I have never played with a crossover before, but I was curious about it.
I do one of two kinds of fics: the ones in which I focus entirely on the lore (The Bigger Picture), and ones where the story is collateral for me to explain the Lore (Revolution, Unbound).
Worm isn't that much interesting to play with in regards to the lore, since it's very well explained, and the story in itself it's kind of fixed, given the nature of Scion that imposes a hard, close end to the Worm book. AU or not, unless the author goes 'ok, in this fic Scion won't happen because I say so', the end conflict must be against Scion.
I don't do that. The whole point of my fics is to explore the existing lore, not creating a new one.
So, these two characteristics simply stop me from starting an SI, or simply an AU with an OOC or new OC. Taylor wins in the end because somehow she manages to force a second trigger and 'trick' Scion.
Here the crossovers came to mind.
I have several plot bunnies for Worm in mind, all centred around a failed trigger of Taylor.
I don't know if it makes sense for anybody but me, but a trigger is a process through which the [ENTITY] plants a shard inside of a human. To do so it must create a connection, but a connection can't be established until the [human] is open to receive said connection. During the Trigger, [human] gets opened to form a connection with [ENTITY] which uploads the shard into the [human] before closing said [human] and thus severing the connection until the death of the now host of the shard.
Why do I think it works this way? Because the two space slugs are seen only during the trigger and forgotten immediately after.
Now, to put the MC in a condition of somehow fight back Scion (impossible unless with a cheated second trigger through Panacea), in my head at least, something must go [ABERRANT] during the trigger: either opening the MC to something different than a Shard, or ... stuff that you'll find out if you read the following fics.
I was curious about The Elder Scrolls.
I mean, I have loved Skyrim, and Oblivion before it, but a ff in that particular universe would be a nightmare and half.
That's because even if I don't lose myself in the Lore, all I'm left with is portraying a series of the MC adventures that basically are sections of my own gameplays of some sort, and that would turn out to be somewhat boring and pointless, I mean, if I want a new Skyrim adventure, I'll just install some new mods and go all out.
In any case, since I've read the crossover 'Dragons' between TES VI and The Inheritance Cycle, I've been fantasizing about a crossover with either the Dragonborn or something from the Elder Scrolls inside another fiction.
I thought about Taylor!Dragonborn, but unless she basically becomes the Slayer of Alduin from the get go, she would be too underpowered to face pretty much anything. And if she already has all the Shouts and powers from the Dragonborn at the end of the game, she would be totally OP, and so boring once more.
A crossover in which Taylor slowly comes into her heritage as the Last Daughter of Akatosh is interesting somewhat, but how would she learn the Words of Power? The only Dragon around to eat is Lung, and so... well, I could likely frame her killing Lung and eating its soul as some sort of dam-breaking event that would cause her to unlock her experiences of a past life as dragonborn.
In any case, Dragonborn!Taylor is not extremely original in my opinion, even if it could turn out to be fun.
The Divines don't interfere directly with Nirn's affair, so it wouldn't really make sense for them to act openly through Taylor.
That leaves us with the Daedric Princes, agents of chaos and whatnot.
But, which prince would set out first from Oblivion to a whole new universe?
Shegorath may by chance turn Taylor into a cheese wheel and give her the wabbajack, Hircine could be somehow hunting something through the Planes and stumble upon Taylor as her [connection] is opened, Molag... well, let's leave the Lord of Rape out from Taylor's first interaction with the TES lore, shall we? Peryite is of pestilence and order, so it could link through the disaster that is Taylor's locket, and could be willing to reinstate order because [ENTITY] are eating slowly the multiverse. Namira could come into play, of disgust and decay, but it's very closely created to Taylor's canon power, and I don't want to write a fic which is basically a ripoff from canon. Dagon is of Energy, Revolution and Change, but I don't want to turn Earth Bet into an open door for Oblivion to invade, even if it would be an amusing fight.
I have recently read some shit regarding the Cthulu Mythos, and so... tentacles and eyes.
AD YEAH, I ONLY SOMEWHAT OWN THE IDEA OF THIS SPECIFIC CROSSOVER, EVEN IF IT WON'T DO ME ANY GOOD.
