Universal Cruelty

Written by HikerAngel

Commissioned by 10K

Imagine, if you will, the shadow of a child looming over an anthill. The ants scurry, maybe even plead with whatever god their limited hive mind can conceive of, but they are still ultimately at the whims of their new god. Did the ants ask for this? No. Did they do anything to deserve it? Irrelevant. All that matters now is that the powerless group is beholden to the whims of the all-powerful singular creature above them.

Perhaps a dispassionate mass flood from the garden hose? An extinction with the sole purpose of taking out as many as possible. Or perhaps a personal yet brutal method of execution—the magnifying glass? Less are taken out overall, but the strikes are still quick and efficient. Maybe even a careless footfall, one which could reduce the mighty anthill to a plateau of unusability, is chosen. Or a mix of all three methods.

One sympathetic to the plight of the ants must ask why the kid is content with such a heinous act. How a usually empathetic creature can so easily disconnect themselves from the pointless death and destruction they can inflict upon a population when given the chance to do so.

For Rihanne, the answer was simple: nothing mattered.

When she was blessed with godlike powers at the age of thirteen, Rihanne was deep within her goth phase. Though perhaps “phase” was no longer the correct terminology, as with the universal truth of the human experience no longer applying to her, she had no motivation to change, even as she grew older and supposedly more mature.

For the first five years of this new normal—Rihanne’s normal—she didn’t do anything too drastic. A murder of a childhood bully here, a demolition of a company’s head office that stopped providing her favorite fishnet stockings there. Typical stuff. She quickly found firsthand just how dominant her burgeoning powers were, as the combined force of the world’s militaries did little to slow her down as she tore through their reserves. This particular rampage was spurred after reading a Tumblr post about how the US had wasted taxpayer money and environmental resources on tanks they’d never use.

Her often performative bouts of activism slowed as the natural evolution of her goth mentality evolved into its natural endpoint—complete apathy. She had always paid lip service to the idea that nothing mattered, often reposting several Nietzschian memes about how god was dead and life was meaningless, but one day upon waking up she suddenly realized just how accurate that philosophy was now.

It was brought about by something so seemingly insignificant. Upon the eve of her 18th birthday, she was suddenly stricken with the cognizance that everyone beneath her was just that, beneath her. She was raised by her parents to believe that they were a proper authority, one to be respected and obeyed. While she didn’t need them to get what she wanted, she found a level of convenience in their decisions. After all, society appeared to function more efficiently when transactions were performed with monetary exchange instead of threats of physical violence. While she wasn’t opposed to using violence, there was at least a suitable substitute that made some semblance of sense.

And then she got the wrong sushi order.

Rihanne was already having a pretty crummy day. Her former bully hadn’t finished her homework in the exact hour she asked for it nor had her latest “free” shipment of black eyeliner arrived at her door. Now her parents wanted to go out for dinner with her to celebrate her birthday? How ungrateful they were!

When Rihanne arrived at the place, they didn’t seem to recognize that she was the infamous unstoppable harbinger of destruction, as the waitress treated her like any other guest instead of falling to her knees and begging to be spared. It seemed like a nice change of pace at first, but she was quickly reminded of why preferential treatment was necessary as her order of California roll sushi was delivered to her as mere sashimi.

Her brow furrowed in disgust at the sight of the slightly incorrect order. Her parents’ pupils shrunk to pinpricks, dreading the inevitable superpowered tantrum that would surely follow.

“What the fuck is this? I wanted sushi, not sashimi!” she shrieked, as if the world was going to end from anything that wasn’t her. “You literally had one job and you fucked it up! I can’t believe—“

But her complaining was cut short upon the strangest of sights. Before her very eyes, the sashimi plate transformed into her exact order. Curious, she imagined a different item off the menu, one that had been long since discontinued, and before she could even blink in disbelief it was there on her plate.

She smiled. Reality literally bent to her will. It wasn’t even a particularly complicated process. She merely desired for the atomic composition of any given entity to change and it did so without complaint.

A low hum began to emanate from Rihanne’s body as her mind began to fully comprehend the potential of her seemingly limitless power. The chair beneath her shattered into wood chips, promptly followed by the table before her. She should have been battered with high-speed splinters of wood, and yet they all appeared to be magnetically opposed to her body, flying off in every direction that wasn’t hers. Of course, that didn’t stop the aftermath of her experiment from inflicting mortal harm upon the people around her as the wood chips erupted from her body’s space like a grenade’s shrapnel.

And yet, Rihanne couldn’t bring herself to actually notice who was affected by it. Her parents were there at the table with her, as was the waiter, they were probably severely wounded and required immediate medical attention, attention her new abilities could provide without any worry for hospital costs or precious time being wasted waiting for paramedics to arrive. That was the last time her mind even floated the idea of her parents as a concept. After all, the child did not consider the ants of the anthill after their fun had been had.

Her absent-minded train of thought was instead rerouted to the amusing realization that not even the laws of gravity could bind her anymore. Upon the obliteration of the chair beneath her, Rihanne’s posterior should have made quick contact with the ground. Instead, she remained bound to her consented position, refusing to allow the uncaring rules of the universe to dictate how she went about her life.

Desiring to prove her absolute domination over the forces that were, she began to ascend from where she floated. Did those around her look on in horror or admiration? It did not matter to her. What mattered was the sheer “what if” of her interacting with the sushi restaurant’s ceiling.

The wood, concrete and wiring gave way before her like curtains to her grand introduction as the unopposed force of destruction that would smite the world before her. Rihanne’s eyes remained fixed upon the sky above her, continuing to ascend rapidly until her body breached the stratosphere.

Only then, once the pathetic populace was indiscernible from the green and blues that surrounded them, did Rihanne gaze down upon the floating rock in space which she had spawned from. While there was no true direction in the infinite cosmos, Earth was undoubtedly beneath her.

She outstretched a singular hand, allowing only the most simple of theatrics to express her intentions. While a mere absent-minded thought would have been sufficient, it was almost more satisfying to watch a simple wave of her palm be the perceived catalyst of her once-home’s catastrophic demise.

