Wednesday, September 29, 2021

Savage Awakenings

WARNING: heavy gore and brutality

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She woke up with her stomach lurching again, forcing her conscious. She tried to make it to the bucket, but couldn’t crawl the full distance before her stomach spasmed, and she had to stop and gag against the floor. Nothing came out, but only because they hadn’t fed her in a few days. How many? Usually they let her starve for three if she acted up. The last clear memory of a meal was the night before, but then the following morning, she’d bitten the last “client” they’d thrown at her. At least, she thought she might have. The man had come in the room, and then things got blurry, and then when she could think again, she’d tasted blood on her tongue. Hers? Or the clients? Before she could really figure out what had happened, they’d given her the shot, and then the room was spinning and spinning and spinning and…

She almost shook her head to clear the cobwebs, but on the first turn of her head, a lance of pain shot through her temples. She dropped fully to the floor, sagging against the dirty stone. She never learned. They beat her, they starved her, they gave her the filthiest of the men, and still she fought. They pulled half her fingernails and some of her teeth, and still it hadn’t tamed her.
 
It wasn’t entirely her fault. She knew her situation was hopeless. She knew she was just a flesh doll for these monsters in human skin. But… part of her didn’t know, did it? Part of her, that part that came out when her mind went foggy, something in her was just… just…
 
Just…
 
What was it again? Something… something…
 
Stomach hurt. Room spinning. Head hurt. Hunger. Taste of blood. Taste of men. They gave her the shot, the shot, the shot that—
 
She coughed, and immediately regretted it, shuddering as her throat, raw from thirst and unwanted use, burned painfully. She’d almost faded again for a moment. She struggled to rise to her hands and knees. Her vision was blurry, but she could smell the water in the small basin, hear the faucet dripping. She needed to drink. She staggered up, failed to find her feet, and shuffled on her knees. She pulled herself up by the basin’s lip and turned the rusty handle. The water flowed in an impotent dribble, and she had to cup her boney hand under the flow to get enough to pour in her mouth. It took several minutes to get enough to slightly calm her headache, and even then, she had to stop before her stomach forced her to throw it all back up.
 
She dragged herself back to the stained mattress in the corner, collapsing on it. The only light came from the bare bulb above the door, a low wattage that kept the room dim. Its soft yellow light glinted off the iron shackle that tied her left ankle to the wall. While she’d gotten used to the feeling of it, she still tripped over the chain at least a couple times a day, when she felt strong enough to stand.
 
Hours passed and she slipped in and out of sleep. Or in an out of that strange headspace where her thoughts turned fuzzy. Once, when her thoughts cleared, she found herself sitting crosslegged in the middle of the room, the pieces of a cockroach splayed out on the floor in front of her. The second time, she had somehow managed to tie the wall chain into a knot. It was a sizable length, so she surmised the only way she could have done it was to crawl through the loop. It took her an hour to loosen the knot enough and get enough slack to crawl back through. It was long enough to just barely let her reach the edge of the small room; she didn’t need it any shorter.
 
At some point, there was a clicking sound from the door, and a slot near the floor slid open. A bowl of gruel with a hunk of stale bread was slid into the room. She let it sit for an hour before working up the strength to get it.
 
With half her teeth missing, the tough bread was too hard to chew properly. She had to wet it first in the sink, and force herself to swallow the mush. The gruel was surprisingly decent, still a little warm after letting it sit. Not that it had much flavor, but it felt good to eat it. Her stomach gurgled a bit, but she managed to keep it down.
 
More hours passed. She regained enough strength to do her business in the bucket. More hours passed. Food and rest let her think a bit more clearly. But she didn’t let herself think much. Thinking about her situation led to nothing but anxiety, and the more anxious she got, the more she fell into that fuzzy headspace, where she did strange things she barely remembered. So she lay there and tried to empty her thoughts, and just exist.
 
Her calm lasted only a bit longer, until there was a solid metallic thunk, and the door to her cell slid open. The shadowy figures of scarred, leering men entered the room. They spoke in Portuguese this time, a language she recognized, but barely understood. There was no mistaking what they were talking about, though.
 
