Brash and the Schrodinger Snare

Brash the Dragon hit the ground face first, skidded three meters, and came to a stop with his feet curled up against his shoulder blades. He lay there, groaning for a few seconds, then rolled around until he was merely on his face.

"Ouchatronic..." he muttered.

Then he sat up and gasped.

The world had shifted.

His perspective had changed.

For most mortal minds, it would have been a jarring wrench. Something so fiercely unexpected and unusual that it would have taken minutes, if not hours, to grasp the profound alteration to not only his senses but his very own conception of his

self

. The essential core of his consciousness.

For Brash, it took five seconds.

"THIIIIIIIIRD PERSON!" he cooed, looking at himself. "Whoaaaaaaaaaaaa!"

He cackled and grinned. Brash the Dragon was currently not looking particularly dragonesque. Thanks to a run-in with his designer and several secretive programs that she had slipped into his genetic sequence, Brash's shapeshifting had been turned off. He was currently stuck in his human form. But as his human form was a slender, incredibly athletic male with long black hair, bright green eyes, and a face that settled somewhere between teen heart-throb and anime bishonen heart-throb, Brash wasn't exactly at a disadvantage.

Brash tried out thinking.

I can hear myself think,

he thought - and the echoing recursiveness actually caused a headache. He started to rub his temples and tried to get a feeling for the space he was in. And, just like that, whiteness exploded into detail. Shocking, vivid detail. He was no longer standing in an empty, uninteresting space. He was instead in a narrow corridor of crumpled metal. Like aluminum foil in its jagged complexities, but far harder. Brash leaned up against one of the narrow walls, sniffing at it, muttering to himself: "Dragonsniffs!"

Deep in his prefrontal cortex - where most humans located their personality expression, social behaviors, and decision making - a specially designed sequence of brain structures got to work, sampling the wall via his nose, skin contact, and light licking. This was why Brash licked a lot of things, and now that he could see himself in the third person (close omniscient, specifically), he realized that he was actually doing materials testing for future battlefield conditions.

To be clearer: He could tell the wall was made of an alloy of several metals that he couldn't get through without super-strength or laser weaponry.

"I have a prefrontal cortex!?" Brash asked, cocking his head. He had often slept through biology class. Or been distracted by cute butts. "I did not!" Brash said, shaking his fist. But as he didn't quite know where to shake the fist, and was perceiving the universe in third person, he ended up shaking his fist at his own self. Or at least what he perceived as his own self. Brash leaned against the wall. "This is

wiggy

."

Still. There was nothing for him to do here. And that meant that the weaponry programming built into Brash's very genetic sequence kicked on. When he lacked a target, an objective, or a place to recharge his biological, arcane and psionic energies, Brash the Dragon was

designed

to find one of the above.

Or, as Brash saw it...

"Need somebody to huuuuug!" Brash skipped forward down the corridor, singing along to the tune of Queen's

Need Somebody to Love.

He was barely through misremembering the lyrics on the third chorus when he came to the end of the tunnel and immediately had his legs swept out from underneath him by what appeared to be a true draconian fortune in golden coins. His arms flared and he laughed with delight as he skidded along coins, which crinkled and crackled all the way down. He thumped onto a clear spot of ground and beamed as he saw that he had stumbled into a hoard. A true

hoard

, not a horde or even a whored.

Golden coins, piled up by a full neck-span of a max sized elder wyrm, glittering beneath warm mage-lights. Gemstones and diamonds and jewelry and magic swords and wands and pieces of armor and rings and

more

. All of it heaped into vast piles, scattered here and there with the raw chaos of a dragon who had properly settled his scaled rump down and done what every dragon dreamed of doing:

Rolling in loot

. Brash had ached for a chance to roll around properly in treasure, but he had only ever gotten to do so with a few quarters that he had gotten as change for buying Wendy's instead of eating school lunches at the cafeteria.

"And it's..." Brash paused, then sniffed at the gold. "Miiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiine!"

His mother - his real mother, Relix Castrovel Miles, not his biological mother, Dr. Palladium - had a hoard. She had even shown it to him. But while Dad, the clueless human, had thought that Brash would then get a chance to roll around in the gold, Mom and Brash knew.

You just...didn't roll around in anyone else's tresh!

Specially not your

mom

.

Like. That was gross.

She was your

mom

. Brash shuddered at the very thought. Ew!

