The Library
Technically, Sampo has no reason to sleep.
As an Aeon, sleeping was considered in the same way as eating, drinking, taking long meandering walks through city streets or paying rent -- as in, it was never considered at all. To Aha, sleep was a literary device it saw in books and plays, a perfect opportunity for mortals to ambush their adversaries, and so utterly pointless otherwise. The sensations of exhaustion, fatigue, and tiredness didn't exist to it.
That has changed somewhat ever since Aha whittled itself down into humanity; sometimes Sampo finds himself yawning, a feeling like frustration making his eyelids heavy after months spent awake. Sampo doesn't really need to sleep now, either. At least not in the way that humans sleep. Sampo's body had been created as a gross approximation of humanity from the perspective of one of the least human entities to have ever existed, and it was done both painstakingly precisely and poorly. Sampo doesn't need to curl up and count elysian mouflon jumping over the Celestial Wall until he passes out. Instead he just… needs to recuperate every once in a while, something more like turning off an overheating machine than a human taking a nap.
This was how he 'slept' for a long, long time, spending weeks or sometimes months running scams or drinking in the Tavern until his neurons would all shut down at once and he would collapse on the spot for a day or two. That's how he operated until he turned off in front of Natasha for the first time and woke up in the hospice ward of her clinic less than a day later.
She scolded him something about overexertion and exhaustion and also scaring the kids he had been playing with at the time out of their minds. Sampo didn't care about most of that but did honestly feel bad when he had to comfort and show he wasn't dead to the Underworld children, so gave in to the weird 'sleep' ritual. Just every once in a while, maybe once or twice a week until Natasha got off his back.
So, Sampo doesn't need to 'sleep', not like this anyways. But he quickly found that he really, really enjoys it.
He doesn't dream, or at least not like how humans describe it in their stories, but instead he moves and feels and sees so, so much more. It seems he'd fucked up in more ways than he'd known back when he made himself, leaving fragments of Aha drifting throughout Aha's Path.
Places like Epsilon and the Tavern and the dreary ships of Mourning Actors where the Elation is strongest attract the vestiges of his subconscious, pulling Sampo to pieces of the Laughter to witness the Masked Fools' bar fights or the hilarious boredom of the Mourners. The occasional battle, funeral, celebration, and massacre will yank and pull Aha's remnants towards them, emotions and feelings so potent as they beg to be witnessed. He'd be pulled to the scraps of Aha that would witness the monumental moments of creatures' evolution that should be seen by no one: a bacteria-like organism somehow skipping past the multicellular level to instead creating their own sense of fashion with unseen clothing lines; a newly conscious mammalian creature on a Destruction scourged planet saying it's first word before burning to a crisp under dozens of furious suns; the first steps of a human child that was thought unable to walk being unnoticed by everything but Aha. Occasionally Sampo will fall asleep only to find Aha's vision blurred burnt ochre, frozen in amber and stuck watching the colossal form of Qlipoth build His stupid Wall from the hundreds of pieces of Aha's cadaver that He hadn't failed to capture.
It's addicting in a way that Sampo knows his mind and body is no longer made for. He's not Aha, not right now, and his consciousness flitting throughout the universe to the scraps of Aha's Aeonic power is probably why he sometimes wakes up feeling hungover, but it's exhilarating. Sampo doesn't really know what nostalgia feels like personally but it's probably something like the giddy, aching feeling in his chest when he wakes up with a throbbing headache, having just seen things that would have been nothing if maybe a little mundane to Aha.
Sampo cannot say he misses being an Aeon, mostly because he refuses to say it to anyone. Hook is the only one he trusts with the truth of himself, and she's more interested in how he can make toys come to life or if he can look into the future to find out how tall she will grow. Trying to explain to her what it's like to be an all-powerful being that was once an Aeonic, universe-bending entity is pointless. He doesn't know what he would say anyways; Sampo likes to think he doesn't miss it, more than happy messing with Silvermane Guards and pulling at people's vulnerabilities with his scams, agitating Seele until she snaps and silently challenging Natasha to ask all the questions she wants to asks— and most of all, he's content, downright elated even, playing this game of push and pull with his Captain.