A quick exchange of words and cash, and the door closed, leaving behind a heavyset man with spidery lines cut into his face. The claws of an angry lover? A broken bottle from a bar fight? Shrapnel from an explosion? Who knew. These ugly men with ugly pasts took their comforts in ugly ways. They didn’t care she was filthy, skin and bones, and barely conscious half the time. If anything, they reveled in it, knowing a rag of flesh like her existed only to wipe their fluids on, and toss in the corner, and no one in the world would care.
 
The man undid his belt and went over to her, looping the belt around her head. She a moment, a well of panic cut through the numbness she normally forced herself into, thinking he was going to choke her. Instead, he secured the belt around her mouth. Probably her “employer” had warned him about her last outburst. The heavy set man wasn’t scared of her, no matter what he’d heard. Going by his features, he’d fought and survived far worse than a skeletal girl half out of her mind.
 
She tried to keep her mind numb, doing nothing as he stripped down, and crawled over her. The stink of the room had masked his smell somewhat, but as he crawled over her, his own reek assailed her nostrils at such close range. Not the worst she’d put up with, but close.
 
He leered at her. She stared back, glassy eyed, trying to be as much of a limp doll as possible. He said something in a lurid whisper, and she knew from the tone he was trying to stoke her fear. She didn’t give him the satisfaction of a response. She may as well have been in a coma. That didn’t stymie his excitement, however, and he used his knee to shove her legs open, before shoving himself inside her. He felt her sex roughly, trying to coax some lubrication, but she had none to give. So he spat in his hand to wet his organ, and shoved himself inside her.
 
She tried to be numb to the pain, but she was still raw from the previous client. She only hadn’t noticed it until now, because her other aches had been more prominent. She screamed into the gag, and the heavy man giggled like a child, whispering something salacious into her ear. Her eyes welled up, and she tried to stay limp, and just let it happen. There was no point fighting. Just let it happen, let it happen, and he’d be done with her sooner, let it happen, let it let it let it let it let it hu-happen it hurt let it hurt it hurt it hurts it hurts it hurts it
 
it
 
it
 
hurts her jaw hurt why did her jaw hurt, she was chewing on something, chewing too hard, her mouth was bloody, the edges of the belt were cutting in her gums and there was something else, her fingers hurt, she was scratching at the man, scratching and scratching and there was blood, there was blood on her fingers, and it wasn’t even his, it was her own wounds from nails long pulled, breaking open again as she clawed and she didn’t care and it hurt and the man was laughed, and the room was spinning and with a muffled scream, she tried to slap at him, to claw at his eyes with her bleeding fingers and the man made a grunt, and he reared back his fist and brought it down like a hammer and her world went white then black and then—
 
—then she woke up a Goddess.
 
 
***
 
Shady hovered over the Earth, gazing upon the whole of the world with her cosmic senses. Of late, she was getting a little tired of pushing around thirsty, innocent boys and girls. Fun was fun, and while some mortals might think she was way too wicked to handle, the way she teased their bodies and put them through her convoluted sex games, she held back with most lovers far more than she let on. Sure, she might deny the orgasms of hundreds of boys across the world, she might make girls cum themselves into comas, but she always made sure they were okay afterwards. She took them beyond their limits, but never so far that they would actually break. Really, she should be given a medal for sainthood for how much she coddled her precious little Playthings. And besides, she knew that no matter how much they all protested, they all liked it deep down. She really wasn’t that evil.
 
Except that she actually kind of was. She didn’t like to butcher people and twist their minds and bodies with Hellish agonies like Domina, but there was a side of her that genuinely liked seeing people twist in her power, tasting the sheer terror and pain and existential dread as she tormented them against their will. There was a side of her that liked to hurt people, hurt them badly, make them suffer in the most exquisite sexual torture a human couldn’t even imagine, holding them on the edge of climax and never letting them cross into the bliss of relief, and lighting up every nerve in their body to experience a pleasure so divine, so ruthless, it agonized their very souls.
 
She was never so cruel as to inflict that level of torment onto her innocent lovers. But there were plenty of people the world over who were not innocent. Millions of hardened criminals, murderers, rapists, drug pushers, corrupted politicians, and more, who thrived on the pain and misery of others. Some, she knew, turned to crime only because life circumstances had all but forced their hands. She tended to avoid those who had only sinned under true duress, but even in those circumstances, there were those whose evil went beyond any excuses. More often, she preyed on those who had had the choice of a better way, and instead chose to be wicked.
 
