Snippets of the Multiverse

The World of Moist Skies

The rain came in thick sheets, drenching the ground below. These torrents from the sky washed away anything that didn't find cover in time, and flooded the surface, drowning all the creatures that couldn't find higher ground to wait out the storm.

Between these cycles, however, life blossomed. Massive birds ruled the upper reaches of the surface, and nested above the clouds when the rains came. Lizards of a dozen different colors stalked through the undergrowth, snapping their jaws down on anything that got too close- including each other. Bat-like creatures flew around in colonies, and many kinds of fruit grew on the bushes and vines entangling the swampy world.

Naturally, this world was not always like this. There were people once, though they vanished long ago. The only things left behind were massive superstructures, computers built to solve a problem that was never meant to be solved. They were so large that the people built their cities on top of them, living out their short lives away from the changes to the ecosystem they caused.

But that was hundreds, maybe thousands of years ago. But the superstructures lived on, toiling away endlessly at their impossible task. Slowly, they degraded, each one amassing more and more filth and disrepair as the years ticked by. Eventually, one fell, the legs collapsing in on themselves as the underhang crashed to the ground, crushing everything beneath it and rendering almost the entire failing computer dysfunctional. Then another, and another, until all that was left of them were the puppets, the humanoid figures that served as the face of their bodies.

Without the structures' heat, and the cooling mechanisms for which that caused the rains, the world grew cold. Everything began to freeze over, the world turning from a lush tropical swamp to a snowy tundra very quickly. Many creatures died out, with only the ones who could quickly adapt or were otherwise already suited to the cold surviving. Of all these things, a small, green, and relatively fluffy creature stood above them, it in and of itself just as timeless as the computers that had all but died.

This creature, a special variant of a species known as a slug-cat, came into being not from normal means. Perhaps it was sent, perhaps it found its own way from another world- it does not matter. It felt nothing, and saw everything. It was the last thing many creatures saw, before it cast their souls from their bodies and ejected them from the endless cycle of life and death.

In this world, to die is to be reborn, waking up the next cycle as if from a bad dream. The task the computers were put to was to find a way out, for the very people they outlasted. They themselves did not die easily, but all it took was for this cold-blooded beast to find their puppet to ascend them as well.

And just as the computers were meant to lead the lost civilization in their quest to escape the cycle while they themselves could not, would this twisted saint give them something it itself would never obtain. And so the world was freed of mortal coils, and the strange slug-cat moved on to the next.

But the world had reformed, now as a nightmarish darkness with endless rain and creatures mimicking those that ascended, with their numbers twice as great. In this darkness, one last slug-cat rose, holding an egg-like object with very odd and very dangerous properties, especially when the shell was broken.

And once that slug-cat made its way down to the void, it found the world restored, a great many other sub-species of 'scugs' living together in a timeline that shouldn't be possible. The structures of all the Iterators, as the computers were called, were restored, yet slug-cats from both before, during, and after the various collapses were standing side-by-side. There was one with gills, which had evolved specifically to deal with the rains, standing beside a deep purple scug that could generate spears from its tail at will, for example.

Perhaps this was simply an illusion, or a dream. Perhaps this was the afterlife, mimicking their world. Perhaps it was something else entirely, built on the whims of a greater being. In the end, it would matter not. And so, the egg-wielding slug-cat went on to try and find any plausible mate, in this new world where everything had converged to one point in time.