Original Of The Earth Far Below

[Umbramatic]

Well. This is a story I've been meaning to tell my sister and her dance teacher for being inspired by my sister's final dance performance at college, a recreation of Doug Varone's Of the Earth Far Below. I thought hard about the performance and what Mimi told me it meant as I conceived this tale, and in finally writing it down was satisfying. For my own personal touch this is set in a fantasy world I'm developing, but that is part of the point; all else I'll say in advance is sorry for taking the title a bit literally.


But I give you:

Of The Earth Far Below




Gaia sat and waited.


He's always late to show up for these things, she told herself. You shouldn't take it personally by now.


Yet when he finally emerged next to her, a brief blur of black tentacles that congealed into a man with medium-length orange hair, purple eyes, androgynous looks, and two of such tentacles sprouting from his shoulders, she couldn't help but snap at him again.


"Stevgonzrak!" she said. "This was urgent!"


The man recoiled, shrinking back from the shorter, black-haired, green-eyed woman before him, his shoulder tentacles bending back as his body did.


"Sorry! I was taking care of some multiversal intruders, they were quite tasty... And please, even in official business call me Steve!"


Gaia sighed. "Fine, Steve..."


She sat back in the throne-like chair she sat upon and sighed, looking down at a massive blue-and-green planet.


"I just... Needed this checkup."


Steve shifted in his own identical chair, polishing the sides of it with his shoulder tentacles, smiling nervously. "Shall I do the honors, then?"


Gaia hesitated before nodding.


Steve hesitated himself before tapping the space before them with one of his shoulder tentacles, creating a ripple that served as a magnifying glass to the world before them.


-----


The smaller creatures scurried, hissed, bared their fangs and spears against the tall, horned, sharp-tailed monster before them. They loomed ever closer, blades at the ready, cutting throgh their necks and chests and limbs until there was only one furry beast-person left. She lunged, fangs at the ready, and had her head cleaved from her shoulder by a horned monstrosity.


Upon her death, the horned monster plunged a flag into the bloodstained earth, saluting to his fellows, who cheered.


-----


"No, no, no!"


Gaia conjured a massive root that shattered the vision like glass; immediately it withered, cracked, and froze in the vacuum of space, Gaia hurling it towards the planet in outrage for it to burn away in its atmosphere.


"They shouldn't be doing this! We deities have been trying to teach them better than this! Why are they still acting like this?!"


Steve stared at her, then sat back, in thought.


-------


A young, brown-haired, gray-eyed man sat back in a campus coffeeshop, sighing and taking a sip of his drink. It had been a long day of studying for him and he needed this break.


As he sipped more of his drink, however, his eyes were directed to one of the TVs blaring nearby.


"Earlier today over two dozen people were killed in a terrorist attack by..."


The man averted his gaze, sighed, and took a much larger swig of his drink, diverting his attention to another TV playing cartoons. The news report still nagged at his mind.


------


"...I... Like to think it's not really us?" Steve said.


Gaia raised an eyebrow. "How so?"


Steve tapped his index fingers together just as his two shoulder tentacles tapped together in tandem. "Well... Like you said we've tried to teach them... But you know how mortals can get! The jerks like to bend things and twist things for their own selfish desires instead of helping each other and ruin it for everyone else!"


"Right..." said Gaia, thinking to herself. "Like how Nocturne's idea for telling them that suicide was never a good option backfired."


Steve snapped his fingers. "Yes, exactly!"


"But..." said Gaia, "Does that mean they're bad learners or we're bad teachers? Or both?"


She sighed. "Maybe the others are right. Maybe it isn't worth it."


"Gaia," said Steve, "I don't want you depressed! Come on, don't they have that one harvest holiday just for you somewhere this time of year? Where they all get together and have fun?"


Gaia gave a small smile. "Yes... Yes they do."


She pointed up to a part of the massive globe before them. "Right about there."


"C'mon, let's watch the festivities!"


He created another magnifying vision with his tentacle.


------------


A crowd of people of varying shapes and sizes - small, guinea-pig like people, tall, saber-toothed monstrous people, salamander people, winged people, armor-tailed cat people, plain old people, just about every variety of people you could think of - were all gathered together in a village bazaar, talking, laughing, feasting themselves on various meats and grains and fruits as a shrine to Gaia stood nearby.


