Radian has been meaning to clean out his closet for ages, and when he finally does, he finds a whole lot more than he bargained for.

Story that's been in the works for quite a while now! This one is for my friend Radian. It's an eldritch horror TF with lots of goo, object assimilation, and some light TG for the road. Enjoy!

As always, comments, questions, and critique are welcome and encouraged.

Character belongs to Rad!


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Gloves: check. Goggles: check. Apron: check. Rags, broom, mop: triple check.

Radian took a deep breath, snapping his goggles into place. The closet door, seemingly innocuous, felt like it was looming far above him, a portal to some unknowable realm. It thrummed along with the beat of his heart, human and storage space in sync as they prepared for combat.

He’d been meaning to clean his closet, honest. Old board games and clothes were bursting from the doorframe, almost bending the wood with their weight. Science projects, high school papers, shoes, and bins of assorted junk took up nearly every inch of the space. Getting the door open was difficult, closing it even more so. Frankly, it was a miracle he still found space to fill.

So, yes, maybe it was a bit out of hand. Okay, a bit out of a giant’s hand. It was just that every time he tried, he’d come across a stuffed animal he’d had as a kid, or an old shirt he used to wear every single day, or a board game he had to pull out to test if it held up to be as fun as he remembered (most didn’t, although Mouse Trap was still a blast). Memories seeped from everything inside, and it was difficult to part with even one.

Unfortunately, something else was also seeping into the closet. A crack of thunder outside was a loud reminder of the storm that had been raging for almost three full days. There hadn’t been any flooding, at least, but on the morning of the third day, Radian was confronted with a foul dark liquid seeping from underneath the closet door. It was almost certainly a leak, dribbling in gutter water that picked up all sorts of who-knows-what from the stuffed room. Cleaning now was a necessity rather than a goal, lest the carpet get completely ruined along with everything inside. Perhaps the gloves and goggles were a little much, he admitted to himself, but if the rest of the closet was already covered in that black ooze he’d spotted, Radian was putting them on immediately. It could be tar or something.

The closet door stood firm, monolithic in stature. Nothing to do but start, Radian though, sighing. He reached a hand out and grasped the door handle, twisting it firmly.

Nothing. Obviously. Not like there was something waiting in the dark, ready to pounce on the first person to reach inside.

Radian threw the door open, and the scents of dust and leaf litter greeted him. He coughed, waving a hand to disperse it, and flicked the light switch on the inside wall of the closet. The single bulb flickered on, revealing a stack of junk that towered to the ceiling, framed on three sides by deep floor to ceiling shelves. The sheer amount threatened to overwhelm him, but he steeled his nerves. Time to get started.

Board games, clothing, and old toys were tossed out of the closet indiscriminately. Radian tried to throw them into vaguely similar piles to go through later. It would be much faster to do an initial sorting and then work through it all at once rather than deciding for every individual thing. A few were difficult to sort, like a bunch of garbage circuit boards, but the rest went into piles easily. Fortunately, the oily water (was it even water?) seemed to have only ruined an old textbook and the box for Chutes and Ladders. Those went straight into a trash bag.

As he was setting down a few plastic dinosaurs, a glint at the back of a shelf caught his eye. Radian set his phone down on top of a stack of cardboard boxes full of old school supplies and reached between a Lego bin and some old faded sheets, fumbling around. He stepped forwards to get a better angle, and his foot met something wet and sticky with a loud squelch!

“Ugh!” he yelped, pulling his foot in like a frightened turtle trying to retract into its shell. He’d planted his foot right into a small puddle of that weird black liquid. It clung to his skin, almost feeling like velcro despite clearly being some sort of fluid (and most definitely not water, he decided). He tried to scrape it off with the edge of a box to no avail. Bending down, he tried to inspect the puddle more closely, teetering on one foot.

The surface was semi-translucent and reflected the light in a distorted rainbow. It was like an oil slick, but far more viscous. Whatever it was, it didn’t seem healthy.

As that thought occurred to him, a section of the slime seemed to rotate in place, somehow opening up into an eyeball that stared directly up into his own.

