The Beginnenings

Serp

Somewhere in the multiverse, in the depths of a dense forest, all was quiet. The moon could barely penetrate the trees’ canopy with its rays, leaving the forest floor cloaked in darkness. The eerie stillness of the woods was seemingly unending; below the earth, however, was restless. Below this forest was a hidden research facility, known only to the top minds of the world. Not even governmental officials were privy to its location; they only got to see the end results. In the facility, though, is where the magic happens. Here, the most formidable scientific minds of the century toiled night and day, forging new paths in miraculous invention and the development of physical theories. Here, in fact, the two most formidable scientific minds in the history of the world constantly churned out new innovations. Here, Serp Lewzez and Jastine Zand worked.

Serp Lewzez and Jastine Zand had known each other since childhood. Anyone who spent some time around them might have come away with the idea that the two were close friends. This could not be further from the truth; as the saying goes: keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer. Serp and Jastine despised each other, seeing the other as an intellectual enemy. They were locked in a war of constant back-and-forth one-up-manship. This occurred on a day-to-day level, but it is no more evident than in their achievements throughout life: Jastine would win the fourth-grade science fair, then Serp would best her in a quiz bowl; Serp would be declared high-school valedictorian, Jastine would enter graduate school first. Even in their scientific careers, this continued: Serp would observe a new spatial dimension, then Jastine would create the first practical-use quantum computer. Back and forth it went, for years and years. Finally, though, Jastine thought that she had found something that would finally dwarf all of Serp’s achievements once and for all. So, she called Serp into the lab to observe her newest innovation.

Serp was walking through a stark white hallway, his paws making no noise as they move across the metal floor. He was a short, somewhat pudgy Duineko, and his light grey fur was quite ruffled; he had just been awoken after falling asleep at his desk forty-eight hours into a research binge. He right paw held a steaming mug, while his left was occupied with rubbing the sleep from his eyes. His goggles were perched atop his forehead, where they usually remained when he wasn’t wearing them, and his white labcoat had various stains, several of which were coffee or ink.

Turning into a doorway, Serp took a sip from his mug before asking, “Well, Jastine, what exactly did you want to show me so urgently?”

Jastine was standing next to a large object covered with a sheet, which seemed to make her seem small, despite her notable height. Her claws were clasped around parts of the sheet. Her face had a huge toothy grin plastered across it, and her orange fur stood on end in anticipation.

“Oh come on, Serp, you should refer to me as Doctor Zand while we’re working. After all, we did earn the title,” Jastine replied, deliberately ignoring Serp’s question.

Serp took another sip from his mug. “You’re right, I suppose it is a sign of respect, Jastine.”

Jastine tensed as a bolt of annoyance arced through her, but she forced herself to relax. He’ll be put in his place soon enough, she told herself.

Her grip on the sheet tightened as she began, “Anyhow, I invited you to my lab so that you could be the first to see my new creation! I thought if anyone should be the first to see it, it should be you.”

“Aw, how thoughtful,” Serp said. “So what is it?”

Jastine’s grin grew wider as she replied, “Take a look for yourself!” before dramatically pulling the sheet from the object.

As the sheet fell away, it revealed a large metal torus, mounted on a platform that stood on the floor. Several wires trailed from ports in the side of the ring, and many bare coils and circuits could be seen. It obviously wasn’t a finished product, but it didn’t have to be; as long as it worked, it would suffice.

Jastine looked at Serp expectantly, but the cat seemed unimpressed. “So… it’s just a space drive stabilizer?”

“No, silly,” Jastine responded, her twitching eye revealing the barely-contained rage that she was feeling towards the grey cat. She walked over to a desk with a switch sitting on it and flipped the switch, shouting “Watch and learn!”

Immediately the device began humming, and, after several seconds, a strange swirling effect began occurring within the ring. After around thirty seconds, an apparent collapsing of the space within the ring occurred, revealing a hole that led to a second ring, apparently hidden under another sheet in the lab.

Upon seeing this, Serp almost dropped his mug. “Holy shit, Jastine,” was all he could say.