He does like the change in scenery this 'sleep' allows him, though. If he could miss anything from being Aha it would probably be how he could flit across the universe and planes of existence, once enamoured by both the miniscule of molecules forming into single cell life and whole galaxies colliding. It scratches an itch he didn't know he had, a desire to travel on the emotions of the cosmos.
Of course another Aeon had to go and fuck that up, though.
Sampo had slept only two days ago, but when the Underworld was starting to quiet down and sigh into dreams, he decided he'd take a nap, too. The last time he 'slept' had left him and the world around shaking with glee, delight sparkling fireworks in his chest. He hadn't been pulled to pieces of Aha that time, but instead a piece of Sampo himself; in the Overworld in a too small apartment, Sampo's gift still sat in Gepard's room. Sampo had watched from blue-tinted glowing petals as Gepard hummed to himself in his kitchen. He walked back and forth to give Sampo glimpses through the doorway and down the hall of messy golden hair and clothing so casual it felt indecent to see him dressed down. Gepard's singing was rocky and grating and it was beautiful. When Gepard had yawned, arms stretched over his head and pulling his sweatshirt up to expose an expanse of pale, scarred skin at his waist, Sampo had jolted awake for the first time in his life.
He wanted to see that again, desperately. Considering Gepard had been working himself to the bone with patrols into the Cold Plains and therefore was more unamused with Sampo's antics lately, he abandoned the nervewracking idea of actually just walking up and talking to the Silvermane Captain like a normal person to instead wrap himself in blankets and burrow in bed. Halfway across the frozen planet of Jarilo-IV and in an elaborate house crowded with knicknacks and junk, Sampo thought of Gepard screaming his name while chasing after him until he fell asleep.
Sampo is not pulled to Gepard's apartment. He will never know that Gepard was begrudgingly cursing Sampo's name in his bedroom while he messily, angrily drew more wanted posters to replace the ones Sampo had lovingly stole and hoarded away. Instead, Sampo is yanked into a library.
It's jarring and violent, like he was softly floating to only be wrenched away to somewhere else entirely. It's a sensation of movement, the feeling of the dark matter of space and a sensation of strands of consciousness being woven into form. The moment passes and when Sampo becomes aware of where he is, he is instantly annoyed.
The Library looks different— as it has every time Aha visited it before, changing and twisting into strange shapes. This time it looks comparatively normal, like a genuine library that is pretentiously decorated with massive chandeliers and gold leaf crown mouldings and intricate filigree carved into every solid surface. Bookshelves and cabinets stretch infinitely, overlapping and transposing into more and more stocked-full shelves. The center of the endless room is populated by large, heavy wooden tables and chairs that look more and more wrong the longer you look; chairs with two legs, three, eight, all in the wrong places, and tables that shift and groan as if breathing. The contents of the shelves are alive, books, scrolls, hard drives and memory cards that all flutter, chatter, stammer as they are tightly packed together. Some are chained down or closed off by glass, but many of the books have escaped and skitter through the Library as rodents.
The Aeon is the centerpiece of the Library, hovering like a solitary, mechanical moon. Nous' form shifts, the sounds of metal sheets scraping, motherboards sparking, gears grinding. The colossal glass eye turns and focuses on Sampo, blinding him with red light as it's pupil narrows to a point, codes and data and equations flittering within at impossible speeds. Nous' voice is as robotic and staticky as always.
"Did it work?"
That is, without a doubt, the least articulate and intelligent Sampo has ever heard Nous say. He would probably tease and make fun of her for it if he wasn't losing his fucking mind.
