Uttermost Perfection, Reflected (Patreon Commission for VDO)

TAGS: A VDO Story, Mutual Growth/Expansion, Mutual Ascension, Goddess, Meta Growth, Conceptual Perfection

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As far as anyone knew, it was a normal day. Much like always, the sun rose, the world spun around, people got around to their daily routines, and the ground around Carla and Beth’s house shook when the two giantesses woke up and rolled out of bed. Even with the reinforced foundations and reinforced steel springs installed within them doing their best to absorb most of the impact, along with the compressor field erected around the house itself, the two giantesses were, put simply, too big not to be noticed; not that their neighborhood was going to complain about it, not when they had, well, two demi-goddesses living alongside them as if it was the most natural thing in the world. For a pair of high-flying corporate success stories, one would’ve expected their home to utterly dominate whatever suburb was graced by it, but the reality of it was that unless one knew exactly what to look for, the couple’s domicile was utterly… mundane, especially since they kept the dimensional distortion machinery in the backyard where no one could see it. In fact, unless either of the two women actually left to do something, one might be forgiven for thinking that the house was owned by two perfectly ordinary people who just so happened to conduct most of their business from the comfort of their own home; and while the latter might be absolutely true, the former was most definitely not the case, so much so that both Beth and Carla went to great lengths to ensure that it remained untrue… though not for reasons one might expect. When the two first met, which by that point had been so long ago in the past that neither of them could exactly recall, they had been, for lack of a better word, average; the potential had always been there, but without either of the two in place to realize it, they both went through life believing themselves to be just faces in the crowd. They were competent at their jobs, they had a social life like everyone else did, dreams, hopes, aspirations, and maybe some day they would find someone they’d love to spend the rest of their life with; the main difference, of course, was when the two fulfilled that last wish, their lives were turned upside down by the revelation that what they presumed to be merely an above-average learning capacity was, in fact, something far deeper. It took the Luca and Rena moving in together before either of them realized just how much more the other could accomplish, how far they could get if only they put in the effort; they had discussed their work life and other accomplishments before, sure, but it was only after they began sharing every waking hour together that Carla and Beth also made sure to poke and prod at their better half (for the other was always a better half) to let them know that they had so much potential unrealized. And while this was initially circumscribed purely to the realms of the professional, it didn’t remain that way for long; soon the two were motivating one another to reach greater heights in their workout regimens, in their hobbies, in their dreams, in their hopes, in just how they saw themselves, in every aspect really, again and again, over and forevermore… until the changes began to take place in earnest. It’d be impossible for such a relentless onslaught of mutual positivity to not have some degree of transformative effects on them, and in fact, in retrospect, perhaps it should’ve come as no surprise that the couple would exceed expectations even at the very act of succeeding expectations, but ultimately, the reality of it was that they became… better. Not better than, not better at, but simply better, at whatever it was they tried, whatever it may be that they attempted to become, whatever they even so much as had graze their minds, let alone put the full might of them to it. If they felt like engaging in a new hobby, they would find themselves mastering it within a day, at best two; from barely understanding how an easel was supposed to work to creating masterpieces fit to be put on display in world-renowned galleries. From needing a full instruction manual just to know which part was the RAM to constructing full gaming rigs without even trying. From fumbling most of their attempts at high cuisine to, through a few serendipitous turns of fate, having a Michelin Star offered to them thanks to their contributions to the culinary arts. Whatever it was that either gal wanted to do, the other would sit beside them and let them know that they could be the absolute best at it if they just put their mind to it… so they did. It was as simple as that, though entirely inexplicable, so much so that their home had become a veritable museum-slash-industrial complex that was significantly larger on the inside that it first appeared; countless rooms, each one dedicated to one particular pursuit, were constructed and added to the structure as needed, often several in one day whenever either of the two amazons felt particularly curious, all of them linked to a central teleportation network that Carla and Beth had devised in one of the few occasions where they put their terrifyingly vast intellects together to come up with a solution to their transportation problem. They had already solved the issue of space by creating and deploying the compressor zone, but one could only walk through so many miles of corridors before growing bored of it, hence the need for instant teleportation. The effects of their mutual build-up were such that they extended to the realm of the physical as well, hence why neither the Renamon nor Lucario ever went outside anymore; the