|
|
Post by Insano-Man on Aug 22, 2019 3:36:41 GMT -5
This topic is a child of the Meat article directory.BE THE MEATMeatsification is the process in which a multicellular living creature is infected, assailed, and - if they're not lucky - eventually overtaken by the meat. At its simplest, it is a steady replacement of the host's body with meat-derived doppelganger tissue. In practice, it's a whole lot worse. For most, it's a painful way to die as super-plague chews you up and spits out sloppy recreations of what it's digested. For a few unlucky survivors, it's a one-way ticket to monsterhood as the meat replaces the brain and drives the rest of the person insane. For just a tiny handful of carefully-chosen cultists, it's the path to ascension - even if the failure rate is about nine in ten. SECTIONS- Infection- Resistance & Mutations- Treatment Options- Meat Monsters- Transformed Cultists
|
|
|
|
Post by Insano-Man on Aug 22, 2019 4:11:00 GMT -5
INFECTION
When a person is infested with meat, the meat begins to duplicate what it can find in their body. Skin, hair, and nails are the first picks for any budding meat tumor. Eyes, tongues, and lungs are for the people who forgot their respirator. Blood, bone, and bile are for the people who took a bullet in the wrong neighborhood - and it's one of the ugliest ways to go. Airborne meatscape flesh is usually the most likely source, whether it's tiny particles in the air or spaghetti globs bouncing off your face. Wounds around meat monsters - or from them - are the runners-up. Intentional infusions are mostly limited to Cult practice - whether it's part of a ritual or part of punishment is for the perpetrator to decide.
When the meat starts taking over a host, it does more than just start drawing caricatures. The meat continues to replicate everything it's still got its teeth in. The germs it brought with it, the viruses on the host's skin, the parasites in their intestines - everything. Every successive generation does more right and more wrong all at the same time. Fungal spores secrete acids, bacteria exudes chlorine, and roundworms grow tusks. Scores of novel contagions eat at the host faster than their immune system can scream for mercy. Meanwhile, with all the demi-clones, it's never sure what to shoot back at.
For that reason, it can be hard to tell when exactly a meat infection has taken hold. Wily meat cells can go undetected in the body for weeks, months, or even years. Strong-blooded people can harbor asymptomatic meat infestations for decades, and only break out when something puts their immune system on the back foot. Some people are even meatsified perfectly without a single outward sign - and, sometimes, never even notice. While rare, the meat is fully capable of duplicating tissue so perfectly that it is, in fact, the genuine article. Some meat infections can resolve spontaneously on their own for just that reason. Some can be prompted to kick back into action at the order of one of the Cult's transformed.
|
|
|
|
Post by Insano-Man on Aug 22, 2019 4:11:19 GMT -5
RESISTANCE & MUTATIONS
One of the things not many people want to acknowledge is that, as difficult as it is to bottle up the meat, most people on the ground have been meatsified at some point or another. Just considering the sheer size of the Crimson Expanse or the Southern Veinlands, the meat is everywhere, in some way or another. Most terrestrials have breathed in a few stray meat stinks at least once in their life. As a result, most planetside people have a base-level of immunity to meat-based pathogens, whether it's from their great grandma's genes or the funny smell that passed through in their teen years. It's one of the contributing factors to the barrier between ground and orbit; when a terrestrial sneezes on a spacer, sometimes it's a little slimier than usual.
In the same vein, the meat's caused plenty of trouble that's been tricky to trace back to it. Take one look at the borders between a major meatscape and the rest of the world, and it's all plain as day. When it can't meatsify something, it mutates it in the process. Sometimes, those mutations are par for the course; tumors, cancers, and new appendages that get lost in the next generation. Sometimes, they're a burst of survival advantages - on the inside or outside - that tag along for the reproductive ride. New species are made daily on the edge of the Southern Veinlands, and some run off to breed in the rest of Ventannen. Some of them innovate a new niche with the rest of a functioning ecosystem. Others spiral off into mutant horrors that follow the meat's guiding maxims.
Between all the juicy stuff riding the jet streams and natural migration away from meatscapes, it's not hard to tell that meat-based mutations are common. A research effort around 1105 OSC went into just that subject, between the Unity Trust and the Future Planetary Habitability Concern. It pulled up figures that, excluding mainstream meat monsters, around 40% of the Set's surface-level population of crazed mutants have a savory history. While that doesn't explain Cloneston's bone tribes or all the bubbled-up-from-nothing horror shows, it's a number that's hard to beat. Set's a massive planet. It's full of unsettled territory. With that much of it related to the Veinlands, the Crimson Expanse, and all the other plates of pasta on the ground, there are at least a billion things the meat's given back.
|
|
|
|
Post by Insano-Man on Aug 22, 2019 4:11:58 GMT -5
TREATMENT OPTIONS
When the meat's too tough for the body to beat, survival turns into a gamble. Out in the field, without anyone to turn to, the best you can do is lop off the infested body part and pray for the best. That only works if it hasn't gone to the blood. Loonies and Space Loonies alike both have treatment options available, but they're neither pretty, reliable, nor universally available. If a bunker doesn't have access, most can't get their people somewhere that does. If a fleet doesn't, they might not be able to keep their spaceritis in check before the victim turns into a blob. The Unity Trust and other high-science factions usually have the means to do it, but most never see the meat. Not many are ever infected. As they're mostly spacers, most end up as tumor piles before they can get a chance at a cure.