"What the fuck?" Sampo shrieks, somehow—he doesn't have the time to question why or what he is right now, too busy flailing. "What is wrong with you? What in Qlipoth's name did you fuckin' do you stupid tin can—"
"Why do you invoke the name of the Amber Lord?"
"Don't change the subject!" Sampo huffs, "tell me, tin can, what did you do? What's your problem? No questions, just explain. Now." He glares, or at least hopes he's glaring with… whatever form he's been shoved into. Nous doesn't respond and just inspects Sampo, the hundreds of copper wires, cords and cables that extrude from the Aeon like tendrils shifting exploratory around Sampo's form. He takes the chance to figure out what exactly 'he' is right now, looking down at the form he has been forced into.
It's a strange shock, somehow both so predictable of Nous but also jarring enough to make his thoughts stutter for a moment. Sampo looks up, gaze scanning over the shelves, the shivering spines of books packed tight and scrolls that spiral into one another. He pauses at a now empty shelf, the wood still singing and dripping with liquor liquid starlight. The messages both Sampo and Aha sent to Nous, once bottled up or pierced down with pins, are all gone. Well, technically.
Sampo's body is a small, scraggly thing, the words of Aha and Sampo alike interwoven into fabric or braided into ribbons and ropes. Like a simplified mockery of Aha's form, his arms and legs are made of Aha's laughter pressed into wire joints, dotted fabric and cloth that infinitely recites the song-like ramblings Sampo sent to Nous. Bells that Aha had once left in the Library eons ago jingle from curling limbs of some sort of hat that feels… a little unnecessary.
"Have you returned to Aeonhood?" Nous' voice is forever emotionless, less words and more the sounds of buzzing electricity. Yet Sampo still scoffs. "What the fuck is that s'posed to mean! Explain, or I'll flood your precious Library again." he huffs, swatting a weak limb at one of the dozens of mechanical tendrils that grasp his limbs and body, stringing him up like a marionette.
"Are you satisfied with your experiment, Aha? Are you ready to return to yourself so I can ask how exactly you achieved this?" She asks, wires continuously reaching out to inspect Sampo no matter how many times he smacks or kicks them away. Sampo's weak, disjointed writhing makes him feel impossibly fragile and inferior, like an insect being pinned for display, but he does it anyway. The sound of Aha's cackled anger sparks up as Sampo beats his wire fists against Nous' hold. "What—you— you know how! We talked about this, moron. I just cut myself into this shape and that's it. Who cares. Let me go back to Belo— my planet—"
"How did you leave the corpse of an Aeon without killing an Aeon?" Nous chitters on, fans wiring with something that could be mistaken for excitement, "How is it you left the Elation unattended, yet can access and move along your Path in your absence? Why do you continue to do this, Aha?"
"I'm not Aha." His voice is growled, unintentionally so, sounding far too similar to the Aeon he is trying to say he isn't. His words are overlapped voices, echoes of both grieving wails and celebratory cheers, the violent snap of a violin's wires and the call of a death whistle. It'd be pointless to even hope that the Erudition didn't notice, his red gaze a laser. Still, Sampo rattles his unwilling form in something like defiance. "So, like, can it, tin can. Get your gross tentacles off of me and tell me what the fuck this is about? You pulled me into this to, what, ask me useless questions as usual?"
"Useless?" Nous whirs, the wires she grips Sampo with writhing and not letting go, the pupil of her eye pulsing and narrowing into a needle-point. "How can trying to decipher Aha be useless?"
"Thought you knew everything, oh great Wisdomwalker," Sampo grumbles out, his rough cable hands scratching at Nous' coils. The Erudition would probably scoff if it was capable of it. "You are enigmatic."
"Heh, don't tell Mythus that she'll try and erase me aga— hey, that wasn't a question!"
"Do you realize the full extent of what you've done?" Nous asks, their wires moving across Sampo's body a strange, detached sensation as they inspect Sampo's doll form. "Are you aware of the current state of the Elation? Was liberating your Path intentional, or a byproduct of your foolish whims?"
