Freedom From Beyond Stars [Persona 5/Scion/Cthulhu Mythos] [One-Shot]

FieldKeeper · Apr 2, 2022

A/N: First of all - if you just want to read the story, feel free to skip these opening notes. This is just my thoughts behind the background of this one-shot, and you don't really need to know to enjoy the story, in my opinion.

Fair warning though: There's a couple major Persona 5 Royal spoilers near the end.

Every April Fool's, I like to do a one-shot that spins my Chronicles of Darkness/Persona 5 fusion-verse in a different direction, and show scenes from another world's crossover that might inspire other writers. This year, I decided to expand a bit and do another Onyx Path property, Scion 2E, a game where the modern world also happens to be the world where every culture's religious myths are factual reality. Every culture. So the sun is the body of Amaterasu, the chariot of Ra, and an incarnation of Huitzilopochtli after the last four suns didn't work out, and this is scientifically verifiable, depending on where you stand and what you believe. You play as Scions, who are the direct offspring, creations, chosen emissaries, and independently sentient avatars of the Gods, as you go around being urban fantasy superheroes and occasionally warriors against the Titans, less human-friendly Gods and their creations.

More recently, however, there was a Kickstarter about two semi-alternate settings which ask "What about times before humanity had myths?" The first, Scion: Dragon, has you playing as the descendants of, well, Dragons, who are primeval deities of the Earth worshiped by dinosaurs who were forced to play second fiddle to the Gods and are really pissed off about that. That book is also more of a magic spy thriller that really deserves its own multi-chapter fic and honestly doesn't fit the Phantom Thieves all that well, as it involves conspiratorial seizing control of the world from the shadows and often butting heads with a Draconic ancestor who only occasionally has your best interest at heart.

The other, Masks of the Mythos...well, you read the tags. It's about Scions of the Great Old Ones, Cthulhu and Company...and utterly moons the original author, since in the context of Scion, the Great Old Ones are just a particularly odd and human-oblivious pantheon that isn't actually out to get you - they just disrupt everything, since their mythology is "Science+", and does not have any messages or human-centric plot in it. It also thoroughly mocks a lot of Lovecraft's...less-than-great traits, especially his xenophobia (even beyond the fact that most Mythos creatures don't care about humans or even have agendas that result in "kill humans" as a necessary step, the Old Ones are immensely permissive patrons; they will provide power even to those who wish to stop them or their cults from wrecking the world, because they did the right arcane calculus to draw them down, so the cackling sorcerer whose teacher is Nyarlathotep might well be trying to banish Nyarlathotep).

More importantly, however, is that Mythos Scions have the power of Awareness, the "cosmic learning" that people sometimes confuse for insanity caused by Things Man Was Not Meant To Know (in reality entirely rational reactions to discovering things like "the oceans are inhabited by horny fish-people" and "the owner of this clothing store is a brain in a jar and he sometimes likes possessing people psychically to experience touch again"). That understanding fuels their powers, the way they break the world...and can "Delete Fate", rendering the literal Will of the Heavens and Stars moot with the understanding it's not something inherent to the cosmos, that man is condemned to be free no matter what the species tells itself. Or what old men tell young men is the nature of things.

That, more than anything else, seems pretty Persona 5 to me.

Freedom From Beyond Stars

Before: The Sun And The Deep

Somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, a life-giving star descended into the sea.

This was not unknown to her. Frankly, it happened once every decade or so, when her brother grew especially cantankerous, or the great catfish goddess trapped beneath her favored islands found a new break in her imprisoning cavern and began to widen it. In both cases, it was to rein in - to knock some sense into the God of Storms, or to cauterize the crack found by the Titan of Earthquakes closed. Normally, she had no fault in either.

But this was not normal times. This descent was taken in the full knowledge it was her fault, and it fell to her to even begin to fix.

And now, it was not to seal, but to unleash. Something that could not be put back in the box so easily, no matter how small a fragment - but the world even the whole would create if its darkest followers were objectively correct in every way would not be a darker future than one she foresaw, if only different in kind.

One that only it and its brethren could reasonably prevent.

So the star set, and fell into the sea.

Deeper.

Deeper.

Deeper.

Deeper.

Until even her light could not penetrate the wet darkness, a deep black that writhed, flickers of scales and mucus from life that had never known light and fled the intrusion into their sunless world in uncomprehending fear.

She felt "her destination before she saw it, to the extent she could see anything at all. Its cyclopean towers loomed from the sand, and if she did not know it was a city, she would have thought it perhaps a living thing. Nothing built by humans would be so lacking in corners, the spheres and curves that composed it speaking more of a thing that grew. But built it was, and as her divine senses studied it more, any thoughts that this was a Worldly thing was banished, for she could sense that much as how a human architect would pour cement in the earth to balance an unsteady tower upon, the builders of R'lyeh had poured space - there was more of the fabric of existence than there should be in the Tomb-City, all too support towers that, when it was still upon an island instead of an outcropping of the sea floor, would not have been able to stand against the merciless fairness of gravity.

Euclidean geometry was a trap considering the Tomb-City's first purpose, after all. Millions of years ago, R'yleh was a place of history; the Star-Spawn of Xoth had built it to study the arcane processes by which the nature of causality could and could not be altered. By its nature, it would enrage the Hounds of Tindalos, the immune cells of eternity, who learned to use angles themselves to trap the prey that had defiled the order of things. Euclidean features were something that spoke of sapients building them, and it was sapients who would be most interested in the alteration of What Had Been into What Could Be. It had served its purpose well then, as it did now - a stasis chamber, to trap the Father-Priest in a moment of eternal death - but never dead.

And as the star lit the walls, she could see it now - the great crypt-sanctum itself, with the dream-stone that devoured light and became an active, living darkness, as opposed to the myriad fish that were simply unseen within it. Even as she approached, the deep doors opened to reveal an even greater deep below, and the Old One who had, in what mortals called the 1920s, had sprung forth from the depths and destroyed what was left of the crew of the ship Emma with the exception of one Gustaf Johansen, who wrote of the harrowing experience as his last act, a narrative of a man escaping the unstoppable evil of Cthulhu.

Johansen was also a liar, for whom his final log was not some warning against doom, but a coded message to his own masters to not underestimate their rivals - to those with a fuller knowledge of the alien pantheon, one would know that the great humanoid giant with a cephalopod head was not even Xothian in form, let alone that of the Master of R'yleh. They were mollusk-like in nature, and certainly close to Earth's cephalopods in profile, but only cephalopods; they stood not on two strong legs, but four great tentacles that formed two trunks on land but unwrapped in water to swim, and that their claws tipped not hands, but each of their many manipulator tendrils. They certainly did not have a squid's head on a stout but muscular human frame.

No, there were two cults that heard the call of the stirring Cthulhu. One was the one who wished to answer and free him, and so take control of the chaotic world left behind by his return to Xoth to become their image of the primeval species, laughing and killing with joy and aplomb - the same one the crew of the Emma belonged to, each and every one, including Johansen. The second, smaller but with a far more involved Godly hand, was the cult of the creature before her, and who spent their lives breaking the curse of lethargy the first had placed him under.

Not Xothian, but half-brother to them.

Not Cthulhu, but born of him and a sorceress of a long-gone Polynesian tribe.

Not prisoner, but warden.

"AMATERASU", the deep rumbled.

Kthanid, the star flashed in infrared light - she did not wish to push the magic sustaining her already aching lungs by speaking in the water. You know why I am here.

"I KNOW. AND I KNOW WHAT HAS DRIVEN YOU HERE," the deep said, without condemnation nor comfort. "AS POINTLESS AS I AM TO PROTEST - YOU KNOW WHAT YOU PLAN IS FOOLISHNESS ITSELF. EVEN A SINGLE DREAM OF MY FATHER WILL ECHO. OTHERS OF THE STARS WILL HEAR HIS CALL, AND STIR. THEM AND THEIR INFINITE CHILDREN WILL RISE, AND THOSE AWAKE WILL BE EMBOLDENED. YOU ARE SOON TO CALL UP WHICH YOU CAN NOT PUT DOWN. NOT AS A GOD OF EARTH ALONE."

I know, the star flashed, bitterly. It will not be the first time I have done so this generation. My own flesh has strayed far from the path, and the world he seeks is a nightmare of confinement worse than any your sire could imagine - one willed by the very Fate I thought would teach him humility and kindness to his followers. The very Elder technology I thought would give him perspective has taught him only fear. And hatred.

"YES...SHIDO. THE LION-CHILD. HE HAS SUCCUMBED TO THE HUBRIS OF MORTALS - BUT THIS IS THE FIRST I HAVE HEARD OF HIM POSSESSING THE RELICS OF THE FIRST SLAVERS..."

It is not something even he wishes to acknowledge. The Machine-God of Control also tutored him in its use - he has become master of his own fate, not unlike your kin.

"...I DID NOT KNOW OF HIS HAND IN THIS, AND YET, I AM NOT SURPRISED. A BIT, PERHAPS, RELIEVED - TO KNOW THAT YOU HAVE COME FOR LACK OF BETTER OPTIONS. A STARBORN FOR A STARBORN..."

I need only two nightmares. One that will seek another of my son's victims, and a second for a catalyst to inflame his hubris. The Emissary will steer him to the Dreamlands, where my son has begun building his Empire of Desire, and to those who will also hear the deep-song.

"...YOU SEEK AN ELDER BAND," the deep realized, with grim amusement. "WHAT MAY EASILY BECOME AN ENTIRE PANTHEON OF MY KIN - NO. MY PEERS."

It is hubristic as it sounds. But I have no options left, and I cannot reach the Dreamlands. No Earthly God can.

"...VERY WELL," the deep rumbled as the warden stood aside "TWO DREAMS. NO MORE. YOUR EMISSARY WILL GUIDE THEM, AND WATCH THEM, SHOULD THEY SEEM TO ASCEND TO BECOME LORDS OF TERROR, RATHER THAN JOIN ME IN MY VIGIL. FOR BOTH OUR SAKES, I HOPE THEY WILL BE PEERS - I HAVE GROWN ILL OF SPEAKING TO ALBTRAUM AND ILLYTH'LA ALONE."

I can imagine. To new and terrifying friends, the star pulsed, her infrared rich in gallows humor as she descended to the deepest point, where the true seal lay.

And with two shots of her arrows later, two bits of the deep preceded her ascent to the surface, as she prayed it was worth it.

No matter how foolish it was for a God to pray, for she needed it.

Shinobu: Drowning in First Breaths

When he was a child, Shinobu Hattori used to play something he called the Ocean Game.

His father, a lake ecologist, had once told him that not only did all life come from the ocean, but that the liquid part of the blood of terrestrial animals - humans included - was chemically composed of almost the same elements that the primordial soup life first evolved in. Shinobu's young mind had somehow spun that into thinking that people were like brine pools and ponds, and from there, he wondered what kind of fish swam inside the blood of each person. He would spend days trying to draw the fish-rich sea inside people he knew, based on what he knew of their personality and appearance.

