Imagination and A Monster Chapter Seven

There’s not a lot for the young man to leave in his awful little town, so it’s pretty easy to just up and go once the creature has set a plan for itself. It’s spent the last few weeks reading up on everything it can regarding the recent history of the world - from the invention of electricity up to the global loss of it years ago that led to a major technological setback that the world still hasn’t recovered from more than a decade and a half later - and learning about how to navigate this place with the least amount of suspicion. 

The whole charade as a human is going to cost it time, but it’s always been patient. It’s spent years on this sorry little rock before, doing nothing but planting innocent suggestions here and there that might just tug at someone’s pride, someone’s pettiness, someone’s grief, and biding its time as humanity twisted every ounce of hatefulness it could around those whispers and destroyed themselves. 

If it’s for even just the chance of revenge, it will wait for however long it will take. 

So it packs the young man’s bags, everything that a travelling human being needs stuffed into luggage, and moves out of the city. It’s time for a breather, it tells the young man’s neighbors, who are understandably curious at who they believe to be their neighbor deciding to leave. They’re supportive, of course, and who wouldn’t be? The poor boy has lost his parents, he has a lot of bad memories of this place. 

The creature lets them think what they want, receives their well-wishes with ‘thank you’s, and stares blankly ahead of it when it’s finally on the bus to get it out of this town. The bus’ final stop is five cities over, and it’ll get off there, get some dinner so nobody looks at it too weirdly, and catch another bus for a night trip. 

It’ll take two days to reach the first crash site that’s near it. A small town with a population of 10,000 people, most of whom had seen the meteor crash into an open field just to the west of the market, where the children would usually play in the daytime. It had been the dead of night for them, when it happened, and those who had run out of their houses after witnessing the crash had found the field unscathed and empty. The only evidence their town had for their claim to see the crash was their meteor dreamers, and those who had been unfortunate enough to be visually impaired by the bright light. 

It was a tourist town, these days, with its economy slowly ticking up the more people were also able to get back on their feet and visit the crash site, which they had now marked with a metal sign. No one would bat an eyelash at a young man travelling to see it. It would simply be another tourist to guide around and entertain, and the creature finds itself shaking its head in disappointment at the fact that the humans would never know exactly how significant that field is. 

If there had been no impact, that would be because that part of the creature, at the time had no body. No body meant it had to find one, and it had crashed into the field, so it was likely buried into the soil, maybe some of the things that were crawling around in the soil, or in the trees. That wasn’t any problem. All the creature had to do was find it and call for it.

It arrives at the bus stop hours and hours later, eats dinner mechanically, and gets on the next bus that’s scheduled to leave. 

It’ll get the rest of its being back. It’s always been able to before, and nothing will change now. It’ll put itself back together, and once it does, it is going to gorge on its bloodlust on all the others it was born into this universe with. 

But for now, it will travel and be unassuming. It will find its goals, one and one, waiting for the moment to strike.

As it finally arrives at its destination and lets itself be dragged away into a tour that it signs up for at the very entrance of the crash-site-now-turned-tourist-post, it smiles as it feels the hum of power underneath its shoes, a part of itself singing and thrumming underneath the earth. How lucky of it, that the impact had pushed it further beyond the grass, which could have been blown away at any time, carried away by the wind. How lucky of it, that there was power hidden under the mud. 

“This area has been very fertile since the Meteor Event,” the guide says, motioning to the open field, her voice filled with that forced eagerness that most tour guides had to muster up every day. “Of course, the mayor has been insistent that the field be left untouched and preserved in its natural state, after we found this out.”

“Ah,” the creature says, pretending to drop a notebook it had been holding. It’s blank, of course, nothing written in it, despite the fact that it’d been pretending to take notes earlier. 

“Sorry,” it mumbles to the guy beside it, and splays a hand out on the ground. Underneath the earth, it feels the buried part of itself surging up, almost overjoyed to be reunited with the rest of it.

Nobody bats an eye, even as it stands, feeling just a little larger now, a little more cramped in the human body it inhabits. No one notices, that as the group leaves and the young man makes his way to the hotel to check the next bus scheduled to leave this city, that the grass in the field appears to have gotten a little deader. 

-

It has a list of places to go to and a number of pages bookmarked in the laptop it carries around with it. There’s nothing it can’t learn once it spends a little time working past its frustrations, after all, and it’s gotten the hang of some of the electronics the young man has at hand. It keeps a trusty notebook with it at all times, several maps, and a handful of pens that it uses to cross out visited destinations.

