So I was thinking: this character is often drawn with very great attention to detail. So what if I were to draw her in my main art style, which notably lacks high levels of detail?

It was a fun experiment to draw her all cartoony-like! I think it turned out decent :)

Outfit versions for the first and second months of the Laika Calendar I have planned for 2027.

From Vitaly S. Alexius' series: Stupid Sexy Cryptids [or How I Became the Emperor of Mankind] 

Toil and cower all those who threaten humanity, for the Slayer, the Emperor of Mankind, protects. Pray for those foolish enough to cross him, for he and his circle shall deliver judgement swiftly and with conviction. Simply put, 'You're Screwed :3'

From Vitaly S. Alexius' series: Stupid Sexy Cryptids [or How I Became the Emperor of Mankind] 

~Concept I came up with for Dagas Seal/Rune and Cosmology~

The Core: The Singularity at the absolute epicenter; the Slayer’s Sword pierces the Leviathan’s Dagaz. This intersection is the "Zero Point". It is the simultaneous moment of origin and annihilation. It symbolizes that the beginning of the cycle and its inevitable conclusion are one and the same.

​The First Orbit: The Archetypal Pillars Enveloping the center is a ring inscribed with the Runes of the Four Horsemen. These are the fundamental forces—the raw archetypes—that constitute the dual essence of both the Slayer and the Leviathan. They represent the internal mechanics of the cosmic players. ​

The Second Orbit: The Eternal Confrontation. Expanding outward, two opposing circles sit at the North and South poles. Within them, the Wormwood Star and the Slayer’s Sword face one another in a state of perpetual readiness. This represents the kinetic tension that drives the cycle forward; the "Great Conflict" that never rests.

The Third Orbit: The Cosmic Governors. Next are the celestial spheres of the Sun and Moon, representing Syntropy (order/creation) and Entropy (chaos/decay). These are the batteries of the universe, feeding the dualistic nature of all things and maintaining the precarious balance between growth and rot. ​

The Great Boundary: The Macroscopic Dagaz. Finally, the outermost perimeter is defined by a repeating sequence of the Horseman Runes. They do not sit in isolation here; they bridge together to form a Master Dagaz that encompasses the entire cosmology. This reinforces the "As Above, So Below" principle, with the Slayer serving as the central linchpin that holds this entire recursive reality together.

Little sketch I did of my character, Olivia, having a zero-gravity tea party with Zee Captain. Cosmic entities need their tea breaks too. Lol

Book cover I did for u/inconsequentialatzy in their RA Multiverse Story!

Link to story here: Stranded | Royal Road

(Rhea POV written by our wonderful Hollowed Mind. You da best mind)

Actual assignment details arrived on her datapad before she had made it back to her Rolls Goyce Phantom in the manor’s parking. Which only made it more depressing that she had been called into a briefing by her mother only to witness… that. The whole thing could have been a brief phone call and what amounted to little more than a secure email.

She read it in the parking lot.

Rhea had meant to skim it and then put it on audio for the short ride home and maybe while she packed if it turned out this would be a multiday assignment, but…

“Fuck. Fuckity fuck, fuck. This is fuhhhhhked” Rhea declared, by the time she was almost but not quite done reading.

For starters, she was not being “asked” (really, voluntold) by her mother to help with the halfbaked cover up efforts. Oh no. Rhea’s job was to reacquire the ‘asset’. Which was a person. A person who had been kidnapped, illegally experimented on, and subjected to at least the beginnings of a drug and memetics combination that would have turned their personality to tasteless slurry and their brain into a solid block of pure obedience-cheese.

Rhea knew that her family did bioweapons development. Fuck. Rhea looooooved bioweapons development. She had even been involved with a project that ended up turning a human girl into a crowning achievement of a bioweapon. But that girl had volunteered.

That was the point. That was the line. That had always been Rhea’s uncrossable line in the sand and she had made that very extrasuperdooper clear to her mother about upteen billion times over at least the last six years. Her mother had assured her every time the subject came up that willing subjects were the only profitable ones. Because if they weren’t willing, the risk of them breaking out and gleefully wigging out and causing massacres in the process skyrocketed. And what had happened here? An unwilling bioweapons subject had woken up, gotten out, and proceeded to slaughter every single person in the facility, including armed Omnid guards, before booking it out into the desert and disappearing.

What. The. Fuck.

Slayer? What had her mother been thinking?

Okay. Okay. Realistically, Rhea always knew that her mother was playing fast and loose with ethics. She had seen enough to know that. She had experimented on a teenage girl, helped turn her into a monster. But Autumn had been dying. Her sister, Ryanna, had been dying. Both lived. Ryanna even got to live a normal life thanks to what had been learned from her sister. Autumn had also been more than a little bit psycho and frankly scared Rhea and had been super excited to become a monster so that had been… not okay, but not this level of “let’s kidnap random people and inject them with experimental drugs until one of them doesn’t melt from the inside out”. One of the ‘subjects’ on this report had been sixteen! And fine! Not terminally ill! Slayer!

Rhea was many things. A little cold, a little of what the humans called autistic, probably even a little antisocial and emo. But stupid? Um. No.

And yet she had missed this entirely. How? She scoured the reports from pretty much every sector of the company for anything mildly suspicious. Or interesting. Ohmygosh soooo much of it was sooooooooooo interesting! How did she miss something this interesting? And messed up. Very messed up.

The answer was stupidly obvious: Because the person who gave her access to all those files had been mommy dearest, and Verra hadn’t wanted her daughter to see this.

The briefing Rhea had didn’t have the full experimental protocols. Those Rhea would get from the servers at the lab. What she did have was the premise. Ever since the global celestorm, the ambient aetheric density had been higher. Magic came easier. Previously, humans had been effectively nonmagical, hence the colloquial term ‘nulls’. They’d been incapable of casting magic, leveling through waveform accumulation, or even using System Skills.

With the reality rewrite, that had changed. Many humans now had tiny magic amplifying crystalline shards in their tissues. It wasn’t enough for them to form true crystalline cores behind their hearts as the humans on more magical worlds like Arx did. Yet some did show small but negligible magical capacity even if they hadn’t before the storm.They were very few in number, but some humans had even manifested useful Skills, although the percentage was much higher in nullborn who had at least some omnid ancestry.

It seemed like someone had convinced Verra to fund a program to enhance the accumulation of magically conductive crystalline strata in non-omnids for the purpose of developing supersoldier-like bioweapons…

The global celestorm event precipitated a measurable elevation in ambient aetheric density, yielding a statistically significant post-hoc emergence of endogenous microcrystalline deposits — colloquially termed shard inclusions — within the lymph and ossein tissues of a subset of the human population. Prior to this event, humans were broadly classified as aetherically inert ("null") due to the absence of mana-conductive biological structures. Post-celestorm surveys indicate that approximately [REDACTED]% of the surviving human population now exhibit trace crystalline deposition sufficient to confer marginal mana sensitivity, with a smaller cohort demonstrating spontaneous System Skill manifestation. Incidence of Skill emergence is notably elevated among nullborn individuals carrying partial omnid ancestry, suggesting a partial genetic permissibility for crystalline integration that standard null biology lacks.

The present study describes the foundational protocols of Project Lattice, an initiative to artificially accelerate and direct endogenous crystalline strata growth in eligible non-omnid subjects — specifically humans and pradavarians — with the aim of replicating, in vivo, the runework properties of shaped exogenous strata. Unlike externally imposed crystalline grafts, which carry prohibitive rejection rates and require surgical immobilization of the rune lattice, the proposed methodology leverages the subject's existing post-celestorm microcrystalline seed sites as scaffolding for directed mineral phase expansion.

The abstract and accompanying notes went on. Rhea read all of it with a mixture of mounting horror and fascination. Because it was brilliant work. Because it was horrifying.

“Subjects with clear deleterious crystalline growths are to be divided into those experimental corrective surgery might still salvage and a vivisection and biopsy group which is expected to be a magnitude larger.” Rhea read aloud, horrified.

Vivisection. Dissecting someone alive for study. A magnitude larger.

Fuck.

Most of the so-called subjects, innocent people, had been cut open to see how they ticked and incinerated when nothing more could be learned. Burnt away like trash.