Amid it all, however, a lone boy with pale skin and yellow eyes dressed in rags gazed upon it all from the outskirts, wanting. Suddenly, he saw a chicken venture forth from the celebrations, pecking in utter ignorance to its surroundings. He crept toward it, his mouth opening to reveal sharp, grooved fangs.


A sabertoothed creature saw and immediately flung a torch toward the boy. He yelped as the flames singed him, patting the fire on his clothes out before scurrying off.


"Vampires," the sabertoothed being said, scoffing. "Bloodsucking parasites in more ways than one."


"And they think themselves better than everyone else too despite it all, like those godsdamn elves," said the cat with the armored, macelike tail.


"Pity that whelp didn't come out during the daylight hours," said a guinea-pig creature. "We could've really roasted him then!"


Everyone in the group laughed, then resumed their celebrations as if nothing happened.


Off in the trees, the vampire boy listened to every word, then curled up and sobbed.


------


Another yell. This time a storm of leaves that near-instantly shriveled and turned to dust in the vacuum but dispelled the vision all the same.


"Excuses! We teach them everything they need to coexist and they always find excuses!"


Steve waved his hands at her in panic. "Gaia, please, c-calm do-"


He gagged as he coughed up a long, black tongue with a slitted, purple eyeball at the end. He panicked, and then more so as a toothy maw ripped open on his right arm. He hurriedly stuffed the eyestalk back into his mouth, clamped the new jaw shut, then coughed and gagged after forcing his tongue back to a more humanlike state.


"Steve!" said Gaia. "Are you all right?"


"Y-Yes it's just this human form's harder to maintain when I get worked up like that..."


Gaia looked at him forlornly before sighing.


"I'm sorry... It's just..."


She grits her teeth and slams a fist down on one of the arms of her chair.


"Why did the Celestials have to create the mortals as a mess for us deities to clean up?! Why couldn't they have left the animals animals instead of creating new kinds of people for us to wrangle?!"


Steve paused and considered things again.


-------------


The table was abuzz with conversation as everyone dug into the copious plates of food before them. The young man was among them, and ready to take a bite to eat, when he heard an uncle chatting to an aunt.


"The politicians are talking about getting rid of those illegal immigrants - good riddance! They're barely human!"


The young man paused, almost thought of a retort, then sighed in resignation and ate his food half-heartedly.


---------


"...I don't think that's the healthiest way to look at things, Gaia."


"Then what is?" she said, scoffing, gesturing dismissively to the planet before them.


Steve sighed and wiped his head with a tentacle.


"You know how I can see into other worlds with my power over dimensions, Gaia?"


"Yes?"


-----


The young man is reading fantasy novels. Piles and piles of fantasy novels.


-------


"Well, I can! And they include some wonderful worlds, some amazing worlds!"


He gave a reassuring smile.


"But at the end of the day, they all have problems they have to move past and deal with anyway! I think our world is much the same! It's something we can keep moving forward on!"


Gaia looked down, then looked back up at Steve and smiled again


"...I guess you're right."


Steve pumped a fist and a tentacle. "That's the spirit!"


Gaia smiled and nodded. "Thank you, Steve... This helped. A lot."


She got up and vanished with a blink in reality followed by leaves that crumbled to dust in the void.


Steve watched the dust drift.


"You're welcome, Gaia..."


He frowned.


"Though... I was speaking from experience, in a way..."


-----


The young man was trapped alone in a void, screaming.


Dark power flowed into him as his body was twisted into something massive, inhuman, wrong. Maws, tentacles, eyes...


----


Steve shuddered at that particular memory and sighed.


"...I'm stuck in Middle-Earth as something out of a H.P. Lovecraft story and have to make the best of that..."


His form became a whirl of black and purple maws, tentacles, eyes, and vanished.


The chairs fell down from orbit and burnt up in the atmosphere.


***

 

[Rainfall]

[Blitz!] [a 'good fic' review] [max-249w/30m plan exceeded; next one]

Hey Umbra! Here with Blitz!

This story title caught my eye! I love that you were inspired to write this for your sister and her dance teacher after her final college dance performance : )

Actually, this story and some themes are right up my alley, actually. Hopping to it. : )

Gaia sat and waited.

He's always late to show up for these things, she told herself. You shouldn't take it personally by now.

The intro reads perfectly well! Good way to set the scene and establish an early characterization and dynamic.