Jastine yelped and clapped her paws together when he said this. “This is it! There’s no way you could beat this.”

She turned the teleporter off and began towards the doorway to the lab. “Well, I’m going to go grab some other people to show this to.”

She set a paw on Serp’s shoulder as she walked past, and whispered, “I’m sure you thought your hopeless ‘pocket’ theory was going to go somewhere, huh?”

After Jastine left, Serp remained still, dumbfounded at what he had just witnessed. Eventually, though, he suddenly began moving towards the device. He grabbed at a loose wire and tugged, ripping it from the machine and sending a few sparks flying. “Let’s see your machine work now,” he muttered to himself.

When Jastine returned with a few other colleagues, she didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary with the machine. Serp was still in the room, but she had expected him to stay. She was glad, too, that he would be in the room to see the recognition on their colleagues’ faces that she was the superior intellect between the two of them.

She went to stand beside the desk with the switch and turned to address the other scientists. “Friends, associates, colleagues, I hope you are all ready to see the world’s first instant teleportation device!” She finished off her sentence by flipping the switch.

The device began to whirr once more, until, after a few seconds, there was a small pop, and the noise died down. The machine went still.

Jastine’s eyes went wide. “Wh– but how– it was working just a minute–”

“Damn, Doctor Zand, that’s a shame. Better luck next time,” chided Serp, a grin now adorning his face.

Jastine stared daggers into Serp. “What did you do?” she asked quietly.

Serp leaned against a nearby desk, responding, “I didn’t do anything, Jastine. Your machine just clearly doesn’t work.”

A growl rumbled from Jastine’s throat. Suddenly she ran at Serp, pushing her colleagues out of the way and grabbing a discarded piece of metal. She pushed Serp against the desk, pressing him down with one hand and holding the sharp metal against his neck with the other.

“What the fuck did you do?!” Jastine screamed in Serp’s face, pressing the metal a little harder into his neck as she did.

Serp’s tongue was tied. “J-Jastine, I– wait–”

“Doctor Zand, what are you doing?!” a black-furred Duineko asked, putting a paw on Jastine’s shoulder to try and pull her away from Serp.

She just shrugged it off, replying, “He did something! He must have! It worked when I showed it to him! He must have–”

Jastine was cut short, however, as an indescribable noise reverberated around the room. Everyone turned towards the teleporter. It appeared as if someone had taken a pencil to punch a hole in the center of the ring. It wouldn’t be accurate to describe it as black; it was more like the light physically could not enter that portion of space, as if the space didn’t exist in the first place. And the worrying part was that it was growing.

“What the hell is that?” one of the other scientists in the room asked, reaching out to touch it.

Jastine released Serp, reaching out towards the scientist. “Wait, don’t–!”

It was too late. As soon as his paw “touched” the hole, it disappeared; as he pulled it back, blood began gushing from the open hole now in his arm.

All hell broke loose in the room. The other scientists began to panic, some trying to stop the bleeding of their colleague, some trying to get the others out of the room as soon as possible. Serp took advantage of the situation to push Jastine off of him all the way, and he immediately took off full-sprint down the hallway.

Serp knew what was happening. He had written a paper on the possible consequences of teleportation done wrong. If done without care, essentially folding to points in space into the same point would cause the spacetime to simply implode at that point, ceasing to exist. As a result, the rest of the space around that point is forced to occupy the same point, causing a runaway destruction of spacetime.

There was only one possible way out of this, Serp knew. It was a favorite recent idea of his, the idea that, supposing multiple universes exist, they are essentially organized in a cosmology that is similar in appearance to bubble wrap. Each universe is an isolated bubble, connected by an infinite cohesive space which Serp called “The Pocket.” However, this theory was completely untested, and, unfortunately, Serp would have to attempt to test it now.

He hurried into his lab, frantically grabbing bits and bobs and putting them together. He picks up a half-finished device that he had been working on to test his theory and began modifying it. If he was correct, he could utilize the extra spatial dimentions he had previously discovered to slip past the universe and into The Pocket. Due to the circumstances, though, it seemed that this would be a one-way trip.