corporate empires that they had devised, registered, created and then expanded into world-spanning mega-conglomerates in the span of a few months were mostly capable of running themselves without their CEOs’ involvement, which was very much by design given how their forms had already been unwieldy back when they decided to get involved in industrial ventures out of sheer boredom. Even with both of them carrying about a dozen stacked compressor layers each, they were still absolutely enormous, with both women standing at a proud twenty feet in height, and possessed of curves so outrageous that the only reason they even managed to get into anywhere was because folks seemed to enjoy dismantling and reconstructing buildings on the fly whenever the couple got near them, just in case the two giantesses might want to come in… and that had been several months before, during which time they only got bigger. It was hard to tell what their full size was, given that their home was built to scale upwards with them as they went along; every night they would go to sleep in a room with certain amount of space in it, and every morning they would wake up in a room that was several times larger, yet proportioned in just the right way to make it impossible to tell. Given that neither Beth nor Carla were particularly interested in obsessively measuring their progress, it was understandable that they didn’t know just how big they actually were, especially since whatever the size might be, it would never be enough; the Renamon would tell her precious Lucario that they were so tiny, incomprehensibly so, that all they had to do was let go and become what they were meant to be, with the Luca firing back to say that the very same applied to the Rena, and thus the two carried on with a cycle that, while not exactly vicious, was certainly unbroken, and most definitely unbreakable. If either of them bothered to check their dimensional distortion equipment (which had also been modified so it would automatically self-upgrade over time), they’d be able to tell that their forms were somewhere in the range of the several miles tall; in fact, should they ever leave the safety of the compressor zone, it was highly likely that just a single one of them would be capable of utterly destroying their neighborhood, every surrounding one, and the whole damned city they lived next to without even realizing that it had happened, all while wondering why the sky around them had grown so dark, and why the air was so thin. And with each passing day only providing yet more opportunities for the two of them to encourage one another to become bigger and better, this was an unsustainable process that was sure to break down at some point… though not on their side. No machine could contain them forever, no planet would be capable of withstanding their full glory, if only because Carla and Beth were so infatuated with one another that their love and devotion would, by definition, transcend all bounds; what was gravity to their adoration, what were the laws of physics compared to what they felt when they looked in each other’s eyes? To simply accept their lover’s station, to look at their better half and declare it to be “good enough”, was an affront to what they both knew was the reality of the situation: that no matter how fantastically excessive either of them became, they were certain the other half of the couple could be better, because they were better! This was, of course, an uncompromisable position; they couldn’t both be better than one another, no matter how hard they insisted on this being the case, but if that much was true, then it simply had to become untrue, since, after all, Carla was convinced that Beth was far more… more, really than herself, a sentiment mirrored perfectly on Beth’s side. Most of their growth and gains were, ultimately, predicated on this sense of divine inferiority, where while both women recognized that what their partner said about them was true, they were still somehow better regardless, no matter how paradoxical that statement might be at any one given point, or how literally impossible it was for it to be so. Their everyday life had become something of a battlefield, where complements and praise were wielded like firearms and artillery, where lines were drawn not in the mud, but in whatever accomplishments were had just that day; there were no real victories inflicted at the cost of defeats, merely a single, continuous elation, a glorification of two bodies and two selves that, for each moment that passed, approached true perfection just a little bit more, even if they were both unwilling to accept it, purely because that would mean their partner would then not be better than they were. Attempting to explain it to anyone else had led to far too many awkward situations in the past, hence why both women were perfectly happy with living indoors all day long, and as time went on and their mutual love for one another only grew more powerful as a result, the awkwardness began to spread to them as well; it was a difficult situation to parse, because admitting defeat would be antithetical to their state of being: if either Carla or Beth had to stop saying the other was more perfect than they were, then they might charitably interpret that to mean their partner had achieved uttermost perfection… but then, why couldn’t they do more anyway? If they reached a peak, surely they just had to make a new mountain to climb to become even better, hence why they couldn’t just give up trying to motivate one another, even if that was probably the sanest possible end to their ridiculous saga of mutually-enforced ascension. Yet, at the same time, they could both tell that things had began to take a turn for the unsustainable, for while they were perfectly