Only the Cult can cure meatsification flawlessly. Just as a transformed can flip the switch on a dormant meat infection, they can flip it back off on a live one. The more proficient the transformed, the better the prognosis. Some top-level meat masters can even pull the meat right out pain-free, and leave the patient prettier to boot. With the right kind of skill, they can even use the meat as a medical tool. Colds, cancers, lost limbs and teeth - if it ails you, the Cult's got it covered. As much as most scoff at the idea of denying divinity, public relations requires that the Cult keeps an open door on de-meatsification.
|
|
|
|
Post by Insano-Man on Aug 22, 2019 4:12:17 GMT -5
MEAT MONSTERS
As void-slickers and dirt-suckers can both attest, when the meat does too well in a host, the end result is a big blob of vomiting tumors keeled over not too far from where it was first infected. The meat grows around it, eats at it, and goes to work seeding a new meatscape - or spreading an old one. The meat isn't indomitable, either; if the host is too tough, the infection too weak, or the drugs too thick, all the meat can do is slop a few tumors and shrink away. In the middle ground, when the host is just strong enough to stay standing, but not too tough to tackle the meat, the fight rages on. It spreads to the brain over time. Whether it's through meatsified grey matter, disease-related brain injury, or raw pain alone, the host loses their mind, and the meat takes over.
When a meatsified creature lives long enough to lose its mind, it turns into a meat monster. Theories on how the meat controls its victims are hundreds in number, but the end result is about the same as the meat acts on the microscopic level. Meat monsters are driven to find, hunt, and kill anything they can, to feed the meat in their bodies and the gnawing in their own bellies. They use just about everything their host had before they turned hungry. Beaks, claws, and talons, teeth, fists, and - if they've got enough wits left - guns. They run screaming at their prey only ever looking for more food and genes to shove into their bodies. Whether that prey is a man, a lobster, or another meat monster, they don't much care. They embody the only constant about the meat; eat, or be eaten.
The line between the host and the meat is always blurry with meatsification. Even before the threshold to insanity, the meat might start giving back. It'll grow new organs, new limbs, and might even string them up with the nerves for the host to use them. Extra fingers, extra feet, or extra rending claws - nothing's off the table. Even once it's won the game and turned the host into a roving blood horror, it'll still keep tinkering away. Older meat monsters tend to have a bit of everything - and far, far too much of it. Some can grow up to reach the size of a city block, so loaded down with tumors and slug-tongues that they may as well be a meatscape on their own.
One advantage all meat monsters share in common is a shared consciousness that allows any meatsified mutant to have an intuitive sense for what another is doing. The more meat a monster has, the more of an idea it has about others - and the more others know about it. How it all works is another one of the meat's many mysteries. Pheromone traces, infrasonic signals, and genuine telepathy are all parts of the mix, but how the meat keeps it all from being just noise and smells - that's something science still can't say for sure. In the end, it's mostly not much of a concern. All it does on its own is make meat monsters pile together in big chewing contests. When the Cult's transformed take control of it and start flinging regenerating horrors at towns and bunkers - that's when it comes into its own.
|
|
|
|
Post by Insano-Man on Oct 2, 2019 7:20:22 GMT -5
TRANSFORMED CULTISTS
When it comes to the Cult, meatsification is the ultimate goal of any devout cultist. For anyone else, the path to meat is certain suicide. While the odds aren't much better for the pious, the Cult has something no one else does; an existing body of transformed to help tame the meat. To this day, science does not have an answer on how the Cult has managed to successfully tumorize themselves. Penetrating through all the ritual, prayer, and sacrifice is something not one research effort has ever had the stomach to push through. One way or another, it's been the Cult's greatest claim to fame and power since its inception.
The Cult's transformed are meat monsters without the monster part. Most have full control of their faculties, complete with control over the meat of their bodies. Mastery of their meat is one of the many personal pursuits of a prodigious pastor; as a believer gains in knowledge and faith, so, too, do they gain in viscous potential. As their control improves, so, too, does their ability to reshape their meat, its growth, and even their own bodies. The final objective for any transformed cultist is to achieve status as either a Living Truth, or to be interred in a meatscape as a Gutmind.
As the middle ground between man and monster, the Cult's transformed serve as a medium between the two. They are able to tap into the group consciousness of meat monsters in order to compel them, to control them, or just to see who they're chomping on. The level of influence a transformed cultist is able to exert is usually based on how much meat is in their bodies, multiplied by how well they can control it. Transformed still training their tumors might only be able to keep a single drooling mutant in line. Top-level transformed can sway an army with a snap of their spleen fingers. Some are even able to delve into who the man behind the monster was - or read the genes that made them.
Living Truths are the top-tier meatsified who preferred to remain mobile. They are the transformed of the Cult who have gained so much in knowledge, power, and squishy stuff that their entire bodies - hearts, minds, and spleens - are theirs to shape at will. They can commune with the meat, divine wisdom from its many maws and eyes, and lead vast swarms of meat monsters as intelligent, thinking soldiers. They can fragment into any numbers of shards, dissolve themselves and remanifest at will, and extend their consciousness across incredible distances. They are immortal telepaths toeing the line of regenerative invulnerability. They are no longer men, monsters, or anything in between. Even Looney bunkers are ready to acknowledge it; the Living Truths are the will of the meat given form.
Gutminds are the bridge between men and the meatscapes. They're Cult transformed who take on so much mass and mastery that they decide to sit down in a meatscape for good. They sink into the flesh, wrap themselves up in the wiggling and jiggling of the meat's many minds, and act as a focal point for all that psychic screaming. In doing so, they gain access to the meat's vast repository of experiences and intellects. When called on by the Cult, they can impart that wisdom - even if they've got to figure out how to convey it through a bundle of wall bladders. To the Cult - and no one else - the Gutminds are seen as tragic heroes. Inevitably, the constant barrage of psychological torture drives them insane. Few have ever lasted more than a few decades.
|
|
