"So what's the plan, then?"

His voice echoed out from behind the desk as he sat on the edge of his chair, hands folded in desperate focus as he stared, tired-eyed at his otherworldly guest. David's brow was slick with sweat, despite the cold sneaking in from the cracks in his windowpane like a thief in the night, chilling the room to the very bones in the walls. Not literal bones, but the bones David had extended from himself into the room itself, as it absorbed all he had done in the past few weeks like a cruel, reflective sponge. All he could see in these chipped bits of wallpaper was his misdeeds. All the cruelties he had imagined here for those that opposed him or stood in his way. It hadn't occurred to him that his loss of control meant a form of exoneration. David could no longer control the God in his head, and it took free will over his body to perform whatever vile thing a normal human being would never do. But he felt regardless that he was at fault. No one would ever believe him.

No human being, but perhaps a man from beyond the stars.

Mr. Supernova sat opposite David Martin, on the very edge of a vomit-green, professional-looking chair, furrowing his brow with every word of the question that had spilled out from David's mouth. There was an intense, unseen feeling of suspense throughout the room. Nova felt his heartbeat in his temples, quickened by the adrenaline being inexplicably pumped through his veins. It was as though he were watching a horror movie, slowly anticipating that one jump scare. But it never seemed to come in this instant. It was only the sickening rise of his stomach that came with such unprecedented suspense that told him to be in complete preparation-mode, should the jump scare ever come.

He looked up vacantly, catching the cold, steely stare of David Martin's icy blue eyes, which caught the slight glare from the porch lights a story below, and for a moment, Nova could see himself in that ocean of a gaze, his eyes tired and his hair frazzled from a night of thinking. It had been but one night since Nova had previously visited the strange, demure writer -- one night without sleep; he had been up all night trying to consider the logic of all the creatures he had encountered across the universe until now, but none of his anecdotal evidence would prove a cure for whatever it is that was lurking inside the mind of David Martin.

"I haven't the foggiest," Nova admitted with a sigh and a slight wave of his hand, seeming to dismiss the issue. He was utterly stumped.

"I had feared you might say that," David replied, downcast. With a grunt of desperation, he pushed himself up from his chair and turned his back to Nova, in order for the spaceman to not see the physical representation of his internal struggle: a wince. To say or not to say, he wondered, stirring the battle inside for the next instant to come. Finally, he gave into the less moral argument, and turned back to Nova.

"There was something Mystica had shown me in a dream long ago," David said with a lurking sense of shame in the back of his skull. "A method of entering another's mind. There is a method -- a sort of meditative state, wherein the two parties are placed in a temporary state of deep sleep as their minds are melded together, at least for a few minutes."

Much to David's surprise, Nova's eyes widened and he smiled. He expediently stood up from his seated position and gave off a light chuckle. Perfect, it was perfect.

"I'm only mad at myself for not thinking of that first," he joked, patting David on the back. "So how do we go about this?"

---

A few moments later, Nova was somewhat disgusted to find himself in a scene right out of a neo-wiccan marriage ceremony. He sat, cross-legged on the floor, in a circle of candles, breathing in a horrid scent of incense that Martin had undoubtedly bought from the head shop down the street. The thick smoke almost prevented Nova's eyes from even making out the figure of David as he sat opposite the spaceman, lighting another stick of incense.

"Does whatever is inside you have to do all this crazy shit every time he tries to do it?" Nova asked with a tongue filled with irony.

Defensively, David fired back, his intention attempting to merely reflect the facts:

"I'm following the details of a story he told me about one of his more primitive followers and their sect. He gifted them the ability, but they felt it prudent to attach it to a ritual of sorts, perhaps as a means of social control over the supernatural power to avoid its potential abuse by those who had been gifted. The manuscripts regarding these rituals was stolen several days ago from a prestigious archaeological museum -- by myself, I presume. So all humanity has left for evidence is the information stored in the heads of 5 extremely educated anthropologists...and me."

With that, David placed the lit incense in a glass burner, which was engraved with a number of symbols Nova had never encountered before. He assumed them to be a form of ancient language, judging on the grouping of the symbols into particular collections -- possibly words or phrases. But what truly bothered him was the basic fact that he was unfamiliar with the symbols. In all of his adventures through space and time and dimension, he had never seen the letters that now glared at him with hateful, metaphysical eyes engulfed in evil thoughts.

