Bleach [IF 3-3] Ichigo Sees

daniel_gudman

KING (In Land of Blind)
Staff member
#1
Iron Fic 3-3: Fhtagn Cthulhu!

Summary: Ichigo is a boy who always saw More Than He Should.

I I I

First, before I began my tale, you must understand that I have always considered my self someone who saw what he shouldn't.

It begins, most simply, with the dying; sickness and injury, inflicted by decay or accident or malice upon other humans. Certainly I saw that, because my father was a doctor; from a young age I have witnessed human mortality.

But soon, when I was still a young child, I saw beyond the dying; I perceived death, the dead.

Ghosts, marked by death. Wasted, emaciated ghosts that were devoured by their own bodies, by cancer within them; ghosts that would have been healthy, save some horrible injury, mangled skulls or pierced bodies. Terrible, awful injuries.

And then when I was no longer a child, but still not yet a man, I saw gods and monsters, all of the world of the dead. The gods, I admit, where not the nigh-omnipotent singular being of the western tradition, or the aspected nature-beings of mine own eastern heritage; they most remind me of the agents of some cosmic bureaucracy of Chinese lore. The monsters, in comparison, where simple rogues that had escaped the administration of the bureaucracy, and been reborn as incarnate hungers.

And this was still merely the prologue. By lucky circumstance, I was the only one who was not ensorcelled by a certain madman, and the only one who was not veiled by his powers; and thus I became the only person who could strike down that madman.

Except I lacked the strength.

So, with the help of that self-same father who first exposed me to sights, however mundane, that were beyond my ken, I became a being that totally surpassed not just my peers, but all peers I could conceive of having; even beyond death.

And with these powers, I became... more. Transcendent. The euphoria, the mental grace and poise, even today I lack the ability to relate the condition I so enjoyed. Even in death, I thought, I could not die, and in all eternity I could lie.

And then, I threw it away. I turned my transcendence into a weapon, and used it to strike down my foe, the only one that could possibly be the rival of one such as I had become.

I cannot help, however, but remark on the irony; at the beginning of my journey as a Shinigami, I possessed sight but not might; and at the end, I possessed might but not sight. And after-wards, when I lacked the spiritual pressures considered "strength" by certain limited circles, I was once again reduced to a state without might. But, I developed a certain sight.

What I developed were the eyes of a transcendent being.

The cosmos swirls. Space is a vast and throbbing jungle, pulsing with the joy of living things. The flutes and trumpeting played by some great thing... I was as a newborn babe, thrust into a world of light and sound, after being suffocated in a swaddling dark.

And do stop screaming, Ginjo-san; you are embarrassing yourself.

You sought to awaken my powers, did you not? Come now; you have accomplished your desires. The form you see before you is my transcendent self. I am trying to explain; surely you can have some respect for the difficulty of projecting such a limited form as a human possesses. By making myself into something you can interact with, naturally you are going to be exposed to something of my powers.

Ah, it's not me. I apologize; I have grown so used to the forms and appearances of my new brethren, I had forgotten how upsetting even I found their shapes. But, of course they are excited to watch the development of a new member of their number. After all, in seeing them, I was seen.

Now now, Ginjo-san, they are not unnatural; they simply exist in a nature beyond what you could comprehend.

They have waited so patiently, you see, to witness one such as myself, who would demonstrate the way to materialize into a mortal world. Countless eons, for a child to blaze a path to their order.

No, no, Ginjo-san. This is not the apocalypse. It is so much more wonderful than that!
 

biigoh

Well-Known Member
#3
Totally awesome. Also, typo, where is not were.
 

Knyght

The Collector
#4
The idea's interesting but the execution wasn't great. It doesn't sound like Ichigo at all and felt more like this was Aizen in Ichigo's place.
 

zeebee1

Well-Known Member
#5
Well, if seeing a transcendent being brings insanity just imagine what becoming one does.
 
#6
I'm fairly sure it was very intentional, but I'm getting a really hardcore Lovecraft vibe off of this, and it freaked me out a bit. I mean, Lovecraftian mythos and the Bleach-verse are two very, very different fields, but damn, this was nicely done. Subtle enough that it didn't beat you over the head with it, but the eldritch horror vibe still came through really clearly.
 

Karnath

Well-Known Member
#7
yojorocks said:
I'm fairly sure it was very intentional, but I'm getting a really hardcore Lovecraft vibe off of this, and it freaked me out a bit. I mean, Lovecraftian mythos and the Bleach-verse are two very, very different fields, but damn, this was nicely done. Subtle enough that it didn't beat you over the head with it, but the eldritch horror vibe still came through really clearly.
Prompt: Surely you've heard of H.P. Lovecraft. The utter insignificance of mankind in a uncaring universe was the major theme of his work; and when he wrote those stories it was terrifying (now it's the punchline). You're probably more familiar with the popular representations of his work, tentacles and human/alien hybrids and the like.

Your challenge is to write a cosmic horror story. Maybe the villain of your work has been possessed by the spirit of something beyond mortal understanding, or develops a bad case of ZOMGWTF!TENTACLES on his defeat. Maybe someone is the sole survivor of an expedition to the City of Madness, and is telling his story to a (disguised) shoggoth years later. Or maybe someone has found that his bloodline isn't quite as... human as he thought.

Two notes: First, despite the challenge title, this does not have to be a Cthulhu story. HP Lovecraft's creations need not appear at all, it's the spirit of it that matters.

Second, it's okay to leave the audience wondering whether the events in the story actually happened. Stories where a character's perception of reality is so warped that the reader can't tell fact from fiction are just as much part of the genre as real monster stories.

The challenge is made!
 
Top