In truth, she might not have even cared for the distinction; in another life, another canon, she might have even just said “fuck it”, and preyed on the innocent as well. But that uptight girl scout Cyl had reminded her how important it was not to lose her own soul to the power she possessed. The were times the white haired goody-good had too big a broomstick up her ass, but Shady still respected her, even loved her a bit, and she knew she was right. But that didn’t make the urge go away.
 
So, when the desire to hurt mortals grew too strong, Shady was very selective in whom she picked. Only those who “deserved it.” And even then, she split the difference with others; Megan, occasionally, just wanted to hurt a douche bag boy for the sake of it, and Devi, occasionally, wanted to break a woman who thought her high status would let her get away with anything. And then, of course, there was Domina, who did things to mortals that sometimes turned even Shady’s stomach. The very worst of humanity was reserved for the redhead’s apocalyptic attentions.
 
But that might soon be changing. Cyl had recently called a meeting of all the Omnys to discuss a possible overhaul of Earth and Thrae societies, a clear violation of the Etiquette, but one that could prove beneficial to the mortals without hindering the Omnys own already compromised desires. Ideally, Cyl proposed, they could slowly, over a few generations, introduce new medicines and technologies to help humanity achieve a stable existence that would lift their society out of true poverty and free them from the most basic dangers of starvation and sickness. It wouldn’t have to be a radical overhaul of their reality, just a subtle guidance to a less miserable baseline.
 
When others pointed out this would absolutely interfere with humanity’s future development, which Cyl had previously been against, she pointed out that in the end, Earth of the Omnyverse was as much a Created World, and its people Created Natives, as any of their personal Omny Worlds. Humanity’s future was already compromised by the mere state of their existence.
 
They could still keep things largely mundane otherwise. They could still take a hands-off approach, let mortals live their lives how they saw fit, but there was also no reason to stick to their author’s original, poorly thought out plan of “just keep Earth the same because it’ll be more relatable.” They could still leave Earth largely mundane, still keep the Masquarade active, still let humanity decide its own future, just maybe they could give humanity a little bit of a boost so things weren’t so miserable at the baseline.
 
The result, of course, would be far less instances of criminality. And while Shady couldn’t disagree that it would be better for humanity as a whole to live better lives, the part of her that wanted to indulge in her own wicked impulses knew that it would just mean slim pickings for her and her ilk.
 
The only thing that convinced her to agree to the plan was the fact that, as Cyl pointed out, in a world where people would be a lot less driven to crime by circumstances, it would be easier to pick out those who were just evil for the sake of it. Given free will, there would always be those people with wicked hearts for the more cruel Omnys to take their sadism out on.
 
Still, the numbers wouldn’t be looking too good. Shady had the better idea that maybe she and the other Omnys should start “share cropping” each other’s Created. Using one’s own Created for their sex games felt too much like masturbation, but Shady had had some fun with those made by the others. It was looking more and more like an adequate fallback plan.
 
The idea was to slowly introduce the changes over time. It would be a couple generations at least before humanity would actually reach that better future, even with the Omnys nudging things here and there to guide them to it.
 
Until then, Shady had to snag what scumbags she could. Thus, she was on the prowl to find some heinous mortals to punish. It was only because she was actively scanning that she sensed the new Ascension first. She snapped her cosmic gaze towards a hidden town in the mountains of Mexico, where a ruthless cartel had set up their base. Hard men who’d turned to this brutal trade to survive, trafficking drugs and slaves, murdering other gangs and authorities alike. Some were career criminals, others desperate survivalists, others forced into the job under threat, but whatever their motivations, most had committed deeds bordering on war atrocities at this point. They were the sort of people that were ripe pickings for Shady to carry off, and twist and break at her leisure.
 
Or they would have been, if a new Goddess hadn’t gotten to them first.
 
 
***
 
She cried out as her body changed. The pain faded completely. Her flesh filled out into a lithe, but fit and healthy figure. Old injuries vanished throughout her body, scars fading as if they were never there, her nails and teeth growing back in, poorly mended bones and tendons realigning properly, all impurities purged from her body.
 