Most of it was, well, goofy. A teacher he liked was inhabited by Wise Glasses-Fins, a notorious bully Dummy Sharks, a lady with two many cats the Schooling Catfish (he wasn't always the most creative child). Sometimes, though, the fish would be...strange. He didn't know where these drawings would come from, really. He had never seen some of the fish they were based on - which grew alarming when he drew an anglerfish perfectly despite never even knowing they existed.

He had theories, though, since he only reliably drew these things when he was drawing the fish inside people of myth or those related. The anglerfish belonged to a woman who was later busted for being the head of a cult of Kiyohime, the Titan of Possessive Affection. There was a remora in the ocean inside the secretary of an ambassador who claimed descent from Zeus. A color-shifting cuttlefish indicated a hidden kitsune.

And then there were the drawings that were outright inexplicable, and sometimes disturbing. A strange and eerie acting troupe had paid a visit to his hometown once, and the fish inside the leader resembled guests in a masquerade, with oddly human hand-like fins and eyes - but all of their "clothes" were part of their body, and all shades of yellow and gold - and ignorant of great blooms of sea-mold that surrounded them. Then there was the time he made the sketch of an odd fisherman who lived by the bay, but the "fish" all looked mammalian - not in the sense of dolphins and whales, but like great carp and trout that had been twisted to resemble otters and squirrels, apes and cats. Also, that the profile of the fisherman's sea looked less like a humanoid and more like a scaled frog on two legs before he felt it was good for being filled in by his sea life. With fins.

The more disturbing was used as evidence for the prosecution at his trial - proof he "always" had something dark in him, something that needed to be rehabilitated. He had to - it was his word against that of the rich and powerful, it was the order of things that Shinobu must be at fault for disrupting the calm and sedate town. Rich, respectable men did not get accidentally injured because they were too drunk to retaliate. Handsome, serious men were not people who dragged away women in cars. So Shinobu must be a thug, cast into the deep, dark cell for his sin of not living up to society's myths.

That's when the dreams of a different deep came to him.

During the leadup to his trial, Shinobu kept his anxiety down by returning to the Ocean Game - after making an utterly generic sea as camouflage to hide his real drawings under "proof" he had somewhat recovered from his "dark thoughts", he began to spitefully sketch the man's own inner sea.

It was as dark as he imagined from the man's ranting when drunk. Polluted, swirling, and filled with too many predators, all devouring each other to rid themselves of any weakness until it was empty. But when he completed the sketch of the soul, he didn't stop - it didn't feel complete. There was something about the man that demanded he draw the beach around him, keeping him separate from the whole. And then the crustaceans made of laws and money. And then the carrion feeders that came to feast on his polluted waters. And then a much larger, darker sea next to the pond...

That was when he would say the nightmares started - except a recurring nightmare implied you were afraid to sleep.

They should have been nightmares - they always started with the realization he couldn't breathe, lost in the true ocean, the aphotic depths where no light had ever graced. There was pain, fear, and a sense of being lost in the deep forever, and the crushing power of millions of tons of salt water. As they continued, despite the lack of sight or sound, he would sense the towers of a great stone city that stood like coral, wherein scaled frogs that could perhaps stand like men swam between the spires like pilot fish cleaning the stone teeth of a great shark , and in the moments before he woke, sweating and gasping, he would sense something else, a great mountain that walked - but as the adrenaline faded, he would sink easily back to sleep or simple begin his long day of sketching. For soon, he realized, he did not need to breathe either; the pain was simply his lungs not realizing it. And he knew the ocean - if the pressure could kill him at that depth, he would not have a chance to feel pain. It was fearful, it was painful, and it was without bars. Simply Shinobu, the dark, the fish, and the deep.

Infinite, empty, and free.

He started to sleep more, to see anything but the bars and the cold faces of wardens, as the deep and the city drove his Ocean Game to greater depths of complexity and scope. Page after page of the sea, and the ponds-that-were-people within it, and the things that were part of no pond but the sea swimming between them. The more he slept, the more he dreamed, and the city became clearer and grander and stranger, as he ceased to see it with just his eyes. The variant pressure and interference of the deep told him far more of it than simply seeing it.

That was how he learned of something greater than the giant stalking it - something within a cove down below, the deepest part.

So he swam to meet it, past the doors, through the catacombs, and then to a door, wherein there was two tiny cracks. Which he looked through.

He could not see it, perhaps mercifully, and the deep told him only so much. No description could truly incapsulate the great and awful thing shifting within what he knew instantly to be a crypt.

But there were words:

Terrifying.

Titanic.

The crushing power and greed of the depths made flesh.

Wounded.

Trapped.

A kindred spirit.

The dream, Shinobu understood without words, was its - as was the pain and the fear. It could not drown, of course; it was native to an even wetter world than Earth, and its kind had been born of far more violent and oxygen-starved waters. But something had happened to it - there was an accident, or perhaps a war, or a curse, or all three, and it died instantly - but its [children/siblings/followers/parents] had trapped it at the moment of death, knowing that "perpetual dying" was not "dead and gone", so that it may one day walk again - whether that day be months or millennia or millions of years away.

They had done their jobs too well - its body was in stasis, but its mind was not, and while the dark and crypt agreed with it, the realization that there would be nothing but the dark and the crypt for eons, and the pain of its wounds, engendered a great fear. It was a creature of faith and knowledge - and infinite curiosity. To be aware but paralyzed? Such a torture Shinobu would not wish on his worst enemy.

The dreams could be a tool of control, of authority, of temptation - but that was not their purpose. No, they were the god-beast's own desperate grasps for air - for sensation. Like drying, flopping fish desperately seeking water, they would jump into the self-seas of the creative and passionate, and immerse themselves in strange thought - free thought. The fear and delirium they produced was an unfortunate side effect, the result of backwash from its own self-sea spilling over.

To those who embraced the new water within them? Those who recognized the touch of "I am trapped" and "I am drowning" in the god-beast's sea? Those it did bring its authority to bear towards, and temptation - a promise.

In his house in R'yleh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.

Let him free, bring him your own dreams, and he will free you in turn.

And the god-beast was humble in hungers - even the waking titan, it most treacherous son who maintained the seal in fear its full power would drown the world in the deep, was also its most beloved, for ever since he took up his vigil, the god-beast was given regular meals of new dreams to forget its confinement - just for a bit.

I understand, Shinobu willed the deep water now part of him to speak to the god-beast - his God, now. For how else could you describe that great and almighty power offered you the greatest salvation of all - that you were not alone in the world?

When he awoke in the wee hours of the morning, Shinobu did not gasp - he breathed in the dark, not quite the deep but still close enough to feel its infinite empty freedom. And as he looked at his Ocean Game board, he saw that the sea he was drawing had self-seas within it - but it was of a similar kind.

During his sentencing, he thought nothing of it - just a dream his anxious mind conjured, but one that provoked him to laugh in mocking relief in the confused prosecutor's face when he was sentenced to the "terrible" fate of being under house arrest under the care of someone who would presumably let him out of his own house to a city filled with new people and sensations.

But when he ventured into the sea-that-contained-soul-seas - the Dreamlands - he knew in his heart, it was real. As was how he could will the deep within him to reach out and pressure the world to his design.

The Ocean Game he played now had some new rules, and a victory condition.

The tide goes in and brings truth.

The tide goes out and washes away the mundane and safe.

Break apart the shore of justifications that the wicked, cruel, and corrupt use to isolate themselves from the Ocean that is the world.

Show that they aren't so separate or different, and everyone polluted by them wins.

Ryuji: Sheltering Storm From Ib

This is a list of things Ryuji Sakamoto did not expect this week.

1. That somehow, he and the new transfer student would be pulled into some crazy dream-made alternate dimension.

2. That said transfer student was some kind of dark sorcerer who instinctively realized where they were and neatly escaping the Bastard Guard.

3. Speaking of, the Bastard Guard. Dreams that were powerful enough - like certain perverted coach's megalomania, apparently - could make minions from the Dreamlands to protect that dream.

4. That during the escape through some ghoul-infested catacombs, he would touch a big evil-looking statue of a dinosaur with fins and a beard of tentacles that would put him in communion with the inspiration for said idol.

5. Said inspiration was actually kind of a cool guy. Very angry, but angry about the right things and clearly angry on behalf of others.

...Okay, if pressed, that Coach Kamoshida apparently had a sex dungeon of a castle in a world made of dreams was also unexpected, but once he knew exactly what the Dreamlands were, it wasn't really shocking enough to be considered for the list. The list was composed things that really didn't follow from one another, once one accepted that dreams in the waking world helped make their own dimension, a Kamoshidastan that didn't make visitors want to clean themselves would have been a mind-bending revelation to the point of breaking.

He had enough of that today, thanks.

"Ho-lee shit." Ryuji nearly collapsed against a fresco of what appeared to be humanoid toads with humanish faces in a perpetually pensive expression and flabby fin-like ears danced around the dozing image of Bokrug, the Great Water Lizard, a scene of joy contrasted with the decayed state of the ruins. "...This ain't the worst day of my life, but soon as we're back home, I'm gonna go straight to my bed, and sleep for an effing month."

Shinobu shrugged, a rather silly contrast to the liquid shadows that dripped off him. "Well, day ain't done yet - still only kinda know what I'm doing."

Ryuji blinked. "You're shittin' me. You're the one who knew what those weird ghoul guys were?"

"No, the deep did," Shinobu replied ruefully as he showed off his shadow. "I don't know how, but after I...I guess got these powers, there's a part of me that knows everything that can be known - but it keeps itself separate from the rest of me so I don't accidentally lobotomize myself or go catatonic from horror. I'm only aware I know things if I want to know them - if that makes sense..."

"...makes about as much sense as anythin' else in this crazy place," Ryuji said with a shrug. "The big dino in that picture now has a direct line to my skull, and I think I'm partly made of water now. Y'all saw how I was able to flow through Mr. Grabby Hands' fingers like I was liquid or somethin', right?"

"We're all made of water," Shinobu said with a slight upturn of his lips. "...but yeah. That was, not going to lie, pretty cool. And gross. But mostly cool."

"Welcome to my world!", chirped a boyish voice.

Ah, yeah, the other thing that was disqualified from the list - the talking not-a-cat.

Admittedly, Morgana looked kind of like a cartoon cat - but then actual talking cats, the kind that walked on four legs and were from a city called Ulthar, showed up to help serve as lookouts when evading Kamoshida's guards. And said cats seemed a bit uncomfortable around Morgana, and also a bit ashamed of it - like they knew whatever it was wasn't his fault, but he was still someone they kept safe distance from, like the victim of an infectious disease.

And also when pissed Morgana could turn into a thrashing ball of tentacles screaming bloody murder from about four mouths. That was a bit of a WTF moment.

"True that," Ryuji agreed. "But, before we start lookin' for a way back, let me run this down - that was somethin' called a Palace, right? A place where that asshole's dreams made a big castle that looks like how he sees the school? And the Kamoshida there is sort of like his inner demon walkin' around?"

"That's the summary, yeah," Morgana said, grooming his ear. "But it's weird...it's not supposed to work like that..."