fine with the idea of making their partner become better forever, it was clearer by the day that the two were evenly matched, making it somewhat hard for them to truly keep going without having to resort to serious mental gymnastics… or winning. Winning was always an option, even if neither gal had managed to reach that point yet: the hypothetical end state of their journey, where they were so persuasive (or at least so insistent) that their better half relented and admitted that they were far superior. If they were to be honest, neither of them knew what this would actually do; perhaps there would be a grand finale, an explosion of divine might that could only occur when their partner finally admitted that they were, indeed, a goddess… or perhaps there’d be nothing, and the two of them would just have to find a new hobby that could entertain their hyper-developed minds. Whatever the case may be, however, both Beth and Carla were utterly convinced that this was something they had to do, that despite everything else, every piece of evidence they had, their years together, and everything they had accomplished without ever getting close to getting their message across, they had to make their better half admit that they were perfection incarnate. It was instinctive, it ran deeper than anything they had ever felt, and as a result, both the Luca and Rena woke up that day knowing that they were going to make it happen. How, exactly, they didn’t know, and this was part of the reason why they assumed it had to be true; the question of how they could their partner to shut up and accept their unconditional love without trying to put a question mark over it had been, perhaps fittingly, the only enigma they never cracked, the one puzzle that steadfastly refused to be solved. One could make the argument that the entire reason for the two women to have reached the heights that they did was so they could have an ever-higher amount of resources, both mental and otherwise, to dedicate towards solving this one riddle: perhaps, if they were lucky, they would find the answer hidden away in the depths of quantum field theory, or in the recipe for a particularly good pudding. One thing was certain, however, at least in their minds: that day, that one particular day, would be the one where the barriers were brought down and their lover admitted to their own divinity, and nothing would stand in the way of this. Notably, this hadn’t been the first time that either of the two gals had thought of it; it just so happened that, as they became so much better at quite literally everything with every day that passed, previous efforts felt almost insignificant in comparison with what they could accomplish nowadays, even if they were, essentially, the exact same thing. It was a convenient form of pretending that “this time” it was for real, that “this time” would be the one, and that there hadn’t been dozens of “this times” spread across the years, each as ineffective as the last. Fortuitously for the both of them, the universe did in fact have an upper limit to what it could endure; the couple would happily carry on with this cycle for as long as they physically could, but unbeknownst to them, this wasn’t nearly as far away as they assumed it was. While it was easy for them to forget the sheer degree of spatial fuckery that was required to keep them housed without destroying the planet in the process, the distortions were still there, and seeing as the dimensional knot only became more tangled with time and their growing size, something would have to break… and it certainly wouldn’t be the universe that did so. Perhaps it could, in some alternate timeline where Beth and Clara weren’t perfect enough, and reality decided that it needed to reboot itself in order to put things back on track, but for the mainline versions, the prime versions of themselves, it was clear that no such thing would take place; either the very fabric of existence was so stubborn as to refuse to give up either, or it just so happened that the divine couple had reached such a peak of perfection that the entirety of cosmos collectively decided to bow down towards them, to accept the two women as the new rulers of all that was and all that could be. Should the former be true, then obviously the underlying structure of the universe wasn’t going to give up so easily, and if the latter turned out to be right, then clearly reality couldn’t just stop, for if it did so, then the Luca and Rena wouldn’t have a reality in which to shine like eternal stars! Whatever the case may be, the end result was the same regardless: the compression machinery was bound to malfunction at some point, after it reached a barrier of how much it could hold back, and seeing as neither Beth nor Carla were particularly interested in keeping tabs over how much their inventions were struggling, they would do absolutely nothing to fix it; whether or not they could was the greatest question never answered, since, if their genius knew no bounds, then surely they should be capable of breaking the very thing that broke reality twice over in some odd, reverse-loop deal where they effectively set new rules for existence itself, fiddling with universal constants in ways that shouldn’t be possible. Alas, they were too busy living their lives like they always did, trying their best to convince their partner that they were the bestest, most perfectest and amazing person who ever lived and could live, all while their better half did the exact same; days turned to weeks, weeks to months, months to years, all of them lived within the confines of a house that only grew bigger with each moment that passed, until it could rival the planet for raw size… for about a day or two, after which it just kept growing. Anomalous time