The ugly, stocky man who’d been inside her let out a choked cry, as the broken woman he’d just entered transformed into the pinnacle of beauty. But what’s more, not just her body, but her sheer sexual presence, filled him with a surge of arousal and pleasure that shook him to his very soul. He let out a death rattle as his whole body shuddered, spasming wildly as if struck by multiple livewires. He tried to fight through the spasms to scramble away, to pull out, but she refused to let him go. The woman wrapped her arms around him, held him close in an impossibly strong grip, and moaned as he came inside her, ejaculating so hard, he tore half the muscles in his back and groin.
 
And it wouldn’t stop. She wouldn’t let him stop. He felt his brain cook and his heart explode in his chest, and somehow, he was still alive, and screaming and cumming and dying and cumming and everything hurt and he was cumming and she wouldn’t let him go, wouldn’t let him die, she was wringing every drop of cum his body could have produced across his entire lifespan. With every spurt, she ripped away his life, every burst bleeding the days off his remaining time. He could feel the years draining from his body, from his very soul, over several minutes of non-stop climax, the pleasure so intense it hurt, until he knew in the depths of his soul, that he had reached the end. With one final shot, he knew his life was over. He was dead, and the moment she let go of him, his body would crumble to dust.
 
But she didn’t let him go, and he still kept cumming. It was even worse now. Every spurt was a new death, more horrible than the last. If it was possible to have a negative life force, to somehow die beyond death, then she was forcing him to experience that, too. She kept him going, forcing him to unlive the final grasp of oblivion a hundred, a thousand, a million times, in the space of a minute. And all the while, she cooed her own pleasure in his ear, in utter bliss from drinking in his life, from feeling his very soul spasm helplessly in her grasp.
 
He wasn’t the only one suffering. In the instant of her Empowerment, she was absolutely overwhelmed with an insatiable need for sex. A ferocious, cosmic, carnal desire that could not be quenched by mere mortal affection, and not just from a single man. Fortunately for her, her newfound power all came so naturally, she didn’t even question it when she split her body into dozens of copies, and sent each copy out to find another man in the town that had enslaved her. She took them all at once, every copy emerging from random shadows to grab each of the cartel’s brutal members. Each copy took them in her own way, her expanded sense of eroticism allowing her to enjoy sex in ways beyond mere penetration.
 
One man she simply held and electrified his nerves, letting them spasm and spray the cum all over her as the sensual lightning funneled into his most sensitive parts, until the semen ran out, and their muscles imploded, and their bones cracked and their cum came out red.
 
For one man, she broke her body into thousands of mosquito-sized copies, and swarmed over him, kissing and humping against his flesh, forming little penises all over his body to use for their pleasure; the tiny members all came in rippling waves across his skin. The unorthodox clenching made him twist and bend until his bones snapped, and he collapsed in a shapeless heap, still jerking and flopping in mind-bending pleasures.
 
One man had been sitting in a tub in a drug addled haze; she turned him into a living liquid, expanding his mass to fill the tub, before sliding herself within him. She lay back and masturbated, her moans resonated with his liquid form until the vibrations made him boil. Her own shivers of pleasure sent razor-sharp ripples through his liquid nerves as she slowly vaporized his body.
 
Another she simply stood there, smiling, as she cranked up the libido of the man before her so that the sight of her nudity alone utterly entranced him, and made him cum so forcefully his brain fried from the visual pleasure stimulation, and his torso tore itself in half from the force of his clenching.
 
For another, she fucked him normally, but when he came, she turned his semen into shards of barbwire that fired backwards as well as forwards, causing his orgasm to literally rip him to pieces.
 
For another, she knelt between his legs and sucked him off, and when he came, his whole body imploded, crunching down into a sack of red goo, and she drank his whole body down through his cock, like drinking a shake through a straw.
 
Yet another, she caused his penis to tear of his body and come to life, and rape him into the dirt.
 
For another, she shrank the man and inserted him into herself, and when she came from his struggles, her pussy muscles crushing him into a red paste.
 
For another, she shrank herself down until she was the size of an ant, crawled down inside his throbbing erection, and over stimulated his nerves from the inside out, causing him to scream and thrash and tear at his own cock to try and pry her out.
 
For another, she turned the man to glass and lightly flicked his petrified cock. Every flick caused his organ to crack, and felt like a knife of pleasure-pain cutting through his soul. She flicked it until it shattered, the “release” caused the rest of his body to crumble.
 