The planet before her shattered into hundreds of pieces as if it were made of glass and an invisible ball peen hammer the size of an extinction-level meteor had collided into it, the fiery core spilling out and extinguishing into nothingness shimmered brightly within the callous pupils of its destroyer.

Rihanne set aside no time to dwell on what she had done, as there was nothing to dwell upon. There was no sadness to be had, nor was there happiness. No anger, no excitement, no tenderness, no horniness, nothing.

Perhaps it was the insufficient size of this planet that unleashed such apathy into her mindset. Testing this theory, she directed her attention to a far more sizable target—Jupiter. At just over 11 times larger than the earth, it was the definitive next step.

Needless to say, it didn’t fare much better against the oppressive might of a random goth girl. Despite its form being gaseous in nature, Rihanne’s desire to watch it tear and crack like an egg in a hailstorm superseded any logical consistency within the universe’s established rules.

Making sweeping gestures with her hands like a maestro at a thrilling concert, physics contorted to her whims as Rihanne tore gashes into Jupiter’s “surface” like a wild tiger given the grace of god. The resulting claw marks singed miles of square footage, igniting the surface which only served to further the effective range of her destruction.

Rihanne paused to see if she felt anything.

Nope, still nothing.

She set her sights on the sun, whose oppressive brightness once made such an act infeasible. But the scorching light of the infinitely burning ferrous dimmed under her dismissive gaze. Not so much as if she merely applied the effects of sunglasses over her eyes, but as if the universe around her mellowed out on the brightness to accommodate for her formerly sensitive eyes.

It was as if the sun was afraid of her—as if the universe itself feared her power. But fear mattered very little to her. She was feared by society as it was. Hell, she was feared by her own parents even before the whole “infinite powers” event. A mere increase in scale, no matter how drastic, was not enough to satiate the endless apathy that droned on within her mind and body.

The sun was already destroyed. She hadn’t even considered it until this very moment. It almost wasn’t even worth mentioning—of course she was capable of destroying the sun! Would anyone really expect anything less from Rihanne?

Her following spree of destruction was but a blur. No matter how she attempted to wow her own mind with the increasingly creative approaches to her work, nothing registered beyond a passing thought. She was so bored she found herself reminiscing upon the simple act of destroying earth with a hand wave, how the mere transition of her black-polished fingernails from one position to another initiating the destruction of every living earthen species felt almost quaint and nostalgic to her now.

This pining for the past permeated predominantly within her mindscape, even as she reduced the universe around her to atoms. It was unconscious to her at this point, doubling down into a sunk cost fallacy of destruction hoping to feel something, anything, amidst the mindless destruction of her own inception.

Rihanne was almost disappointed to find that she continued to exist even when the universe did not. There wasn’t even blackness, it was simply the indescribable absence of everything—and her continued unchallenged existence within it.

She took a deep breath, her immutable lungs forcing nothing to create something to fill them. It didn’t have to be air, but it had to be something. When it couldn’t provide anything, the space simply ceased to exist.

The apathetic girl suddenly found herself thrust into another universe, one also teeming with life and love. Parallel universe theory was correct, and yet that knowledge brought her no joy at all.

Great, just another identical universe for her to run the motions in.

And yet, she ran the motions anyway. Perhaps it was out of unconscious optimism, that this universe would carry something different that would reignite her desire to continue forward. Unfortunately for this universe, its functional identicality to its predecessor would prove an evolutionary disadvantage now that Rihanne was the apex predator of the multiversal ecosystem.

Rihanne found herself lazily fondling her body out of boredom as this parallel universe around her decayed into the same miasmic nothingness as its predecessor. Her pre-ripped hot topic black tank top somehow maintained its composition as fingers—which had torn through dark matter mere moments ago—groped the twin mounds of supple breast flesh within it. Even though she cared little about the beauty standards applied to women by society, her mind had unconsciously improved her body in tandem with her pleasureful exploration.

She looked down to see lines of definition appearing on her stomach, revealing a perfect set of abs. Elegantly sculpted trenches appeared between each muscle, carving out a toned core that looked as if it had come straight from the pages of one of the sexiest lingerie catalogs that no longer existed in her universe. Each muscle visible under her pale skin as she floated about, reflecting the light from stars as her body mimicked the movements of walking, even though such an action was beyond her. Her body’s striations were subtle, equal parts fitness and femininity.

And it did nothing for her.

So she was sexy, what of it? Once the high of her pushing her dopamine receptors to their limits was reached, the sight of her awe-inspiring body became dull. The higher highs merely resulted in lower lows as her mind became numb to the last of her earthly pleasures, using her nigh-omnipotent abilities to overstimulate her desperate sex just to feel something.

Not knowing any other method of traversal—and not particularly caring to learn—she decimated universe after universe, discarding them like candy wrappers as she attempted to discover some sort of happy sense within any of them. All proved to be fruitless, slight variations of the same cookie-cutter universe that weren’t even worth consuming space within Rihanne’s infinite memory.

And then, it happened.

Even though Rihanne’s mind did not need to sleep, much less to dream, she pinched herself just to be absolutely sure as this latest universe engulfed itself around her.

Pastel pinks and blues assaulted her retinas with a neonic haze. A sound of upbeat, peppy music seemed to linger endlessly within what should have been the voidful expanse of space. The sugary sweet smell of every pleasant candy there was put together wafted past Rihanne nostrils, tempting her to venture farther within the depths of this strange reality.

Strangest of all, however, was how impossible these experiences should have been for the goth girl. She had exhausted all of her earthly pleasures through desperate overexposure, and yet three of the most simple pleasantries appealed to three separate senses entirely. What she was feeling now was something long forgotten and foreign to her—comfort.

It wasn’t perfect. The music was a little grating and some of the colors were harsh on the eyes, but those were actual feelings! Expressions of emotions beyond endless apathy! It was a strange world—no doubt about it—but this could be the first step to her enjoying life, as tiny of a step as it may be.

Traveling through the vast, tie-dye expanse of this brand new world, it wasn’t long before she came across a planet—or, at least, it didn’t feel that long.