"There's a specific phrase, if I remember correctly," David continued, tenting his fingers over his lips as he tended to do when lost in deep thought. "I can only recall some basic principle of it. I can't guarantee I'm pronouncing it right. The language does not exist in any known human documentation -- neither first nor third person account."

"Can we just...get to it?" Nova asked with a tinge of anticipation, not wanting to hear David's annotated history of modern language. The writer sighed, realizing he had been rambling, and nodded before he opened his mouth and spewed forth a hideous collection of what sounded like non-human vocalizations.

"Nghatahn q'luk nais nigtun ahn unuh'tur dahnsohn."

Before he even knew it, Nova's surroundings had changed. It was an instant of time in the alteration. There had been no transition. He hadn't blinked. His perception had simply changed in the speed of a nanosecond, faster than any living thing could truly react. It was as though Nova had suddenly woken from a bad dream, only to find himself with the fleeting recollection of the dream world and needing to comprehend reality. But this "reality" was incredibly surreal.

The peeling wallpaper-lined walls of David's office had been replaced with a curtain of darkness -- not a single hint of a vertical surface all around him. It was as though the black were simply the walls, though Nova knew better. This shade of black, fading into gray, could only determine the impossible -- he was not in a physical place, or even the very mirage of a physical place. This was a place that could only be imagined by the maddest of the mad. But the lack of a second dimension in the presence of depth was not the most disconcerting thing about Nova' new surroundings.

There seemed to be an ethereal glow -- the colour of campfire's fleeting orange-and-red lights and sparks -- enveloping the locale, though it did not assist Nova in trying to see through the dark that seemed to be, at the same time, all around him. This sourceless light only revealed what it wished to reveal, suggesting to Nova that perhaps the light itself was cognitive: a living, thinking entity. And what it desired on this occasion to reveal was the thing that had taken David's place in this new reality.

Before Supernova lurked something from beyond his wildest nightmares and fantasies. There were no words to describe such an abomination of nature, physics, and composition, tough Nova attempted to rationalize it all into known words. To him, the thing before him was coated in a sort of forcefield of tiny scales, which caught the sentient light at certain angles, making the entire creature look slime-covered to the unwise eye. It held no true form, but the writhing collection of non-mass contorted and flowed like a liquid to and fro. At will, from beneath the surface of this liquid skin composition came random assorted pieces of anatomy, none representative of any known species Nova had encountered. A hive of eyes popped up from the liquid, all of different sizes, shapes, and colours, but all glaring at him in recognition. Nova froze. Whatever this thing was, it could see him quite clearly.

"Impressive," came a clamor of thousands of voices, speaking all at once at various rates, accents, tones, volumes and meters, yet all coming from nowhere and everywhere all at once, speaking the same words.

"You have not yet begun the process of cognitive dissonance."

Nova stared up at the behemoth, possibly multiple stories tall. The spaceman, in that instant, felt so very, very small. But not helpless. He was never helpless.

"What...are you?" Nova asked in disgust, not wanting to look at the abomination any longer, and yet finding it impossible to look away. He was being drawn in by a morbid fascination. Or, perhaps, he figured, he might simply be undergoing his species' equivalent to human perception shock.

"I am the amalgamation of nothing and everything. The Sleeping God. Born from the Bang. A starchild. Aothaac to some. Nar-lghathomon to a sect long-dead. The half-living, half-deceased lord. Forever and never."

"Mystica," Mr. Supernova declared, standing in defiance of the creature's overwhelming presence of dread. "This is your true form."

"No," the eldritch mass answered. "It is only what your mind can comprehend to be my true appearance. Your mind cannot fully create a proper image of what you are truly perceiving with your eyes. It refuses to reflect unto your mind something so true, but which seems so horrific to your consciousness. Your imagination is saving your sanity. And yet, I know what it is you see me as. Intriguing. The very fact that you've remained sane for this long...you are not human."

"And neither are you."



To Be Continued...

Achievements

• 1x Tag Team Champion
  
• August 2013 Superstar of the Month (Thank you all so much!)
  
• 1x US Champion
  
• 1x X-treme Champion