It's been thousands of years since the fabric of existence was initially torn apart in a still-ongoing cataclysmic event, unleashing Unreality, a chaotic and unpredictable force, the antithesis of Reality, upon the Earth.
The event shattered the world as it was known, leading to the emergence of new races and species, the disappearance of familiar landmarks, and the rise of the paranormal.
Once a singular species, the human species has been split and mutated into numerous races, adapting to the influx of Unreality in multitudinous ways.
Many humans utilize supernatural abilities or wield arcane magics. Others augment their bodies with fantastical technology. Still others hybridized with their environment, giving rise to various races of demi-humans.
Everyday threats from mutants, monsters, and magic constrain civilization to compact cities.
+×+×+×+
I’m jolted awake by a sensation of falling, just in time for me to impact the ground. Stunned, I lay there in silence for a few moments.
At first, I think I’ve just fallen out of bed during my slumber, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here.
Immediately, a whole slew of complications make themselves apparent. First, of course, is the most obvious: my vision is tinted a light purple hue and expanded into a sphere of coverage. I can’t even shut my eyes to make it go away! It shifts and distorts as I change my focus and gather my surroundings.
I appear to be in a cave or dug-out chamber of rough-hewn construction, made of what looks to me to be a dull purpleish-gray stone. The ceiling is obscured by shifting shadows, reflecting a glistening sheen occasionally as something moves about up there. Along the far wall is a hole, the source of the light glinting off of the ceiling. The exit, perhaps?
Around me are the obligatory cave stalagmites, many of which have been stained by splatters of something wet and viscous. In this dimness, that’s all I can discern.
It doesn’t take me long to discover that when I look at things, the world around that spot appears to blur while the actual thing I’m looking at sharpens in clarity, reducing my field of vision to a small area. When I stop focusing, the world regains sharpness, though not nearly to the same degree as when I’m concentrating.
I absolutely don’t remember my eyes working like this before, which leads me to my next little problem.
Which is that I can’t remember how I got here. Excitement, maybe, impressions of animals… Something… I think something went wrong, very wrong. There was screaming between flashes of strange lights, and I wasn’t the only one screaming.
My memories from before then are suspiciously absent.
I remember that I had family and that we had conflicts. I had friends, a job, and a social life, but I can’t remember anything about them beyond the knowledge that I had them. I can’t seem to make myself care about losing them.
Little remains of my personal life beyond some generalized knowledge about the world. Mostly small things, like how I know what eyeglasses are, and that I used to wear them.
It's almost like I'm a computer hard drive, and someone’s gone and waved a magnet over my brain.
Moving to sit myself up, I instead find that my sight stretches upwards and out. Reaching to rub my eyes, nothing happens. I try again, and again, and again: nothing!
Confused, I struggle to feel my limbs at all. No response from arms and legs in the slightest. Either they’re missing, or that fall broke my back something real fierce. Have I become an invalid now?
Logically, I know I should be panicking and terrified, or at minimum, I should probably be at least a little concerned. Instead, I feel fine, I feel great, even! No discomfort, no pain. Normal, calm, even, if maybe a tad famished. Under me, I can feel the chill of the stone, while a slight draft hits my naked body, causing me to shiver.
Wait, naked?
I look down at my body, expecting to see familiar human skin and limbs. Instead, I find naught but a dripping gelatinous mass below me.
Shocked, I throw myself backward, and the stuff follows me. I feel how the mass flows, the way it moves across the stone floor. Gooey blobs separate from me and rejoin again, collecting into a puddle under me. I guess this explains why I couldn’t feel my arms earlier, as it appears that I don’t even have them anymore.
This… this is my body, this strange semi-transparent and gooey substance. Either it’s the same color as the tint overlaying my vision, or the world really is just that purple. My movement and body feel entirely natural, with no jarring disconnect with my sense of self.
I… I think I know what’s happened to me now.
It’s one of the few things left in my memory, the basics of the knowledge of the relentless force of Unreality, that which is the source of magic and phenomenon.
I must have been unlucky enough to have been caught up in a surge of it, turning me into this amorphous slimy thing. Which… doesn’t sound bad at all, if I’m being honest?
There is little that is interesting in this cave, just me and that light in the distance. Having nothing more to do here, I figure I might as well investigate further about where I am.
The next steps will be, of course, to secure food, shelter, and water, and hope like hell that there’s nobody around who might consider me easy pickings. Or worse, a threat, and they’ll preemptively take me out before I even have a chance to get acquainted with this new body of mine.
I feel a surge of hunger in my core, reminding me of my famished state. Right. First things first. I need to go out looking for something to eat, and then, figure out how to eat it.
As I approach what is presumably an exit, I begin to pick up an interesting scent, leading me to wonder how I’m smelling. I don’t worry overly much about it, because whatever this smell is, it’s making me hungrier the closer I get to it.
By the time I enter what I find to be daylight, I am practically drooling in anticipation. Taking a moment to adjust to the sudden lack of darkness, I look around me, hoping to identify the source of that intoxicating scent.
It doesn’t take long at all for me to locate where the smell is coming from, and I can’t help but feel shocked when I finally spot it, halting me in my tracks.
The corpse of a deer lay there, putrefaction well underway, clearly the source of the scent I’ve been following. Flies buzz around the body, and maggots squirm under its tattered hide. I should feel, at minimum, at least a little disgusted, but all I can think about is how much I want to sink my teeth into it.
My hunger grows worse with each passing second, not helped in the slightest by the aroma emanating from the bloated and decayed animal.