This strange sphere was more of an oversized jawbreaker than an actual globe. Its palette resembled more of a girliepop Jackson Pollock than the lush hues of a common asteroid. Of course, this only served to entice Rihanne further, the departure from known astronomical structuring restoring that sense of curiosity within her she thought to be long gone.

Touching down upon the surface, the ecosystems at play were vast and surreal, appearing to be composed of very cartoony-looking pastel plants and waterfalls of rainbow-colored liquids. Every object, from stems to rocks, had a unique tempo to its movements, as if the constant background music was so compelling it commanded them to dance along.

This place… it’s so cutesy and pathetic! Rihanne thought to herself, her inner voice growing more excited with every word. If I destroy this place, watch as every happy and carefree flower cowers in fear at the sight of me, I’ll definitely feel something!

She found herself giggling evilly as she hyped herself up. “That’s right, Rihanne! Let that anger build up within you! The annoying music! The eyesore-inducing visuals! The sickly saccharine smell of space that permeates every square inch of this place!”

Rihanne scanned the horizon until she found the perfect first group of victims for her ensuing onslaught. Within a white desert of sugar was an oasis of diverse and varied foliage, a symbol of rebirth and survival within impossible odds. The perfect underdog to mercilessly demolish for first blood.

She landed atop the shimmering expanse of the oasis’ limited water supply, directly in the middle of the circular enclave of wacky foliage. What would she do first? Would she rip each individual root from its precious soil, pluck by pluck? Maybe she’d dry up all the water in the oasis and speed up time to watch as every single luscious plant slowly withered and died. Maybe she’d even—

“Ohmigosh, ohmigosh, Hiiiiiii!” came a voice with a cheerfulness to rival the entire universe it resided in.

Rihanne whisked around, only to see that she wasn’t alone on this oasis after all. Lounging in a hammock between two palm trees was quite the strange sight—an actual human. At least, the world around her made her appear relatively normal in comparison. Whoever this was, she was human enough at a glance, but there were minuscule aspects about her that just seemed… off.

Her hair was an ever-changing miasma of color, each strand never quite committing to any particular color or tint, replicating the effect one might see if they were to stare at a bright light for too long. Her skin was pale, paler than even the gothic Rihanne, nearly white in hue altogether. Her outfit somehow struck the perfect balance between expressive and homely, wearing a thick, washed-blue sweater that failed to hide the visual splendor that was her curves from Rihanne’s eyes.

But none of that mattered compared to the glaring elephant in the room.

She was cute.

Like, really cute.

Rihanne felt her cheeks turn a shade of crimson at the sight of this slightly off-kilter girl, a feeling she could not recall the last time she had truly experienced. What was a simple wave from across the water felt so much grander than entire universes Rihanne decimated without a second thought, nor a first one.

The girl vacated her hammock, and yet her sandaled feet never actually touched the ground. Instead she floated about an inch off the soil, her body slowly approaching Rihanne while remaining perfectly still in the air, as if she were a flying person-shaped brick. She gradually picked up speed as she crossed the tiny reservoir before coming to a complete halt right in front of Rihanne, spooking the goth girl slightly out of sheer unexpectedness.

“My name’s Lily! What’s yours?”

The discrepancies kept piling up. As powerful as Rihanne was, she was still susceptible to optical illusions. At first, this “Lily” girl appeared to be of average proportion, but as she closed the distance between her and Rihanne, a height discrepancy became immediately apparent. The goth, back on earth when she pretended to care, had allowed her height to rise to an impressive 6’8, which was only further exacerbated by the platform boots she often wore. While Rihanne towered over many of her peers, Lily was a whole other beast entirely. The pastel girl must’ve been at least 7’7, nearly a full head taller than Rihanne, without counting the inch of dead air between the ground and her actual feet. She didn’t even look particularly lanky or oddly proportioned, instead it was as if she was unusually large, like every part of her was simply 1.2 times the average.

Only then did Rihanne realize she had been staring silently at this strange girl for about a minute without answering her question.

“Oh, er… my name’s… Rihanne!!”

“Well, that’s quite a long name, Rihanne! Too many syllables! I’m gonna call you Ri-ri instead!”

Ri-ri… No one had ever given Rihanne a nickname before, especially not someone so bubbly and full of enthusiasm. It was… a nice feeling. She didn’t have many friends back on her home planet, nor did she see the apparent value in having friends, but now… it was all starting to make some sort of sense. Rihanne was so caught up in the supposed euphoria of the moment, she didn’t even have time to retort with a snarky comment about how “Rihanne” and “Ri-ri” actually had the exact same amount of syllables

“Sooooo, Ri-ri!” Lily jumped to the next topic, not waiting for Rihanne to approve or deny her new nickname. “I don’t recall ever seeing you around in my dimension before! When did you show up?”

“Wait, your dimension?” Rihanne shot back, confused. “As in, you yourself made everything to be like this?”

“Yep! Made it alllllll by myself! And why wouldn’t I? Pink is only the prettiest color there is! Everything deserves to bask in its glory!”

Rihanne so badly wanted to dispute that point. To inform her pastel-loving associate that she only held that opinion due to years of media brainwashing compounded upon by companies that wanted to make an extra buck by creating a distinction between “boy’s clothing” and “girl’s clothing.” The type of soapboxing that often distanced her from those around her before her ascension. And yet, she couldn’t bring herself to mention any of it. The thought of witnessing Lily frown was not one she wanted in reality, so she did not pursue it farther.

“It’s… a good look for the place,” Rihanne brought herself to say. She didn’t even have to strain herself that hard to utter such a lie, but Lily didn’t even seem to understand the concept of a lie.

“Thank you! I think I really outdid myself with this one!” She spoke enthusiastically, putting her hands on her hips as she paused to admire her handiwork. “Oooh! Ooooh! Do you want to see my castle!? It’s a biiiiig one!”

The jarring shift in topics confused Rihanne for but a moment, gathering her bearings quickly—though not quick enough for Lily.

“You have a cas—?”

