|
|
Post by Insano-Man on Aug 22, 2019 3:39:45 GMT -5
This topic is a child of the Meat article directory.HIVE OF HORRORSMeatscapes are what happen when the meat can't find somebody strong enough to stand the slime. It gorges itself on germs, eats up trees, and laps up losers. It spreads across the land as a creeping, oozing tide of blood and guts. It swaps out the local biosphere for a meat-brand knockoff with an extra kick of body horror. It builds up a choir of meat monsters, stolen minds, and meaningless maws. It swallows up everything and anything it can just to keep itself going - and then starts eating itself. Once it's been fed enough people, it starts thinking for itself - even if it's all still just screaming in the end. SECTIONS- Initial Growth- Meat Biosphere- Diet & Resource Concentration- Spines of the Dying Ascendant- The Mind of the Meat
|
|
|
|
Post by Insano-Man on Aug 22, 2019 4:39:19 GMT -5
INITIAL GROWTH
Meatscapes are mostly formed on the periphery of another meatscape. They usually start with meatsified wildlife or roaming monsters that swell too big to stay on their feet. Some are kicked off by heavy winds or meat storms saturating an area with microscopic meat particles. As critical as they are to the meat's spread over rough and populated terrain, Cult rituals are responsible for only a tiny fraction of meatscape seedings. However the meat lands, the health of its new territory is a major factor for its success. Even as frugal as the meat is with its calorie budget, it still needs a steady stream of chemical energy to build itself up. Without water, corpses, or arable land to help it get started, a stray tumor's just as helpless as a sunflower seed in Darimesa.
At the same time, the meat can grow just about anywhere there's life and water. Whether it's up on a peak, snacking on goats and hawks, or down at the bottom of an oceanic trench, slurping on crabs and whale carcasses, the meat is not picky. It's been found everywhere from airless derelicts in the graveyard orbit to volcanic hellscapes pouring with open lava flows. The only place the meat won't go is underground. At about three kilometers underground, the meat refuses to grow, and the Cult refuses to seed it. Public Cult beliefs are all superstition and curse-claiming. Talk to a learned Looney or a travelled transformed, and they'll tell it to you straight. Down there, in the darkness, the meat disappears. Monsters, tumors, and transformed alike all go poof. The bigger they are, the sooner they vanish. Nobody knows why. Standard procedure for the Cult has been to ignore it and hope it never becomes important.
When it starts growing, the meat sticks to what it knows. It replicates the plants and animals it can remember - or, at least, the parts that it needs. It spreads organs around, strings up veins to keep the supply balance even, and adds in a few mouthparts for good measure. It keeps its hunger going indefinitely. If there's stuff to eat, it'll eat it. If there's people to meatsify, it'll meatsify them. As the circumstances evolve, the meat evolves with them. If mobile prey is everywhere, it'll grow meat monsters early, or squish together some snare maws. If all it's got is soil to work with, it'll sink its veins into the ground and start sucking. If it's landed in the ocean and it still can't find the bottom, it might just start swimming.
|
|
|
|
Post by Insano-Man on Aug 22, 2019 4:39:32 GMT -5
MEAT BIOSPHERE
Once the meat's big enough, it starts feeding off itself. It develops into its own ecosystem. Viscous protozoa are slurped up by tongues with legs. Light and soil are exploited by retinal moss. Meat monsters run wild, eating eachother, the bottom-feeders, and wall tumors all over. Sometimes, competition - or a clumsy mutation - forces idle flesh to uproot into a novel kind of meat monster. All the while, the atmosphere is saturated with the screams of the meat and the bloody stench of free-floating meat particles. Clouds turn crimson, the skies stain full of oranges and reds, and the heat of the meat starts to win out over the native temperature. Even a cold winter breeze in the open air can feel like being trapped in a gangrenous armpit.
When the meat takes over, it takes over everything. It hijacks weather patterns with all that extra pressure and heat. It adds humidity with all the sweat and bodily fluids. Sometimes, it just screams hard enough to make the wind move in another direction. Between all the barfed-up meat chunks, flying meat monsters, and blood mists, all that ends up kicking off into its own kind of weather. A whole category of meaty meteorology is dedicated to it. Given most meat masses and mutants can adapt to the depressurized depths of space, it's not unusual for hard winds and gravitational anomalies to blow chunks up to orbit. Given how big the Crimson Expanse and Southern Veinlands are, most low-orbiting stations are forced to keep security details just for meatscape pass-overs.
|
|
|
|
Post by Insano-Man on Aug 22, 2019 4:39:42 GMT -5
DIET & RESOURCE CONCENTRATION
As a replicant superorganism, the meat's got to eat. It's got an appetite a mile wide and twenty deep. It'll eat anything and everything, anywhere and everywhere. The caloric throughput of a major meatscape is usually enough to beat out the total power production of most Space Looney fleets by itself. As much as it wouldn't surprise anyone, meat's what the meat likes most. People, pets, and large game are its favorite treats. Plants and germs are its basic mainstays. At the same time, it's not all living things the meat slurps on. When a meatscape takes off and runs out of unmeatsified game, it starts dredging up nutrients out of the soil - and it is not picky in the slightest. Iron and uranium are just as edible to the meat as nitrogen and sulphur.