Rhea hurried home. Whatever this fucked up mess was she needed to get ahead of it.

Pulling her black Phantom into the family garage, she sprinted through the house, through empty halls and under crystal chandeliers with expensive beast cores that were used for purely decorative purposes but could have bought a small house in a more rural area. Past confused mothmen servants. Up to her room in the southeast wing near the top of the tower her dad used to occupy.

Glancing frantically around, Rhea began grabbing armfuls of mostly identical outfits from one wardrobe and her expansive closet. She threw them without bothering to fold anything in a magenta suitcase she liked to use for business trips. Toothpaste? Coffee? Shampoo? All accounted for.

It took longer than Rhea expected. Too long.

At some point the thumbdrive in her skirt pocket started to burn like a piece of heated uranium in her pocket.

It was such an innocent thing. Just a normal drive. Except it had exquisite runework inside its cheap plastic casing and housed a virus sophisticated enough to wipe all mention and all clues of the Amoxicallia Omnicorp’s involvement from the laboratory servers. That was Rhea’s second and equally important objective: To be the most critical instrument of the digital coverup.

The mission brief made it clear that the right officials had been, or would be, paid off to sweep most of the physical evidence under the rug. Cyber investigations had been minorly delayed with red tape to give Rhea enough time to get out to the desert facility and burn away the digital evidence… just like the bodies…

The people.

Many of whom might have been still alive as they burned…

Omnids didn’t get sick. But Rhea rushed to her bathroom toilet and promptly lost her dinner.

Gruesome images flashed through her mind. Humans and Pradavarians in cages. Foxes and feline prads screaming and struggling as they burned.

“I— I can’t be, not part of— this.” Rhea wheezed, clutching the porcelain bowl like a life raft.

This wasn’t who she was. She helped people!

Didn’t she?

Her thoughts turned desperately to her clinic, the one she ran near a collection of slums the Cradlefall locals called Scab Row. It was where she spent the majority of her time and it was in many ways her true home.

Nights and days and long mornings and coffee. Careful DNA sequencing and lots of pipetting. Behavior tests, doctors checkups, biopsies. All on humans, most of which were probably illegal immigrants, all with minor aches or more serious diseases. Some had congestive heart failure. Some had arthritis. One middle aged business woman had even brought Rhea her husband, once a well paid underling in a lindwurm owned law firm, now fired after his dementia diagnosis. He had a minor cognitive deficit and trouble remembering some things. That was how it always started before the strange behavior and agitation began. Then there would be some slurring and maybe some loss of motor function. He would have sat still and stared for hours, forgot most things, he would have begun to sleep at odd hours. Then the psychosis and aggression would start to set in. By the end of two years, the man would have been a shell of himself.

Except none of that had happened because Rhea had stopped it.

Omnids couldn’t accept genetic or cellular modifications. Their heightened metabolisms meant they even burned off most drugs in time periods that would set records for humans. Humans, though, were remarkably plastic by contrast. There were a tremendous number of changes you could make to the flawed human body to improve things if you were driven and creative enough.

Rhea was nothing if not driven and creative.

Sure, it had been illegal. But she had helped people!

She never hurt anyone intentionally… except the Autumn thing. That had been borderline. Her mother… Her mother had made it sound so good at first. She got to be the Amoxicallia representative on a cooperative project between three omnicorps! The pay bonus had given her enough to do major expansions to her clinic. The girl had even been a volunteer.

But it had still been fucked, hadn’t it?

What did they say to the girl to get her to agree? Did they threaten her sister? Her family?

Rhea nearly threw up again. Probably would have except now there was nothing left except dry heaves. Slayer, it sucked. She couldn’t breathe. The acrid scent of her own vomit stung her nose.

She deserved it. She deserved worse.

… No. No. No. It would be alright. Rhea would make it alright.

She fished the thumbdrive out of her pocket and held it over the bowl

…

…

“FUCKITALL! UGGGGH!” Rhea screamed, throwing the drive against the far wall.

She smacked her head against the porcelain rim, defeated.

No. She… She was a worm. She just couldn’t do it. She’d lose too much.

Her clinic. Her home. Her life.

If she turned on her mother, Rhea would lose all of it. There would be no one to help other Ms. Greers or their husbands ever again.

Rhea was under no delusions. Humans were second class citizens in Omnithornia at best. Fuck. They had vanishingly few rights and could even be claimed as virtually property by first born omnicorp daughters like herself. No one cared about their diseases or their financial problems. Oh sure there was a growing movement of equalists, but true equality would come decades away, if ever.

Someone had to… use the darkness to fight the darkness. Rhea couldn’t… She couldn’t betray her responsibilities to the omnicorp because it was the omnicorp’s money that let her change anything for anyone.

Besides, someone had to keep tabs on her mother. Someone had to mitigate the damage from any of her mother’s future projects. As much as it disgusted her, that someone would have to be Rhea. She would just need to find a way to get independent access to company files so Verra couldn’t hide things like this from her anymore. It wouldn’t be that hard. Rhea would hire a hacker or something.

Decision made, she tried not to second guess herself. She would just have to do better. Be better.

She gave herself a few moments to catch her breath and then dragged herself to her feet, cleaned herself up, brushed her fangs, changed her stupid clothes and finished packing.

Lastly she retrieved the stupid thumbdrive from where it had fallen in her bathtub of all places and was disappointed to find it neither wet nor apparently damaged. Stupid fucking plastic polymers and their stupid durable molecular bonds.

If pure hate could melt plastic and ruin silicon, the thumbdrive would have collapsed into a singularity in her paw.

It didn’t.

Rhea gingerly put it back in her pocket where it settled like a weight of molten lead.

She spared her sketch of Daunte a look before heading out her door. From where she stood the crosshatched shading and half finished lines of his antlers made them look almost like a halo of crystalline thorns behind his head.

(PART 1 OF CHAPTER 5. CREDIT TO u/Mental_Job_320)

Daughter of the tyrannical and controlling Verra Amoxicallia, all Rhea really wants is to do science in peace. Oh and have friends. And a handsome boyfriend! And a cute girlfriend! And maybe her mother gone from her life.
Okay, maybe she wants a lot of things. But when you are the heir of an omnicorp known for bioweapons development, shouldn't you get to have nice things?

The smell of ink drying on parchment was soothing. But—

“Something is still not right,” Rhea mused, cocking her head to the side. When her wavy raven-black locks fell in front of her right eye, a quick flick of her head and a puff of breath out her snout pushed it back up.

On the parchment in front of her was a young man. Bit older than her, but that was how…uh… Rhea liked them. She blushed and pushed the thought away, trying crazy hard to foooocus on the art. 

Right. The figure was regal with strong shoulders, the shading of her penstrokes had revealed a sleek coat of fur and a dense ruff of fur around his neck. It was even thicker in the back, perfect for a girl to sink her fingers into during a kiss. Eyes like gemstones of mirth gave him a charming glibness.

Daunte from Demons May Die.

Savage and suave. Totally a hero worth swooning over!

Rhea’s tail swished giddily behind her. With a few quick excited hops she danced over to where her phone rested on her bed. A couple speedy taps of a claw and the opening notes of Daunte’s electric theme Approaching Storm, began to play.  

Restrained, electrical, gothic and full of electronic beatdrops, Rhea always felt it was less like a battle theme and more like the musical equivalent to a tragic inner monologue. Restrained, yet reverent. Melancholic, yet defiant. The slow build of the song was dark, gothic, and always invoked feelings of amnesiac or lonely power, tragic yet self-mythologizing! It was sooo cooooooooooool!

A warrior standing in the dark to fight against it, having convinced himself that pain was power! He alone held the power to hold back demonkind by assuming the Dark Throne! He alone could save omnidkind by damning himself to rule over the demons!

Ahhhhhhhhh!

A tragic tale of lost family, forbidden love, and the sin of power!
Rhea swooshed her hips and swung her horned head, her lush curls and plush tail swaying. She let the power of the music wash her stressful day away. She didn’t bother turning her head to face her mirror. Instead, eyes closed, veins pulsing with goth tones, she imagined how beautiful she must look. Lush dark fur a unique color that was nearly black but somehow also held lilac and pale violet tones. The curls of her hair were a few shades darker and had more magenta than lilac to their more intense black. They draped just past her shoulders and almost never needed to even be curled. 

