Capítulo 30: Meddling of a Bird Brain
"Return to me—"
The last words rang in my head before the white flash. I was on a ship… my ship. Figuring out the logistics of the war… How the blueberry boy scout does it so effortlessly is beyond me. Now, here I am… not knowing where here even is.
Just a black void, I can hardly tell if I'm closing my eyes or not. Or if it's naturally this dark.
Suddenly–
"Shit– fuck! Turn down the lights!" I shouted.
My eyes were blinded for but a moment. As they adjusted– with the help of my hands blocking some of the light– I saw… a planet… one I've known all my life.
"Earth," I whispered.
I whipped my head around; I was floating in space. First a void now in space. The void must have been so dark that mere distant stars blinded my eyes. My eyes glided along my arms seeing as I can now see again. My limbs are intact, no pain can be felt. As I checked myself, I was back in my birthday suit.
"Duraeus!"
A voice sounding so elegant as if it speaks in cursive. I whipped around—
"Kagk!"
–only to have all the air knocked out of my lungs.
Seeing as I felt no pain before, now I felt all kinds of pain in my abdomen. A flash– glimpse before the pain. A woman as tall as me speeding at a speed number couldn't even count. Irate are her blue eyes, she channeled that anger to a single point of her fist. Too bad I was the targeted release. How I'm not dead– that's her motherly way of loving me.
My eyes involuntarily closed as I held my stomach. I felt the rush of motion… then heat. Mom really just hit me toward the gravitational pull of planet Earth. But mom being mom, I soon felt arms wrap around me from behind. Soothing warmth, the final transition from that soaring heat.
"Open your eyes."
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He did as he was told. The voice he first heard from the moment he gained consciousness. Duraeus– same blue eyes gazed upon a more vibrant and glassy variant… but ultimately the same. His mother before him– only she can come out swinging and somehow turn that pain into elation. An… interesting relationship– maybe borderline mutual abuse.
Duraeus couldn't help but smile. So many questions… Now he can ask them. But that can wait, at least that's what his eyes are saying.
"Hello Factory," Dureaus affectionately called out.
The woman before him– Alicia– returned the greeting, "Been awhile, Product."
Both had cracks on their smiles; threatening to turn into a full on laughing fest. Duraeus couldn't hold in his mama's boy instinct and rushed for a hug. Alicia returned it in kind.
Mother and son– Duraeus and Alicia– back together again.
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Somewhere, in a land of change. A certain bird scoffs.
"Sooner than expected," it said, a voice hard to pinpoint. Raspy yet smooth, guttural yet clear, male but female. An ever changing identity.
Although, its annoyance soon turned to worry as all connections were cut off. Plan A was caught too soon before the change… all back doors to the second Primarch not only closed, but were completely erased.
The lord of change was smart enough to tag the boy before slipping his grasp. That led to a whole new universe outside their own. A whole new playground… or so he thought. Now, he has inquired about the wrath of a being… god? No, this thing is higher than that… but weaker than a god… it fluctuates in power…
Either way… the last thing he felt was nothing short of weak. It flared a vengeance true– truer than the words of their pesky loyalist. With such convictions, it was only a matter of time before that thing comes here. But when? Past, present, future? When dealing with a being equivalent to a god of a different– maybe even outer in universe– such questions are necessary.
The bird thinks in thought… maybe… just maybe it bit off more than it can chew.
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"So… what am I?"
That's how the conversation started. Under the bright blue sky– clouds a plenty– the warm breeze brought forth a peaceful comfort. Two beings on top of a hill– mother and son– a heart to heart talk of the truth.
To start, Alicia Vendrandar is a being none human. To put it in simpler words, she's a being of a higher power. A god if one were to compare her to something more… tangible to imagine. But she's more than that. Induced by the change Duraeus has brung, Alicia is not constrained by basic limitations of gods. Gods for the most part need a faith to be beheld in existence– she does not. Her entirety is straightforwardly unconstructable power. Meaning she is however she views herself. She is power– she is beauty… she is a mother as well as wrath. She is pride as well as peace. Imagination is her domain; a complete opposite of her past self. The her before was merely a being of existence that held no memory, no recognition, no matter… not even emotions. She was just there, in a void, in nothingness. Until… Well, Duraeus slipped through.
That's another story too, the whole "coming in contact with Alicia." Nothing much to go off of there according to her. She simply felt a string-like presence– she finally felt something. Wasting no time, she wanted it– needed it. But see… that's where the whole phisaco started. Just as the whole change within her began as Duraeus took root as the base of her conceptuality, the key word there is change. Being in the 40k world, change is… something of a common commodity that is often unknowingly tied with the lord of change– at least when it comes to the knowledge of the common folk in hive cities and such… the Emperor knows they have worse things to worry about. The needed rush of having Duraeus– alongside her inexperienced with everything– left quite a big connection to the bird brain's domain. It was quickly patched, although duct taping something can hardly be called a patch.
So, she told him everything. Everything that is from the day of his 'Yanking' as she likes to call it, to now, she didn't withhold important information.