Yet when he finally emerged next to her, a brief blur of black tentacles that congealed into a man with medium-length orange hair, purple eyes, androgynous looks, and two of such tentacles sprouting from his shoulders, she couldn't help but snap at him again.

Perfect flow from the start to this! Natural inclusion of Steve's description, while showing that Gaia still can't stand Steve's tardiness.
Mm, I don't know Steve, but it's good to know that a core element of him, at least when flitting to and from places, is made of black tentacles. (+1 for alliteration!)

The man recoiled, shrinking back from the shorter, black-haired, green-eyed woman before him, his shoulder tentacles bending back as his body did.

As the shoulder tentacles should! (unless they were to have a mind of their own)

Gaia hesitated before nodding.

Steve hesitated himself before tapping the space before them with one of his shoulder tentacles

Ooh, this makes sense, and I wonder whether adding a comma after Steve's "hesitated" or after "himself" would help with parsing the phrase. I'm not sure!
This is the third explicit mention of "shoulder tentacles" without any other tentacle mentioned so far, so I feel that "with a tentacle" works, especially since the second mention was recent. : )

The smaller creatures scurried, hissed, bared their fangs and spears against the tall, horned, sharp-tailed monster before them. They loomed ever closer, blades at the ready, cutting throgh their necks and chests and limbs until there was only one furry beast-person left. She lunged, fangs at the ready, and had her head cleaved from her shoulder by a horned monstrosity.

Well, that was a sight to behold through their celestial looking-glass!
I liked the clause "blades at the ready". My first instinct was not to repeat "fangs at the ready", but on second thought, that works as a parallel. (A letter missing from the word "through".) I like "scurried, hissed, bared their fangs and spears against" and "cutting through their necks and chests and limbs".
I like that the beast-person was ready to continue battle before being guillotined by a previously unmentioned entity.

Gaia conjured a massive root that shattered the vision like glass; immediately it withered, cracked, and froze in the vacuum of space, Gaia hurling it towards the planet in outrage for it to burn away in its atmosphere.

Yes to the successive "withered, cracked, and froze"! Seems like the vision-glass is material, which is a small surprise. Always a fan of meteoric particles.

"They shouldn't be doing this! We deities have been trying to teach them better than this! Why are they still acting like this?!"

Gaia and Steve are obviously beings of certain power. I don't know the scaffolding of power and entities in this verse, but I assume this means it comes with a certain amount of time scale to accompany the scope and power scale of teleportation, remote detailed sight, and implied guardianship of a "massive blue-and-green planet" 's denizens. How long have they been stewards? How varied has their approach been in cultivating what they would see as proper behavior and conduct? Has it changed any? Do the ground-bound denizens know of the guardians? In what ways are these caretakers themselves flawed?

"Earlier today over two dozen people were killed in a terrorist attack by..."

The man averted his gaze, sighed, and took a much larger swig of his drink, diverting his attention to another TV playing cartoons. The news report still nagged at his mind.

Serious news and subjects are hard to digest and deal with, and it's easy to get bogged down in chronic stress in life both personal and societal, certainly.

"Well... Like you said we've tried to teach them... But you know how mortals can get! The jerks like to bend things and twist things for their own selfish desires instead of helping each other and ruin it for everyone else!"

Oof

"But..." said Gaia, "Does that mean they're bad learners or we're bad teachers? Or both?"

Mm, yes! Not a simple answer, often enough.

A crowd of people of varying shapes and sizes - small, guinea-pig like people, tall, saber-toothed monstrous people, salamander people, winged people, armor-tailed cat people, plain old people, just about every variety of people you could think of - were all gathered together in a village bazaar, talking, laughing, feasting themselves on various meats and grains and fruits as a shrine to Gaia stood nearby.

Sounds like a lovely mix of people in the village! Splendid harvest festivities, even in context deference to Gaia.

A sabertoothed creature saw and immediately flung a torch toward the boy. He yelped as the flames singed him, patting the fire on his clothes out before scurrying off.

"Vampires," the sabertoothed being said, scoffing. "Bloodsucking parasites in more ways than one."

"And they think themselves better than everyone else too despite it all, like those godsdamn elves," said the cat with the armored, macelike tail.

And even among all the mutual cohesive community, there are species that are outsiders and maligned as non-human...

Everyone in the group laughed, then resumed their celebrations as if nothing happened.

Off in the trees, the vampire boy listened to every word, then curled up and sobbed.