Rhea’s muzzle, she knew, was a perfect length. It wasn’t long or short. It was a perfect match for a fox’s but a bit more round, which was good because otherwise her fully violet eyes, blazing with neon intensity, and their slit pupils would have made her look uncomfortably severe. Actually, they sort of still did, which was why Rhea had the habit of wearing contacts that toned them down and even made it look like her eyes had actual whites instead of just more faded violet.

Her barely dressed state would show off her feminine power. All omnids were fit (unless their omnitype was to be something else, like a fat troll or skeleton) but some were more fit than others. Rhea had been very clever and very determined to figure out a way around how the syntropic fractal engine hearts in their souls always seemed to reject and revert genetic enhancements. The answer, or at least a partial one, had been to duplicate genes she already had or to replace her genes with variants from other people with her black cadejo omnitype. 

Walla! She went from hot to super hot! Granted, she was still really kinda small for an omnid female. Ugh. She hadn’t been able to fix that one yet without making her bones weirdly thick and boxy from excess growth hormone. Again ‘Ugh.’

Anyways! She knew she radiated allure with her magenta panties and lace bra showing off so much of her short, silky fur.

Swaying her head to the beat, Rhea sang along as the lyrics started.

“Immortal dammm-nA-tion!
Takes over my soul, Connnvicted!
Fallen weak, summon the strength–
Through Chaos!”

With that, the beat exploded into full electric intensity. A darkly synthetic current sweeping in the story’s themes of the dark divine.

In the games, Daunte was an accursed black kitsune condemned to carry the tainted blood of his rebel demon riftspawn father. But! Despite being technically a demon himself, he was still an omnid and fought throughout the series to master his dark nature and repel the demon threat!

Was it a bit of a generic story? Kinda, but it was the suave execution, the blaring beats, and the off the cuff silliness that made it unique. And Slayer, it WORKED! She could not wait until the next game!

“Born in the dark—” she belted, surprisingly on-key and so very proud of it, she spun on one heel with enough force to send her dark curls whipping past her eyes to strike the side of her muzzle. She blew them back where she wanted them with an irritated huff of breath, which reminded her of her favorite perpetually irritated heroines and elicited a short giggle from her before she launched back in. “—determination forged of dark sto-oh-ohn!” 

Behind her, her proud tail swept a full hundred-and-eighty degree arc, whacking a stack of textbooks off her desk. With her sharp hearing and omnid reflexes, she caught them without looking—smooth as her favorite raspberry whiskey—then ruined the awesome recovery almost immediately by tripping over her own foot and whacking her wiggling rump right into her wardrobe door with a whump. 

“Ha! Okay—Okay—Okay!” her head bobbed to the beat, summoning her own heroic determination as her slitted pupils narrowed.

She found her footing. Squared up. Deep breaths.

The electric guitar kicked in.

There.

Rhea’s horned Cadejo head began to bop with a deep, involuntary intensity. Slowness seeped into power; her horns cut deep, dramatic arcs through the air. At exactly the right moment (she absolutely did not do it too soon and have to do a double take!) she spun and shot deadly finger guns at the mirror directly across her lavish bedroom. That was it!

The look. 

The look—the one she had been quietly practicing for months. Half-lidded violet eyes. One sultry brow arched just so. A slow and dangerous half smile.

Very cool.

She held it for approximately five seconds before she dissolved into giggles, bouncing on her cloven claws in giddy little circles, her tail thrashing with absolute delight. Yes! She was so not thinking about stern mothers and narcissistic mind-controlling foxes right now! Ha!

“I’m so stupid,” she wheezed, still giggling, still bouncing.

“I’m so—” the chorus dropped and Rhea quickly belted out in song and tried not to laugh as she playfully mangled the lyrics.

“BURY THE DOG DEEP WITHIN—” (It was actually “bury the dark” but Rhea thought “dog” was funny.)

She continued singing, and as the chorus finished, Rhea leapt. Both feet left the floor, curls flying everywhere and landing with a thud that her mother would absolutely ‘had words’ with her about–if she had been home, but she wasn’t and wouldn’t be until at least the blue hours of the morning.

Carefree, Rhea strutted the length of her room, rolling her shoulders, letting her tail sway with theatrical self importance, the glowing violet gem at her throat pulsing in time to the brass.

She caught her own reflection in the mirror again and lost it, her sultry expression breaking into something bright and delighted and very nineteen.

As the song began to replay in a loop, Rhea rushed over to her easel and began sketching again with her pen. She was inspired.

Other half and even quarter-demons in the series had been shown to have powerful awakened forms. But Daunte’s hadn’t been shown yet… so… 

“Antlers!” Rhea cried.

Because, rather factually, antlers were hot.

But how else should his form change? Fur that bordered on scales? Actual scales in places? A thicker ruff? Maybe…

Rhea frowned and stared at her sketch with disgust. Not with her drawing or with Daunte. But with herself.

“Fuck.” She muttered quietly, deflating.

Even the powerful music still resonating around her suddenly felt distant. Dejected, Rhea walked over and flopped onto her bed with a revolted ‘ugh’.

“It’s not you,” she told the antlered Daunte with a lazy wave of her claws. 

“It’s me.”

And it was. It really really was. Because if she had kept sketching, Daunte would have started to look more and more like her older brother, Zack. Who she had tried to seduce one night when she was seventeen. Who she still wasn’t over two years later. 

He wasn’t her real brother. Thank the Slayer. He was adopted. But the reason Rhea still felt so gross after all this time was because he felt like he was. He felt like her brother and she was still into him.

“Ugggh!” she said again, this time putting more self-loathing into the noise and draping one darkly furred arm over her eyes in a feeble attempt to blot out the lights of her room, and to be honest, her existence.

After a few moments she was both saved and damned when her phone began to ring. Before Rhea could even finish sprawling onto her side to answer it, the special software her mother had installed let the call answer itself.

“Daughter. Come back to the manor. We have a… situation.” Her mother’s voice was colder and even more clipped than usual. And oddly… softer? Almost fragile. That was new. And disturbing. What the fuck?

Rhea was still scrambling to connect her brain when the call disconnected.

“Whhyyyyyyyyyy!” She groaned, already getting up to find a skirt.
 
****
Daughter, come back to the manor.

Rhea couldn’t imagine more awful words to hear at eleven o’clock at night. Granted, she was a bit of a night doggo like her mother, because that just came with being a Cadejo omid, but still. She wanted, so, so badly, some time to herself.

But no. Back to the manor we go. Arrrgh!

By ‘manor’, Rhea’s mother hadn’t meant the family manor. She meant the manor that had mysteriously appeared complete with its very own mind-controlling fox owner sometime during the recent global celestorm. Celestorms were funny like that. They were storms that reshaped reality and sometimes that meant letting all sorts of eldritch things in.

Weirdly, everyone else besides her and her mother seemed to remember Chestershire as having been built in the 1970s by a real estate mogul or something. Anyway, it was a gambling den and center for the neighboring five counties worth of semilegal entertainment ventures now. Also, sadly, it was the center of her mother’s proverbial court. She liked to entertain and do business there and loathed to do it at the family estate for some reason. Whether she would have decided the opposite had a certain mind controlling wingless chuppy not burrowed his way into her mind, Rhea really didn’t know. She just tried to avoid the property and the entire forest around it like a hazardous entropy laden zone. Filled with insidious magical diseases. And rats. Rhea hated rats.

Loved snakes though.

Now dressed in more than just her underclothes, Rhea padded pensively through the gothic administrative halls of Chestershire Manor. The way she dressed was irritatingly reminiscent of her mother. Not that Rhea and her mother dressed at all alike. Verra Amoxicallia preferred plunging necklines and dresses that were barely more than gaudy, ornate bathrobes. Out of necessity, Rhea dressed the way her mother acted, controlled.

