Prelewd: The Spiral

Author's Note: This chapter was written specifically for the second eBook as a sort of prologue to explain the headspace I was operating in when I first decided to give the Omnys their own blog. At the time, I was operating under the assumption that existing readers would be able to follow along without much confusion. However, as a self-contained book series, I felt some sort of better explanation was needed, so I wrote this piece for the book. It just occurred to me now, that I should have gone back and posted it to the blog as well, so newer readers aren't completely lost. Better late than never, I suppose.

This is actually being posted on January 2024, but I've decided to back-post this to the beginning of the blog, as its the most fitting place, given the sequence of the chapters. If you are finding this post first, you should still read the first batch of stories as listed in the Table of Contents before this one, as that further sets up the context of this story.

=====

In the darkness of his room, the man known online as Salamando Flames stared moodily at his laptop. A blank Word document stared back, the blinking cursor mocking him. He had to write. He had to write another story. He had to get the ideas out of his head. But they were a whirl of compounding complications that he just couldn’t parse.

The Omnymphotents. They were supposed to be a joke. Just a one-off. Maybe a two-off. Then it suddenly became a short series of random sex fling fantasies. And then he started writing lore articles, when the worldbuilding side of his brain couldn’t help but take the idea and run with it.
But it was getting bigger now. Too big. It wasn’t just a joke anymore, was it? He’d deliberately tried not to think too hard about the idea, but it was based on such a ludicrous premise. Omnipotent women who just used their powers to run around and have sex, and had no other concerns? Preposterous! Why were they all like that? If it was all just one horny woman, he could maybe reason that it would just be a trait of her character to be a sex fiend, and thus all the other women she pretended to be were just roleplay bodies that weren’t their own people.
 
But that was boring. Even though in the early stories, when the different girls were all quite similar, that was only because he hadn’t taken the time to develop them before writing the scenes. At the time, he had thought of the Omnys as just, for lack of a better term, plot devices in and of themselves. You weren’t supposed to know them or understand them. The stories were all supposed to revolve around the mortals they played with, and though some Playthings might try to figure them out, they weren’t supposed to really learn anything the Omnys didn’t already show them.

Except the girls gestated in his mind. He made art of them to get a better visual sense of them, and that cemented them more in his mind. The more he thought about them, the more he started seeing the possibilities. Instead of just writing about them visiting mortals, he wrote quick little shorts in which they would interact. Nothing he ever intended to post, just writing exercises to feel them all out, but once he gave it a try, they started feeling like an actual cast of characters, with distinct voices and personalities.

 
They were no longer a joke in his mind. The Omnymphotents had potential. To be a real project, a real story. To be more than just the one-dimensional fuck puppets he’d written thus far, with only that last story hinting at something bigger.
 
An origin. He’d kept it vague in the mortal stories, but now, he had to decide. He had to come up with a reason the Omnys were the way they were. Why they were so powerful, why they were so sex-obsessed? Where did the power come from, and for what purpose? Not only for his own sake as their writer, because how could he really write them if he never even knew where they came from, but for the readers as well. Surely, no one would really be able to enjoy these characters if they were all just samey sluts.
 
Okay, so most of his readers just wanted to see sex scenes. Maybe they didn’t care. Maybe none of them cared. But he cared. He wouldn’t be able to move on with this idea until he figured it out. It was a puzzle he had to piece together before he could even see the full picture.
 
He hesitated. This is how it always went, didn’t it? He hadn’t planned anything out before for a reason: over planning tended to kill his projects. So many superhero stories, so many fantasy and science fiction adventure stories, all going down the drain, because he spent too much time planning and not enough time doing, until those projects collapsed under their own weight.
 
But he couldn’t just keep going with nothing in mind. There had to be a backstory. Going in with no plan whatsoever never helped him either; stories he tried to completely improvise, he would always burn out on quick. He was always left with a loose pile of narrative strings, never woven together.
 
Okay. Alright. Okay. Beating himself up wasn’t going to solve anything. For now, just focus on the origin. What were his options?
 
The Omnys were already such a stupid idea, he could just embrace that completely. Why were the Omnymphotents so powerful and horny? Because one night, they went to sleep, and woke up that way. Why did they wake up that way? Because one of the things an Omny can do is Empower other women; although they usually just gave them simple, low-level powers, there was no reason an Omny couldn’t make another woman as powerful as herself. Likewise, an Omny could also warp reality and step through time. So wouldn’t it be funny if the only reason an Omny was an Omny was that, once she had her powers, she just went back in time and gave herself her own powers? And the horny bit, well, maybe she woke up horny, because she decided to prank her past self with a sudden spike to her sex drive?
 
