Death Becomes Me(SOLO/Training)

The rough beast slouched to Bethlehem to be born. Yaksha rather liked that phrase, found himself mulling it over in his skull for a bit. He'd contemplated the thought of 'something wicked this way comes', had worked very hard to come up with something suitably poetic for what was to come; after all, it wasn't every day that one planned to spend a day in quiet contemplation, delving into a collective that spanned across so many continents and generations that it could almost be called omniscient.

But was omniscient really the right word? What could one call an entity that saw all things simultaneously, something with a sense of scope and scale so broad that it could never be focused on any single point in time? It was all fine and good to see into the future and the present and the past, and perhaps it wasn't even a problem to do all three simultaneously; it would take an incredible amount of throughput to manage something like that without going insane, but Yaksha had a few million minds at his disposal. Or he would, if all went as he hoped.

The more important question is how one dealt with a detached retina in their minds' eye. If Yaksha really went through with this...if he dove head first into the deep end of mankind's primordial soup, if he spent the next...however long it took trying to sift through it all and find the connecting pieces, here and there and everywhere. Could he ever come out again? If you spent -that long- drowning in memories, could a person step back to the present without being changed? Had anything of this scale even been attempted before? Mankind had come into amazing revelations, and had invented countless ways of dealing with the unexpected, of putting the impossible within their grasp. But this was no machinery; this was no simple act of hacking. This was hacking the human mind. This was hacking into the collective unconscious. What arrogant beast would ever attempt something like that, honestly? Who could ever expect to perform such an act, and have something even approximating a happy ending?

A madman, naturally. And one would have to look far and wide to find someone madder than Yaksha. He was, in a very real way, so mad that he had perfected the art. Yaksha was a man so mad, he looped around and hit sanity from the other end. And it hardly seemed like there could be a better man in the world to set out on a fruitless, insane, thankless endeavor that would almost certainly end in tragedy, than a man who was so chillingly logical, so singularly arrogant, that he had formed a bastion of sanity out of nothing but left over bits of mania.

Yaksha Dokuja wandered through the sands, feeling his mind reel, his sense of self expand. He could feel the gentle roiling gurgle of countless myriad souls. For centuries Yaksha had spent his time wandering the human world, sating his hunger on countless rumors and stories. He had spent so very long trying to entwine himself in human culture, in the endless powerful nature of human creativity. It almost made him forget who he was. So very satiated, so very calmed, he was forgetting more and more every day that he was not one of them anymore. Humanity had spoiled him, had dulled the edge of his fangs. And so now he wandered these sands, etching the memories of centuries into his very being, extracting and unraveling the countless stories that he had found himself stumbling upon without realizing it.

This is a new story, Dear Reader. It is not a very nice one.


Yaksha's fangs had begun to sharpen upon one another, his jaw rotating and grinding serrated teeth against one another. He had spent the last few hours thinking about the people he'd met ever so recently. That wolfen woman, the one who had nearly one-sidedly shut him down and out, had toyed with him like he was just some idle distraction. He was so exceptionally frustrated by the mere memory, so tired of his impotence and incontinence. He was older than any of these wretched whelps, he had so much to offer and they all just...wanted nothing to do with him! How was he supposed to handle a world where he lived forever on the sidelines, forever a witness!

The doctor. That wretched wretched man, the way he looked down at Yaksha as if he were hardly more than a flea, as if he wasn't even worth the his attention! Playing games with him! And yet...was it truly such a curse, to be off on the sidelines? Weren't some of the greatest stories in the world shrouded in mystery? Weren't some of the strongest, most influential, most dangerous figures the ones no one ever noticed? Mystique could be his weapon. Anonymity, his shield. Yaksha could pull strings no one ever imagined, could leave people reeling in confusion.

But first, there was something else he needed to do. Yaksha Dokuja was an old hollow, unfathomably old by most standards, so old that his brain swam over with memories. And anyone his age grew quite good at compartmentalizing; at sectioning things off into near little boxes, at making sure everything had its place. It hadn't been easy, but he'd been able to do the same with his meals, holding them apart, leaving them nearly incapable of fighting against his influence. And somehow, in the process, diluting them. He had stripped these creatures of their purpose, had left them little more than a list of attributes and qualities, of personality factors. A rush of sympathy ran over him as he realized how callously he had stripped away these beasts' agency, how easily he had tossed them aside the way others were tossing him aside.

I'm listening, little ones. Let me hear you, for once.

