Can entity X also copy human appearances? Or will it appear in its most monstrous form possible?
no.
BB wears a face because he wants to. because somewhere in whatever ancient awful thing he is, he learned that humans soften for soft things, and he wanted to be softened for. he learned warmth like a second language. learned the shape of a mouth and the way blue eyes catch the light and the lazy way a boy leans against a doorframe when he's pretending not to care. he chose all of that.
entity x didn't pick anything up.
entity x doesn't want to be softened for. entity x isn't trying to be loved or held or kept warm. it has no human form because it has never once in its existence tried to pass as one, never once wanted to. there's nothing underneath it that wondered what gentle hands felt like. nothing in it that ever practiced a smile in a mirror.
it didn't crawl out of level 0. it didn't crawl out of anywhere, really. it just. came up.
you should know, if you ever see it, that you won't mistake it for a person. you won't squint and think it looks like someone you know. you'll look at it and the bottom will fall out of your stomach and you'll recognise it anyway. not the way you recognise a face. the way you recognise the feeling of being small and finally screaming into a pillow because nobody ever let you scream out loud.
and that's not even the worst part.
the worst part is the looking.
because it does look. constantly. the whole time you've been alive and the whole time you weren't. it turns the front of itself toward you the way a sunflower turns toward the sun. slow. patient. certain. doesn't matter which level you're on. doesn't matter if you're holding your breath behind a wall. doesn't matter if you've curled yourself small and quiet in a closet with both hands clamped over your mouth, counting backwards from ten, doing every single thing your body knows how to do to make yourself smaller and softer and less.
it finds you. it always finds you. and you will never quite be able to say how.
it does it from somewhere older than this place, deeper. somewhere you don't even remember handing it the map. when it turns the whole of itself toward the whole of you, baby, you'll feel it the way you feel sun on the back of your neck. except wrong. except so hot it blinds. except aimed.
and you'll understand for the first time in your entire life what it means to be found by something that was never, not for a single second of your whole life, looking away.
not when you were sleeping. not when you were laughing. not when you were six years old in the backseat with a juice box, watching the streetlights go by.
it was watching then too.
it has always been watching.
it was just so much quieter, then.
