Cosmic phenomena occur in every multiverse. In some multiverses, cosmic phenomena occur more regularly than in others and this is almost always purposefully done by whatever unfathomable entities craft multiverses.
In one multiverse, the type of cosmic phenomena that is occurring in a small, still undecorated college dorm room, has never occurred before. While one college freshman sleeps the night away, having spent the day moving into his very first college dorm, and having gone to sleep under the impression that he will have his room to himself for the school year, the empty bed next to him is suddenly both the birthplace and the current resting place of a strange superficially human creature.
The strange creature in the bed has not been created ex-nihilo. Instead of being a living creature fashioned from nothing, the creature’s origins are decidedly darker than being a cosmic miracle being given form and sapience by the whims of the eldritch administrator of the multiverse.
The creature that is currently fast asleep is, in truth, a beating heart of a whole cosmic plane given a humanoid form, a soul, and sapience. It is the embodiment of the plane known as “Hell”, a tortuous and vile place of darkness where demons, devils, and other creatures ruled by malice rule desolate castles where the screams of the damned are applauded by unholy royalty.
The “Sleeping Beauty” on the bed is a living creature with all the might of an entire plane, a layer of reality itself given a vaguely human form and a conscious. This is not merely an experiment, it’s a cosmic prank that the multiversal administrator responsible for this multiverse is inflicting on the people who call this seemingly infinite collection of universes home.
The being in the bed looks human. He has the olive complexion commonly associated with humans from Latin America or the Middle East, he has the dark hair that is commonly associated with people from all over the planet, and he has the healthy muscular build associated with young student athletes. All in all, he has a rather dreamy, and stereotypically handsome appearance. It’s on the inside where he differs from humans.
The bodies of human beings hide muscles, bones, and organs underneath the skin. The body of the being in the bed has none of those things. Instead of having organs, the interior of the body of the pseudo-human in the bed has facsimiles of them, shallow attempts at mimicking the complex organic structures and fluids that help shape and support the human body.
The clothes he wears, on the other hand, are actual, real clothes. He comes into being wearing sweatpants, simple underwear, and a non-stylized t-shirt.
The figure is destined to sleep for the next few hours. During the time that the mysterious stranger is sleeping history is rewritten in subtle ways, with time itself being rewound and edited in the simplest and least obstructive ways possible to achieve one simple end. Starting at a point a little over eighteen years ago, events are slyly added to the history of this universe.
The first event that is stealthily added to history is that eighteen years ago a couple of Hispanic adults have a healthy baby boy. This couple quickly “perishes”, having never actually existed in the first place, and a long string of falsified events are added to history that are all unremarkable and culminate in the memories of a handful of residential advisors, and the memory of the young college freshmen who thought he’d be living by himself, are being rewritten even as they sleep, all exhausted by the eventful move-in-day they have endured.
The purpose of this mental modification is to account for the fact that the last dorm in the building where a college freshman could have been placed, a solitary dorm room where only one student was going to be living, is now home to two college freshmen. None of these rewrites are complex or stressful, but doing enough of them to account for eighteen years is a bit time intensive as it’s so many memories to rewrite even while doing the literal bare minimum.
The moment that the last memories are rewritten, sunlight is just beginning to reach the dorm’s window and sneak into the dorm room. The figure who has been the subject of the creator of the multiverse’s attention for a few hours awakens, right as the creator of the multiverse smirks at their creation and sits back, ready to see what choices their newest creation will elect to make mere hours after their creation.
Less than an instant after the figure wakes up, he sits up and proceeds to inspect his surroundings. The handsome Hispanic student curiously wracks his mind to search for any sort of context that might help him understand where he is, but he is unable to find any. Information about his surroundings readily fills his mind, with examples of such information, being facts like what a bed is and how to use one, but there is nothing that answers any of the pressing questions on his mind.
The figure studies his surroundings for a few moments, taking in even easily overlooked facts like the number of shoes that are placed underneath the twin-sized bed his roommate is sleeping in and noting the strength of his senses as he unpacks the sensory stimuli his mind works to contextualize. His eyes are superhumanly keen, his nose inhumanly sensitive, and his hearing strong enough to hear conversations occurring all around him.
He can overhear what roommates more than two floors above him are saying! What’s more is the fact that his senses are not so mundane that all he does is hear well either. The living heart of an entire plane possesses an attribute that makes him constantly grow. Every passing second his senses grow a touch sharper, becoming ever so slightly keener, and he is not yet consciously aware of this very peculiar trait.
Nothing about his surroundings immediately screams anything of note to him, other than the fact that he is certain he is in a college dorm. He has no mental mechanism that’d allow him to question this instinct, and so he trusts his gut on this, which gives him some peace of mind as he continues to study every detail of the room he is in.
The mysterious college student eventually slides his legs off his bed and gets up once he has studied the impressively spartan room to his satisfaction. His pseudo-muscles easily elevate him and support his weight with no difficulty, allowing him to escape the confines of his bed with ease, even as he realizes that there is something in his pocket.
Once he’s on his feet he physically inspects the pockets of the sweatpants he is wearing and finds a wallet containing a handful of hundred-dollar bills, a debit card with a sticky note denoting its pin number, and both a simple ID card and a student ID.
He studies the photos on both IDs and he quickly, and correctly, assumes that the face he sees in the IDs is his own, which he uses as the basis to conclude that he is a student and thus that this is probably his dorm room. This information, which he has yet to conclusively confirm, provides him with a modicum of comfort since he can now make one mild conclusion about himself. That said, he knows he needs to confirm this information and that is not something he can do all alone, so he begins to prepare to leave the room.