A BARGAIN FOR
It shouldn't have been possible.
It couldn't even have been allowed.
How could it?
Even for them, this was beyond horrifying.
She had known there was something wrong as soon as she had returned to school.
She knew something had been done to her locker, it wouldn't even be the first time. But this...
She even somewhat expected the disaster inside, but to be shoved in and locked inside said disaster...
From the moment she had been tossed inside, there hadn't been any room for 'I knew there was something wrong' or 'I should have expected it'.
There was no room for thought of any kind, everything was squashed under pain-panic-hate-despair.
Taylor Hebert screamed, only to immediately gag and fail to suppress the urge to vomit as the smells overwhelmed her, to trash wildly when she felt 'them' crawling on her legs, over the open cuts caused by her savage flailing, skittering over the metal doors of her coffin, buzzing too close.
It couldn't be real, but even that last hope found no way to survive inside of Taylor's mind.
The blood on used tampons gave a sharp tang to the air, while the rancid scent of her vomit meshed with a vengeance with the strangling flavour of stale shit and acidic piss. All that happened in the dar, the thin beam of light that managed to climb its way inside the locker from the edges of its door was just enough to give her tearing eyes awareness that something was moving over her. No, not something, several somethings, skittering, climbing, biting, burrowing, tearing, stinging, hurting.
Disgust quickly left the way free for Panic to rise, Fear and Rage both surging forth, the second building after the first as the walls felt
In the smell of vomit and toxic waste, of despair and panic and not-enough-room-can't-breath-help-die-I-wanna-die that completely encompassed the girl, Taylor broke, and her being opened to something... beyond.
Vast, amidst the star, moving impossibly in a fractal nightmare of twin raising spirals, there was something beyond the realm of human thought, beyond the scope of mortal understanding. But even in that moment of impossible and blessed detachment from reality, that impossibly brief sliver of time, the body of Taylor Hebert failed, her heart stilling over the overload from her panicked vegetative nervous system, her mind blanking out over the convulsions shaking her body, her muscles spasming out of any form of control and limit, she distractedly felt her teeth biting on empty air so strongly that her molars cracked, but by then, Taylor Hebert was dead.
As she died, [ENTITY] retreated the [Queen Administrator] that it was about to load into the cracking being of the [Potential-Host, and if it could have, it would have felt dissatisfaction with the loss of [Potential-host]. As [Entity] abandoned any attempt to complete the releasing of [Queen Administrator, and the equivalent of its attention crumbled away from the [Potential Host - Deceased, something else walked in Taylor Hebert through the open connection left behind.
Tylor Hebert didn't realize that she was dying, how could she? And yet she was aware that something was about to end. The primordial state of [SURVIVE] her mind was into didn't realize anything beyond the metal coffin that was related to the something which was about to end.
No living being truly understands the concept of death, of the end, of no-more. It can't, because the very definition at the base of every living being is to be and to refuse the not-being. Oh, humans have come to realize it in their thoughts, some even think that they accept death once it comes, but it's only a lie built and perpetrated to reassure both themselves and th ones around them.
For the same reason people can't hold breath long enough to die, the [Primal Mind] at the core of the human being doesn't accept death. The human body will always choose life over death. Cells burning resources to live just a little longer, unconsciously gulping when water is poured in your mouth.
As she died, the last corner of conscious thought of Taylor Hebert realized that it was done for, and while it surely refused the idea of death, it scampered through itself, madly looking for anything, a hope, a way out, a secret trick to turn the panic-inducing situation into something that couldn't be real.
As her body trashed out of control, her tongue swollen from the lack of water and the acidic presence of vomit almost suffocating her as she didn't manage to breathe, she felt a pull of sorts, and she couldn't really realize if it was real or only in her mind, if it was her soul leaving her body or her sanity abandoning her.
The dark and oppressing metal coffin in which she was dying suddenly unravelled before her, her eyes, swollen and half stung and bitten into parodies of what they once where, returned to their original size, stinging madly and throwing a spike of indescribable pain through her brain. The shock was so sudden that her heart jolted back into function, as her tongue was returned to its original size, the cuts, bites and tears over her skin oozed something before closing apparently on their own.
