Cobalt's World-Ending Premiere
#1 of Cobalt, Baby, Cobalt
Cobalt the catweasel has a bracelet that lets her get into, and cause, a lot of mischief. She's a hedonistic reality warper now, thanks to that device. What she wants to happen, happens, and her life is a nonstop exploration of what true omnipotence can do for one's recreation and sex life.
This is the story of what happens when a creature from a species of cruel apex predators gets handed the console commands to the universe.
[Art not strictly an illustration of this story, but you better believe that's the only Big C around.]
Her business was genocide: targeted, thorough, unrepentant genocide that scrubbed sapients right out of their ecosystem substrates. She left the land opened for its latest and effectively original owners, freshly enriched with infusions of charcoal and bone meal, free for whatever important settlement, industrial plant, or game preserve her employers had in mind. It was a niche industry, but in the shadier corners of the galaxy, there was no shortage of civs too dumb to make their own habitats and too mean to share the natural planets with the locals. Beneath the notice of a galactic community more focused on big invaders than small-time operators, someone had to clear out the squatters, and that was best left to an expert.
Enari Lakh dam Kharva, or "Cobalt" to her less cosmopolitan employers, didn't actually need money, but hey, even cybernetic apex-predator catweasels needed a hobby. Cleaning out primitive, defenseless prey was just the kind of light exercise her ancestors would have approved of. "Cobalt" was just the public name they used for their race, the Mnaiijrachu-uch; bad form to let people know their name really translated as 'rightful oppressor.'
It was her eighth clearing mission. The planet-hopping, radial-symmetric theocratic collective that was her latest employer had been pleased enough with her recent performance to ask her to take on some larger game, a bunch of electricity-harnessing mammaloid primitives that had gone and spread out over an entire garden world's best real estate, busy spewing carbon and trace pollutants in every direction. Obviously, they all had to go. But en route to wipe the targets' capital city from the crust, her grafted sensors had given her a single sweet, pure ping of excitement. Something... out of place was here. Something reading, in its quietly understated way, as more complex by far than her own implanted tech harness.
She told her orbital module to Displace her down to the city, in the ancient temple that was reading as the epicenter of the anomaly. The jump was precise to the millimeter, as always. An entire military honor guard stood here on a perpetual watch over their holy relic. They startled at an eight-foot-tall pillar of catweasel stepping out from behind thin air, as might be expected, and a hundred rifles swung her way. Her face lit up in eager anticipation.
Eight and a half seconds later, her bare padded feet stepped daintily over the smoldering remains of the last rank. Her tail flicked to wave away its onboard laser's waste heat, raising faint stirs of ash. White combat armor flexed like heavy silk over a lean and blue-swirled frame, now dappled with a hot pink mist, and her pink-blue eyes widened in fascination at her prize.
It was waiting for her atop some kind of altar in the center of the hall: metal, a smoothly formed torus or band, embedded in a solid translucent sphere of what she only slowly recognized from her scans as a self-sustaining collapsed matter lattice. Her spade ears dipped in awe; no way these rock-banging primitives had formed this, and they could hammer on it until their star died without breaking the seal. It was a way of making sure its contents got into the worthy hands, she figured, and hers felt mighty worthy for whatever was valuable enough to hide in a perfect ageproof vault like this.
She had a quick internal dialogue with her neural lace implant, scanning dimensions and angles of the little metallic circlet buried in the crystal sphere, and tapped her foot impatiently as the calculations ran. She didn't want her time with her new prize interrupted by having to wipe out the local authorities as they investigated the kerfuffle.
Her orbital platform sorted through the data she piped up in record time. It's like it was meant to be, she thought happily to herself, as the platform's Displacer unit neatly nudged the bracelet in a quick four-dimensional hop through infraspace. It appeared in midair on the other side of the sphere and fell into her waiting tailtuft, which passed it up to four-fingered hands.
She watched the device's lights slowly pick up a bloom of colors. It felt unusually dense even for metal, warm against her fur, and it read as perfectly normal matter now. Her jacked-up combat senses failed to pick up a single twinge of electromagnetic activity inside, not a trace of field-based wave circuity or computational substrate. This thing was as simple and inert as an ice cube. So why was it twinkling?