Outside his lab, Serp could hear the screams of scientists being consumed by the un-space, and several others ran past his doorway. He ignored them; he was too much of a coward to go out there to help them. It wouldn’t do any good regardless. He had to finish this.

Serp finished the device just as the un-space made it to his doorway. He powered it up, praying that it would work. The space in front of him rippled and shivered; for a second it seemed like that was all that would happen. Eventually, however, a doorway opened into a black void. The Pocket.

As quickly as he could, Serp stepped through the portal. It closed just as the un-space outside consumed the rest of Serp’s lab.

* * *

Some time later, Serp was floating in the empty void, alone. Everyone in his species, all life on the planet, would be undone by now. Soon, as the spatial implosion accelerates, the whole universe will be consumed. Everything that Serp once knew, the entire existence that he had spent his life studying: all undone by him in a stupid act of petty rage.

He wouldn’t be left with his guilt for long, at least. Escaping to the Pocket was a temporary solution; without a way out, he’ll just die of dehydration soon enough.

Suddenly, though, something caught his eye. He thinks that he might see something floating in the distance. That shouldn’t be possible, he thinks to himself, the Pocket should be completely empty. Despite his doubts, he couldn’t help but feel hope at the idea that there might be something in this place. It could mean that he could survive this.

Serp squints his eyes to try to see what the thing in the distance could be.

“Is… is that…” he says out loud to himself, “Is that a sailboat?”

Gum

Somewhere in the multiverse, someone was running. They were sprinting through the woods, their shoes crunching on the layers of fallen leaves. Overhead, the waxing moon shone through the bare limbs, creating streaks of white light across the ground. The person running was beginning to show signs of exhaustion: his breaths were ragged, his strides becoming irregular. Regardless, he continued forward, keeping his feathered wings close to his back and using his three eyes to scan the ground ahead.

Suddenly, voices cried out into the forest.

“Come on, Gum, what’s the matter? We just wanna have some fun with you!”

Several darkened silhouettes weaved between the trunks of the trees, flying several feet from the ground. They possessed long, sharp claws and piercing fangs. Their faces cast fearsome images onto the ground, as both their eyes and mouths emitted a cold white light. The feathers on their wings were entirely black, and darkened veins ran along their limbs. They had been transformed by their hatred into monstrosities.

The running figure, Gum, continued at a full sprint without faltering. There was no way he were going to get caught tonight, especially not by these guys. They were notorious for kidnapping angels with similar abnormalities to Gum’s, and the he did not want to put those rumors to the test.

“Gum, where you going? You know we can’t do anything to you, even if we wanted to!”

Not even remotely true, Gum thought. The pursuers could hurt him as much as they wanted; that’s the main issue here. Nothing much to do about it other than run until they lose interest. Gum had gotten pretty good at running throughout his life since that was the best way to avoid being kidnapped by angels akin to his pursuers; ones who decided to act on the prejudice and hatred they felt towards angels like Gum, in the most gruesome ways possible.

Gum had been captured those types once before when he was much younger. Luckily he had managed to escape before too long, but he had absolutely no intention of returning to that situation again.

Then Gum came to a halt. Before him, the forest which he had been racing through stopped dead; instead, he was overlooking a sheer cliff, which stood several stories above the scree below.

He had to do something so that he wouldn’t be caught, but he wasn’t too confident in his flying skills; his pursuers might catch up to him. There was no other option, but still, Gum hesitated.

And that hesitation would change his life.

Gum finally jumped from the cliff, unfurling his wings and stretching them to their full span. He began to flap, but before he could gain much lift his wings were clutched from behind. Several pairs of hands grasped tufts of his feathers, suspending him above the rocks below. Gum barely had time to register someone saying “Send him!” before being flung towards the bottom of the cliff.

Snap. Crack. Crunch. Gum’s body shattered upon impact, spraying muddy ichor across the stones as his form settled in a crumpled heap. His nerves were on fire, overloading his brain with the pain. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. Gum was just able to process several figures landing to stand above him before the darkness at the edges of his vision overtook his consciousness as well.

