章 68: Legacy of the Old Ones (40K OC Insert) by Beetz
An Old One sı I wish there were more of these
Words: 41k+
Link: https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/legacy-of-the-old-ones-40k-oc-insert.972922/#threadmark-category-1
(A man from our world wakes up in Warhammer. The twist? He's no longer a human. He's an Old One.)
Chapter 1: Revelation
I opened my eyes, blinking slowly the world in blur. I am surrounded by fluid, thick, viscous. I do not know what color it is. I open my mouth, trying to breath. Liquid fills my lungs. It tastes like batteries. I flail around, waving my limbs. Something is wrong. My body feels unfamiliar, heavy, uncoordinated. I continue to flail, my arms beating against...something. Glass?
Whatever it is, it shatters into a million pieces, and I feel air fill my lungs as I cough up the liquid and fall to the cold tiled ground. Shivering, I do my best to blink. My vision clears...somewhat. I can make out colors now. Wherever I am, its dimly lit. That or they have a fondness for black. I attempt to stand, but my legs are weak, and I flop back onto the ground.
What was WRONG with me? Every limb felt distorted, ungainly, and that was before the weakness in each factored in. Blindly, I felt around, trying to figure out where the hell I was. "Hello? Anyone here?" I croaked out, my mouth feeling...distorted as well. A flash of lights, causing me to cringe in surprise, and a voice.
"BEGINNING BOOT SEQUENCE. ATTEMPTING TO ACCESS ASTROMANTIC NETWORK. ERROR: NETWORK NOT FOUND. SCANNING FOR LOCAL USERS...ONE LOCAL USER FOUND. HELLO, HATCHLING."
The terrifying thing? That wasn't English. I don't know how I understood it, but it wasn't English or any other language I had ever heard. Half of it...half of it wasn't even words. It was something else: some sort of song, one I didn't just hear with my ears, but with my...soul?
I blinked, and once more my vision cleared a little. Looking down at my hands, I saw that they were instead replaced with reptilian digits, stubby and ending in talons, the pale skin I associated with my visage replaced by dark green scales. It was then I realized why my body felt so alien.
It was because I was an alien.
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After the long period of panicked, irrelevant blubbering that needs mentioning in this log for posterity (but not expanded on otherwise due to its, again, irrelevance to larger matters), I eventually worked up the nerve to examine myself. The first thing I noticed: either my species was short, or the creators of this facility were very large. Personally, I cleaved towards the former theory due to how stubby my limbs were, at least in proportion to my body. Other changes included a beak of sorts: I had teeth still, thankfully, but instead of lips, I had hard keratin ending in a point. My entire skin was covered in a thick layer of leathery scales that, from what I could observe while lacking a mirror, were mostly a greenish color.
After this impromptu self examination, I eventually (after another round of panic: for the sake of brevity I'm henceforward going to excise any mentions of it from this account except when novel, relevant, or notable, but assume that in my early days I had several moments like that between events) began exploring my surroundings.
I stumbled around, doing my best to maintain coordination. My first observation was that my eyesight was not good. My second observation (which required close examination due to the first observation) was that the room I was in was filled with many, many vats, including the one that had, apparently, housed myself: now cracked open and leaking fluid, which I could now see was a sort of translucent cyan color.
And each and every vat were...things. My best guess, at the time, were that they were failed attempts at whatever process made myself: similar looking creatures, or at least the remains therof. So many of them were either grossly, obviously mutated with tumors that would effectively be a death knell for any normal biological creature, or else clearly decomposing. Above each and every vat was a screen with words on it. I assumed my new brain was hardwired to understand the language, as I instinctively knew what each message said: NON-VIABLE. TERMINATED. NON-VIABLE. DECASED. TERMINATED. A grim ledger of those who failed to survive as I did.
A few vats were entirely dark, the cyan liquid replaced with a dark, opaque substance, my eyesight not good enough to see but trace outlines through the haze. I did not like what I saw. These too had messages. VAT FAILURE. ERROR. NON-FUNCTIONAL. And some, the text on the screens was broken entirely, consisting of pure gibberish. Likely those in these vats never even had a chance at survival: their vats failure doomed them first before they could even begin to be viable.
I felt a spring of pity, and, approaching one such vat filled with the decomposing remains of one of my peers, placed my hand upon it, gazing into the dead, cold eyes of someone who but for a twist of luck could have taken my place. This was both a mistake, but one that would later prove illuminating: a vision comprised of sensation flooded me, and I saw what had occurred. Decades long gestation, carefully monitored by shadowy figures, until they disappeared. Then, aeons and aeons of stasis, until the preserving nature of the vat began to lose its effectiveness due to sheer passage of time and the mixture it had been housed in losing its oxygenation at the same time. The pitiful creature had, briefly, been aware, and like me had attempted to escape, only for its limbs, weak and not properly formed, to be unable to break the glass. It had drowned in its own steel utero, terrified, screaming for oxygen, unable to comprehend what was going on as its life faded.