And on and on it went. She fucked these brutal, mortal men to literal pieces, shredding their minds and bodies and souls with inhuman sexual abuse, keeping some alive through it all to experience the sensations well past death, or continuously resurrecting them to re-experience the same death over and over again.
 
With every horrid climax the wicked men were forced to experience, the new Goddess came with divine pleasure. She fed on their pain, their madness, their screams and prayers for mercy, their sobbing pleas for forgiveness, their desperate attempts to repent at the very end of their savage lives. The pleasures she fed them that forced them to cum despite the agony barely qualified as a light tickle to her, but were absolutely soul-crushing to them, more terrible than even the pure pain in itself. She bathed in the feedback as if for nourishment, all her bodies climaxing together, the force of her orgasms throwing off shockwaves that shook the mountains around them. Her mind went fuzzy and she was one with a world of absolute, excruciating bliss.
 
She only stopped when she sensed another coming towards her. The sudden presence of an equally powerful feminine force intruded on her senses and jolted her awareness back to the physical world. All at once, she ceased her torment of the mortal men, letting them finally die, their bodies crumbling to ash or dissolving into puddles of gore.
 
Her duplicate bodies vanished, all condensing back into the body in the cell. She saved the scarred man above her for last, letting him have several more seconds of blinding, horrible climax, before letting his body burst like a rip balloon from the sheer force of his final spurt. Slowly, she got to her feet, and stepped out of the cell, to greet the woman who had gotten her attention.
 
***
 
Shady floated down onto a dirt road, lined with ramshackle buildings. Blood and fragments of bodies painted the buildings inside and out, and streaks of remains cut across the road itself. A quick assessment told her that everyone in the town was dead, obliterated by the Hellish attentions of the newly awakened Omny. It was a scene right at home in Domina’s world, and Shady debated for a moment if she was going to need back up dealing with this woman.
 
Not that she was afraid or anything.
 
There were some survivors. Other beaten and bloodied women, and some young men, long abused by the monsters that had used this town as a base. Shady reaffirmed that at least the only ones who had suffered the Omny’s brutal Ascension had been members of the cartel. Their enslaved victims had not been touched. Yet.
 
With a thought, Shady whisked them all away, teleporting them to the nearest shelter, healing their worst injuries, but leaving enough to make it obvious they needed help. She gave them false memories of a daring escape, and made sure the facility she’d sent them too had the proper supplies and staff to help them. She’d check on them later, once she assessed what this new Omny was like.
 
Shady approached a building that could generously be called an oversized shack. It was mainly a cover for the cellar stairs that led down to a small cave-like dungeon where the slaves had been kept. She stopped as she sensed the new Omny coming up the stairs and opted to wait for her.
 
Just incase, she sent a mental thought to her brother to keep watch from afar. Her Splinter Brother immediately dropped what he was doing and prepared to intervene, but didn’t yet make his presence known.
 
The woman stepped out of the shack. She walked with creeping slowness, easing herself out into the daylight, almost shuffling across the dirt, except her steps and posture were too graceful to be called a shuffle. She was almost drifting over the ground with dream like detachment.
 
She was tall, fit, exotically beautiful with clear brown skin. Long black hair hung down over one shoulder, almost obscuring the right side of her face. Her eyes shone with a wild green light, glowing beneath the shadows cast by her hair. She wore nothing but a coating of human blood, flecked with bits of bone and scraps of flesh, splattered across her from head to toes.
 
Shady raised her eyebrows at the sight, not sure what to make of this new woman or how to approach her. A glance told her the woman’s name, so she opened with that. “Illia?”
 
The new Omny didn’t acknowledge her at first. She stopped in the middle of the road, still staring ahead. She took a long breath, slowly inhaling, then exhaling, as if savoring fresh air for the first time in years. She looked up at the sun and stared and for a moment had a hint of a smile.
 
Shady took a relaxed stance, settling back on one foot and waving. She spoke in Spanish, knowing it was the young woman’s native language. “Hola, chica! Looks like you had a heck of a start, huh?”
 
