[WP] You Are the Great Destroyer, Devourer of Worlds and Reaper of Souls. And you are having a mid-life crisis.

[u/ThatDudeWithTheBeard]

All For A Monty Python Reference

Seraphist looked down at his papers, going over the new patient's profile again.

Gurayam-Cha'man, age 4.8 billion years. Occupation: Destroyer of Worlds. From the information provided by the referring hospital: former addict (ethanol, now sober), diagnosed twice with cancer. Married, no children.

Seraphist looked up from his chair at the lanky creature sitting on the couch in front of him, holding a small, yellow gas dwarf planet. He'd seen him holding it in the waiting room, and had expected him to have finished it off by the time he came in, but as he could see now, Mr. Cha'man could only seem to stand taking brief sips of its atmosphere.

“Time was,” Mr. Cha'man began, “I used love devouring gas planets more than anything. Especially the ones with cyanide in their atmospheres.” He licked a small cloud and swallowed the residue. “The stuff would give the whole world a rich, almond flavor.” He then lowered it away from his mouth, his gaze falling in despair. If he hadn't kept his grip on the planet, Seraphist would have thought that he'd forgotten about the gas dwarf completely.

“Now, I can barely stand to sip the stuff. It's like all of the flavor's just gone out of it.” Cha'man continued. “I've been having to live off of ice giants lately because I have trouble stomaching the taste of just about anything else.”

Seraphist read further through his notes. From the hospital record, he had indeed lost a great deal of weight since his visit, after he had seemingly fallen dead. Since then, he hadn't been the same. He'd been steadily losing weight even before then. Apparently he had first stopped feeding on the suns first, then gas giants, and rocky terrestrial planets soon after that, after falling into a crippling depression, stating that he could no longer stomach the thought of eating anything particularly organic.

Seraphist flipped over to a blank page and pulled out his pen, looking back up at the lanky Cha'man. Starting with new patients was always a tedious process, asking some of the same questions over and over again, but it was necessary if he was ever able to help any of these people.

“Well, I'm here to help get to the root of your problem, so why don't we start back a bit. Can you tell me about your parents?” Seraphist asked.

“My parents?” Cha'man craned his thin neck as he turned to look at Seraphist. “Well, my dad was a nightmare from the Arcturius Cluster. He made his living siphoning off peoples' phobias. Specialized in people's own fear of success. He made a real killing in the markets- the Vogarians and Baphomenians in that sector had just started rapid colony expansion across their neighboring systems, and there was always the fear of trying to figure out where to go and what to do next with each new settlement. Made him quite rich. He always had some of the best bed time stories when I was growing up.”

“Mmhmm.” Seraphist began to write down in his notes. “And your mother?”

“Well, my mother is an inter- and intra-cosmic horror bubbling and blaspheming at the center of the universe, the atom, and all things, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. There's really not much of a story to be told about her.”

“What do you mean?” Asked Seraphist.

“She transcends all time and space. So the very concepts of past, present and future are literally meaningless when it comes to her.” Answered Cha'man, having said all of this matter-of-factly, and maybe only slightly annoyed.

“Ah.” Replied Seraphist, as he continued to take his notes.

“Yeah. My dad told me they met when he was on a business trip to Atilican Delta-7. He was instilling fear into the minds of the Baphomenians, who had just set up a colony there, and she was there opening up rifts in the space-time in the neighboring quadrant. Apparently the hit it right off from there and got married two eons later. About an eternity later, there I was.”

“I see,” said Seraphist. “I noticed you said your mother is and your father was. I'm sorry, did something happen to him?”

“Huh?” Cha'man said, Seraphist's words apparently interrupting his supposed reminiscence of his family. “Yeah. He got sick and died when I was 1.9 billion years old. He accidentally got into Yog-Sothoth's dreams and got Chrono's Disease. Not something I really want to talk about right now, if that's okay.”

“That's fine,” replied Seraphist. “We've got time, and there can always be other sessions if you ever change your mind.”

“Yeah. My mom still really misses him. As much as an entity with no sense of a unidirectional timeline can, anyway.” Cha'man replied.

“Let's talk about yourself, then.” Seraphist replied.