And while we don't see much of the reasons why the villagers detest vampires and elves, we do see a moment of forlorn humanity in this young vampire boy.

He gagged as he coughed up a long, black tongue with a slitted, purple eyeball at the end. He panicked, and then more so as a toothy maw ripped open on his right arm. He hurriedly stuffed the eyestalk back into his mouth, clamped the new jaw shut, then coughed and gagged after forcing his tongue back to a more humanlike state.
[...]
"Y-Yes it's just this human form's harder to maintain when I get worked up like that..."

Ah, the true nature within roiling to manifest to typical form. A very nice passage on the corporeal depiction of such an incident!

"Why did the Celestials have to create the mortals as a mess for us deities to clean up?! Why couldn't they have left the animals animals instead of creating new kinds of people for us to wrangle?!"

Steve paused and considered things again.

Mm, context for the order of the world. Major world-theme there--creation of developed forms of life, with the accompanying introduction of new struggles and strife.

The table was abuzz with conversation as everyone dug into the copious plates of food before them. The young man was among them, and ready to take a bite to eat, when he heard an uncle chatting to an aunt.

"The politicians are talking about getting rid of those illegal immigrants - good riddance! They're barely human!"

The young man paused, almost thought of a retort, then sighed in resignation and ate his food half-heartedly.

Earth-like-world parallel to the harvest festival occurrence described earlier. A lot of tension at harvest and appreciation gatherings, when there are differences, and even the very humanity of some people is a point of contention...

"You know how I can see into other worlds with my power over dimensions, Gaia?"

"Yes?"
-----

The young man is reading fantasy novels. Piles and piles of fantasy novels.

-------

"Well, I can! And they include some wonderful worlds, some amazing worlds!"

He gave a reassuring smile.

The emotional, destructive, healing, and explorative power of words, of writing, of solo and shared worlds in imagination.

"But at the end of the day, they all have problems they have to move past and deal with anyway! I think our world is much the same! It's something we can keep moving forward on!"

Gaia looked down, then looked back up at Steve and smiled again

A theme, mm? There's problems in all worlds, you can't fully solve them, but you should keep trying and keep living. (also, missing a period at the end)

His form became a whirl of black and purple maws, tentacles, eyes, and vanished.

The chairs fell down from orbit and burnt up in the atmosphere.

When both leave from their celestial seating post, even the chairs fall and vanish as stardust.

Gaia and Steve have completed another meeting, seemingly to review how this particular world is doing. Troubles abound, and there are parallels from Steve's more simpler-mortal days, but at the end of the day, they resolve to continue their optimism. This was not a strategy meeting, nor an operations meeting, but a review and purpose one. Discussion directly implies they don't serve solely as watchers, but today they are watching, struggling, and resolving to keep on.

For this particular meeting that we get to see, there was a "issue-raiser / framing-resolver" dynamic to Gaia and Steve, though one wonders if the roles aren't reversed or matching in pessimism or optimism from time to time.
Overall, I appreciate the exploration of human themes and struggles in this exploration of Of the Earth Far Below.

 

[Flaze]

This was very intriguing. It left me curious to be honest since you mentioned that this was a sort of sneak-peek for an original world of yours. Consider me interested in that.

For what we see here, I feel like you have a good hang of paragraph and prose flow, which lets the one-shot read easily. That being said, I kind of feel like maybe we could've had more detail given to scenes. At the same time, I get that your focus was on impact and conveying feeling, particularly Gaia's feelings as she continued to see the people of her world committing all their wrongdoings. It reads very much like a play in that way, which fits with your original inspiration for it.

I also really liked the parallels between Gaia's world and the world Steve belonged to when he was a human. At first I thought we were looking at different parts of the same world and was confused why one seemed like ours and the other didn't. But your reveal at the end makes it all come together as we realize that just as Gaia is complaining about how her world is ugly because of how openly callous and horrible the citizens in it are...Steve's remember that his world, our world, can be just as bad, even if people aren't so openly hostile to others.

And yet Steve still dissuaded Gaia from just ending it all and tries to reassure her. Even with their problems he still believes that there's value in Gaia's world, just as he could still find value in his own world from his books. And the reason he's able to do this is because he was a human himself, giving him a higher level of understanding and preventing him from seeing humans as just children that don't listen, which is something that Gaia seems to think when she complains like a mother who can't get her kids to behave how she wants.