Taylor Hebert hugged herself, cradling her broken being with the same care one could reserve for a frail-looking crystal flower, and with the same fear reserved for nocturnal panics and heart-stopping scares. For a long time, or maybe no time at all, she remained still, trying to understand what was happening. How did she...? When? Why... the locker. The thought sent a rolling wave of revulsion and panic through her whole being, making her jolt upright from here she was curled up in a fetal position.
With a start, she noticed that she was stark naked.
The fifteen years old hastened to cover herself with her arms, lowering herself into a crouch over the ground which was... made of ripped of pages? Her mind discarded the panic of being naked in an unknown place in order to try and come to terms with her senses where telling her.
The temperature was slightly chilly, and forced her to fidget and move a bit without straying from her position in order to get the blood running.
She as standing in a dimly lit environment, on a bridge apparently made of ripped pages pressed together, inks of deep and dark colours gleamed wetly at her, but left no blemish on her skin. The sky above her was defined by a hazy cloud, and like a smaller cluster of nimbus, here and there appeared to be a tear into the void, from where languidly moving masses of tentacles of a rotten dark green seemed to hover without purpose. Beyond the greenish coat of clouds, Taylor could almost imagine that there was a starless sky, waiting to swallow everything beneath it.
Beneath the impossible bridge made from mind breaking concepts, a poisonous green sea churned and breathed almost as if it was alive, toxic looking fumes raising in lazy swirls for several meters before drifting down again. Taylor looked through the shaded air to the extremities of the bridge she was standing over.
Like islands over the sea, giant stacks of reading material broke the surface of the murky waters, numerous shelves lined the edges of what she could see, almost as if walls, columns and crannies, nooks and sharp turns that she couldn't possibly be seeing through her eyes given the distance and the little light available. After long moments of indecision, she turned on her left and quietly moved toward the closest looking of the two islands, and as she crossed from the bridge to the island with a little jump, she observed that the halls and walls were literally crammed to bursting with ancient scrolls and smouldering journals, heaps of books and papers littered the floors, and even entire buildings rose in hazardous patterns, constructed from twisting stacks of books.
Hours later, or perhaps minutes, as panic and fear fell through her and got pushed aside, she trailed her fingers over the cover of one of the books, and given that Taylor had no idea about what to do, that she was likely either dreaming or in a coma, she couldn't really bring herself to ignore the book that looked like it was better preserved than its surrounding brothers.
With a wistful twinge of thought directed towards the memory of her mother, she opened the book and started reading, curious to witness what she had come up within her dream.
A Dance in Fire
Chapter 1
by
Waughin Jarth
Scene: The Imperial City, Cyrodiil
Date: 7 Frost Fall, 3E 397
It seemed as if the palace had always housed the Atrius Building Commission, the company of clerks and estate agents who authored and notarized nearly every construction of any note in the Empire. It had stood for two hundred and fifty years, since the reign of the Emperor Magnus, a plain-fronted and austere hall on a minor but respectable plaza in the Imperial City. Energetic and ambitious middle-class lads and ladies worked there, as well as complacent middle-aged ones like Decumus Scotti. No one could imagine a world without the Commission, least of all Scotti. To be accurate, he could not imagine a world without himself in the Commission.
"Lord Atrius is perfectly aware of your contributions," said the managing clerk, closing the shutter that demarcated Scotti's office behind him. "But you know that things have been difficult."
"Yes," said Scotti, stiffly.
"Lord Vanech's men have been giving us a lot of competition lately, and we must be more efficient if we are to survive. Unfortunately, that means releasing some of our historically best but presently underachieving senior clerks."
"I understand. Can't be helped."
"I'm glad that you understand," smiled the managing clerk, smiling thinly and withdrawing. "Please have your room cleared immediately."
Scotti began the task of organizing all his work to pass on to his successor. It would probably be young Imbrallius who would take most of it on, which was as it should be, he considered philosophically. The lad knew how to find business. Scotti wondered idly what the fellow would do with the contracts for the new statue of St Alessia for which the Temple of the One had applied. Probably invent a clerical error, blame it on his old predecessor Decumus Scotti, and require an additional cost to rectify.