Shinobu looked up. "Eh? I didn't get that..."

"Yeah, because someone wants it kept secret - the power of the Cosmos Calling allows you to know a ton, but it's really specific, and if someone with a strong will has hidden some knowledge away, or there's no way you could learn it on your own? That'll trip it up, and you'll learn only that it's something hidden without actually knowing what it is. With training, you can overcome that, but right now you're way green. No offense."

Shinobu thought about it. "So...I have to work for knowledge still. Honestly, not the worst thing, I'd get bored otherwise. But continue."

"Gotcha. So, yeah, in the normal course of things, the Dreamlands is made of two kinds of location and the substrate between them. Fluid ones are those made from normal dreamscapes, while stable ones are those made by magicians or natural phenomenon in the physical world. Er, magicians here, by the way - people who have developed independent existence or immigrants from the physical universe can both stabilize the Dreamlands," Morgana began. "There's also Leng, which is kind of both, and stable places like Master Igor's Velvet Room don't need to be in one spot but - I'm getting ahead of myself. Point is, fluid locations should be quickly dissolving back into the substrate, but Palaces? Palaces stick around, and they actually grow bigger over time - start leaking into other dreamscapes. Makes some pretty bad nightmares if you don't agree with it at all..."

Ryuji was suddenly reminded of how fatigued a lot of the students in Shujin were. "Son of a - so that's why all the girls were saying they were afraid ta sleep!" A second later, he paled. "...oh fuck, they're trapped in the castle of Coach Pervert..."

"If it makes you feel better, I don't think they were abused or molested in their dreams...but I think that's because the Palace is relatively young," Morgana said. "Right now, their dreams are separate, but they're slowly being terraformed into a part of the Palace...then Shadow Kamoshida will be able to do anything he wants to their own Shadows, and worse, he'll be able to start reprogramming minds to make Shujin his Palace in the matter world, with all the students meekly obeying him or lusting after him by warping their conscious minds from this side.."

There was a long pause.

Shinobu gave a shaky inhale. "...Excuse me, I think I'm going to be sick..." He gagged.

"That asshole," Ryuji agreed, aghast. "I think the entire school being hit by a goddamn tsunami would be nicer. It'd kill him, and at least everyone would die without brainwashin'..."

Morgana's ears perked up. "...that wasn't sarcasm," he stated, seeming a bit disturbed. "You'd really destroy the school rather than let Kamoshida rule it?"

Ryuji opened his mouth to protest - he wouldn't kill everyone in the school, c'mon-

And the words died when he realized something - would it be murder if everyone was already functionally worse than dead? If Shujin had to be washed clean to even begin to heal?

The track star-turned-delinquent didn't hear his own voice thinking that - but it was him. Or more accurately, it was him as a toad with a humanish face signing it.

Part of him wanted to think that wasn't truly him, that was the thought Bokrug had put in him - but Ryuji had spent what felt like months seeing the Great Water Lizard's memories of Ib, and the unhuman, voiceless people who lived there. How the greedy, cruel humans of Sarnath had put every denizen of Ib to the spear to take their homes and bounty rather than build anything of their own, and turned what had been a quiet trade port into the heart of a despotic empire based on raids and brutal sorcery, ended only when Bokrug finished gathering a thousand years of power from his people's ghosts and the prayers of Sarnath's victims to strike all within the city down in a single night, weaving new bodies for the voiceless from their corpses.

And knowing all this, Ryuji had let the thought in, feeling Bokrug was not that awful a God.

Shinobu sensed the debate within him. "...You know, Bokrug is also the Old One of protection and purification as well as vengeance. He's not the kind to be too upset that things to be vengeful about never occurred."

"....yeah," Ryuji said, a bit pale. "Fist mission of our gang - make sure I never have to answer that..."

Morgana: Alleycat of a Thousand Faces

The Elder Things had a lot to answer for. That humans could see themselves in the antediluvian race was not a compliment to the hairless apes.

But it made it easier for find metaphors more learned humans could instantly understand - "Imagine Spain in the era of conquistadores, only it never stopped, they picked up fascism at some point, and then got so frustrated with not having slaves for every purpose they made slaves that could be all purposes - and sentient enough to feel oppressed. Now imagine what kind of person keeps on being caught off-guard by said slaves fighting back."

The Elder Things on earth died - or at least, were cryogenically frozen - long before Morgana gestated, but shoggoths had enough genetic memory to be excellent storytellers.

Not that Morgana was a shoggoth. Not entirely. He wasn't entirely cat either. Or Outer God. Morgana was "not entirely" a lot of things.

How it happened was that his parents were deeply in love, a storybook romance of boy meets girl, and decided to start a family. This would not be so hard, were it not for the fact the boy was a cat of Ulthar and the girl a shoggoth; it wasn't like Deep Ones, where for all the apparent differences, there was somewhat less genetic distance between them and landlubber humanity than there was between Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis. No, cats could not have kits with sapient organic robots, no matter how, er, flexible the latter could be.

So they did what any would-be parents would, and got help with making a baby. Unfortunately for said baby, said help was located in the Plateau of Leng, the strange (even for the Dreamlands) mountain formed by the dreams of Gods slumbering for eons, first and greatest of which was Azathoth, the Daemon Sultan, the dreams of whom were a necessity to stabilize reality by observing all quantum states and forcing them to collapse into coherency when above even the smallest levels. Which naturally meant it was a place where Nyarlathotep, the Messenger who likewise interpreted the dreams of the Nuclear Chaos into coherent action, could be found, and the idea of breaking down the barrier between species was a miracle appealing to him. And so, Morgana was born with three parents - his biologically incompatible biological ones, and his ever-shifting very literal godfather.

To say he was a bit ambivalent about this was an understatement. On the one hand, a Scion was a Scion, with his patron-parent's infinite capacity for shapeshifting, which was pretty cool - and of course, he was around to be ambivalent about it. But on the other, shoggoth and feline were an uneasy combination, and Nyarlathotep was before all else the Outer God of Disruption; while he was a creature who violated neither letter nor spirit of the deals he took in good faith (none with any sense would deal with him otherwise, and that just wasn't fun), the Crawling Chaos would not - could not - do things that did not disrupt order in some way. Hence, Morgana was also a creature who could not hide he was both shoggoth and intelligent felid to those who knew of his true nature, and so bring into question what all around him was a basic fact of life, that one could not be two entirely different species.

To say this was a tad alienating was a bit of an understatement.

Morgana had a lonely kittenhood, both sides of his heritage not sure what to make of him, and the other myriad races of the dreamlands finding him outright alien to their experiences, and thus a figure of terror. To overcome this, he learned how to make himself look like a human child, or sometimes a cartoon cat, as he found humans approached things they thought was their own heritage or "cute" more easily. That was how he came to learn about humans, admire them, and eventually, want to become one of them; they, at least, would sometimes make themselves believe the cartoon or the boy was his true form, or functionally so, especially if he was of use to them. Or if they just liked him.

(That this caused even more disruption when the children sided with the "monster" over what was conventionally acceptable was not lost on Nyarlathotep.)

That was how he met Igor, that strange magician that was perhaps once a doll, now a steward of what he called the Velvet Room. A place between dream and reality, mind and matter (at no point did he specify how this was different from the rest of the Dreamlands, but eh). They struck up something of a friendship, he and the steward and his golden-eyed attendants. Fellow observers of humanity, though not of them, not by a long shot.

Then the Velvet Room became hard to find. Then two attendants who Morgana had never seen before but who smelled like Lavenza appeared in the Dreamlands, offering "rehabilitation" by changing the dreams of criminals in the Dreamlands. They seemed honest - they did think that they were able to help people through changing their subconscious, and the people they selected did seriously need it.

Except that wasn't what Igor did. Morgana had his own doubts about "freedom of the mind over all else", to see anyone claiming Igor had done a complete 180 like that made his fur stand on end, and his fangs solidify. Which only got worse when he learned about Palaces - even in the Dreamlands, some things were unnatural.

That was when he got the letter from Igor: There is a boy named Shinobu Hattori. Tell him about Palaces, and ensure he and whoever he brings escapes one. Then join them. You'll find a place.

He wasn't sure how he leapt from "integrate himself" to "lie about being a cursed human", but in hindsight that was neediness talking. He didn't want to drive human(ish) friends away by admitting he was a freak of supernature.

(To his endless fury and shame, being arrested was not an act - even creatures who could grow eyes in the back of their head could be surprised if they got overconfident.)

Frankly, though, Morgana would thank Igor profusely if they ever met again, because Shinobu and The Other Guy (okay, yes, Morgana knew Ryuji's name, but both Morgana and Ryuji could be real pissants) were his ticket to see the matter world for the first time.

The first thing that came to mind, weirdly, was "vast." One wouldn't believe an entity born from the Dreamlands would find a place that was literally bound by physical law to be so much more open, but in truth the very omnifarious nature of the Dreamlands resulted in them being inherently less distinctive; what was a forest today could be an ocean, a castle, a giant body of meat, or nothing at all tomorrow. Or in the same hour. So nothing truly stood out or was worth remembering or living in, unless it was the stable areas, and those were a very small minority of places - and those became cramped real fast.

Earth, on the other hand? If you walked somewhere, you'd always end up somewhere that would be forever there, and it'd remain there - even if you didn't have it in mind. In a weird sense, being finite and fixed made it seem far larger - far more free.

Of course, Morgana himself was fairly harmless for a creature of the Great Old Ones - other, darker entities were soon to follow, and the influence of the Palaces soon made themselves known. Inokashira soon became host to a clan of the mole-like tentacle-nosed goblins known as zoogs, who soon began snatching small animals to eat and seeking powerful monsters to serve in return for protection. Sightings of the bogeyman Red Cape became more common as ghouls picked up the legend of the immortal serial killer as a disguise to hide their true natures as semi-human beasts away when looking for dead flesh to eat (or making it, in the case they felt pissed off or hungry enough). Not from the Dreamlands, but related to them, was the insectoid surgeons and scientists of the Mi-Go, who began light experiments on humans to observe how the Dreamlands' closeness to reality, and the Palaces, affected them.

That last one was somewhat fortunate, though - because Morgana, the expert shifter, was able to infiltrate their ship, and learn that observing a "Threshold Event" was only part of their motive for observing Yongen-Jaya; the other was to track a missing empty brain cylinder that had begun broadcasting that it was active a few days after the trio of Shinobu, Ryuji, and Morgana had gotten back to Earth.

That had also been the day Shiho Suzui disappeared - and the Red Cape ghouls were staying far, far away from disquieting pressure caused by the growing Palace.

(The events that this discovery would provoke would soon cement Morgana as one of Nyarlathotep's favorite Scions - few things caused more disruption than discovering how a "beloved Olympian teacher" was a grotesque pervert on an outright eldritch level.)

He suggested the name "Star Phantoms" before then, but after they took down Kamoshida's Palace and turned it own power upon him to force him to feel the pain he had caused and confessed, Morgana began to feel like one.

To use the power of a slaver against them, using the same force they had thought would be theirs and theirs alone...that was a part of Morgana's heritage he was thrilled to finally be able to embrace.

