8 – Different

8 – DifferentI took an unnecessarily deep breath and then twisted myself through the small window, making sure to latch onto the wall deeply and firmly with my tendrils. I flattened myself onto the surface of the wall and began what would hopefully be my final climb. The wind was overwhelming up here, sometimes managing to get between my body and the wall causing me to nearly lose my grip and fall. Thankfully I managed to hold on each time and after an arduous fifteen minutes, I crouched on the top of the building in a semi-human form. I still had a bunch of tendrils extending from my hands and feet to secure me to the building as I finally took a look around. This city was massive. I could probably only see maybe a third or fourth of it but it extended far into the distance on either side of me while at my back was the previous sight of the dead wastes at the edge of the city. I was looking towards the centre of the city. Some taller spires were dotting the cityscape but most buildings increased incrementally with the tallest being the one at the very centre, reaching high into the atmosphere and its top being hidden behind a cloud of smog. I was in one of the smaller spires poking through the canopy of this artificial forest, giving me a better view. I was maybe one-tenth of the way between the city edge and the central spiral. The city was ugly as hell by the way. The dark exterior of the haphazard buildings not giving it much architectural beauty, nor did I think there was any city planning involved in it. It looked like people just built atop the previous layer of buildings while making the bare minimum of reinforcements so it wouldn't collapse under the extra weight. It spoke volumes about the sort of people that would build it and the society it would cultivate. The central spiral was probably the main governmental building here, or maybe a palace for the sovereign if people here had some sort of neo-aristocracy. That should probably be my destination if I wanted to find out more about this place and whether I could survive here, or I'd need to find a way to escape. Maybe there were space whales like in Marvel in this place, if I ate one of those couldn't I just leisurely wander around space while eating radiation? I glanced back at the dark wastes extending towards the horizon behind me, not a single sign of life out there, nor anything except for the large pipes carrying god knows what into this city. I only found any corpses in that one room far down from the city's skyline but searching through the lower floors of these buildings for similar places would be such a pain. I wasn't even sure whether I could find anything before I ran out of juice. By my count, I could keep going at my current energy consumption for about five years, less if I overexert myself or if I need to spend energy on healing myself or stuff like that. Soon I might need to test out my self-healing capacities if I decided to go for that obnoxious building at the centre, and let's be honest if it's a decision between checking out a potential futuristic palace or a dystopian slum the choice is much more self-explanatory. If I'm running low I can still choose to search for more food. Oh wait, corpses would decompose by then. Fuck. I wanted to check out the better parts of this city though, I might regret it later but fuck searching for corpses in the underbelly of this shithole. Yeah. I already have an idea for quickly travelling between the rooftops of these buildings, if jumping and hoping for the best can be called that. My instincts told me that unless my physical body got obliterated it could be healed back up, even if the only thing remaining was a splatter of gore on the next building. Experiencing that didn't sound too appealing but it was good to know that it wouldn't be my end. What could even kill me now? An explosive with a high enough yield could probably obliterate me enough but there would still be parts of me left to heal from no? My instincts were much less clear on the bare minimum needed for recovery. A splatter was fine because that was still organic but if I got myself carbonized then I was fucked? Let's stay away from fire and explosives then. Also acid and stuff that would melt me down. I focused on the closest building to the spire, its rooftop was maybe 20 meters down and 30 meters away from this one. Humans can't jump that far, I think the longest jump was somewhere around 8 meters with a running start. Luckily I wasn't much of a human even if I was masquerading as one. Surprisingly the thought of not being human anymore didn't make me feel the existential dread I assumed people should feel in this situation. I shook my head, dumb thoughts, I'm thinking far too damned much but what else can I do when alone in a ghost city. I might go crazy here, well crazier. Sane people don't feel relief and joy at becoming a tentacle monster. Sane people don't jump off rooftops either. Now for how