Never Pass Up A Chance For A Villain Song

[Bainrigh Mab]

With Kat hopefully swayed to her side, Queen Mab retreats to the corner of the woods she has claimed for herself. A tree with branches splitting wide at the trunk to form an adequate throne for her to sit on, overlooking a clearing. It's not much but it's a start. She descends from the tree and finds the entrance hidden among it's roots. A cave has been carved into the earth, extending out and around thick roots that were left to serve as pillars of sorts. The ever-present light fluttering around her cast jittering shadows as she approaches a series of carefully dug and alcoves, thin hanging roots serving as a kind of curtain for the two foot wide and tall recess.

She reaches inside and withdraws what can be generously described as a lump of flesh the size of an orange. It twitches in her hands and something inside of it slides around in folds of membranes and organs. "Yes, I think you're ready..." she says as she caresses the thing and places it back before checking on another two similar lumps. As she does she feels a hum in the air and she grins. Something is happening. Unrelated, but it's in the air, coalescing into sound...

♪♫"In the dark of the night I was tossing and turning
And the nightmare I had was as bad as can be
It scared me out of my bed
A corpse savaged and shred!
Then I opened my eyes
And the nightmare was me!"♪♫

Her shape changes into a pale and haggard look, teeth elongating into thin needles that bristle in her mouth

♪♫"I began by just dragging them into the ocean
Just a horror devouring the fear in their skin.
But as they all passed away
I saw little lights in their play
Little Sparks, beware
The monster's awake."♪♫

As she spins through the room the little light dances around her in a tight spiral, ending up hovering right in front of her face and casting it into sharp relief. A tendril grows from her head and captures it in the bulb of the angler-fish lantern hanging from her head.

♪♫"To the depth of the sea, terror will drag you.
To the darkest abyss, far from the dawn
Your meat will be sweet
When your power is freed.
In the dark of the night
You'll be gone!"♪♫

♪♫"I can hear what mere voices could never reveal to.
Way below, shimmering glow of your soul in that well.
As we're driven out of that place
Revelation dawns on my face.
Dealachadh, iar-bhanrigh, your grace.
Farewell!"♪♫

Throwing her arms wide she shucks her look like an old coat, pale flesh folding into fleshy but colorful moth wings and scales, the anglerfish bulb bursting and freeing the small spark to burst into bright illumination. Behind her from the alcoves the flesh blobs are pulling themselves out and flop onto the floor.

♪♫"Deep behind every scene, puppets are acting.
(Act in a play without end!)
Deep behind every scene, I'll pull the strings.
I'll set them free, cast their parts perfectly!
Behind every scene, they'll attend!"♪♫

♪♫"Behind every scene, wishes are granted.
(Granted!)
Behind every scene, I will ascend.
(Join her!)"♪♫

The little light zips behind Mab, attending to each flesh blob in turn. As it touches them they change and unfold, hatching into what one would have to be very generous to call 'fairies'. They're small humanoid figures with wings, but one of them only has a single large eyeball for a face, it's wings more sheets of fungal growth. Another has no eyes at all and only horizontal holes for a nose, it's 'wings' looking like an axolotl's gills. The last one is mostly human, but misshapen and mottled, the dragonfly wings on it's back uneven nd distorted. All three of them have a faint light glowing in their chests that gathers strength as the creatures stagger to their feet, dripping with ichor and who knows what kind of biological slime.

♪♫"My dear, here's a sign
We'll step over the line
Behind every scene
Behind every scene"♪♫

♪♫"Come my fairies
Dance for your Mistress
Let your powers shine
Find them now
Yes, fly ever faster
Behind every scene
Behind every scene
Behind every scene
They'll be mine!"♪♫

The little monsters, each carrying within them the growing spark of a power coaxed forth by Mab's shaping of their flesh, flutter into the air, picking up speed as they circle around her and finally dashing off through the air and up, out of the cave.

[Narrator]

The creature had a singular objective.
Find the human it was meant to imbue.
It knows that it was split off from Queen Mab.
It had slept for weeks, growing, changing.
It had gradually lost most of what it inherited from the Queen.
Adapted along very specific ways she had planned out.
Changed its flesh to be able to hold the spark that now blossomed inside of it.
Its siblings had already taken off.
The creature’s wings are malformed and it struggles to fly as swiftly.
The queen’s power is slowly fading now that it has hatched.
A group of three humans. Its siblings already landed on them, merging into their flesh.
The third human looks confused when their two companions fall to the ground.
The creature approaches while the human is distracted.
It misses, lands on the human's head and slides down to the ear.

No time to be careful, be quick. It’s a tight squeeze but it wriggles into the ear canal. The human is panicking now, grabs at their ear, gets a hold on the creatures legs. Pulls. The creature struggles, digs tiny fingers into skin. Something tears. Everything below the stomach is suddenly gone. Cold is grabbing at it, its own warmth spilling out, but it yet lives. It scrabbles and tears, slides along bone. Its own shape begins to dissolve, just meat pushing itself through different meat. It squeezes past a bundle of nerves and blood vessels through an opening in the bone.

The meat inside the skull tingles and is full of panic. So is the creature. It bites and tears, but it knows it's dying. It failed the Queen. Things get hazy. The torn and ragged grey matter around it is equally lost, thoughts faltering. What is it doing? It holds on to the only thing it is still certain of. The Spark inside of it is important. The most important. The only thing that matters. It was supposed to give it up but it’s all it is now. The thoughts around it are coming apart too. Too much tingling meat is gone. There’s nothing left but the spark and the spark isn’t anything at all. It knows a great many things. Confusing things. Contradicting things. Things that are sometimes true and sometimes not. Anything can’t be anything at all unless it is something.