Ann: The Night Is For Lovers And Monsters

Ann Takamaki decided she was no longer human.

On a factual level, she knew this - you didn't get thrown out of the passage to the Dreamlands to the in-between and only end up back in your dimensional neighborhood through the power of Ilyth'la, the Great Old One of Outsiders, Queen of the Night, and remain what could be traditionally called the same species. If Ann didn't think about it, she would occasionally leave afterimages of herself behind her, alternate-universe echoes of versions of herself that took identical actions in indistinguishable alternate timelines.

But she made herself believe that she was still of the same nature, mostly out of denial - and then she saw what had happened to Shiho. What Kamoshida planned to do with Shiho.

From that moment, not being human did not seem so terrifying. In fact, it was almost a relief, to no longer be part of the beasts that produced...this.

"Ann?", the proto-being said as the lights on the brain cylinder's side pulsed with the timbre of the synthetic recreation of it inhabitant's voice. "...I can't see you..."

But of course not. That fucking asshole hadn't figured out how to grow eyes yet for his trophy's new body.

The more she thought of it, the more it seemed like she should have seen this coming. For all of his pretensions of women throwing themselves at him, Suguru Kamoshida ultimately got off on the idea of dominance. To have girls molded into people who would seek out his affections would also remove the "challenge" of making them obey his will. No, Kamoshida still needed someone to break, someone to own rather than just a willing toy. He believed otherwise, of course - from his journals (from what she had all but forced her male comrades to read of it aloud rather than see herself), he believed on some level that he was going to use the Mi-Go technology to create a mold-born body for himself that didn't age...but then he wrote that a "successful test" would result in an "eternal harem" as well, and that thus, he would never have to give up his "favorites" due to them simply aging.

That it was likely that said "harem" would dream in a fundamentally different way, being brains in jars telepathically steering partly-fungal cloned bodies, also meant that they were no longer vulnerable to his Palace, but he seemed to regard that as a minor thing, the scientists he paid to reverse-engineer the brain cylinder having their concerns about it marked as "I can deal with it."

So no, Ann wasn't human - not like Kamoshida. Not like the people who helped him in full knowledge of what he planned. Not disgusting.

But she could be human for Shiho.

"Shh, shh, I'm here," she said, hugging the cylinder briefly before remembering that Shiho had no nerve endings she felt in the semi-organic construction, and hugging the paralyzed, forming proxy body. "I'm here..."

The proxy's fingers and arms were at least working now, so Shiho could return it - desperately, clinging, feeling every inch. "...You're here," Shiho muttered, delirious with relief. "But...you feel...strange. Your skin's...different..."

"...Yeah. Yeah, it is." Ann tried to force the tears in. "I'm...I'm not in my old body anymore, Shiho. This is...a patchwork."

Wrong words. "No, no, no, he got you too, he said he would I couldn't save you no no NO NO NO-"

Ilyth'la possessed a Calling that Ann was not particularly thrilled to inherit. She was what scholars of the Great Old Ones called a Defiler, but that wasn't quite a Calling in its own right so much as the flipside of another Calling, Healer - more specifically, it was the amoral, cynical insight of the Eldritch that Awareness often represented that took a "normal" Calling like Healer, one created by the Fate produced by human belief, and recognized the negative aspects. Much as how the Calling of Sage, the ultimate teacher, could be seen as the Cosmos, the hoarder of knowledge for their own benefit and proof that some learning could bring pain. The Defiler then, was the Healer who showed the metaphorical poison was in the dose, using their ability to treat wounds and develop cures to engineer plagues and to create poisons. It was why the Mother of Truth was so often confused with Lilith, who was an entirely Earthly Titan rooted in the mythology of the Elohim, the pantheon of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and all their children sects (though the Angels very vociferously claimed they were only powerful servants of the One God, naturally). Lilith was a spreader of disease, and Ilyth'la would gleefully send plagues against the oppressors of people in the in-between, the outsiders, impoverished, and neglected who had no place in conventional society - which meant anyone who would write about her, generally. Societies did not allow proof of their failures to write about them.

But a Defiler was still also a Healer, and in the momentary panic caused by believing she had accidentally set Shiho over the edge, Ann looked at the proto-body, and suddenly understood how to fix its sight.

Reaching into a potential universe where the eyes came before the ears, Ann transplanted the not-really-existing organs from that universe's homunculus into this one, the onyx talons she had received from Ilyth'la to channel her powers scratching open the empty holes to reveal the nerves, then reaching in with her Calling to fuse the nerves with the eyes, the power of the in-between speeding time so fast that Shiho would not have time to feel the pain of the procedure.

Shiho gave a surprised cry as the new eyes began broadcasting their sight to the cylinder, slightly pained from her brain adjusting to the returned input.

A few blinks, and they widened as Shiho realized what she was looking at. "...Ann? You're...you're pretty..."

Ann looked down at the starlight shining from within her - a creator's mark of the Night Goddess that had reconstructed her physical form. "...yeah...yeah I am. And I'm going to get you out of here, and back in your body, and-"

"No, no, it's okay," Shiho said, the place where the mouth would be on the proto-body deforming to show that if it had a mouth, Shiho would be smiling. "You're safe. You're whole. That's what matters..."

This was a lie, of course - a way to make Ann feel better about being too late to stop Shiho from being turned into a monster, a bodiless brain in an alien computer that controlled homunculi made of fungus and cloned flesh.

But it was a very human lie - a comforting untruth meant to aid the comfort of someone you sincerely loved in a bad situation, a much-appreciated irrationality.

The kind of thing that, even as Ann learned to glory in being the outsider, the monster, the inhuman - she never hated the species. The desire for companions could twist men into horrors, but it could also provide care to a paramour when it was needed most.

Two monsters embraced each other in the dark, as the broken Palace above was devoured by the Dreamlands and Kamoshida broke the facade of normality that hid the rot of Shujin. And two found the monster they were holding to be beautiful as the night sky.

Yusuke: A Journey of Xanthic Inspiration

Yusuke Kitagawa had felt the touch of the King in Yellow since he was a young boy.

That was probably what kept him balanced when he realized just how toxic everything else related to Madarame was. The realization that Hastur was likely looking on from the sidelines of his Sensei's fall and applauding the drama unfolding was something to cling to as he slowly realized that in the war between the lords of the Palaces and the Star Phantoms, there was inhuman soulless murderous fiends who would tear apart the fabric of reality for their own gain, not caring if the Old Ones kept at bay would devastate the world. (The other side, of course, was composed of three ex-human Scions and a half-shoggoth feline.)

He didn't know the influence was real then, of course. All that happened was that sometimes, especially when thinking about his mother, he would notice men and women in bright golden masks observing him, whom no one else could see - and when he took to paper, ideas for what he was trying to make would flow even more readily, though those "yellowed paintings" would always have a melancholic air. Like the grave goods of a thespian's tomb, someone who truly loved life and wished to sleep eternally surrounded by elements of it. Madarame appreciated them, though he would naturally have to fend off questions about being in a "dour mood" when Yusuke was the only student he could steal from left.

After he saw the Palace, and Madarame's true nature, that was when he met the true King for the first time, his touch degrading the gaudy, tasteless museum as he strode through it to remove what was both mask and face to show to Yusuke - because to see what was within Hastur's hood was to see Death, devoid of comfort for the grieving or the malice those touched by sometimes it wished to ascribe. Hastur was the Old One of Art, yes, but that was secondary to being the God of Endings; the reason he was Unspeakable was that to speak his name was to be reminded of the coldest truth, that all things would one day die - even death, as the quantum breakdown of the universe after entropy would be fertile ground for a new Big Bang to sprout, with the new universe being blissfully unaware there was anything before.

It was horrifying, it was mind-shattering, and it was the kick in the ass Yusuke needed to stop clinging to the idea of Madarame as a well-intentioned Sensei; that his horrible situation wasn't permanent or the only way it could be serving as a foundation for his mind to reform around (and also the psychic impression of the Amber Aristocrat's fondness for poetic justice, a goal to work towards given how awful Madarame had been revealed to be). Yusuke wasn't sure he was traditionally sane anymore - few sane people accepted the nature of endings so completely without an existential crisis - but as a Scion, he felt he could deal with it.

Not the least because of the vistas he was now capable of visiting.

"Pardon, but could you move a little to the...thank you sincerely," Yusuke said as he penciled in the nug-soth in his sketchwork of their home planet. "This is an excellent base for the painting."

The elephantine alien gave the masked artist a bit of a flat expression. <'Tis good that you are sketching the bhole, as it devours what is left of my home, instead of, say, getting rid of it?>

"And I shall get right to that, after I...there. That is the proper hue. Toshio, if you will hold this..." Yusuke handed his sketch of the great lightning-eating worm and the ruins of the city it was dozing in to the space-bending byakhee mount he had flown to Yaddith on, the great vulture-like scarab beetle stowing it within his saddle bags, as Yusuke cracked his knuckles. "Though, can I ask...there are very few of your kind on Yaddith left. Your people and their exodus have survived, and you are still thriving in the stars, and the bholes seem content with the magic your sorcerers left behind. Why not leave the worms in peace?"

<Is this the artist or the Unspeakable's child speaking?>

"A bit of both," Yusuke admitted. "You said it yourself; there are too many bholes now. Yaddith is a breeding ground for them, so rich in magic and electricity that they do not even need to hunt meat to supplement their diets; they haven't destroyed its ecology like they are sometimes known to do, and your people understood this - they chose to move to other places and to let the world heal from your industry. Your ancestors learned the lesson of the prideful, and so they let the world heal from their ignorant abuse and pollution of it, as the worms feasted on the dark energies left behind. And it's a rather picturesque image; the still-inhabited cities standing in defiance of the vegetation and lightning worms, while acknowledging their time is gone without dying. So I fail to see why this bhole needs to leave."

<Because this bhole has acquired a taste for a particular kind of magic,> the nug-soth whistled. <We have tried leading it away through lures and shielding to make the Archive-City unappealing, but it keeps coming back - it wants the temporal viewer, which we use to watch our history. I think you may understand why that is a problem?>

Yusuke made an understanding noise. "And your stories, and the humility they showed, would be lost...that is a problem. Speaking of lures, however...am I breaking a taboo if I...?"

The nug-soth understood instantly. <Not at all. There isn't even many corpses of my people left, and we have little attachment to the husks; if the brain is burned and thoughts released to join the soul in the suns, then it would actually be an honor for the flesh of the deceased to sustain their living relatives. It being repurposed to rid ourselves of a persistent worm wouldn't even register.>

...Yusuke had spent too long around ghouls. The notion that apparently the nug-soth considered their dead part of the funerary feast didn't even register at first. "Thank you. Now..."

The artist pulled out a flute, and began to play.

The bhole gave a start as it sensed the corpses a kilometer away animate, slowly closing its star-shaped mouth and rolling on its belly as it stopped feeding on ley lines and stirred to investigate the new and fresh source of magic.

Which also happened to be near a portal to the Dreamlands it could be tossed through, and find itself lost.