“Great! Let’s goooooo!”

Lilly grabbed Rihanne by the arm and took off into the sky, the world melting around her as she used some sort of pink-coated wormhole to warp several million light years to another spot in her universe. If Rihanne wasn’t nigh-omnipotent in her prowess, her arm would have been ripped from the socket. Though perhaps that would have been the least of her worries as this wormhole between destinations was horribly unoptimized for traversal. Every passing millisecond, Rihanne felt as thought her molecules were trying to separate, to be left scattered across this indifferent universe.

When the ride through the Willy Wonka tunnel had finally ended, Rihanne found an unfamiliar sensation pulsating through her gripped arm. Pain. Not a lot, but the presence of it at all was a surreal feeling for the goth. Lily didn’t even seem to regulate her strength at all—perhaps that was simply a result of her being all alone in this empty universe.

Speaking of which, where was everybody else?

Rihanne wasn’t given much of a chance to postulate it, as she was dragged along by Lily once more by her sore arm. Apparently, they had only paused briefly so that they could absorb the grandness of this castle—and grand it was—but Rihanne had been rather preoccupied tending to her injured limb and couldn’t exactly focus on any details.

The inside of Lily’s abode didn’t fair much better. Rihanne was briskly whisked through a labyrinth of complex and sprawling halls, several of which seemed to lead nowhere at all. It was as if Lily’s hyperactive mind couldn’t decide where to take Rihanne next, so she simply took her halfway everywhere.

“Lookie here! Look over there! Oooh! Look at that!” She shouted again and again, her own words somehow overlapping with themselves as if there were an N + 1 amount of Lilies talking every time she brought Rihanne to a new location. The goth eventually became numb to the pain, it was quite a familiar experience to her after all, and yet even as she found her focus shifting to what Lily wanted to show her, it was simply too incomprehensible to make any sense out of. It was as if she had never left the wormhole at all.

Rihanne attempted to slow down time, increasing her perception. She had done it a few times back on earth, though found little use for it as she found people had nothing interesting to say even when she could properly process their speech. But Lily… no amount of slowing seemed to have any effect. It was as if she could sense the reverberations of time being altered around her and simply decided to talk faster to compensate.

“Aaaand… that’s the whole castle! Though I’m always adding more to it every second! I’ll take you on the expanded tour tomorrow, but first, we should eat! I bet you’re starving after such a long tour!”

“Food… sounds nice,” Rihanne replied, popping her arm back into its socket once more. “How about we, er, take our time on this one? Y’know? Really savor the food?”

“Hmm, I suppose you are correct in that assertion, Ri-ri…” Lily replied, rubbing a hand over her chin.

Good, so she wasn’t completely without reason or understanding. Rihanne thought to herself. This manic pixie dream girl could be domesticated after all.

“Alright! Let me talk to the head chef and they’ll whip up some grub for you!”

Rihanne’s hopes to see another living person were quickly dashed when Lily snapped her fingers and a chef hat appeared on top of her cascading rainbow hair. She pulled couple of pots and pans out of hammerspace, placing them down on a double-decker stove that Rihanne swore wasn’t there a second ago. Whatever she was cooking, it was something Rihanne wasn’t at all familiar with at all But whatever it was, it was making her salivate. The striking smell of salty sushi wafted through the air, bringing a comforting, nostalgic smile to the goth’s cheeks.

She closed her eyes and took a big whiff, savoring the moment. When Rihanne opened her eyes, she found herself seated at the end of an impossibly long dining table, one that stretched far off into the horizon while still appearing to exist within the confines of Lily’s castle. She glanced around the unfamiliar environment, the twisting of her neck revealing that she had been fitted with a dining napkin in her collar. Lily was nowhere to be seen, but her presence was felt as a peculiar sight rocketed into view. Coming from over the horizon and rapidly approaching Rihanne’s location, a distinct dome-shaped metal object caught the light of the endless identical chandeliers.

By the time Rihanne recognized it as a metal serving tray, it had already slowed to a stop before her. Glistering in the light, every square inch of the hemisphere appeared to be encrusted with pink diamonds and gold trims. Sure, this was a sight that Rihanne could conjure for herself if she really wanted too, but the simple fact that someone else did it for her made the act that much more enticing.

Speaking of that certain someone, down descended Lily. Like an angel disembarking from heaven, Lily slowly came into sight from what appeared to be the ceiling, touching down on the leftmost side of the table, only so that she could reveal the contents of the dish like a waiter might present it.

As the smell alluded at earlier, what she saw before her was simply one of the most beautiful sushi dishes her eyes had ever been graced with. Rihanne wasn’t sure how pots and pans on a stove created a dish meant to be prepared and consumed raw, but she wasn’t about to argue with the results. The sushi looked absolutely scrumptious, like right out of an advertisement or display piece, the ones that always looked too good to be true. But in this world—Lily’s world—it simply was true.

“There you are, Ri-ri! California rolls and shrimp sashimi! Enjoy!”

Rihanne spent a few moments blinking in disbelief at the sight before her, but afterwards she did exactly as Lily told. It had been so long since anything had crossed her lips, mostly on the account that she didn’t need to eat anymore, but goddamn, she missed sushi. It was comfort food to her, and this might’ve been the most comforting version of it she’d ever had. She had become so caught up in the rhapsodic elation of it, that she only just now noticed that Lily didn’t have anything on her plate.

“Aren’t you going to eat something as well?” Rihanne asked with concern in her eyes, pausing in between bites.

“Nope! None for me! Watching you eat and enjoy my food is filling enough!”

Rihanne found that blush of hers returning. If anyone else said something like that it might’ve come off as a little creepy, but Lily just had this earnestness to her voice that quelled all doubts in the goths mind. She genuinely seemed to appreciate Rihanne’s company, and even appeared to be flirting in her own Lily sort of way. This was clearly a girl who also had feelings yet never had a proper outlet to express them through—much like Rihanne herself.

Maybe—just maybe—this could work out.

Maybe Rihanne could be happy again.

Lily sighed wistfully. “I’m sooooooo glad I ran into another person around here! Most people that show up don’t last very long.”