I'll close it off by saying that, again, I'm really interested in seeing a proper story fleshing out this world more, if only because I'm a sucker for these kinds of fantasy worlds, especially if there's going to be involvement from the deities. I particularly wonder about Steve and what happened to him, how he got to that world and his relationship with Gaia and other deities. That as well as who the Celestials that Gaia mentioned are.

 

[Nubushi]

Happy New Year; I am here from the Review Blitz.

So, for the setting, we have Gaia sitting in a throne and looking down at a planet. I guess that's enough to go by that some readers might be able to guess that the setting is outer space. But that's not necessarily a given--coming to the story with absolutely no background info, it could be a spaceship, it could be some sort of grand palace floating in outer space from which Gaia is looking out a window. So personally, I would like the setting to be established with a little bit more clarity.

Also as a side note, the moment when Steve sat down in the chair wasn't defined--he materialized, and then later you mentioned he was sitting in a chair, so that was a bit sudden.

While I'm on that subject:

She sat back in the throne-like chair she sat upon and sighed, looking down at a massive blue-and-green planet.

I found myself wondering, if they are in space, why does she even need it? (Is it an environment in which there is some sort of gravity created for their convenience? If it is in the middle of space, there wouldn't naturally be any particularly strong gravitational field, would there?) Convenience? Psychological comfort? The image of two chairs floating in space (which didn't quite become totally clear to me until the end) is interestingly bizarre, so again, personal preference, but it would have been nice to see this made a little clearer a little early on. (It's such an interesting detail--it seems a shame not to spend a little time to give your readers a vivid mental image of it!)

For characterization methods, though I don't think your visual descriptions are excessive (Steve's description in particular was interesting), it can seem a little new-writer-y to always introduce characters with just visual descriptions, or to have a sentence(s) solely focused on visual description. At other times in the story, you do have some other forms of characterization through things like dialogue (how the two interact), gestures and actions (Steve tapping his fingers and tentacles; and Gaia smashing windows when they show her something she doesn't like), and even a little bit of characterization of Steve through how Gaia perceives him (always late), which makes the characterization more well-rounded. So if you can mix those in evenly so there's not a sentence that's like, "And here's the visual description of this character," then that makes things smoother and more natural.

In terms of personality, Steve's character (the way he is a Lovecraftian monster, but mild-mannered and shy almost to the point of being timid) has some lighthearted, tongue-in-cheek quality to it that reminds me of Neil Gaiman's Death from the Sandman series (if you're not familiar with it, Death in that series is a woman who dresses as a goth and is simply a nice, approachable person). I also liked that the reason he wants to be called just "Steve" comes clearer at the end, but without it being hammered in.

Gaia's frustration with the creatures on her planet makes me think this gives readers kind of a glimpse of how God must feel, for those who do believe in one God.

That one line that you slid in about a different deity teaching that suicide is always wrong was really fascinating, because it brings up all sorts of resonances of how when one culture tries to impose its values on another, trying to outlaw things that they see as immoral (e.g. with European imperialism), it quite often has unintended negative consequences. This would be a great concept to play with more in depth in any other stories that you may end up writing about this fantasy world.

Steve pumped a fist and a tentacle. "That's the spirit!"

This line (the "fist and a tentacle") was amusing, back to that lighthearted tongue-in-cheek atmosphere I mentioned earlier.

His form became a whirl of black and purple maws, tentacles, eyes, and vanished.

Lots of strong nouns here; this, and the final sentence, make a strong closing.

Overall thoughts:

For overall characterization, Steve was really interesting. I think the discrepancy between his monstrous non-human form and the way that he was mild-mannered and even sometimes shy was a bit part of what makes him so interesting, and also that in this short story we get some background into how he became the being that he is now (his past as a regular human). Gaia came across as a bit more stereotypical--a thin, high-strung, kind of snappy (but not truly mean-hearted) woman. It's a type I've seen before, but even in this short story she does have some other sides to her personality, too, like trying to tell herself she shouldn't take Steve's lateness personally, apologizing when she snaps at him, and so on. So that gives her a little more depth and prevents her from being a total stock character.

It's an interesting concept, and it's nice that you gradually drop more hints until we learn that Steve is stuck in this fictional universe, with a body like a Lovecraft monster, but with this ability to look into other worlds which I assume are the worlds from other novels. It would be interesting to see more of this fictional world sometime!