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Senten

By Tyrammafar

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Prologue

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‘The world is always changing,’ I heard a guy say once. Man, he had no idea how right he was. Well, to tell the truth, it wasn’t really this particular world I was thinking about when he said it. If there is anything in my life that I should be used to, it’s change. It really does happen all the time, in every world, but the one I happen to think of changes far more drastically and more often than this one.

‘What in the world is this guy talking about?’ That’s what should be going through your mind right about now. Hell, if that thought wasn’t going through your mind I would fear for your mental health! I fear for my own sometimes. Well, for those that haven’t heard the story already, I guess I better get to explaining. Sit down somewhere comfortable…this might take a while.

I’m talking about Senten. Weird name, isn’t it? I didn’t think so until just recently. As any reasonable physicist knows, there are many alternate realities, parallel universes that run alongside our own. Well, I should actually be saying your own. Yes, I’m not from around here. Hell, I have no idea where I’m from! No one from the world of Senten really knows where they came from, who they are, or even what they are. Sure, I might be human, but that’s just what I look like when I’m in this world.

Back to the story. You see, when a decision must be made in a world, it splits into two parts or more, each one with a different choice being made. At some point there had to have been a starting point, the trunk of the tree, if that helps you think of it. Where do all those branches meet up? Where was the first decision made?

Well, that place is Senten. Senten is a world where things change so quickly that you could be in white armor fighting off a dragon one second, and then living in the slums of a highly-advanced city the next. As luck would have it, in my case, I’m usually doing the former, or something similar. Swords, guns, ships, starfighters, planets that talk, I think at this point I’ve seen it all.

And the sick thing about it? It’s all a twisted little game. I’m just a pawn on a chessboard. Life is a game, I always say, but you aren’t the player; you’re the piece that’s being moved. At some point in my life I got sick of that shit. Yeah, I didn’t want to be toyed with a second more, and so I decided to get revenge on the players of this game.

The thing is, revenge is also a game. A dangerous one, and one not easily played. It had rules, but they could be broken. It had pieces, and they could be easily manipulated.

After twenty-six years of waiting, it was my turn to move a piece.

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Chapter 1

The World of Senten

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My name is Christopher Thompson. Pretty normal sounding name for someone from another dimension, huh?

Here’s the thing about Sentenians: we never know what we are. Or, rather, we don’t know what we are born as. We are born and then thrust into this world of games, tricks, and lies, and if we don’t learn fast we are killed. Of course, you can’t expect a newborn to be able to do much, can you? That’s why only a few Sentenians survive. It shouldn’t be any, but by some twist of Fate a handful of the billions of new Sentenians live to the age of ten.

Now on to the surprising part; whenever the world of Senten changes, the Sentenians usually do as well. I am human in the world of Terra, where you are right now, but while in Senten I could be pretty much anything. One day I might end up being a huge, walking, talking lizard. Another day I might well be a slug. No one can tell. That is the real reason why we don’t know what we are; we never had a permanent form.

There aren’t just us Sentenians in this world, no; there are also the other pieces. People like me are the pawns, but someone needs to fill the other spaces. That is where the Minors come in. Minors are unable to change; they stay with the form of the world that Senten chooses. When the world changes they go along with the old version, and if that version comes around again then so do they. It’s more complicated than I can explain, so I’ll let it explain itself.

Maybe I should stop explaining things, but then you would get lost and most likely stop reading my story. Go ahead, I don’t care. You can go back to your peaceful little life in your quiet little world, and not care that an alternate you might be dying with a knife in their throat in some other dimension. It happens all the time, no need to worry.

But then you’re no better than the thing that moves all the pieces. Sure, I’m a Christian man now, but only because God exists in this world. In other dimensions there are either no gods or more than one, and this always causes chaos. I’ll never really know if Senten had its own gods, and I don’t really care; the gods there were pieces as well.

I was twenty-six, as I said, living my life in this strange and dangerous ‘game’. Not that age matters to a Sentenian, since we’re immortal. Here’s the only cool thing about being a Sentenian…have you ever played one of those shooting games on a computer, and when you die you just ‘respawn’ somewhere else, good as new? That’s what happens when a Sentenian dies; we just respawn and keep going. Why don’t the children that die after birth just respawn, you may ask? This benefit isn’t applied until you reach the age of five years old, no one knows why and no one has enough patience to care.

