The gods were left in silence at Cthulhu’s proclamation that he was the rightful God of Humanity. Cthulhu looked around the room and decided it was time to leave, as the Goddes with three legs looked as if she was in shock and would not be asking her favor. He faded from the plane where they held their meeting and rematerialized on the bottom of the ocean. Cthulhu knew that now he had to do the more difficult tasks his plan required. He began walking, and as the ground under his feet sloped upwards, Cthulhu knew that he would drive many of his precious humans to madness or worse, but this bothered him little.

Since the first moment of his acceptance of himself as their God, he had been tasked with creating an afterlife for those humans who passed on. The creativity of Humanity inspired Cthulhu. Thus he allowed them free reign in creating their own worlds and stories in the afterlife, some choosing to punish themselves for deeds done in life, others choosing to reward themselves for things they had done, and others still. This third group, Cthulhu’s favorite, chose to ignore their past life and instead create marvelous worlds of adventure, magic, and fantasy to dwell in for the rest of time.

Cthulhu left the waters of the Atlantic Ocean and moved up on shore in his natural form, towering over homes and apartment buildings. He moved carefully up the shore and onto the road, following it for several hours, moving carefully up the road so as not to harm anyone. When he finally finished his trip from Lusby, Maryland, to the lawn in front of the White House, Cthulhu stood still as troops and equipment moved around him. 

“Children of the betrayer, you know me as Cthulhu, an ancient evil that slept in your oceans. I am here to tell you that this is false. Your God, the one Christians label as ‘The God,’ abandoned you mere moments after your creation. I rose from the sea to see you struggling and acted to end you, A mercy killing in my eyes. But centuries later, I rose to find you thriving instead and grew to love all Humanity. I stand before you now with a message from the gods of the other races that inhabit the Galaxy. I will not harm you intentionally; please bring forth your leader so I may discuss it with them.” His voice, while nothing remarkable as far as tone, seemed to boom out across the entire city.

Many of the soldiers who had surrounded him were already falling into hysterics, some scratching out their eyes, to banish his visage from their sight, others falling to their knees in prayer. Only one, a young man, seemed unfazed. Instead of panicking, he bowed to the God and smiled, making a sign that Cthulhu recognized as a gesture of the faith of his followers. The God smiled at the young man, who seemed to shine with the recognition.

Moments later, a woman came out of the White House; she approached the Dark One hesitantly; while she was doing her best to maintain a sense of decorum, she clearly wanted to run screaming from him. She stepped forward brazenly, “Cthulhu, we cannot allow you to meet with the president.”

“Child, Let me rephrase,” Cthulhu said, smiling at the willfulness of Humanity. “I am waiting here as a sign of respect. I will go to him if he will not come to me.” The Dark One began to shrink and change size. When it had finished, there was a roughly human-shaped being with tentacles coming out of his shoulders. His skin seemed to absorb the light around him, but even this was nothing to his eyes, which seemed to burn with a dark flame. He wore no clothes, his skin was perfectly smooth, and his presence seemed to exude power, and his mouth, filled with blazingly white teeth, seemed far too large for his face.

After a few people tried to stop him, only to be gently pushed aside, their minds nearly broken from his touch, Cthulhu found himself in the oval office, an incredibly shaken older man, sitting behind the resolute desk. Cthulhu sat on a chair he had materialized opposite him. “President Staltson, I believe you are aware of the situation involving your man on Mars?” Cthulhu was smiling.

“Ye…Yes.” The President stuttered out.

“The race that took him is called the Chilxan.” Cthulhu watched as the man seemed to be struggling to hear him over his own body’s desire to run away. “If there is any question I can answer for you to make dealing with me easier. Please, feel free to ask it.” He was a patient being, but Cthulhu needed to be able to communicate with this man.

“You claim to be our God, but the bible….” The President began speaking and was cut off as deep, rumbling laughter slipped from Cthulhu’s lips; it was something not meant for human ears.

“You would speak of a holy book that pays homage to a god who abandoned you?” Cthulhu asked, amused; his voice had switched from the normal tones he had been using, to its true tone, a deep rumbling bass that reverberated with the very soul of all who heard it. 

“The Bible says that he created the Earth in six days, rested on the seventh, and sent his son to die for you. He abandoned you, his creation, his children, mere moments after he created you. I do not know the reason, nor do I care, but it is I that crafted your afterlife; it is I who has blessed Humanity with the world they now inhabit as it is. It is I who am responsible for you all. I am not your maker per se, but I am your God.”

“Will I go to hell?” The President blurted out before he could stop himself.