I don’t want to, not at first. But with my hunger growing by the second, I’m feeling myself getting loopier and loopier and loopier and…
Unable to hold back and resist the siren call of the glorious feast in front of me, I let myself go nearer to it. Guided by my body’s hunger, I flow over the rotting remains of the deer’s skull, wrapping around it. At my touch, it begins to fizz and sizzle, and before I even realize how I’m doing it, I’ve already begun to dissolve the corpse.
The sudden influx of flavor distracts me enough from the fact that I’m eating something that, by all rights, shouldn’t be nearly this appetizing, and I lose myself in those sensations. I burrow into the corpse, and find myself entering an absolute smorgasbord of deliciousness!
Worms and maggots add texture and a pop of nutty smokiness to the oozing remains, and I eagerly dissolve them as well. They wriggle and squirm inside of me, and I revel in the sensation for the moments each one lasts before it vanishes.
And the flavor! I take my time with it, just to be sure to savor it as fully as possible. Unbelievably, the stuff has a sweet and fruity accent to it, and I eagerly dig in.
By the time I remember what it is that I’m eating, the whole thing has vanished. Not just scoured to the bones, either, because I think I ate those too!
All that remains is the indent in the grass where it had been until I’d come across it. That, and splashes of dark red that soaked into the soil as I was enjoying my macabre meal.
Disappointed it’s gone, I look around, hoping to find more delectable tidbits of rotted offal. It hits me then, just exactly what I’ve been eating, but I’m not disgusted. I even find myself fantasizing about it, hoping that I’d missed some just so that I could revel in that amazing flavor again.
Only mildly unnerved by my behavior, but feeling much better now, I look around at my surroundings. As I had suspected, the light led outside the cave. I’m in a forest, I note. Unfortunately, this doesn’t exactly narrow things down much. For all I know, this could be a forest on another planet entirely!
Unreality can be unpredictable like that, or so I recall.
I don’t think I am on an alien planet, though, as everything is still recognizable Earth vegetation. Mostly birch and evergreen trees surround me, and I even spot the occasional cedar and elm.
Huh? Did I use to be some sort of plant nerd or something? How do I know what various species of trees are, but I can’t even recall a single thing about my own face?
For now, I choose to go with the assumption that I am still on Earth, that I haven’t died and been reincarnated as an alien or something silly like that when I wasn’t looking.
I mean, I’m not exactly ruling it out, due to the whole “unexplainable phenomenon” bit re: Unreality, but it’s all I’ve got for now. So, until proven otherwise, that’s just what I’m going with.
First things first, I need to focus on survival. Food, water, shelter. I just ate, despite the gruesome nature of my meal, so I’m good on that front for now. Water? There’s none in my immediate surroundings that I can tell. And as for shelter… if there’s anything I remember about the wilderness, it’s that there’s a reason people live in cities and not in the middle of nowhere. You know, because of all the man-eating monsters out… there…
Where I am.
With the monsters.
You know, on second thought, maybe I’m safer in the cave!
Okay, new plan! Instead of building a little lean-to out of sticks and logs, as I’d originally planned, I’m just going to “borrow” this cave for a while. Maybe barricade it or something, I don’t know. I’ll figure something out.
Hopefully, nobody else is using it or wants to take it from me.
Speaking of building things, I need to figure out something about this whole “no-limbs” situation I’ve got going on here. Now that I’m actually in the daylight (around noon, I’d say), I can see myself much more clearly.
Purple really does seem to be the color of this new semi-transparent body of mine, now that I’m getting a better look at it. If someone were to ask me to put a label on exactly which shade of purple I am, I would put it more on the lighter and more lavender or lilac side of purple than any kind of darker grape or eggplant.
As for my little problem at hand, I think I’ve got an idea about how to fix that. See, before, I was under the impression that I still had arms, and thus, was attempting to activate muscle groups that I apparently no longer have.
Yet, I’ve been moving around just fine without legs, without muscles and a skeletal system. Not a bone in my body, as far as I’m aware. So what’s the difference between this and that? The key, like with walking, is to NOT think about it.
Surprisingly, this works! It’s fairly crude, yes, but it works! It’s an extremely rough approximation of a hand, sure, a sort of pseudopod, if you will, but it works! Flexing my new limbs’ nubby little digits, I marvel at them, which is when I notice something fascinatingly bizarre.
Namely, that I can see from my ‘hand’ as well as my ‘face’. In apostrophes, because I’ve just found out I don’t even have a face! I’m just a pile of featureless purple slime! Well, that’s not quite true, there’s also this weird star-shaped gem-looking thing at the core of myself. It’s a silvery white color, cut in the shape of a five-pointed star.
I have no idea how that got there, but there’s no way I’m touching what might end up being a vital organ or something like that. I don’t even know what it’s supposed to do, so I won’t bother touching it, and just leave it at that.
I can feel it spinning in there sometimes when I get deep in thought, though.
Shaking my head to clear it, I start to collect rocks and small logs to put together a campfire circle. Might as well get one of these ready to go before the sun goes down, you know?
Lighting it, on the other hand, might be a bit of a challenge with these sticky gooey fingers of mine.
Eh, I’m sure I’ll figure out something to do about the lack of heat at night around here. Caves are usually fairly consistent in temperature all year round, which makes them perfect as a base of operations.
A low growl in the forest has me fleeing for the relative safety of the dark cave. I peek out from the entrance, and do my best to give my best attempt to return a glare to the forest out there.
This… Yeah, this might take me a while.
asphalt_muncher· Jan 29, 2024