Nobody suspects a thing, exactly as planned, and why should they, really? These humans don’t know anything about the world outside of their own, and they’re pathetic enough to lapse back into primitive ways once all of their advancements crumble, too reliant on steel and glass and money to the point of brittleness. The universe, to them, is just starting out, when the creature looks up and knows that the dust between planets is debris from wars fought long ago. 

Pitiful little things. 

Not that it’s any of its concern. Its goals haven’t changed, even after months and months of travelling. It’s a little hard to maintain the appearance of a regular human being, at times, when it has to be mindful of making sure it’s presentable enough to not gain any attention, has to clean and care for the body in the way the humans of these times deem acceptable, and keep its manners about itself so no one makes a note of remembering it for its rudeness. 

It’s exhausting. It’s irritating. The sooner it finishes with its quest, the better.

The young man’s mind has been silent, in the past three months. There’s only so much space inside a human body for souls, after all, and with the creature picking pieces of itself back and slotting them into place, it’s gotten a lot more cramped inside. It can fold itself into humans, sure. It’s done so plenty of times. The humans never had a good time, though, pressed to the walls of their skin so tightly not even their thoughts could breathe. 

Oh, well. It’s not like it can do anything about it. 

Its next destination is a seaside town. The town has no tourist spots, but there has been witness reports of a meteor crashing into the ocean, evidenced by the meteor dreamers in its population. Understandable, given that it’s a little hard to make a tourist spot out of the middle of the ocean, especially when a good chunk of the citizens are fishermen, and need the space to be able to make a living. 

It asks around the town, posing as a student - there were forums online of medical students visiting this town for either research purposes, or their universities coordinating seminars in the area - smiling and asking questions and dutifully taking down notes as the town’s citizens answer it questions. The people around here get enough new faces asking about the Meteor Event, anyway, and the creature has done its research, making sure to time its visit with the usual season for students to visit the town. 

There’s a good chunk of professors and doctors who actually live here and do research as work, it turns out, observing if there’s been any impact on the wildlife from the meteors (as some places have reported soil fertility on the impact sites), or calling for volunteers among some of the meteor dreamers for interviews. The creature asks a few of them, as well the citizens of the town, as to where the crash site is, and they happily point it out. Even if the location isn’t dead accurate, instead just the general area, that’s all the creature needs. It can just feel if a part of it is close, anyway.

It spends a few days reading up on how to operate speedboats, hangs around the port with a hood up and some sunglasses and with clothes too big for it that it later discards and never wears again,then steals a boat in the dead of night. It drives it (after a few failed tries) to the spot where the townspeople had pointed it to, a little expanse of sea right several meters away from a cave. 

It stops the boat right there, looks over to the water, and frowns. It had asked a lot of people, again and again and again, and this spot had been their consensus. A few meters away from the mouth of the cave. That’s where the meteor had crashed. Fishermen saw it crash and had remembered exactly how it had gone.

And yet - 

And yet the creature feels nothing. It doesn’t feel anything in the water, nothing is stirring and calling out to it, a part waiting to be fixed back into the whole.

It frowns. The sea is large, but it’s ever-moving, always crashing onto the shore, with so much dwelling in it that also constantly moves about, migrates, or perhaps dies at the hands of a fisherman just wanting to bring food to the table. 

“Of course,” it says, leaning back into the boat and frowning. Of course. How did it not take that into account?

Even if it were to become one with water, if the water were to move about, it would still be spread out all over the place. If it were to be one with the life in the sea, there was no telling where those things would end up, not to mention there’s so much in the water that it’s probably been separated, piece by piece by piece, every fucking plankton and algae and krill moving around and about with a part of the creature just living it their bodies. The earth was easier, in that it was often stationary. The creature could lose a few pieces to a few worms and ants here and there, but if part of it got stuck in rock and dirt, unless those rocks and dirt moved, it could just find it. 

Here - 

“Fuck the ocean,” it says. It stays in the boat, staring up at the clear night sky. The townsfolk here have taken to turning off all their lights past midnight, just for the stars, and the view of the milky way just stretching out across the dark is gorgeous. 

It looks like home. 

The creature angrily gets up. It’s gonna have to cross off all seaside destinations.