Yusuke hoped it would pick up speed. He had only a week to draw as many planets as possible before his "trauma recovery" time off from Kosei ended, and Yaddith stopped him mostly because it needed help. Hopefully he could reach Kythanil, and see what light a world that had lost its sun could have.

Makoto: Metamorphosis of Hunger

Makoto Niijima was 18 years old and 4 months when she shed her skin for the first time to reveal the fur beneath.

This was greeted with as much enthusiasm as one would expect of a sane individual who expected something like this would happen, and was not a member of a species that shed skins naturally.

Which was why that every one of her friends rushed into her room in terror, only to become relieved when they saw the now downy Makoto staring dumbfounded at her own husk, instead of being eaten alive like the shriek implied.

"Yeah..." Shinobu hid his eyes behind an arm that was turning the translucent shades of a deep-sea fish, attempting to preserve Makoto's dignity. "The new abilities are awesome, but holy shit does the process of mutation suck..."

"If it makes you feel better, white fur suits you!", Ann said, attempting to smile even as her afterimages showed continuities of her that displayed her actual nausea at seeing a hollowed out human corpse. "I was afraid you'd look like a bug..."

"...I look like a gnoph-keh," Makoto mumbled, still processing. "That isn't better..."

"...dunno," Ryuji whispered loudly through his decaying vocal chords. "...kinda cute. Gnoph-keh look...pissed-off bears..."

To be frank, unlike seemingly every other Star Phantom, Makoto didn't have a semi-friendly interaction with her patron - or even just an encounter. No, Rhan-Tegoth was not an entity who did friendliness. Rhan-Tegoth was by far the most animalistic Old One; She of The Ivory Throne did not descend from heaven for arcane reasons or to research something found on Earth, she descended because Earth looked to be a rich hunting territory. The only thing the Terror of the Hominids was interested in was eating, and she did not possess enough empathy for even a functional pack instinct with her worshipers; the primordial, semi-ursine and -primate hunters known as the gnoph-keh worshiped her not out of kinship (though their hunting-central culture found much sympathy), but out of a wary fear of a much greater predator, and raw pragmatism - the rites allowed them to direct her hunger at prepared prey far away from them. While "Elder God" was a human construction for the Old Ones' human worshipers to convince themselves that the alien pantheon wasn't quite as inhuman or aloof as they actually were (even those who were once human, like Kthanid, were a bit alien - when it came down to it, the "nemesis" of Cthulhu was essentially running a protection racket on the Master of R'yleh's behalf to sacrifice dreams to him so he did not wake up too early for mankind to deal with the chaos), no one called Rhan-Tegoth an Elder God; not even her church saw her as anything other than a divine monster, at best The Most Terrible Enemy of My Enemy.

So it was with Makoto, who was actually meant to be a sacrifice; Madarame had been Fated to die as a bringer of beauty, and Shujin had been Fated to become a school for evil, a place where students learned that the only thing you could rely on was your own power and strength - that authority was not to be trusted, only abused. Since both had been shredded, Junya Kaneshiro, who among his many other illegal businesses also dealt in the smuggling of black magic and proscribed lore, realized early on that the Star Phantoms were children of the Old Ones, and that his own Fate as the Titan Fujin's hidden facilitator would not protect him from the Fatebreakers. So he dedicated much of his resources to protecting himself with the Old One's peculiar mythology as well - by the time that Makoto had begun her ill-advised crusade, he had made treaties with the local zoog clan for mutual protection, much of his high-ranking goon squad was outfitted with the crystalline thaumatechnolgy of the Deep Ones, and he himself had a gnoph-keh bodyguard and knowledge of their leading-rites. Makoto was meant to be a catalyst to turn the wintery Old One's hunger towards devouring his enemies, and then leaving behind the gnawed, winter-touched bones as a new resource to leverage.

He didn't understand the nature of Rhan-Tegoth as well as he thought. While she did not comprehend the idea of using Scions (she would rather eat anything that got close enough to be gifted with her power), the thing about being the God of Cold and Hunger was that she didn't entirely control those concepts; hunger was just as much of a problem to those who felt it, after all. Thus, as her manifested proboscis descended to feast upon the class president's blood, Makoto's own hunger - for a good college, for her sister's attention, for proof she was worth something - was more than the Terror of the Hominids anticipated, and it overwhelmed her mere hunger for flesh when the Terror was not starving herself. Rhan-Tegoth had leapt back in surprise and confusion when she bit into Makoto's flesh, and the bite had left behind her nature as a divine predator - and that was enough for Makoto to channel the great monster's infinite stamina and sovereignty over ice through herself, and break herself free.

But a Scion was still a Scion - and all Scions were more than just the children and chosen of Gods. They were also the Godly equivalent of larvae - beings that could one day shed their mortality and join the pantheons themselves. And as they developed, more and more of the God they could be would show itself in what scholars of divinity called Omens.

For Scions of Earthly pantheons, they were an issue, but not the worst issue. Humans conceived of their gods as familiar creatures; great men with horns, multi-armed goddesses, the wind with a face, and so they were. With their Scions, the Omens they showed were an escort of crows, the impression of a spinning golden halo, or a flash of feathers as they drew upon their powers, at least before they became full Demigods and were set on a path to divinity or destruction - then they would show permanently unless hidden.

For the Great Old Ones, however, Omens tended to reflect the worship of species throughout the cosmos, assuming they had basis in any mythology at all rather than being expressions of the unknowable cosmos. So they tended to instead be full mutations, making the human Scion more like one of the myriad of otherworldly worshipers, ever more something both and neither - in other words, fairly typical for the Old Ones, but it was still traumatic to see proof of growing distance from humanity and mortality.

Makoto sighed, running her now-clawed hand over her fur. "...at least it's soft...and warm..."

Yusuke picked up the skin, inspecting it with well-manicured and bony hands, as much religious art as skeleton. "...Hm. It appears this material can reseal...I am reminded of legends of hunters in human skin. Perhaps this Omen follows the logic of something similar...?"

Makoto winced, but after a moment's thought, she took it, and wiggled inside. A few pinches, and-

"...Huh." She stretched her fingers. "...Snug, but it hardly feels uncomfortable. At least I can still go to school...."

"On the bright side," Morgana said, felid muzzle grinning in an un-cat-like fashion. "If you get some black paint to put on that fur, you can say it's your ultimate Buchimaru cosplay. HSSSTEKLI!"

The hiss, naturally, was due to Morgana dodging a claw-swipe from Makoto's sudden, gnoph-keh-like lunge. And having to partly dissolve into a furry blob to get all the way out of the way.

Futaba: Date Dive

Futaba Sakura, in comparison to her fellow Scions of the Old Ones, was fairly lucky, she realized.

For one, her patron, Yig, was not quite one of the aliens. In fact, he was actually, originally, a God of Earth - a Dragon, to be specific. Before humanity evolved, Earth still had Gods, primordial creatures of fire, stone, and life that would later be so awed by the rise of dinosaurs that they chose to remake themselves in the image of sauroids, raising up a group of sentient species that humanity would later call the serpent people (though it was long before actual snakes evolved). Later, when the brilliant and decadent artist-scientists of the K'n-yan arrived shortly after Cthulhu and his peers, a much, much younger Yig was enthralled by them and became a patron to them as well. When humanity arose, and the existence of their Gods accidentally made the Overworld uninhabitable for Dragons (or was it the Gods who arrived first, and their creation of humanity that terraformed the Overworld?), Yig accepted the change with grace, becoming a more human God - but balked at the idea of bowing to Fate, breaking it around him to become something more akin to other, stranger Gods the K'n-yan worshiped. But he was ultimately a native God in an Old One's role, and so, he was a far less distant and more kind patron than his ostensible pantheon, if more than a bit temperamental and vindictive to those who harmed his children.

Speaking of, that was the other thing - the other Star Phantoms were made into the larvae of Gods by chance encounters, byproducts of their patrons' existences, or in Makoto's case being unlucky and then extremely lucky, but Futaba? Futaba never had to adjust on her own, because her mother had prepared her for the inevitable, given how she was the one who gave her informed consent and slept with Yig to begin with.

While Futaba did not really think of the Father of Snakes as Dad of Herself, biology nonwithstanding, this had more to do with the fact that as with most Gods, he was a rather distant parent - but not uncaring. More like a divorcee who didn't hate his ex-wife at all, and tried to spare as much time as he could for her and their child. So, the fact that she wasn't entirely human was something she never fully rectified, because that was roughly akin to rectifying how gravity meant you could not fly by thinking about it - roses were red, violets were blue, Futaba was part-snake, and also a terrible poet.

Her uncle Youji had more difficulty accepting that, both as a fact and how it led to Futaba's more odd behaviors, like how she would demonstrate anxiety by balling up and bearing her teeth at the source, or sniff-tasting something when she was inspecting it. That he accepted that Futaba occasionally acted like a snake and flatly denied her dad was also a snake (in a world where Scandinavia was known for its Troll reserves, America had frequent trouble with unfriendly design of buildings for centaurs, and Susano-o hosted and occasionally competed in a surfing championship) required more cognitive dissonance than Futaba thought the rational human mind was capable of, but it still led to the justifications Youji had for his piss-poor treatment of her, though with the benefit of hindsight she realized Youji was looking for any excuse to torment proof his sister was "better" than him and to punish someone for her "suicide."

That was what led to her coming into her powers, actually, when Yig paid a visit after finally tracking her down. Youji was still alive in a hospice, somewhere, being studied by fascinated and horrified doctors who wondered exactly how legs and limbs could be fused together like that, or how the surgically implanted venom sacs could simultaneously damage and heal his cells so that he was constantly suffering, but would survive for decades on the venom alone. Even Sojiro Sakura blanched at his fate a bit, even after Yig turned the shivering Futaba over to him, and explained what her family had done to her.

Futaba wasn't sure if it was the serpent or human parts of her nature that told her the safest part of the world from then and there on was the depths of her den (ie, room), only venturing outside via mentally possessing the various animals surrounding Sojiro's house (which became quite the urban park over time - Yig was a creature of the forests, and the forest made itself present to the extent possible in Tokyo), preferring instead to absorb as much knowledge as possible while making a name for herself online as both vigilante hacker and postmodern occult sage. She told herself it was because it was her nature, that the world no longer had a place in it for serpent people, especially as she started to sprout scales, forked tongue, and tail - but she had decided this long before, especially as she manifested the serpent person ability to hide most of her unhuman traits. It was only the discovery that Sojiro had begun to harbor other Scions she might call her extended family (and from knowing fully how well how her own nature developed, what he had somehow wound up with) that made her even consider leaving, seeking to meet her true peers - and even then, she only let herself be dragged out after the discovery that someone had made her insecurities into a Palace with an Elder Thing "projector" in order to convert the surrounding area into an especially toxic form of Old One cult, one that simultaneously despised the very existence of the alien pantheon and all they stood for, and yet at the same time embraced the darkest aspects of their indifference and aloofness from the world - true nihilists who felt all were going to suffer and die, and did not care so long as the enemy they hated suffered more than them, and they were allowed to be as vile as they pleased while praised for "telling it like it is."

