#if*I* was one of the ancients who designed and built pebbles none of that shit wouldve happened | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

yourfavoritecascade · 1 year ago

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Alr time to clog up some poor souls’s dashboards let’s do this.

(Warning: this is a long-ass post abt my rw au, if you don’t really feel like reading all of this rn, feel free to keep scrolling:))

They were built to solve a problem, some of them were even worshipped, they were compared to gods, but they were gods,they just didn’t know it anymore.

To put it simply, this au of mine features the iterators as somewhat more literal in the god sense. They all have different designations and things they can make and/or control.

At first, there were three “primordial gods” (almost comparable to the Titans from Greek mythology if you know that kinda stuff), who sort of controlled/made things out of the earth sky and void. The first is Greatest Azure Abyss, the sky(she’s the first one in the picture). Second is Terrace of Endless Boulders, the earth/ground(and the second one in the picture). And lastly The Voided Gold, who is pretty much the void itself for all intents and purposes(and obviously third one in the pic).

In this au the ancients probably just came about from however they would’ve in canon, with minimal interference from the three beta-iterators running around. At some point they would’ve discovered ascension, which TVG was fine with, being the void itself. However, just like in canon, the echoes became a thing, as TVG didn’t want anything too attached to a different world trespassing on its own.

At some point the other two gods woulda been found, and through methods I have not come up with yet and probably never will, the ancients start finding ways to utilize them to run iterations on how to ascend without the void.

This obviously doesn’t sit well with any of the three, and so they eventually settled for trying to create their own allies with their own powers to keep their freedom in check.

The Sun, the Moon, the Vines and the Wind, among many others were all attempts for this, but when the ancients figured out how to control gods, they used that power.

Ofc in canon the ancients are clearly able to use taboos for mostly anything they want the iterators to do or not do, which meant all it took was something that tethered their new puppets to strings and took away their memories of old powers to get their way regardless. At this point the three original Iterators would’ve been slowly cranking out various gods, only for them to be taken and repurposed for the thing they were supposed to be fighting.

At some point the original three would have slowed down/stopped with their creations entirely, shortly before the mass ascension.

At this point so far in the timeline I’ve imagined things get a little fuzzy. For the most part none of the iterators know what they are, the Pebbles rot thing still happens, and some time after, Suns breaks the taboo keeping them and their powers ‘n shit in check from the ancients time, and that’s when the present kicks off!

Ok that was a long post, my fingers kinda hurt rn :,) But for future reference I’m gonna put down the main local group’s godly designations here:

LttM: Goddess of the moon and water(ironic ik)

SRS: God of the daylight, the sun, and fire

NSH: God of Plants(and possibly the winter/seasons, more on that in a future post)

CW: God of the wind and birds

UI: God of charms/magic and things like that(it’s kinda hard to explain? I’ll do by best to elaborate further in the future if possible)

FP: Minor God of the earth and stones(ToEB is the main god of the earth, way to make the bug feel extra small and sad :,D

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twitchesandstitches · 5 years ago

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Three Tides Turning

Odina was, perhaps against her preference, an expert on magical things of all kinds. Academic knowledge, with a lot of firsthand experience, and the joke was that she had approximate knowledge of pretty much any magical thing.

She was very surprised to have Toast, of all people, asking her advice; she was pretty certain the little robot hated her guts, and would in fact have been happy to SEE her guts spread all over the wall. It wasn’t personal, he simply hated every single human to ever exist. It was a democratic sort of loathing, an almost genteel hatred that ignored cred and origin and country and deeds, all in favor of resenting the great teeming mass of humanity and proclaiming them all equally guilty of being absolute bastards.

She’d never asked why he hated her species so much. She had her suspicions. The magic that powered him was fueled by his own hatred and anger, but the special kind that came from pain. Emotion magic had its own flavors, and he reeked of suffering, and in his impassioned rants she heard the echoes of absolute despair so painful the only sensible response was to make it into kindling. He had suffered, and given the reputation of humanity among its mechanical offspring, and the optic that had been torn out of his head, she could guess what KIND of suffering he had endured.

Even at his most sociable and miserably lonely, when he had no choice but to seek out company that might include humans, he tended to avoid her. So seeking her advice out was, well, a really big damn deal!

Toast hunched over on a small overturned table, a little red robot apparently designed for a quadrupedal stance. Here and now he looked a lot like a mechanical dinosaur, but one that was oddly cute. He was just so… small, and compact. His wiry tail lashed around, and his boxy head tilted around, his single remaining eye blinking as he twisted his head around to see her.