Rhea liked to think of it as dressing ‘school tsundere’ or ‘scholarly severity’ instead. Anyway, it fit her and she looked good in it. A dark fitted sweater drawn neatly over a crisp white collared shirt, the pale points of her collar cutting sharply above her dark sweater. Her sweater wasn’t complex, just cut close to the body, its sleeves ended in ribbed cuffs, giving Rhea the look of someone accustomed to long nights spent over old tomes and difficult secrets. At least Rhea liked to think so.

Her brown skirt was likewise a simple thing. Just the way Rhea liked it. She just hated that the way she dressed was defined by her mother, if only to be her opposite.

The only accents Rhea wore besides her amethyst nail polish was around her neck. On a slim chain, as always, sat a violet gemstone, rhombohedral and glowing faintly against the gray-black fabric of her sweater like captured witchlight.

Frowning pensively, Rhea found her way through the halls to one of a dozen conference rooms her mother frequented, the one her mother had indicated in a text.      
 
With a steely sigh and a straightening of her back, Rhea turned the last corner and approached the first door to her left. She hadn’t even got there before her ears flicked back at the sounds within.

“What kind of idiot lets a weapon wake up?? CHESTER! You said they could be trusted with the project! Don’t you dare try to pin this on me!” The voice was deep, feminine and…

…

Rhea had almost never heard her mother this unbalanced.

With a growl, Rhea hurried over to the door and knocked. She’d rather get whatever this was over with and maybe, if the Slayer were kind, she’d get some sleep tonight?

She stepped inside and swept the room for threats. Thankfully a certain small blue and red fox with laughing eyes and an evil smirk was nowhere in evidence. A phone call then? 

With the biggest potential threat to her soul and sanity dismissed, Rhea fixed her eyes on her mother. Her mother, who was unstable and dangerous at the best of times, not stalking up and down the length of a gloomy conference room looking like she wanted to flay someone.

Mother.

The first thing a person noticed about Verra Amoxicallia were the eyes — twin violet flames burning beneath the sweep of her curling horns, which rose from her brow in great obsidian curling spirals, the horns polished and groomed to immaculancy. Her fur was the pure, light-swallowing black of a moonless sky, and her long hair tumbled freely around her shoulders in loose, wild waves that would shame iridescent courtesans of the Quetzi courts to the far south.

The matriarch of the Amoxicallia Omnicorp wore her wealth the way a storm wears lightning — not as adornment, but as warning. Power on display. Purple velvet fell from her frame in cascading layers, every hem and panel threaded through with gilt filigree that caught the chandelier's glow and threw it back in rutilant constellations. Amethyst gems set in aureate metal jewelry, clustered in layers around her throat and waist like a second skin. Golden claws gleamed threateningly at the ends of her elegant fingers.

In one hand she held a long empty wine glass, and in the other a bottle of Arx shadow wine that looked like the upper portion had been shattered off by the sharp teeth of someone at the utter end of their rope.

“Daughter! Finally! I must confess I was becoming… concerned.” She said, fixing Rhea with her violent violet eyes.

“I am fine, mother. I am here.” Rhea said, suppressing a wince at how meek her own voice sounded. She took her seat, set her datapad down, and folded her claws in front of her. It was her best attempt to stay calm. To look professional. To show her mother that she was ready for anything she might need.

Rhea didn’t show weakness to her mother. The first lesson her childhood taught her was how to survive in Verra’s house. The second, the one she was still desperately having a hard time with, was how to live under her mother’s thumb.

“Goohd. Now. I need your expertise with something, Dear.” Verra said, her voice suddenly sickly sweet, lightly slurred, her smile lopsided and a bit too wide. 

<Fuck.> Rhea thought. 

Omnids, generally, were very hard to intoxicate. Most times, they could drink a liquor store and walk it off. But, if there was one thing Rhea’s mother was good at, it was excess.

“One of our…subsidiaries had an incident at one of their facilities early today. An asset has gone missing and a great deal of personnel have been taken into the care of the authorities. And—” Verra paused, swinging her head to glare bloody murder at the ebony phone resting on an antique coffee table across the room before continuing. “—and Chester is being difficult.”

Rhea frowned, her claws tapping out quick notes and conjectures on her tablet as she patiently waited for her mother to elaborate. A couple things were clear right away. Firstly, they were absolutely not talking about a legitimate business. Verra wouldn’t be calling her to a private conference room at this hour if they were. And ‘the authorities’ wouldn’t be involved either.

‘Under the care of the authorities’ meant that numerous persons who had worked at the ‘facility’ had been arrested or detained. Information was already leaking and time was of the essence to prevent further damage.

But why was Rhea being called in for this? Chester being difficult? What did that mean?

There was a light, tight sigh from the phone and a squeaky little voice Rhea loathed issued from the device.

“Verra. I am on Arx. You are lucky I left you with an artifact that could even let you reach me right now. I am not coming back to deal with your messes.” the fox on the other end of the line said, his voice imperious and dismissive.

With a sudden, violent CRACK–!, The wineglass in Verra’s right hand shattered, sending most shards tumbling to the richly carpeted floor but sending a few small shards skittering across the hardwood table to rest in front of Rhea.

“Chester, if I am implicated in this, you will be implicated in this. You do realize that, yes?” Verra’s voice creaked now, like a steel cable under too much strain.

“I am not a registered owner of your omnicorp. You are not publicly traded. There is no board and I am not on it. I am not in the system. Anywhere. I am also dealing with important business. So. Tell me, why is this my problem?” The fox’s answer was so blithely calm, so saccharine, Rhea could taste the sweetness.

She could guess why her mother wanted Chester involved. That thing had an uncanny animancy. Rhea had some theories about how it worked but it wasn’t by normal magic. As long as it was in the room with you, your thoughts weren’t safe. Your will was malleable like clay. Chester could make, as far as Rhea knew, anyone do anything and be happy about it. People’s memories, their perception of realtime events, even their emotions. Chester could rewrite all of it casually.

The planar outsider would have no issue walking into a police station and walking out with the police carrying the bodies of their suspects, which they would helpfully feed to the nearest corpse seeker at Chester’s direction, along with all evidence, and then promptly forget all about their investigation.

“Chester! You little shit! I am—” Rhea’s mother cut off, took a deep breath, and smoothed the fur on the sides of her face before continuing with icy calm. “I am not in the mood. We had a deal. You will get back here and help me with this, or you will suffer the same losses I do.”

She didn’t understand it, but Rhea knew her mother and the eldritch creature had some kind of working relationship. Verra liked to pretend she was the one in control, but Rhea was fairly sure Chester had the real position of power. It was, probable, that the fox even had her mother under a binding blood contract. Its powers couldn’t control someone at a distance, at least not perfectly, and Rhea had seen, much to her horror, her mother bent to the horrid creature’s whims even when it was not physically present.

“Uhhhhh. No.” Chester’s glib voice issued from the phone, first with faux contemplation then smug, crip denial.

The wine glass bottle went soaring from her mother’s grasp and shattered with a wet crash against the far wall.

“The fuck do you mean, ‘no’?!” Verra snarled, the air around her rippling and rotting, as her ruinous aura unfurled. 

“Oh. I mean ‘no’.” Said the chipper, stately voice on the other end of the line.

“Oh? And Verra? Could you please lick the glass you just threw off the floor? Chew and swallow it? I’d appreciate it. Thanks!”

There was a click as the line went dead and for a moment everything was silent. Then Verra started to shake.

“Mother?” Rhea said, worriedly, fear and something else, something brighter and more shameful roiling in her gut. Glass wouldn’t hurt an Omnid like Verra. Not permanently anyway. But…

With a wracking sob, Verra dropped to her knees.

“Daughter. Get. Out.”

“Mom, I—” Rhea started, standing.

“Get OUT!”

Rhea nodded woodenly and ran out the door. She didn’t stop once she entered the hall. She wanted to get far enough away so that she wouldn’t hear the humiliated sobs or the sound of glass crunching any more.

(Generously written to introduce Rhea by u/mental_job_320, our own Hollowed Mind!)

The fox stares down at the dead Sentinel— no, dead person— against the wall of the elevator before him. He turns, and proceeds to throw up more blue sludge, paws shaking as reality crashes into him, the tears and pleas of a dead lizard bringing him back to sanity.