Alright, back to the story.

I was twenty-six, a healthy specimen of…whatever creature I was when I was born. At the time though, I was a human. Nothing special, but you have to admit that humans are well suited to just about anything. One thing they aren’t suited to, however, is hanging by their fingernails on the edge of a cliff that drops into a gorge of razor-sharp rocks. That was what I was doing just then, the wind flapping my woolen clothes, my brown hair being tugged with invisible fingers.

Sure, if I dropped to my death I would just respawn, but dying still hurts. Hell, just the coming back to life hurts, but that part I could cope with; dying, though, hurt like hell. Believe me, there is no such thing as a peaceful death for a Sentenian. I really didn’t feel like dying at this point, so I hung on to the gray rock of that cliff with all the strength I could muster, which I have to admit isn’t very much when I’m a human.

Why was I hanging onto a cliff, you ask? Long story, but I’m telling a long story now so I might as well tell you this one. I made a mistake, plain and simple. I had thought that I could have just gone into that foul smelling cave and slain that dreadful dragon that terrorized the villages far and wide as easy as I would smash a bug. I had done it before, why not now?

There’s another thing about Sentenians: we can’t stay still. We are a people of action, and when there is something exciting to do we just can’t help but do it.

Well, the dragon-slaying was a bad idea. Instead of a dragon as the villagers had told me, I had found a manticore. Most of you won’t know what a manticore is, so I’ll explain it for you. A manticore is also called a ‘man-tiger’. The traditional human representation is a female human head on the body of a lion, but this is barely like the real thing.

Real manticores are brown or orange, earth shades that blend with their surroundings. They have a long tail and their backs are covered in spines. The club of their tail is tipped with hundreds of poisoned spines that are designed by a twisted evolution to cause the most pain possible to prey before killing them by melting their insides. Their jaws are lined with several rows of teeth one after the other, like a shark, and so they can tear a man into bits with a single bite. They also have wings.

Thankfully this manticore was old, with glazed eyes and few teeth that would regenerate. I had already been hit by its tail, and my leg wept crimson, but it no longer had poison. It did, however, have razor-sharp claws, and it was also intelligent from many centuries of survival. It knew that I was hanging by a thread on that cliff, and it watched me from the edge with the same interest a cat might show a mouse before killing it.

I wasn’t scared of death; I’d died many hundreds of times since I gained my respawn ability. I was instead feeling the fear of incredible pain and agony before that death, as this was a manticore I was dealing with. It was bred to cause pain.

Unluckily for me, Sentenians also have this problem with things that make your adrenaline rush. We can’t get enough of it. This applies to me, even in this day and world, and it most certainly applied to me there. I wasn’t going to just drop to my death, or just let that beast kill me; no matter how futile it was, I was going to try and kill it anyway, barehanded or not. I needed to do it. No fault of mine my kind are a race of psychotic idiots with a death wish!

Anyway, I was hanging there by my fingernails, which were now bleeding by the way, being watched by a very old, very hungry monster of men’s nightmares, and hoping to whatever god there was in existence that I would be able to get back up to the edge without breaking anything. Like I said, humans are ill-suited for this kind of thing; in fact they aren’t very good at anything physical. Most certainly not hanging by their fingernails on a cliff while a mild necrotoxin is going through their veins.

Necrotoxin? I asked myself that question too. A necrotoxin is a kind of magical poison. I guess I must have lost you at the word ‘magical’. One thing you have to know is that while magic does not exist in Terra, your own world, it does exist in Senten. Well, not all the time, but nevertheless it does exist. Necrotoxin is one of those things that work by magic, destroying tissue in certain ways other poisons cannot. It was mild, the manticore being so old, but it was still incredibly uncomfortable. The best way to describe it is like being on fire. Why was I not screaming? I’m kind of used to this sort of pain. Necrotoxin is nothing new.

Hanging on a cliff as a human was new, however, and so there I was, trapped. Now, if I was something a little more powerful strength-wise, I would have no trouble leaping up and choking that old beast to death. But instead I had no claws or fangs, weak muscles, and a little problem with blood-loss. Yes, I was bleeding pretty bad. I was feeling a little dizzy, and hell, I might have tried dying from the loss of blood, which is far more pleasant than the drop or the manticore.