"I have correspondence for Decumus Scotti of the Atrius Building Commission."
Scotti looked up. A fat-faced courier had entered his office and was thrusting forth a sealed scroll. He handed the boy a gold piece, and opened it up. By the poor penmanship, atrocious spelling and grammar, and overall unprofessional tone, it was manifestly evident who the writer was. Liodes Jurus, a fellow clerk some years before, who had left the Commission after being accused of unethical business practices.
"Dear Sckotti,
I emagine you alway wondered what happened to me, and the last plase you would have expected to find me is out in the woods. But thats exactly where I am. Ha ha. If your'e smart and want to make lot of extra gold for Lord Atrius (and yourself, ha ha), youll come down to Vallinwood too. If you have'nt or have been following the politics hear lately, you may or may not know that ther's bin a war between the Boshmer and there neighbors Elswere over the past two years. Things have only just calm down, and ther's a lot that needs to be rebuilt.
Now Ive got more business than I can handel, but I need somone with some clout, someone representing a respected agencie to get the quill in the ink. That somone is you, my fiend. Come meat me at the M'ther Paskos Tavern in Falinnesti, Vallinwood. Ill be here 2 weeks and you wont be sorrie.
- Jurus
P.S.: Bring a wagenload of timber if you can."
"What do you have there, Scotti?" asked a voice.
Scotti started. It was Imbrallius, his damnably handsome face peeking through the shutters, smiling in that way that melted the hearts of the stingiest of patrons and the roughest of stonemasons. Scotti shoved the letter in his jacket pocket.
"Personal correspondence," he sniffed. "I'll be cleared up here in a just a moment."
"I don't want to hurry you," said Imbrallius, grabbing a few sheets of blank contracts from Scotti's desk. "I've just gone through a stack, and the junior scribes hands are all cramping up, so I thought you wouldn't miss a few."
The lad vanished. Scotti retrieved the letter and read it again. He thought about his life, something he rarely did. It seemed a sea of gray with a black insurmountable wall looming. There was only one narrow passage he could see in that wall. Quickly, before he had a moment to reconsider it, he grabbed a dozen of the blank contracts with the shimmering gold leaf ATRIUS BUILDING COMMISSION BY APPOINTMENT OF HIS IMPERIAL MAJESTY and hid them in the satchel with his personal effects.
The next day he began his adventure with a giddy lack of hesitation. He arranged for a seat in a caravan bound for Valenwood, the single escorted conveyance to the southeast leaving the Imperial City that week. He had scarcely hours to pack, but he remembered to purchase a wagonload of timber.
"It will be extra gold to pay for a horse to pull that," frowned the convoy head.
"So I anticipated," smiled Scotti with his best Imbrallius grin.
Ten wagons in all set off that afternoon through the familiar Cyrodilic countryside. Past fields of wildflowers, gently rolling woodlands, friendly hamlets. The clop of the horses' hooves against the sound stone road reminded Scotti that the Atrius Building Commission constructed it. Five of the eighteen necessary contracts for its completion were drafted by his own hand.
"Very smart of you to bring that wood along," said a gray-whiskered Breton man next to him on his wagon. "You must be in Commerce."
"Of a sort," said Scotti, in a way he hoped was mysterious, before introducing himself: "Decumus Scotti."
"Gryf Mallon," said the man. "I'm a poet, actually a translator of old Bosmer literature. I was researching some newly discovered tracts of the Mnoriad Pley Bar two years ago when the war broke out and I had to leave. You are no doubt familiar with the Mnoriad, if you're aware of the Green Pact."
Scotti thought the man might be speaking perfect gibberish, but he nodded his head.
"Naturally, I don't pretend that the Mnoriad is as renowned as the Meh Ayleidion, or as ancient as the Dansir Gol, but I think it has a remarkable significance to understanding the nature of the merelithic Bosmer mind. The origin of the Wood Elf aversion to cutting their own wood or eating any plant material at all, yet paradoxically their willingness to import plantstuff from other cultures, I feel can be linked to a passage in the Mnoriad," Mallon shuffled through some of his papers, searching for the appropriate text.