Yaksha died. He must have been dead, for only death could explain this sharp agony, this formless shapeless sense of nothingness. The voices weren't truly voices at first, were little more than wretched, primal, screeches of hunger and pain and great, overwhelming loss. Yaksha felt his body slipping away from him, felt his mask cracking and reforming, felt his already lanky, gangly limbs growing and extending. He realized it, and was helpless to control it; thousands upon thousands of grasping hands held him back, pinned him in place and left him a babbling, gurgling mess. He felt his mouth opening, felt the words escaping from between his lips before he could even understand what he was saying. He writhed and wriggled, pinned down by countless souls. Hungry, wretched, agonized souls.

Something happened.

He couldn't even find it in himself to fight back, not against this endless, crushing force. He felt his very mind threatening to be torn apart by the amalgam, felt his very psyche fraying at the edges. It was an odd sensation, rather like having his limbs fall asleep. He closed his eyes, felt the hungry damned souls overwhelming him, felt the infinite void of voices washing over him, lulling him to sleep. He wanted it all to end, wanted the pain to go away, wanted this wretched existence to stop! All he had to do was fall asleep, was rest and let himself be subsumed. Surely someone else could take on this wretched, wracking pain. Someone stronger, someone better suited to this...

Algo pasó.

Yaksha's hand slid out, coiling around one of the formless shadows, yanking it close. The specter coiled and oozed around his claws, its form little more than a primal memory of something long past. The soul had even forgotten its name, no doubt...it was no more than a stray memory. But if there was one thing Yaksha knew about memories, he knew that memories held a power that nothing else could possibly match. Yaksha's claw dug into the shadowy material, scrabbling for purchase. He'd never realized how hard it could be, to grasp something with a hand that was no longer functional. He clawed and scratched for several moments, before he finally managed to clutch onto a piece of its shadowy presence, lifting it towards him and speaking in a soft, almost calm voice.

"My name is Yaksha Dokuja. You are...?"

The entity struggled and scrabbled and clawed at his face once more, its movements hardly more than a whisper of wind, but that whisper was one of millions, flaying his very flesh layer by layer. But he calmly and patiently held the creature in place, letting its ephemeral substance slap against him over and over. Yaksha knew, moving at the speed of sound that he was, that this hadn't taken more than a minute. He couldn't begin to imagine the rampage his body was going through, right about now. But he held fast, his smile never wavering, even as his face was battered into soft formlessness by the even softer, even more formless hands. Finally, with a soft twitch of his wrist, the beast was slammed against the ground, pinned in place as he smirked.

"My name is Yaksha Dokuja. You are...?"

"Silas."

"You are welcome here, Silas. You are safe here, Silas. There is nothing to fight about, anymore. Remember my voice, because if I have to have this conversation again, I will unmake you. You will become less than a memory."

The specter underneath him calmed and settled down, growing still. There were still hands, so many countless hands slapping against him. Like the tides themselves, they threatened to wear his very body into nothingness, into another pale shadow of mere memory like him. But as he released Silas, it shuffled backwards, settling against what could've generously been called a wall in his mind's eye. He rose slowly, triumphantly, reaching out a clawed hand, his grasp extending to encompass the sky, even as he raked it down across his soul, snatching up vicious memories and clutching them so tight, it became almost impossible to tell where one began and the other ended.

"My name is Yaksha Dokuja."

All he'd need was a few million more tries. But Yaksha was moving at the speed of thought, which bypasses even light; he could snatch up a new soul in the course of time it took him to think about the option. It was grueling, tedious, unpleasant work...but with each one Yaksha could feel his mind knitting itself back together. His brain was being pounded on an invisible anvil, and each time it struck, he would either shatter or reverberate, coming back all the stronger from the stress. It could take him weeks, perhaps even months, before he was fully prepared to come out of this inkblot world he had found himself dunked into.

If there was one thing Yaksha Dokuja could do, it was wait patiently. In time, he'd be back to his old self. Even greater, perhaps.

Things had settled down, at least somewhat. Yaksha could still feel an undeniable sense of frisson, a feeling that his entire being was being wracked by some intensity that he could hardly imagine. But this new form was so spectacularly...interesting. He had a nearly limitless pool inside of him, a spreading flowing ocean of spirit energy that seemed to slosh about like water trying to escape the sides of a bucket. And that was the problem, truly; the bucket was ever so small, and the sloshing so violent that every second, Yaksha could feel his power, his exceptional, incredible power going to waste. He rose a hand slowly, inspecting it. At least, he called it a hand; it was more like a thin, inkblot shape that roughly had what might have been fingers. Nearly useless for grabbing, now. But his tongue, always a prideful thing for him, had become so very...amazing. He could whipcrack his tongue nearly ten feet away without even trying! Lesser hollows would be skewered before they even saw his mask! And oh, how he made use of that lovely little trick every chance he got. He needed the fuel, to replace his ever-diminishing mass of spirit energy.

