NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="talien" data-source="post: 5142146" data-attributes="member: 3285">Grace Under Pressure: Part 8 – The End of the BeginningThe Deep Ones swarmed Jim-Bean.  He could feel their malice, their hatred, their fury at what he was trying to do.  He was wrong about them, Jim-Bean realized.  He thought they were mere savages, gasping fish-monsters filled with an alien hatred of all life.  But they were far more malignant than that.They were cells.  Single cells, shed from the greater being, the thing that men called Cthulhu.  They were the castoff, its detritus.  But it was their god, their universe, their source of life.  Their fury was not out of fear for their deity, but out of love – they were trying to impress their misbegotten god.It didn't notice, any more than Jim-Bean noticed the skin that flaked from his body.  There was nothing to notice, after all.  It was so small, so imperceptible, that the very notion was absurd.  It was the ultimate vanity, a display of sheer ego, to think something so important could even notice, much less appreciate, the veneration of floating specks of insignificant life. The muck at the bottom of the depression bubbled and swirled, and in one large area the glow intensified. Within a few moments something began to rise from the muck. Its head was an enormous, great rubbery slab of tissue with malevolent dark eyes and a writhing mass of huge tentacles at the mouth.  Claws rent Jim-Bean's suit.  Water pumped in.  A sacrifice.  That's what he would be.  The Deep Ones, frustrated by the attack on their god, were going to pay obeisance to their master by ripping Jim-Bean limb from limb.Jim-Bean knew all this.  He knew what they were thinking, feeling.  The psychic pressure of the titanic being below was immense, but now it was no longer threatening to drive him mad.  He felt peaceful.  It was joyous, the arrival of the One True God.  All was right.  He wanted to laugh, to sing, to dance…Their sacrifice would be meaningless, realized the tiny part of Jim-Bean's brain that was still functioning.  He'd be dead long before they tore him apart. Jim-Bean drifted off into darkness, in the comforting psychic womb of his lord and master, who was now as much a part of him as he was of them. The Deep Ones backed off, uncertain.  Jim-Bean's head twitched as he drowned, body convulsing as saltwater exploded his lungs.  The suit's faceplate was shattered, revealing his peeled flesh and the ruin of a face.  The Deep Ones had torn one of his arms off, and it rolled hazily in the water, trailing blood like a misguided rocket. Jim-Bean was dying.  No more pain.  No more worry.  The light faded.  Jim-Bean was already blind, his eyeballs long since destroyed from the radiation, but there was a light within his own mind that shone brightly.  Even that was fading.  He was falling, falling, falling…He deserved peace, didn't he?  Jim-Bean had been abandoned, experimented on, treated like a dog.  He had been betrayed, violated, and used.  He was crazy anyway, increasingly losing his grip on reality. Stupid humans.  They could fend for themselves from now on. It was better this way.And yet.  And yet.Jenny was in his mind's eye, straining.  The babies were being born.  His babies.  His children.  Boys and girls all jumbled together.  Nurses whisked them away, except for one.  One of them, only one, was stillborn. The doctor said something to Jenny, holding the limp little creature up for her to see.  She wailed a scream of anguish that woke Jim-Bean up out of his stupor.  Dead?  Dead!No, not dead.  The other six were alive.  But the doctors were hiding it from Jenny, hiding it from him.  Those were his children.  This was his future.  They were the inheritors of the earth, and Majestic was trying to cover it up. Jim-Bean forced himself back into consciousness.  He took a deep breath, and found that gills had formed in what was left of his chest. The virus!  The PI virus had infected him, turned him.  Now he was one of them. Though his senses were ruined, his mind's eye could still see. The Deep Ones chanted in a huge floating mass, ushering in their god's arrival. The beast rose from the muck, bigger than anything Jim-Bean had ever seen. It was coated in the phosphorescent stuff, so that it glowed dimly as it rose into the water. Its glow pulsed faintly and seemed to shift in patches, as if the glow itself were sentient.No.  No, that would not do.  Jim-Bean reached out with his remaining good arm and grabbed hold of the handle near the airlock.Down, down, down the Horseshoe plunged.  It was heading right for Cthulhu.  Jim-Bean reached out with psychic tendrils.  He could feel the grenades, positioned in a wedge, ready to rent a hole in the reactor.  Someone just needed to pull the pin.  Someone.Jim-Bean reached out and pulled.</blockquote>

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