Long Time No Taco

Part 6 ROKA (Part 1 is  HERE ) Who are the Sakamai? Nothing quite like them exist. Once, they were residents of a quaint village, Tanbo. A community of like-minded homebodies, they craved routine and order and found joy in the peaceful monotony life offered. Until one late Autumn day, a higher power snatched them up, and for months subjected them to a cataclysmic series of forced metamorphoses. They were starved, infected, and drowned until they finally separated from their physical forms completely, becoming a combined consciousness, floating in dark tank of chemical reactions... Nature, gravity, and whatever more mysterious forces were at play, began dragging the skeletal white remains of their former bodies into a murky sediment at the bottom of the tank. Just above that, the Sakamai could sense a similar, silty layer of Kin bodies. With their gnat-like lifespans, the Kin would rapidly multiple, grow old, and die, sinking carelessly to the bottom like grains of sand i...

Part 5 HAKKOU (Part 1 is  HERE ) "The Creators" were a god-like alpha race to the tiny, simple folk called Sakamai. The Sakamai lived blissfully unaware that these behemoths designed and cultivated all they had ever enjoyed until it was brutally taken away. After weeks of increasingly confusing transformations were forced upon them, the Sakamai found themselves reunited, divided, and reunited once more, as an even-stranger state, akin to an afterlife was induced. Their consciousness remained intact - unified in fact. Their new, formless hive mind floated in an ever cloudier sea of the hollowed-out deteriorating remains of their former, physical bodies. Eviscerated by the peculiar, psychic, gnome-like beings called Koji.  "No matter." They thought serenely, "Now our minds are united as one, and sustained without the need for our corporeal shells". The Sakamai were evolving beyond their former, timid ways.  Having transcended their physical fo...

Part 4 SANDAN-JIKOMI (Part 1 is  HERE ) Their village demolished, Sakamai - the people of Tanbo - were tortured and twisted in strange ways, physically combined with tiny hive-minded creatures called Koji. As the two became one, these new "Koji-Mai" learned from the Koji's memories that their towering and unstoppable alien captors were "The Creators" - an alpha race who designed and cultivated all they had ever experienced, just for this. But these answers only begat more questions: What would happen next? To what end was any of this happening at all? When would it be over? Would the Koji-Mai ever see the Sakamai they were taken from in their last steel prison? Even if they did, would their families even recognize them after yet another transformation?  As usual, the Koji provided soothing thoughts of complacency:  "All is a cycle The Creators have planned for. We are not the first or even the thousandth, and we will not be the last. W...