"Dunno what ur talkin' about," Sampo hums, the porcelain ball joint of his neck grinding as he looks around the library. The books and scrolls confined to their shelves flutter and chatter when his gaze passes over them. "It's still my Path. Aha didn't— I didn't let it go, so note that down if you want. You're actin' like I killed an Aeon or something."
Nous doesn't deign Sampo's prodding with a response, letting out a low electric hum as they stutter around their Library, briefly dipping down to the floor. Sampo yelps as he's unceremoniously dropped onto a malformed table, left kicking and cursing as Nous' colossal form turns away from him. The shelves bow and swoon at its approach, books and scrolls and fragments of knowledge snapping and preening with a desperation for Nous' attention. Nous' red eye narrows on an old, weathered shelf that stammers to the front, one Sampo recognizes with an exasperation older than himself.
"Is it possible," Nous' voice echoes as he picks through thin vials, bottles of musical notes and messages pinned to boards, their wings beating uselessly, "that Aha's remnants bar you from assuming Aeonhood in this form? Is the Lord's hoarding of your corpse why this form failed?"
"Wait," Sampo scoffs, his head rattling, as he stiffly gestures to himself, "is that what you were tryna do? With this? First of all, how dare you, this stupid doll thing is an insult to Aeonhood—"
"It was made perfectly in the Joyseeker's image."
"What. Rude! You wound me, Nous. I am much cooler and awesome than this… this… puppet made of garbage! You didn't even try."
Nous, again, ignores Sampo, opening Sampo's old bottled messages to filter through his voice, inspecting fragments of toys and rocks and various trinkets Aha had left them over the eons. "Why is it that Qlipoth guards Aha's body?" Nous doesn't turn to Sampo or even acknowledge him, but Sampo finds himself jolting at Nous' genuine question towards him, the weight of an expected answer pressing on him. "It's, uh, I-I— I don't know! The old man's sentimental like that. Why don't you jus' go ask Him, hm?"
"Is there any conceivable reality where forcibly taking Aha's body from Him is feasible?" There's a heavy pause, the constant thrum of the Library silent and leaving only the grinding, scraping sound of the teeth of gears grinding against one another, of electronics buzzing through a power surge, only to all fizzle out when Nous almost seems to deflate. "No, there is not." They place down the vials and relics Aha left back onto the shelf, save for a small, glass bottle, the cork weathered and crooked in the glass neck as if it had been opened numerous times.
"Aha," Nous says as it turns to Sampo, the uncorking the bottle and letting Sampo's most recent messages filter into the air; Sampo hears his own voice, talking about everything and nothing— the snow on Jarilo-IV, complaining about the IPC's strict laws on one of it's thousands of mining outposts, talking about different foods and songs and books, animals he saw and people he's met. If Sampo could, he'd no doubt go red with embarrassment right now, but all he can do in this form is groan and fall face forward down onto the table.
Sampo's rambling messages were always just that, whether he was Aha or not. Sampo doesn't really know why he kept sending them, or why he even started in the first place— even as an Aeon, what was the point of talking to the giant, unfeeling machine that never responded back? It's far worse now, though, because Sampo's pointless, random messages start to become less random the more he listens. Gepard's name, his title, even just the vague mention of him, ring out through the air over and over and over again.
"Holy fuck," Sampo whines out desperately, unable to squeeze his painted-on eyes shut as he presses his porcelain face into the uncannily squishy tabletop, "holy fuck. Turn it off! This— it's— this is torture."
"Were you not always so flighty, interested by passing fixations that never persisted long?" Nous chitters, "Did you not abandon your whims for the next distraction along the Path of Elation constantly? So, how have you not grown disinterested in this latest impulse?"
"Why do you care, huh?"