She looked at it, wishing it were the right size to fit her arm, where it would at least make a neat display piece until she figured it out. And then, suddenly, it was the right size, without the slightest change or stirring. Just as if it had been the right size all along. Her eyes flared wide in alarm, and her pink-blue irises swirled in fascination at the same time. This thing could obviously sense a new owner and adapt to fit. This thing got more impressive with each reveal.
The flexible fur of her tuft curled around the edges of the bangle as she weighed it and her options. Something about the thought of it around her wrist felt very, very right. And as she looked down at the colored lights on the thing's display, if display it was, they flashed the exact pink-blue shades she'd chosen for her eyes. Well, what omen could be better?
If all else failed, she mentally shrugged, she had a backup from just twenty minutes ago. She could be back in the swing of things in no time.
Enari Cobalt Lakh dam Kharva slid her hand into the bracelet and ascended.
There was a faint twinge from the gravimetric and electromagnetic facets of her enhanced senses, distant but unmistakable. It was the tech-sensor's equivalent of a sailor in the open ocean feeling the swell of something truly large swimming beneath. But it was instantly lost as the lights blazed into new colors beyond the scope of even her enhanced eyes, and at the first glimpse into these new lights, she saw everything. The catweasel staggered in the smoky chamber of the temple as she dragged her attention from the brink, the information like a library being poured into each eye-
Her silent howl immediately ratcheted the flow down to nothing, the knowledge of the universe sublimating straight out of her brain again. I'll tell you what I want to know, she thought to the bracelet in smoldering fury. And the lights became mere lights again. She took a breath, smoothed out her cloudy white headfur to something presentable again, and let herself review the bracelet. It could change its size. It held pure information, unbounded knowledge, a flood she couldn't even hope to grasp, and it was listening in on her, and to her. It was answering her requests.
Well. What kinds of requests could it answer? She thought to herself about how thirsty she was. Nothing happened, until her subconscious wandered into the merest thought of the bracelet, and then her thirst was gone. Better, but something more tangible would be an even neater demonstration- and as she thought it, there it was, a cup of ice water in her suddenly posed hand. A simple, generic cup, the kind that could be seen in any culture that had mastered silicate glass, but a cup from nothing. Her eyes swirled with concentration. Now it was a crystal goblet. And now, as she focused on it, the water bloomed to the glossy red of Tucharan hazeberry extract, a personal favorite.
Nothing was missing from the room to be converted into the mass. She hadn't detected the tiniest hint of matter-manip or 4D activity. The matter just appeared and changed as she wished it to. She blinked her eyes and wished for more, and a few goblets appeared neatly in midair, waiting for her to grab them. Not impressive enough. Touching the bracelet to center herself, she focused her mind and -wanted- a wall of drinks. Now the entire smoldering temple was filled with identical goblets of the liquor, stacked neatly brim to base, several tons of drink appearing without a whisper of fuss.
Even her manufacturing facilities back at home could never fill a request that smoothly. This bracelet had as much matter alteration ability as a Systems Vehicle-class Culture ship- and from nothing Her tail curled as she considered the possibilities. It could make stuff, it could change stuff better than any manufabricator, but what really made this thing stand out? What other tricks could it do?
She looked at her hands and wished them a solid cobalt blue, then back again. The swirls in her fur danced and whirled at her silent order. And then- she held her breath- they floated entirely off her pelt and through the air in lazy weightless swoops before diving back into her fur. That was impossible, of course, and it happened at her say-so.
Her ears dipped in quiet awe as she fixed on the bracelet. But her cobalt pride let this stand unquestioned: of course her wishes were important enough that reality should bend to satisfy them. Her fingers came to rest on the bracelet again, the connection thrilling through them with a tiny click of power.
You're mine, she told the device_. You can do whatever you want, but you do it at my command. I'm the one wearing you, I'm the one who calls the shots. And if you keep up the good work, if you make me happy, I can promise you that you'll never be bored._
She wasn't sure if it would answer, how she would even know, and what it would say. But there came a distinctly secondhand sense of... satisfaction. Of completion. How she thought a gun would feel as it was loaded. Whatever this thing came from, whatever higher 4D worldsphere or alternate timeline had flung it down to this backwater flyspeck, it wanted to be in this role. It wasn't a tool; it was an assistant.
