Black holes were curious things.
They could be seen only through the effects they had on the world around them.
No one truly knew what lay within them.
Once something passed that event horizon, there was nowhere else to go but in, and there would be no way out.

0 was very much the same way.
Once its sights were set, there was almost nothing that could be done to stop it.
True, it had grown somewhat through the ages, even tried to deny its inherent nature, but not even the number could run away from itself, not forever.

Nonexistence incarnate: an unstoppable force, an immovable object; despite the futility of it all, the number had been fighting against it.
It saw what other numbers had done, and sought to do the same.
Moving beyond the total destruction that gathered around it, the utter loss of existence that trailed in its wake, the number began to build.

As a toddler might have, it began with stacking blocks upon blocks, a keen eye always cast over the landscape, examining the burgeoning, empty city, looking for imperfections.
Of course, they were always there; there was always something that could be improved, that needed alteration...in some cases, a complete restart was in order.
As was bound to happen, however, intent focus began to wane, turning into inattentive drift, eyes and thoughts alike wandering.

Out of nowhere, life eventually sprang up, and soon after travelers would be tumbling in.
Though at first there would be a brief moment of refocusing its mind in order to boot out these trespassers, it wasn't long before the imperfections and interlopers alike grew on it.
As its interest continued to falter, the number would take breaks from the work, these breaks turning to vacations, the trips away ever-lengthening until, sometime later, the cuboid civilization was nothing more than yet another mark on the map of an infinite universe.

Only the smallest of laws were kept in place, which was to prevent the city from suffering utter annihilation, and to allow the residents to do as they will, in the same manner as a lucid dreamer.
The city could be altered and the people could be harmed, but only if both allowed it, or otherwise held no way to counteract the intended effects.

Many things happened in the city through the passage of time, the number quickly learning to tune the radio away from its respective channel, or else it would be bombarded with far too much information all at once.
Therefore, as it stood, there was little that could make the number feel as though it should check in on the city, make sure things were all right, and, in any case, the city itself rarely contacted the number on its own, much less for something so minor as yet another drifter's arrival.

However, something clicked all the same.
While out exploring some other universe, static suddenly slipped into hearing.
Scattered snippets of sensory input began to seep through, and for a few moments the number remained confused.
Not particularly interested in anything else at that time, it followed the static to its source, and found itself hovering some distance away from the enormous cube-of-cubes that was the city it had built.

A tone rung through as it managed to catch a glimpse of a bench being flipped over, the neatest of cracks splitting it into two perfect halves as it toppled.
This was hardly an oddity.
So an angry object or a destructive force might have blundered into the city -- so what?
There wasn't much something like that could actually do, beyond fooling itself, through the miracle of dreamlike hallucinations, into thinking it had killed everything living, or what-have-you.

Though a bit miffed at the city for bothering it with such a thing, curiosity got the better of the number, and it drifted closer to the point where the sensory input was being sent out from.
Hopefully remaining invisible to the stranger so as to maintain proper, unhindered watching view, the number slipped in from behind, deciding to observe whatever happenings might occur.
The static in its head grew very loud the closer it got, yet the information pushing through was evermore distorted, drowned out by the noise.
It was rather distracting and irritating, and the number wasn't sure how long it could take it, much less why it was even happening in the first place; it even half-expected the stranger to turn right around and give it a knowing look, but perhaps that was just paranoia tugging on it.

The apparently vacant park that the stranger had popped in was a small but pleasant-looking one, with bulbous, plastic-looking trees and; assuming the city or someone else hadn't changed its layout, the number knew right where everything should be.
There should be a seaport over that-a-way that occasionally caught stray itinerants, some restaurants past those trees and up a hill...maybe it would stick around a little more and find something to do -- after this mystery was solved, of course.

Voices listed in through the air, the number glancing over to see a duo making their way through one of the winding, worn brick paths.
There was a small, somewhat muscular human child (or, at least, about as muscular as a kid that age can actually get), and a very tall bipedal cat, the former chatting happily while blue icing dripped down from the frosted sphere in a paper cone that it was holding, while the latter was sucking on a popsicle with a bored, confused look on its face.

