Spliff took a long drag from the blunt, the embers crawling up the cylinder of pulverized fine cannabis expertly rolled in tobacco leaf until they almost reached his fingers. Having finished it, he dropped the remnant into his Hutton Mug with the others he had saved. Old habits die hard. At his present level of affluence, he no longer needed to keep the "roaches" to be unrolled and rebuilt into another blunt as a means of conservation, but he was used to doing so. What was once an act of desperation had now become one of benevolence. Instead of saving them for himself, he had begun dispersing them among any Imperial Slaves that he might transport, or to the ground crew of the stations at which he would land. Such a gesture was always appreciated.
He rose from the captain's chair, and having removed his Remlok suit, strode across the Shoggoth's bridge clad only in his loose-fitting but comfortable black undershorts. He walked towards the rear starboard corner of the bridge, empty except for himself, and instructed the ship's computer to play some ambient electronic music. He opened a cabinet door upon which was a green decal in the shape of a cross. Inside were various implements for imbibing cannabis, along with a few unmarked cylinders and a jar the lid of which had an extravagant filigree around the edge and an embossed image of a happy face with X'ed-out eyes. He opened the jar, reached in, and removed three blackish-red seeds. He reached for one of the unmarked, short and wide cylinders, opened it, and dropped the seeds inside. Closing it and pressing down on the lid, it hummed for a moment until he ceased putting pressure on it, then opened it. Inside was now a crimson powder with small black flecks throughout. He smiled as he reached for an elaborate water pipe and packed some of the powder into its bowl.
After setting the cylinder and jar back in their respective places, he took the now packed bong back to his captain's chair. Sitting down and getting comfortable, he typed a code into the arm panel of the chair which darkened the electronically-lit buttons on both sides, disabling them from being pressed. It was a necessary precaution, he felt, given the mind-altering substance he was about to imbibe. He pressed a button on his Remlok helmet, which currently rested atop the head cushion of the back of the chair, which would activate voice recognition command. This would give him some ability to control the ship without allowing him access to manual controls that could maneuver it into danger. After making certain that all precautions had been attended to, he pressed the button on the side of the bong, watched the powder illuminate as it began to vaporize, and inhaled the smoke from the top of the device.
Onion Head was a fast-working psychedelic, and before he took a second hit, he had already begun to feel the effects. By the time he initiated a third hit, the colors surrounding him had become astoundingly vivid. Upon recognizing the beginning of his trip, he uttered a vocal command to the ship, "Activate Frame Shift Drive". The Shoggoth, already aimed towards its vector, began the countdown as blue waves enveloped the ship. Before the countdown reached zero, Spliff looked forward and saw that his destination was in the direction of the Large Magellanic Cloud.
His ship entered Witchspace, and the image of the Magellanic Cloud remained front and center as the waves of stars and nebulae swirled around him. The cloud appeared to grow larger as he flew closer to it. The ship was gone, he was flying alone through Witchspace towards the blue maelstrom which continued to increase in size as he approached it. He was hurtling towards the center of the cloud which slowly rotated counterclockwise as he entered its dark central recesses. Darkness seemed to become more and more tangible with each light year he traversed towards its center. The ring of swirling stars and nebulae even began to give way to this darkness, the tunnel of light ejecting him as though he tasted foul, sending him hurtling end over end towards a gravity well he could certainly feel but of which he could not see the source. For a moment he wondered if he were entering the event horizon of a black hole, when suddenly he stopped. He could feel the seat of his chair under him, and its back behind him, as if it floated, somehow in a fixed position, without a ship around him. Slowly though, the rest of the bridge came into view, bathed in a dim sort of light which emanated from no discernible source. His own skin, the complexion of which was naturally dark as his ancient ancestry had come from the tropical subsaharan regions of Earth's African continent, appeared unnaturally black, as if made of void opal. His dreadlocked hair felt like whiskers, communicating olfactory sensations to his Third Eye. That eye was wide open, and focused on the anomaly before him.