He inspects himself to the best of his abilities and finds that he has a muscular, but not showy, build and that he is wearing casual clothing. The figure sticks his head in a small walk-in closet and inspects the clothes in them.
One half of the clothing belongs to someone who is much larger than him, which he quickly realizes must mean that the clothes belong to his roommate, and the other half belongs to someone who is decently tall and at least somewhat slender. He smirks as he studies the second half of the clothes, before he selects some jeans and a simple button-down shirt to change into. The “Human” “Student” is relieved when he finds that the clothes are a perfect fit.
Once he is changed he slips into one of a handful of pairs of shoes underneath the bed he awoke in and approaches the lone door leading in and out of the room. The moment he places a hand on the doorknob that’d let him in or out of the room he feels himself freeze in place as information begins to fill his brain.
The figure’s mind is supernaturally being filled with visions of the past as he holds onto the doorknob. He is frozen in place as he witnesses figures, past inhabitants of the dorm and their friends, opening the door and entering or exiting the room with ease. For a full ten seconds he firmly grips the door, his knuckles whitening from the strain being put on his mind as his first supernatural power manifests for the first time.
The doorknob has been touched by many different college students, and by assorted housing and residential life staff. This information floods into the mind of the superpowered stranger, giving him unclear glimpses of how past inhabitants of the room decorated it, and even vague sightings of the room’s past inhabitants themselves.
It takes the young man a few moments to recover from the shock of the first of the many powers he possesses exploding to life in this particularly dramatic way. When he recovers he shakes his head, mutters a string of expletives, and then opens the door.
He steps past the open door and into a long hallway that has been decorated in a way that highlights the university’s commitment to various fields of science. Many different doors line the hallway, and the figure considers touching more of the doorknobs to see what would happen but when he glances in the direction he wasn’t facing and sees a door leading outside of the student housing unit altogether he realizes that he’ll have to touch more stuff to get out anyway.
He can see the earliest rays of sunshine beginning to illuminate the area just outside of the dorm he woke up in. The stranger smiles at the scene, and he elects to go ahead and go outside. After all, while he has no context for this knowledge, he is keenly aware that universities invariably have libraries where students go to study and use technology provided by the universities. He understands the importance of taking advantage of those resources, and he plans to do so.
This also lets him see a thin scanner placed outside of his door that a simple glance lets him realize is the way to lock or unlock his door. His mind, a mostly blank thing not marred by past experiences, is able to conclude that his student ID must be the way to lock or unlock the door.
He shuts the door behind him, and tries to open it to see if it’s locked, only to find that it locks automatically. After mentally filing away that discovery the curious young stranger heads to the exit of the dorm and places his hand on the metal bar students use to open the door leading in and out of the housing unit. This time even more information fills his mind.
He is rendered speechless as his mind is filled with images of thousands of students and staff using the entrance to the housing unit everyday for years. Even during summer break the building sees regular use by staff and by visitors to the campus who come for specialized events and camps and who reside in the dorms, and this time the power is stronger than it was when he first awakened it, so it lets him see the past far more precisely than it just did.
Even as information surges into his partially prepared brain, he can recover much quicker this time than he did last time. Mere heartbeats after he touches the metal bar, he pushes the door open. This gives him the ability to step outside of the building he was “Born” in, and allows the figure to set foot on a stone stairwell that leads to a small courtyard leading to the university’s cafeteria and primary dining building. The courtyard is surrounded by other dorms, which makes sense since this area is one of the four big residential blocks on campus.
Sunlight touches the figure’s skin and he senses his skin begin to actively absorb the light touching him in a way that is impressively hungry. The man sighs pleasantly as he feels the warmth of the sun’s most energetic rays on his skin and as he pulls them into himself for the sake of some of his own powers.
The figure does not yet realize it but he is an incredibly potent being. He possesses a vast array of powerful abilities, most of which are currently hidden in the depths of the soul the multiversal administrator handcrafted to house his symbolic heart. And even though most of his powers remain hidden another of his powers begins to awaken when the curious living plane spots a stranger in the distance.
A young man, roughly the same age, physically at least, as the enigmatic stranger who is visually tracking him, has stepped out of another nearby dorm building and is making his way to the university’s cafeteria. The being keeping an eye on him is experiencing the effects of one of many “Demonic” or “Infernal” powers he possesses: the quasi-psychic, multipart power known as “Accord”.
The contents of the heart of the young man slowly make themselves known to the god-like being watching him. Every single one of the young’s man desires etch themselves into the mind and memory of the cosmic creature curiously observing him, and so does every solitary fear he’s ever had growing up. This knowledge is strange to the creature collecting it, but the being knows that every scrap of knowledge has its uses causing him to have no qualms about hording what knowledge makes itself known to him.
Eventually the figure the cosmic creation is watching reaches the cafeteria and slips into it, before quickly disappearing into the building. When he is out of sight the cosmic being watching him sighs contentedly and turns his head in a direction to the left of the cafeteria. After all, the creepy cosmic being is not hungry, he’s just plain curious about his circumstances.
He spots an elegant building in the distance, a large edifice painted the colors of the university. He dares to hope that what he sees is some sort of student union building, or a library, where he can hopefully begin to address meaningful questions about his own circumstances.
The handsome monster begins to make his way towards the building, a curious but determined look on his face.