(She really did not think she should have been surprised when the Star Phantoms discovered it was an authoritarian politician with dreams to rule the world behind all this.)

But in spite of her fear, she thrived in the sun - even found her fellow cosmic aberration in human form was, well, quite the gentleman. And perhaps, a bit more - the lore did say Il'thya had a thing going on with the Lord of the Great Abyss (the true identity of the entity sometimes known as Nodens), Yig himself with Shub-Niggurath; maybe the fact that they were both larval Gods of knowledge, darkness, and social upheaval led to a natural syncing of purposes that could only be described as affection, in terms humans understood.

Or maybe it was a mutual crush that bore fruit. Some things didn't have to be all mythical and eldritch.

Frankly, when your mutual idea of a date when taking a trip to Hawaii was to dive into the waves and tour a Deep One city for the sights, frankly you were the kind of odd that resulted in either infatuation or mutual loathing when you came into contact with each other.

"So, what you're saying is - you do sell this to people, so long as it is someone worthy of bearing it" the sea-breathing cottonmouth that was also Futaba made the darkness say, split tail holding up a jewel that shimmered with data.

The priest burbled in defeat. "...for the children of the Gods, yes. But I want more than just your word for repayment - you will enact a ritual that binds you to a favor to summon an emissary."

"So long as it isn't another wannabe Godzilla? Score!" The cottonmouth put the mystical computer in her bag, and swam out back into the cyclopean construction.

And promptly nearly busted her lung again when she saw the crowd of humanoid fish frogs dragging her date, and prophet the Deep Ones' personal patron deity, from ritual to ritual had somehow become even larger.

There had to be sixty of them by now, or one-half of a single Yuuki Mishima in terms of fanboyism.

(Admittedly, the Star Phantoms were the kind of thing that drew literal cults around them, but frankly, Mishima was the kind of person that if Futaba pinned to the ground with a foot, shifted her face to its most ophidian, and described in detail how his new name would be Spot, he would haggle on what breed of dog he was and how many treats he could expect in a day. For the sake of her own sanity, she had not conferred with her inner Cosmos on that to be sure.)

Haru: Orphan of the Black Goat

Haru Okumura had long known that the loneliest place was in the middle of a crowd.

This wasn't wrong, but now it needed a corollary - nothing would make you ache more for family than having 999 and upwards siblings.

It was an exaggeration and understatement both - for one, Shub-Niggurath was quite possibly the first carbon-based lifeform to exist, and all others the result of panspermia from her many meteroid spores, so literally everything recognizable as alive could be considered her descendants, and beyond that she hardly stopped creating more direct children at just a thousand. For another, most of those children were not even aware of Earth, let along natives, or humans. Many weren't even traditionally sapient.

But Haru wished she knew them. With so many, at least a few would have lost the parent they knew and raised them. And even if she couldn't rely on them, at least she could lean on them as she grappled with being an orphan in all the ways that mattered.

She envied Futaba; the Outer Goddess of Life was purely an adoptive mother to her, chosen to be a Maiden of the Harvest (as father had described her) on a whim when she figured out how to nurture a particular, bizarre flower that was apparently sacred to She of Endless Eyes. No, not even the Black Goat knew Haru was going to be one of the Thousand Young until she had decided on it, and in truth Kunikazu Okumura might have preferred it if a storm made of jungle mists had not manifested in his mansion, extruded hooves and tentacles of thrashing plant matter to announce that Haru had been chosen as her daughter too via pheromones, and departed leaving a room full of slimy biofilms left by mutated bacteria behind her. Her father's sense of love had long been eclipsed by pragmatic concerns, so being unwilling thrust into the role of regent for the living idol for the cultists that were equal parts the Okumura Foods employees who saw the Black Goat's manifestation and were enthralled, and the strange prospective employees who mysteriously submitted all their resumes after the minimal time needed for a scrying rite was performed. Shub-Niggurath was a protective parent, even as a stepmother, and Kunikazu thought it prudent to not push his luck and try to marry her off to a convenient suitor.

Instead, she became a resource, as she focused Shub-Niggurath's power into the agriculture side of Okumura's business, tripling their crop yields and halving their environmental impact at the cost of regularly having to hide evidence of two-headed calves, the bounty crops seemingly escaping their fields to invade the native ecology of plants with tactical foresight, and occasionally customers of Big Bang Burger sleepwalking through ritual dances directed by night owl cultists of the Great Mother as they sang what occultists would occasionally recognize as poetry in Aklo, the mathematical language of Yog-Sothoth. It wasn't a happy life, being what was effectively a living altar and high priestess both, though the realization that Haru had become more valuable to him as someone he had to deal with regularly broke down the carefully neglectful distance he had from her; occasionally both of the Okumuras could believe they were simply father and daughter, and professional partners both.

Which was why his death, destroyed from the inside by a Dreamlands curse, hurt even more than she thought it would have - when the Palace was turned against him, and Kunikazu confessed to her that he knew what created Palaces, an invention of the Elder Things to control both shoggoths and other client races more acutely by making it so that their overseers would imprint their personal reasons for loyalty to the ancient conquerers on their own respective species. For a blessed week, it almost appeared as if things could almost go back to how they were before, with Kunikazu as something resembling a good parent and employer, unbound by his own greed.

And then...black tears spilled from his eyes, that smelled of seawater and fear.

So now she was, along with her friends, hiding out from a society that was finally and eagerly ready to cast the alien forces of revenge as villains and monsters, instead of uncomfortably laying bare the issues in Japan's national myths. Showering.

She wasn't bothering to hide her Omens now - her innate Awareness had evolved to the point where she was at the border of semi-mortal Scion and true Demigod now, and had been for a while - her Omens were getting closer to being impossible to conceal, even when she wasn't drawing on her powers. She still didn't need much effort to conceal her Omens, and unlike an Earthly Scion, for whom Fate guaranteed some amount of personal celebrity, the Scions of the Old Ones could remain hidden if they made the effort - she could remain alone, just as she was doing now, floral tendrils having emerged from her hair to bathe and soak in the shower as she rested her head against legs that terminated in something between a monkey's gripping feet and cloven hooves.

Not for the first time, she considered just...losing herself in Shub-Niggurath's inherited instincts; still capable of intellect, but no considerations beyond fulfillment of biological imperatives and sensation. Sentient, intelligent, but not sapient - and immune to the aching pain that humans felt when they lost something important. And the lingering on it.

She was still rolling it in her head when she heard a knock. "Haru? Can I...come in...?"

Haru mumbled an affirmative, which Makoto's acute hearing picked up - a benefit of her own Omens.

And Makoto did, having temporarily discarded her human skin to reveal the queen of winter beasts beneath. "Do you...need me?"

"Mm." She nodded, as much as the wounded animal in her wanted everything and everyone to stay away.

She wasn't expecting the soft, dense fur to suddenly enclose itself around her, including the miniature pair of arms the other borderline Demigoddess was sprouting beneath her original.

And doing a thing the gnoph-keh she increasingly resembled would find landed her squarely in the uncanny valley for the ursine race of hunters, a species that was generally solitary ambush predators - they did not cry for others.

"I'm sorry," she said through her sobs. "I'm sorry..."

Haru turned to embrace her Mako-chan right back, letting her own tears flow, sharing her suffering as only social, altruistic animals could.

In hindsight - a reason that abandoning her human side wasn't just unadvised, but unnecessary.

Akechi: The Tides Go In

To understand Goro Akechi, one needed to understand that, along with breaking Fate, the Old Ones also poached the Scions of Earthly pantheons if allowed to. It didn't happen as much as certain pessimists (or occasionally for cults of said Old Ones, megalomaniacs) believed, because the permission to poach also laid with the Scions themselves, and it was not an instant process so much as a slow dance and seduction, a clever donkey sniffing a carrot the alien Gods were offering until it willingly accepted being broken and trained. But it happened enough to the point where it had a formal name, Transcendence; with a new affiliation with the eldritch powers came their affinity for the erasure of Fate, destiny no longer defined by legend and mythical roles.

So it was that Akechi, initially marked by his great-uncle Tsukuyomi, eagerly munched on the carrot of freedom offered by the deep dream that entered his mind. Looking at his past, the real shocker was that nobody saw it coming. A child of someone who was by all signs of Fate the future hero-emperor of Japan who would transform it into a world power through demonstration of perfect Sincerity and Right Action, the Virtues of his Pantheon and apple of Amaterasu's eye - whose very conception was proof that Amaterasu needed to look in the mirror and ask herself where she went wrong. Sincerity, to Masayoshi Shido, meant that whatever felt good to him was something he must embrace completely regardless of how much it injured those around him, or what he had to take in order to find satisfaction. Right Action for him was to enjoy and carry out all the privileges and duties as future monarch, which to him meant harsh and total correction of all deviance that threatened the social harmony, including that which was inherent to the deviant in question. Thus, to him, pressuring a Korean prostitute into unprotected sex to indulge one of his personal fetishes was Sincere, and then completely obliterating all chance she had of defaming him and thus the social establishment of the Japanese government was Right Action. Tsukuyomi understood this, the God of the Moon also being the God of Truth, and by Choosing someone so victimized by his nephew, Tsukuyomi had sought to make Akechi an emissary of that aspect to expose the corruption, and so change the myth so that Shido learned from his errors or was forever cast in the role of fallen hero.

Unfortunately, what Tsukuyomi didn't fully understand was that, especially in those lost days after his mother killed herself in shame, Akechi saw nothing of value in Japan, the nation that left him a pariah and drove his mother to take her own life. To discover that his deadbeat father was not only a monster, but a monster born of the Queen of Heaven? And that said Queen's brother saw him as a way to save her from her own mistakes? No, Akechi thought, the Kami could burn in the hell of their own making after that slap in the face - they had certainly scorched him good. So, he didn't even really try, simply seeking to become the new Detective Prince, something respectable - and free of the stench of poverty, so he actually had the choice he was denied as a child. He could destroy Shido after his victory, and bring down the entire sorry rotten edifice of "Japanese pride" down with him rather than save something not worth it, no matter how much it gave the species a well-deserved kick in the ass (and earn his respect and attention, a voice Akechi didn't want to acknowledge added).

So when he first had the dreams of the drowned city, terrifying as they were, he was nonetheless intrigued by something so unlike Tsukuyomi's increasingly desperate pushes to fulfill his unwanted destiny. And when he discovered what Transcendence was - and the negation of Fate - he dived into Cthulhu's waiting tentacles with insane, overjoyed laughter. Finally, a God who did not lie about his selfish (if understandable) motives, who let Akechi be what he wanted, who would generally shut up and leave him in peace!

He was so ecstatic he didn't fully wrap his head around the fact that there may have been more than one reason that, shortly thereafter, Shido himself contacted Akechi about this strange new technique he found to ensure social harmony through manipulation of the Dreamlands, and given the amount of cynicism Shido detected, would he be so kind as to remove some inconvenient razorblades from the candyfloss of life...