* * *

Gum awoke with a start. He would have screamed, but he was gagged. He couldn’t see anything, and he couldn’t move his limbs; he was strapped down.

He did his usual checks anyways. He moved his limbs as much as he could manage; seems like the bones are healed there. He took a deep breath, then winced; his ribs were still settling back into place. He continued on like this for a while, making sure various parts of his body were repairing themselves well.

Then Gum heard footsteps; there were people moving all around him, murmuring. The blindfold was torn off of his face, exposing his three eyes to a harsh white light above him, emitted by a hanging light fixture.

Before he could get a further grasp on his surroundings, one of the figures leaned over Gum. He felt a cold blade slowly cut his throat open, helpless to stop it. Gum began to struggle to breathe, spluttering and gasping as his dull ichor seeped from the wound. The figure stood upright and looked towards the others in the room.

“Let’s start him off easy, eh?” said the figure, eliciting chuckles from the rest. Then they stood, watching Gum suffer, watching him pull against his bonds, trying to get away. The room was filled with nothing but Gum’s noises for several minutes, until the wound on his throat finally healed itself.

Gum tried to take a few breaths, attempting to get his bearings on his surroundings, but his attempts were cut short when the figures above him drove three spikes through his eyes and deep into his skull. He cried out in pain, and then everything was blank for several minutes due to the sharp rods stuck through his grey matter. At some point his tormentors must have removed the spikes, as awareness and consciousness eventually returned to Gum following his neurons reconsituting.

It continued on like this for some time: Gum’s captors would inflict some fatal wound to him, Gum would have to endure the pain or simply lose consciousness, and then a new wound would be created. Organs were damaged, skin slashed, bones broken. Gum was set on fire; he was torn open; his skull was crushed by an anvil. Gum didn’t know whether it would end.

And then, instead of waking up in his own body, Gum appeared to wake up in someone else’s. He couldn’t control his actions, though; it was like he was in a dream. Gum had somehow accidentally activated his third eye and was seeing through the eyes of another person.

This person was odd, though. They didn’t have hands, but paws. They were scrawling in some arcane script on a piece of paper, periodically looking at some sort of readout from a terminal. They appeared to be in the lower decks of some kind of ship.

Eventually the strange person’s scrawling became frantic, until they suddenly stopped writing and began pressing buttons on the terminals in front of them. Then they turned, revealing a second stranger person. Gum thought that they looked sort of like an angel, but their wings were odd and their eyes – of which there were only two – were a single solid color of teal. Maybe another mutant like Gum?

Before Gum could see anything else, he found himself back in his torturous situation, bound to the table with his tormentors looming above him. He was anticipating the next horrible infliction that they had in store for him when there came a noise.

With a loud screech, a tearing sound, a small pop!, and an enormous BOOM!!!, the walls and ceiling that Gum hadn’t quite been able to make out collapsed upon everyone in the room. Gum was hit on the head and fell unconscious.

* * *

Gum was awoken as rubble was being moved from his body. He opened his eyes to see the stars shimmering above him, which were quickly obscured by a face that he had seen before. Solid teal eyes blinked at him from behind a mop of black hair.

“Hey, you good?” the stranger asked, “I think we kinda crashed on top of your house or something.”

Gum huffed before replying, “Actually I’m great now. You saved me from some awful shit. I am lucky, though. I could have actually died from the building collapsing.”

The figure began helping Gum out from the rubble, noting that he was still partially tied to a table. “Oh damn dude, I’m glad we crashed on you then. I’m Aweegee by the way.”

“Gum is what they call me,” Gum responded. Now that Gum could see the stranger more clearly, he examined his wings. Aweegee’s wings seemed to be made entirely of ice crystals, and they were barely even shaped like wings at all. On top of that, as Gum grabbed Aweegee’s hand for assistance getting out of the rubble, he noted that the stranger’s hand was ice cold.