To Scotti's vast relief, the carriage soon stopped to camp for the night. They were high on a bluff over a gray stream, and before them was the great valley of Valenwood. Only the cry of seabirds declared the presence of the ocean to the bay to the west: here the timber was so tall and wide, twisting around itself like an impossible knot begun eons ago, to be impenetrable. A few more modest trees, only fifty feet to the lowest branches, stood on the cliff at the edge of camp. The sight was so alien to Scotti and he found himself so anxious about the proposition of entering the wilderness that he could not imagine sleeping.
Fortunately, Mallon had supposed he had found another academic with a passion for the riddles of ancient cultures. Long into the night, he recited Bosmer verse in the original and in his own translation, sobbing and bellowing and whispering wherever appropriate. Gradually, Scotti began to feel drowsy, but a sudden crack of wood snapping made him sit straight up.
"What was that?"
Mallon smiled: "I like it too. 'Convocation in the malignity of the moonless speculum, a dance of fire -'"
"There are some enormous birds up in the trees moving around," whispered Scotti, pointing in the direction of the dark shapes above.
"I wouldn't worry about that," said Mallon, irritated with his audience. "Now listen to how the poet characterizes Herma-Mora's invocation in the eighteenth stanza of the fourth book."
The dark shapes in the trees were some of them perched like birds, others slithered like snakes, and still others stood up straight like men. As Mallon recited his verse, Scotti watched the figures softly leap from branch to branch, half-gliding across impossible distances for anything without wings. They gathered in groups and then reorganized until they had spread to every tree around the camp. Suddenly they plummeted from the heights.
"Mara!" cried Scotti. "They're falling like rain!"
"Probably seed pods," Mallon shrugged, not turning around. "Some of the trees have remarkable -"
The camp erupted into chaos. Fires burst out in the wagons, the horses wailed from mortal blows, casks of wine, fresh water, and liquor gushed their contents to the ground. A nimble shadow dashed past Scotti and Mallon, gathering sacks of grain and gold with impossible agility and grace. Scotti had only one glance at it, lit up by a sudden nearby burst of flame. It was a sleek creature with pointed ears, wide yellow eyes, mottled pied fur and a tail like a whip.
"Werewolf," he whimpered, shrinking back.
"Cathay-raht," groaned Mallon. "Much worse. Khajiti cousins or some such thing, come to plunder."
"Are you sure?"
As quickly as they struck, the creatures retreated, diving off the bluff before the battlemage and knight, the caravan's escorts, had fully opened their eyes. Mallon and Scotti ran to the precipice and saw a hundred feet below the tiny figures dash out of the water, shake themselves, and disappear into the wood.
"Werewolves aren't acrobats like that," said Mallon. "They were definitely Cathay-raht. Bastard thieves. Thank Stendarr they didn't realize the value of my notebooks. It wasn't a complete loss."
"I don't have the imagination to create something quite like this." she realized, closing the book and putting it back where it was before her eyes roamed a bit over the countless stacks of the other books, instinctively knowing that they were fille and written with stuff beyond the scope of her understanding.
After a second, the realization came through: "This is not a dream." she stated dumbly.
No
And the answer came through all of her senses, encompassing and impossible, dissonating and resonating beyond the scope of her understanding, the voice was the sound of falling leaves echoing through a puddle of water and a rough pen scratching parchment, it held a silver of whispers and promises of causality, cascading through her senses and making her very bones quiver. And something deeper into herself felt like drowning into the flapping pages of that voice, dissecting its meaningful secrets and discover its true depth.
Her mind endured the wave of confusion that she barely grasped before it went away, leaving her like a pebble carried by the rolling sea over a dry stretch of land. Taylor turned on herself, her eyes searching for the origin of said voice, and when she saw what she was looking for, she almost wanted to ignore it and refuse its existence: through a fractal-like break into the air, an eldritch flow of tentacles, claws and eyes with pupils shaped like a horizontal eight containing the void amongst stars inside dark yellow irises, blinking without rhythm or reason.
Her mind stilled, all conscious thought processes halted for a single second, before the urgency of the situation pushed her towards reacting, ideas and words building over each other towards a scene that made sense of her situation.