Cthulhu smiled, “Rejoice, President Staltson, for I bring tidings that no other can; there is no heaven or hell; there is simply a space and what you can make of it. I do not care to punish, those who are truly evil degrade their soul in such a way that it haunts them for eternity, and they punish themselves. I do not care that you paid your way through the ballot box,” the President paled at this, “nor do I care how many women other than your wife you have slept with.” Cthulhu looked the man in the eye, making sweat stand out on his face. “I care about one thing and one thing only, the survival of the human race so that I can watch you all grow and change.”

“What about all that stuff about you being the Dark One?” A secret service member said Cthulhu had been casually ignoring the nine men standing behind him with weapons drawn.

“I am; if I so willed it, I could very well end your race,” Cthulhu said, his head twisting a full one-eighty on his shoulder to look at the man who had spoken, “but I will not because I love humanity.” his head completed the twist, facing forward after a whole circle. “I had no name before I became a Second God to humanity, and since then, I have done my best to give you what you needed.”

The President asked a series of questions, each as self-serving as his first. Cthulhu answered them all. The last one was unexpected, though. “Cthulhu, you say that you are responsible for our change, but if the one you call the Betrayer left only moments after creating us, then according to the bible, that was only a few thousand years ago.”

“Again, with that book,” Cthulhu said, his tone exasperated. “Tell me, President Staltson, if you were to become an all-powerful God and wanted to demand the loyalty and worship of your creations, what would you do? Would you create them and then try and convince them later, or would you create a system that worked flawlessly with your particular type of power and then create beings who would be biologically motivated to follow said system?”

“I guess I would do the second option…” the President thought momentarily. “Does that mean we have no choice but to worship him?”

“No,” Cthulhu laughed, “no, it does not. Judging from what I found when I first came across your kind, or more accurately, what would become your kind, that was the intended result.” Cthulhu raised a hand and summoned forth a book that the President recognized as his own personal copy of the bible. “This book, or at least its contents, have existed on this planet in one form or another for longer than the life of any kind you would recognize has walked it.”

“The true amount of time that has elapsed since your ‘God’ betrayed and abandoned you is eons, not millennia.” Cthulhu looked at the being whose worldview he had just shattered and replaced with the truth. “When I acted to kill you, it was out of mercy, for as you were, your race would not have survived without their God. Instead, something he overlooked, or something I did, or more likely a combination of both, caused you to evolve, growing from the weak and subservient beings originally designed solely for the purpose of worship into a race of beings without equality in the Galaxy.”

An energy-filled Cthulhu’s voice that made the President see him, the incarnation of eldritch horror, as an excited parent. “Humans grew to be strong! Stronger than anything that another God would allow, your minds expanded, always searching for answers to even the most trivial of things. Humans mastered Art, Love, Speech, Logic, and hundreds of other topics and skills that had they not been pushed by the very world they lived on, by the very nature to worship that was encoded in them, they never would have.”

“I don’t understand.” The President said.

“No, I didn’t expect you would,” Cthulhu said, a faint tone of resignation in his voice. “But that is not why I am here. I am here to announce that one of yours has been captured by an Alien race. A race whose God sees you as little more than wheat before a scythe that must be harvested before his worshipers can continue their glorious quest to make him the most worshiped God in the divine realm.”

“What? That is what happened on Mars? We thought Martians….” The President was mumbling to himself.

“You have a choice, Mr. President. You can send me away and let what happens happen. Or you can announce this to the world, all of it, and let people decide what they want to believe. Either way, a war is coming, one that without me you stand no hope of winning, but with me not only can you win, you can bring prosperity the likes of which has never even been written of.” Cthulhu smiled a smile that would make anyone think that a devil had just offered a deal. “So, Mr. President, what will you do.”

[Onboard Chilxan Ship]

Ted watched as they worked. Three of the Aliens had entered the room and were assembling something across from him. Judging from the way with which they moved, this was an incredibly practiced sequence of events. They finished setting up the device and pressed a button on it, and a hologram appeared, and the Aliens left the room. It was an image of what Ted guessed was a young alien speaking. The computerized voice that had been translating for the two watching him began speaking again.

“You have been chosen for conversion into the light of the glorious path of Dem’Noq. Dem’Noq is the one true God, Dem’Noq is a merciful God, Dem’Noq is your light, your life, your master, and your reason for existence.” This message, it seemed, was played on a loop.

“Oh, this is some bullshit,” Ted said to himself. He had never been particularly religious after growing up the way he had. His father was Catholic, and his mother was Episcopalian, and they had moved him and his siblings to Idaho, where most everyone was Mormon. As such, he had always found religion to be a personal choice, and his choice had been to refrain from it. “Okay, no more, mister nice guy.”