Pink and blue pulsed through the lights in primal fervor as she slid her fingerpads along the twinkling metal like a lover. Well, who was she to keep her new partner waiting? It was time to see what just how impossible this bracelet could get.
There was one thing even modern-day hypertech couldn't do easily. Sure, bodies were as malleable as wet clay, but changing one- a different sex, extra limbs, different biochemical base- took days, even weeks of prolonged effort. Growing past meter-scale wasn't just considered tacky, it was hellaciously boring and inconvenient, which is exactly why she'd been including that in her sims ever since she was a cub. Cobalt necks were designed to look down, not up.
Well, the hell with manners, she wanted to be big, and she wanted to be big pronto. She touched the bracelet and focused herself, centering every thought around the one image of herself expanding, stretching out in every direction at once. She imagined her footprints deepening with her weight, and she wrapped up every bit of that image, and she focused, and wanted-
-and two point two meters of sleek white catweasel flashed into thirty-five point two in the space of her ecstatic gasp. The temple exploded to powder as she grew from within like a newborn goddess, the ground trembling beneath the new crushing presence upon it. The masses of drinks from before were crushed and sent flying in the destruction, and several shrieks began abruptly and were cut off just as quickly. Her white fur was still dappled with red spray from her earlier crowd control, but she grew straight through her clothes to send white fabric snowing down the avenue, confetti for the destruction of their holiest symbol.
She hadn't asked to grow out of her clothes, a part of her mind thought even then, but the bracelet made the right choice. It really was more fun. If this dusthole civilization was going to lose their church, seeing her sleekly nude form was more than enough compensation, she figured. Her sex appeal was orders of magnitude beyond their greatest living idols, and suddenly there was exactly 4,096 times as much of her to love, by mass.
The carefully squared blocks of the ceremonial temple were below her bare thighs. She walked through the millennia-old wall like so many stacked coins, and the city spread out below her in its crude fuel-burning majesty, the simple steel and glass structures of a prespace city looking like a museum model at her feet, little more than tripping hazards. And they weren't sturdy enough to trip over, as she quickly found when she lifted a broad foot high and lowered it through three levels of guardhouse as easily as paper shells. The structure put up no more resistance than the armed soldiers inside who, briefly, cried out in alarm before compacting into wet gum that failed even to bother her by sticking to her beautiful foot.
It wasn't really any more one-sided this way, she knew; a teched-up cobalt with a full war loadout could demolish this city just as easily as a giantess that looked down on its highest peaks, and take just as little damage. But frontline-grade lasers and antimatter dust were as impersonal as they were cool. This was savage, vicious, and satisfying to her basest hypercarnivore instincts. Finally, the universe was submitting to her as she deserved. Primordial victory thrilled through her as she demolished the neighborhoods below with her bare feet alone, treading carelessly over vehicles to flatten them to foil, entire houses small enough to crumble into grit in testament to the might of each footprint.
She moved her way out of the wreckage of the temple in a joyous run that sent vehicles tumbling off their suspensions. There was no aim, she simply had to move, to stretch and run and play and enjoy herself, and kill with every hammering footfall through the town homes of this civilization's rich and powerful, across their manicured parks. Wading through the high blocks of their shopping districts, her hips alone killed as they broke balconies off at the roots.
The masses shrieked below, and each piping cry of horrified despair brought on tingles of proud arousal. So many cries ended every time her foot came down and left a sticky patch of crushed innocents or pasted building rubble together with red smears. The sub-kilometer "skyscrapers" the locals were so very proud of beckoned ahead, several times her height. She could grab them by the bases and topple them, throw herself at them in a running start, see how loud a crash they make falling...
Or, she realized as her tread came down on a refugee-packed walkway, instantly pulping several dozen souls into thin grease beneath her sole, she could just grow again. The bracelet had taken her this far. How much farther could it go? The city was screaming beneath her. She wanted to hear the whole world shriek.