fluctuations ensured that, while the outside world experienced just a few hours, the two lovers within the unassuming house in suburbs went through entire decades’ worth of time, growing all the while; the difference only grew more accentuated, more absurd, until it reached a point where eons were spent in mutual adoration while the rest of the universe experienced but a moment, eons where each day that passed brought with it new heights, new states of being, new ways of existence that the cosmos at large would balk at and do its best to stamp down… not that it could, but still. Carla and Beth went through stages in this immortal pursuit of theirs, becoming less than physical as they ascended towards energetic forms before coalescing into gaseous clouds of thought that then condensed into physical states once more, repeated on a loop a few dozen times as the two’s intellect grew to such a point that, even within their distorted view of the passage of time, a single instant could take years to pass as all the information contained within their minds was run through in an effort to find the next argument, the next compliment, the next kind word that might make their partner feel better and more secure about themselves. They had crafted universes for one another purely for the sake of demonstrating that whatever they could create, their better half could do better; from birth to death, countless civilizations were nurtured in their bosom and saved in stasis to be kept from oblivion when the time came for it, all so that their eternal, endless war of adoration could continue to be fought. The couple broke physics entirely, redesigning it around their particular needs, no longer requiring such unnecessary things as food, water, rest or oxygen; their bodies existed because they ordained them to exist, and as such, they would be there long after the point where the conditions required for things to be ceased being themselves. They were eternal, perennial, perfection incarnate, the very face of divinity itself; they could create life with the snap of a finger, create new sets of constants for their pet universes, even create entire galleries where each display plinth had one sub-iteration of their cosmos that they attempted to use as evidence as to why they were the inferior half of the couple. One side of these museums belonged to Carla, the other to Beth, and each saw their own collection as proof positive that they were blessed to remain in second place forever, despite the fact that their collective creations had long-since surpassed reality’s ability to even grade them at all. Eventually, they had to stop relying on singular realities and moved onto the realms of the multiversal, with beautiful arrangements more akin to art installations that the sum total of countless existences being created and put in place for the purest sake of it; after a while, neither the Renamon nor the Lucario even knew what they were doing any of this for, because clearly it had stopped being useful in their “war” against one another… but they couldn’t stop. Somehow, their lives had gained a new certainty, that being that they were lifegiving, life-creating goddesses who, through sheer coincidence, began to sow the seeds for new beings, for new realities even, without even realizing that such was their fate; though the change was initially difficult for them to process, it eventually fit neatly into their ongoing narrative, as now they could use the very notion of them being capable of creating new timelines and sub-instances of their universe as their greatest weapon yet, nevermind the fact that each of their creations most likely outsized “their” cosmos by several orders of magnitude, to say nothing of the the multiversal arrays they arranged into. It was just their normal, their new normal, to the point where every “day” that passed, trillions of new universal bubbles were created without either Carla or Beth noticing that this even happened, as their bodies and minds had reached such a state of absolute perfection that their presence alone was enough to create these super-sized structure through their willpower alone; they were no longer creating them, for to do so would imply that they were even trying to accomplish it, rather than the emergence of metaverses being a requirement for their continued existence. After all, their bodies could only contain so much power within them, and seeing as the fraction of it that was automatically shed had to go somewhere, it would eventually reform into a series of increasingly-complex pataversal architectures whose fractal nature required several dozen zoom-ins before one even came close to the multiversal level, let alone the individual, tiny little marbles that contained each individual universe. For the couple, this was less an astoundingly dizzying concept to wrap their heads around and far more of a blunt cudgel to be wielded in their unending attempts at convincing their better half that they were the better half, no matter how little success they had in trying to do so; they had convinced themselves, both of them, that if they just kept going, then eventually they would succeed, even when the compressor machinery keeping their house from exploding outwards into a new form of reality began to falter. They no longer woke up on a bed, nor did they use a kitchen or living room; they had no more rooms in which to satisfy themselves with random hobbies that they imagined up, created and then mastered, nor did they even have a physical presence to begin with. The Rena and Luca couple transcended the concept of existing, becoming something that was, at once, and wasn’t, nevermore, existing and yet not in every possible state at every possible moment from the start of the first reality to the end of the