Somewhat brainless with added shoggoth

[narcasse]

“Words and words and words!” The shorter of the two exclaimed, throwing his hands up in the air in exasperation. “Do we really need words, Wilhelm?”
“We need some of them.”

- an excerpt from something I shan’t write



I’ve been reading articles today, mainly objective ones online about neural networks and such, and haven’t really done much else with my time. I don’t think I quite have the something or other to be terribly coherent in written text today at all, which will be rather unfortunate since tomorrow the world engages in annual celebrations of the birth of a lanithro. For those of you who don’t know, it’s a demon of the air which means that its powers extend over literature of course, inevitably meaning that I should be writing something around about now. Unfortunately, right now all I seem capable of is run-on sentences which aren’t much use at all.


Oh, but have a fairytale about a shoggoth instead. And I expect that unless my creativity should suddenly burst in upon me while I am unsuitably attired, I shall proclaim this a fairytale to celebrate the birth of a particular demon of the air for tomorrow.



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In a far off land, not so long ago there lived a shoggoth by the name of Tuesday. Now Tuesday was a very philosophical sort and liked to spend his days sprawled across warm objects, such as volcanoes or tectonic-plate faults and contemplate the world around him. He studied the things in the air and the stuff on the ground with the greatest of interest but even all those great many things couldn’t hold his attention for long. Tuesday had a voracious appetite for knowledge and as such wasn’t at all content with everything that he had already studied. He wanted more, he wanted… information.

Now, being a shoggoth he was capable of traversing vast distances and burrowing through the very fabric of time and space, which he did repeatedly but fortunately or unfortunately as the case may be, travelling through the warping portals of reality changed him. And it was on the 13th of one month, a Tuesday, ironically enough that he tumbled down through a hole in reality that seemed a little smaller than all the other ones.

He landed with a quiet ‘plop’ on top of a rack of something in a world were he had never been before.
“Y’hah, n’gai ghaa?” He thought to himself, which to you and I would translate roughly as “Goodness, wherever might I be?”
And he opened his eyes wide and saw to the furthest of his vision, a room. Filled with a great many brightly coloured books and a line of bipedal, mammalian creatures queuing up in some strange and esoteric ritual. They were actually lined up for a Neil Gaiman book-signing but Tuesday didn’t know that.
He tried to slide off the top of the rack of something under his own locomotion but to no avail and it was only then that he realised that he had shrunk. Of all things unimaginable, he had shrunk down to a size that one of those mammalian creatures might even describe as ‘hugable’ and he was trapped there for all time, until… until nothing really.
Tuesday, always the philosophical one, signed and at once set about understanding and resigning himself to his fate. Who realized his limitations is healthy after all.

But strangely enough, not long at all after Tuesday had decided upon this course of action he became aware of a pair of eyes staring at him and suddenly he was lifted down from his high perch and held up precariously at the level of this mammalian creature’s eyes.
“I say, you’re a shoggoth aren’t you?”
“F’eh.” He answered sarcastically.
The dark eyes of his captor gleamed. “Shog n’gai, fee’i?”
“Fee’i na’gei.”
“Slothoth y’chei?”
“Ar’eth b’ak na’gei fee.”
There was silence as each stared at the other.
“Yog-sothoth, n’gai?” Tuesday questioned suspiciously.
“Oh, no. I can assure you that I’m not.”
“Brrr…”
“But I’ll tell you what; if you’ve no objection I can take you home with me, away from all this commotion.”
“Brrr…”
“My home is quiet and dark and peaceful. There are books and warm machinery and other beings like yourself who have slipped through various portals. I live a reclusive life mostly and you wouldn’t be troubled.”
Tuesday thought about the proposal. It wasn’t often, on the other side of various portals, that people recognised him, let alone understood him. But how could he know if he could trust this strange fellow who now held him up whimsically balanced on an upturned palm?
“But how remiss of me. I should actually tell you my name.” And his strange captor bent his head so that his lips almost brushed Tuesday’s skin and whispered a word so softly that it wasn’t even a real word at all as far as Tuesday knew but it was an oddly familiar one. It was familiar enough that Tuesday relaxed and let his tentacles sprawl just a little bit further up the arm of his new companion.
“Homewards, shoggoth.” He whispered in the language of his new home and fell into a drowsy sleep.

And when Tuesday awakened, several days of long deserved nap later, he found himself in a warm dark room, sprawled across a folded bit of machinery that gave out a nice, soft hum.
It was, he later reflected, perhaps the best of all possible worlds that he had tumbled into. And sometimes, when the enchanter was busily researching in his archaic tomes, reading about jolly Nyarlathotep and Ol’ Cthulhu, he’d absently pet Tuesday too, which was never a bad thing either.

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It’s the enchanter from here again. He does seem to get about a bit for a self-proclaimed recluse, doesn't he?

Tuesday, it seems, has turned out to be a rather amazing linguist too.