Could she be bigger still? She asked the wordless question, pictured it in her mind, and touched the bracelet as if taking her pulse.
Yes, she could.
The city at her feet jetted away from her like a camera trick, the once-tall towers ahead now no more than blades of grass. Like grass, they bent at the touch of her bloodied toes; unlike grass, they didn't rise back up again. It didn't seem real. She killed people on a surprisingly regular basis, and this didn't feel like murder by the millions. It felt effortless, it felt impossibly quick and easy, it felt... good.
She pressed her thickly furred digits over a clump of the towers and crunched them into fine grit with their occupants inside. Her tail traced a long arc of crumbled city in its wake, decorated by dots of explosions and fires, and when she lifted it again, the lovely white fur dripped a twinkling glitter of ruined cityscape. It felt like volcanic sand to her sensitive blue solepads, lubricated by an entire population. She could feel some of it clinging to the weight-bearing parts of her feet when they shifted.
Cobalt shifted her weight, and in that motion she killed and destroyed more than her entire earlier rampage combined. The miniscule dot-people scrambling around her feet could never do anything to inconvenience her, apart from staining whichever part of her ends up crushing them. There was no challenge in their deaths; the fun resided in scale. Her toes curled deep enough to collapse bunkers and cave in buried transit systems, and at her lightest touch, buildings exploded to powder, the civilization's greatest works were reduced to a momentary itch across her lovely feet as they fogged the dying city with their warm petrichor.
Could she be bigger? Surely this thing had to have a service ceiling. Nobody could make an artifact this powerful and just leave it lying around.
But, somebody apparently did just that. And, she found as she touched the bracelet again, she could be bigger still.
It took her a moment to realize what she was seeing from the new perspective. The white foam brushing past her ankles like a bubble bath was a storm system. Her bare feet rested upon a mountain range; she turned the balls of her broad paws, and felt the mountains give under them like loosely packed dirt, forest less than fine moss between her toes. The city, if any was left, was utterly lost in her tread.
She looked far across the curvature of the world, far enough to see the gleam of nightlights on the other side, and wondered how she was breathing. But then, she didn't really care to know. It was obvious. The bracelet didn't follow orders; it could read between the lines, cover for her wishes, fill in the gaps. It was the perfect ad-libber. She smiled a gleaming white archipelago.
One step. Clouds rushed away and reformed in the wake of her stride- her feet were affecting the weather, she realized with a rush as sweet and focused as any tailored narcotic- and she turned the nation into a deep footprint. Every structure, every citizen, every wild animal was fine powder on her silky blue sole. She didn't even feel them. Even in her glory at her own atrocity, there was a sour twinge of disappointment at the lack of satisfying crunch- and then it hit her. The bracelet, of course. She gave it a touch and made a wish.
Then she felt it. As she asked, so she received, and the moment replayed in a sudden sensory ghost, but this time she was able to feel every single splatter, every wet splotch adorning the landscape of her lovely footpad with its cute wrinkles as deep as canyon systems and packed with demolished countryside. Every single crunch registered at once. She gave a shuddery gasp, almost climaxed on the spot, and toppled back in a limp sprawl that cracked tectonic plates like lake ice, instantly destroying civilization on that planet in the seismic shock of her toe-curling collapse.
So the filters could go down, she somewhat shakily noted. That was very useful to know. And even as she burned with overload, deeply and emphatically wet, the chastened catweasel found herself reaching for the bracelet again.
Could she...?
Yes. She was realizing that would always be the answer, no matter the question. Yes, she could.
Any spacer worth her engine matter was used to the view of the big black of 3D space: the endless points of fine white glitter, fixtures in infinity, spiced with a dusting of the ships, Orbitals, and occupied worlds that made the cosmos more interesting than the sum of its hydrogen. She was familiar with the view, accustomed even to seeing it with no more protection than a transparent field suit; it diminished her spirits with how little of it she'd been to or could affect, so she usually tuned it out these days.
