A Gathering of Vixens - Part 1 (Patreon Commission for Wanderer-Rychen) (Patreon)

TAGS: Starryverse, Absolute Hyper, Metaphysical Macrohyper

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The nature of infinity was difficult to explain, even more so when it was abused to the point where it was ready to shatter into an infinity of smaller infinities that occasionally contained one another, but mostly remained separate except for some high-end mathematical proofs of dubious accuracy. That is, whenever this infinity existed; at any given point, it might not even be there, having been replaced with a patch of fur or some milk. It was hard to tell, really.

For the Starry collective in general, attempting to pin down any finite number in the vast expanse of everything and nothing they inhabited was… difficult. None of them even knew who the oldest among them was; while it stood to reason that at least one of them had to have been the first Starry to ascend, none could agree on who that vixen truly was, and not even through selfish proclamations either. Rather than a great number of them claiming to be the oldest, none made such a bold statement, confused as they were about how old they even were, or if time even applied to them when they existed outside universes.

The same could be said about their number, seeing as there was a literal infinity of vixens, and an infinity more being created at any given moment; such was the nature of it, that to have a literally endless multiverse meant that, at any given point, there was always at least one ascension taking place, with a chunk of the collective paying attention to it while the rest remained blissfully ignorant. Such was how it had gone one for what felt like forever, even if the Starries knew, intellectually speaking, that there had to have been a discrete beginning to their all-consuming, multiversal expansion.

Yet, there was only one constant to them, and one that, perhaps fittingly, went against everything the collective stood for. While it had always been there for as long as every vixen could remember, it was only when the Eta-Prime Starry ascended that the existence of their meeting grounds was truly called into question. For the Starries had always been large, but after their body plans were all radically altered to adopt a tauric, multi-laden form, when even the smallest among them could outsize universal clusters with but one of their nipple buds, it became far more strenuous than it used to be to maintain their neutral middle ground.

For out of the vast infinity of existence, there was one, a countable one universe that had not produced an ascended Starry. There was one in there, but unlike any other of her sisters, she was… people-sized. Proportions were normal, size was normal, there was no grandiose emergence from within her cocoon; just a regular vixen, living her day-to-day life, until at one point she became aware of the collective, and the collective, surprised to see a new Starry without there being a physical ascension, turned to look at the newcomer.

It was, in my respects, an exotic universe, in that it existed even as it was made to physically shrink down. While there was undoubtedly plenty of room for the Starry collective to exist in, simultaneously, their very existence to begin with rendered vast swathes of the multiverse unusable, occupied as they were by so much vixen that nothing else could be within that not-space; this was only made worse once the great taurification was complete, and the total volume occupied by the many Starries went up by so many factors that it became literally uncountable.

One of the consequences of this exponential expansion was that the total number of universes that existed had been steadily going down, as was the amount of universes that could exist. Granted, this meant very little when there was a literally infinite amount of them to go around, but that was hardly important; what mattered was that they were (technically) running out of room faster than they could make  more of it, and as a result, something had to give.

Oddly enough, this one universe seemed to have volunteered to turn itself into the focal point of the Big Squeeze, the one spot towards which all pressure seemed to go. As a result, it became less of a universe and more of a point… that was still a universe. Only a handful of Starries were deeply connected enough to reality to begin to understand the spatial fuckery that went on within that instance of reality; for the rest of the collective, what they saw was a whole extant universe that, despite having everything it should have, up to and including complex structures and life, still only occupied a single infinitesimal point.

One that grew smaller by the moment as well. As more Starries were ascended, and the one of their sisters that remained within that universe refused to, so too did their cosmos become smaller. How exactly its dimensions were so heavily folded that it could occupy an infinitely small space and yet still have all the hallmarks of a regular universe was best left for all the scholars that no doubt existed within it; for the Starries, this one oddity served an entirely different purpose: a place to mediate their disputes.

For despite being a collective, they still were not without their disagreements; there were several competing lines of thought on how the Starries “should” act, on how ascensions “should” take place, in addition to pettier, more personal issues that nonetheless spilled over into open confrontation. With the vixens being what they were, direct conflict ran the risk of destabilising the entirety of meta-existence; hence, the need for a place where they could all (metaphorically) sit down and discuss things, using one of their own as a mediator.

And, to that end, the Mini-Starry, as she begrudgingly became known, was appointed to be the professional babysitter for the collective. While the other Starries no doubt saw it differently, this one despised every moment she had to actively take care of all the others who decided to barge into her reality and ask for her to help with whatever nonsensical argument they were having. As if it weren’t enough that their very presence had folded her universe into a size so tiny it could fit into a proton, now she was expected to be the voice of reason for a bunch of horned-up vixen goddesses.

Even worse, every time they showed up, things just got worse! She used to be able to walk, and now she had to resort to simply willing herself from place to place and hoping the dimensional pockets didn’t collapse on the way; honestly, it was a chore to even get groceries done, and that’s when the concept of it existed and hadn’t been temporarily subsumed into one of her “sisters’” nipples or something equally as ridiculous.

Everything was a terribly complicated affair now, so much so that despite her best intentions, the smaller Starry couldn’t help but let some of her frustration vent out towards whoever she was with at the time… or, more accurately, towards whatever Starry was there with her. The rest of her universe had come to see her as something of a guardian entity, and while she wasn’t at all enthused by that, the mini-vixen could at least get behind the idea that she was the only thing standing between that reality and it simply not being real anymore.