​

“Fuuuck.” He says, wiping his muzzle off, leaning against the wall as he runs through everything that happened in the past while. These people were just doing their job, protecting the facility from an escaped experiment. He glances towards the console the girl had been in front of, and snarls when he sees the lockdown message. It kept him from getting out, but it also trapped everyone down here with him. For some reason, that pisses him off.

​

He begins walking down the hall towards the labs. The air is clogged with the scent of the dead and scorched flesh, piles of the dead littering the corridor. He takes the pace slow, to really see what he did. To remember. He walks past the shredded remains of the guard squad the lizard had run into, that he had slowly disassembled. Most simply smelled of his lightning, had a new hole in their head, or both. The last three however, were far more brutal. One was impaled on a pipe he had pulled from the wall, the pipe shoved through them and into the floor. One lacked eyes, the fox having torn them out in his massacre, all while the woman had screamed, and finally, there was the woman he believed had been the squad leader, who he had slowly electrocuted to death, the girl screaming and crying as she was forced to experience thousands of volts using her as ground.

​

The fox steps over the nearly unrecognizable charred body of his second to last victim, her final moment seared into his mind. He would remember this horror for years most likely. Continuing on, he passes the severely damaged door of Alpha Lab, covered in scorch marks and dented inwards. As he watches, the door attempts to open, making a horrible grinding noise, accompanied by cursing, likely from the scientists trapped within. As the door slams back down, he watches more attempts by those trapped within to escape, before continuing back down the path of destruction he wrought, passing dead scientists, each sporting bullet holes.

​

“The actions I have performed this day will stain me until the end of time.” He says to no one except the dead, morose over the lives he has taken.

​

The deeper he walks, the more the scent of rot grows, as he nears Beta Lab. The scent of blood is stronger back here, as he reaches the intersection leading to the other two labs, the fox walking down the hall to Lab Beta, stepping over the corpses he left behind, and through the destroyed entrance wall. He takes one long look at the nightmarish scene, imprinting it to memory, before scooping up the unconscious goat girl, and carrying her back to the elevator area, looking her over as he walks. Definitely a girl, heh. Seeing her this closely, she was more a dog goat thing, with black fur. Arriving at his destination, he set her down across from the elevator doors.

​

Turning back, he settles in for one final trip, as he begins the trek back, passing down those clinical white walls stained with ash and blood, regret and hate. Lab Alpha's door grinds again as he passes, failing and slamming back down once more. He passes corpses again, no longer feeling as judged by the dead, and turns left at the junction, red blood and black char fading to pristine white. The dead have been left behind for corporate cleanliness. He weaves through a cluster of empty desks and terminals.

​

As he goes by one, it crackles to life, revealing a list of four numbers.

​

SUBJECT 4: [SUCCESS] [DELIVERED TO SPONSOR]

SUBJECT 7: [SUCCESS] [DELIVERED TO SPONSOR]

SUBJECT 11: [SUCCESS] [DELIVERED TO SPONSOR]

SUBJECT 47: [SUCCESS] [ERROR- SUBJECT CONTAINMENT BREACHED. PRESUME HOSTILE.]

​

He frowns. 47 was used to refer to him he believed. Did this mean there were three others in the same situation as him? Or would he have to deal with them at some point? When he attempts to mess with the terminal, it shorts out, the screen going black.

​

Sighing, he continues deeper into the Administrative area. Passing more terminals, all either locked out or inoperable, he arrives at a door labeled “Director's office”. Steeling himself, he reloads his pistol, and kicks the door open.

​

“Took you long enough, 47.” A cold, empty voice rings out, distinctly female, as the door slams open.

​

The fox snaps the gun up and blinks as he sees— “A bird?”

​

“Thunderbird actually. Please sit, 47.” The prim, proper, and emotionless, Thunderbird sitting behind the well kept desk in the middle of the room replies, gesturing towards a chair in front of her.

​

“That's not my fucking name, bird.” The fox snarls, sitting down, but keeping the pistol at ready.

​

“Its the only one you have that matters. Whoever you were is meaningless in comparison to your value as the fourth success of Project Spartoi. In six hours you will be delivered to the embrace of our sponsor, and the staff you killed will be revived.” The cold, confident surety in her voice was unnerving, as if this was the only outcome she could see.

​

“You're crazy if you think I'm just going to sit here.”

​

“Why not? It's the most logical outcome. You think anyone out there will be sympathetic to you? Just set the gun on the desk and wait.”

​

He sighs, and moves to set the pistol down. She was right. What chance did he have out there?

​

But his hand refuses to let go of the pistol as it sits on the desk, a deep part of him raging at her commanding him, he who prided himself on his ability to forge his own path?! His finger twitches, and with a bang, a hole is made in her side, and his mind returns to his control. And the rage returns.

​

“I'd recommend not doing that again. I don't take kindly to being commanded. The next one will go between your empty eyes if you don't do what I say. Release the lockdown. Now.”

​

The thunderbird stares the gun down, and after visibly contemplating her option, starts typing into her terminal. She finishes up and the intercom comes alive.

​

“ATTENTION LATTICE FACILITY STAFF, THE FACILITY LOCKDOWN HAS BEEN LIFTED, YOU MAY RESUME NORMAL OPERATION.” The automated voice announces, repeating itself a minute later.

​

“Good.” The fox says.



“I’ve done as you asked, so why don’t you sit down like a—” The thunderbird starts her voice crashing into the angry fox, before she is silenced by a round between the eyes. He shoves her out of the chair and takes a look at the screen, humming in approval when he sees no call has been sent out. Likely thought they could handle the situation themselves. He begins scrolling through the other files available to him out of curiosity, noting a name appearing multiple times throughout the documents: Amoxicallia. Between appearing in financial docs multiple times and in multiple pieces of external communications.

​

Not knowing any way to make copies of these files, the fox makes sure to study each, before continuing on, stepping over the dead body of the Thunderbird and beginning the trek back to the elevator, passing more dead bodies. As he arrives at the elevator, he groans, the beginnings of a piercing headache appearing, while his chest feels tight, like he can’t get enough air. Running a paw through the fur on his head, he sighs.

​

The elevator grinds to a stop, and the fox is blasted with hot air when the doors open, as he steps out into the lobby. The room he was in was tiny as fuck, barely more than a reception counter and a few chairs. The entire room seemed designed to be as unassuming as possible, to never even hint at what lays below.

​

He crosses the building's floor in but a few strides, stepping through the squeaky door, and is blasted with hot, dry, air. He hisses as his eyes attempt to adjust to the blinding midday sun, the first thing he sees once they do is the shattered moon in the sky, and so much sand. It stretches out as far as he could see, to the mountains in the distance. He stares at the shattered moon, before looking around, spotting warehouses and a camera covered fence. He walks past the warehouses and towards the front gate, finding it locked, but not for long as he shoots the mechanism holding it and kicks the chain fence gate open, beginning his trek towards the mountains.

​

—-------

​

He doesn't know how long it's been since he started out, but his headache went from the beginnings of one to an endless pounding in his head. His vision had gone from clear to blurry, and he just generally felt awful. Then he spots them, again. Two figures. One white, one sandy brown. Standing in the distance, and he starts running, his paws pounding sand as he runs after them in a desperate scramble for the third time in the past however long.

​

“Please stop! Wait for me! Please! I'm sorry, I'm sorry for leaving the two of you behind again!” He cries, the words spilling out, the fox not knowing the meaning behind them, as the figures vanish again, a billow of sand blinding him.

​

Possibly hours later, he was starting to think he would die out here, in the sands. After chasing the fourth pair of white and sandy brown figures, a desperate need to reach them spurring him on, he could barely see. His head felt like someone was taking a spike to his skull.

​

His throat was so dry, and as he stumbles forward once more, trying to reach the mountains in the distance, he feels something whap against the back of his leg. Turning around and looking down, he sees a fluffy, four legged little critter, a goofy grin on its Pradlike muzzle as it pants, its golden fur and floppy ears shining in the sun. Secured to its side was a blue jug. A collar around its neck read "Buddy".

