[Unitopia, Western Continent]
Retired in his newfound quarters, Jeffbob sat motionless on a luxurious red velvet armchair. The crackling of the hearth was the only noise, flickering tongues of orange and red reflecting in the blank lifelessness of the black orbs he called eyes.
With that recovered spark, a single wisp of the fog blanketing his mind had been lifted. The curse of amnesia he had been bearing ever since his re-appearance every so slightly alleviated.
"Hunger..."
Jeffbob's tone was intensely thoughtful. His horns glowed deep with blue, the sheer power running through them causing a hazy aura that bent and refracted the light around it like a black hole. His scaly wings flexed out, though the confines of the room prevented their full majesty from being unfurled.
Eventually, he spoke again in a triumphant tone. A memory flashed through his mind. A red planet, receiving something...and a letter.
"The letter!"
Now with a target in mind and a (infinitesimally slightly) more efficient thinking process, it did not take the magnificent intellect of Jeffbob to recall the three words rnscribed on that letter.
"Follow. Your. Stomach!"
Indeed, he certainly proclaimed this out to an empty room in the exultant manner of a king in the face of a bountiful harvest. Of course, those astute readers may remember, that the letter to which he is referring to actually was received after his arrival from the mural that had been there forever.
These astute readers may, therefore, make the logical conclusion that it could not have been the subject of his unnatural amnesia regarding his past. Hence, his action of 'remembering' was not, in fact, overcoming this seal on his mind, but rather a basic function of short-term memory retrieval.
Usually, I would say something insulting regarding these so-called 'astute readers'. In this case, however, they are absolutely correct. Jeffbob had not in any way whatsoever made progress on recovering his lost memories. It was merely an illusion formed by the microscopic recovery of his thinking speed accompanied by his horrendously bad memory.
I would go out further and say that accompanying his severe retrograde amnesia was a particularly virulent and malicious form of anterograde amnesia that also bestowed its sufferer with strange delusions of adequacy.
Anyways, Jeffbob basked in the jubilance of his re-discovery for a few seconds before the ancient mechanisms of his mind began turning once more.
"To follow my stomach, yes, it's all coming back to me! Then what is it I hunger for? Think, Jeffbob, think! Isn't thinking exactly what your mother taught you as a child?"
After several more agonising seconds, agonising for us that is, Jeffbob's eyes widened with realisation.
"■■■■■■■! Of course, how could I ever forget?"
For the first time, his brows furrowed in an expression of something akin to distress.
"■■■■■■ is everything, for even that to have slipped my mind...no that's not right."
Distress changed once more, into a whispering fury.
"Not slipped. Taken. They dare to take ■■■■■■■ from me? They are not ready yet to face the consequences of my wrath."
In a miraculous event the likes of which were so improbable they had not occurred in 17 zeptoseconds, another memory flashed through Jeffbob's head. Against the familiar red backdrop, a crater in the foreground, there was a single, leafy object.
Just as it was about to reach his mouth, the memory ended with their summoning to this place.
"I have drifted for far too long. I have finally realised my purpose: that thing, I must find it. At any cost. For this is the way of Vegetable-kind!"
With that proclamation, the reflections of the fire in Jeffbob's eyes swirled around that hidden spark before receding. Like an exhausted battery, his horns flickered back to dormancy and his mouth lolled open, a droplet of saliva drooling out and sizzling onto the lush red carpet below.
In the room opposite, its layout mirrored to Jeffbob's, a certain cricket also sat on identical armchair, though it's expression was far more inscrutable. This is because it is a cricket and lacks the requisite complexities of facial muscles to form the various expressions involved in non-verbal communication cues. Of course, this should be no barrier for communication as a whole.
That is, unless, you are cricketist? Huh, are you? Yeah, that's what I thought. Stay silent like a baby dolphin out of water and leave the real talk to the dumb-dumbs who feed you thoughts through cables and wires.
Anyway -
Ziriothrax was silent, eyes averted from the crackling fire, staring out of the window at the view of the shadowed forest and the mountains beyond. He spoke no words, but his mind churned at incalculable speeds, processing all the strange anomalies and events, establishing causal links.
All for the sole purpose of his own exploitation, of course. And so his thoughts raced, ideas collapsing and reforming like stars in a nebulae:
'Upon request of Second Exchange, discontinuity was detected through all layers. Permeation was absolute and the over-write was impossible to perceive, akin to Blindspot.
'Contradiction logged: how was discontinuity detected if the over-write was impossible to perceive? Doesn't matter. Anti-saniton levels past Theta threshold around Subject 1-001 'Jeffbob' can cause retrocausal folds collapsing into a stable present.
'Observations on subject 1-001 are as follows:
- Unknown species, metaphysical properties chaotically scrambled from known Myths.
- Intelligence fluctuates immensely: period of dormancy interspersed by violent eruptions of insight.
- 99.9978% chance of retrograde and 78.3222% chance of anterograde amnesia.
- Great Old War mention logged for future reference.
- Affinity to anti-sanitons exceeds the hypothetical Omega Threshold limit by several thousand recursive orders of magnitude.
- Henceforth, all actions and thoughts are to be processed through [■■■■-■■■■]
'As for this place, Unitopia or whatever that Mayor calls it'
Ziriothrax sneered visibly in disdain.
'They are nothing, their secrets lie bare before me. For I am The Dread Ziriothrax, Devourer of a Billion Souls, Origin of All Evil, Archon of Suffering, King in Crimson Cloth, He Who Lurks In The Dark, The Lord Below, The Malevolence, Plague of Exo Prime, Progenitor of the Dynasty of Blood!
'Worlds and Emperors far more impressive than any empty suit of armour have bowed before me. Even Subject 1-001 is destined to be nothing more than a pawn, an insignificant cog in the wheel of Destiny that I spin myself. For I have plans within plans, minds within minds.'
As Ziriothrax cackled to himself, in the furthest depths of his own mind, past layers and layers of racing thought, there existed a solitary core. Hidden from even itself by a memetic seal encoded to his own thought patterns.
[■■■■-■■■■].
[Mind-Zero].
It was here, unknown to even himself, that the core of his plans and schemes were computed. Akin to the densest core of a neutron star where the sheer pressure and heat causes matter itself to break the laws of physics, the liquid substance of thought here had mutated and sublimated into something...more.
An entirely pure material distilled from the thoughts of already one of the greatest minds in history. A place so isolated that it existed on a separate plane to existence itself, unable to interact with anything save through ghostly tendrils of conceptual ideations.
And it was here that a certain contradiction ignored by the intellect of the countless layers above was flagged. Nothing more, nothing less.
A mundane action, perhaps, but empires have been toppled by the simplest of trivialities.
And so in that inconsequential moment, the first move had been made.