"And now, to enjoy my totally not suspicious reward for arriving in the super duper not a trap!" Brash said, cheerfully, sliding his palm through the golden coins. Then he gasped, melodramatically, like an extremely bad actor trying to show off how shocked and appalled they were. "Oh

noes

!" He picked up one of the golden coins, then snapped it in half. Gold foil crinkled and tore, revealing nothing beneath but chocolate. And not even

good

chocolate.

Cheap chocolate. The kind that tastes like its at least 25% cardboard.

"The treasure is all faaaaaaake! What an unexpectedly horrifying revelation!" Brash said, then popped the candy into his mouth before kicking a gemstone - revealing as it shattered that it was nothing more than cheap cut glass. He swallowed, then spread his arms. "Oh woe! My mind is shattering before the inexplicable terror of this nightmare dimension."

There was a pause that could only be called pregnant in its length.

"That's what

she

said!" Brash said, wiggling his eyebrows. Before anything could happen, he began to exposit - apparently, entirely to himself, pausing only to pop another coin into his mouth. He had to admit, even cheap chocolate was still, well, chocolate. "So, basically, I've done this song and dance before. You know, get exposed to extradimensional energies and be forced to live a nightmare constructed from the depths of my psyche? And you know what happens when someone does a thing like a thing that happened before? Well, once, I petted this cat, and the cat scratched me! So, instead, the next time I petted a cat, I made sure to get scratch resistant skin. Also, then, I turned into a cat, and then got pets! Basically, what I'm saying is...I

really

miss shapeshifting." He sighed and then sprawled, belly first, over some foil gold coins. As the illusion was no longer trying to make them seem like gold coins, they immediately began to soften and melt against him.

"...oh, also, I totally had a mental deffo planned!" Brash said, perking up. "Deffo is how cool kids say defense, by the way!"

It, without qualification, was not.

Brash scowled and stood up, chocolate glistening on his shirt. "Hey!" he said. "So, anyway, rather than being thrown into a horror nightmare dimension where all my friends and fam are dead and stuff, I just settled on my

other

worstest fear ever. Which is having bad tresh!" He grinned. "But I've learned a lot on this adventure. I've learned that vampires make the best wives. I've learned that when you get a chance to pet a wolf, make sure to do it

before

the battle royale starts! I've learned that sometimes, you can't just ask a girl out without getting to know her better! Oh! Also, roller skates are cool. Like, super cool. But most of all, I've learned that powers don't make you spesh. It's how you

use

the powers you got!"

He tapped his temple. "So, I guess that guy in the fedora was worried over

nothing

."

Brash sat there, smeared in chocolate, and felt quite proud of himself.

Lord Darkeye was having a far less sanguine experience.

***

Darkness.

Then, stabbing, light.

The woman on the ground was beautiful. Her skin was a pale, almost milky color, while her hair was a luminous blond. By human standards, she was quite strong looking - muscle slid beneath her skin like iron. Her fingers had the faint callouses of a swordwoman, and her body was seamed here and there with scars. She had the body of an adventurer. She sat up, her eyes wide. They were bright purple. She looked at her hands, then at her body.

"Oh no. No. No no no no no no!" She sprang to her feet, her hair hanging almost down to her athletic rump. She looked at her body, then closed her eyes, her fingers going to her temples. She felt dizzy. And sick. And

horrified.

"W-What is

happening

?" she hissed. "Where's the hoard?"

"Oh? You thought you could just waltz in here and take

our

treasure?" A gurgling, crackling voice came from the darkness. The woman snapped her head up, her eyes widening as glowing lights flickered on beyond the range of the single beam of light. Ten glowing points - ten glowing

eyes

centered around one massive central eye. The woman's heart skipped and she stepped backwards the beholder floated forward. The spheroid body was strange - and the eye-stalks each formed a different character. But the face? The face was

horribly

familiar. It was the face of a halfling, twisted and made large and stretched around a single glaring eye.

It was the face of the first humanoid that Lord Darkeye had ever obliterated.

"Hehe, she's not very

bright

is she," a crooning female voice came to the left. Another beholder. This one had the face of that elven wizard who had once vexed Lord Darkeye for nearly ten years before the beholder lord (he had not yet then been a cybernetic abomination) had vaporized her tower, dominated her, and made her fall into her own pit of lava. The eye-stalks on this beholder smoldered with raw energy. "Still wondering where the hoard is."

