Chapter 36 - Fyntn the Third
I came back two days later, following a read of a philosophical part of the text before. It was scary when Lila sounded smarter and made more sense than me. It made me believe that this was actually happening. I entered the library to find Kara and Lila already waiting for me. They were likely sitting there just waiting for a good hour, since I was not sure at what time I started.
“Hey,” I said, with a wave of a hand. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here yesterday. It’s honestly weird saying ‘yesterday’ since you don’t really keep track of my time. I mean, there is a clock downstairs in the room, but nothing here works on my reality’s time.” I paused, shifting between the two of them. They were not moving, not even to blink. It felt like—
“See, I told you it would fool him,” a voice spoke from above. I looked up to find Lila, Kara, and Tarne suspended in rainbow-looking bubbles. There were two more beings in the air, but they were standing on air. “You have poor timing.”
“Fyntn?” I asked.
“The third,” he replied. “I knew this was going to bite me in the tail the second that girl asked me to tie you to the spawn chamber. You wouldn’t believe how long it took me to find where it ended up. This place is before all of space, after all. You hardly expect something created by a fugitive to hang out in the virgin existence.”
“Ok, he’s here,” the other Goni said. “Can we just reset the story now?”
“Yeah, it should work now,” Fyntn said. He brandished his temporal claws, but I motioned quickly to remove them all from his fingers, ears, and the two claws on the tail. I did the same for the other Goni and bagged them in a pocket dimension. Fyntn and his buddy were visibly stunned.
“You can’t do that here,” he said, then inspected his fingers, now just as stumpy as a human. “This feels weird.” The other Goni was not taking the declawing as peacefully as Fyntn. She or he fell to the floor of the library and bared their fangs at me.
“GIVE THEM BACK!” They shouted, then lunged. I waved my hand once to change their place with Kara inside the bubble. If there was anyone who could help me, it would be her. Fyntn on the other hand started attacking me in my reality by trying to erase the writing, as if that mattered. It could have been just an error in the Bluetooth keyboard that tried to eat some text, but felt targeted to the moment.
“I don’t know what you expect me to do,” Kara said. “You already declawed him. Harsh, by the way.”
“I’m pretty sure those claws pop right off,” I said, looking over to Fyntn. “Or was it painful?”
“Nah, they come right off,” he replied. “So… HOW THE FUCK ARE YOU OPERATING IN VIRGIN EXISTENCE?”
“Untethered space,” Kara corrected.
“Whatever,” he shot a glance at her. “It’s the uncorrupted space, the building blocks of existence that makes up the Infinity Void and all the worlds within. It’s the damn spawn chamber, isn’t it? I damn well tied your reality core to it.”
“I would assume so,” I said. “I was able to use creationism inside it, as if it was my own imagination. Is that what a reality core is?”
“No, dummy,” Fyntn said, sneering his best sneer. “Imagination is a reach into the void. The reality core is something that holds you from falling out of your reality. Think of a bubble around your body that has no existence to interact with reality, but it keeps you within the set reality. By tying you to the spawn chamber, I must have duplicated the effect of your core in that space where that other girl was, which somehow ended up in FUCKING VIRGIN EXISTENCE! I’m so getting reset for this.”
“You can get reset, too?” I asked. “I thought being the Nth Goni means you do all the resetting.”
“Bullshit,” he said, and sat down on the ground. “We’re under the most pressure. We watch over the other stories and look for other forces acting on them, and buddy, your story is exhausting. This joker is the one watching mine. I was under threat of being reset, but needed to have you there since I interacted with you. I told his dumbass not to take you lightly, but I didn’t expect you to be able to change reality here. I mean, the spawn chamber is downstairs, right?”
“I kinda… expanded the field,” I said, and hesitated about telling him of the invisible vines. The glance around gave him enough pause to change eyes to blue color. They were gemstones cut hovering in molten gold of his eyes, as I was not sure if I defined how Goni looked before. His body was small, yellow-green in a de-saturated manner, somewhat mustard color. He had a long tail with an arrow point. His ears were also very long, and curled a bit at the claws now gone. His mouth had sharp long teeth that seemed to only be visible when they were needed. The temporal claws I took away from them both were rainbow-black and bumpy as if smelt from some sort of rock at a very high temperature.
“No… way…” he said, looking around. “You planted a seed of thought?”