Radian screamed, jerking back upwards, almost tearing his arm off at the shoulder, since it was still stuck between the boxes. His ooze-covered foot came down and landed atop a bunch of old Mighty Beanz, and he would have been thrown to the ground if not for a vice-like grip on a shelf.

He took deep breaths, reorienting himself. Other than the sore shoulder, he couldn’t feel any pain, just addrenline. A fearful glance downwards, fueled by disbelief, showed him that the eyeball was gone. Had he imagined it? Was it an old marble or something? That wasn’t unlikely, in this closet.

“That’ll sting…” he mumbled, speaking more of his pride than any actual injuries. He trailed off, however, confused. Something wasn’t right.

Radian looked down again. The puddle was still empty, though there was now a second one beside it. Probably splashed it, he reasoned. He stared, trying to process the alarm bells going off in his head.

Finally, he realized the problem: he wasn’t looking at two feet. He was looking at a foot and a paw.

He started, lifting up his left leg once more. It was shiny and black, far wider than his foot should have been. A Mighty Beanz toy was shoved into the side of it, dug into the goop. Radian watched with his mouth agape as it was slowly sucked into the black expanse. Once it vanished, a paw pad popped out the bottom of the appendage, and physically feeling it happen shocked him. He dropped it back down to keep from falling over, and the feeling of the pads against the ground was foreign and strange, scraping against his spine. It was all at once alluring and terrifying.

“This one’s definitely a bad dream,” he told himself breathlessly. It obviously wasn’t real, so what other answer was there? He was having a stress dream because he’d been putting off cleaning for so long, that was it. There was no weird ooze that swallowed your feet and old toys. Yet, the way the toes of the paw flexed, responding to his mind, felt so real.

Okay, focus. Radian tried to clear his head and think rationally. Dream or not, he had to do something. Calling an ambulance didn’t sound like a bad idea right about now—or maybe poison control? Anyone who knew what to do about tar dripping from the ceiling. Or gas leaks driving him crazy. He levered his fingers out of their immensely tight grip, leaning on the shelves to support himself as he reached for his phone.

Splurt.

And, of course, shoved his whole arm into a dripping wall of goo.

Radian tore himself away a moment too late. The goop stuck to his skin and clothes, making long, thick strands that stretched like a membrane between himself and the shelves. It was like it was spreading, each attempt to pull it away only resulting in a more complete covering of black tar. He tried to step back, but he tripped over his huge paw, arms pinwheeling and slapping walls and shelves as he was sent tumbling back out the closet door and into his piles of old stuff.

WHUMP.

A pile of hoodies cushioned his fall, the sound underlaid by a wet slap as his soaked arm and leg made contact. He sat for a moment, stunned. His arm rested in a bin full of Nerf guns; if he’d fallen just a foot to the right, he’d have had a sore rear for days. Instead, his arm felt… awkward. And heavy. He pulled it out, intending to look for damage.

Rather than a regular, slime-covered arm, Radian pulled out an entire multi-barreled arm cannon attached to his elbow. He stared at it. His brain took several moments to process that it was there, and several more to realize it had replaced his hand, yet somehow retained feeling. The chassis was a sleek black metal, highlighted with bright neon patterns, and it had several blinking lights across it. A whirring clickclickclick emanated from it as the barrel rotated. It was clearly modeled after a double-barrel shotgun—just like one of the Nerf toys he had in the box.

Unlike the paw, the arm cannon was setting off serious alarm bells in Rad’s head. It didn’t belong. Neither did the paw, obviously; he had feet, not paws, but that one didn’t feel so horribly wrong. It was unnatural, but not unwanted. The arm cannon was both. He wished it was gone.

Something bent in his mind when he thought that. With a sound like a rubber boot pulling itself out of the mud, a plastic gun ejected itself out of Radian’s arm, hitting the wall with a crack! Covered in strange goo, it stuck in place, slowly sliding down. It smoked, clearly somewhat melted. In place of the arm cannon, Radian once again had a regular (albeit slimy) hand. He flexed his fingers, fascinated. What was going on? He gingerly reached down to prod the sweaters beneath him and watched as the goo seemed to cling between the two materials, the threads of the sweater deforming as it was dragged underneath the slime. His finger and the two beside it rippled, the goo resolving into threads of its own. When the strand broke contact between the sweater and hand, it sunk back into a glassy, smooth surface.

