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Post by Insano-Man on Aug 22, 2019 3:31:59 GMT -5
This topic is a child of the Meat article directory.A SPREADING STAINLooking down on the planet, nobody could fault you for thinking that, in the next few centuries, Set is going to look better on a plate of pasta than as a planet. Even under fire from all sides by the Loonies, the meat keeps growing. Even taking orbital bombardment daily from the Space Loonies, the meat keeps spreading. With the Cult at its back and meat monsters swallowing up every border town that doesn't agree, it's not hard to imagine there won't be much dry ground left as the decades wear on. SECTIONS- Core Behavior & Replication Patterns- Adaptation & Regeneration
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Post by Insano-Man on Aug 22, 2019 3:53:24 GMT -5
CORE BEHAVIOR & REPLICATION PATTERNS
To understand how the meat spreads, it's best to start with an idea of what it is at square one. As described by Loonies of the Pioneer Network, notably Wilfrey Cloud and Jazis'Masah nes'ara Ishean, the meat is a hyper-efficient biomimetic organic gel. The short of it is that the meat, at its most basic, is a paste of formless precursor cells that can recreate - or infest - every form of life known to Set. On contact with another living organism, the gel replicates its most savory qualities on the cellular level. From there, it attempts to imitate - or infiltrate - the original organism to the best of its abilities.
As an imitator, it doesn't take much looking at a meatscape to know the meat's not great with faces. When it starts putting genes together, it never stops. Eyeballs on fingers, fingers on ribs, and ribs on spleens. Blood for blood's sake, skin for skin's sake. It blankets the Erf with bodyparts and viscera in a constant attempt to get just one thing right. Most of it is digested daily to reclaim its calories. All the while, the least half-cocked creations are kludged into doing something useful. Ears put down roots and leech the land of its life. Vertebrae sprout wings and snack on greenery. Kidneys grow legs, teeth, and go on the hunt. It's through this process that meatscapes are formed - and where the meat gets most of its staying power.
As an infiltrator, the meat is something wicked. It's never been a hundred percent at getting its disguise down right, but it knows how to stir up trouble once it's found its way in. As meat replicates inside the body, it steadily overtakes the host with bastardized and plagiarized copies of itself. It builds its own cancers, creates its own metabolic instabilities, and prompts a civil war most immune systems just aren't ready for. Little by little, it replaces the host with meat - and what it can't swap out, it eats. It's through this process that meatsification happens - and is one of the most effective natural vectors for a meatscape to spread.
Whether the meat is workshopping with a victim or gene-guessing on its own, it's usually eating something. Its host, happenstance bacteria, or even other meat cells - everything is fair game. Energy intake at its most basic is predation during replication. At the same time, every replication comes with a few extra precursor cells as bonus. These keep up the cycle by finding other things to imitate, snack on, and use as calories for another division. With enough sliming and spreading in one spot, the result is a crimson slush of meat eating and imitating itself. Only the strongest and cagiest survive.
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Post by Insano-Man on Aug 22, 2019 3:53:33 GMT -5
ADAPTATION & REGENERATION
With all the meat's infighting, it's usually the most complete and coherent products that survive. As the meat eats itself and recycles its half-baked ideas, mutations enter the mix. Evolution happens in milliseconds on the microscopic level. New creatures are created, old inclusions are improved, and life lives in fast-forward until something finally works. Most of the time, it's a mix of everything all at once; the grass it slurped last month, the fly that landed in it last week, and the poor sod that ran into a full-grown meat monster last night. All of this happens whether it's squirming on the ground or sliming through someone's veins.
As the meat grows, it picks up new tricks. It passes them back through infighting to the rest of the meat. Slowly, but surely, the whole of the meat in the area gains access to a collective library of all the things it's eaten in the past. Older meatscapes get bolder with their ideas as time goes on. Long-running infections start adding other people to the mix. What might've just been a big puddle of carmine slime one day could end up as an endless source of human-shaped meat monsters by the end of the year. What might've just been a boil one day could end up as a clone of your sister's arm by the end of the month.
As any Looney'll tell you, spacer or otherwise, all that fast-forward replication means that the meat can't be beaten conventionally. Whether it's the guts hanging off a monster or the guts squirming around a meatscape, headshots are not absolute with the meat. Put a hole through a meat monster's brain, and it'll just come back crazier. Sear away a tendril of a meatscape, and it'll be tripping over itself just to get at the fresh-cooked meal you've left behind. Bones, nerves, blood - to the meat, it's all just tissue. The only good way to kill it for good is to wipe it out wholesale. If you don't, all those legs and arms you lopped off will start growing new brains - usually before they've even hit the ground.
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