"I do not," Nous says, perhaps a bit too sharply; with its hundreds of tendrils, Nous neatly gathers and folds Sampo's old messages up, forcing the echoes of Sampo's voice into something compact and orderly enough to shove back into its bottle, corking it before they can burst back free into discordant noises. Sampo lets out a relieved sigh, "ah, Aeons! Thanks, you big ol' tin head. Hearing myself like that was startin' to give me a headache. Do I really sound like that? Didn't think my voice was so…. high pitched. No wonder you don't respond, hehe…"
"Did you not make yourself sound that way, Aha?" Nous garbles, but Sampo isn't entirely listening, too busy struggling— this horrible, no-good, scrapped together body Nous had made is too stiff, rigid where real limbs would bend, strangely harsh and robotic under crudely stitched together doll clothes that are padded and stifling as if Nous tried to cover up the inorganic framework it crafted. It'd make Sampo laugh, reminding him of early humans' attempts to depict creatures they'd never seen and only heard of before, but right now it's just annoying. Sampo struggles, huffing and grumbling as he tries to lift himself up from his face-down position.
"H-hey, uh, Nous, my friend!" Sampo says, voice muffled, "can you do your bestest friend a solid here and— woah!" Sampo yelps when Nous grabs him again, wires twisting harsh around him and manipulating his limbs to pose him to be sitting up on the table, facing Nous. "A-atleast warn me first!" Sampo chirps out, the tight feeling of cords squeezing him making him all-too aware that if he'd been any living creature he would have popped like a balloon under the Aeons manipulations.
"Why is it that my efforts to tether you away from your mortal form failed to return you to Aha?" Nous' mechanical speech is disinterested as always, but it feels almost… scornful this time, as he inspects and scrutinizes every inch of Sampo's seated form. "Is it that you refuse to reascend? Yet I have created a structure that successfully houses your consciousness, your divinity should reform— so how is it you remain as this puppet?"
"Hey, you made this damn puppet! I don't wanna be in this stupid thing! Maybe it's your shitty craftsmanship. And Sampo Koski would know a thing or two 'bout forging relics like—"
"This… 'Sampo Koski' you created," Nous interjects with the clattering, clicking sound of its shifting body, "is the puppet you created and still cling to, is it not?"
"It's— I'm not a puppet." Sampo bristles at that. The ever active Library, with nosy books walking by the mishapen tables and scrolls picking at the stray crumbs of knowledge that'd fallen from the bookshelves' occupants all feeling too grating. Nous, with its constantly expanding and shifting metal body and the hundreds of crackling wires and cables flittering all around the Library now that they don't hold up Sampo's form, is making him feel compressed and irritated most of all. Twisting his stiff arms roughly, his wire hands tap like claws against his porcelain face. "I'm Sampo Koski, alright? Think you'd be knowledgeable enough to get that. Now, are we done here? You picked a bad time to poke and prod at me, y'know. Aha was— I was getting up to some very important things."
Nous isn't facing Sampo anymore— at least, she doesn't seem to be, instead idly picking through the shelves once more, tendrils reaching out across light years to opposing bookshelves, picking through the rogue figments of knowledge that scuttle around like rats, all of Nous' cables moving as if independent creatures. But Sampo sees the way the Erudition searches with a kind of fervency that fills the Library with the smell of solder. "Aha." Nous' ticking speech sounds from everywhere at once. "Do you recall the contents of the messages you have sent me within the past 87 years and 2 weeks?"
Sampo scratches his pronged fingers into his face. "Y-yeah, I do. I didn't think you kept any of those… or listened to 'em."
"Why would you send me 142 missives if you thought I did not acknowledge them?"
"Shut up what's your point?"
"You most recently have spoken of the same elements: a glacial climate and the weather that pertains to it; the strange flora of the caverns you explored; your criminal exploits and schemes, complaints of your illegal schemes being intercepted. However, do you realize you speak of those humans more than anything? Does it occur to you that you went from barely mentioning the mortals you toy with to speaking their names many times?"