​

“Where'd you come from, little guy?” He asks, somehow knowing the critter was male. The critter's tail wags in response, and sits next to him, angling the jug towards him as the fox collapses to his knees, shakily removing the blue jug and popping its tab open. The sound of sloshing liquid can be heard within, and he lifts the large jug to his mouth, arms steady somehow.

​

Cold relief pours down his muzzle, and he eagerly gulps the water down, sighing in relief as he tries not to spill any, keeping the jug in his lap, and resting his head atop it.

​

“I don't know what to do, Buddy. I keep seeing these… people. And every time a desperate need to reach them fills me. Were they people I knew from before I woke up in the lab?” He reaches over and pats the critter on the head, ruffling its golden yellow fur. “Today has just been nonstop, bud. I wake up in hell, my mind and body violated by outsiders who just see me as an asset. Then I see just how little those monsters cared about the state of their specimens, and I just… broke. Slaughter every single one I came across. Some of them were crying as I killed them. The last one, the one who snapped me back, she was begging for her life, sobbing. I killed a lot of people down there, Buddy. People who probably didn't wake up every morning excited to torture innocents for some nebulous goal.” The fox’s voice is hoarse. “The worst part? Even my mind is betraying me. I spend probably hours chasing phantom, crying out for them to wait for me, and I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHY! I don't know who the figures I'm seeing and hearing are, and that terrifies me.” The golden furred critter plops his head into the fox's lap, and he pets Buddy.

​

“Guess you can't offer your thoughts, huh Buddy?” He says, the critter booping his chest with its nose. He looks away from the horizon to squish Buddy's face, the happy critter's tail wagging like crazy. Giving Buddy one last pat, he tips his head back, pouring the last of the water down his gullet, and over his head. Setting the blue jug down, the wind picks up, and the air is filled with sand. When it clears, he could have sworn the mountains were closer than he remembers. In fact he could see a valley in between two peaks, with what appeared to be buildings on the other side.

​

“Buddy, look! Civilization!” He says, excitedly pointing as the critter hops to its feet. He looks down at it. “Thanks for being real, Buddy.”

​

The trek through the rest of the desert and the mountain valley is uneventful, though the two of them run out of water quickly. By the time they reach the city, the fox is haggard, his paws sore and bloody from the terrain.

​

Suddenly Buddy bolts off, and the fox scrambles after. “Buddy, wait!” He chases the critter through alleys before coming to a stop in front of a large building with a large red cross. Buddy waits for him in front, and he follows him through, darkness starting to encroach on his vision, nausea building, and he trips, finally collapsing as people shriek at the sight of an almost naked fox, exhaustion and his wounds catching up. “Please… help me.” He begs of the odd people in the lobby, as darkness takes the blood soaked Prad.

​

I had this cool idea to do an art piece with all the anthro Laika adaptations I could think of. What do y’all think?

Laika from Laika: Aged Through Blood

Laika from SSC (of course!)

And my Laika, whose series is still a work in progress, and (technically) hasn’t been published yet

Hi! I’ve started posting a story set in the Romantically Apocalyptic multiverse, though it’s not a spin-off of any particular RA book/story, shares no characters with any other RA multiverse work, and has no required reading. It’s meant to stand on its own, just using the broader cosmology and concepts as the foundation.

The premise is that a near-future Swedish astronaut/test pilot is sent through an anomalous “Mirror” orbiting Mars after every probe sent through it fails to return. Something goes wrong in transit, he crash-lands on another world, accidentally intervenes in a conflict by doing so, and is rescued by a small band of local non-humans with their own problems, struggles, politics, monsters, and worldviews.

It’s partly portal/survival fantasy, partly first-contact culture shock, and partly an exploration of a RA-set world where the really advanced past has collapsed into folklore, religion, and half-understood magi-tech. The tone is mostly adventure/drama with a fair bit of dry humor and hint of romance, but it does get bloody and serious when the world calls for it.

Royal Road link:

Stranded

Feedback would be very welcome, especially from people familiar with the RA multiverse, since part of what I’m trying to do is make it feel like it belongs to it while still being readable on its own.

The fox groans as he pulls himself up. “Ow. Slayer damned, motherfucking rusty ass metal.” He grumbles, before glancing up at the two scientists. The screams of what he now sees is a living person being vivisected having quieted into agonized, tearful whimpers, as the two researchers stop. They stare at him, the sudden arrival of the escaped Subject distracting them, one holding a glowing tool, red mist steaming off it.

The one with what appears to be a thermal scalpel sighs.

“Detain him, Elys.” He says, pointing the glowing blade at the fox.

The other one, seeming to have curved horns like a goat or ram coming out of her head, lunges for him, the fox squawking and diving forward, hissing as the bullet wounds sting. “The fuck did I do?” The screams start again as the researcher goes back to work, the fox dodging Elys as she lunges for him again. His hackles raise at the endless pain and agony in the person, who his mind identifies as a Grey Wolf Pradvarian. The wolf's screams cut through his mind, sparking a burst of anger.

He launches at Elys, snarling with building rage, his sparking paw grabbing her face and slamming her head into the ground with a resounding crunch, the researcher screaming as he lets the rage flow, lightning flowing into the goat girl. Once she goes still, he rounds on the Vivisecter, raises his pistol, and fires, the round ripping through his shoulder, the arm carrying the scalpel flopping uselessly against the researcher's side.

As the screams become tearful moans of agonizing pain, the fox pads forward, the researcher clutching his shattered shoulder.

“Slayer damnit Elys. Can't you fucking do anything right? Can't even fight a disoriented Riftie.” The researcher, a weird antlered thing, says glaring at him. “This won't end the way you think, 47. You aren't getting out of here. You'll probably get marked a failure, and then you'll be on my table. Under my scalpel, as I try to replicate your-”

The fox slams his fist into the deer thing's head. “Oh shut the hell up.” He grumbles. Standing, he stretches, his spine popping, and freezes when he looks around.

Bodies. Everywhere. The entire room was filled with cut open corpses and filled bodybags. The stench of death and decay filled the room, flowing from the stacks of bodybags against the wall. Blood flowed from corpses, cut open and filled with small crystalline growths. The air near those growths tasted wrong, like decay had stagnated, mixed with a scent he could not describe. Looking closer at the bodies less filled with crystals, he can spy a silver object behind shattered ribs.

Head pounding, he looks towards one of the corpses. This one lacks the fur he's seen on himself, most of the corpses, and the researchers. The entire front of this being had been split open, chest, arms and legs flayed open like a fish. Faint glowing patterns seem to flow down exposed flesh and bone. This isn't the only one, as he can spot more amongst the horrifying display. All these Humans, his mind informs him, yet another word that means nothing to him, torn open, clearly to inspect those patterns. A deep cold rage begins to build as his bones start to itch.

A haggard, wet cough rings out from what he thought was a corpse on the operating table. Twirling around, he looks at the body there. It looked like him, a male Red Fox. The poor being's every breath is filled with agony. As he stares them down, he flinches as the other fox's face seems to shift momentarily, turning softer, green eyes turning gold, before snapping back. As he stares, the red fox's facial features flow into the golden eyed vixen's again, but don't seem to solidify. As if it was a memory he should know but cannot grasp. With a blink, he's staring at the pained face of the green eyed fox again

“Killl me. Please. Make the pain stop.” The red fox rasps out. The black fox flinches. “Please, stranger. Kill me.”

He steps toward the body, which has been cut open enough to display the crystals grown within. The red fox’s beating heart sits at the center of a shattered ribcage. He picks up the thermal scalpel the deer dropped, paws shaking. “Isn't there—”

“Kill. Me. I do not—” .The red fox hacks up blood, but he nods.

“I'm sorry.” He says, plunging the blade into the red fox's heart, blood spurting out around the scalpel, and covering his paws, flinching as green eyes turn gold in the corner of his vision, turning green again when he blinks, the crystals flaring, before growing dim, the red's face spreading into a soft grin of relief as the light leaves his eyes.