She was, after all, ascended. Not in the way the others were, but she knew the collective existed and could act upon it, in whatever limited manner she could cook up. Why she hadn’t grown to be larger, she didn’t know, but the fact was she was there, and now she couldn’t take that back; this did not, however, mean she had to be nice to everyone who knocked on her not-door and demanded-not-demanded a portion of her seemingly existent time to mediate a “dispute” that inevitably turned out to be something so asinine as to be insulting.

But it was her life now… her life, so far as it was allowed to metaphysically be. Maybe some days she wasn’t actually alive, merely “existed” in the sense that her folded-up universe allowed; maybe others she was more alive than all of her sisters, and they were eternally jealous over it. Most of the time though, she was just annoyed, and wanted nothing more than for the collective to buzz off and let her universe breathe.

Unfortunately, this just wasn’t going to happen. At least, not without some encouragement on her part; being ascended meant that she could access the collective knowledge of all the Starries that existed and ever did exist, and this meant that her understanding of spatial dynamics was unparalleled… that, and her innate comprehension of the very power source that lay within each of the vixen goddesses looming up above.

She couldn’t put it into words, for no words existed that could ever describe what this power was. Divinity, perhaps, was the closest her language could get to it, but even that failed to account for all the specificities that were intrinsic to that state of being. What the Mini-Starry knew, however, was what the power was, in a subconscious manner, and how it worked; thus, it wasn’t too much of a stretch for her to try and understand how this power could be manipulated, warped, and, most importantly for her plan, stolen and stored away where no one could ever see it.

The collective’s biggest mistake was not paying her. Not in money, but just… something, anything that would make it obvious they appreciated the hard work she put in, every single not-day, into being their babysitter. Even a thank you every now and then would’ve been appreciated, but no; the job was supposed to be her reward, the “pride” in having been handpicked to mediate the collective’s internal conflicts, as if she hadn’t been chosen as a default option.

Thus, if she wasn’t going to be paid, then the Mini-Starry was going to find a way to extract payment from the other vixens, even if she had to resort to some less than savoury tactics to do so. It wasn’t her fault; as far as she cared, she was only acquiring that which was hers to begin with, as the least the collective could do was give her something in return for having her universe turned into a point and her life upended as much as it had been. That they didn’t was evidence that she had to do this, and evidence for why she was the one most deserving of having ascended in the first place.

She couldn’t lie: there was some jealousy there. Much as the smaller vixen would’ve liked to get on her high horse and pretend that she was only doing this for the sake of “justice” or some other, equally abstract notion she didn’t care about, the Mini-Starry had a non-insignificant amount of envy being used as fuel for her machinations. After all, why were they allowed to be big? Why were they given the opportunity to be immense hyper-goddesses, while she had to stick around and be so miniscule that she hardly even existed at times?

It would’ve been one thing if she’d remained blissfully ignorant of the collective; at least then, she wouldn’t know what she was missing on! Instead, the universe had seen fit to show her what she could have gotten, only to dangle it on a string just out of reach, taunting her with the possibilities, with the power that she would never have. And if that was the case, then she saw absolutely no reason why she shouldn’t just take it if she had the chance.

For the longest time, the Mini-Starry struggled with the idea, mostly on account of not having the required resources to bring it into fruition. To contain a power such as the one held within the collective’s members was no easy task, and no material found within any one universe was up to the task; rather, she needed something exotic, a form a meta-matter that was only present outside the bounds of reality, manifested through the actions of the collective itself.

Now, getting some of it was the hard part, given that she couldn’t exactly leave her universe, hence her issues to begin with. The other Starries had this material in abundance, but they could move in and out of reality more or less at will, while she was stuck within her point-sized patch of existence stranded amidst uncountable amounts of boob. There was, however, a way around this: the very job she was saddled with in the first place.

It was surprisingly easy to leverage each meeting in order to convince the other Starries to bring some of this material in with them; most of them were unaware of its significance, and were more than happy to get rid of the “excedent” so they wouldn’t have to brush it off later. A few raised some eyebrows, but after their “trusted mediator” pointed out that she was simply trying to understand the nature of the collective on a deeper level, said eyebrows were promptly lowered.

Meanwhile, the Mini-Starry accrued for herself a hoard of meta-matter with which to proceed to the next stage of her plan: capture. This one would be the easiest, seeing as the very fundamental state of being most of the Starries existed in made it practically impossible for them to notice any amount of power being sapped from them. To their mind, it might as well have been an extra-powerful spurt of milk from one of their many breasts; to the smaller vixen, it was yet another fraction of infinity she could store away and hold for a later date.

Quantifying it was nigh-on impossible; as much as she was only stealing away a small portion of the power held by one member of the collective at a time, said power source was, at its core, infinite, conferring the same property to whatever fraction of it was broken off. An interesting trick of mathematics, but it checked out: infinity being what it was, any part of infinity was itself just a smaller infinity… or, at least, that’s what the Mini-Starry figured.

As far as she could tell, that collection of crystallised soulstuff in her closet was her ticket out of that universe and straight into a position of power and dominance. The moment she took that power into herself was the same one the collective would tremble before her, reduced to mewling whelps before her magnificent might! Then they’d know what it was like to be an insignificant little dot in the face of a literally endless expanse of vixen!

… as soon as she figured out how to actually use those things.