71. Butterfly

Modification gained!

Flash scale

There was something... Therapeutic about a good hunt. It was simple. It was, nowadays at least, easy. And most importantly, it usually ended with a good meal. Or, well, quite a few good meals in my case.

As, in the course of hunting for the right ingredients Paradox needed for creating Dreg's healing flower, I had - to be blunt - glutted myself. If it wasn't important, or helpful to our goal, it went down my gullet. A delightful little process that saw me feeling a lot more like a bloated tick than I had in a while.

Tail laid over a few trees like a bed, butt resting on the ground behind them, and my belly laying fat and full on the ground in front. Three of my four arms rubbing circles into it as I took a moments rest. The sound of the forest in its natural state surrounding me.

It was peaceful. Very peaceful. The sound of things that should've been birds tweeting in the distance. The cry of swaying leaves - literal crying - and the call of a vicious hunt come to an end just a little ways off.

Not my hunt, though. No. I was taking a break. Both because I was currently too stuffed to move comfortably, and it was getting kinda hard to think straight when there was so much of me to grab. A problem I was only slightly embarrassed to admit to myself. Which, as far as I was concerned, was the only person I ever needed to admit it to.

But, uh, I suppose that was an - (non-) - issue for later. When I wasn't so dangerously close to true roundness. For now, after my break ended in the next minute or so, I needed to resume my hunt.

A task that I was technically already in the process of, using my serpents as eyes all throughout the forest. Snakes that hung from trees, hid in bushes, and stalked all about. Each keeping their eyes peeled for whatever strange monster Paradox sent me after next.

And right on cue, I felt her presence burgeon to life within the forefront of my mind.

There. The big one. It should be the last I need.

She whispered - for some reason - drawing my attention to the eyes one of my serpents, and down to a hulking monstrosity that even I struggled to look at.

It was something like a gorilla, only 15 feet tall, had a lower body made out of crabs, and instead of having a head it had a mass of tentacles that ended in blackened fingers. A visage made immensely worse by its soft wet looking all white skin. Almost like it was a sheet that had been submerged in slightly dirty water for hours and then wrapped around the creature.

Not to mention it smelled horrible.

Unofficial copy! This story was published elsewhere by its author and copied here without anyone asking them.

I started slithering it's way. Bulk knocking over slight trees, and trampling alien bushes. A part of me delighted in the hunt to come. In the prospect of putting my might against a creature that near matched me in size. A hunger for the brutality to come.

It was a thought I wouldn't of had before. Too barbaric to belong to the woman who was always late to work, and wanted nothing more than a few more hours rest. It was violent and greedy for sensation. Monstrous and foreign. Belonging to a beast that lived on sensation.

It shouldn't have been mine.

And yet it is. Vice whispered. We are becoming... A thing entirely different, I think.

Not human, I finished. The realization hitting me once again with a flash of shame and anger both. Followed by a thought that wreaked betrayal - perhaps I already wasn't human.

Perhaps I really should choose what I am becoming.

It was inevitability, I knew. Discussed and feared. And though I had pledged to decide, to steer my own ship, I had to begin. Yet to take the task into my own hands, rather than letting all other forces shape me.

There was shame there too. A burning sound of self directed betrayal at my failure. For clinging to my more fragile half.

I turned away from it. Mind too soon becoming a hive of warring thoughts and personalities. All of them utterly me, and almost none in agreement.

I couldn't help but wonder if the collective of my future selves was like this as well.

They are. Paradox answered unprompted. Each a spiraling version of you, yourself, and I. All in disagreement on how we should turn out. On what forces should press upon us and what choices we should be allowed to make.

"But they don't act?" I asked.

Never in the same timeline for the most part. Though there are times when they must. Each and every variation of you is a project that always grows beyond control. We are a dog devouring the hand that feeds us. A caterpillar that grew into a dragon.

I decided I didn't like the sound of that. A thought, I was sure, Paradox heard but ignored. And why wouldn't she?

There were probably countless variants of me that shared the opinion. Countless different outcomes of myself that would either do something about it or nothing.

Which was, a profoundly depressing thought. The dawning that I was an experiment of my own and others creation that was being experimented upon endlessly until I grew strong enough to break free and start again myself.

Unless I decided against it. Decided that I wouldn't continue the cycle.

Which I likely already had. Which somehow, I felt, still ended up continuing the cycle.

It does. Paradox confirmed, a sigh following the words. Then the you she would've guided suffers for it, and so she makes sure to ensure her exact suffering is not repeated.

"How long have... I been doing this for?"

Impossible to say really. At some point, one of us ate a portion of the timeline, and now none of us knows.

I decided not to open up that can of worms, and moved past it. "Okay, well, how long have you been doing it? Or how far back do you know it goes?"

Paradox didn't answer immediately. I felt her stop to think. Her conscious fading away for a half second before returning.

A few... Hundred thousand cycles, at the very least. But it definitely goes back way further than that.

For a moment, I was left speechless. Unsure of the nature of my own existence in a way that felt entirely novel. Surreal even. But it was at the same time oddly liberating. As if I'd reached a peak of sorts, that made the newfound oddity of my current life - in this timeline - seem rather mundane all of a sudden.

Mayhaps I was never human to begin with.

It was a thought I did not pursue. Nor was it one I argued for or against. I simply let it sit and stew and rot and become.

Mayhaps, I was never meant to be human.