Whatever was happening, it was clearly volatile. He needed some help. Radian focused on the closet door. Inside, resting atop a stack of boxes, was his phone. He’d decide who to call when he reached it, but he knew he had to call someone. Actually reaching it, though, was going to be a challenge. He could feel the strange gooey material that encompassed his arm and leg—both legs, now, he noted with dismay—clinging to the piles of random objects strewn about. It wasn’t goo, exactly; the light bent strangely around the substance, and although it dripped and flowed, it didn’t appear to actually be a liquid. It had crawled up his leg like water up the sides of a tube, not like a living being would. And, obviously, it was subsuming impossibly large objects into the small space of his limbs. It was distinctly out of touch with reality, and if he didn’t move fast, he might end up oozing into the floor or something.

So, he started to crawl. Radian leaned back, then swung himself forwards, pushing off a clear spot of ground with his goop arm and a stack of old magazines with the other, making it to his feet. Each step was like tearing velcro off the floor, slamming it back down with a heavy paw on one side and a gooey foot on the other. He hadn’t fallen that far from the closet, so how come he wasn’t already inside? It almost seemed farther than before. His head ached from trying to interpret the distance.

Disaster struck in the form of a ping pong ball. Radian hadn’t noticed the white sphere until it was too late, and it crunched under his paw. It didn’t get absorbed, but he yelped in surprise and leaped off of it, only to lose his balance and tumble back to the ground. His oozing hand slammed into a neatly stacked pile of assorted Neopets stuffed animals. It went straight through them as if they were nothing, each one sucked up into his palm, bloating the arm to thrice its size before contracting and sending reality-breaking slime racing across his back and all the way to the fingers on the other side. Both arms puffed outwards, covered in short, multicolored hair. One seemed to be a sort of orange, plush dog paw, the other clawed and feathered. No time! he thought, shaking his head and looking back up to the closet. This time, it seemed close enough to touch, but when he tried to grasp the doorframe, he felt his gut wrench. The floor was tilting—not from dizziness, it was actually tilting.

“Waaagh!” Radian shouted, digging his new claws into the carpet. The floor sped up, and instead of sliding him into the closet, it flipped his legs right off the ground. He swung by his deeply-embedded claws over the bedroom ceiling, now the floor, hurtling backwards. The momentum tore his claws free, and he was catapulted through the doorway. His back slammed into the shelving, crushing the broom between it and himself. A tail with a bristly puff at the end shot from his tailbone, and it flopped down against his nose as he slid to the floor. Dizzy beyond belief, there was no way to dodge the avalanche of debris that rained down atop him. A bucket of Mighty Beanz hit him in the gut, and four more arms erupted out of Radian’s sides to grip his stomach, groaning. His still-normal leg was twisted oddly, shoved into a shelf, and it had found a collection of old sticky hands. It oozed free from the shelf, unraveling like a poorly wound braid into a collection of tentacles topped with flat, sticky paw shapes.

Radian was stuck, unable to do anything about the assault. His body became more and more unrecognizable, a mess of disparate, patchwork parts. Not only that, he could feel each and every thing that became a part of him. The objects had a sort of mental weight to them. The heavier that weight, the more they controlled his form. He was an amalgamation both physically and metaphysically.

He grabbed a shelf, cracking it under the force of three huge paws. He had to right himself, get ahold of his phone, and… well, he didn’t know what he would do, but he needed something to hold onto. Otherwise, he feared he might lose track of reality altogether.

A sound like a waterfall made him look upwards, and he was confronted with his marble jar tipping over and dumping its contents out over his head. He tried to throw an arm over his head, but having a baker’s dozen worth of limbs made controlling them with any finesse impossible, and he entangled himself. He slammed his eyes shut and tucked his head forward, bracing for impact.

Just before the marbles collided with his head, the goo splashed into their path, enveloping his head. It felt like a hard rain pattering his scalp as they plowed directly into his body. Eyes bloomed across his body in all shapes and colors: cats eye slits, steely gunmetal, clear and milky orbs that looked almost like watery ice, and every other kind of pattern he could imagine. Suddenly, the closet was in full three hundred and sixty degree view, rendered in colors he didn’t know existed. A few eyes glanced up to see a shooter slipping out of the bottom of the jar, the biggest marble in his collection. It barely slipped out, looking like it was going to land atop the stack of boxes.