"Looks like the eyestalk is on the other head now..." The third voice was familiar as well - a rough, dwarven burr. Looking over, the woman's eyes were now so wide that the purple was nearly lost in the consuming, terrified whites.

Guard Captain Brunt's dwarven features looked like pure horror, stretched and contorted across the sphere of a beholder's body. But he still had his beard. His great big bushy beard, dragging and rasping along the ground as eyestalks focused in on the woman...who realized just who she was. The horror mounted as Lord Darkeye realized the pressure in her - in

his

mind - had been trying, desperately, to use his eyestalks. Eyestalks he didn't have. Eyes he didn't have. He couldn't see without turning this pathetically limited head. And he...he was trapped in a body that was weak. Pitiful.

Small.

To add insult to injury, he wasn't even in the body of a humanoid male. He had respected a few of them.

Scant few.

"P-Please..." Lord Darkeye whispered.

"Aww, please! Please!" The halfling he had killed centuries before cooed at Lord Darkeye, making his voice a simpering, whimpering mockery of Lord Darkeye's former baritone. "What did

I

say when you ripped me apart...atom...by

atom

..." His mouth made a hideous smacking noise, his lips pressing together, his tongue - that long, hideous tongue of a true beholder - slurping and slipping along his mouth and jaw. Drool dripped and pattered onto the ground.

Lord Darkeye felt her back bump into something large and round. Disgusting, fetid breath exhaled around her thighs, making her feel as if she had been painted in oily grunk. A low, chucking laugh came from behind her - and Lord Darkeye felt herself

freeze

. Freeze utterly in mind consuming, sanity snapping terror. She knew that to turn was just as good as to stay standing - but at least turning to face the new beholder behind her would let her retain some dignity. But she couldn't. Her knees were locked. Her breath was frozen in her throat. Tears brimmed at her eyes. Behind her, a voice she almost recognized growled. "Tasty. Tasty. Maybe we won't even use our rays...

"Maybe we'll

eat

you up!" The elf crooned. "Like how you ate my husband. I remember that. Yes. I remember

that

."

"Start with the toes! Tasty tasty toes..." Brunt growled, floating closer and closer.

"Dominate her," the halfling crooned, bringing the eye around that could charm and control minds. "Make her meek."

"Eat! Eat! Eat!" The beholder behind Lord Darkeye chanted.

Lord Darkeye screwed her eyes shut.

A long tongue slurped along her back - coiling around her ankles. She screamed. She couldn't stop herself. It was as reflexive as breathing or blinking. Her legs were yanked out from under her and her palms slapped against the ground. She scrabbled, screaming and screaming and screaming and-

Something smashed into the eyeball of the beholder behind her. Lord Darkeye felt it more as a rustle of wind along her back, a teasing of her hair, and a blessed feeling of release as the tongue unwrapped from around her ankles. She forced herself forward, dragging herself along the ground. Then, looking over her shoulder, she saw the beholder was recoiling, his eye closed, his eyestalks flailing in pain. And poised against his eyeball, like a gymnast ready to spring off a wall, arms spread in a near parody of a courtly bow...was...

"Brash!" Brash the Dragon sang, then flipped off the beholder. He landed, his feet caked in gore. "Ahaaaaaaaa! He'll save every one of us!" He grinned. "And when I say every

one

of us, I mean EVERY. LAST. ONE." He reached out with his hand to Lord Darkeye, grinning as he did so.

Lord Darkeye gaped at him.

Then took his hand.

Brash tugged her up and behind him in a smooth motion. He smirked at the beholders that still gaped at him. He lifted up his hand, then focused. A crackling beam of red light exploded from his palm, forming into a sleek long sword made of psionic energy. Brash smirked. "I still haven't lost

this

, mofos!"

The beholders all focused their main eyes. Shimmering cones of force exploded outwards, washing over Lord Darkeye and Brash the Dragon. The energies were contra-arcanic in nature - beholders used this power to dampen all magical powers. Normally, psychic powers would be unaffected. But the thing was? Arcane powers drew on what scientists of later eras would term Potential Psychic Energy, while psionic powers tapped a source that would be codified and measured with Internal Strength Points.

...but both were interchangeable. Both were similar sources. Internal strength points were harder to dampen. But when three beholders forced every iota of their anti-magic fields on a single point, even internal strength could falter.

The psi-sword that Brash had relied upon for so long flickered, dimmed, then vanished.

The beholders all beamed.

