Far From The Pacific, part 1 ============================ Yvonne Carter studied the curious artifact on her mantlepiece. The university had not been overly inclined to keep it, saying it was "a crude pagan representation of little value and dubious authenticity", so they'd let her take it home. It rather reminded her of some of the things that appeared in her uncle Randolph's diaries - tentacles and such, and no clear indication of actual *form*. She picked up the bizarre idol and turned it over in her hands. There was an inscription on the base in an unpleasantly sinuous script, the likes of which she had, again, only seen in those diaries. Pondering the matter, she walked over to the bookshelf, idol in hand, and took down the thickest of the diaries. She laid the idol down on the coffee table and flipped through the diary to the page she remembered seeing, that showed a set of correspondences between various characters. With very little surprise, she saw that the strange letters on the base of the idol corresponded perfectly to one of the sets described in the diary. Yvonne scribbled down a transliteration, and stared at it for a good minute afterwards. As far as she could reasonably tell, the whole thing, despite being about twenty words long, had only three vowels. "Nonsense. Sheer nonsense," she muttered, and then her eyes lit upon the words written on the opposite page. _Ph'nglui mglw'nafh R'lyeh Cthulhu wgah-nagl fhtagn._ "Maybe it's not such nonsense." * * * * Yvonne's rest that night was much disturbed with uncanny visions of a luridly horrifying sort. Unnameable _things_ writhed in an incomprehensible yet surely obscene fashion amidst a sea of viscid ooze. From time to time, it seemed as if she saw the tortured visages of men and women amidst the sinuous tangle. Shortly before dawn, she abandoned sleep as a futile pursuit, and walked downstairs and into the lounge. The idol lay on the coffee table, where she had left it before dinner. A dark greenish stain marred the pale pine surface of the table around the idol, and the stone of the idol itself glistened as if wet. Cautiously, she reached down and brushed a fingertip lightly across the surface of the strange artifact. Her finger came away with a glistening coat of greenish slime that seemed oddly reminiscent of her dream. She picked up Randolph's diary again, and flipped through it, looking for something that might closely correspond to those unspeakable words she had transcribed the day before. Finding nothing, she returned the volume to the shelf, and reached to the shelf below. The books there were nothing of Randolph's, being rather a diverse array of fragments she had gleaned from long hours searching through the university library. None had been catalogued, and few had been touched by any hand since being deposited in their damp dingy storerooms. She whispered a soft prayer to a God whose true existence she had long since come to doubt, and slipped one of the fragmentary volumes off the shelf. It had no name, and no mark to tell who might have written it. Yvonne sat down and paged through it slowly, studying the strange diagrams and incoherent rantings that its forgotten author had penned. Finally, she found what she sought. The exact text from the idol's base, accompanied by what seemed to be a translation mingled with the raving commentary of a madman, so that neither could be distinguished. "Secrets are mine. This thing is cursed, and fills my mind with slime! I must destroy God. He is dead. He is alive. What secrets does this thing hold? Let his presence fill the Earth. Perhaps we are already doomed." Yvonne snapped the tattered volume shut, and shuddered. She seized the idol, and ran into the kitchen, meaning to dash the hideous thing against the quarry-tile floor. Even as she raised her hand to destroy the idol, she found a strange sensation spreading down her arm. Green ooze covered her hand, thin streams of the stuff slithering slowly down her forearm, and her hand seemed suddenly unwilling to open and release the unclean thing. She screamed in terror, and slammed the idol against the bricks of the kitchen wall. The vile object survived unscathed, and droplets of the ooze spattered across her face and chest. Yvonne lowered her arm and stared at the unharmed idol uncomprehendingly. The ooze crawled up her arm in defiance of gravity, and she felt the spattered droplets on her face and chest spreading. Her arm, suddenly moving of its own accord, twisted round and started rubbing the idol over her body, spreading the vile green ooze liberally. The ooze spread further, flowing over and between her lips and up her nose. A cruelly bitter taste filled her mouth, making her gag, and then the ooze reached the back of her throat and the taste seemed suddenly *right*. She swallowed, hastening its downward spread towards her guts. Yvonne shivered with excitement as the ooze spread under her nightdress, slowly coating her breasts, her back, her belly. No longer fearful or disgusted, she moaned with delight as it flowed down between her thighs, spreading upwards into her sex and her bowels. Overwhelmed by the tide of sensation, she felt her legs give way, leaving her sprawled across the floor heedless of the icy feel of the quarry tiles against her back. She writhed on the floor, enraptured as the ooze stimulated every inch of her body with uncanny and arousing sensations. The idol slipped from her fingers and started to swell and contort, its tentacles snaking out to caress her greenly glistening flesh. Yvonne arched her back in delight, and the tentacles tore away her slime-soaked nightdress to leave her naked and exposed. A tentacle snaked between Yvonne's thighs and stroked around the lips of her sex. She moaned with delight, and another tentacle plunged into her mouth, muffling her cries. The tentacle between her legs slipped inside her slime-filled sex with an obscene squelch, and a shuddering orgasm ripped through her body. The tentacles rocked in and out, swelling with each thrust. The tentacle in her mouth pushed deeper, and one last muffled whimper escaped her lips before it forced itself down her windpipe, pushing slime down into her lungs. A third tentacle pressed at her anus. The ring of muscle relaxed at its touch, and the tentacle snaked into her bowels, thrusting with the same rhythm as those penetrating her sex and her throat. The tentacles increased their pace, their movement gaining a sudden urgency, and Yvonne felt another orgasm building. The tentacles suddenly stiffened, sending fresh jets of green ooze flooding into Yvonne's body, and a second orgasm exploded through her body. The tentacles withdrew from her, leaving her lying limp and spent on the floor, green ooze leaking from her sex and her bowels.