am doing so, I can easily lay my eyes on the two women kneeling at the side of my bed.
Both of the women are lovely blondes who look at me with sincere, though distinct, expressions. The woman known to Sophila as “Stool” is worried about me, and I can tell she is cognizant of something relevant to my current condition, while Sophila is simply heartened by my mere presence and the fact that I am awake.
“Sophila, Stool… I am indeed awake, though I am a bit disoriented.” I explain, lightly. The voice that escapes my lips is oddly beautiful. There is something impossibly musical about my voice and I can tell, again without any sort of context, that the words that I have just uttered are impossibly beautiful and musical. There is unnatural pleasantness to my voice that I can sense soothing the concerned and anxious spirit of Stool.
“My Liege, you sound… different. May I part the veil that keeps us from looking at you? I wish to lay my eyes upon your face and see you as you are in your present state.” Stool asks, courage filling her voice with every word she manages to utter. Courage, and desperation. She is still scared. Sophila, curiously, does not question the apparent changes to my voice.
I sense her eyes on my silhouette. I can feel her studying it, waiting for the slightest movement she could reasonably interpret as any sort of “Go ahead”. She desperately wants permission to do as she has just asked.
As she waits and watches me, scanning my silhouette I can consciously feel my senses gradually expanding. For now, my senses are confined to a range that is still within the room I am in, presumably my bedroom, but with every passing nanosecond, the range of my senses expands a bit more. I can also tell that this is a perpetual thing, that my senses will always continue to grow in width and scope.
I take a nearly imperceptible breath and then I lightly nod. Stool sees my silhouette nod and she lightly moves a touch closer to the bed she is kneeling beside and gently grabs a portion of the veil. She delicately pushes it out of the way and looks into the newly created gap so she can lay her eyes on me.
I watch her eyes widen and I sense the numerous slight but meaningful changes to her physiology that she undergoes as she sees what I know is my “New” form. She blushes nervously, and I can physically hear some of her body parts adjusting to elevated hormone levels and the rate at which her heart beats. Sophila notices the way Stool begins to tremble and curiously moves next to her so that she can also see me.
When Sophila looks at me the changes are more subtle than in Stool’s case but they occur nonetheless. I recall how I looked a few minutes ago, and I think about how I looked when I first opened my eyes. I am also somehow aware of the fact that things my physical attractiveness have not stopped increasing, and that like my sensory range increasing with every passing second this is a perpetual thing.
The mechanics of these changes are not things I understand intuitively but I have enough awareness of them that I am certain they will only ever move upwards. I am akin to some sort of burgeoning divinity of beauty and attractiveness, my attractiveness will continue to slide upward to the point that if someone looks at me once and then looks at me again a minute later I will be noticeably more attractive the second time they lay their eyes upon my form than I was when they first laid their eyes on me. It’s weird but not unpleasant.
It’s all so odd… And perhaps the oddest thing of all is that I can sense the presence of other mysterious abilities within me, all just waiting to awaken or otherwise flare to life. Their presence within me is as obvious to me as the air in one's lungs would be to a human being. And what else is obvious to me is that I am something beyond a human being, even if the right words to describe my species and my state of being are eluding me.
