User:Tooltroll/UnBooks:A Rude Awakening

In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu lay dreaming. After strange aeons, death died.

"Yawn!" -stretch- -smack, smack, scratch scratch- The greatest of the elder beings, he of the facial tentacles, rolled off his basaltish slab of repose, and headed for the fwrghm; that is, the pisser. Even freakishly alien and ancient biology requires the elimination of waste, after all. Sloshing across the room, it occured to him that something was not quite right. . .

Wait a minute. . . Sloshing?

Damn! R'lyeh's sunk again. Must've overslept.

Head out window. Look up. Yup. About a mile of water overhead, greenish in the sensitive sight of the dread one. Begin slowly rising, rising. . . Surface and scan the stars. Groan.

150 million years?! How could I oversleep 150 million years?? What have those little parasites managed to bungle over such a span of time? Damn things should've wakened me!

Groan. He'd just seeded sentience in the damn dirty apes before bed. Mmmm. . . delicious sentience. After the cock-up with the dinosaurs. . . losing a whole crop to a damned meteor, of all the stupid things. He'd had high hopes for the new crop, but it should have been harvested long, long ago. Left to themselves, sentient creatures tended to cause. . . complications. . . if they were allowed to get over-ripe.

I left very specific racial memories and instructions to be woken when the stars were right. Did the stupid things somehow fail to evolve?

Spreading massive wings, his bloated body lurched forth from the frigid waters to investigate. The plan had been perfect: The little anthropoids had already shown some promise before he had ever influenced them. Why, they killed each other in more numbers than any other predator! What species could be more worthy of a gift from the greatest of the Old Ones? After stirring the first seeds of thought in their feeble brains, they had promptly began devising new and better ways of killing and torturing almost immediately.

I wonder. . . Perhaps they were too aggressive? Could they have killed themselves off before attaining a stable civilization?

But no. Ahead on that continent. . . Ruins of some sort. Terrible ruins, dwarfing even his majesty and bulk, and horribly, horribly euclidean. What had happened? Had some other elder race poached his game while he slept? Who had built these massive towers, these titanic cubes and cylinders? Strangely cautious, he approached them for a closer look, his malevolence quashed at the enormous scale of the city. Straight lines everywhere, dazzling his vision, making him blink his oozing eyes. Spanning the whole western coastline, extending far into the body of the continent, the city humbled even dread Cthulhu.

The detail is so small, though. Look at those tiny openings! No elder race could squeeze through those! They're about the right size for the little apes. But this is monstrous!

outline
So Cthulhu explores the city and comes across evidence that the humans
evolved past his level, left the planet, and seized the universe from
the great old ones in a bloodless coup. He also finds a message that the
humans, being grateful to him for the initial spark of sentience, left
for him when they departed which essentially reads:

"Dear Cthulhu, Sorry we didn't wake you, but you looked so peaceful
sleeping, and we thought you could use the rest. When you wake up
come look us up for tea. Love, Mankind"

Oh, hang it all. I should've stood in bed. . .

In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming. Some days it just doesn't pay to get out of bed.