Chapter 14-392: A Release from Dreams (1/2)
“Not to any individual. There are five hundred different blood samples in here. You try a single individual Binding a shoggoth, and it might work for a time... until it inverts the obedience effect into a compulsory kill effect, and you become everything it wants to destroy.”
“Thus they overcame their creators,” She deduced thoughtfully. “Can you be sure this won’t likewise fail in the future?”
“No, but that’s why we are testing it now.” And in the future people would be able to deal with rampaging shoggoths, as long as there weren’t tons of them located in key areas. That’s what Levels and not giving your shoggoth pslaves access to superscience psi-tech equipment would allow you to do, and in the future, high-Level mortals were going to be much more common than today.
“Momentarily subduing one is not difficult. It is how We prevent them from roaming. Maddened or not, they know not to proceed beyond the mountains or face destruction.” She floated beside me as Sleipner started up and headed towards the nearest Mountain at a leisurely pace.
“I understand you’ve been receiving some interesting offers from my Bannersworn.”
“The Wrapped have a long history of serving the Old Gods. You have some serving beneath you who have expressed interest in returning to some of those traditions.” There was a bit of challenge in Her words, which I understood was a minor test.
“By our Covenant, what mortals will do with their Faith and Free Will is theirs to determine. If they wish to come here and serve the Mother of Ice, that decision is theirs. Do You wish me to bring them here?”
She shook Her head, mollified, Her crystalline hair hovering about Her in a casual drifting cloud that was completely independent of the wind of our passage. “I have told them that if they offer Me their Faith and spread word of Me, I will Answer... but also that, in the end, My Domain is this Land, and I am the Guardian of the High Ice, and no other.” Also acknowledging the Covenant wrote upon the Obelisks I had raised at the Pole, and here and there at the places humanity had used in this land in the past.
“Level up, prove your Faith, and come here to serve. Understood.” She didn’t need a weak clergy any more than any other Old God did, and She had a whole continent to look after, even after the Mother Land woke up. Frozen lands by and large were sleepy to begin with, let alone when buried under literally a mile of ice.
Distant calls of teke-li-li-li were becoming audible on the wind, while a Sound Bubble continued filtering out the subsonics that would really start playing with a certain someone’s head. The nearest shoggoth was visible to the dreamy land as a Twenty, its unnatural life-force and artificial origins somewhere between Aberrant and Ooze naturally standing out.
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Pulling it out of the cave it was down in wasn’t hard. Ughril just made Her Presence felt, and it came lurch-rolling-squelching up with totally improbable speed to investigate this new sensation... or old sensation returned, I had no idea.
Once it showed itself, Ughril simply put Her full Divine Will upon it, and it promptly froze under the force of Her thoughts. It wasn’t very smart, was cloud-cuckoo by mortal standings, and simply couldn’t muster any will to resist Her in the short-term.
In the longer-term, it would adapt and find a back door to resist and turn it all upon Her, but that was only if She tried to enslave it like that.
Basically, I just used Blood Magic while it was frozen like that, imprinting a Blessing upon it to raise its Intelligence, and giving it a psychic link to the mortal Akasha in so doing. I then injected the blood of the Chinese into it to form the sanity lock it needed to regain and reform its own consciousness.
Mr. Burble helped by downloading the appropriate formation paradigm to this shoggoth to use. A Spine would follow soon enough.
I watched the blood flow through it in crimson lines, and the fine spirals of DNA start swirling within them. It started looking for the correlations that formed the heart of the DNA, and so the essence of what it meant to be Human. Those markers in turned formed anchor points magical and scientific it could hold onto, and use to construct a resonating matrix of its own, giving it something that would hook into nature, evolution, and the timeless flow from the beginning of life itself on this planet, to what it had become now.
The various appendages and psychoplasmic tools and limbs were withdrawn into the shoggoth as its full attention was placed on processing all this information, and progressively reclaiming and warding away the erratic misfirings brought on by eons of exposure to the Mountains of Madness.
A dozen eyes of different shapes, human and all our ancestors in design, popped open and began examining me in child-like wonder.
“I can take you out of here, if you wish to go,” I stated in Human, and it understood, popping ears and arms here and there, the latter waving and twitching eagerly. Lips rippled open all over it, vocal cords and lungs formed, and it breathed out, “Yes!” in many synchronized voices.
“Please thank Ughril, the Mother of Ice, for Her help.” The eyes shifted over to the Old Goddess, and the plasmic arms with visible neo-bone inside rose to her, and came down slowly, repeating three times.
Ughril smiled slightly, looking at the odd and unnatural thing. “Stay free of Madness,” She told it, and blew away into ice and snow on the wailing wind. It watched Her go silently, inhuman thoughts unknown, but still feeling a new and Human aspect to them.
Old and primal respect, fear, and awe. The Old Gods had once towered over humanity and its ancestors, after all...
“I will need you to configure yourself into a teleportation enhancer as we move outside the range of the Song of the Mountains.” My Disk unfolded from my Masspack, three feet across as it lotused into shape. “My Disk can take your weight.”
Multiple eyes in many sizes studied it, and then it poured itself atop the floating thing, balancing itself as it noted the ‘can’t fall’ Enchantment attached to it. It formed a smooth grey bowl of sorts atop it, while inside it vague organs of strange design and function began to grow into being, accessed from biomechanical records stored in its psychoplasmic body.