Too late, he remembered that’s where he had left his phone what felt like an eternity ago. Radian pushed himself off the ground, reaching to stop it.

CRACK.

The sound of a screen getting decimated made Radian want to wail, but it didn’t last for long. The marble smacked the phone, and the loose cardboard underneath it let the heavy glass sphere keep going, plunging into the box and sending the cracked phone flying—directly into his face.

The ooze of his face, still mostly untouched save for a few extra eyes, sizzled. In terms of memory weight, the cell phone weighed multiple tons. It was positively overflowing with it. Radian tore it from his face with a paw, but it stuck there, sinking into his paw. The whole thing flickered, glowing a bright blue.

His metaphysical weight was catching up to him. With each object absorbed, Radian grew more and more aware of things he knew he shouldn’t be able to sense. Subtle scents that were normally undetectable and the pattering of rain outside were first as his scent and hearing improved; then, more esoteric senses kicked into gear. He could taste the time, run his paws through the energy of the room like a thick, ethereal soup, predict how the air would shift and spin in reaction to any little movement. Gravitational sensors and radiation detectors in his blood made his brain spin. With all this increased awareness, he knew he was getting too heavy for reality to bear. He was teetering on the edge of a higher-dimensional precipice that he could scarcely begin to understand, even as knowledge flooded his brain. His tentacle-leg spread and grasped the walls and shelves, his paws reaching out to either side and pressing against walls, trying to keep him stabilized in both physical and nonphysical reality.

Ironically, the thing that did him in was not the phone, despite its immense weight and presence in his body, barely contained to digitizing a single arm. Instead, as he climbed to his… well, not feet, but reached an upright position, he accidentally tripped against the concept of down, somehow. It was just enough for the bowling ball on the top shelf to roll forwards, unseen even by his many dizzy eyes, and slam into Radian’s back, forcing his chest to FWUMP outwards in two distinct shapes. Every eye on his body widened simultaneously and with a strained squeak. Despite his body looking like it was straight out of The Thing, he could put two and two together, and all mental barriers crumbled instantly. With the glimpse of what could be, he punched a hole straight through reality and fell.

______


Radian had no faculties to process what was happening, but they were forced upon him. Air didn’t exist here, so there was no whooshing, just the sensation of movement. It could be falling or flying; there was no way to tell. Could the concept of falling even exist in this environment, where gravity was naught but a second thought? He didn’t even know how he knew that, but he knew it all the same, and he could feel the forced enlightenment tearing through his mind at terrifying speed. The same force that had corrupted his physical form was entrenching itself into the very concept of his being. Vast couldn’t describe it, because constraints of size didn’t apply to whatever it was, but that was the only word he could conjure.

As he underwent the terrifying ordeal of ascension, he thought. He was honestly a little surprised he could still do that, but whatever was happening to him, he could still formulate thoughts and feelings, twisted as they were by a multi-dimensional perspective not meant to touch the mortal mind.

Due to being freed from the unyielding grip of chronic movement while outside of reality, Radian knew this would last both forever and less than no time at all. He might yet figure out how to escape, but that had already happened and would never happen. If he was going to be stuck for never and a day, then he at least wanted to be somewhat comfortable.

After all, if he had to be stuck in nothingness and everythiness as his brain became a cosmic network of physics-rending information, why couldn’t he be a girl while it happened?

So, Radian settled in as she was warped out of being what was and into being what should not be.

…

There was a presence here, she realized. It had been… she stopped that train of thought; time wasn’t real, after all, so nothing had been. And here wasn’t accurate either, since whatever dimensional plane she was in didn’t have distances currently. A presence existed, she corrected herself.


It watched. It listened. It seeped through the cracks of her being and back out again. Radian knew that in this existence, it was her and she was it and both of them were everything. Her mind, now so thoroughly expanded as to be incomprehensible five times over, reached out. She was pleased to discover she could still feel hesitancy, as it reminded her of feeling, and more so to realize she could still be pleased.

She made contact.

All around her, a lidded eye opened.