He sensed multiple forms of radiation from it. There was heat, for he could feel that on his face, and there was light which must have been on wavelengths imperceptible to his mundane eyes, but which his Third Eye interpreted as a form of ultraviolet. It did not bend light around it as a black hole would, there was no warping of space outside of its horizon. However, its surface seemed to mirror space, indicating a reflective nature to its substance. Spliff wondered if he should dare to approach it closer, to see if he or his ship's reflection would be visible, when there was a surprising disturbance in the mirrored image of the backdrop of space. Those reflected stars began to rearrange into what appeared to be a multi-lobed eye, an eye which he could feel studying him as intently as he studied it.
Its gaze flooded his mind with images of distant planets in uncharted regions of the universe. Vegetation, animal, and microbial life on innumerable worlds in countless galaxies grew and ate and spread through ecosystems of every imaginable and many unthought of forms. Even the majority of worlds which appeared barren and lifeless in fact had life which took the form of crystalline and even gaseous anomalies. Life existed in the vacuum of space as well, both in star systems and in the unfathomable stretches between stellar bodies. There were truly lifeless planets as well, huge balls of rock, metal, and even gemstone, revolving around stars of every conceivable color, or black holes where a star had once been which now slowly devoured the system of worlds which formerly orbited it. He saw monstrous collisions of galaxies and planets, black holes fusing into one another and the resultant explosion of energy, supernovas that incinerated entire planetary systems, and interstellar maelstroms absorbing the matter from millions of stars to form supermassive gravitational anomalies.
There was an unmistakable sense of insignificance permeating the vision. The Dark Star had seen and watched all of this over unknowable eons, watched life evolve and extinguish only to appear again and repeat the cycle. Everything had happened before, nothing was unique. Spliff's mind reeled with the overload of imagery, his head felt as if the sudden influx of information increased the pressure within his skull to the point that it might burst. Realizing that a release was necessary, he reflexively sent his own stream of images back at the Dark Star. He thought of the urban centers of his home planet and of those on more heavily populated worlds, of the gorgeous towering palaces of Achenar, and the metropolitan splendor of the many starports at which he had docked. Memories of the interior and exterior designs of various orbital stations flowed from him, as did those of the gargantuan capital ships and old multigenerational megaships. Here, he decided to focus on the intricacies of detail, the feats of engineering which created the internal wiring within his starships, their navigational circuitry, fuel injection, and heat dispersal systems. Bringing to mind technological machinations, he could not help but consider those of non-human constructive origin. He remembered the glowing orb in the ruins of the Guardian city from which he gathered blueprints for ancient alien technology, and the mysterious luminescent obelisks which bestowed patterns of data integral to the construction of their modules. The strange yet naturally occurring meta-alloys which enabled much of the recent technological advances came to mind as well, and though he had not seen them personally, he recalled video he had watched of the barnacle sites and ground bases supposedly constructed by Thargoids.
The memory of the sensation of being "licked" by the spectral tendrils of a space flower sprung into his mind, and as the haunting dream-image of the pulsating bioluminescence from an enormous, distant Thargoid entered the thought-stream, Spliff felt the connection sever. For an instant, he thought the Dark Star was shrinking, but quickly realized he was instead shooting back and away from it, spewed out as if he were a bad taste in something's mouth. The swirling display of astronomical firmament enveloped him as he soared backwards through that tumultuous and somewhat effervescent tunnel of light, returning him to his captain's chair with the distinct feeling of having fallen into it as one wakes from a dream in which they were falling with an abrupt landing onto their bed.
His trip had not ended, as the colors of his HUD and the Beluga's bridge remained extremely vivid and appeared as if in correlating motion to the music which continued to play. The center of his forehead, where the Third Eye seemed to manifest, felt sore like a muscle that had been overexerted. He was also still in Witchspace, having not yet reached the star to which he was jumping. For the moment, he could not even remember what star that was, and strained to focus on the name of the system which the navigation panel stated was his destination. After a moment, he realized that it was not a word he was looking at, but an unfamiliar designation of letters and numbers which reminded him that he had not targeted that specific system for anything he desired there, but because it aimed his ship in the direction of the Large Magellanic Cloud towards which he wished to jump while under the effects of Onion Head. Ever since he first ventured into space, he had felt drawn to that Cloud. He felt that Yog-Sothoth was callling his attention to it, beckoning him to come closer. He remembered his first journey to the bottom of the galaxy so that his eyes could see it unobstructed. Now, he had seen it with his Third Eye, and now, it had seen him.