But now? Now as the final note in a series of humiliations (being tricked by a less-powerful stepsibling and his Band completely, discovering Akechi's own notes were raided to infiltrate Shido's own Palace and base of operations, discovering they had a cult that was willing to fight and suffer for who and what they actually were instead of a carefully constructed persona of the Perfect Detective or the Sorcerous Conspirator, and finally beating his ass even after being tired out by fighting Shido's own Band of Scions and their Dreamlander mercenaries/creations), he was being held at gunpoint by his illustrious father's real opinion of him.

"Such a shame...we were so easy to manipulate," the tulpa bearing his face said. "Ever since Captain Shido found out that his gossip of an uncle enlisted his own son to stop him..."

"...he KNOWS!?", the cloud of roiling murk that was also Shinobu Hattori roared.

"But of course. The Elders developed more Dreamlands manipulation technology than just the Palace-Builder," the tulpa-Akechi said, his smug face the spitting image of Shido's own (and the real Akechi felt a level of shame he did not know he was capable of). "They also developed the Mind-Eater Venom that you saw so excellently employed on Okumura. More pertinently, they also found a way to excavate the discarded parts of older dreams - the more Tsukuyomi sent those orders to stop the Captain, the more detritus he left to discover Akechi's real identity. He was under observation months before Transcendence even began, as a potential threat - Shido was most pleased to discover that Akechi had abandoned that untoward Fate by himself, and made himself a most productive resource..."

Slowly, Akechi felt his knees buckle. "...All along," he choked out. "All along...he knew. And he didn't care...because I didn't," he finally let himself realize. "I just wanted to believe...I got one over on him. That he...respected me..."

"Respect? Please - you are a glorified repairman," the tulpa gleefully emphasized. "He initially considered using you as an assassin - but by that time you were already the Detective Prince, and he realized that you would blanch at risking your reputation by becoming a murderer. Your contributions to perfecting the Palaces and mapping the Dreamlands most useful in arranging the disposal of Wakaba Isshiki and Kunikazu Okamura, however. To find another Scion with the same command over dreams you have will be most frustrating - but with the Captain's newfound expertise, I can guarantee it will be quite possible to train one. As for you..." The tulpa lowered the gun. "You served him well."

The shadow-limbs that were his Omen drew around Akechi - not to defend himself, but to hide his face away, to hide the shame of a fool and a pawn-

There was a brief shriek of surprise, followed by the sound of something falling on the ground.

"...oi. I know having your ass shown to the class is embarrassing for any chunni, but you can lower your shadows now," Sakura's voice said.

Surprised, he did, to see his own clone's corpse on the ground as the snake-like hacker cleaned the blood off her fangs.

"First of all - wow, your asshole of a dad really doesn't respect you - your clone had no peripheral vision at all. Second - it's going to be a crapton of penitence before I consider you worthy of being forgiven for helping along my mom's actual assassins, let alone nearly killing my boyfriend yourself. All that did was prevent me from dragging you off to snake-dad for some real pain. Thirdly..."

Haru stepped forward, a feral look in eyes that currently possessed currently vertically slit pupils. "It appears we have mutual enemies. Care to join our revenge plot?"

...Akechi was an idiot, he realized.

For all he told himself he was nothing like the Star Phantoms - they spoke his language.

Sumire: Last Dance on Earth

Sometimes, Sumire Yoshizawa wondered if she once said "I want to be better at something than Kasumi" in earshot of a monkey's paw somewhere. Because not only was her sister dead, and thus by definition could not continue to outshine her anxious, easily upset, and depressive screwup of a twin, but now, Sumire discovered one person that seemed to appreciate her gymnastics, and made her something that Kasumi could not even begin to compete with if she lived.

Sumire couldn't exactly decode the expression on an octo-frog-cuttlefish's probably-a-face, but she was sure that, when she encountered them, the Flutists of the Daemon Sultan looked either amused at her clumsy attempts to keep pace with their manic symphony or offended that Azathoth had apparently decided that such a worthless excuse for a gymnast was worth observing to calm his eternal hunger and endless chaotic dreams.

But from the moment the Outer God of Creation and Destruction implanted a bit of his stellar fire into Sumire, and she became caught in the metaphysical event horizon of the black holes he embodied, she knew that she would need to dance to the music of the spheres. And dance she would. To not do so would stir the Nuclear Chaos from his sleep, and invite chaos as he grew closer to waking.

Really, the Blind Idiot God was more akin to the Holy Roman Empire in that he was only kind of any of the three components of that title. For one, he didn't perceive much, mostly because his basic mental state was what humans might call "asleep", and it was difficult to stir him to true consciousness for even a moment - but when his attention was upon something, he understood it completely, in the sense an architect understood a blueprint, or a surgeon the human body. The Daemon Sultan was also largely driven by instinct and impulsive reaction, but again, he was mostly asleep - nobody really criticized humans for acting bizarrely and dumbly when sleepwalking, and Azathoth only waking enough to sleepwalk was normal for when something agitated Nuclear Chaos - but the fleeting moments of true waking thought would spew out technological singularities, esoteric philosophies, and detailed plans that could span eons (Nyarlathotep himself was the issue of one of these thoughts; the Daemon Sultan had thought to himself "I must have one who will run my affairs while I sleep", and this errant thought immediately learned to think for itself, and think itself a new identity). And "God"? God was too limiting a term for one whose general will was a pantheon of musicians who existed to keep him within deep sleep lest he provoke disasters and the upheaval of realities with shallower REM sleep, and yet in so doing enact what he wished whilst ensuring there was a coherent set of physics at all, anywhere.

A more respectful name for Azathoth was the Foundational Paradox; a being of both unthinking instinct and infinite knowledge, unstoppable entropy and eternal creation, the heartless stellar catastrophe and the music of the spheres. Literal music, too. Perhaps that was why he was drawn to Sumire; the sister who so desperately loved and worshiped her sister that she wished Kasumi did not exist - because then Sumire could be Kasumi. Logical in its incoherence, just as the Pipers were intentionally and skillfully discordant. Opposites, yet the same, a pleasing tension that helped Azathoth lull himself into deeper sleep and pleasanter dreams, where his hunger for raw materials to create anew would not trouble him.

Dr. Takuto Maruki had taken her under his wing after that - or rather, the being who was once Takuto Maruki took her in under his wing. A decade ago, when he had willingly drawn upon the memory-alteration technology of the Elder Things to ease his lover's pain, his willingness to erase himself if that was the only way to help her drew the somnambulant attention of the Daemon Sultan, who saw in him a willingness to destroy his own happiness to make the world happier, itself a pleasing paradox. And after adjusting, Maruki took to his new Callings well, transitioning from a neglected and ignored psychology student with some occult knowledge to the heart of a hidden cabal of mechano-mystics and would-be lords of the Dreamlands, seeking to revolutionize mental health in secret - only to discover that the world rejected him, and in the most underhanded way. Masayoshi Shido was quite willing to play the ruler defending his people from the foreign sorcerer, conspiratorial cultist, and hawker of a devil's deal, and then turn right around to use the technology said sorcerer was presenting for his own ends. Maruki, broken and defeated, retreated - and decided what the world needed in the dark future he no longer felt able to forestall was a hidden symbol of resistance in the Dreamlands, a God who was able to break the control of Palaces - or at least one able to reliably fight back without much preparation.

And so Sumire ended up with a mentor who resembled a mass of cosmic matter kept into coherent form by golden armor, who helped her learn to control her powers - and to develop a part of her able to forget she was Sumire for a bit. To let herself sleepwalk through Kasumi's dream, and so ignore the wretched sleeper.

Meeting fellow Scions of the Old Ones changed that - in time, the sleeper stopped needing a dream to believe there was something worth it in herself, and she came to realize her own lack of belief in her gymnastics regardless of her actual skill was probably another pleasing paradox to the Daemon Sultan. She never quite joined their Band - she had enough trouble with helping keep her patron safely comatose, and managing the petty kingdom she somehow ended up with in the Dreamlands. But she appreciated their help, and the discovery of a level of dexterity and acrobatics that was not natural to Azathoth - it was purely Sumire who unlocked it, purely a facet of her own Awareness and potential godhood.

But now, a bitter victory on their behalf sent her to Maruki's own sanctum again, for one final counseling session:

Discovering if it was worth it to follow his lead, and begin the path to true apotheosis to fight an insurmountable divine monster.

"...I knew he couldn't have understood my notes alone," the gold-armored specter muttered, punching a wall. "I am such an idiot!"

"If it makes you feel better, Doctor, even Akechi didn't realize Shido was receiving any help. I don't think Shido was fully aware of it - you saw his Palace too, and how the engine had prayers to his future Godhood written all over it..."

"And that should have been an indication to me. Shido isn't an idiot, but he is no great scholar of even the Kami, let alone the mechano-mysticism of the Old Ones or any of their follower species. If he genuinely thought he was the one who learned how to operate it, it was because someone else was engraving the blueprints into his subconscious." Maruki sighed. "And I was so busy sulking I couldn't help - just cheerlead..."

"Um, you did more than cheerlead," Sumire said, kindly. "You were a balm and guide they needed..."

"Thanks, but that doesn't make it all better. Some relic of the Elder Empire is still around, and now, it's using the fact that a would-be Emperor failed in becoming it to rebuild the original. I've seen the altars and radial sigils..."

And it was true. Shido's sudden confession to everything he had done on the eve of what was supposed to be the day he became Prime Minister-elect had thrown the country into chaos, and not the mystical kind that Sumire warded against. Prophecies of the New Emperor were not only shown to be false, but of a man who had no right to call himself a hero, or even a strong leader. Titanic cults to the more wild Kami like Fujin, Raijin, Namazu, and Izanami had come out of the woodwork to jeer at the exposure of how hypocritical the order Amaterasu had made on the gravestone of her mother truly was. And the Star Phantoms? The sudden reveal that the social order the "villains" had disrupted was a sick animal that deserved euthanasia had provoked seemingly one half of Shido's most diehard followers to decide that they must be somehow omnipotent conspirators who had an infinite array of crisis actors who existed to make them-er, Shido look bad, and the other was even more disturbing, wanting them to replace Shido as the strongmen.

Then, a week in, the crisis halted, and things were peaceful again - as smiling people tore down sacred shrines and raised five-sided altars of clockwork and grown flesh from their debris, statues were being knocked down to be replaced by the severe glare of prehistoric Priest-Kings, and hymns were sung in the street to the First Explorers, who brought life to Earth for their experiments, and how everything was soon to be fine once the Elder Things returned and took control of humanity. How the Star Phantoms were not truly an upheaval, but cleaning out the debris for the true rulers of humanity to return and bring world peace in gentle chains (with Japan holding much of them, was the unspoken implication).

And in the Phantoms' dreams came a single name associated with this new embrace of madness and willing bondage - Yaldabaoth, Elder God of Control.

"I know, and that's why..." Sumire sighed. "That's why I am asking - if there's a God behind this, we can only fight him on more even ground..."

The air around Maruki turned even darker as he considered it. "...You are aware...of what that entails...correct?"

"The Five Trials of Apotheosis," she replied, grimly.

