chapter one

You are vast, larger than any mere mortal could hope to conceive of, and yet the one calling you, your summoner, wants you to squeeze into a form so small as to be insignificant. The little mortal asks for the impossible with a sort of blind faith that, at its base, amuses you.

A twist, a turn, and mass, insofar as you have mass, is compressed. Space is transitory, it does as you wish. With a scream, physics reels from your irreverence to its laws. It batters at what you are doing but that is as easy to ignore as a faint stench.

Between one blink and the next you are an entity of the void no longer.

***

The ceiling has wooden beams, some of them marred by smoke stains and soot. You know this, because you are on your back on the floor, which affords you an excellent view.

You wrinkle your nose at the smell of burning sulfur and something sickly sweet, then you wrinkle your nose again just because you can. You have a nose now. This is rather novel.

Of course, that’s all perfectly normal. You are a being made flesh now. You have bits that are squishy over hard parts. It’s all quite disgusting and probably unsanitary. It’s no wonder that mortals are so mortal. One small impact is all it would take to rend this sack of meat you are calling home apart.

There’s a noise. You know this because you have ears.

You wiggle your limbs and, after a moment of not really moving, decide that your patience for mortal flesh limbs has already reached its end. You reach into the space between spaces for more of yourself and pull a fraction of a fraction of your essence into the mortal coil. There’s a tearing sound, and a splash.

Warmth runs across your back and you see inky black blood pooling out around you.

That’s probably bad. But at least now you are no longer limited to a mere four limbs. Your new limbs sprout out of your back like the wings of an Angel. Though unlike those weaklings your wings are black, and wiggly, and a little bit slimy with your blood. They are also boneless and featherless.

They’re tentacles.

Tentacle wings.

Angels don’t have anything on you.

Now equipped properly, you let yourself go limp as your tentacles spear into the floor and raise you up to your feet.

There are two meaty fleshbags in the room. They are small, with delicate little bones covered in mostly beige flesh. One has long brown fur atop her head and the other black. Perhaps the fur means somethings. You will have to look into it and make sure any fur you have tells the mortals that you are not to be trifled with.

One of the girls steps forwards, the shorter of the two and the one you suspect is your summoner. She opens the hole in her face and noises come out.

You blink at the strange, guttural sounds. This is a problem. But of course, you have a simple solution. You just need to tear the knowledge out of your summoner’s head. Everything these mortals know is stored in the meaty organ in their head. A terribly inefficient way of going about things but they’re primitive mortals, so what can one expect?

Bringing one of your tentacles back, you prepare yourself to spear through your summoner’s skull to get to the juicy brain matter within when you pause. Would going through the skull break the summoner?

Best to merely apply pressure atop the summoner’s head and extract the knowledge of their meat flapping language that way. It is not nearly as efficient, but it will work.

You step forward, then the world shifts and you brand new nose twinges as it meets the floor with a meaty smack.

Curse physics! It is attempting to foil your amusement by dragging your squishy meat body to the ground.

Walking cannot be difficult if the mortals are doing it, but the only two you see are standing still and not assisting you by presenting the art of waking in an easy to digest fashion. Very well, you don’t need their assistance anyway. Your tentacles bring you back to your feet.

Raising one arm up, you reach for your summoner’s head.

You feel the muscles on your face drawing your brows together as you reach harder. Perhaps you cannot touch your summoner’s head because you are not standing at your full height? That must be it, you decide.

You stand to your full height.

...

You stand to your full height.

You blink your fleshy meat eyes, then look down.

The ground is very near. You look back up. Your summoner is taller than you are. A whole two heads taller.

This is a problem.

But all problems have solutions. And the best solutions always involve tentacles. You wrap your fleshy tentacles around the beams of the ceiling, then push off the ground with others until you are suspended in the middle of the room. Your summoner cowers away from your form which is unacceptable. You wrap a tentacle around her waist in a fleshy cuddle of muscle and drag her close.

You are now taller than your summoner, the perfect height to reach out and...

Hand meets head. Tendrils that are only partially in this realm and in this time scour through your summoner’s mind, skipping past boring things until the parts that dictate speech and the knowledge of how to move the flaps on your face to communicate are found.

Ah, you were supposed to use your tongue. That is what the small, inefficient tentacle in your face is for.

Disappointing.

You clear your throat as you remove your hand from your summoner’s head then gently and reluctantly lower her back to the ground. The moment she’s out of your grasp, you feel a lack, as it you had accidentally bumped into a black hole and lost a bit of yourself.

You will have to see if wrapping your summoner in even more tentacles will fix the issue, but that is a problem (which can, again, be fixed with a liberal application of tentacle) for another time. You are nothing if not a paragon of self-control.

"Hello," you say.

"Ah," the girl says in return. Truly, your summoner is lacking in many things. It would be best if you kept her safe, cocooned in a whole pile of your flesh-- you shake your meat head and refocus. She is about to continue. "Hi there," she says. "My name’s Abigail."

A name.

Yes. You will need one of those. And then you’ll need to discover why this mortal called upon you.

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