Now she saw it anew, and this time, she had one eye on the stars and the other on the unassuming ball of water-filmed rock she absently rolled in her palm. Its oceans should have been tidally ripped from the surface, but the bracelet kept the planet a perfect blue pearl, warm and wet on her palmpad with a faint tickle of continental outlines. She could peer closely and see her signature wide-toed prints stamped into the crust, the graveyard of an entire race.
She looked at her own genocidal footprints and wondered how many deaths were hidden in each familiar contour. The number came to her in sudden inspiration, piped in by the bracelet, and she felt a rush of needy inner heat at how long it was. Then she realized that there was something she could do about that. Smile radiating enough white to rival the system's star, she dipped her hand between her sculpted thighs, guiding the planet along fleshy softness with a soft murmur of anticipation, then accepting it within.
And that was that. The planet was gone. She felt it rolling within her, saturated, its rocky mass straining under the powerful clench on all sides. The biosphere was erased for a moment's pleasure, the oceans replaced with her nectar. The thought alone made the sticky pressure build, the planet threatening to crack within her as she whetted her lust by tumbling it between talented, custom-designed muscles. The entire planet. The bracelet was letting her reduce a world to a sex toy. What had the inhabitants thought as they died?
Anything she wanted, she realized. If the bracelet could pull off this insanity, it could surely create anything, affect anything. But there was one last test to ensure that this really was the greatest possible thing to happen to her. Fingers slightly curled from the bliss of her planetary toy ricocheting insistently in its living, pulsing confines, she tapped at the bracelet, and the world appeared again before her, an unmarked little jewel. All she needed to do was frame her question and touch the bracelet to know the answer: this little world was exactly as it was before she arrived, save for a few very alarmed astronomers who happened to know why their night sky seemed to have blue swirls.
Satisfied, she reached out and snuffed the planet between her fingers as she would a candle flame, and let her rain-scented honey engulf the copy within her. She needed more zeroes at the end of her numbers. There had to be more. The system's star was still big enough to rival her in size; that had to be fixed. She swept her eyes across the sky and considered the great milky band of the galaxy. Billions of worlds, endless trillions of lives, history that stretched back to the very dawn of complex matter, everything she knew and coveted for herself...
She wanted it all inside her, and so it would be.
The dozen worlds of the system were quickly used. The smaller planets she slid into herself like the love beads she'd enjoyed once in the Arxigos Cluster. Each little sphere of stone tumbled within her, massaging the fine convolutions of her inner silk, crusts fragmenting as the planets crunched together and strained under the quaking power of her pleasured contractions. She felt the spill of magma from broken planets as a thick and pleasantly hot syrup within her, a continental creampie. The larger gas giants she laughingly swatted apart with her hands like smoke from a drug bowl.
When she looked around herself and found the volume empty save for the star, the realization of her destruction made her arousal clench down again, and this time she felt worlds crush to powder within herself. This hunting ground was depleted, she noted with smug satisfaction as she wished herself clean inside. Time to move on.
She reached for the bracelet to teleport to another system to find fresh prey, but inspiration struck even as she stroked at her hood, the enhanced nerves there radiating pleasure through her in deep hot pulses. A million miles tall now, she swam to the dead world's modest yellow sun with a single smooth stroke, planted her feet on the delightfully hot and squishy fringes of its photosphere, and jumped her hardest. The star ruptured in an apocalyptic gout of plasma, nova on the spot; she flew on to the next system, hands and tail ready to snatch more planets.
She shot through the system that housed her former employers, amusing herself by asking the bracelet how many kilolights she was moving at. An occupied moon exploded to powder against her toes, still warm in the vacuum of deep space, as she reached out to the planet and greedily stuffed it deep within herself. They could smell the petrichor in their last moments, she knew, and realize who was doing this to them. The thought made her growl in marrow-deep dominant joy.
The cobalts, the rightful oppressors, had been the best thing on their planet since they evolved, born knowing their dominance. Even when the outside world came knocking and graciously uplifted them, they had still felt truly superior, just without a few of the fancier toys. Now, though, reality has caught up with her deepest feelings of genetic arrogance. She objectively is the toughest thing on two legs, the best around, top of the food chain, the galaxy's apex predator, A-number-one. The titles rolled through her brain as she closed her eyes and let the bracelet show her the fate of the primitive dirt-farming fanatics who had thought they held the upper hand with her, had believed they gave the orders.