Now completely removed from the collapsed building, Gum looked around. Sure enough, there was a large wooden sailboat standing several feet away; although, there were a few things that were odd about it. It seemed to have thrusters on the back, and it looked like it hadn’t actually been used for years.

Gum turned to Aweegee. “So where’s the other person?”

“The other person?” Aweegee was surprised. “How did you know–?”

Before Aweegee could finish his question, the rubble below their feet began to glow and vibrate. Gum had completely forgotten about his captors; they were properly immortal, and they were sure to be furious that they had been interrupted.

“Oh fuck,” Gum cries, “We need to go! Now!”

Aweegee looks unsure. “But I don’t know how the ship works, and there’s still no sign of Serp!”

Almost as if on cue was a shout from a few yards away, where a small anthropomorphic cat was sprinting towards Gum and Aweegee. He was carrying a satchel filled with something, and several angels were pursuing him.

“GET ON THE FUCKING SHIP WE’RE LEAVING NOW!” he shouted at the duo.

Aweegee remarked, “Oh, there he is,” before beginning to board the boat. Not wanting to stick around with the angels who had captured him, Gum followed Aweegee.

On the deck of the ship Gum looked around. This place was in worse shape than he had initially thought: there were several holes in the deck, dust and cobwebs were abound, and there were whole skeletons lying about.

Aweegee helped Serp to hoist the bag up onto the deck before helping the cat onto the ship. The goggle-adorned feline immediately began to descend to the lower decks, calling out behind him, “Distract them!”

“How?” Aweegee called back.

From further away, Serp responded, “I don’t know! Just figure it out!”

Aweegee walked up to the stern of the boat. Gum followed him.

“We could throw whatever’s in that sack at them, that might distract them,” Gum suggested.

“Nope, that’s food, and we don’t have anymore. We’re keeping that,” Aweegee replied. “But don’t worry, I’ve got an idea.”

Aweegee set into a stance. He held his arms out towards the incoming angels. Suddenly a gust picked up, whipping his hair back and forth. His eyes began to glow more intensely, and he began to hove above the ground. The angels slowed their flight towards the ship, unsure of what was about to happen.

Then, on the ground in front of the angels, a chunk of ice began to form. It started out as a speck, but then slowly grew to the size of a golf ball. The angels stopped, watching the ball of ice grow.

Then it stopped at the size of an apple.

Aweegee immediately fell to the deck, hitting the planks hard. He muttered, “I’m really out of practice,” before passing out.

Gum looked back up at the angels. They began laughing and advancing upon the ship once more. Gum looked around for something that he could do to further distract the angels, but he needn’t have worried. A hum began to reverberate throughout the sailboat, and it started to hover. Gum watched as a hole tore itself open in the air in front of the ship’s bow, making the same screeching and tearing sound Gum had heard before. Then, with a pop! and a BOOM!, the ship flew through.

Gum looked around with wonder at the vast empty space he found himself in. There was nothing around besides the ship.

Serp came up from the lower decks. He spotted Gum and ran up to him before spotting Aweegee’s unconscious body.

“What happened?” Serp demanded.

“Uh, he just kinda… he just did some magic and then… then he just…” Gum stammered.

On the ground, Aweegee stirred, before simply muttering, “Shut the fuck up and lemme sleeeep…”

Serp grinned and sighed with relief. “Well, at least he’s okay. And we have food!” He stepped over to the sack and pulled out an apple, taking a bite out of it. “Oh fuck yes sir,” he purred to himself.

Serp then noticed Gum looking around at their new surroundings. After taking another bite from the apple, he walked up to Gum and held out a paw. “Since we met in such frantic circumstances, we didn’t get to be introduced. I’m Serp, top physicist at–” He stopped short, before continuing, “Ah, just a good physicist I suppose.”

Gum took the outstretched paw and shook it. “Well, I’m called Gum.”

Serp offered Gum a bite of his apple, causing Gum to realize how hungry he was. He eagerly took a bite from the apple. Serp laughed.

“Welcome to The Pocket, Gum,” Serp said.

Gum took another bite from the apple. For the first time in his whole life, it seemed like Gum wouldn’t have to keep on running.