The locker actually happened. she cringed, then I... triggered? The only thing that could explain impossibilities was, after all, bullshit powers. I'm a parahuman? That realization, however, didn't bring warmth nor comfort, because she had never heard of powers that would throw their owner into another dimension over which she didn't have any form of control.
"You healed me." she accused the impossible being that was intent into scrutinizing her. She knew that she had received wounds in the locker,
Yes
The voice once more washed over her awareness, making her stumble and take a step back from its origin.
"Why?" she stammered out, before deciding that another question would perhaps be more adequate for the situation: "Who... What are you?"
The riddle unsolvable. The door unopenable. The book unreadable. The question unanswerable. The shape of tentacles and eyes seemed to blink itself inside and outside of Taylor's perception as an unconscious process.
I have more names and titles than what your feeble mortal mind can possibly understand. The eldritch being swirled around Taylor, covering sky and ground alike in slowly blinking eyes.
I've been called the Demon of Knowledge the Master of the Tides of Fate, the Gardener of Men, the Prince of Fate, Lord of Secrets, the Golden Eye, Ur-Daedra, the Abyssal Cephaliarch, Old Antecedent, Scryer, the Inevitable Knower. I have been named Hyrma Mora and Hermorah and Herma-Mora, the Woodland Man.
Once more the shapeless being swirled around Taylor's now prone form, as her breath started to come in ragged and uneven, the presence of the shapeless being thundering through her very being.
I am Hermaeus Mora. I am the guardian of the unseen, and knower of the unknown. I see you, mortal.
"Where are we?" Taylor asked without truly understanding what was going on, and why amongst all the possible powers she could have ended up with she found herself with a sentient one that she couldn't really understand.
This is Apocrypha, where all knowledge is hoarded. Perhaps you will prove clever enough to uncover the secrets hidden here. If so, welcome. Perhaps you are a fool or a coward. If so... not only knowledge lurks in the dark.
Taylor knew something about every sentient being, in particular, about the ones capable of speech: nothing was ever done for nothing. "What do you want from me?" she asked.
You have entered my realm. You have sought out forbidden knowledge like many before you tried. You are a seeker of knowledge and power. the Prince of Fate stated, sidestepping her question as gracefully as any being without legs could.
"I didn't do it." She protested. That just wasn't true, it surely wasn't because of her that her power went completely bonkers and landed her in... Apocrypha, was it?
You looked for a secret, and found the home of all knowledge. the Lord of Tides retorted simply, almost as if it was amused by her denial.
"But that..." Taylor frowned "...this isn't what gaining powers it's supposed to be like."
Hermaeus Mora was many things beyond human understanding, but something of its inscrutable depths easily resonated within the mind of any scholar to have ever lived: [CURIOSITY].
The mortal was not of Nirn, that much was obvious, her connection to Aetherius as new as the one in a newborn mortal, she was no walker of Oblivion, giver her lack of awareness and manifest ignorance, but then, where did she come from? The daedric prince of forbidden knowledge was always looking, always lurking, always seeking, like many of its servants, for yet another nugget of knowledge, and thusly, his action already took shape among the deep currents underneath the Tides of Fate, and it glimpsed how much knowledge it would be able to harness through the mortal in distress in his realm.
And yet, none of its servants could accept the task without being tested. So, as Ur-Daedra had always done since the beginning of Apocrypha, he offered knowledge for servitude.
Serve me. And I'll grant you what you seek.
Taylor shook herself free from her reverie, bringing her focus back on the dramatic weight of her actual circumstances. The girl had suffered for a long time at the hands of neglect and oppression from her own kind, Herma-Mora could see that much without looking any further than the hunched title of her shoulders. She wasn't the first human to appear to him in such a guise after all.
Yet, something inside Taylor turned against the eldritch being. Servitude? She didn't manage to survive the... locker... to serve. Like hell. Whatever power she gained, she would use to be a Hero, damn it, and if Octo-eye had something against it, well, it could go and take a swim in the toxic looking sea beneath the islands of books.
I won't serve you." Her voice felt feeble after the one of the ancient being in front of her, and yet it carried her well across nonetheless.
You will serve me, willing or not. All who seek after the secrets of the world are my servants.