The surface was already scoured clean by the time she'd stuffed the large high-g world into herself like a satisfying marble, but she watched the slow replay even as her tail went out on autopilot to pluck out more planets of the system and slip them into herself one at a time, turning occupied skies dark in a series of juicy, flooding eclipses. Her entire visual center was occupied with the scenes of the starfish-aliens frantically flailing in the streets, trying in vain to escape as their entire horizons were filled with masses of high-speed, steaming-hot catweasel arousal that pressure-washed their world down to bedrock, even as the light died around them, their worlds reduced to stray glimmers off the wet slimy sheen that coated what was once their home. Then, darkness.
There was a nebula between her legs, she realized. Entire planets were being caught in the weightless cascade of her nectareous arousal, slimed together, drowned. She was killing hundreds of millions of souls every second with her juices. That just worsened the problem as hot jags of sheer dominant bliss blazed through her, white-hot surges of pleasure that started at her brain and lanced down to melt her loins, as inhabited worlds mired in her folds.
She had to have more. She fumbled at the bracelet, her fingers leaving behind glistening streaks of viscous arousal, each droplet carrying a fine trace of crumbled city, and went to the next level.
Enari shook off what she at first thought was a daze brought on by this latest exponential jump- but no, she wasn't stunned. The galaxy was a fog of tiny multicolored dots before her eyes. The dainty gleams of the nearest stars were so frail that they guttered and went out like candles from her aroused panting. She could see clear through the disc, and the nearest arms were gossamer wisps. She swept her fingers and toes through them and swatted out stars like glowflies, pleasant sparks of heat and light that failed to even singe her lovely blue pads, while her other hand worked within to pump and curl, trying in vain to satisfy herself now that planets were lost within her vagina.
But the craving inside was deeper than what fingers alone could satisfy. Her prehensile tail, each hair longer than a cometary orbit, swept through untold light years in an arc to harvest the richness of the great galactic metacivilization like a filter feeder. She stoked her fire, so close to release, by simply forcing the stars themselves inside her, fluid toys, the thermonuclear plasma sizzling deliciously within her and fusing into apocalyptic energies as each strand of her tuft vibrated and hummed within. The bracelet flashed up a counter of the sapient lives she was destroying, at her unspoken request, and the last ten digits were blurs even to her.
She hit the bracelet one more time. The blackness pulsed in her vision with exotic radiations, the filaments at the edges of reality. The galaxy, the very one that held everything that ever mattered to her, was one of the handful drifting before her, feathery wisps scattered in the great dark, snowflakes of light in the greatest emptiness. It was hers. She could spare it or destroy it, move it, transform it into a sculpture, wear it on a necklace, smother it between her toes. She was beyond a god.
That was enough for her orgasm. Her moan was enough to rattle the galaxy apart, stars blasted into stars, systems pinwheeling to destruction. Digit after digit appeared on her counter, and she rolled and thrashed in the emptiness, feeling herself surge outward, growing even as she rode out the long, roiling orgasm her people had genetically engineered in themselves long ago. Galaxies splattered against her pelt, a hot drizzle that grew fainter and fainter as she expanded, and the borders of reality raced outward much slower than she did.
When she blinked back to awareness, curled as if to fit in a small space, her tailtuft peeled out of her folds in a glued mess, saturated with catweasel honey that still bore the lingering glow of starlight worked deep into the fluid. She blinked her way to awareness again to see the dots of a few distant galaxies still serenely undisturbed along the fringes, easily within reach. Everything else was a great fog of juices and stray plasma and echoing shells of overlapping galaxy-popping ultranova, still tumbling in the great cleared space around her.
She would let those twinkling dots be, she decided. If she went and killed the entire universe her very first time out with the bracelet, what would she have to look forward to after that?
Her fingers came to rest on the bracelet again, almost numb with afterglow. Time to reset back to finding the bracelet and try something else. She had a lot of ideas to try out, and nobody, nothing, not even the laws of reality could get in her way.
Damn, was this going to be fun.