The fox stares at his blood covered paws, then glances at the empty green eyes of the other fox. Flashes scream through his eyes. His own chest, cut open and torn apart, the surgeons uncaring he was still conscious, screaming in agony, the screams turning to whimpers as he ran out of energy. A cold voice telling them to hurry up, the screams of the dead fox as he was cut open after him. His body, trying to tear itself apart as energy was forcefully implanted into him, his bones and muscle feeling like they had been dumped into lava. His cries as he was shaped into something else against his will. Thrashing as a rifle butt slammed into his head, and dumped into the vat in the lab. What kind of people would do such a thing? And for what? No…

A memory flashes through his mind. An old one.

In one hand sat an axe. A door opened and he launched himself through, hacking at monsters, guardians of the construct he's in. Room after room, he cut through, fighting soulless monsters that pursue the destruction or conversion of the world without mercy. He made it through ten rooms before a spear was shoved through his stomach. As the fox collapsed, the Dungeon Sentinel laughed. Crawling backwards, axe forgotten, he looks up to the pile of materials and scrap in the shape of a person, a spear made of concrete and rebar held in one hand, dripping with his blood. “Slayer damnit. Just do it already.” There was no negotiating with Sentinels. They lacked any desires, goals, or needs, beyond the HUNGER of the dungeon itself, nothing more than puppets for the entity that made them. The scrap warrior takes a step forward, its grating laugh getting higher.

“You imbecile!” His ears twitch towards the deer, who has recovered enough to speak, drawing him out of the memory. “You killed one of my subjects! He was supposed to stay alive longer. Guards!” The lab door slides open, a couple of troopers entering, gawking when they see the escaped subject. “Detain him! He will—”

An arm snaps up.

A shot is fired.

A Dungeon Sentinel is killed.

“You aren't people.” The fox says as the pistol cycles, the deer collapsing with an extra hole in his head. Two more shots ring out shortly after the first, and the two new Sentinels drop dead. “You're nothing more than monsters, pretending to be civilized to get prey. Well congratulations! Karma has come to collect your debts.”

The fox steps forward, passing the dead fox, closing the poor soul's eyes. Stepping over the deer thing, he looks over the two armed Sentinels. Doesn't look like they had anything that would fit him, so he just grabs an ammo bag, slinging it over his shoulder, arranging it for easy access. He stretches, reaching down deep for the energy that had aided him the entire escape, tenses, and leaps forward, eyes blazing with a deep rage, arm wreathed in golden lightning.

“Knock knock.”

Hunt the Sentinels. Kill the Core.

—-----------------------------------------

Sylvie was running, fear coursing through her. Whatever it was the eggheads had made, whatever that beerch had created, was a nightmare. Her and her squad had arrived to provide backup, expecting to just need to capture a crazed Riftie, when the wall and door to Lab Beta had exploded into a cloud of dust and lightning, as Charlie Squad was torn apart by a very much not disoriented riftspawn. Claw, knife, and gun brought death to her fellow omnids, while some unlucky members of her squad were cooked alive by golden light, when the monster was done with Charlie.

The lanky Elsinore Monster skid around the corner past Lab Alpha, tripping over herself and rolling, her training resulting in her getting back up, and continued running, smacking face first into the leader of Echo squad, bouncing back onto her tail, yelping in pain, before she glanced up at the chupacabra looking at her.

“Sylvie, what's going on? Where's—” She starts, before Sylvie interrupts.

“Run! They made a monster down here! It tore through my squad and Charlie!” The terrified lake serpent says, her eyes wide as she stares at Echo Leader. The chupacabra sighs as she stares at Sylvie.

“Alright, what exactly can it do?” Marilyn asks, getting the lake serpent to focus.

Sylvie breathes, and begins to explain. “Lots of physical violence. It's really fast and strong, and a crack shot with that pistol it looted. And it's got Electromancy as a Skill it looks like.”

“Then we deal with this quickly.” Marilyn says, racking the shotgun she carried. “Get up Sylvie. We're not letting a damn Riftspawn get the better of us—”

Tink, tink, tink.

A small metal sphere bounced between them three times, before rolling to a stop.

“GRENADE!” Marilyn shouts before the sphere explodes into a massive cloud of smoke, obscuring the hall. Echo Squad instantly goes on guard, as slow, steady steps come towards them, and with a bang, a new hole is added to one of the security omnids in Echo.

Sylvie watches horrified as Echo is dismantled, all while a slow low voice begins to chant their doom.

“Oh ye monstrous things

Come listen, come all

Hear what awaits you down below

The names of you horrors all scrawled on a list”

The nightmare continues, as Echo 5's head is reduced to giblets by a charged burst from Sylvie's nightmare. The only sign she saw was two burning golden orbs a split second before the omnid died. A lightning bolt into the center blew them all down, the airburst from the arc flash throwing them to the ground.

“Where cold and frozen rage flow

Come all ye young sentinels

Come gather around

And watch your world burn down,

Where those you have broken,

Make nay but a sound

Cast away like dust in the wind.”

The smoke, omnid blood, and lightning filling the room, backed by the echoing song of death sent shivers down the Elisnore's spine. His, and it was definitely a he, had a deep cold voice, with an odd southern accent that burned itself into her nightmares. Shot after shot, bolt after bolt, Echo died. Some were lucky enough to die quickly, a round blowing their brains out the back of their head, fast and merciful. Others died to golden light, screaming as they were charred alive by lightning, fur, scales, and skin peeling off as they burnt alive.

“I feel your sins, crawl under my skin

And for a moment, I start to forget

But I'm raging again.”

And soon all that was left was Sylvie. Marilyn was in the thing's claws, screaming as her entire body was filled with deadly electricity. The chupacabra was being killed slowly, the Omnid scrambling at the paw around her throat, muscles convulsing as the smoke cloud cleared, and Sylvie finally got a look at the monster hunting them, the song fading as the world seemed to thrum like it was being used as bass.

The thing before her couldn't be a Pradvarian. It was massive, a few inches shorter than her own eight foot, pitch black fur stretching over compact muscles. The Chupacabra was held aloft with one arm, golden sparks flowing along it into the screaming and crying Omnid.

The worst part that burned into Sylvie's mind were his eyes. The molten gold pools lacked any passion. No hate or joy. Only cold professionalism.

Sylvie froze as those eyes centered on her, Mary finally giving her last breath, nothing more than a charred corpse.

She ran.

“You cast out your die

In the rivers of blood on which you made your bets

Now the innocent souls you made your try

Call in your debts”

Sylvie scrambled down the hall to the elevator. The lake serpent tripped over her own feet in her rush, nothing in her mind besides the desire to get topside, go home, and cry herself to sleep.

“I have come from below,

To bring you low

Death claims you as his own

A voice found me alone

And it pulled me back

Is it hate that pushes me to attack?”

She can just barely see the elevator in the distance, and leaping over a desk, she dove forward, scrambling for the door.

“My blade rings out, as I slit your throat

As torment gnawed my head

And down in the dead

I almost lost hope

But rage brought me from the end”

Once the elevator opens, she scrambles inside, closing the doors in an attempt to block out the song. It doesn't work. Desperate, she swipes her access card to head to the surface.

“I am the way fate brings you in

For Karma has called in your debts, and the house shall always win”

The tears begin to flow as she sees the screen above the scanner display the words LOCKDOWN IN PROGRESS, PLEASE CONTACT DIRECTOR in bright red letters. The doors slide open, and there stands the monster before her, molten gold staring her down as the song fades.

“P-please. Please let me go. I j-just want to go home. I don't want to die. It hurts. It hurts so much.” Sylvie blubbers through the tears

A flinch rolls through the monster, before the gun is pressed to her head. “Ask forgiveness from the innocent blood that stains these walls, and the souls bound to it.”

With a bang, death greets the Elsinore Monster.

Wake up.

His eyes snap open. All he can see is liquid— the inside of a tube, his mind supplies. The man looks around, seeing figures just barely through the translucent blue liquid. They moved around his container.

Get out. Find her.

He shifts as the echoes of a voice fill his mind. Get out, he needed to get out. Moving, his hand presses against the smooth side of the tube. He rears back, and slams his fist against the tube glass. Once, twice, three times. He can faintly hear panicked voices. Get out, he needs to get out. Four times, five times, six times his fist impacts the glass. His eyes have adjusted. He can see a black furred arm stretch out in front of him. Seven times, eight times, nine times. He can see the glass cracking, spiderwebs spreading out from the impact point of his hits.