Both his arms articulated as he tried to explain himself. One arm was slender and ended in a kind of paw. The other was a massive taloned gauntlet, larger than he was, the obscene mass built around an elemental fire core that fueled his various powers. It made him a truly fearsome heavy hitter, but it also severely hobbled him, and only now did she appreciate just how awkward he moved with it; his claws alone were a painful sight, when all his other movements were fluid, if so jittery you could expect he was impatient to finish moving and making little gestures.

“It’s… it’s my friend,” he managed, and pointed, and some of the things he had been telling her clicked. Ah, she thought in the back of her head.

Looming behind them was a monstrously huge figure, apparently the size of a house, draped in a tent crudely worked into a rough cloak. Atop it was a feral head, snout poking out of a projecting head but still obscured by a massive set of puffy lips.

God, it was so big. No, she was so big. Femininity radiated from it, like the psychic tide you couldn’t help but hammer you with pleasant vibes and sudden surges of hormones, and the desire to… do things. Animal things, rutting and breeding and delighting in the most basest of pleasures...

Odina’s absorbing powers sucked away the worst of it, so that she was a whirlpool of negated essence right there. Her total lack of interest in sex of any kind also provided a defense. The great mother-monster noticed this somehow, and turned to see them. A massive pair of breasts, big enough for Odina to fit inside them, shifted behind the cloak, and were so large they dominated the heft of even this hulking frame.

An aberrant hand, or perhaps a paw, raised its two webbed fingers. Claws longer than Odina’s arm wiggled playfully at her. “Sup, hun,” she rumbled, her voice deep, resonant, like an echo of the primordial sea.

Odina waved back nonchalantly. “Hey, terrifying monster lady.”

The eldritch monster mother - Tiashar was her chosen name, according to Toast, who had made himself an expert on her - chuckled at that. It was hard to make out details with that big cloak she wore; Odina could make out a massive mane of hair, or perhaps feathers, growing down her neck and shoulders and expanding outwards into a huge floor-dragging cloud several times larger even than she was. Some bits of it had become little tentacles, or tongued mouths. There were eyes, many of them, beneath it, but were quite invisible behind the long bangs. She did see a hint of multiple floppy ears, tweaking vaguely in response to stimuli no mortal senses were capable of perceiving.

Most of the exposed body was deep black. The shade differed; upon her face and the smoother parts of her skin, it was the color of ancient tar. On the patches of scales, a blue-black like the deepest parts of the sea. The armored plates on her shoulders, forearms, or the enormous tube that was her tail? It seemed to be even darker than all that, oily and rich. And oh yes, there were patches of other colors here and there; the gills lining her neck and sides were the same magenta as her mane, her huge lips and various other parts were a brilliant green… and in fact green seemed to be a secondary color, as if to offset her other shades.

Pebbly scales, slabs of chitin, features of ten thousand different phylums all mashed together in a strangely ideal form with her, and she suspected that was the key to understanding her. So many things that didn’t seem to belong, but with her, they did.

Presently, she seemed content to now ignore Odina and laid down, cooing at the dirt. Apparently whispering to the bacteria.

“...I’m worried about her, “ Toast said, his smaller hand rubbing its claws against a single digit of his big hand, his normally grouchy expression winding up into something forlorn and distressed. “She’s being so… so weird lately!”

“Weird by what metric.” Odina indicated her vaguely. “This is the same lady who spent half a month living in an attic, eating our garbage cans and screaming at mega-possums.”

It was amazing how Toast instantly shifted into hostility; he flared up, flames exploding around him, and a fireball appeared in his hand. “You talkin’ shit about her!?” he snarled, embers flying from his mouth like spittle.

Odina let herself instinctively eat the magic he was throwing off, but if he noticed his flames dying, he didn’t notice. They just flared up again, and her butt expanded, shelf rising over her waist and her skirt creaking in protest at it slid up, her hips expanding sideways. ‘Do NOT push him,’, she reminded herself, he absolutely would try to kill her instantly if he felt even slightly irritated, regardless of needing her help or not.

It didn’t come easily to her to play nice, but she would do her best. “I’m not making fun. I’m just saying, she’s kinda weird. Like the rest of us?”

He grunted, depowering. The local magical quotient went down, though her backside scale remained embiggened. “Yeah, okay.”

“So what do you MEAN, she’s acting weird?”

“I don’t know. The other day, she’s all calm and serene, hanging around with the men and women that wanna be around her all the time. Y’know, she feeds ‘em, gives ‘em baths in her milk and stuff, sometimes they feed themselves to her and she pops ‘em out as monstery versions of their old selves, but mostly they just… adore her?” He shook his head. “I don’t know, its weird. It's like… she needs it?”

