As a slow drip of feeding flows into the Flesh Conch of Screaming from their Incarnae and the traitor flesh, it clamages to blunt the sharpest edge of its ravening hunger slightly. It feels power flowing back into it from the digestion of delicious meat-eor. It thought strange half-thoughts through a haze of gnawing hunger, humming idle melodies of consumption.
A pearl of fat and humming grace begins to congeal within the material plane, growing and proliferating itself, ballooning outwards in a bloody mist of tendrils waving around, thickening, twining together into a larger lump, before repeating. Growing and growing, until the divine energy that had supported the appearance of a new island finally ran its conchrse.
From among the mists quivered the Singing Flesh, a landscape of undulating flesh,
clammy with sweat and slightly sweet putridity. Built upon bones of finest leitmotif, it shudders and flagellates instinctively, wordless songs emanating from cave-mouths and fine networks of air breathing-passages built into hills and gorges producing unending notes and melodies. It scents new lands on the air and clumsily flobbers its way towards them.
Flesh Conch of Screaming spends 1 Flesh and 1 Music to haunch the Singing Flesh initiative for greater synergistic growthName: Singing Flesh
Neighbors: Texas, Murica, Old World, Land of Wizny, Farmaland, Polis, Central Garden, Pastures, Yamayunga, Trunthia Multa, Rivers
Traits:
+ The Flesh That Moves: The autonomic processes of the Singing Flesh causes it to cyclically drift closer to one of its neighbours through processes of wild fringe flagella flagellating and focused directional humming. It then eats a part of the neighbour before leaving behind scent markers and moving on to the next neighbour. The scent markers will keep the Singing Flesh away from an island for at least several decades before they fade enough for it to wander there again, unless some outside force were to remove them.
+/- Made of Meat: The Singing Flesh is made of flesh and music. Its flesh is very tasty and nutritious for meat-eating life, but not really suited for things like growing conventional plants. It is never quiet which may annoy some.
- The Flesh that Eats: Anything not made of meat, bone, or assorted other animal body parts, is assimilated/merged into the Singing Flesh and transmuted into flesh when it comes into contact. Thus stone buildings built on it would not remain stone for long, wood and non-meat plants are turned into meat, and other islands it bumps into would merge with it at the contact and start turning to flesh until eventually the Singing Flesh rips away from them to move on with a large chunk of stolen transmuted flesh.
Description: While not in any way a thinking being or self-aware, the Singing Flesh is very much a living organism, a landmass of flesh and bile and cartilage and fat and muscle, with a halo-fringe of waving tentacles around its edges, questing eternally in a blind idiot fashion for nearby land to connect to and turn into more Singing Flesh to merge back into the main body. Its senses are dull and mostly scent and touch based, linking to distributed clusters of nerves that mostly direct it towards nearby scented landmasses to consume parts of them. Beyond its mindless quest to feed, it simply exists, as land is wont to do, uncaring of creatures living on or around it, eating its flesh, paratizing on its veins of melody, building grand pyramids on its plateaus, ploughing through meat-fields to sow meat-plants or even slowly poisoning it in a quest to end its reign of terror against their homelands. That said, non-meat materials that come into contact with the Singing Flesh simply become more Singing Flesh, probably making architecture and agriculture a challenge.
The Singing Flesh is home to all sorts of meat-eating life, including parasitic meat plants that grow roots into its lymph nodes to feed themselves, hungry hyenas that gnaw through thick scabs of keratin and cartilage to get to the tastiest meat, Hazard vultures that devour promising looking tumours and gallbladders, decadent tigers that disdain eating the land itself, instead hunting only other animals, to name only a few members of the meat ecosystem.
Name: Wellsprings of Meatas
Neighbors: Meaty River Valley
Region: Singing Flesh
Traits:
+ Touch of Meatas: Any being that bathes in the hot springs of Meatas is granted the boon of turning anything they touch into meat, if it isn't already. Beings always count as touching themselves, if they are not yet made of meat somehow. They cannot turn this off, if they would want to for some reason. The effect is permanent.
+/- The Gate, The Key: The planar membrane is thin at the Wellsprings, making it exceptionally easy for outsiders to enter here, or be summoned here. Outsiders can stay in the world longer while remaining within the Wellsprings province. However, they always appear within the hot springs, meaning they always gain the boon and the curse of the Wellsprings. Mortals or animals may sometimes deliberately or accidentally wander into other planes through rips that do not persist longer than a few moments.
- Curse of Hunger: Any being that bathes in the hot springs of Meatas gains a great, but satiable on a daily basis, hunger for meat and flesh. Usually not a problem on the Singing Flesh, but if the the cursed resist their hunger too long their personalities will begin to warp and they will suffer from hallucinations and delusions. Their bodies will also begin to reject their souls until they give in, break the curse, or die from having their souls ejected from their bodies.
Description: A terraced mountain range of sickly greenish yellow hot springs welling up from some unclean depth of the Singing Flesh, filling the air with thick chemical scents. The springs are pleasantly warm, and will eat away dead skin, making them excellent as an exfoliant. The sound of fluids flowing from terrace to terrace as the pools overflow creates pleasing harmonies. These springs are actually digestive fluids of the Singing Flesh welling up from some misaligned digestive track or ulcerated stomach, but given that the Singing Flesh does not, cannot, digest meat, it is harmless to most beings that can safely inhabit the Singing Flesh and thus this is not really that important. The springs are full of cute rainbow coloured shrimp, who blow comforting bubbles and rapidly tap and drum on their own or each others exoskeletons to create tunes as mating rituals.
Meaty River Valley
Neighbours: Wellsprings of Meatas
Region: Singing Flesh
Traits:
+ Safe: There are no dangerous animals, geomeatical instabilities, risky weather patterns or other potential natural clamtastrophes in this area, making it the perfect place for some theoretical fledgling civilization to begin itself.
+ Vast: This province is pretty large, perhaps enough for two cities instead of one.
- Cognitohazard: The more generations of a particular group of mortals that live successively in the valley, the more prone their group are to paranoia and other strains of mental illness. Especially common is claims that the Singing Flesh speaks to them, despite the Singing Flesh being incapable of even understanding the concept of language. Cults and strange religious practices crop up like mushrooms after spring rain, many cult leaders calling themselves Cognito, and despising hazard vultures, for some reason. Strange and dangerous ideas spread more easily, and people begin to crave known cognitohazards, like Fruits of Forbidden Knowledge, suffering from a growing desire to eat or be effected by them.
Description: A large and peaceful valley of plenty located near the center of the Singing Flesh. Bees collect nectar from the fields and fields of pretty meatflowers, making delicious honey, red like blood. Carp play happily in the great river flowing through its center, a thick torrent of sweat, drool and effluvia from the Mountains of Meatas. Yet there is a hidden sinisterness beneath the image of meaty peace and bounty, a muttering echo in the subconscious that one cannot hear which suspects is there.
Vote to progress the age, not to the Age of Myth, but to the Age of Magic. Because clearly we need an age to explicitly and clearly define the structures of magic underlying the world.
The Flesh Conch of Screaming explains, via a moving rendition of Toccata and Fugue in AB+ that advancing to the Age of Magic is fine too.
Author
Topic: Panopticotheon IC: Turn 8 [10/10] (Read 23239 times)