No. No, that was too stupid. On the one hand, the idea was worth a sensible chuckle, but on the other hand, come on. He wanted to make real characters out of these Omnys, didn’t he? It was fine for a laugh, but unless he had a reason to care about the characters, something to latch onto that he resonated with, he wasn’t going to be able to take them seriously enough to write them any further.
 
He sighed, stopping midway through typing this origin. He saved the note and dumped it in the scrapped ideas folder. He opened a fresh document.
 
He had been hesitant to tap into his already convoluted lore for his erotic Multiverse. But truthfully, he could never escape the impulse. It was a complicated mess, but he had been building it up for over a decade now. The Sex Mage World, now a Sex Mage Multiverse. The Erotic Adventures Universe, now mostly retired, but with a few small spin-offs still trickling out. Those two clusters of his erotic oeuvre were, despite his attempt at a reboot a few years ago, still connected to each other by a deeper lore, through the presence of Temael.
 
Ah, yes, Temael. The Dark God. The Living Universe that sought to collect and subsume the inhabited worlds of the Erotic Adventure Universe. Whose power had infected the many Earths of the Sex Mage Multiverse, subjecting them to monstrous infestation. Perhaps Temael could be included in some way to the Omnys’ backstory.
 
The Omnys were so powerful, there was nothing that could challenge them. Of course he couldn’t take that seriously. Every story needed conflict, real conflict, in some way. Even if the Omnys stories were normally just slice of life sex flings, there was something inherently intriguing about them still being threatened by greater forces in the Multiverse. He had already hinted in that last story that they had had strange encounters with monstrous beings. And what bigger monster in all his erotic works than the Dark God?
 
Okay, let’s run with this. What if he did it this way: Omnymphotents were not really normal women who Ascended. That was just a cover story. Instead, what if Omnymphotence was actually the final evolution of various Sex Mage Worlds? What if each Omny was actually a gestalt entity that formed from the whole of humanity, once Sex Magic in a given universe reached a critical mass of power?
 
Yes, that was a cool idea! Even as it made part of him wince to complicate his lore further, the worldbuilder in him couldn’t help but run with the concept in almost giddy excitement!
 
In this canon, Cyl, the first Omny to form from the coalescence of Sex Magic, became aware of the greater Sex Mage Multiverse, and through that, the cosmic threat of the Dark God Temael. Believing she could save all Sex Mage World’s from Temael’s predation, she gathered the hundreds of other Omnymphotents that had formed across the Multiverse to invade and kill the Dark God!
 
They failed utterly; despite their vast cosmic powers, Temael, in Its own domain, is truly Supreme. The Omnys can bend the universe to their will, but Temael, being a sapient universe unto itself, could easily resist their powers, and bring Its crushing existential might to bear on any that would dare to invade It. The Omnys were slaughtered en mass. Of the hundreds that attempted the attack, only five escaped the doomed mission alive: Cyl, and the four nearest Omnys she could grab as she made a desperate attempt to escape. In the process, Cyl was struck by Temael’s power, and permanently scarred with Its Mark, emblazoned over her left eye. In the aftermath of this horrific event, the last five Omnys (Cyl, Shady, Lettie, Whitney, and Devi) travel to an Earth untouched by Temael’s power, or by Sex Magic. They then proceed to become the carefree sex fiends we saw in the early stories, because they are too traumatized by Temael to do anything more substantive with themselves.
 
He sat back and read the explanation over. He nodded, telling himself it was a satisfactory origin, but already putting an asterisk on that qualifier. He mulled it over for a few more days, kicking it around in his head. He started to go back and adjust some of the articles on his blog to reflect this new canon.
 
Except, the more he thought about it, the less satisfied he felt. This was not exactly the easiest origin for the casual reader to come into, was it? Why did he always keep falling back on his lore, when he was supposed to be trying to make fresh starts? And, moreover, the pathos went too far, in this case. The Omnys were supposed to be a fun series, so why was he trying to force such a dark origin onto them? It was the Sex Mage World’s Cult Wars problem all over again.
 
Scrap it. Do something else.
 
Still, if he was going to explore the Omny’s personalities, he had to have a reason for why they didn’t use their powers to help humanity beyond getting some lonely people laid. So, new idea: whatever actually empowered them, the Omnys we see in the early stories came from a previous timeline, where they did, in fact, try to bring paradise to humanity. But as seen in countless other fictions, forcing utopia onto the species ultimately goes sour, as human nature cannot so easily accept a world without problems. Their attempted good deed lead to a humanity forever trapped in a terrible existential malaise that the Omnys were unable to fix. They left that timeline in a sealed off purgatory realm, and go to another Earth, determined to not repeat their mistakes, refusing to be saddled with the responsibilities of godhood.
 
No, too dark. Scrap it.
 