The number watched as the stranger picked up one half of the broken bench, swallowing it whole.
A few pops went off in the number's brain, the static rising louder for a moment, before fading into a hushed whisper, and it got the strangest sensation that that half was gone.
Well-- of course it was gone...it had just been stuffed down into someone's stomach, hadn't it?
But this was different, and the number racked its brain and senses in an attempt to pin down the location of that half, not paying attention to what the stranger did next as it did so.

The two new arrivals -- well, perhaps not as new as the initial stranger here -- were suddenly being set upon by the visitor.
While the tall cat, having been not at all wholly distracted by the child, its eyes meandering about the area, managed to notice the encroaching stranger and jump out of the way just in time, the human instead was instantly devoured, smile unfading and unworried even as the icy cone went flying from its hands, a bit of straw falling from the seams of its legs, scattering at the feet of the stranger.

At the same moment, something clicked in the number's mind -- that half of the bench was simply...gone.
Really, truly gone.
As though the city had simply deleted it from existence, or shot it out into the farthest reaches beyond nowhere space.
Neither of which seemed to make any sense to the number.
Its gaze passed back over onto the stranger, noting its new position, and that the recent pair of arrivals was now one person less.

The cat took a few more steps back while it blinked bewilderment at the situation it had only now been thrust into; within seconds, however, its fur turned to smooth, almost velveteen rubber, and its body reorganized the structure of its build, forcing it to fall down upon all four of its paws, ears pinned back and tail lashing behind it, a red line like that of a laser pen being traced in the air around it, paws stepping into the leaking fluids of what had been the human's snow cone.

A teensy bit curious--or was it worried?--now, the number hastily scanned the nearby area for where the child was -- nada.
Did the human leave the city?
The number hovered in the space above and between the feline and the stranger, watching both in increasing interest.

"Salut?" the feline hissed, popsicle dropping from its mouth, as a cautious, suspicious eye was offered to the stranger.
"Paraître?"

The cat kept an eye on the child, quickly falling back after he had crouched and rushed forward.
The tail lashed out as the feline again leapt out of the way, the red lines that had been traced in the air around it suddenly straightening, splitting, and then shooting out like arrows aimed at the aggressor.
If they hit, and assuming the child was actually human, the lines could cause a pain-splitting sensation, somewhere between being burned and shot...of course, that was if the feline's attack wasn't ignored in its entirety, which is almost what seemed to happen here.

Whether they were dodged or the counterattack simply didn't work -- in fact, some arrows seeming to pass right through the other's body (but was it only a trick of the light?) -- the child had skidded into a turn and started off after the cat again, who, in turn, wheeled about and fled the other way.

The invisible number watched as they dashed off through the park, wondering if perhaps it had been getting worked up for nothing, if it was putting too much thought into this.
With that in mind, it dropped to the ground, light stopping flat across its body as it turned to a solid black form, thin legs stretching beneath a pointed head, a short, tapering tail whipping out behind a long body.
Tall ears perked to the static first roaring loud, then slowly fading away, the newly formed shadowy canine went loping off after the pair.

The cat, with the child close on his heels, and, unknowingly, a dog some lengths behind them, broke through a bundle of bushes, paws hitting concrete as it dashed across a street and over to the sidewalk on the other side.
Using a trash bin just outside a bakery pumping fumes of fresh bread and warming yeast, the cat jumped onto a cobblestone wall and began to run along the top of it, risking a backwards glance to see if the child was still pursuing it.

The number crashed into the wall of a bakery, its body splattering all over the place, before pulling itself back together with some squishy sounds.
The dog looked about, noting that the cat, although no longer in sight, could faintly be felt running along a distant wall, before jumping down and heading elsewhere.
Jaws parted in a white-lined smiling pant, it stepped over to the bakery and stuck its head through the door.

