It hurts. Every single feeling on my body could be summed up in one word. Pain. You would think that I, being exposed to it my whole life, should have some type of immunity against it. But this was different from what I had ever experienced. After years of living in a world where pain was expected in a daily basis, the only way of keeping my sanity was to not focus on it, but rather concentrate in another feeling or thought. Even if it ran through my veins and made my muscles ache and scream, it wouldn't affect my mind since it would try to alienate itself from what the body was experiencing.
My notion of time was so screwed that I could no longer tell if it had been mere instants or half of my life that went by. It all finally ended when my left side felt something that was definitely not pain. It was the ground.
My vision still hadn't cleared but my senses were slowly returning to me. The advantage of having twelve conscious beings adhered to my head was that our minds were entwined with each other. I was able to see what through twenty four different eyes, smell with the tongue of each and one of them and most of all, be able to have several train thoughts at the same time. The last one had its pros and cons but right now all I needed to know was where I was.
The first thing that entered my mind was the feeling of soft ground underneath me. I was confused by what my hands touched. It felt… weird. Kinda like a mushy humid ground. This contrasted with my mental image of how it should be. Slowly, my senses of smell and hearing came to me and they also send confusing images of my surroundings. Chirping, rushing water, snapping, gentle breeze… I tried to stand up but my legs were half numbed so this made it more challenging. Once I could properly stand, my vision returned but everything was blurry. I blinked repeatedly and rubbed my eyes until I could differentiate shapes and colors. It was difficult since it was so dark. I frowned; it could have only been dark if I was underground…
I snapped alert. If I was underground, this was very very bad news. That meant that I was trapped and an easy target.
My vision had finally cleared, so I could see everything surrounding me. I seemed to be in a forest like area, but the trees looked strange. The usual closeness that the underground tunnels seemed to always have was missing, and instead it was replaced to a freer environment.
After listening intently for a while, I could hear something ahead. I stepped closer to whatever was lurking here and saw a clearing between the shadows of the tree and in its center was a fire. Surrounding it were biped beings, with a body built not unlike my own corporeal shape. While there was a certain similarity, I noticed that they didn't have any means of defense in their bodies. There were no fangs, claws, or anything that suggested some kind of strength or power. When I read their energies, they only had one soul. This puzzled me. How could they have survived so long being so… defenseless and weak like a recently incarnated demon?
They were speaking in a foreign manner and I tried to come closer to them. I accidentally stepped on something and their attention diverted to where I was standing. There were five of them, but I could take them down if it was necessary. A beam of light shoot from one of the being's hands and illuminated my face. I snarled in response and they seemed to be frozen. I took advantage of their paralyzed positions and moved to a crouching stance near the fire. I could now see them better. Two of them were feminine and the rest were male. The feminine ones had their legs uncovered and very revealing shirts while the males wore shirts that were short sleeved and very colorful. One of the females had some type of… thing hanging from her nose and ears, with big black squares in front of her eyes and glasses covering its interior.
The moment I moved closer, they scrambled to get away from me and began screaming nonsense. One of the male ones, who had a very tight shirt on, was pointing a metal thing to me. He was grasping its handle and I realized that it was a weapon by the way the tube like contraption was focused on me. I snatched it from him and threw it away, out of his reach. This made them more anxious fand some of them had started crying. While this was amusing, I was getting sick of their antics so I used my telepathic influence to make them shut up and be compliant.
"Where am I?" I had barely spoken when they all clutch their ears in sign of pain. Interesting. Apparently my voice induced pain to them, so I opened a telepathic link in order to communicate and repeated my question.
'United States, America, Earth.' None of those names gave me any indication of where I was, but I filed the information for later use.
'What is your species?'
'Human.'
Each answer from them created more questions, making this interrogation fruitless. I wiped their memories of ever seeing me and made my way into the forest. As I got deeper in the woods, I began to look around for Titian. The faint light didn't make it any easier and adding to that the ability of invisibility we demons had, it may take a while to find him.
"Titian, Titian, Titian." I didn't know how long I had called out to him, but finally I felt his presence near me.
"Euralye."
"Titian, do you know where we are? All I could find out was that we are somewhere called United-States-America-Earth and that it's populated by humans. Does that mean anything to you?"
Silence. Finally he responded with a guarded question. "How did you get that information?"
"From a few of these humans. It was given by telepathic means, so it's accurate since they were in a mental bind."
"Then, we are no longer in the Ethereal Realm." My silence was all he needed to go on. "I only saw a few of them a couple of times in all of my lives and they usually go insane in our home dimension. Chzo snatches them for feasting, so they never remain for long. They're native to the World of Science/Technology."
I paled at what he was insinuating. "But that would only mean…"
"That we are in their World? Yes, we are." Fucktastic.
This is not the same Earth in which the events of Chzo occur, but a parallel dimension instead. I really didn't want the Order of Blessed Agonies to get involved so their worlds are not going to be the same. Also, demons have magic, but it's obviously dark. Their magic will be used and explained later on. In the saga, Chzo and anything coming from the Ethereal Realm communicates only telepathically. Not once is it suggested that they may have some type of language so I'm improvising, considering that the pain element is the base of energy in their dimension makes my theory of speech inducing agony is not that far-fetched.