"I don't need your help, I'll figure out whatever power I have without you, and a path back home as well." Taylor was being uncharacteristically confrontational, but something inside of her was reminding her about all those times she had witnessed her father challenging people clearly richer than him when they wanted 'an in' with the dockworkers in order to push forward their own agendas. He knew in those times, that if those people could truly do something without his intercession with the people of the Union, they would have done so already, and thusly he would squeeze everything from them before giving in even an inch.
Why would a being 'with more names and titles that her feeble mortal mind could understand' take this much time off only to chat with Taylor about a casual offer of servitude?
"I'll find a way out on my own. And what my power is as well, without your meddling, and most certainly without serving you."
No mortal, look around. You can nothing here on your own. You could spend a hundred lifetimes searching my library, and you will never find what you seek.
"What do you want my servitude for?" Taylor asked, unwilling to even consider the idea of accepting the creepy-monster's deal.
The shapeless void pouring tentacles and eyes shifted in place, but did not answer, choosing instead to redirect their talk.
I know what you want: to find the power to bend the world to your will. In my realm there is the knowledge you seek, and much more. Many before came just like you, for the same reasons mortals find so appealing: many failed, and lost themselves, only a few succeded. I could grant you the power of those few, but all knowledge has its price.
"No prize will make me willingly your servant." Taylor shot down the being's proposal without even considering it. "But we can trade. I would know what to offer if I knew what you'd need me as a servant for."
After several moments of heavy silence broken only by the fluttering of pages and an occasional whip-like sound that Taylor refused to focus upon, the being' eyes, yes, all of them, blinked.
I seek what my servants seek. Knowledge, secrets, discoveries, stories. I seek past, present ad future, I trade in knowledge, and the power that it grants.
"And yet you still believe that there is only one world." Taylor smirked, her mind had focused on the being's speech, again and again, trying to figure out what she knew that it didn't: and just before, he had mentioned that his servants sought the secrets of the world. World, as in, singular, not the multitude of ones that the schoolgirl knew existed.
The eldritch being shifted and twirled without moving, giving a kaleidoscopic impression of flowing tentacles and blinking eyes.
Knowledge for knowledge. The nature of the universe, and the truth of worlds beyond Nirn has withheld secrets from me for many long years. The time has come for this knowledge to be added to my library.
"I'll be able to come and go freely, to roam Apocrypha without monsters attacking me, your servants will help me find what I look for, and you'll answer all of my questions truthfully and without withholding any secrets or pertinent information." Taylor stated the terms of their agreement with a secure voice, she could understand why her father appreciated haggling that much: "In exchange, I'll drop in Apocrypha knowledge from the worlds I meet."
If you find your way from and to Apocrypha, the beings that answer to me will not attack you. The path to the knowledge you seek, you'll have to forge on your own. If I answered a question with everything that I found pertinent, you would wither and die waiting for me to finish, I'll answer truthfully, but making the right questions is up to you. As payment, all the knowledge of the worlds you reach is to be added to my library.
"I don't know how to come and go from here, I landed here by accident remember?" Taylor crossed her arms over her underdeveloped chest: "Besides, it's in your best interest that I'm able to drop in whenever I can, and I can't look for knowledge in the worlds I meet if I can't leave easily."
I'll grant you a way to come and go, but lose yourself in the thirst for knowledge, and you'll join my countless servants as Seeker.
She was about to agree, verbally sealing their pact, when caution raised its head imperiously: "Why should I trust the world of a tentacled monster that tried to trick me into becoming a servant until ten minutes ago?" Taylor asked with a sarcastic tone.
My word is as true as fate, as inevitable as destiny. Respect your side of our agreement, and I'll hold myself up to the terms, fail, and pay the price.
Perhaps she could read that book to find a clue towards the exit? "Chance's Folly" she murmured out loud, "by Zylmoc Golge."
REACH AN EXIT FROM THIS PLANE, AND I'LL HOLD TO OUR AGREEMENT, OR LOSE YOURSELF, AND LET APOCRYPHA GAIN YOU.
With a startled jump, she dropped the book, and started looking around to figure out how to leave.
With a yelp, she realized that she was still naked.