“Sounds like they’re worshiping her,” Odina said vaguely, an idea coming to mind.

“Seems legit.” he tweaked his fingers, popping them off and chewing on them anxiously. “Then the next few weeks, they do none of tat, they just hang out with her and we go exploring? Fighting monsters together? The other folks, they fuse together and stuff, its like its a big adventure party? And it's fine, but then, just a few nights ago, she got hungry. Really hungry.” he looked uncomfortable. “And horny. Like, even more than usual.”

“Sounds like a lot of effort,” Odina said, who regarded all things sexual as an alien endeavor way more trouble than it was worth.

“She just wanted nothing but sex, twenty-four/seven, for almost a solid week! With all of them! And then they let her gobble them up, and now…” he gestured at her. Odina noticed her belly was very ripe, round and projecting outwards. A gravid, super-pregnant belly, with both the offspring sired with them, and the cultist’s reborn souls. “She just did nothing but eat continuously, barely speaking a word. I tried to talk to her and she looked at me like… like she couldn’t remember how.”

He paused.

“She kissed me.” He hugged himself, looking faintly lost, like he couldn’t quite understand how anyone would want to do that to him. “She couldn’t talk anymore, but she was happy to see me.”

“She’s talking now.”

“Yeah, I mean, she’s back on her regular mindset, where she’s being a chill mom and stuff but… shit. She keeps going through these phases and! And! And I’m really freaked out, is something wrong with her, is she sick, is she going to go away and ascend or something!?”

He shook Odina by the neckline desperately. “I can’t deal with that, okay!? How do I help her!?”

She gently but firmly pushed his claws off. “Calm down, she’s okay. She’s just trying to balance herself out. It’s part of what she is, okay?”

Toast stared at her. “Part of… what she is? What, a chimera monster girl?”

“No. You… do know she’s something else altogether? One of those things that…” she gestured vaguely. “Come from Outside?”

He stared blankly.

“The far realms?”

His optic blinked, slowly. “Nuh uh.”

“The parts of the multiverse that exist outside the set that has anything at all to do with mortals or our understanding of reality?”

“I’m drawing a zero here.”

“...The mad things that were here before the gods?”

“Still nothing.”

“...Okay, she’s an eldritch abomination that decided to be like a mortal, okay!?”

He nodded. “Ohh, right. Like that. Got it.”

“...You really get it?”

“Honestly, no.” He shrugged. “Could not give a shit, to be honest.”

She sighed. “It’s like this. Creatures like her tend to develop certain traits in common, because they’re forming minds like ours, but they’re still working in a totally different way. They’re not exactly elder beasts, they’re a little bit like gods, but they’re something a bit in between. And SHE is learning her way around that. Every day, and sometimes backsliding or losing her sense of what she is.”

Toast seemed to understand that, at least. He nodded.

Odina sighed. “Right, okay. So, if she’s like the other sorts of things I’ve heard about, she’s basically formed a mental state made out of three different parts that influence her in different ways.”

“What does this have to do with her being weird?”

“Because these are giving her contradictory urges, and she has no impulse control! She IS her desires!” Odina snapped her fingers, producing a little magical sign that said ‘get it??’. “Firstly, what you probably think is her ‘regular self’ is really just the parts of her mind she’s forced to think like a mortal.” A troubling idea came to her. “Or… what she thinks mortals are like. But she’s so different that even that is just guessing games, and she’s forced her brain into patterns completely unnatural to her, and it's always shifting around and trying to become something else. Because change is what she DOES.”

Toast looked baffled.

Odina tried again. “Look at it like this. When she’s worked out some kind of balance between her natures here, this side of her is the one that probably wins out and makes a happy medium. She wants to please herself and please other people, in moderation; it comes off to us as weird and constantly hungry, but that’s just what happens when godly hungers get curbed. That’s still moderate, by HER standards. The kind of things she doesn’t really get, like abstract causes, and long term stuff; she’s able to deal with those things more easy. She’s able to think more like you can.”

“Okay, I get THAT, at least.” Toast scratched his metal ears sheepishly.

“Now, you probably noticed her gathering people to her. That’s just a function of what she is; she’s a sort of proto-god. Gods want to be worshiped and admired; she needs a cult, and it's her nature to build them. So that's the bit of her that’s the most divine coming out. Probably also why she goes off and fights monsters; she probably sees it as protecting her people.” She paused, thoughtfully. “Or maybe she’s just getting into the ‘guardian kaiju’ vibe. She does have the look.” Another pause. “And getting people to breed with her might also be a god thing; she’s probably compelled to do it, as a function of what she is.”

