It had become fascinated with the idea of kids, and, by extension, small creatures. And what beings were smaller than insects? Leo was chock full of them, which delighted it almost as much as the abundance of fish did. Though it had seen beautiful, rainbow-hued bugs before, even the plain ones were mesmerizing to watch. Such as the little fluffy moth currently perched atop a flower, for example.

Slowly, it drew closer, gazing at it with wide, unblinking eyes. A pair of enormous, feathery antennae sprouted from above its eyes, and the catwhale had an overwhelming urge to give them a delicate pet. And its tongue grew in a spiral! It uncurled gracefully to take sips of nectar, and retracted neatly into those beautiful circles once it was finished. How the catwhale wished it was half as cool.

Struck by a sudden whim, it pounced in a lightning-quick motion, front paws reaching out for the moth. In hindsight, it was probably not the best move for a quadruped, as it nearly tipped over headfirst when it landed. And it nearly got what it wanted: a quick peek underneath their paws confirmed that it had indeed caught the moth, if only for a brief moment as the bug snatched the opportunity to escape through the opening.

Bedlam cried out with dismay, lunging after the moth again, but caught nothing but a massive inhale of the dust that trailed behind it.

Content Warning
This post contains potentially sensitive material:

hallucinating intense bug-related creepy crawlies, warping its own body accidentally
Even as it prepared for another pounce it already half-knew would be fruitless, the earth beneath its paws seemed to swirl and distort, and then it was sinking: down, down, down. The catwhale cried out with confusion, but its voice sounded almost as though underwater. Swirls of colors it hadn't known existed sped past it, as if it were swimming through a sea of variant rainbow bumblebugs.

Then they attacked with a vengeance, their buzzing intensifying to an ear-splitting cacophony as they enveloped it, their stings pricking every square inch of its wrinkled hide. It could feel wriggling and the tickle of wingbeats next to its eardrums as some crawled inside. Bedlam fell backwards, shrieking with horror and frantically batting at itself. Magic sparked, a spell born from desperation. The bumblebugs writhed and became liquid, like a soup--at least, Bedlam thought they did. But even as the fluttering inside its ears turned mercifully to the more familiar sensation of trapped water, a new sort of pain gripped its eye.

The scene shifted before its eyes. Everything became oddly circular and curvy, and mirrored too: as if in a kaleidoscope. The trees melted. The rocks melted. The water arced and drifted like plumes of smoke. A mountain came crashing down on The Mountain, squishing both into a shape oddly reminiscent of a roller coaster--? Not that it knew what those were.

And it could feel itself changing, too, as everything around it liquified. Spreading, bloating, like a puddle in a rainstorm, like a tide that never stopped rising. It turned the world green, dying the sand.... the rocks... oh, Blight was already green, and he was quite a spiky puddle. "Help," it bubbled, and reached out with a foreleg that stretched and stretched and stretched and stretched and stretched and stretched and stretched and stretched and stretched and stretched and stretched and stretched and stretched and stretched and stretched and stretched and stretched and stretched and stretched--

Blight flickered, like TV static. He began to smoke. The smoke formed the image of--oh, caves, a giant dust moth. They were multiplying! They had come for revenge! "I'M SORRY!" it splashed and burbled. Its words were not words. The dust moths multiplied. They were a square, ten by ten, hovering in the air. Then a cube. Then... it had no word for the shapes and formations that followed. Six! It counted six dimensions! Its eyes drifted... floated... sloshing around in the liquid... it sank into the sand, absorbed by the earth, pulled up by a dense mat of roots, evaporated! What a sensation it was to be gas! It had no bones! It had no flesh! It was free to do as it wished!

Laughing, it zoomed sideways--

And choked on seawater rushing up its nostrils. It coughed and coughed, trying to figure out what was going on. Gas couldn't choke! --but it was solid now, trapped in this prison of flesh and bones. Leo was back to normal. Blight wasn't here. The sand was sand, as usual, and the volcano looked as it always did. It shook its head and blinked. Only one eye. Why couldn't it blink the other? Where was the other?

The other, as it turned out, had been warped and extended by its own magic. It dripped down from its face, like a fried egg that never ran out of its liquid-gold yolk. Oddly cyan now, instead of olive green, it extended all the way down its face to its chin, where it continued dripping down into the sand. The one remnant of the world of liquid.

A final droplet beaded and dropped onto the beach, and its entire body seemed solid once more. Bedlam collapsed, letting waves of ocean water soothe the phantom pains from the stings-that-had-not-been-stings. It never wanted to get up again.

((to clarify: everything was a hallucination except for its eye turning into liquid!))

A nap? A nap seemed like a good idea, after all that chaos and panic. A period of time when it could recover, and just not think for a while. It didn't want to think and try to figure out what happened. It just wanted some peace.

When it tried to close its eyes, though, one wouldn't.

There was nothing for the eyelids to shut over. There was not even an eyelid to shut. The cells had melted away into cyan goop and swirled into the waves lapping at the shore. The skin and bone around it had warped and stretched almost far enough to close the gaping hole there, but there was still a dark, empty slit that reached into its face. It was twisted. It was so wrong. The muscles wouldn't relax right, and it wondered half-hysterically if it would get permanent cramps in its face.

Gingerly, with rising dread at what it might find, Bedlam brushed a paw against where its left eye had been. Even touching it gently, it could feel how the bone jutted and twisted. Wrong, wrong, wrong, they wailed inside their head. I want my eye back！！！

Its paw came away with surprisingly little blood. Perhaps the warping magic had done something to the blood vessels there, but Bedlam didn't feel particularly lucky. It wanted its eye back! If it couldn't have that, then-- a nap! If only it could close its eyes and feel normal again! It would exterminate the dust moths for this transgression, Bedlam determined, dragging itself back on dry sand and flopping down in a sullen heap. It lay there stubbornly in a futile attempt to sleep, one eye closed and the twisted remnants of the other 'staring' blankly at the distant ceiling.

exit