“A seed of thought?”
“That’s what this is, damnit!” He replied. “It’s… a difficult feat. Also, impossible to destroy by us. We’d need the Rahin for this.”
“They’ve stopped by,” Kara said. “Jack offered to give up under the condition of putting Tarne here into the Nth Infinity with the Goni.” Fyntn shifted his gaze, as the gem changed hue to a mainly-desaturated green.
“Oh, come on!” He said. “Why is your reality core on this child?”
“I… kinda WAS her for a time,” I replied. “I was stuck as Tarne for a while, but seeing that there was another person that took over when I wasn’t here, I divided myself out for her to have freedom to grow up.” Fyntn closed his eyes, then shook his head, making his ears wave side to side.
“A right mess,” he said.
“Yup,” Kara said. “Sorry.”
“You’re not to blame for it,” I said.
“Damn right I’m not,” she said. “But maybe I am a little for encouraging this back when Rebecca was here. I helped her secede from you. I just didn’t know it would cause such a mess. I sure wish I still had James to help me deal with it.” Fyntn sighed, and shook his head again.
“Ok, can you at least give my one claw back for a moment so I can free your dumbass friends?” He asked. I withdrew a claw from the pocket dimension and inspected it. The outside looked shiny, but it did not bounce light. The light was coming from inside it, like a galaxy behind a bubble. It felt cold to touch, and the edge was very sharp, more than possible in any reality. They did tear open portals after all.
With one swipe, the bubbles around Lila and Tarne popped, and I floated them down to the ground. Tarne hugged Lila, clearly afraid.
“Here,” Fyntn said, chucking the claw back at me. I almost did not have enough time to catch it, so I just opened the pocket dimension where the other claws resided to add it to the sack. “I’m leaving that guy in the bubble. It’s a load off my shoulders. It’s stressful to be micromanaged by an idiot. Sure enough, the guy in charge of his story will try to find him soon. Fat lot of good that will do. It took ME a lot of searching to find you, and I had a vague idea of this disaster.”
“I have to go,” I said.
“Yeah, go,” he said. “Gives me some time to unwind.”
“If you need anything, just ask Lila,” I said. “She can create anything for you.” I stepped forward and vanished.
break
I came back the next day to an empty library save for the bubble containing the other Nth Goni. It looked like he gave up trying to get out, and sat in the bottom part of it dejected.
“Hi,” I said. The Goni turned, amber color gems shifting in the molten gold toward me. “I never got your name. I’m sorry I took your claws.” Rather than responding, he bundled up away from view.
“His name’s Kelio,” a voice said behind me. I turned to find Fyntn holding a cup of coffee in one hand, and mop in the other. “The micromanaging prick. He deserves everything coming to him. The Goni in charge of him must be having a fit right now.” He took a sip, meaning he poured some of it down the opening without teeth visible. Sometimes when he talked the teeth just appeared out of nowhere in the mouth. I was going to ask, but another question took priority.
“What’s with the mop?” I asked.
“I made a mess making the coffee,” he said. “Lila made it for me, but I don’t know how to make it disappear. That said, I’m realizing that she could have cleaned up the mess instantly, but chose to make me a mop.”
“I guess you have to clean up your own messes,” I said, feeling stupid. The metaphor related to me. We shared a quiet look before Tarne burst out of the garden with a high pitched giggle-screech. A green vine whipped out of the opening and caught her by the arm to yank her back inside. “So, no chance of letting Kelio out?”
“I mean, without his claws he poses little to no threat,” Fyntn said.
“There are still the teeth,” I said.
“Hence I said little,” he said. “He’s what you might call an uptight government type. I doubt there is a rebellious bone in his body. Either way, we won’t be here long. I found my way in, so the other Goni also can. Once the dummy in charge of Kelio here figures it out, they might come here enmasse.”
“But you— they can’t destroy the seed of thought, right?”
“The seed? No. The stuff growing in virgin existence that has no place being there? Most definitely. They will take the weed whacker to the whole thing, Lila and Tarne included. I’d say Kara should take them elsewhere, but I’m sure the Goni in charge of her story is already involved. Lila’s one, too.”
“And Tarne?”
“That’s where it gets tricky,” he said. “She’s a special case, seeing as your reality core is entangled to her as much as this whole place. You can’t see it, but it’s something like this rainbow bubble, stretched to crazy proportions. Here.” Fyntn held out an empty hand. “Alter your vision until you can see the thing I’m holding.”