to reach the other side. My eldritch form wasn't too good for combat as its strength paled in comparison to even my human one, it wasn't built for fighting. Its purpose was to assimilate and analyze organic matter but it was also nearly weightless, could I turn myself into a kite or something similar? The winds up here would make it annoying but maybe it could work. I crawled over to the side of the building, still securing my body to the rooftop with my tendrils and glanced down into the gaping depth between the buildings. Damn, couldn't these people build bridges or something? Something to connect two buildings to secure them? Not that I was an architect, maybe connecting them would be problematic but come on. I liked arcologies much more than haphazard hive cities in my sci-fi settings. I readied myself, breathing in deeply then I let it out through my nose. The muscles in my legs tightened like a coiled spring and I flooded them with energy, reinforcing them and pushing them to the limit. The muscles expanded, the muscles contracted and the energy fuelled them beyond what my human heart could provide. I must have looked quite horrifying, the upper body of a girl and the legs of a giant on steroids. My body glove proved its worth as it didn't rip or tear but expanded along with my muscles, sticking to me like a second skin. I let my coiled muscles release and shot off the roof like a bullet, well I felt like a bullet, with the wind whipping my hair around and trying to rip my head off at this speed. I released a bunch of tendrils out of my body to make up for my compromised eyesight. It proved to be a good decision as I realised I was already closing in on my targeted building, I wasn't going to make it. I was steadily losing my momentum as the initial acceleration bled out of me when I was only fifteen meters away from my starting point, only five more meters to go but I could already see myself plummeting like a rock before reaching it. My previous kite idea didn't even come to my mind as I twisted my form into a white blob in a panic and shot out tendrils towards the building. The first few were a miss, they only scraped against the wall, ripping out chunks but failed to grip onto it. The third was close but I lost my grip on the wall when I tried to pull myself in. By the time the fourth and fifth reached the wall I reached the apex of my jump, soon I would start falling but I managed to calm myself and the tendrils carefully carved out only enough of the wall to gain a steady grip on it. I would have sighed in relief if I had either lungs or a mouth. Thankfully I didn't have those and neither did I have nerves at the moment which came in especially handy when I got splattered on the wall. My tendrils still held and I didn't feel any pain but the sensation of going from a spherical form to wall paint wasn't too good. No part of my body got snapped off thankfully, so I didn't even lose any energy from this accident. The next jump would be better, I didn't know how but I could perfect this. I converted most of my splattered body back into energy and pulled the rest up with the two tendrils gripping the wall for dear life. Next, I proceeded to crawl up the wall like an octopus with an additional six tendrils to make sure I didn't fall. I knew I wouldn't die even if I fell to the dark depths but it would be an enormous pain to make it back up here. Once I made my way onto the rooftop I reformed my human body and sat down, panting hard. It hit me then, while my clothes were still on me as I held onto them inside my body when I transformed I forgot about my bag. I gloomily glanced towards the edge, towards the darkness that ate my loot. Sighing again I laid down on the roof, this one had raised edges so while like this the winds weren't that bad and it wasn't a protruding spire like the previous one so the wind currents got broken on nearby buildings too. I could have just launched my tendrils over to the next roof and pulled myself along. I knew that but that wasn't cool, a part of me wanted the adrenalin and thrill of jumping off the rooftop but the first one vanished from my body as soon as I transformed. Turns out eldritch shapeshifters don't need adrenalin and similar stuff to function, nor any other chemical or hormone. That form is cold, my thinking grows cold and calculated too while I'm in it. It helped now as it managed to calm me down enough to latch onto the wall but it was somewhat concerning, I thought it wouldn't change me too much as I could also think freely while I was only a soul, why would being in a body now influence me? I stared up at the dark grey sky which for a moment gave was for a glance at the stars hidden behind the constant smog. Unfamiliar stars, not that I was much of an astrologist but the distant yellowish moon halfway peeking out from the smog curtain was unmistakably different from Earth's moon. I closed my eyes and sighed once more. Different world, different me.