Ted had been looking at the restraints that held him in place. There were seven in all, one around each of his ankles, wrists, and thighs and one more around his chest. He flexed his arms and felt the silvery metal around his wrists begin to give way. He smiled to himself. “No more mister nice Ted.” he thought to himself. He started with his right leg, bracing himself against the chair that held him and pushed. The metal strained and then snapped. Ted repeated the process with his left ankle. He then ripped his wrists free, grabbing the straps around his thighs and ripping them off. Last of all, he grabbed the arms of the chair and threw himself against the strap around his chest. It strained for a moment before giving way as the other six had.

Ted stood up and stretched. He walked over to the device projecting the hologram. “That’s enough of this,” Ted said, searching for a button and failing to find how they had activated it; he lifted the object from the floor and then slammed it into the wall a few times until it stopped. Then Ted went and sat down opposite the door the aliens had entered through and pulled his legs up again, his arms on top of his knees. “I guess it’s nice not being alone anymore; I just wish they would have come down and said, ‘Hey, nice to meet you; here is a beer.’” Ted placed his head on his arms and closed his eyes to rest and wait, seeing where tomorrow took him.

[Containment Chamber Observation Room]

Shiv’Ru was in shock; she had watched the human casually strip the bindings from his body and smash the conversion device against the wall with enough strength to cause its casing to cave in on itself. She summoned Kal’Tak, and pointed at the human that appeared so peaceful, huddled up in the room with its eyes closed.

“What did it…” Kal’Tak began to ask, and his eyes finally fell upon the shredded restraints and crushed machine. He pressed a button on his personal AI, “Get guards to the containment chamber. Restrain the human.” He smiled and watched; the human was asleep he would be unable to wake fast enough to resist.

As they watched, the door across from the human opened. And seven soldiers entered. Kal’Tak blinked, and the human was gone. He searched the room with his eyes and found the human standing behind the soldiers blocking the door. As the soldiers turned, the human grabbed the nearest one and threw him into the group of the others, sending them all sprawling.

“If you want to see them all in one piece again,” The human said, turning to look at the window where Kal’Tak and Shiv’Ru stood, “then the two of you should come down here and talk with me.”

“What do we do?” Kal’Tak asked, stunned at the actions and words of the human.

“Well, for now, we go down to that room and pray to Dem’Noq that the human chooses to talk with us rather than kill us,” Shiv’Ru said, moving to go down to the room.

[White House Press Room]

“So that is the reality of what I have learned.” The President said, with Cthulhu standing beside him. Much of the Whitehouse press corp was silent, pale, and looked as if they would be sick.

Cthulhu approached the mic, “Humanity, I have watched and waited. I have seen your creations of art, science, and fiction. I have to say I am proud of you. But you could be so much more!” He smiled at the camera, and two of the press corps fainted. “You must all choose, you can ignore my existence and continue your lives as if nothing has happened, or you can embrace the reality that is. I realize that I am not what you all view as a god, and I know that I am more often than not viewed as a monster who claims the souls of humans. This is true, except that the evil I committed is responsible for your inevitable evolution into what humans are. The souls that I claim are all of Humanity; I claim you as my own, not for any benefit, but because I am the Second God of Humanity, Humanity’s rightful God.”

The President and Cthulhu walked back to the oval office, where an aide, shaking slightly, came in and announced that someone wished to see him and had introduced themself as the high councilor of the faith of Cthulhu.

“Well, send them in.” The President said, and Cthulhu smiled.

“It’s all going as planned.” Cthulhu thought, smiling his demonic grin as a woman entered the office.

[Containment Chamber Onboard Alien Ship]

Kal’Tak and Shiv’Ru stepped into the room where the human had seven soldiers on their knees. “What do you want, human?” Kal’Tak demanded.

“Well, first of all, I want to be put back where you found me so I can finish my mission,” Ted said, smiling at the two beings. “And I would also appreciate it if you didn’t try to mess with my people. I’m not really who you should talk to, though. You should be talking with a diplomat or something.”

“You are not protected under the divine treaties, so we are not required to have diplomatic relations with your people,” Kal’Tak said flippantly.

“Excuse me,” Siv’Ru said, “forgive my interruption, but I am Shiv’Ru; I gather that your name is Ted. Why should we deal with your diplomats?”

“Because I cannot actively settle negotiations for my country, let alone the whole human race,” Ted said, ignoring the more aggravating of the two beings. “Shiv’Ru was it? My people do not take threats and actions like those you have taken lightly. I worry for your race as a whole if you should try to take Earth by force.”

The human Ted smiled then, sending a shiver through every Chilxan in the room.