Considering the sickly sweet nature of this dimension, alongside how obnoxious the constant background music was, Rihanne was beginning to piece together why that probably was. Though, that didn’t mean she planned on doing the same. Even though Lily was rather abrasive, she was still charming and oh so cute. It wasn’t perfect, but Rihanne didn’t need perfection. She just needed an outlet that could make her feel something again. Lily seemed more than capable of providing an enriching experience.

“I’m… glad I ran into another person around here too,” Rihanne admitted, nearly tearing up from pure elation. “I think I finally found the home I was destined for.”

Lily jumped up with jubilant joy, throwing her hands in the air and shouting a loud “YIPPIE!” Her long hair fell in gorgeous cascades once she landed, revealing the cutest freckles upon her contoured cheekbones. Rihanne didn’t think it was possible, but Lily somehow got ever prettier through a mere expression of excitement. The goth’s serotonin receptors were all but fried at this point, yet Lily had some sort of powerful charm about her that superseded what Rihanne thought was possible. Destruction and suffering was all she knew, it was what she could rely on, and yet it paled in comparison to the sensations Lily’s world offered.

~

After some further after-dinner hijinks, Lily appeared to grow quite tired. Rihanne wasn’t sure if that was because of her boundless energy needing a recharge or because she thought Rihanne herself might be somewhat tired. Either way, the goth wasn’t about to pass up an offer to tenderly snuggle with the pastel girl if given the opportunity.

The bed before Rihanne was surprisingly self-contained compared to the vastness of the castle’s other vistas. A simple, pink, heart-shaped bed just big enough to fit two people within it awaited the goth girl and the pastel girl, and Rihanne knew what that meant!

She giddily leapt into the bed, phasing through her clothes mid-leap until only her lacy black bra and panties combo remained. She may have trained herself on an icy cold exterior, but even Rihanne could not resist giggling at the prospect of cuddling up next to a girl as cute as Lily.

Conversely, the pastel girl was more reserved in her approach, slowly and sultrily slithering into the bed. Almost as if to explicitly mirror Rihanne, Lily’s bra and panties obeyed the same color logic as her hair, the flowing lava-lamp-like miasma of rainbow that had the goth practically hypnotized at this point.

“Heehee, I see the carpet matches the drapes, eh?” Rihanne remarked, pointing downward with a perfectly manicured finger. Lily, however, did not appear to understand the innuendo, confusedly looking at the corresponding furnishings within the bedroom.

“You’re right, Ri-ri! They are identical! How about that?”

“Well I meant… Y’know what? Never mind. Let’s just shut up and cuddle already.”

Rihanne gripped tightly onto Lily’s larger body, finding her surprisingly warm and soft, as if ice cream retained its texture while shifting sides to the opposite temperature. Where there should have been uncomfortable bones were instead pillowy yet firm muscle. The goth couldn’t believe it! Lily was even more comfortable than the bed’s actual pillows!

Palpable yet weightless, Rihanne couldn’t believe just how perfect Lily was! Waves of warmth washed over Rihanne, all the while her leg and arm that were both underneath Lily went unaffected by pressure of any kind. The goth girl smiled contently as she found herself drifting off to sleep…

And then, Lily hugged Rihanne back.

Rihanne was jolted from a state of half-consciousness from the sound of a loud crack… and the feeling of a loud crack too. Lily was squeezing her hard! Way too hard!

She attempted to breathe, only to find the feeling strained beyond belief. Lily had shattered two of three of her ribs, puncturing her lungs in the process. Rihanne desperately began to slap and kick at the multicolored beauty, desperately hoping that she’d wake up and realize the error of her position. But no such event happened. Unfortunately, Rihanne was simply too powerless to do so much as wake up her pastel love interest.

Before Rihanne could even take solace in the pain becoming familiar, Lily lowered her arms in an effort to get more comfortable, only to squeeze even harder than before. The black-haired girl found her spine shattering in three different places, with bits of bone fragments piercing her pelvis from the sheer force of Lily’s snuggle.

Rihanne desperately tried every known ability in her arsenal to escape this death hug, only to come up painfully short. She tried warping away, but wherever she teleported too, Lily followed. She tried expanding space and time around her to loosen Lily’s grip, only to find that this space and time would not change at all without Lily’s express permission to do so.

The goth kicked her legs out of desperation, only for Lily’s far larger thighs to encompass hers in entirety. What should have been soft, pillowy mounds of scrumptiously smooth skin instead crushed and crumpled Rihanne’s form like twin steamrollers. This torturous process continued long into the night, with Rihanne’s acutely aware mind forced to count out every grueling second as minutes became hours.

When Lily finally did come to, her body rustled innocently as she slowly unfolded herself from Rihanne’s mangled form. She yawned adorably, her limbs cracking as she stretched every which way as she floated out of bed, dropping the crumpled goth to the floor with a thud.

“Aww, look at little Ri-ri! All scrunched up from cuddles!” Lily exclaimed, as if Rihanne were little more than a silly, cute dog. “Let me help you get all un-scrunched!”

Without even as much as a further signifier, Rihanne found her body suddenly shifting and changing. Her bones were reforming, but not in the way they were supposed to. The goth let out a raspy groan as her bone structure was restored incorrectly, her ribs pushing straight outwards and piercing through her chest as if they were teeth. Her spine became zig-zagged, constricting like a cartoony accordion missing several in between frames of animation as it distortedly cracked and shook with her constricting musculature as they adjusted. The bones within her legs were reordered wrong, putting her kneecaps far lower than they needed to be and leaving her unable to walk.

On the outside, with the exception of her exposed rips, Rihanne looked fixed. But she could feel her nerves screaming in agony underneath her skin. Her hands were shaking like a wet dog as she slowly and painfully got to her feet, having never felt anything quite comparable to this.

Rihanne closed her eyes in concentration, slowly returning the afflicted bones to their correct orientation with wavering telekinesis. Her balance faltered occasionally, throwing off the repairing process and lodging chunks of bone where they didn’t belong, but eventually, her skeletal structure was repaired.