For that reason, as squishy as meatscapes are, they concentrate - and synthesize - a surprising amount of valuable resources. Some meat monsters run around with tungsten-edged claws. Some meat shrubs thread their veins with viscous aramids. Some spleen trees trickle out Prussian blue from their trunk sphincters. Even Cloneston's massive underground of coordinated clones and mining drones has a hard time keeping up with the sheer sucking power of a well-sited meatscape. What all that means is that, for the Cult and anyone unlucky enough to be stuck in a meatscape, food and industry may as well be the same game. They've just got to run their furnaces a little hotter than usual.
|
|
|
|
Post by Insano-Man on Aug 22, 2019 4:40:02 GMT -5
SPINES OF THE DYING ASCENDANT
What meatscapes do with some of their iron production is something nobody's quite figured out - and that includes the Cult. Deep inside the biggest meatscapes, usually surrounded by some of the biggest gore piles they can slop together, are the Cult-named Spines of the Dying Ascendant. Each one is a Cult religious artifact named for the Ivory Ascendant, one of the Cult's most esteemed bands of martyrs. The Spines are masses of nerve coils and bones that are, as their name suggests, built like giant spines. Each one is at least 3 meters tall, potentially up to an unimaginable 27 kilometers, as seen in the Laboring Giant of the Southern Veinlands. Each one is covered in naturally-formed iron plates, etched from top to bottom with holy sanguiscript glyphs. Nobody can read them. Nobody knows what they do. Nobody knows how or why the meat makes them. The Cult reveres them and makes a study of the glyphs, but nobody has a single solid answer on what purpose - if any - the Spines have.
In the days long gone of the Pioneer Network, the Spines were claimed to be "torguonic compression organs" by joint Pioneer-Unity Trust scientists, but nobody has any idea what that's supposed to mean. The Unity Trust maintains that the meatscapes at large are "major torguonic reservoirs", but they've never explained that for anyone's benefit. They've claimed in the past that the destruction of a large Spine could trigger a catastrophic "torguonic inversion" that could potentially destroy the entire planet. Ask anyone - Loonies, Space Loonies, even some members of that same Trust - and they'll just give you a blank stare about what it all means. As unhelpful as it is, it's been the only theory that's ever stuck with the Spines - and that's mostly because nobody can figure out how they're supposed to disprove it.
That has not stopped the Space Loonies from pummelling every Spine they know about with derelict bombs and orbital artillery barrages. It's not stopped Loonies in Talto and Ventannen from landing smart shells and surgical strikes on every Spine they can reach. As much as the Cult knows they're major targets, their sacred duty compels them to guard the Spines. They surround them with manpower, resources, and - as either variety of Looney is concerned - brainpower. Some of the Cult's most prestigious transformed are the so-titled Keepers of the Spines, the guardians and theologists charged with their protection and interpretation. Gutminds often choose to bed down under or near a Spine to keep a close hand on it - and a well-timed strike team can kill them right at their most vulnerable moment.
|
|
|
|
Post by Insano-Man on Aug 22, 2019 4:40:18 GMT -5
THE MIND OF THE MEAT
As living, breathing, screaming things, meatscapes all have a mind somewhere. Mostly, they're full of the wails of the lost and damned, but they meet the criteria. As the meat grows, it adds more and more experiences to its repertoire. It absorbs the thoughts of meat monsters, swallows down the brains of claimed travellers, and grows cognitive organs of its own. The bigger it gets and the longer it lives, the more it remembers. Not unlike the harvester drones in orbit, the meat constitutes a vast collection of mixed knowledge - historical, philosophical, culinary - that has, so far, gone mostly untapped. Only the Cult has ever been able to work its feelers inside the mind of the meat - and they've mostly mutated it into religious lore.
What the Cult doesn't rip off from the meat is sound, solid, up-to-date strategic intelligence. Cult transformed take on accurate force reports passed on by chains of meat monsters. They feel the vibrations of Looney tank treads through many miles of mindful mucus. They pass on eyewitness accounts gathered by looking grasses all around the meatscapes. When in the heart of the meat, it's not much of a mistake that people feel like they're being watched. Every eyeball popping out of the walls isn't much different from a surveillance camera in a Cloneston metro station. All it takes is the right kind of cultist to tap it.
The Cult taps the deeper meat mind for its esoteric knowledge through its top-tier transformed known as the Gutminds. These selfless - or self-loathing - souls submit themselves, their knowledge, and their sanity to the meatscape they choose to submerge into. It is there that they become a mouthpiece and a focal point for the tiny handful of lucid dreams the meat can string together. Other transformed only have base-level access - and only the best can handle the kind of psychic pressure a Gutmind has to endure. The pain a meatscape feels - as a widow, a mother, and as thousands of meatsified men and women - all of that is lumped on to every piece of the whole. The name of "Gutmind" wasn't an accident; after enough time, most end up psychically digested into the screaming hivemind.
What most manage to communicate in their time spent conscious is that the meat is hungry. Not just for more meat, but for more kinds of meat. The meat is always looking for a new muse. It, as a whole, wants to see the world, meet new and interesting people, and eat them. It wants new genes to play with, new mutations to sample, and new minds to add to its collective. It wants more knowledge, more interesting biochemistries, and more novel takes on body plans and organ structure. Some of the Cult's most forward-thinking members even dream of a day when they can propel the meat into the heavens, to drink of the stars themselves. What's a little unsettling to everyone else is that, given enough time, they might just do it.
|
|