I felt myself recoil. Aeons upon aeons my vision had lasted, but in the real world I could tell only moments had passed. I will not lie. What I had seen, it had shaken me, even more so than my seeming metamorphosis.
I spent some time digesting what had happened: was that a trait of the vats, or a trait belonging to whatever I was now, the visions? If I touched the other vats, would I have visions about them? I briefly (after getting over the dread the incident caused) touching one of the blackened, brackish vats, but decided against it. The first one had been...had been disturbing enough. Both for the content and how vivid it was: I had felt...perhaps not every sensation the failed specimen had experienced, but all the important ones.
After that, I finally began working my way outside the room, stumbling my way into the rest of the facility, which was also in a clear state of disrepair, moss on the walls and dust on the ground, many of the lights blinking on and off, to say nothing of the ones that remained dark, the corridors they were supposed to illuminate resembling a dark, dreadful maw. Out of a sense of apprehension, I avoided those corridors: some sort of antediluvian dread filling me as I gazed into the darkened abyss.
The first thing I realized is that my room was not the only one filled with vats. Indeed, many of the rooms seemed to be devoted to the purpose of the installations. A handful instead had strange pools filled with cyan liquid, thick, viscous and swirling, with the edges made out of an odd crystaline substance that resembled diamond (others instead were like the broken vats: tepid and black, staining the crystal around them), floating orbs constructed of what appeared to be jade, emitting a strange humming noise that made me feel a sensation I can only describe as the grinding of teeth (some clearly cracked and sparking, shooting out bursts of light every now and again, with the humming replaced by a high pitched noise, a terrible wail that filled me with dread: I avoided those), and a handful had odd stone pillars that gave me strange vibes being in their presence, carved with strange effigies and symbols, almost mathematical in their precision and impossibly intricate in their design like fractals within fractals, and studded with gems, some glowing with an ethereal light that evoked some alien emotions and sensations in me I couldn't understand. However, for the most part it was just...vats. Vats filled with dead or deformed versions of myself, floating in the cyan brine, either near skeletal reminders of my grim mortality, or tumorous failures that evoked both pity as well as relief for avoiding that fate.
Eventually, I realized there was no apparent way out of the facility, not without venturing down the dark corridors. This presented a dilemma: presumably, whatever I was still needed food. Unless I could subsist on moss, there was no food. However, something told me that venturing down the shadowy path wasn't the correct choice, some primeval instinct that blared like a dark siren every time I tried to walk down that path.
I needed a solution. The only tool I had was the strange psychometry displayed: hopefully it was an ability of mine and not the vats. Hesitantly, I chose my target: the crystal orbs. Entering one of the rooms containing a non-cracked orb, I shielded my eyes from the glow, noting the haze of runes and sigils on the walls that shimmered in the orbs light, giving the illusion of movement. Walking forward, I placed a single claw on the orb...
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My vision swam with words, concepts, ideas, sensation. I saw the orb being crafted: both a repository of knowledge and a source of power, its physical shell housing power from the world beyond the world, before being imprinted with knowledge by its creators and owners: diagrams, sketches, genomes, ritual matrices, an endless spiral of knowledge, paired with the ability to use its connection to the immaterial to convert psychic energies, raw and unmoulded like fresh clay, into electricity and nuclear energies. A reactor and a tome of knowledge both, because why would it not be? What reason did those two have to be separate? Was knowledge not power, as they said, and power knowledge? All the Orb did was take the metaphorical and through craft turn it literal: the more knowledge it held, the more power it provided. The more power it provided, the more knowledge it could hold. The more knowledge, the more power, the more power, more knowledge.
Though through the aeons the orb had degraded and unraveled, it still contained infinite mysteries to peruse. I saw in its vast infinities methods to harness my psychometry, as well as its origins, the mystical energies present in my soul and the realm beyond and how to turn them to other ends: warping space and time, crafting wonders such as the jade orb, and even creating life. I saw patterns upon patterns for organism after organism: Krellid Worms, Pyrovores, Ugallu, Krork...
Wait, Krork?
With dawning, damning horror, I searched through the knowledge and patterns available, not just the genetic sequences but also the lore and history contained within, and certain names, terrible names, not for what they were but for what they collectively represented, stood out, monuments to terror as I realized where I was, what I was, and why this place was abandoned. Eldar. Jokaero. Necrontyr. C'Tan. Enslaver. Immaterium.
With a cry of terror, I removed my claw from the jade orb, and stood, shivering, as panic filled my bones. I was in Warhammer, incarnated as, according to the orb, an Old One. The last Old One.
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AN: An Old One OC Insert. A personal project I've been doing some worldbuilding for for awhile that I've finally decided to write and post. I should note that the 40K in the title refers to franchise, not timespan: when this takes place in the timeline will be covered eventually.
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