Opening her tear-filled, tired eyes, they met Lily’s peppy, cheerful ones. She had been watching Rihanne’s excruciation with glee, not once stepping in to help correct her earlier mistake. It was as if she had no clue that the goth was suffering, or if she even understood what a word such as “suffering” entailed.

Rihanne’s breathing was shaky as her pain slowly subsided, though her desperate cries for assistance fell on deaf ears as Lily was eager to move onto the first big morning activity she had planned.

“Let’s not dilly-dally, Ri-ri! Plenty of activities are calling our names!”

“Can’t we… can’t we just take a little break first?” Rihanne replied. “I’m sure we have plenty of time today to do whatever it is you want.”

“Teehee! Oh Ri-ri! You’re so silly! We just got 12 hours worth of a break when we went to sleep! That’s more than enough breaktime!”

Rihanne wouldn’t have called being crushed within a hydraulic press of silky smooth skin a “break,” unless Lily was referring to the goth’s bones.

“Well, what if we… did a suggestion of my own? Maybe that could be fun?” Rihanne asked, hoping she could reel in Lily a bit.

“Okay! What did you have in mind, Ri-ri?” she replied, bending down so that her face was level with the goth’s.

“How about a, er…” Rihanne found her mind wandering in the presence of Lily’s plush, thick lips—the natural gloss practically reflecting her own face with their perfect sheen. “...kissing game?”

“Kissing game? Sounds fun! I love games! What does a ‘kissing game’ entail?”

“Oh, well it’s…” Rihanne wracked her hyper-advanced brain for any sort of convincing answer, and yet the power of her potent neurons were practically canceled out by the sheer devastation of Lily’s mind-boggling beauty.

“...a game like spin the bottle.” Sure, it wasn’t really a game only two people could properly play, but Rihanne hoped that Lily’s unperceptive attitude would aid Rihanne in leading the two towards a less violent path.

“Oh boy! Oh boy! I love spinning stuff! How do we play?” Lilly practically jumped for joy, the ground quaking even though her feet never touched it as she hopped up and down in the air.

“Well, uh, first we get a bottle,” Rihanne spoke, concentrating significantly harder than she ever had to before, even when conjuring something so simple. It was as if the nature of this reality was actively constraining her abilities, even if Lily wasn’t physically hindering her in any way. The omnipresent music and miasmic tie-dye haze was like a suffocating suppressant to Rihanne’s mind, providing her with a soothing comfort of happiness, yes, but also a creeping lack of freedom. If she wasn’t so excited by the prospect of being happy again, she might’ve been more concerned by the idea that she didn’t know how to leave this universe.

But the struggle paid off, as a typical empty beer bottle was successfully generated before the two women, already laying on its side and pointing at Rihanne. It didn’t seem all that significant, but Lily was ecstatic all the same.

“Wowie zowie! You did it! You made a bottle appear! Good job, Ri-ri!”

Rihanne couldn’t tell if she was being talked down to, Lily didn’t know what she was capable of, or Lily knew and was genuinely impressed at her conjuring skills in spite of how oppressive her universe was. If this were anyone else, Rihanne would have easily assumed the worst of the three. But since it was Lily with her beautiful body and oddly pleasant attitude… she wanted to assume the best of intentions.

But before she could affirm an answer, Lily was impatient to continue. “C’mon, c’mon, c’mooooon Ri-ri! What’s the bottle for? How do we play?”

“Well, it’s pretty simple… we spin the bottle and whoever it lands on first will have to kiss whoever it lands on second.” The goth hoped that if she explained it confidently enough, Lily wouldn’t stop to question why there were only two players. Fortunately, she was correct in that assertion.

“Okie dokie then! Me first!”

The pastel girl sat down into a criss-cross-applesauce position, with Rihanne quick to follow. An exaggerated sweep of her hand spun the glass container rapidly, nearly making it invisible to the goth’s advanced eyes. It took quite the grueling amount of time for the bottle to slow, yet Lily seemed fascinated by the mere act of it twirling about, gazing longingly into its spherical haze as if it were the crackling flames of a campfire.

When the spinning eventually did subside, the resulting point was in Lily’s direction. “Yaaay! Me! Ooooh, I wonder who it’s gonna land on next!!!”

She preformed a perfect recreation of her last strike, slapping the lip of the bottle with her fingertips and sending it once more into a semi-transparent frenzy. When it finally concluded, the bottle had landed facing Lily for the second time.

“Oh boy! Me again! Aren’t I lucky!”

Before Rihanne could object to the impossibility, the pastel girl made it possible. Her form began to distort, a strange split seemingly occurring down the middle of her face, extending down to the middle of her torso. Without warning, her head tore in half, spooking Rihanne as the leaky goop of her insides reformed and expanded, repairing both sides individually without reconnecting them. Extra hands sprouted from these two towers of identical Lilies, creating conjoined pastel twins connected at the hip.

Rihanne wasn’t sure if she should be scared or aroused. She settled for both.

These two half-Lilies then locked lips, their mouths melting into one another to combine back into the singular, familiar Lily. She then hugged herself snugly, flourishing in her own loving company before quickly moving on and spinning the bottle again.

“Alright, round two! Let's see what happens!”

Despite only having a 12.5% chance of occuring, the bottle’s lips once more faced in Lily’s direction. It was as if this universe existed solely to reinforce the already existing Lily bias that would be present given her overwhelming power. Whether she was aware of this bias was unclear, but Rihanne was about to find out. To avoid a repeat of last time, the goth used a subtle amount of her telekinesis to ever so slightly influence the outcome of the bottle come the next spin. It was just barely successful enough, with the bottle’s neck falling within Rihanne’s hemisphere.

But all that effort would be worth it. Because now, she got to kiss the girl she didn’t even know she wanted.

“Alriiiight! Pucker uuuuuup!” Lily exclaimed, making grabby motions with her outstretched hands as she floated closer and closer to Rihanne. The goth didn’t hesitate, leaping into Lily’s arms and locking lips with her.

And locked they remained.