“And you said something about a beast, earlier?”

“Right, her third nature. That’s the part of her that’s… well, monstrous and ravenous. A beast, nothing but hunger and desire. Not that its bad or evil!” she said hurriedly, noticing Toast’s temper starting to rise on Tiashar’s behalf. “Just… she’s already impulsive, but that part of her is literally nothing but instant gratification and satiating herself! Like…the bit of her that wants to be pleasured and satisfied all the time, that wants to be constnatly gestating monsters and having sex whenever she’s not eating? And then eating them right afterwards, and turning their souls into MORE things to gestate so they can stay with her forever in new bodies. ITs the part of her that runs on instinct and animal hunger, forever.”

He nodded, in a dour sort of way. “Okay, I think I get it. So…” he tried to process it all. “She acts weird because she’s got a whole bunch of competing drives and urges, some of them at odds with each other, constantly changing how she thinks and feels?”

Odina shrugged. “Her actual feelings are probably pretty, uh, consistent. The way she responds to them and acts on them does change, depending on which way her brain is working. Like if she likes someone and she’s pure beast, she probably wants to just jump on them and rut until the sun goes down, and them nuzzle them for a full month. And when she goes full god, she wants to shower them with blessings and love. And if she balances it out and can think properly? Then she just wants a friend, or maybe a tiny spouse. As long as she can hold onto that scale.”

He looked uneasy. “God… and she has to live like that…?”

“I don’t think it bothers her,” Odina said, not sure if she was actually trying to reassure him, or herself. “It’s just the way she sees the world and prioritizes stuff changes. She probably doesn’t really notice her perspective shifting. It’s just part of what she is. The tide turns, because that’s what it does; same thing with her.”

Toast looked troubled. “But..”

“Most eldritch entities, the ones that are making an honest effort to really understand us, wind up something similar. Plenty of them strike up a balance. The trick is them holding onto it.”

Toast wiggled. “So… Mama Tiashar…?”

She noticed, but didn’t say anything about it, his use of the honorific.

A small slip of the tongue, but a big, big deal for someone so miserably spiteful and suspicious of the whole world.

“Nothing’s wrong with her,” Odina said. “Her nature is just to change to different extremes. Sometimes she’ll be wild and ravenous. Sometimes she’ll be weird and think like an old goddess. And sometimes, more often than not, she’ll be like a regular weird mortal thingy. Just depends on the way her tides are turning.”

He whimpered. “But I want her to be happy.”

Odina looked at him, with something she didn’t dare admit might be pity.

It was a hard thing, to find out what love was at this point in his life, and to be afraid to know it.

There was a heavy stomping noise nearby.

Tiashar had stood up and slowly approached. Her massive tail lashed around, her enormous thighs slapped together as she approached, and slowly she leaned down, her head looming over Toast’s body. Her mouth opened, and she whispered softly.

“Toast, buddy,” she said, the words sounding distant and carefully picked. “Something bothering you?”

He shivered, and suddenly hugged her lip. One arm too skinny not to just sink in and instantly vanish, the other a huge and awkward club that started to fall on its own weight. “I’m just worried about you,” he whimpered.

She giggled, and gave him a soft kiss, pulling him right off the ground. She stood up, to her full height, and with another smooching pop, deposited him neatly into her cleavage, where he immediately snuggled up. “Aww, you’re a sweetie, little buddy. Don’t you worry. Mama Tiashar has herself figured out.” She gave her gravid belly a hug. “Be chill, my little dude, and don’t beat yourself up over it.”

“Can’t,” he said shortly. “I just worry a lot about you…”

She chuckled. “I don’t worry about nothin’, and I’m totally chillaxed forever. Try it some time, sweetie. It’s fun.”

She nodded at Odina. “Later, short stuff.”

Odina waved vaguely at her, trying not to instantly butt-bloat up to the size of a building just from being in her presence. “Later.”

Tiashar skipped off, her gargantuan butt jiggling like literally all the gelatin there ever wars, her tail even smacking it possibly by accident, as she cooed gently to the still fretting Toast.

And Odina thought about the tides turning, and how they were fortunate to have wound up with an eldritch horror that seemed perpetually stuck on the ‘be a sweetheart’ side of things, regardless of her current flavor of impulses.

#my writing #fics #my OCs #twitchy!tiashar #twitchy!toast #twitchy!odina #queued

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