Illia’s faint smile faded, and she turned her head with a deliberate slowness, to gaze at Shady. Their glowing gazes met, and Shady’s grin faltered a bit, before she forced it back into place. Illia stared back with an almost dead-eyed expression.
 
Shady pointed. “You, uh, got some red on you.”
 
Illia didn’t look down, but she did reach up and wipe her forearm over her lips and chin, wiping some of the blood off. Not enough to make much difference, though. She kept her arm held up, her gaze dropping down to it. She tilted her head, as if studying the red fluid, then licked a tongue full off her arm. She closed her eyes and held the blood in her mouth, savoring its taste, before swallowing. She opened her eyes, lowered her arm, and gazed at Shady again.
 
She did everything with agonizing slowness, like a spider creeping towards its prey. Shady tensed up as Illia turned fully towards her, and she sensed the blood-drenched woman cast her senses forth to study her. Shady prepared herself, expecting at any moment for the woman to pounce at her. From another dimension, she felt Jax coil himself to interject, but Shady told him to hold off for the moment.
 
Instead, the woman flinched, and blinked, and her manner shifted. She glanced around rapidly, her breath quickening. “Wh-what… what was…” She looked down at herself, eyes widening, and she whispered, “Oh.” She glanced up to Shady, glanced around again, then back at herself. “Oh.”
 
Shady offered a sympathetic smile. “You okay, honey?”
 
“I think… I think I am now. Maybe. I can’t… I can’t tell…” The woman waved a hand over herself and the blood vanished. She stared at her hands, particularly her fingers, the nails long and painted green. She smiled. “Yes. Yes, I think I’m good. Finally. Finally, I’m good.” She turned her face to sky and laughed, staring again at the sun. She closed her eyes and tears ran down her cheeks. “Thank God, I can think again! I can feel again! I can—” She collapsed to her knees and wept. “Oh God. Oh God.”
 
Shady shifted awkwardly. She stepped closer and patted the woman’s shoulder. “There, there, honey. Just take a moment.”
 
Illia looked up at her, still teary-eyed. “You don’t understand, I was… I was down there for…”
 
“I know, hon. I know.” Shady gestured to the mess of shattered and splattered bodies around them. “I can tell you’re coming into this under some extremely shitty circumstances.”
 
“I was a sex slave,” said Illia. “They used me as a fuck pump for almost eight months.”
 
“I know,” said Shady. “I can see it.”
 
“God, eight months. But where was I before that?” Illia gazed into the middle distance, but Shady could detect she was searching her own past. “Oh. Right. The asylum.” She frowned. “That was hardly any better.”
 
“Asylum, huh?”
 
Illia looked back up at her with a haunted gaze. “I think I was insane. I was insane when they found me. It was a shitty, rundown building where they just sent people like me when the doctors had no options. And the cartel broke in to find drugs, and they took some of us.” She blinked, and glanced back to the shack. “You… took the others…?”
 
“They’re fine.” Shady really wasn’t used to being the caretaker type. “And you’ll be fine. Trust me. You’re all powerful now, no one like them can hurt you again. You’re free.”
 
Illia shook her head, tears welling up. “But I’m crazy! I have these moments, where I just… my mind just fades away, and it’s like… like this animal takes over.”
 
Shady smirked. “I don’t think you’re appreciating what I just said. You are all-powerful now. Anything you want, you can have.” She paused. “Well. There is the Etiquette to consider. But we’re currently doing a little revision of that in regards to Earth.”
 
Illia paused and pondered, and the standards of the Etiquette were known to her, at least initially. “I… I see… but…” her brow furrowed, and she looked up to Shady in a small panic. “But that’s my point! What if I… blank out again…? What if my thoughts scramble again? And to have this power and be that unhinged, how can I be trusted to—”
 
“Hey,” Shady cut her off. “Do you want to be crazy?”
 
“No, of course not.”
 
“Then don’t be.”
 
Illia’s brow furrowed. “I… what…?”
 
Shady shrugged. “I already told you. You’re all-powerful. You get what you want, when you want it, barring the Etiquette, which should not in any way stop you from fixing whatever faults with yourself you want to fix. You don’t want to be crazy anymore? Than just decide to stop.”
 
Illia stared at her blankly. “I can just… not be…?”
 