Erm...--its face fell back to formless shadows--that wasn't good.
The canine flinched as a series of pops went off in its head, the static flowing one last time before stopping altogether, and it watched as person after person, thing after thing was gulped down by the strange child.

The dog rose quickly to the hunched stance of a common werewolf, dashing over as the entirety of the bakery's insides fell away to senseless nothing, when it could no longer tell where those folks and their things had gone.

"HEY!" it barked, trying to get the child's attention.
The bakery was mostly empty now, shelves of baked goods consumed, including the shelves themselves, the front counter gone, all the customers and staff having disappeared -- well, save for one baker that was walking nonchalantly out of the baking room, glancing their way with disinterest, before noticing that everyone was pretty much gone.

The baker blinked, threw off his apron, and tossed the dish of doughnuts he was carrying to the floor.
"Everyone's always breaking without me...," he grumbled with a roll of the eyes, making his way over to the front door.

The number was too late, it would appear, to save the baker, who was quickly downed with that same bored, hurt look on his face, clearly unperturbed by the situation.
Shadows prickled across the black werewolf's shoulders, growing evermore disconcerted by the lack of being able to perceive where the things being consumed were going.

Standing its ground, small, red eyes glaring down at the encroaching child, the canine bunched up its hands into fists, allowing itself to be devoured...or not?
The wolf blinked, looking down to see that the child had simply phased through it.
Well-- that wasn't exactly what it had been planning.
It was kinda hoping it'd get eaten so that it could solve this mystery, once and for all!
See where everyone was going, but no--

With haste, the number recovered, and forced itself into an oily, sticky explosion, all parts of its body spraying throughout the bakery in a thick, shimmering shadowy goop, hoping to entrap the child, to knock him down, or hold his feet to the floor by its pieces.

By an' bye-bye --free at last!
Or-- opposite, I suppose?

Everywhere had I splattered, though slowly now begin to pull myself together, like running water, dripping from ceiling and slopping off walls.
The child with off-white had thusly been caught, feet snagged in my oily entrails, and I fully intended to ask away.

Briefly I was put to pause, the lick of a tongue on tar, the strange sensation not entirely unpleasant, but all the same -- that stray piece, stuck to the roof of another's mouth...eugh, I hastily hopped it out of there.
Sunlight glinted off me oily parts as an arm was pulled out, covered in the stuff, and again I moved to try and keep the stranger still.
While most was brought to surround his vicinity, a haul of myself slid from above the door and windows, growing and leaking to cover any visible routes of escape.

"All right-y, BUDDY," I gurgled through the muck, lifting up a bubbling, formless head to point at him in the manner of an accusatory finger.
"Why don't-cha tell me what yer doin', eh?"

The head bubbled, grimaced, and splattered, replacing what was already being scraped off of the other's body by his hands.
I pulled myself even closer in, drawing away from the remaining walls, growing thicker and stickier, not willing to let the stranger go, not when he had yet to answer my question!

Starving, he says?
Well, s'pose that IS what he had been doing -- eatin' everything in sight...like a madman, in fact.

"But why are they missing?" I pressed on, in partial spoken thought, pulling another body from the slop over the doorway, crawling towards him on long arms that held the oily structure high.
It didn't make sense, not from what I knew of this city; if it was simple consumption, the things that were devoured shouldn't just be disappearing from the city -- if they wanted to, they wouldn't have been eaten at all, or reappeared elsewhere, or pushed on an illusion...pretty much anything but teleport away, and certainly not the same exact results over and over, by vastly different folks, items, and structures!
"How are you--" a crash interrupted my next question; all at once, the ceiling came raining down.

Shadows fell on top of me as rubble came to flatten that oily body to the floor, and I could feel the pieces of me sliding from their grasp on the child's skin, only a few stray bits managing to keep ahold for the moment.
Frantically, I wriggled about to try and maintain a hold on his ankles and feet, slipping though it may be.
Stone covered my senses as I began to translate partial liquid-solids back to ghostly gaseous state, reaching back out to the city to determine where the child was, what had just happened.