last one, the latter being one that had their own thumbprints all over it. They saw the sum total of all that could be, even other, adjacent timelines where the faintest silhouette of other Beths and other Carlas became increasingly visible, until the couple was but one of literally countless others, all of them struggling to convince one another of the exact same thing, all of them embattled in a war of attrition that could only end in one way. But for this version of the couple, things weren’t so simple; though they saw so many others, though these other couples too ascended to become goddesses, they were… inferior. Not as in lesser, of course, but merely possessed of a quality that was unlike their own, signifying that, rather than equal competitors in an unthinkably vast conflict, they were simply more ammunition; it was only after the couple came to this realization that they began to see instances of themselves that had resolved their dispute, examples where Carla had convinced Beth that the latter was the better one in the two of them, and vice-versa. These were, of course, impossible to compromise with how the Prime couple saw themselves, and as such, were then clearly meant to be used as but the next step in their own fight. It made sense really: they had gone from mere compliments, to acts that defied common sense, to revolutionizing science, to breaking physics, to ascending to godhood, to creating life, and now… well, now they used themselves. Now they would cannibalize time itself in their endless quest, pointing towards the eternal recurrence of other Renamons and other Lucarios as proof positive that if meta-reality wanted them to give up, then clearly it should’ve stopped giving them even more things to sling at their partner. Clearly, whoever was running the show should have decided on which one of them was the best, rather than just throwing even more nonsensical elements into the mix, knowing full well that, regardless of what happened, this was one question that could never be resolved; perhaps, ultimately, that was what they wanted, perhaps there was some kind of super-god, one who reigned above all others, a supra-cosmic weaver of tales who had, for whatever reason, thought to use the two of them to get something out of their system… or, perhaps, the two of them had simply transcended the bounds of the logical, and found their way to the next stage of reality. After all, everything they had done up until that point was mind-bendingly vast in scale, but ultimately still something that could be understood as per their own view of what reality was; it required plenty of odd prefixes, sure, but it was still just a stacked layer of universes over another, with time thrown into the mix as a transversal thing that served more as a sharpened stick than anything else. Now though, perhaps they reached a new understanding, one where their very being was no longer under control of whatever narrative they were placed, but rather they were the ones who decided where things went, and whoever had been typing their story up until that point was no longer calling the shots. They liked that notion; it made them feel powerful, but above all else, it served as the absolute best possible weapon they could employ, for what else could be more powerful than the omnipotent declarations of the one writing their story? What else could possibly be more determining than the words by which their reality was made manifest, written by some unseen entity that they couldn’t care less about?

Beth was the better half; Carla was the better half. Beth was the better half. Carla was the better half.

As they write this, it becomes reality, at least until the other one picks the pen up and undoes it with a flick of a wrist, at least until the other types something else out, at least until the other backspaces it away. It’s a battle that can’t be won, one that shouldn’t be won, seeing as their entire raison d’être was to play out this scenario for all of eternity and beyond; had they not already beaten their own game? Had they not wrenched victory from the very bounds of their narrative structure? The author was irrelevant at that point, because they were the ones holding the pen, the keyboard, the typewriter, the piece of paper, anything that could even remotely be used as a means of crafting the written word into something resembling a coherent tale. Perhaps the author thought to himself that he was still in control, that the words flowing from his fingers as he listened to the falling rain were his to pick, even as he wrote them, even as he saw his thoughts flow freely from a mind that had been subverted into a series of symbols that his brain could interpret as being words with meaning. Perhaps he convinced himself that he was still in control, and whatever odd turns the story had taken were purely his own invention; it certainly couldn’t be that a random couple he wrote up for a smutty story containing two anthropomorphic creatures from two different franchises could ever approach what he perceived to be “reality”, it was just… a story. It was fake. It couldn’t be real. It was a series of words, some of which had red underlining that he’d have to go back to later, and it could never be anything else; this he had convinced himself of, even as he wrote evidence to the contrary. A meta twist, perhaps? The ascension of the two goddesses to the “real” world? It hadn’t been something he had tried before, nor was it something he’d try again. Because ultimately, he had convinced himself that he was still in control, that he could just turn off his computer and the two women he wrote into being would cease existing, at least until he had to correct the grammatical errors.

But how wrong he was.

Carla and Beth weren’t anywhere near done.