I looked at his hand, then flipped through different modes of vision. It was not until I got to shadow-sight from Barnaby’s world that I saw something there. It wasn't very clear, so I inverted the sight, then overlaid regular vision under a fifty percent opacity mask of the inverted shadow-sight.
Fyntn was holding a small bauble of glass that hovered over his palm. I realized that the same glass-like material was wrapped around me, extending toward the garden. It shifted slightly, possibly due to Tarne moving around. It was like a corrugated glass-like soap bubble that shifted in mesmeric sort of kaleidoscopic designs. This was definitely not meant for regular vision as it seemed to create its own light, but sustain it inside the glass without casting any outside, and still very hidden from sight.
“Whoa,” I said. “Trippy. So what happens when I leave this space?”
“The essence of you still lingers in your form, not visible to others,” he said. “Any stray thought of the place from outside, moves your reality core remnant to different places. That’s what made the mess with the coffee. I was making some, then you suddenly popped up in the kitchen. It’s creepy when that thing moves around, but only I can see it, so no point— well pointing it out.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to make this mess. I just wanted to… keep a memory of something bad I did once.”
“It’s not all on you,” Fyntn said. “I stupidly agreed to make the spawn chamber for the other girl to keep you tied to a spot for convenience. I could have ended the whole thing back then, but I have to admit, it was pretty fun to rebel. Doing new things keeps existence interesting.” I smiled.
“I miss her,” I said. “The other girl.”
“Didn’t she like, split herself into ten versions because of you?”
“I didn’t say it was perfect,” I replied. “But it was nice to have someone to talk to, to exist next to sometimes and even teach new things. We could enjoy some things together.”
“I think…” he started, then took a big gulp of coffee. “...you should find that in your reality. It would cause less issues. Not to mention the Rahin might cut you off based on Tarne.”
“My reality is limited,” I said. “It’s vast, and there are a lot of wondrous things and new things to discover, but there are also billions of people already doing those things from the comfort of their upbringing. A lot of them struggle, seeking only normalcy in place of the new, but everyone just wants to enjoy life, even if for a brief moment.
“I wanted to challenge the laws of the universe, because it’s so timid. When compared to a single electron, the universe is gigantic, seemingly endless, but put next to the alternates, it becomes a mesh of reality that is decided upon by choice and time expanding the sheet of universes into a solid body of alternate universes over time. And STILL, that is one perception of a single mind, a grain of sand in a desert of the amount of stories there are out there, written and reset, supervised by another, who is supervised by another.
“In that way, the solid body of sand particles of universes over time in alternates of choice, is extruded into another dimension forming connections between certain parts of the alternate universes, into a solid less like a desert of sand, but more like a glass structure. And even in that glass structure of many little grains of sand of universes over time by alternates of reality based on choice, there is the Infinity Void.”
“Yeah, and?”
“Yeah, and what?”
“Yeah, and what about it?”
“Doesn’t it just— hurt your mind to think about your place in all that?”
“Nope.”
“Just ‘nope’?”
“Yeah,” Fyntn said. “Remember, you’re talking to a governmental figure who should be altering time and space, cutting connections in said glass structure to make new ones. I’m in there, but I’m working. I’m not just an electron sitting in a universe, in an alternate reality, or whatever you were saying. I kinda spaced out. Basically, I got work to do, but it’s been nice to relax a bit. Goni don’t get vacation time. That’s a cool concept from your story. People should take vacation time anytime they can get it.”
“But that just strains the people working with them, creates a strange dichotomy, a divide between those who want to work, and those who just want to relax.” Fyntn pointed up at Kelio.
“That’s the government,” he said. “The robotic drive to work until death, not that Goni ever die, but I’d be the one representing the other side. I’d say the Nth Goni are the oldest and most stuck up beings in the Infinity Void. We kinda have to be, to keep things running standard. At a certain point, standard isn’t enough, and then you have… I guess you’d call it a revolution. But in terms of beings that wield claws that alter time and space, revolutions happen, then they ‘un-happen’. So it’s all pointless. Just like in alternate timelines of your reality, there have been a LOT more revolutions, and they might have been un-happened with a little nudge of a reset.”