But I’m a Sentenian, and I can’t just wait to die. I have to do something stupid to hurry it along.

I dug my bleeding nails into the hard, cracked gray rock, my arms popping as I strained to pull myself up. The manticore was expecting this and opened its mouth to prepare to eat me alive, but this turned out to be a mistake. A manticore comes in two varieties; lower-jaw and upper-jaw. This is from the fact that their spine can either be attached to their upper-jaw or the res of the skull, like a human, or their lower-jaw, like some birds.

This was a lower-jaw manticore, and so its upper-jaw tilted up so it could open its mouth. I could easily see its yellowed teeth gleaming in the light of the three suns. Did I mention that the current state of Senten had three suns? Of course I didn’t. Not only were there multiple suns, but I was wearing wool. I was very hot.

Anyway, back to the story…the manticore opened its maw and reared back to snap me up, but this also raised it so its eyes could not see me. I pulled myself back up onto the rocky cliff and rolled to the side as fast as I could, popping several arm tendons in doing so, and the manticore snapped down on solid rock.

It roared.

Now, you most likely have never heard a manticore roar, so let me describe it. It hurts. A lot. It hurts a hell of a lot. It hurts like all fuck times a thousand. It…well, I think you get my point. At this time I have no need to describe how much my head was hurting while my ears were bleeding. The stone cracked and green manticore blood dripped from manticore jaws, and the bits of old teeth that had been broken fell from its mouth onto the stone with clattering noises.

I had the biggest headache I had gotten in a long time; I was nearly unconscious from the sheer weight that the sound waves threw at me. The stone cracked beneath my bare feet, and I crawled towards the manticore. Yes, that’s what I said; towards the manticore. Still think I’m sane? If you do, you must be the one with no sanity.

I was unarmed and without a plan of escape or attack. I had no idea what I was doing other than the fact that I was most certainly going to die, and it would be very soon. Did I care? When you are immortal, you don’t really know the meaning of the word ‘caution’.

The manticore was breathing heavily, and I could hear its few teeth reforming in its mouth. It hissed at me and raised its tail up to smear me on the stone like a bug, which even at its age it could do very easily. I rolled to the left as the club was brought down on the stone with a resounding crack and the sound of bones breaking. Several spines stuck into the rock and broke off, and the manticore growled in frustration.

Manticores happen to be fairly intelligent, I might add, though not near as intelligent as say, a dragon, or even a griffin. They are still cunning, like a wild fox, but with an unnatural bloodlust. Let me also remind you that I had thoroughly pissed this thing off. It no longer saw me as food, it saw me as something to get revenge on and grind into the dust of the ground. Which it would most likely do, as I was still unarmed.

But not for long I wasn’t. I managed to reach one of the broken bits of manticore teeth, a canine as long and narrow as my forearm. The tip was needle sharp, despite its age, as it sharpened itself on a molecular level. I had a weapon, though primitive it was, and I may have a chance. Now the manticore decided to stop playing around and it brought its forelegs up to slice me to ribbons. Literally, into ribbons.

I was quite sure I was going to die…but let me remind you that I don’t care about death. Death may have well been my middle name, but instead my middle name was Suicidal. Yeah. Great for the self-esteem, isn’t it? The manticore brought its forelegs down with bone-crushing fore, and I stood up and leapt forward so I was now under the beast.

The beast seemed to not notice, and began ripping at the rock where I had just been in a rage, grinding the stone to dust. I thrust upwards with the tooth, aiming for its heart, and I saw the canine enter flesh and blood spurt out as it found its mark.

And then the world went white. No time to celebrate my victory, no time for a warning, Senten had decided enough was enough, and now I was laying on my back on a white surface in the white nothingness that was the Nexus, where I always went when the world made a change.

I was still bleeding, and my vision swam with sparks of light and darkness, mist swirling around me.

“Well…” I said to myself. “…at least that part is over.”

I passed out, and I knew that the next time I opened my eyes it would be a whole new world. A whole new way to die a horrible death in this strange and deadly universe of Senten.