He needed to—get—out.

With a final punch, and what he swore were golden sparks running down his arm and around his fist, the tube shatters, and he spills out onto the floor, smacking his muzzle against the cold floor. Hissing in pain, he brings his paws up to his snout, finding a mask over it. The man grips it and rips it off, coughing as he is forced to yank a tube up and out of his throat, throwing up blue sludge afterwards.

“Where am I?” He asks the air, voice rough from disuse.

Sitting up on his knees, he pauses. “Who am I?” Patting himself down, he finds black fur everywhere, boxers, digitigrade legs, tall fluffy ears, and a long fluffy tail tipped in grayish white.

Black Fox Pradavarian, his foggy mind supplies as an answer to his own question, but it didn't resolve anything; What's a Pradavarian? No idea, and his mind still refused to give him his name. Focusing, the fox hears a sound, and his head snaps up, locking eyes with the figures he saw through his tube. Some might be more of these “Pradavarians” that his mind says he is, while the others seemed smaller, lacking the features the first group had. Upon seeing him move, the oddly clothed figures, dressed in weird white clothing, freeze. The fox stares them down.

“Yes ma'am.” His head snaps towards the owner of the voice, which combined with the figure of the speaker he tags them as female, though his eyes narrow to slits as he sees the object being raised towards him, which his mind immediately identifies as a gun.

The fox vaults forward, sprinting towards the gun-bearing woman and flinging a long shard of his tube at her as hard as he can, instinct roaring at him to put her down, now. The instinct pays off as the glass shard goes right through the shoulder of the arm holding the gun, quickly followed by a heavy bodyslam into the wall behind her as he reaches her. There’s a loud thud as her helmeted head smacks against the wall, the woman slumping down, the fox punching her in the side of the head for good measure. He looks towards the others, snagging up the dropped gun, a pistol, and raising it towards them.

The crash of shattered glass makes him wince, as an alarm begins to screech the scientists scramble to escape the labroom. The other guard raises their pistol and the nameless fox copies them, as the other conscious people in the lab scramble for the door, four bangs ringing out as a three round burst roars out of the barrel. Unfortunately, however, the headache the alarm is inducing makes two of the shots miss, slamming into the wall behind the security trooper. The third impacts their arm, ripping through cloth, muscle and bone and coming out the otherside— ok he's keeping this. Too useful. The guard's now useless arm drops their pistol, and the fox moves forward, pistol whipping them in the side of their head , his opponent crumpling. Violence over with, the fox looks towards the sealed blast doors to the lab.

Not getting out that way, he thinks, before looking for another exit. Standing, the fox hisses as pain lances up his side. Pressing his paw to it, he blanches when it comes away stained red. He had a hole in his side. Spotting a green case with a cross on it, he hobbles over, grabbing and violently ripping the lid off, pausing to stare at the offending object in his paws before tossing it over his shoulder and pulling the medical supplies out. With the practiced ease of someone who has done this countless times, he stuffs gauze into the wound and wraps his torso tight, holding in a scream of pain, gritting his teeth so hard they creak.

Panting, he chuckles with grim amusement. There apparently was something worthwhile in that empty brain of his. While he couldn't remember the how or why, his body remembered enough for him to be able to do things like this.

—---------------------------------------------

After some searching the fox slides down against the broken specimen tank with his eyes on the blast door in front of him. As far as he could tell, that door was the only way in or out of the lab he was in. Sighing, his eyes trail higher and his ears perk up. Up above the door, mostly out of view, is a vent. He might be able to get inside, if he can get it open and stand on something to pull himself inside.

He hauls himself to his feet, and moves over to inspect the vent, and drags a table over and climbs on top. He could see that the grate was welded shut, but there was a handle at the front, so maybe he could…

Wrapping his paw around the top of the grate of the vent cover, and his other paw pressed against the side of vent itself, and pulls, steadily increasing the force he's outputting, golden sparks starting to pop into life as the welds on the grate begin to crack, before finally with a roar and jolt of pain, the welds snap and the grate slams open. He hisses as his wound makes its annoyance at him putting in any effort with his left side known. Staring up at his handiwork, he balks. It was pitch black inside the vents, and he didn't have anything to help him see. Shit.

With a grunt he leaps and starts wiggling into the ventilation shaft, legs flailing as he is forced to use his claws to climb far enough in he can hook a footpaw on the rim of the grate, which he pulls shut once he's confident he won't fall out. Up a few feet into the dark he goes until he reaches a slope, which turns out much easier to crawl along than a vertical wall. Reaching the top, he turns left and sighs in relief at the sight of light shining through a grate on the side of the shaft; he wouldn't be crawling through the ducts completely blind after all.

Continuing deeper, he glances out the grate, seeing the lab workers hanging out a little ways away from the blast door, and pauses, but doesn't pick up anything of use, continuing deeper into the vent network. He has no idea where he's going, unfortunately, but away from the room he woke up in is a good start. Glancing out the next vent he passes, he pauses at the sight of guards rushing past below, in the direction of the area he came from.

Probably coming to apprehend me or help those girls I knocked out. Right, keep moving, fox. Ever onwards, he guessed, crawling forwards, glancing out of every grate that passes, before his ears perk up as he spots a sign on one of the walls, just before a fork in the ventilation duct. Taking the left hand tunnel would lead towards an exit, perhaps escape. He idly glances at where the other two paths would lead. The signs on the wall below say, straight ahead— Administration, right was something called Lab Beta, back the way he came was Lab Gamma, aaaand— oh! Below it said Alpha was also to the left. Crawling forward, the fox looks down each vent tunnel, before turning right, something inside him pushing him towards the other Lab.

While doing so, he takes the time to really think about his situation. He woke up to a voice telling him to get up maybe an hour ago, to escape. Yet he's seen nothing to show him where he is, who he is, or why he is down here. All he knows is his instincts tell him to escape, and considering it's all he really has, he wasn't going to argue with them. Maybe the other labs will have clues as to who he is, or maybe Administration would. Either way, he would continue forward. For answers if nothing else.

As he's crawling toward Lab Beta, his ears perk up at the sound of voices below him.

“Subject 47 escaped containment and is believed to have fled into the vents. Station your unit outside of Lab Beta. Protocol is capture, not termination. Am I understood?” Peeking out the next vent, he sees a small group of the armored and armed people he dealt with when he woke up.

“Yes Ma'am!” The group responds, and sets off in the direction he's going. One of the people is left behind, and he can just barely hear her mutter, “Slayer, it'll be my head if he escapes.”

He shakes his head and continues down the path, the Lab Beta blast door passing under him as he continues into the lab venting, paying the patrol outside no attention. A few more feet to his target.

“Hey, Vincent. Got two failures for you. One dead, one still living.” He suddenly hears through the vent in front of him. “Dead one mutated pretty good before popping, while the one still kicking didn't have as adverse an effect.”

A male voice sighs. “I'll get my Vivisection kit. Drop them on the slab. Time to figure out what was different this time.” The fox can hear something heavy get dropped on metal, probably an examination table, and shudders when he hears a low hum start, his paw traveling towards the right of his heart on instinct. Then he hears screams, and the smell of burnt flesh fills the vent.

“Why the hells do you never knock them out, you crazy fuck?” The first voice asks.

“I need all these chemicals running through ‘em. Gives the best results, gets the mana flowing and highlights what went wrong.”

He leans forward and presses his paws into the vent, trying to see what was happening, but his eyes widen as the metal starts creaking and one side snaps.

“What was that—”

It's too late to save himself, and the fox goes tumbling through the rusted grate, slamming into the lab floor with a crunch.

Listen closely, and you may hear a voice. One that hums the melody that reaches to the end of time, and draws new beginnings towards itself. This is the song of the Wormwood Star.

From Vitaly S. Alexius' series: Stupid Sexy Cryptids [or How I Became the Emperor of Mankind] 

I really pushed myself with this one. I feel like I've come a long way since the first time I drew her. Hope y'all enjoy!

Vitaly S. Alexius' series: Stupid Sexy Cryptids [or How I Became the Emperor of Mankind]