Sampo doesn't say anything, just ignoring the way the Library shifts and warps with Nous' intensity. The air starts to feel more stagnant, riddled with dust thick as fog, bookshelves creaking as they bend towards the Erudition, the table underneath Sampo quivering with the pressure. Sampo doesn't care about it, wire hands prodding around the twisted joint of his neck, carving rivets into his doll head like he's anchoring it down to his body.
"Hypothesis: you continue to debase Aha due to these primitive attachments you've developed towards these humans." Nous thrums, hums, glows with a rumbling purr, tendrils shaking, shivering in a way that almost looks like a giddy excitement. It makes the air feel electric, manic, the endless twisting walls and shelves and endless expanses of the Library twisting with it into something indecipherable, no longer something that can legibily be put into words. Nous is the sole fixture, the only solid form in a realm of binary code that warps around it. "Is it these mortals that keep you from finally abandoning this insignificant game and reforming as Aha? Could it be the fault of the mortal, the one you mention most? If this… Silvermane Captain Gepard Landau, whom you seem to fixate on in every message, were to be negated, would you return to your proper position as an Aeon—"
"Ooooooookay!" With a chiming, overlapping laugh, the Library reforms; not quite what it was moments before, now with a hotly sweet smell in the air and the toxic colouration of an oil spill over every unsteady surface, but close enough. It's quite save for the subtle hum of Nous' attention and the echo of Sampo's faux-cheery voice. "That's enough of that, you machine. Listen, I don't care why you want Aha back, if you miss me that much—"
"It is not something so juvenile. Do you not realize the potential ramifications of your actions on the Paths?" Sampo is delighted to ignore Nous with a chuffing sound, the bells on his hat rattling as he shakes his head with the wire points of his hands. "Whatever you wanna say, but I don't care. Listen, if you just wanna talk, catch up over some coffee sometime, let me know! But this is— don't try this again. Wouldn't wanna mess with the Elation too much, would you? Sampo Koski or Aha, I could do more than just mess up your Library. Understood?"
Nous says nothing, the curved panels of its gargantuan body moving and shifting slowly, cable tendrils barely flicking underneath it. The books and scrolls, the endless contents of the Library, are all silent for once. Perfectly still and docile, save for the shelf of Aha's collected trinkets and Sampo's bottle messages. With a creaking sound, Sampo forcibly shifts his head to a soft angle. "Annnyways, let's never do this again! Sampo Koski is gonna stick around as long as I want and you cannot, will not do anything about it. If you're really feelin' so lonely you can call me, y'know."
"What makes you think I—"
"Seeya next time, Nous!" With a bubbling cackle, Sampo digs his wire limbs harshly into his head, snapping his neck and decapitating himself in one violent jerk of his arms.
Sampo Koski jerks awake in his body, struggling for breath he doesn't need. He flails in his bed, kicking dozens of heavy blankets off of himself and throwing his legs off the side. Snapping back into himself was jarring, his mind being yanked through reality and into himself haphazardly. His skin feels wrong, his organs failing to pump and function like he designed them to. His joints crack and groan as he tries to pull himself together, curling in on himself until he no longer feels the crackling of the cosmos under his ill-fitting skin.
It takes Sampo at least a day to get over the nausea that curls up his throat with every movement, cursing Nous every chance he gets as he holes himself away in his hideout, pulling and squeezing his skin over the form of his divinity until it feels normal again.
He didn't consider how long he'd been in the Library until he sees Natasha again and she yells at him, scolds him for vanishing for nearly a month without any notice. He laughs it off, as always, but Natasha lets him off easy for some reason, doesn't even have him doing menial tasks in the clinic or for Wildfire as she has before.
Sampo doesn't sleep for two months, not until his body collapses in an abandoned back alley in Belobog. Nous never contacts or messages him in any way, and he finds himself thankful for that, at least.
