User:Rabbeseking/Sandbox2

She spent eons roaming her galaxy, completely alone. But the time had come for her to find a mate.

This is no small task for a cherub. Being an asocial species, they spend virtually no time in each other's presence at all. Aside from when it is time to mate, they may go their entire lives without encountering another. And so they scatter their numbers throughout space, each staking a territory spanning many lightyears.

But like a predator is able to track the scent of its prey, a cherub can sense the presence of another nearby. This sense is especially strong if that cherub shares the same qualities its other half once had long ago, before it experienced the maturation process known as predomination.

You see, when a young cherub hatches, it would appear that only one creature has begun its life. But the appearance is not to be trusted. The young cherub actually consists of two completely distinct beings, a male and a female each sharing one body. The two halves are endowed with polar opposite predispositions as well. One predisposed toward malevolence, another toward benevolence. Good or evil, if you prefer to deal in simplistic terms, or at least those which are convenient for the sake of this story! I prefer to view the dichotomy as a kind of moral alignment, like an attribute that dictates the choices a character makes in certain types of games I used to play. The male and female halves can be aligned either way, as long as they differ from each other. The resulting conflict between the two personalities is central to life as a cherub, both before and after predomination.

Shortly after hatching, the two halves begin vacillating, taking turns controlling the body. The only physical differentiation between the two is the coloration of their cheek swirls, which indicates alignment. There is otherwise no way to tell male and female apart before a cherub predominates. The vacillation process is demarcated by sleep. When the male goes to sleep, the female wakes up. And when the male wakes up, again the female sleeps. And so it goes, back and forth like this, as the two identities vie for dominance over the other, and ultimately, permanent control over the body. They grow to detest one another, and develop a view of social interaction centered entirely around animosity and confrontation. For good cherubs, this readies them for a long life of isolation, as they will prefer to avoid the sort of conflict that comes with social interaction as they have been conditioned to understand it. But for evil ones, the contentious upbringing only serves to fuel their inclination to harm others.

And though this duality makes for a tormented childhood, the inner conflict it creates is an extremely important part of a young cherub's life. The defining part, actually. It is the struggle a cherub must overcome to mature, and this process culminates in predomination.

One half will prove to have a stronger will than the other. The less dominant half will then weaken over time, and it will eventually become clear to both that one will not survive. The dominant personality will then completely consume the other, integrating it in such a way that only one is left. The cheeks will become solidly colored, and the cherub will grow to maturity as a single being, endowed with the alignment of the dominant half, and with all his or her personal qualities at the forefront of the union.

In the case of our heroine, she was the good half, and the day of her predomination was in a sense the day her brother died. And though it was to her benefit and personal growth, because of this loss she would always live with a sense that something was missing. Every sexually mature cherub lives with this feeling. It drives them to seek out another cherub similar to the half they lost, the part of their being which they grew up in perpetual conflict with. The desire to travel the universe in hopes of reigniting that conflict is very important to their species. It's the force which compels them to procreate.

So she set out to track his scent, as it were. And soon, she found a physical trail as well. A path of carnage left behind by a particularly destructive male cherub. She followed the debris from civilized worlds and star systems he left behind, as if to mock her, to make it clear he knew of her pursuit and was all but paving her way with the dead. His brutality made her more furious, thus setting the mood, so to speak, for their imminent courtship.

A cherub of his alignment is seemingly motivated by little other than to conquer and destroy. From a bioexistential perspective, they behave somewhat like viruses attacking the system from within. But as with all symbiotic organisms living within a universe, there are balancing factors. While those inhabiting an evil cherub's territory will regard it as an unpredictable tyrant, those in the territory of a good cherub will likely come to view it as a protector, waiting quietly for millennia in deep space, ready to attack any encroaching threat. In that sense, they are not unlike cells in a universal immune system.

This balance of forces allows stability, such that life and new civilizations can blossom and thrive within a universe, thus assuring the possibility of its own elaborate procreation process. But if that balance was ever disturbed, it would lead to chaos in that biosystem. The universe could not survive for long. And if by some means a cherub with such destructive tendencies were to achieve unprecedented power, the resulting imbalance would be catastrophic for paradox space itself. And though the heroine of our story could have no way of knowing, this is exactly what would result from the pursuit of her kismesis.

Like humans, cherubs perceive romance through only one quadrant. Unlike humans, their relationships are exclusively black. But their mating ritual is much more violent than any practice trolls would, or even physically could engage in. And though it is critical to the perpetuation of their race, the confrontations can sometimes be lethal to one or both cherubs. Regardless of the outcome, the stakes are always high. The winner of the duel will assume control of the other's territory, while the loser will slink away to bear the offspring. So as she toured the planetary wreckage, she knew her quest for a mate was not just about the propagation of her species, but the liberation of billions from a monster.

She pursued him for many sweeps with mounting obsession, until one day the trail came to an end at a black hole. Cherubs typically seek out black holes as the setting for their mating ritual. But not any black hole. Once long ago it was a star, and circling that star was a planet. That planet was home to one of the presently sparring cherubs. The male in this case returned to the site of his hatching to mate, a location now conspicuously occupied by a truly massive black hole.

This was where she found him. And this was where they would duel.