Juiblex

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The LocalsJuiblexCopyright © 2000 by Rip Van Wormer

Bubbling chaos. Infinite filth. Formlessness. The oozing substance of pre-existence; the unending hollow confusion of stillborn belief without structure. These were the outer planes.

Then there was light.

Beings of light came out of the darkness, spawned by the First Word. Flaming spirals, tunnels, and lattices came to poke and prod and shift and *hurt* and create a new multiverse in their image from the sticky psychic ocean that had come before. Soon they had built their kingdoms and marked off their territories as, their work done, they began to bicker and fight with one another. Those that still served the Twin Serpents called themselves "devas" or "solars." Those they drove out called themselves "asuras" or "balors." Meanwhile, primordial chaos was having a bad eon. Driven to the utmost corner of the multiverse, trapped in a pit with shining balors on either side, Chaos began to stew in its own hate as it had once stewed in the excrement from which it had made its reality. The ultimate indignity, the worst prison, was when the Bright Ones branded Chaos with a name:

Juiblex. The Faceless Lord. The Scum God.

Juiblex surveyed the planes in which it found itself. It wasn't, thank the First Void, a perfect place. Half of it had already begun to crumble into a state resembling itself, although even at its most chaotic it had a disturbing habit of spontaneously generating shapes and meanings, even if they changed from moment to moment. Nearer to the gulf that was home, the shapes and meanings were more foul and disturbing, but they were still defined, arrogantly and defiantly so. Juiblex dissolved some of them and drank of their essence, spitting them out into the Abyss. It didn't seem to do any good; no matter how many "alkiliths" it created, the multiverse remained much the same, still marred by the patterns the Bright Ones had given it. Juiblex would have given up hope if it weren't already that concept's antithesis. That, or at an arbitrary point we can call "that," was when it happened. One of the defiant shapes of the Abyss poked its toes in the shores of Juiblex's pooling offal. Juiblex was about to dissolve it when, to its surprise, it saw the shape dissolve itself. The shape called itself Zuggtmoy, and greeted Juiblex as a lost cousin. Juiblex was delighted that part of Creation had decided to return to its origin. Zuggtmoy told the elder thing about pools of slime, ichor, ooze, and random globs of fungi elsewhere in the multiverse that had unconsciously or consciously worshipped the Faceless Lord for times uncounting. Every part of Juiblex's domain resembled these things, and would be them if they were only named. Plans began to glop around in Juiblex's amorphous mind. Big, multiverse-altering plans. Maybe, by working together like many pseudopods swallowing the same screaming bit of food, the entire multiverse could be dissolved, and things could return to the way they were. Zuggtmoy went away for awhile, infecting or being infected by some of the walking shapes of the worlds beyond. Then Zuggtmoy came back, full of fresh hate and new ideas. Now, thought Juiblex, or what the walking things would call now. Now we can begin.

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