Like with Lily’s own siamese twin, Rihanne’s lips began to fuse with the pastel girl’s own. She attempted to panic and scream, but all expressions were muffled as her pale flesh became goopily stitched together with Lily’s tan skin.

“Teehee, your head is like a musical instrument, Ri-ri!” came Lily’s voice from inside Rihanne’s own head, only to be followed by an eardrum-rupturing cacophony of random notes from random instruments. She attempted to grab at Lily’s shoulders to gain some leverage in order to pry herself off from the insane kiss, but the rainbow-haired girl wouldn’t let up.

“How’s that for a kiss? Maybe I should add a little tongue?”

The words couldn’t come out of Rihanne’s throat fast enough before Lily’s thick, lengthy, intruder slithered its way into it. It continued past the usual cutoff point for a tongue’s length, continuing far beyond the throat down into the goth’s body.

“Body” was the best way to describe it, as Lily’s tongue did not follow the expected trajectory of her esophagus. Instead, it forged its own path through Rihanne’s organs, randomly rearranging them with its prehensile movements like a toddler in a sandbox. Rihanne’s eyes nearly rolled back into her head from the unfamiliar agony.

“MMMMWAH!” Lily concluded with, finally breaking the kiss between her and Rihanne. The goth’s first thought was to puke, but she somehow managed to hold it in long enough to put all of her guts back into their proper locations.

“Alright… alright… time out!” Rihanne shouted, collapsing to her knees. “I can’t… I can’t do this anymore, Lily. You’re just too much for me!”

The pastel girl raised a confused eyebrow. “But Ri-ri! That’s what makes it fun!”

“Maybe fun for you, but not fun for me!”

Rihanne couldn’t take it anymore. She didn’t want to ruin the fun of the girl she loved, but this was becoming too much for her body to handle. If her safety came at the cost of making Lily upset, then it would be all worth it.

But what the pastel girl said next blindsided her completely.

“Well, I don’t particularly care if it’s fun for you, Ri-ri! In fact, I hope it hurts! That’s when I enjoy it the most!”

“Wh-huh!?” Rihanne’s jaw fell to the floor, but it took a few seconds for her jaw to even process the sentence. Lily dropped that bombshell as cheerfully and casually as any other sentence.

“Honestly, I thought you were pausing because you thought of an even more fun way to torture you!”

“Y-you… n-no…” was all Rihanne could muster. It was as if her worldview was shattering before her and she was struggling to keep it intact. “B-but, we snuggled! We kissed! You-you made me dinner! I thought you loved me!”

“I do love you, Ri-ri! You’re the bestest playtoy a gal like me could ever ask for!”

“P-playtoy? But I don’t want to be loved as a playtoy! That’s not what I am?”

Once more, Lily’s smile adopted a bout of condescension. “Oh Ri-ri! Don’t be silly! There’s no other way to love another person! There’s merely those who get played with, and the one who plays. And I play!”

The feeling of despair was settling in for Rihanne once more. This time, however, it was not the same as when she was alone in the universe. No. Now she was no longer alone. Now, she was just as vulnerable as those she had effortlessly dispatched without a second thought. The world around her… its unusual emptiness despite how inviting it appeared. It all made sense. This happy-go-lucky girliepop goddess with a candy-coated universe had no passion or joy behind her eyes at all. To Lily, torture was just another immutable aspect of her life. She got enjoyment and pleasure from it, sure, but there was no sense of deviancy to it. Torture was simply Lily’s life and nigh-omnipotent goth was her new favorite toy.

Rihanne made a run for it, but she didn’t make it far. It didn’t appear as if Lily had even tried to stop her, it was as if her body just shut down due to something residing within her lower intestine suddenly activating, sending a searing pain pulsing throughout her entire form.

“Ack… grk… innk…” Rihanne attempted to speak, though all words were unable to squeeze through the sheer amount of pain she was experiencing at the moment. ‘What just happened?’ was what she had meant to inquire.

“Welllll, you said you wanted to take your time on the food after the tour, so I made the sushi’s poison kick in slower!” she replied as if Rihanne was still perfectly legible.

“P-poison…”

“Yep! Why else would I make you delicious food if it weren’t for the irony of you suffering from it later?”

Rihanne couldn’t respond, much less keep her eyes open. There was only one more sentence the goth caught before she faded from consciousness. “Ri-ri, out of everyone I’ve ever played with, I gotta say, you’re my favorite!”

Rihanne fucking hated that nickname now.

~

When Rihanne awoke, everything hurt. Everything was also awesome within the next millisecond. By the time the next millisecond passed, the agonizing misery returned. Her bloodshot eyes looked downwards, only to witness the viscera that was once her torso. To say it had been chopped into pieces would be downplaying it—her body had been mashed into ground beef. Some parts of her body were hung upon strange pink-yet-multicolored hooks that appeared to be made from the sky itself. The veins still connected between her hooked meat and unhooked meat were glowing with the exact same rainbow color, passing its strange effects directly into Rihanne’s brain. The brief window into pleasures unknown only serving to enhance the pain half of the equation, never letting the goth experience a second of non-excruciation as each of her body parts were pulled farther and farther away from each other without ever letting a part of the nervous system break.

“Wakey, wakey, eggs n’ bakey! Torturing you is almost no fun when you aren’t even awake to react!”

Rihanne could only gurgle in response as her gag reflex was involuntarily triggered by a sink’s worth of blood within her mouth.

“Heehee! Eggs n’ bakey! What a silly phrase! Your mother just loved to throw it around willy-nilly when you were waking up every day as a child!”

Several distressed and confused gurgles were further generated from Rihanne’s mouth. Lily understood the qualms perfectly.

“Confused? Why? Of course I’ve been reading your mind this whole time, piecing together your limited memories and finding out your entire life story!”

More gurgles. This time far more distressed than confused. Music to Lily’s ears.

“I’ve been able to see every single thought of yours since we first met! Every memory. Every experience! That’s how I tailor-made that dinner to be exactly what you desired! I’ve never even known such nebulous concepts such as “society” and “humankind” until you showed up! Oh boy, I bet they’ll be super fun to play around with! I didn’t even know there were universes beyond this one! I never even thought to check!”