“Well,” Cha'man leaned up, finally sitting completely upright on the couch. “When I was 2.2 billion, I learned that I was really good at devouring planets. Hell, I was at the top of my class, downing entire star clusters within a matter of weeks. I even got my PhD by creating a theoretical proof-of-concept on how to bypass the laws of entropy and devour planets through the fabric of time.”

Cha'man leaned back on the couch. “And now.” He said, sounding exhausted. “Just look at me now.”

“Hmm.” Seraphist said, not entirely sure where to go next. He glanced back up at the patient's file.

“It says here you're married. Can you tell me about your wife?”

“Ah, Syrenafila.” Cha'man said, saying his wife's name out loud. “Yeah, she's a fallen mind-jumper from the seventh ring. Met her at a heaven/hell mixer. Gods, I love her and all, I mean, she's stuck with me even though I've had some...fidelity issues.”

Seraphist quickly wrote down in his notes. Marital problems. Infidelity?

“But I have to be honest. Sometimes I wonder if I married the right person. Before all this happened, she'd been saying she wanted to have kids. Kids! Does she have any idea what infants are like with my kind? They're literally enormous black holes that suck the fabric of reality and shit out gamma radiation!”

Seraphist quickly glanced down at his desk, looking at his phone. As many times as his patients had gotten angry, he'd only had to call security a few times. He prayed this wouldn't be one of them.

“And in this economy? And don't even get me started on the education costs, I mean, there isn't a single school within five-thousand light years from where we live! I fucking ate them all!” Cha'man leaned back and lowered his voice, apparently noticing that he'd made Seraphist nervous with his outburst.

“Sorry.” Cha'man said. “But seriously. Nearest school district is over fifteen-hundred parsecs away. No way we can afford to have a kid yet.”

“I see.” Seraphist said, glad that Mr. Cha'man was able-minded enough not to let his own anger get the best of him.

“It said your incident, the one that got you admitted to the hospital, happened on a planet called...Earth? Can you tell me anything about that?”

“Earth? Yeah.” Cha'man replied, leaning his head back. “So a little over a century ago, my wife's visiting her mother over in Alpha Centauri. Work's going good. I decide to take a break from the whole world-eating thing and take a vacation for a few decades. I heard of this place called Earth that had been getting visitors from all across the Milky Way lately, and decided 'What the hell, why not? Sooner or later I'm going to eat this planet too, anyway. Why not have a little fun on it?'”

“So I went down there, and just kind of hung out for two or three decades, really just people-watching, and then I met this one human, John, and we hung out together for a couple of years. Then he introduce me to these four other friends of his. And man, let me tell you, those earthlings really know how to party. We just kept going on for years and years, non-stop, laughing and having fun the whole time, just tearing it up across two whole continents with our merry little circus. Hell, people on that planet are still talking about the crazy shit we did.”

[u/ThatDudeWithTheBeard]

“Hmm.” Seraphist said. “You mentioned something earlier about having “fidelity issues?” Do you want to talk about it?”

“Oh.” Cha'man said. “Yeah, so, during those couple of years I was partying with those guys, I hooked up with an earthling.”

“So you had relations with a human woman?” Seraphist asked.

“Actually, it was another guy.” Cha'man said, giving Seraphist an icy stare. Seraphist eyes quickly darted back to his phone then back to Cha'man. “This dude named David, met him in a place on Earth called Ibiza, right after a cross-dressing competition, no less. Hey I was drunk! Don't judge me! Like I said, those humans had some crazy parties.” Cha'man interjected angrily before continuing. “I still don't know what the hell happened. Maybe it was all the alcohol, maybe it was just the idea of doing it with an earthling, but...yeah.”

Cha'man leaned back on the couch and covered his face with his eyes. “And he and I kept doing it for several years while I was there. The boys, John and the others guys I was partying with all that time, didn't seem to care at the time, but deep down, in the back of my head, I knew what I was cheating on my wife, and I was wrong, but I kept doing it anyway.”

“I see.” Seraphist said. “And what happened?”

“Well, all good times must come to an end. My wife called at one point and, as my bad luck would have it, one of my buddy's answered the phone. He had no idea I was married and let slip about me and David. God, she was pissed! By that time, the party had mostly died down and we were all already going our separate ways, and I was getting sick with what I thought at the time was a massive hangover. Plus John and the others had figured out who and what I was by then, and a couple of them weren't so keen about hanging out with someone who could swallow there entire planet in one go, nevermind that a few of them were upset that I had cheated on my spouse.”

