Second Serpent

“Hey Yisini, are you busy?” Arkadin asked as he knocked politely on the bolted metal door.

“Nope!”

“Can I come in?”

“If you want!”

Arkadin hesitated. He could hear weird noises happening on the other side of that door, and he really wasn’t sure whether Yisini was lying to him or whether she genuinely wasn’t busy. As far as he was concerned, Yisini had no reason to lie to him, so he shunted the door open, glanced inside and immediately closed it.

“You said you weren’t busy!” the Thantophor shouted.

Yisini laughed loudly. “I’m not! You can come and watch if you want!”

Arkadin coughed, thankful that as a deity, he didn’t have a proper stomach to throw up from. If he had been a mortal, he probably would have vomited everywhere. What was in that room was… disgusting. The smell was still lingering.

“Why in the name of all that is pure would I want to see any of THAT?”

The squelching noises stopped, and the door creaked open, Yisini’s head and long, snaking hair peering around it.

“You can’t have pure things without sex.”

“I think Epani and her galactic works would disagree on that…” Arkadin sighed. “And aren’t you worried about infections or disease or anything like that? What are you even doing anyway?”

Yisini threw the door wide open, revealing what was inside. There were four other very Yisini-like beings, all lying in pools of their own pleasure, all looking immensely satisfied. The only difference between them and Yisini herself was the colour of their bodies, all a very basic brown colour rather than Yisini’s cosmic shades of pinks, purples and blacks.

“Working on reproduction!” Yisini’s answer was weirdly short and blunt.

“You’re cloning yourself.”

“No, I’m making lesser copies of myself, so I can send them down to all those lovely, godless, slow-breeding races and get them all to worship me and breed faster. I call them Lesser Yisins.”

One of the Yisins smiled at Arkadin, waggling her fingers at him in a vague attempt to lure him over. Arkadin shook his head and pulled Yisini out of the room, being careful not to close Yisini’s tail in the door behind them.

“Sister, what the fuck?” Arkadin was whispering now. “Are you alright?”

“Are you alright?” Yisini asked back. “You look slightly… Slightly less black. As if seeing that disturbed you a bit. You really can’t handle sexual things. You can’t handle the union of all things because it goes completely against what you are, the separator of all things. But that’s beside the point. You’ve seen sex before. Grow up.”

The Thantophor tutted. “Not really… But seeing sex is completely different to walking in on your big sister having hardcore sex with four clones of herself. It’s worse than when I walked in on you fucking Epani. Which was about an eleven on the scale of awfulness!” Arkadin sighed. “Is there something wrong? Do you want to talk?”

Yisini smiled as she coiled her tail around Arkadin, hugging him tightly. “You seem in an odd mood.”

“Well, the fact that I killed a universe and I might not have made it back home afterwards did… worry me a little. I think it worried you too.”

“I was worried that someone would replace you. Because you get me. You’re unstoppable as a being of death and entropy, but you’re willing to give me the time I need to try and create immortality. But here I am, worrying I’m not going fast enough.”

Arkadin pushed Yisini’s tail away. “Not fast enough? We’re less than 14 billion years in and we’re already at 99% Speed of Light travel with a huge number of well-developed, technologically advanced species!”

“Yeah that took 14 billion years, how much longer do we have?”

“Um…” Arkadin shrugged. “About nine hundred and eighty six billion years.”

“Not long enough.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Neither do you!” Yisini shouted. “You don’t know how long we have! It could be in a trillion years time, it could be tomorrow that you get hungry and consume us all! That’s why I am making these clones, to speed things along and maybe even get me some more worshipers.” Yisini paused and smiled. “I like worshipers. Can never get enough of them. They’re nearly as good as sex. You want some sex, little brother?”

Arkadin growled, then rolled his eyes. “I’m just going to leave you to it. You’re clearly both busy and delusional.”

As he turned to leave, Yisini grabbed him. “Wait, did you want something?”

The Thantophor brushed away the Allbirther’s hand. “No. Not any more, not since you’re busy. I’ll ask Kairos or Epani or something…”