Next idea: Branching off from the previous, Cyl and Shady decide that if humanity really can’t be happy without conflict, they will assume the roles of a Goddess and a Devil, and nudge human civilization so that choosing between good and evil is more straightforward. But the two end up going too deep into their roles; it turns out removing nuance just leads to a swifter destruction, as this version of Earth devolves into a vicious war, with Cyl and Shady actually trying to kill each other, and destroying the universe in the process.
 
No, no, too dark and too stupid. Scrap it. Dial things back a bit.
 
It occured to him that he never did include a redhead in the core Omny cast. He also wasn’t sure if maybe he still wanted all the Omnys to turn out to be one all-mighty woman in different guises after all. What if he made a new Omny that was supposed to be the “core” Omny? How about a redhead named Domina? A rampant sex fiend who only cared for herself, so of course, she would just use her powers for personal pleasure. As she travels around the world, she takes on different identities. However, due to her cosmic nature, these alternate forms split off and become their own entities, thus creating the other five Omnys from the previous stories.
 
He sat back and sighed as he mulled it over. It still didn’t feel right. Domina herself was kind of too over the top as a character, a one-dimensional selfish hedonist for no real reason. What if Domina herself was actually a different woman to start with, who used her powers to take on the Domina identity to escape her own self-image? Then, what if she got bored playing that role, and tried the other forms? Maybe that could work. He already had an idea for that new “original” character, a girl named Megan. But Megan herself, he wasn’t sure he was really into her as a character. Did he really want to have to slog through her mundane origin story?
 
Actually, no, go back. Honestly, the more he thought about it, he really did prefer if the Omnys were all their own characters, not just roleplay skins. He also still preferred the idea that Cyl was the first Omny; she was growing on him as probably the best choice for a main character, as she was the most down-to-earth of the girls, and the closest thing to an outright “good guy” out of the cast, at least to his mind. He liked the idea of a dynamic where Cyl was the responsible one keeping the others somewhat in line. Maybe she still was the one who rallied the others into a big battle that left her scarred somehow. But of course, she needed a villain to oppose. And he still liked the idea of Domina being a big, actually evil character, while Shady was really more of a trickster rogue. Of course, for Cyl to get branded with the Mark, which he was really getting to like as a visual to her design, the Omnys would still have to end up encountering Temael for some reason.
 
He sighed. Of course he couldn’t escape the need to inject some kind of Good Guy versus Bad Guy fight, because he was utterly incapable of writing anything that didn’t eventually fall back on superhero fiction tropes.
 
So, okay, how about this: Cyl, Shady, Lettie, Devi, and Whitney all Ascend in that order, with Cyl being the responsible one who has to wrangle the other four in line as they appear, but ultimately makes friends with them. But then, Domina appears from nowhere (whether or not she started off as Megan he’d figure out later), and she tries to take over the world, but she is monstrously strong compared to the others. They have this big fight across time and space, and ultimately, the Omnys are able to destroy her, but then it turns out that Domina’s power spread throughout the timeline during the battle, and that is what caused the other Omnys to Ascend in the first place, creating this time loop that—
 
Oh, come the fuck on! That’s just so hacky! He’d seen better plots in an 80s toy commercial cartoon! And wasn’t this supposed to be about horny nymphos? Why did it always come down to stupid superhero bullshit? Why couldn’t he just write sexy stories without it all turning into convoluted lore dumps and schlocky super battles?
 
God, did he even actually want to write an origin? Not really. Frankly, he just wanted to introduce the characters and immediately dive into random adventures with them. Except he was already out of ideas for their “random adventures”, and if he didn’t present some kind of origin, some kind of starting point, something tangible that new readers could get on board with, how was anyone supposed to follow any of this? How was he as the writer even supposed to know where to go, if he never figured out where to begin?
 
This was all so stupid! The idea was stupid, but he was stupider for not being able to just run with it! He wanted to make these Omnys into real characters, but he couldn’t decide on anything, he couldn’t do anything but spin his fucking wheels. Why did he ever delude himself into thinking that he could be a writer? Why was he so fucking shit this, so fucking shit at everything? Why why WHY—
 
He sighed, dejected. This wasn’t working. All he was doing was pissing himself off to the point he was going to give himself another an anxiety attack. He closed the Word processor. He had to do something else to cool off. He looked at the games on his computer. He didn’t really want to play anything right now. Moreover, he really needed to stop wasting so much time on gaming anyway. For the moment, though, he didn’t really have anything else to take his mind off his stress.
 
Then his eyes fell on the icon for Koikatsu, a hentai “game” that he had used to make some Sex Mage comics before. Sometimes working in another medium helped unclog the mental gears. It had been a little while since he’d used the game to make anything, but he did already have some models of the Omnymphotents made. Maybe he could just start slapping together panels and see what came of it. Don’t worry about figuring out the lore, just make a short little comic so that he could go to bed feeling like he’d at least done something today.
 
What’s the worst that could happen?