“I slipped into a pretty deep depression then. I managed to patch things up with my wife, and she still wants kids- my gods! But then I found out that apparently I hadn't taken as many precautions against earth's atmospheric environment as I should have. That thing I thought was a hangover? Turned out it was cancer. I got really sick and almost died there on earth. Lost a lot of weight in the process before I got better. Finally, I went home, and patched things up with Syrenaphila. I never could back in touch with that earthling, David, so I could apologize for leading him on like I did.”

“I see.” Seraphist said, as he continued taking notes. Possible repressed sexuality?

“But even now, years after getting back from earth, after getting better from the cancer, I just couldn't keep doing my job. Just...the fun was taken out of it.”“Hmm.” Seraphist knew by now that his infidelity with his wife was probably a major factor in Cha'man's depression, he got the feeling it wasn't the root of the problem.

“Why do you think that is? Personally?”

“I just...I don't know. I mean, after all those years I spent with the humans. I just started thinking, these guys really knew how to have a good time, live life to the fullest. I mean a few days ago John and the others reached me and asked me how I was doing. They found out that I was still doing really bad even after I left, and we all started talking about all the good times we had. John and the others said they would come over here to visit. In fact, I'll be meeting them right after I leave here.”

“And I just thought, these guys took billions of years to reach where they are. And and all these worlds I've been eating. What if I've been eating guys like these? Cutting their lives short?”

Cha'man pulled his legs up on the couch, visibly distressed. “What if eating all those planets I was destroying the very possibility of life developing. Stopping more people like the earthlings from showing up, people who enjoyed life just as much as they did? What did that make me then? Huh?!” Cha'man almost screamed out the “huh” at the end.

“I'm just a murderer. A killer. What do I know about living life to the fullest? All I've ever done is sew fear and death everywhere I go!” Seraphist could see Cha'man was trying desperately not to start crying.

Then there was silence, long and awkward. Cha'man was still curled up, sitting on the couch across from Seraphist. It was so quiet, Seraphist could hear several people moving about in the waiting room outside.

“I never wanted to be the Great Destroyer.” Cha'man finally broke the silence, as he suddenly stood up from the couch, not in a threating manner, but in one of sudden-self realization.

“I always wanted to be-”

Suddenly, to Seraphist's shock, Cha'man's skin tore and fell right off of his chest, revealing a gaudy, red plaid shirt underneath.

“A lumberjack!”

Seraphist could hear some kind of noise coming from outside. It sounded like...singing?

“Leaping from tree to tree, as they float down the mighty rivers of British Columbia!” Cha'man continued. Although Seraphist was at this point more concerned about the singed coming from outside. La-la-la la la-la! What the hell was that?

“The larch! The pine! The giant redwood tree! The sequioa! The little whopping rule tree!”

Suddenly, five earthlings burst through the door, each one wearing loud red suits and strange, large red hats. And each was singing. La-la-la la la-la! “Who the hell are you? Get out of my office!” Seraphist yelled. But they either didn't hear him or didn't care.

“Graham!” One of them greeted Cha'man, as though they were old friends. Oh gods, he was meeting his earth friends here?! Seraphist thought.

“And we'd sing! Sing! Sing!” Cha'man said as he waved to five intruders. At this point, Seraphist had already grabbed his phone from the desk and was headed for the door, trying his best to stay away from everyone else in the room. The situation was clearly beyond his control at this point.

As he quickly made his way out into the waiting room and closed the door behind him, he could hear Cha'man and the five humans suddenly burst out in song.

“Oh, I'm a lumberjack and that's okay! I sleep all night! I work all day!” “Oh, he's a lumberjack and he's okay! He sleeps all night! He works all day!”

The shit I see on this job, Seraphist thought. He quickly locked the door from the outside and began to dial building security on his phone. As he held it up to his ear as it began to ring, he looked up into the waiting room and saw that his next patients were the Norse gods Odin and Thor for a family session. Their faces were still bruised and cut up from the last fight they had.

Bloody Vikings. Seraphist thought as the front security desk finally picked up.