Rihanne’s cold stare only got colder and more distant. Not only had she doomed herself, but she had also doomed the rest of the multiverse as well…

…Or had she?

Summoning what little strength she had left, Rihanne swallowed the mass of blood within her  mouth, freeing it up for one last chance at making a difference.

“Oh, thank goodness!” she shouted. That was all she needed.

Lily stopped dead in her tracks, as did seemingly the world around her. The silence of this world was deafening now that the background music actually ceased.

“What’s making you so happy all of the sudden, Ri-ri?” Lily asked, much like a concerned pet owner observing their dog scurrying away with something in their mouth, a bout of worry crossing her brow. It was as if the very idea of Rihanne being relieved from her torture was one worthy of concern.

“Well, if you go and torture the infinite others that exist out there in the multiverse, that means eventually, you’ll forget all about me as an infinite spew of other Rihannes come into the picture. It may not happen anytime soon, but it will happen. One of these days, Lily, you will completely neglect to torture me at all. Then, I will finally be free. Free from your love.”

Rihanne knew she had to be very careful with what she said. Lily could read her thoughts—one wrong admittance would cause this whole plan of hers to fall apart. But, she knew it would work. It had to.

Because, to a certain extent, she did believe what she was saying. She did want to watch this super sexy girl destroy the multiverse, the very multiverse that had made her so apathetic and joyless. But she knew now what it meant to suffer. What those beneath Lily would likely suffer one-thousand fold for. Rihanne would never truly understand humanity, but at least she could protect it from something even worse than herself.

The goth watched with bated, bloodied breath as the ancient gears turned within the rainbow haired girl’s head. She stuck her tongue out adorably, mulling over what seemed like an actual complicated decision for the first time in her infinite existence.

“Alrighty! You’re right, Ri-ri! Better to have a dedicated plaything instead of neglecting them! That would be sooooo rude of me!”

The music resumed.

Then the carefree, playful vibe of her universe resumed.

Then the torture resumed.

~

Rihanne’s eyes were assaulted by an unfamiliar sight: bright white light—as in, something other than constant pinks and tie-dyes.

That was the first sign that something here was off, but as her eyes adjusted, the color of the light was the least of the surreal sights present. Instead of a barren universe with bright, frilly colors, Rihanne was greeted by a rather voidful universe of simple blacks and whites that was bustling with life.

Strange creatures of all shapes and sizes were relaxing—or at least, they appeared to be. Apparently, the universal desire to sit motionless within heated liquid was one that transcended language and culture, as the closest three-word phrase to describing this location was “alien hot springs.”

But these were not the average alien creatures chillaxing within monochromatic water—no, these creatures were massive in scale, nearly eldritch in nature. Was this a new form of torture from Lily? It seemed a bit too esoteric for her.

Rihanne would get her answer as a nearby being called her attention with its mind. She whirled around only to be greeted face-to-face with a mammoth-cthulhu-dragon hybrid creature.

“Welcome, little one, you’re awfully young to be invited into the realm of the selfless.”

“Realm of the selfless?” Rihanne reiterated, confused.

“That’s correct. A dimension beyond dimensions, one of leisure and comfort. A reward of sorts for ascended beings who acted selfless in the face of overwhelming adversity. At least, that’s the prevailing theory.” The being then made a ‘so-so’ motion with one of its massive hands.

Only then did Rihanne notice that her physical form had been restored to its proper proportions. No more cubic chunks of her body floating on a rainbow hook three feet from the next closest part. She was herself again!

The goth girl found uncontrollable hysterical laughter come to her as tears fell down her face. She had done it. All that suffering, all the unsureness… it had all been leading to this very moment. Basking in her new freedom, she fell backwards into the nearest hot spring with a nonchalant splash. The water was better than anything she could have ever imagined. Was it the result of being tortured that made the pleasure greater? Perhaps it was simply the power of extradimensional pleasures? Truthfully, it didn’t matter.

All that mattered was that Rihanne was finally happy on her terms.

“Oh, there you are, Ri-ri! I thought I lost you for a second there between dimensions!”

Rihanne’s pupils shrunk to pin pricks at the sound of that all-too-familiar girly girl cadence and nickname combo. She almost didn’t want to sit up from where she was comfortably laying, as if she could just deny the reality of the situation a little bit longer, she’d never have to return to that awful pink perdition.

She found herself being slowly levitated out of the water, inch by inch, as if Lily wanted Rihanne to embrace the last bits of carnal pleasure she could. It would probably just supplement the following torture anyways.

“C’mon, Ri-ri! I know you’re not dead! You can’t die when you get here! At least, according to the minds of the locals I’m reading!”

The locals! Rihanne realized, holding out hope. Surely, once they see this regular old 1st dimension girl trying to forcibly remove one of their own, they’ll fight back! They’re like eldritch monsters amidst one enhanced human!”

And yet, not a soul moved a muscle besides Lily and Rihanne. Every other creature merely watched with bated breath as Lily trotted right past them without any trouble.

These were extra-dimensional creatures—a dimension beyond what Rihanne even accepted about the universe until about 15 minutes after she had arrived there—and yet no one could do anything to help her.

Eldritch beasts the size of entire planets simply watched in frozen terror as Lily playfully dragged the poor goth girl back to her designated dimension of torture, a rift in spacetime opening up that glistened with sparkled and shined, unleashing a suffocating stench of girlypop pink into the monochromatic world.

Rihanne should have been furious. That in this existence, there was nothing above her tormentor, no hope for her to live a better life. But if it meant keeping the rest of the multiverse safe, then it was all worth it.

She took solace in the fact that Lily completely ignored all of the beings in this dimension beyond dimensions, her focus solely on retrieving Rihanne and nothing else. In a way, Lily had lost. No matter what torture she inflicted upon the goth, the hidden knowledge that she was the most important lynchpin to ensuring that every other living creature retained freedom was good enough for her.

Rihanne paused to see if she felt something.