A Demigod was not just a Scion so powerful that they had begun the metamorphosis from potential God into actual God, butterfly wings sprouting from the caterpillar of their previous life. Fate knew that a new God was sure to be a disruption in the careful balance of the world, and moreover, what myth with any staying power said "this person decided that they wanted to be a literal divinity, and then became so without any trouble or self-discovery at all"? No, from the moment a Scion crossed that threshold, the Scion would be faced with tribulations to teach and test if they were really worthy of the position - the Second Call and the Threshold were simply refinements of a Scion's Callings and personal story, but the Theophany was the final exam of "ascend above this in all senses, or if Fate is kind it will merely kill you", and among those Trials were the Parting and the Descent, the enforced teaching of the two most painful lessons of divinity:

One, you could not have a life as a God and your old mortal one. Connections to what you loved and valued would bow to the slow decay of time or be incompatible with the mythic roles you needed to embody in order to even continue being.

Two, that in many cases, these bonds would be severed by your own hand. Gods did not get to have power without responsibility.

While Scions of the Old Ones drew power from Awareness rather than Fate, Awareness was not so different from Fate in that regard. In fact, it was even more brutal in its Trials, for to Awareness, the Trials were a law of the universe, not a monomyth.

That was why Maruki was a bit of dark matter in a containment suit, after all - for him, the Descent was that for his paradise in the Dreamlands, his human body was simply not up to the task. He needed one primed to become a living conduit of the metamorphic power of the dimension, to stabilize it.

"...I can't say you're wrong. But I have to warn you - the moment you take that step, you can't turn back. I'm not human anymore - I doubt even a part of me could live on Earth anymore, my garden was primed to help stabilize my flesh and I still need a suit to remain humanoid and physical. Sometimes...sometimes I forget that humans need to sleep, too. Or breathe. I don't have the reminders."

Sumire closed her eyes, and sighed. "...I know. And...I was just starting to live as Sumi again..."

Maruki put his gauntlet on her shoulder. "...if it makes you feel better...I think Soomy'rea, the Dancer Between Thresholds, will be an Old One people are eager to worship - and don't think they need to sacrifice to."

The gymnast shivered. "Please. I'd hate if some maniac thinks a pet is something I'd be pleased with..."

"Quick tip - start early on what is acceptable offerings. It took me several tries to get that across..."

After: The Doom That Came To Tokyo

So, this was Yaldabaoth.

Inside the mass of deep shadows shaped into the image of a chimera of squid, dolphin, and seabird whose maws were the night sky, Shinobu couldn't help but feel...cheated. And disappointed. But also cheated.

As his Omens overwhelmed him, Shinobu found it necessary to bring the deep with him to stop his skin from drying out with light greater than a particularly bright lightbulb, his friends had mutations that could be even more extreme, and Yaldabaoth...was an old bald man plugged into a mecha suit.

A mecha suit of clockwork and twisted flesh that resembled a five-armed, radially symmetric gold-and-ivory angel covered in wounds that bled light and sunfire, but the man at the center just looked like a particularly old cyborg with a bunch of wires and pipes running to and through him, keeping him alive long after he should have passed.

"...Is this the great 'Inheritor of the Children of Heaven'?", Shinobu shouted through his dream-body's mouths. "A guy who turned his ICU bed into a giant robot?"

The man's brow ceased, as the ocular stalks on Yaldabaoth's crown turned to face his challenger. "I see that Caroline and Justine were correct in their assessment of you, heretic. Arrogant as always, and without even the decency for maturity."

A bit of the false city block that was the hiding, and currently massively grown, Morgana bristled, but not enough to reveal himself and spoil his ambush. Don't say their names, he hissed, telepathically. You don't deserve to say their names...

"And why not, mongrel?", Yaldabaoth retorted. "I enhanced them - where there was once one Lavenza, now there is two minds plus her own - you reintegrated her before I was ready, but now she has three perspectives to consider and perfect any decision. What you and your friends have done to yourselves simply makes it rank hypocrisy to bring myself to task..."

On top of the Dreamlands sea-reptile that bore one of the two sub-teams composed of Phantoms who did not have their personal kaiju forms or equivalents, the Ibian form of Ryuji furiously signed, the green fog surrounding him giving voice to the rage he was no longer capable of vocalizing in return for true amphibious existence and unmatched speed. "That'd land better if she did it to herself at all, asshole!"

And frankly, you don't get to scream that you know better, the world remembered Ann saying at some point in her past, turning her attention away from helping Shiho furiously try to hack into the Mi-Go components of the final Palace control network. I think Ryuji and Bokrug might have some issues with proclaiming you're bringing about a safe kingdom, eh Zokkar? Or do you prefer Zo-Kalar?

There was a long pause. "...You know," the body of the First King of Sarnath spoke through his divine identity, more a statement of recognizing that fact than shock.

You aren't the most subtle mastermind, every snake and computer in Tokyo echoed in energy pulses. Seriously, you were broadcasting your codename across the entire city and then put your own human form's mug in the place of Hachiko. Light Yagami, you are not - and on a related note, what the hell!? What did dogs ever do to you!?

"Hmph. That statue is in praise of an animal's delusion - I did not order it being moved, but I am glad for it," Yaldabaoth sniffed. "Humanity's insistence on sentiment is one of the many reasons it cannot advance without correction. Far better to reminded of actual heroes and the glory of the past to provide a rock against the uncertainty of the future and present."

Another monster conjured from the deep, but thatched with moonlight to provide structure as its skeletal structure as a great raven, found its mouth handing open as its creator stared in disbelief. "...actual heroes like yourself, you self-absorbed asshat!?" Akechi screamed. "Thanks for that - now I know any loss to you is entirely the fault of the weaklings on my side - what kind of cowardly, shallow drivel is that bullshit!?"

"What will enable humanity to survive, regardless of your willful denial of the truth of your own nature," Yaldabaoth retorted. "The most merciful thing in this rotted world, I have seen as warrior, king, and God, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. You have witnessed the human reaction to having the conventional and sane upended, even for their own benefit, as I did - as soon as the species beholds the black infinitudes that surround its placid isle of order and ignorance, it promptly attempts to flee from the light into the safety and peace of a new dark age of mighty rulers, or succumbs to nihilistic madness. You should be grateful to me - I provided a new belief for the masses of Tokyo to cling to, a new father figure to hide them after you ripped Shido from them. Unlike in Sarnath, where Bokrug's trick led my beloved nation to tear itself in twain in a single night."

On the other team of shared-kaiju-control, in the midst of a forest of tentacles, bones, and fines, Haru rose an eyebrow. "I think that may have more to do with how Sarnath spent a thousand years hosting a festival day to mock the people it murdered. The blow to the ego of said people turning out to worship a real god and that they were ready to demonstrate their offense seems a bit more destructive to the mind than just a group of frog ghosts dancing."

"Bah. Any who claim that their people are innocent of sins in their history to thrive is proof of humanity's inability to accept truth..."

"EVEN SO," Makoto said from her howdah of ice upon Haru's Dark Young cousin, words made in the cracking of ice, "THAT IS A CONVENIENT ANALOGY FOR THE MAN WHO ORDERED PUTTING IB TO THE SWORD TO STEAL THEIR MAGIC FOR HIMSELF, AS OPPOSED TO A DESCENDANT GENERATIONS AWAY FROM BEING BORN."

"And what else was I to do?" Yaldabaoth growled, his kingly tone having turned frustrated, the mechanical distortion of his voice increasing as he lost his regal edge. "I had learned of the Elder Things, and the actual origins of life upon Earth as an accident of their projects - and one they would have happily twisted to their own purposes. This planet was an accident, worthy only of consideration for the forces beyond it as a replaceable resource, if at that - even its native Gods. I had to minimize the influences of the Old Ones upon the world for it to thrive and even approach the glory of older sapient races. That meant removing any impurities that might lead it to becoming a weaker bulwark against the hostility of the universe. A single, strong people with their minds incapable of doubt, who may witness the absolute horror of existence and greet it with barred teeth, seeing only an enemy to conquer rather than a reason to despair."

Sumire's existence within the Dark Young's protective shell of atoms briefly localized to express her own disbelief. "And you created a mythology about how wonderful it was to be willingly enslaved to the Elder Things? And patterned your own God-form after them?"

"What is kinder - to believe you are beloved servants and vassals above the rest of your creator's get, or that you were a discarded child of an abuser you would be better to not know? No, humanity depends on believing it is treasured in the universe - to know that it is the creation of a not even unique accident would break it, utterly. I undertook the Trials to help protect humanity from this truth - a God providing the Control they need to walk the narrow path to greatness."

Shinobu paused to consider this, an increasingly divine mind examined it, and considered the truth of his position.

Naturally, he began to laugh his ass off, followed by the rest of his friends.

Yaldabaoth's sun-fire flared. "YOU DARE MOCK-"

"What else can we do, you puffed-up idiot!?", Shinobu shot back. "You're...adorable!"

The sunfire began to gather into a miniature star. "YOU-!"

"Okay, real talk - I get it," Shinobu said, suddenly turning serious. "You're right. It's kind of embarrassing to know that you are the accidental creation of galactic conquerors who couldn't even do that right. There's a reason they aren't ruling Earth now."

"Thing is, coward?", Akechi said, his crow-shadow grinning madly. "I was a product of something with active hate - and frankly, knowing I'm something he couldn't control? It goddamn rocks. I think my friends are a bit too cheery about humanity, but frankly, you're not an improvement. If humanity's problem is lacking courage, I think we'd be doomed if we had to listen to someone so fucking spineless."

You think you're the one holding the ruin back - but no. You're the doom that came to Sarnath, Futaba agreed. You taught your people that looking strong and feeling strong was the only thing that mattered - and in so doing, they forgot how to be strong, relying on slaves and the magic you stole instead of ever confronting the weakness in themselves. So if you'll let me be a big white troll without a face for a sec - you have no belief in yourself, and you expanded that to all of humanity. Congrats, you played yourself.

"And frankly, we're in the middle of becoming those awful, whim-driven monsters; we're laughing and shouting and reveling in joy, like the Great Old Ones. And frankly, what's making me joyful is the idea of stopping you from killing humanity's soul in the name of 'survival'. Fuck that noise," Shinobu agreed. "All you're doing is just making the 'killing' part of that mantra sound more and more appealing."

The sun grew bigger. "Then there is nothing more to say."

"Yeah, and I'm real annoyed you thought there was, Akechi said. "LET"S DO THIS!"

And with that, the god-monsters clashed in the bay of Tokyo, an apocalypse in motion.

A/N: Yeah, Akechi was not nearly as murdery here.

I could go on about how that he was worth more as part of a plannng team than a thug or enforcer here, given how Cthulhu is more about knowledge and mysticism than death, and how he was an actual detective long before he met Shido here...but really, this was because that final scene with everyone in their end boss forms was what I was aiming for, and do you really think Haru or Futaba would have let him into Team Nice Eldritch Abomination for that lecture-off if he was a provisional, emergency member who killed their parents?

Please feel free to comment - this was also an experiment in writing semi-mythic prose and setting for me, and I'd really like to know what worked and what didn't.

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