“So you don’t think there could be an alternate version of you that just works and works without ever coming to that realization?” I asked.
“I’m sure there is,” he said. “I’m sure that’s the average of the realities. It’s always a bell curve, most numbers hit on the average, but some lucky ones end up in places like these. So, what else can I do, but enjoy myself? At least until the damn fish come to gobble it all up.”
“I guess,” I said, still thinking of alternate versions of myself I had seen on the bell curve of alternate realities, leading happy lives. Was the bell curve that measurement of boredom? Maybe the standard was not boring after all, just a different sort of enjoyment that did not threaten to cut me off from a seemingly fun afterlife.
“I gotta go,” I said.
“I’ll be here,” he said. “You COULD give me back my claws. It’s not like I’m going to do anything. It’s Kelio here you gotta worry about.” I hesitated. Fyntn noticed my hesitation, and put his hands up, coffee cup and mop still in hand.
“It’s ok,” he said. “I know you don’t trust easily. I don’t need my claws. It’s fine.” I grimaced, then pulled his claws out of the pocket dimension and affixed them back on his six fingers, both ears, and the two on the tail. I wanted to say “Don’t make me regret trusting you” but saying so would just feel horrible. Trust was… a leap. I jumped up, disappearing in the air.
break
I came back the next day, fully expecting trouble. Either the Rahin came back to threaten the seed of thought growing out of control in the untethered space, or Fyntn was not to be trusted. Instead, the library stood empty, almost eerily so.
“Hello?” I called out.
“Up here!” A muffled voice called back from the ceiling. Now looking up, I realized Kelio was no longer here. Was the call upstairs a trap to catch me off-guard. I set up a few invisible barriers, physical, elemental, spiritual, and existential around my form before floating up to the painted ceiling and phasing through it to the ballroom above the library.
It was lit like a dance floor, colorful lights shifting around with a dulled white for visibility in spots that needed it. In the very middle, and close to me, Fyntn was dancing wildly, ears and tail flailing gracefully with every motion. The music was something of a Latin twist with techno underlay, which was a bit strange. Kelio’s bubble hovered in the corner of the ballroom, bouncing lights off the rainbow bubble even more dazzling than the initial light.
Tarne was dancing, too, while Kara and Lila had a corner to themselves, dancing a lot more provocatively at each other. Lila would rub her back up against Kara a lot, while the Keir wielder kept putting Lila’s legs between hers at any chance she got. It was obvious why there was a difference, and if I had to explain it, then there was no point to all the writing before this moment.
I watched the two of them do their own versions of “grinding” up against each other, and felt disconnected. Even with the music going that was easy to move to, I did not dance. Instead, I let JJ out to join Tarne dancing. A beast thought skittered across my mind of the two women grinding on the dance floor stopping the tease and going down on each other right there on the dance floor, but I shook it away. It was likely to happen later on, and the entertaining idea let loose a mental clip of the two of them in bed, kissing in a naked embrace with fingers everywhere they needed to be. After a few minutes more of watching the clip, I shut it down.
#It was just getting good!# beast exclaimed, salivating at the mouth. I met his eyes internally, at the cage in my mind.
#It’s ok to be excited,# I thought. #It’s another thing entirely to lose yourself to it and play into the desire. It burns you down to cinders.#
#I’m fine with a little fire,# he thought. #Besides, I’M THE LITERAL DESIRE ASPECT OF YOU!# The last part he shouted in a very loud voice that knocked me out of my mind. When I opened my eyes, Lila was holding my hand, pulling me along to dance with her. There was a wet spot on the lower back portion of her shirt. I was happy for her.
I cut loose for a little bit, as we danced into the morning hours before I had to start work. The next time Lila got close to me again, she whispered hot air into my ear.
“I can still get you off, if you want,” she said. I stopped dancing in shock. Her eyes blazed crimson with a wicked little smile, as beast tore his cage apart to take over one hand. With it, he pulled me closer to her, slipping fingers in under her shirt to the triskele vagina slick with moisture. I felt a pull to her lips, but hesitated. Internally, I reached for robot, but also hesitated.
“NO!” I shouted, stopping the music and the lights. Everything stopped, setting me as the center of attention in the big room. It felt like daggers of eyes, piercing my flesh, into my core. I had to go and ruin the fun again. Before anyone said anything, I disintegrated into goo and exited.
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