_____


Radian smashed through the closet door, smacking into her bed. She heaved and gasped, air inflating lungs she had never and always used. Her brain was still timeless, experiencing her entire life all at once, but only for a moment before she slammed it back into the rigid box of linear time. She shuddered, six paws clutching the sheets on her bed, tentacles wrapped around its frame.

She wasn’t herself anymore. Not entirely, at least. Something writhed inside, something from out of space, painted in colors that hurt to imagine and echoing cries of beings that resembled dead and dying gods, and that was her now.

Fortunately, she was also still Radian, so that was a relief. She was all of her and nothing of her in every possible way, and the thought simultaneously excited and unnerved her. She found several of her eyes actually tearing up as emotions filled her heart once again. Or whatever was in her chest. It probably was an organ, at least. Or she hoped it was, at any rate. Maybe she didn’t even have blood.

Radian realized that she was wrapped up in her bedsheets. It wouldn’t have been remarkable, save for the fact that they remained firmly outside her body.

“I guess forgotten eldritch knowledge comes with some perks…” she mumbled. The sound came out doubled, and she coughed, realizing that she’d accidentally layered two mouths over the same physical space. That would cause problems in local reality. A tentacle flicked down to the floor and grasped a small plastic dinosaur, sucking it in. She used both its physical makeup and its memetic association with real dinosaurs to fashion the doubled mouths into a snout. It grew from her face, completely ruining any semblance of humanity that remained in her multicolored body.

She didn’t worry about that now. There were other things to worry about, not the least of which was the fact that she’d somehow become entangled with a higher dimensional entity that rent basal reality to shreds like it was wet paper. Plus she had to fix the battered room and the dimensional leak manifesting in her closet. They were all problems for later, though. She flopped back onto the sheets, body squishing against itself, sluglike, in order to fit the whole thing on top of the bed.

Getting cozy was a challenge, though. Radian quickly found that with so many mismatched limbs, no position lent itself well to resting. Maybe she could work on that? She focused on the heavy weight of memories soaked into her being and started to shift them around.

First, she spread out the sticky hands. Better to have both legs be tentacles if she was going to be keeping those. Much easier to walk, she reasoned. She followed that up by ejecting a few Neopets out of her back and into the mess covering the floor, plus a few Mighty Beanz, letting two of the arms fold in and reabsorb back into her torso. The spray of ooze solidified into a set of tiny wings, matching one of the remaining plushies still residing somewhere in the nebulous space of her metaphysical construct. The two remaining sets of arms rippled, colors blending until they were all a matching light blue with a few white spots, topped with large, plush paws. She kept enough Beanz to maintain the large pads—those were necessary, of course. Made for great pillows. For good measure, she also got rid of the phone, setting it on the bedside table, and the arm that was phasing in and out of reality flickered back to solid.

After all that restructuring, Radian still wasn’t quite sure she was happy with her form. It was mostly humanoid in shape, minus the tentacles and the extra arms. Her body was mostly oil slick black, shimmering with iridescence, and stripes of the same light blue and white spots that decorated her arms spread across her back and tail.. It had a springy texture where it wasn’t covered in faux fur on her arms and tail.

She really could mold it however she wanted, that much she’d confirmed, so why not make a few additions of her own? She scooted forwards, leaning over the edge of the bed and fishing through the debris. After a moment, she held up a fuzzy scarf and a pair of ear muffs, dragged out from among the rest of the winter clothing. With a flourish, both disappeared into her paws. The long, thin tail unfurled outwards, becoming wide and soft, and two fluffy ears popped out of her head, each with an adorable boink!

Radian flopped back into bed, pulling her tail up and wrapping her arms around it, grinning. She grabbed her phone with a tentacle and sent off a quick text to her dragon friend. No details, just a quick invitation: Hey, I gotta show you something I found in my closet, can you come over? She’d keep them far away from the closet, of course, but she had to show someone.

That done, she was about ready to pass out. The whole ordeal had been exhausting. Clipping through the sheets instead of pulling them down and over herself, she settled in for a nap. She even partially untethered herself from chronological constraints so she could stretch the time. Radian had a corruptive eldritch awakening to sleep off, and she was going to snooze hard enough to fall asleep through multiple layers of reality.