When the topic of what Duraeus considers his first life came up, an added unknown reason entered his ears–
"The life you've come to know as home is so much more," she says whilst looking up at the same sky that hasn't changed since the start of their conversation, "that life was not to only give you a chance to live a life you were fated to be robbed of, but it was a means to protect you from my mistakes. That realm, you may even call it a simulation, was a bubble I formed with my recently developed powers. Almost like a crystal ball– untaintable and unbreakable as long as I was there. A realm to keep outsiders out, hehe– you already know whom that might be. But, that was not a solution. More of a cage. So, I devised a plan, stupid on paper, but it ultimately worked."
She explained the rest with this goofy grin as if she herself can't believe the words are escaping her mouth, too.
Essentially, whilst she was protecting her son and herself, she stumbled across DDossing. Distributed Denial–of–Service (DDoS) is a cybercrime. In short, they flood your systems with useless traffic that ultimately deprives the user of connected access.
…
"Deprives the user of connected access."
…
Taking that info, she flooded her realm outside the marble she held herself in with so much useless info that it became too much for even Tzeentch to spread his influence.
Unknown to her, Tzeentch had brain rot for about a week that even the other gods in his realm were a bit confused.
That did the trick. It didn't completely clear out the presence as tiny slivers were still there. "Were" is the key word, recently her realm is clear. But, after that stunt, she needed to rest as tossing the amount of random useless information at once is taxing. Like a powerful tower with all updated specs; even they can't handle thousands of tabs with random bullshit.
While leaving a body double in the marble for Dureaus, she slept in her normal realm. Powers dormant, things naturally fixed itself. Not only that, she gained even more power from the thing she calls a "Power Nap."
But, that bird still had something in mind.
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"A lie?" I repeated in disbelief.
"Unfortunately, yes," she confirmed, "When your life ended in our own little world, you were ready then to be put in something more real. The life you lived there may be real to you but was nothing more of a simulated life. Think of it as throwing one bullshit in only for that one bullshit to sprout out multiple other random bullshits. That bullshit was you by the way." she had this deadpanned look on her face as she stared at me.
"Your existence did all that," she held out a marble.
To where she got the marble from, I don't even want to process that. But… I saw it. Well, it wasn't much seeing but more of a feeling of familiarity. That was home, compacted in a head-size crystal.
"So… that truck… you put a hit on me?" I asked jokingly
She didn't respond, only continued on. Now I know something's off. Not in a sense that she wasn't the mother I know, but because she's the mother I know that when jest stops being thrown around, shit's about to hit the fan.
"Once dead, your soul would then be released. That was the program I had written down. An automated process. That soul would then be incubated into something more… until that shit stain left something even I didn't see coming. I may be powerful, but I'm not an all seeing eye."
Just before I was to be incubated, the being I saw that "reincarnated" me wasn't my mother. I didn't think anything of it, too discombobulated at the time of death then suddenly getting thrashed into that mess I was in in EDF.
…
FUCKER WAS A DAEMON OF CHAOS! I was reincarnated by a freaking daemon of chaos!?
…
I know what happened after that: the system, the edf world. According to mom, the reason I'm not demonified yet was due to her. Put a spell that basically marks me as her own, something has to be more powerful than her to turn me into something different.
But I digress… the system, the world I was in, all a lie. A ploy; apparently they were going to give me the biggest character development just to bring me to the darkside. I should've known about Aze… this was the biggest red flag. I just attributed it to being a new marine, still an infant in the mind.
Now I'm here, no system, no legion, just here with my mother. Honestly, not a bad life to live.
"But you'd have no life here my son…"
Forgot she can read surface thoughts–
"Hey Duraeus…"
I looked over to her. Overlooking the distant lands before us– hair dancing in the wind, she had a smile before turning to me with a certain– dangerous glint in her eyes.
"What would you say to dominating the world of 40k?"
Silence filled out my response. I didn't need to voice out my opinions on the matter. I wanted my hands on them damned daemons. I wanted a good heart to heart talk with my father. But ultimately torturing Tzeentch for being a prick.
She smiles before closing her eyes. Then before I knew it, she's gone. Nowhere in sight. The sky, the clouds, the ground, my clothes– wait, forgot I was naked the entire time I was talking to her. But everything else was gone. Back in a familiar blackness, I hear her voice again. This time, radiating all around me.
"Will you let me give you the real tools for our endeavor, MY Primarch."
I couldn't help but feel elated hearing her call me her Primarch. Probably close to a mother calling her children her little honeybunch but… I don't care.
"Yes"
That was the last word I said before another flash of light…
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Shook, everything shook to the core. Gods of different worlds. Beings able to tap in outside the 4th wall, they all felt it. A coming tide. A tide not like water. A tide of a different legion not like we've seen. A tide of dark gray armor– of golden visors– of midnight black pauldrons. A renaissance of the II Legion. Made in the image of her wise vision.
The Empress Alicia Vendrandar.
A force like no other. There's a morbid time coming. One of confusion.
They all asked the same question in mind.
Will they be foes?
Or friends…
Or… is this the coming end time for all of creation– for all of existence.
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