Issue 23, Page 23
Transcript
1: Xijo stands still, touching the panel, looking up
Xijo: I am initiating the Shankar radiations stream.
2: The sample of black mass twitches, flinching away from the glass panel on which it leaned.
3: It starts to shudder and shake, whipping itself against the glass with dull thuds, leaking black fluid profusely.
Xijo: It… moves? Fast? It is very rapid? Ah! ‘Twitching’. Also leaking.
No mutations. This could be a triggered aggressions response.
4: Xijo’s gloved finger streaks across glass to turn a digital dial.
Xijo: I am applying modulation.
5: The sample presses against the glass and is still, its black surface hardening into solid shell.
Xijo: It is now still. There is mutation. It… hardens like, ah, ‘armor’.
[martian swear]
This was only a small change to the wavelength.
Me when I hear my pizza rolls are done
Me when mommy forgot the chicken nuggets
So what happens when they find the right wavelength and it turns into a fur begging for their life?
So I did a re-read and checked that Shankar Radiation is likely produced by “neurological activity.”
So yeah, it’s likely we might end up with this black idol turning itself into a thinking being to protect itself from the thinking emitions,
Like a body producing melanin to protect itself from the sunrays.
The Black Idol is already intelligent.
It’s already intelligent, but it may have little or no native self-concept, like it’s enlightened. I like this idea that it produces sub-selves as defense against the outside thoughts. It needs an ego, and egos are too self-involved and unstable to extend to the entire Black Mass (so there have to be a lot of them).
If it developed “sub-selves” to protect itself from “outside thoughts”, and thus led to the creation of the anthro (Earth) races, from whose thoughts was it protecting itself?
My hypothesis is that, long ago, it lost a fight with one or more other deities, and part of it was banished to Earth, where, cut off from the rest of itself by the Shankar radiation, it gradually evolved into the anthro races.
Now, there’s an idea, TCDD.
Seriously, I can imagine the black idol piece be forcibly mutated into a fur, and begging, “Why am I doing this t myself?!”
It’s giving itself little choice.
Sometimes humans have an ego-free experience and then come back to their habitual sense of identity. I’ve seen someone describe it like “why am I picking up this weight, it’s so heavy and I don’t need it”.
To be clear, are we talking about a literal or a metaphorical weight?
Literal, but it’s just a given example. It can apply to anything.
How is every form of the Black Idol somehow MORE AWFUL.
Like you’d think familiarity and desensitization would set in at some point, but noo, Rebecca somehow finds ways to keep making it *viscerally upsetting*. It’s really impressive in a really unhappy way.
Agreed, Rebecca definitely has a talent for the… disquieting.