Shady gave her mind, her whole essence, a thorough scan, and Illia was too thrown off guard to stop her. “Gunna be some traumatic memories to work through. Probably going to translate to some strange impulses from time to time. But from what I can tell, I think you’ve already patched yourself up. Ascension tends to eliminate any health issues we had as mortals, just reacting to our needs automatically, and that includes mental health, it looks like. You said it yourself, you can think clearly again now, yeah?”
 
Illia paused to consider, and nodded hesitantly.
 
“Well, there you go.”
 
Illia stared at her a moment, then the tears welled up again, and she laughed. “Praise the Lord. Oh, praise the Lord!”
 
Shady laughed along with her. “Yeah, I don’t mean to disrespect your religion, but you’re going to find our reality isn’t quite how they taught you in Bible School.”
 
Illia shook her head, still smiling. “I… I know… I just… let me have this, huh?”
 
Shady let out a long breath, then glanced around to the gory mess surrounding them. “Okay. Well. First things first, we need to clean this up. I know how you must feel, but an incident like this is really pushing it with the Etiquette.”
 
Illia stood, and her smile turned into a frown. “Men like this exist all around the world. Women who help them exist all around the world. Why should they be suffered to live? Why should anyone have to suffer what I went through?”
 
Shady held up her hands. “Hey, I get it. I do. But we set things up the way we did for a reason. And right now, we’re reassessing those reasons. We’re looking to make sure this kind of life doesn’t happen to people ever again. But we still aren’t going to just flagrantly take over the world and force humanity to obey us through mind control. Okay?”
 
Illia’s frown maintained, but she once again scoped the situation out with her new cosmic senses. As much as it upset her, she begrudgingly knew the situation was more complicated than simply “let’s just murder every criminal across the planet in an instant”. She felt her blood boil for a moment, thinking about it, but unlike her mortal self, her thoughts didn’t dissolved into a fuzzy haze, for her to wake up later with new wounds and another person injured and god knew what else. This time, she was able to retain her mental clarity and calm herself down.
 
Shady had tensed, not sure how she was going to react, but upon seeing Illia relax, she did likewise, and put a hand on her shoulder. “Hey. Tell you what. I got a nice little world where you can work out some of that aggression on some more fuck heads who could use a little punishment. And if that’s not enough, I know another place you can go to really go all-out.” Shady glanced again to the mortal remnants about them. “You might like that place more, actually, but let’s start off a bit simpler, okay?”
 
Illia took another long breath, and nodded. “Okay. Thank you.”
 
“No problem. Hey, I know it’s a lot right now, but trust me. The Omnyverse was built to be our oyster. You’ll be having the time of your life before you know it.”
 
“I believe you.”
 
Shady grinned wide. “Good! You know what they say, always believe women!” Illia’s brow furrowed again, and Shady waved her off. “Forget it. Anyway, you want these fucks to stay dead, we can arrange this to look like a rival gang came in an butchered them. Or we can bring them back to life and—”
 
“No. I won’t go after any others like this, but this group stays gone.”
 
“Fair enough. Let’s clean this up, then.” Shady wished the scene to change, and so it did, the cartel members reformed into their normal bodies, just now the corpses were riddled with bullets, and several of the buildings suddenly collapsed, looking like they’d burned down or been damaged by grenades. All evidence was arranged to make it seem like a thorough attack, though not necessarily enough to pin on any specific rival. It would be weeks, if not months, before anyone even found the place at this point.
 
“Thank you,” said Illia softly, looking over her handiwork.
 
“Don’t mention it,” said Shady. “Now, come on. I know you’re going to need some more action pretty soon, and I’ve got just the line-up of scumbags for you to take some aggression out on.”
 
Shady teleported her off to one of her own Worlds, to let the new Omny satiate her punishing desires. As she took one last look at the cartel’s base, she had to admit that Cyl probably was right after all about elevating humanity’s baseline quality of life. She couldn’t help but feel that they’d all just dodged a bullet with Illia, and there was still a chance she might become a problem later. If more Omnys were going to keep Ascending from Earth, it would be a lot better for everyone if they didn’t emerge all twisted up from broken lives. Even if it did give her less bad people to take her own twisted desires out on, the last thing they needed was more cosmic trouble from within.
 
If nothing else, Shady wasn’t ready to relinquish the title of Top Troublemaker any time soon!
 
END

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