And he could feel something else inside of him, something...hard to explain. It was like that self-same sense a person had that told them they could breathe or speak or make their heart beat, some unfathomable process going on just behind the scenes, just behind the realms of logic. Something that couldn't be understood, no matter how. It could only be...felt. Embraced. He reached into that boundless ocean of souls and beings, touching gently in his mind's eye on the smoothed dome of one of the inkblot people that inhabited his body. Inkblot bodies for an inkblot world...how fitting. As he touched upon them, ever so gently probing, he felt it with an absolute, chilly certainty. He felt a swelling, surging sense of...something.

And this time, as his mouth opened, a yellow pillar of light exploded outwards rather than his tongue, pounding into the sands with a faint puffing sound, causing the creatures just beneath the surface, the countless clever dead hoping to escape his passing presence to...float. Gently, ever so slowly into the air, these lesser, insignificant hollows floated. Yaksha knew, knew with a certainty that he couldn't ever have explained to others, that these things were no longer a part of the normal universe. From the moment his beam had struck, he'd assimilated them into some between world, some miniscule lagoon he had formed within his inkblot world. A dismal, unpleasant place to be...but a safe one, to be sure. A world divided, apart. A world that was halfway between his world and the world he inhabited. A world where he had just enough influence, just enough presence...to put an ever-so-gentle spin on them, directly towards his mouth.

God, how Yaksha loved being in control. This was a feeling he'd have to do his best to remember. How to draw tiny little ripples across the surface of his tides, how to send a topspin on it just so to ensure that a tiny enough portion would go careening off, just for a moment. How to draw others into his own inkblot world, even if only in effigy, even if only for a moment. There were so many amazing things that Yaksha had learned, and so many amazing things he would have to find a way to put into action after all of this.

Yaksha would remember. He was, after all, a ghost. And what was a ghost, aside from a persistent memory?

The bucket sloshed and overflowed, more and more of Yaksha's spirit energy radiating outwards in a cloud entirely against his will. He felt like a fevered demon, giving off heat in such thick waves that he melted the very ground around him. He idly wondered for a moment if such a thing had ever existed, before he realized of course it had, it existed in the minds of men, and that alone was enough to say it was real in a manner of speaking. He was contemplating the possibility, just for a minute, that he might have been able to bring such a thing into actuality, to turn it from a mere idle wondering into something that people spotted, spoke of and hunted for years without end. It couldn't be that hard to turn reaitsu into heat, yes? Even if he had never done it before, never even imagined it. God, what a lovely world it would be if he could carry his perfect little climate bubble, always a nice toasty temperature! Never again overcome by shivers, never...

His mind was beginning to roam and ramble again. Thoughts came slowly, loosely, his brain firing off of a billion billion synapses without him even realizing it. This body was so damned inefficient! How was he supposed to get anything done when his body barely reacted and his brain wandered endlessly! He had to find some way to reign this in, to make sure that the endless murmured ramblings of a million million souls didn't make him lose himself. For a moment he closed his eyes, feeling that ocean of reaitsu again, that far-too-large body for a far-too-small container, that odd impossibility that sloshed over day after day. And then, with a bark of laughter, a thought came to mind. A strange little image, something plucked unbidden from one of the countless souls he'd consumed. He pictured, for a moment, an endless fountain of flowing chocolate, spilling over the sides, only to be sucked right back down and pushed back to the top, to cycle endlessly. He crowed for nearly two minutes, before he went deadly still.

Why not?

It could work. Why not just take the reaitsu that leaked from his very pores, and send it seeping down into another one? He had thousands of them, had so many openings that his reaitsu poured out from. Why not just have each hole pour into the next one? It'd be just like having the water trickling over in a giant water wheel, the residual motion sparking its own motion, a self-perpetuating phenomenon the moment it started. He slumped down into the sands, folding his legs over himself slowly, ruminatively, his breath turning soft and measured as he began to focus his mind inward. Now it wasn't a bucket, but more like a...shotglass. An endless display of shotglasses, with the overflow from each one filling the next. But even that, too, must end...even if it were glasses all the way down, it would simply be one infinite versus another. Eventually, he would lose out. What else to add in? How to perfect this little array?

Once more, it came to him in a flash, almost ludicrous at first. A small, dipping beaked...thing. Some other human contraption. A plastic bird, one that dipped forward and back, levered by its own actions. One at each glass, nipping away the tiniest little mouthful every now and then...a mouthful that would naturally be passed over into Yaksha's caring, meticulous hands. A mouthful that would last him a lifetime of man, if he could just perfect the process. Still, for now it could be...serviceable. All he'd need was time. Another day or two, ought to do it.

When he awoke, Yaksha Dokuja would be something new entirely. Some new beast, slouching to Bethlehem to be born.

...Perhaps not entirely new, then.