Brash hung his head forward as Lord Darkeye pressed against his back, clinging to him. Her terror had receded ever so slightly - enough for her to know that it was better to die

with

someone than alone. And maybe she could shove Brash into a beholder's mouth and buy herself some time. Brash squeezed the hand he still held, clearly choosing to believe that Lord Darkeye was clinging to him for comfort.

"I've lost my shapeshifting," Brash said. The beholders started to float forward, laughing. The one Brash had nailed in the eyes was starting to drag itself off the ground, groaning. "I've lost my flight. And my guns. And my arcane powers. And my psychic abilities. And my super-strength, regeneration, and even my harem." He looked up, his eyes flashing as he smirked. The beholders were slavering, muttering to one another about how they were going to tear the two limb from limb.

"But there's

one

thing no one took from me." Brash smirked.

Then he clicked his heels together.

The shoes he wore

snicked

and two sleek skates burst from the soles.

"These RAD ASS ROLLER SKATES!" Brash said, then swung Lord Darkeye's feminine form into his arms. He leaped up and started to skate - the beholders all gaping in utter and complete shock. He shot past them, and they swung around, roaring in fury as Brash worked his legs - the gravity-blades leaving behind shimmering contrails as he rocketed towards the edge of this part of the hideous nightmare dimension. Lord Darkeye clung to him - but she was looking over his shoulder.

"Dodge!" she yelped.

Brash banked just before a crisscrossing stream of eye-lasers flew through where he had been. Then he was at the hole he had crawled through and shooting along a connective tunnel.

"Where are we going?" Lord Darkeye asked.

"I have no idea!" Brash said, laughing as he skated faster and faster. The echoing roars of beholders rang out behind them - and he knew that they would be flying as fast as they fucking could. So, he put on more speed. He swung wide around a corner, his gravity-blades cutting glowing arcs in the air as he almost went entirely perpendicular to the ground. But as he skated, he saw that the tunnel branched. There was the route back to where he came. Then there was the tunnel he had avoided. The glowing, faintly reddish tunnel that echoed with distant screams.

"Okay!" Brash said. "Close your eyes, Lady Darkeye!"

"W-Why!?" Lord Darkeye asked. "And I'm

not

a Lady!"

"Your third person pronouns beg to differ!" Brash said, squeezing her to him. "Plus, we're going somewhere where we absolutely DO NOT WANT TO HAVE EYES!" And with that, he put on more speed, swung towards the tunnel with distant screams, and closed his eyes tight. Lady Darkeye closed her eyes - and then snarled in irritation.

Lord

Darkeye, thank you very much.

Brash was blind. He could not see. And yet, he was skating forward with unerring precision, taking advantage of the fact that while he couldn't see, he wasn't seeing in first person. He was skating through the world at a distance, and the terrain around him was as clear to him as if he had been in a camera. And he was right. He did not

want

to have eyes in the place he skated through. The tunnel emerged into a vast room of meat and spikes and barbed wire. It was a place of screaming corpses and whimpering bodies. It was a place of frantic thrusting and grotesque orgies of blood and death and dismemberment. It was a place where the poor crew of that long ago starship had visited - a kind of gestalt nightmare.

Most people had specific fears.

But most people could be broken quite easily with a more

generic

fear: The fear of psychopaths skinning you alive and using your still sensate skin as a condom for barbed wire death orgies.

Brash maneuvered around the upside down crucifixes, banked past the chain-demons, ducked beneath the spiked scrotum, and finally shot into another tunnel. When he opened his eyes, Lady Darkeye was shivering and clinging to him.

"Did you peek?" Brash asked, his voice tight.

"I-I still have

ears

!" Lady Darkeye hissed.

Behind them, the screams were split by roars of furious beholders and the unmistakable zzzzzap of their disintegration beams. Brash laughed. "Hey! They don't place nice in this place!" he said, chuckling.

The next chamber they exploded through held four individuals. The fact they were the size of mountains did make it a

touch

odder than it would have been. Brash skimmed past the thigh of the immense, red man with fierce bull horns who sat before a table the size of a small continental plate. He held cards in his gargantuan hands. Poker cards. Across from him was a titanic bird-beaked creature covered in thousands upon thousands of eyes. The far end of the table held a grotesquely obsece green mound of rotting flesh. Across from that fellow was a gorgeous woman of purples, pinks, and futanari cocks. Like, at least six futanari dicks.