To make nothing into something. To create. For something to exist. For itself to exist. It needs examples and something is there to provide them. Something like itself. More than one. Countless of them. They’re all defined by their functions. Concepts they now communicate, in a way. Suggestions or examples or instructions. Ways in which things can exist. Ways in which Potential can be made to adhere to rules and be given definition. Ways that were gleaned from all manner of existing things. Things they don’t understand other than for what they are. They learn more all the time, forget other things until they’re unearthed by cosmic happenstance. Nothing’s ever truly lost with very few exceptions.

Some things are very crucial. They cannot be if the connection closes, if the spark winks out because it inadvertently destroyed the very thing that reached out. Humans they usually call themselves. Mutants. That alone holds vast concepts, but with enough examples it’s easy for the important things to emerge. Certain structures are required and can’t be disrupted, must be preserved. This one is damaged but hardly beyond repair. Quantum potential collapses into quarks, weaves together into atoms and molecules, forms fatty acids and proteins, ions and water, forms neurons and brain tissue from nothing to reshape what was lost. Sometimes Their emergence damages nearby humans or structures, but never their host. Change it, yes; for worse, sometimes. Evolution is messy.

The brain is restored nigh instantaneously, incorporating the homunculus that carried the right genes and proteins to create the pinprick in reality that forms the Spark. The healed brain is a blank slate. But there’s a viable body here. Just no mind to go with it. What’s one more thing to make from nothing using the closest thing available...

[Mooncalf]

Eyes snap open from a disjointed dream of abstract concepts shaping reality, rapidly fading into vague feelings of purpose and longing. Longing for what? I don’t know. Who am I? I don’t know. But I do know that I am. My chest hurts, which makes me aware of the fact that I have a lungs and all the associated bits. Bits that run on reflex and gulp in a desperate breath of air. I have to breathe. I know what breathing is. This is great progress.

Above me the pale-blue is broken up by billowing whites. Sky and clouds. The names come to me right away but nothing else about it. I sit up because that is something my body can do and lying on the ground had become uncomfortable. Two humans - people - are stepping off of the grey-black ground onto the green and walking away at a steady, unwavering pace. They have large humps on their backs. I sit a little longer until a loud blaring sound startles me to my feet. A metal box on wheels - car - has crept up behind me and the human within looks at me with creased brow and agitated arm movements. I step off the grey (road) and onto the green (grass) to let the car pass.

I take stock of myself from the bottom up. My feet are encased in woven fibers and aged animal skin - socks and boots. More fibers around my hips and upper thighs, blue and sturdier. Yet more fiber around my torso, tied underneath my chest. This one has repeating patterns of rectangles of different colors, offset and layered. I can’t look at my own head but my fingers tell me I have an olfactory organ, eyes (obviously), metal embedded in one of the thin strips of hairs above my eye, calcified growth for grinding up sustenance, a prehensile muscle too short to manipulate much of anything, ears (wet with some drops of red liquid), several inches of flexible horns. Thousands of them actually. My fingers have the same stuff but fused and flatter, covered in some kind of protective resin.

Next to me is a discarded hump like I saw the other two people carrying. Had I been in danger and discarded part of myself defensively? No, it has some give but it’s inorganic. A container then, full of all manner of confusing things, including sustenance. Water in a metal cylinder and foil-encased bricks. I figure out how to unscrew the cylinder and drink. Then I start to walk, chewing on the tough foil brick. I know it’s for eating, but that’s it. After a while it bursts and I realize my mistake. I shake the crumbly (and somewhat moist) contents out of the foil and shove them into my mouth to be ground up more. Making all kinds of great strides!

[Mooncalf]

The world is beautiful and entirely made out of things. I’ve yet to find something I can’t identify at a glance, but I still don’t really know what any of them are. It’s very confusing but at the same time exciting to figure out. Like the couple tricks that make walking easier so now my [shoes] slide almost frictionless across the ground and I've only fallen over three times. The first time hurt, afterwards I figured out how to quickly adjust the ground to have some give, though the rough surface still scratched up my palms a bit. Still worth it though, I'm going much faster now and the wind is whipping through my hair. I can't change myself like I do other things, which has helped me put things into some categories. There's me and things like me, people and [birds] and [insects] and such. They all have some kind of characteristic I can't figure out or define. Then there's most of the world. {Rocks] and the [air] and the [sunlight] and things I can manipulate. And then there's the tiny things that may or may not exist. Mostly not. Like a background hum. I have no idea what that's all about.

People in cars going the opposite direction pass me every once in a while, the people inside usually staring for the brief moment we're close enough to. I don't get it. The road seems to be for going fast and that's what I'm doing. I tried chasing down one of them to ask them about it, but they look [scared] so I stopped. At some point I found the [sea] and I stood on the crescent of tiny rocks and dead things for a while. The air smells different and the [sun] is turning the water crimson and purple under an orange sky. It's very pretty and for a while I play around with trying to make my clothes shimmer and break the light the same way. It takes me a while to notice that in the process I've accidentally changed the density of the things I'm wearing and I'm dangling from my shirt and backpack as they float in the air. It gives me an idea and I find a rock heavy enough to hold me to the ground enough to take a running start and jump the moment I drop my improvised [anchor]. I shoot into the air like an air-bubble pushed under water in a long arc across the sea...