I’ve found that if you really want to know about a people and a culture, whether it's their level of civilization or their outlook on life, you look at their myths and monsters.

Generally the stories they tell, will let you know what they think of themselves and the world around them. With a generally consensus of all that one would run into, fitting into one of three main outlooks.

Older, more agricultural civilizations, and peoples of quote-unquote bygone eras feared the dark and imagine their gods and fiends as unstoppable forces.

Beings and entities that struck without warning, living storms that could either destroy or create, that humans could do little else than hopefully placate and pray.

The industrial, or enlightened ages brought monsters that could reasoned with bargained with, or outsmarted. Gods were either benevolent or apathetic or beyond the ken of man, but it was generally believed that man’s fate was his own.

The modern or rational age finally brought monsters, that could be beaten, and monsters that weren’t even monster but were merely creatures that were misunderstood or yet to be studied.

The gods, if they were acknowledged or believed in it all, were background observers, their interference or interaction with the world of the men, either non-existent or so beyond man's scope that it wasn’t really worth worrying about.

These were the three main outlooks that would finally if one looked at a culture or people. As for the reality, what the actually truth was, I’d say that it was a mixture of the three. The bad place, that world that lies within the cracks and corners of creation, had countless tendrils that ran through countless worlds.

I’ve run into things that could be called gods if you didn’t have a sense of scale to compare them with, and have seen creatures that it actually causes me pain to think about for too long. I didn’t hang around those too long and it was a little too dicey to swim ‘too’ deeply in the waters, of religion and the hereafter.

What I do know is monsters, and true monsters, the big ones, the baddies that mankind quickly forgets about rationalizes out of existence, are just as unfathomable as our forefathers thought they were.

In fact all monsters are like that. If it’s a monster, there’s no way to make sense of it, or to rationalize it, or try to study it, because that’s not what monsters are. If you’ve run into an entity of that sort, congratulations.

You’ve run into a ‘creature’, not a monster. Monsters are those strange and alien beings that transcend reason or logic, creatures are merely entities that are a little weird.

If you beat a monster you did it by sheer dumb luck or divine providence, if you get it to leave you alone it was probably costly, if you think you’ve escaped, its almost certainly knows where you are. Either that or it got bored or distracted in the middle of the chase.

I know this, because I’m one of them. I had to become one of them, because it was the only way to stop the other guys from trying to eat me. I couldn’t just run for forever, and at a certain it had gotten too hard for me to find good places to hide. So I grew and became whatever it is I am.

As for what I am, I’m not entirely one hundred percent on it. By my reckoning, I could be one of two things. My first theory has me down as some kind of living mass of psychic energy.

I’m like a thought, that’s alive, or some kind of self perpetuating moderately high-level, telepathic, telekinetic (terrakinetic, thermokinetic, photokinetic, chronokinetic...etc..) impression.

If you so much as think of me, I’ll know it, and it feeds me, and let's find you, and find out all about you. If you’re weak enough or you invite me, it lets me have you. The limits of what I’m capable of are exactly the same as the limits you average ghost. Please note, that histories grasp on what ghosts are capable has always had a somewhat wide variance.

Going from those who can only make you ill or make you hallucinate, to the types that destroy entire nations, poison rivers and knock over mountains. And generally make the entire landscape change before divine intervention becomes necessary and they have to be sealed away.

Like an urban legend that keeps on growing. Gaining legs and a life of its own. Or like the antagonist in those horrors stories and internet blurbs where the poster, or main character is almost definitely supposed to be writing it posthumously because they couldn’t get away.

The other theory is that I’m magic. No further elaboration needed. Just like that most famous of tropes, except instead of saying ‘a wizard did it’ you can explain everything about me away with the words, ‘cause he’s a monster’.

There ‘are’ limits to what I can do, but those are seemingly flimsy things based on need, what I’m willing to sacrifice and how much fuel I have to burn to achieve my goals.

As someone who prefers to dwell within the rational myself, I honestly kind of wish that I could give a measurement in newtons, for what every unit of laughter, sadness, or soul essence, I take in, makes me capable of. I can’t but it’d be damn helpful, for those few times I inexplicably find myself running dry.

On paper its actually a very sweet setup. My time in the bad place has made it so that I’m functionally immortal.

Time doesn’t really affect me and even if I’m killed the most that will happen is that I’ll go away for a while. Dissolving into the aether till someone remembers what I look like, or so much as thinks of my name.

While I’m not omnipotent, my powers and attributes are just vague, and flexible enough that there’s very little I can’t do, and I get stronger the more the people think that I’m strong.

Gaining powers and knowledge from the vast akashic ledger just because people think that it’s something I know or should be able to do.

In reality, its not that sweet...the only one’s who can pull off anything near the nigh-omniscience and omnipotence, I’ve just described are either gods, or entities that are on or beyond that level.

The rest of us plebs have to keep things simple or we tend to fall apart or fade to nothing. Ditto if we burn too much or too little of whatever our fuel of choice is.

I guess the multiverse is pretty touchy about people breaking its laws of conservation without properly paying for it.

Meaning we have to keep things simple. Bolstering our internal logic, with the cause and effect or logic systems, of mundane realities, i.e. getting all our power-ups a relatively normal way.

Which varies on what the normal way is, for a given universe, and whether it’s a high energy magic capable world or a low energy one, magic starved one.

While the immortality is pretty nice, you could just as easily be brought back as a mere shadow of yourself or reduced into something warped and weak, if you rely on it too much.

And let’s not forget that any death a monster experiences will probably be painful, especially once you take sickness and old age off the table.

Last but not least, the worst thing about being a monster, is all the other monsters. There is always someone bigger than you and they’re all as hungry/horny/angry as you are.

As if that wasn’t enough I’m at least ‘sort-of’ almost human now. So I kind of have to see how that’s going work out and hope I get a handle on things before I run into anything nasty.