[centre][h1]The Great Till, Part Two: 
When Nature Strikes Back[/h1][/centre]
[hr]
Hummus had gotten to work immediately. He had initially gathered up some straggling goblins that he hadn’t previously tilled over and tried to teach them to farm. Issues were twofold: 

One, they didn’t have any horns, so how were they supposed to till? One or two tried with their hands, but the land was just too vast.

“Iz too much, Big Guy! We, we iz tired!”

The bull snorted angrily. “After a sloppy job like that? Put your backs into it!”

One of the goblins started crying. The bull rolled his eyes. “Oh please. The giants have toiled for weeks already and have you ever heard them cry?”

Two: The giants.

“AAAAAAAAH!”

“SLUPGLIP, NOOOO!” Three goblins ran over to a fourth goblin (or what remained) as a giant strolled off with a mouth full of goblin legs.

“P-p-pleaze… Tell my… Fam’hih… I…” Slupglip’s eyes rolled back. “... Luh… Bleh…”

Hacking, tearful blaring choired between the three remaining goblins. One of them grabbed a fistful of grass to blow her nose. “WHY?! He was so young - so full of hope!”

The bull was unamused. “His flesh will fertilise the soil. Now bury him!” The goblins looked on in horror.

“W-with our hands?”

The bull clapped his stalagtite club into his free palm. “... If you have alternatives, I’d find them fast…”

That was the final drop. With a harmonious scream, the three goblins got to their feet and ran off into the woods. The bull let out a groan and rolled his eyes. He slumped over the bank of a nearby river and picked up a nearby boulder. With an absent-minded toss, he skipped it across the surface, sending small tsunamis in all direction with each splat. The boulder finally crashed into the opposite bank a few hundred metres away. The bull sighed. Had he been too harsh? Had his didactics been lacking? Perhaps it was the tool issue, in the end? After thinking about it long and hard, he nodded. It had to be a tool issue.

Just as he reached that conclusion, a small group of beastmen staggered out of the woods, their fresh birth confusing them to the point of drunkenness. The bull didn’t care much for their shapes or phenotype; he already had a different one in mind. He rocketed to his feet, thundered over and grabbed one beastman by the face. 

“H-hey, what th–HMMPH! MMMPH! MMMAAAAAAAAAH!” The screams were unbearable, enough to rip the remaining beastmen out of their trance. But they couldn’t run; their feet wouldn’t let them. A crimson, wicked light blasted from his palm and deep into the face of their comrade, casting a blood-like shadow over the minotaur’s form. The beastmen may be beasts, but before them stood The Beast, a veritable shaitan and the most gruesome being they had laid their eyes on. With time and morbid curiosity, their gazes shifted to their comrade again. His small body grew tall and fat; arms swelled with muscle; feet became cloven hooves; what hair had been on the head coalesced into a stiff, fuzzy mane that ran down the back; the shoulders swallowed the neck and pulled closer to the chest; finally, the face grew long and tusked. When the transformation was complete, the bull dropped the creature to the ground and admired his creation.

“Yes… You will till the soil well.” 

What stood up from the ground horrified the onlookers. It stood almost two metres and was over half its height in width, bulging with muscle, fat and cartilage. A shovel-like snout with massive tusks grew out of its face like a trunk, and its main strutted with hormonal rage. Like a predator on the hunt, the beast immediately descended to all fours and charged at the soil behind the bull, using its powerful neck muscles as a lever for its snout plow. It fed on the roots and fungus underground and, almost instinctively, saved some for planting afterwards. The only beastfolk felt fear pump strength back into their legs, but escape was impossible – the bull had turned his gaze back to them again. 

“... And now for the rest of you…”

[hr]

Time passed, and the territorial snouters soon spread out across the whole of the Striped Lands and beyond. Sometimes they met other races and settled near them peacefully (for now); sometimes they came to blows. Sometimes these blows led to victory; other times, the snouters were whipped back to whence they came. Their expansion was a constant tug of war with internal power struggles and infighting, which would lead to blood feuds and raids between villages. As months became years, the snouters had gathered into tribes which had settled into farmsteads raising crops like yams, spelt, emmer, corn, roots and leafy greens. One tribe in particular, the Voots, had settled by the river they called the Lick. Here, the Voots had found a veritable eden. The river curled and curved in scenic slopes, and the land around it was fresh and fertile. Mineral-rich mud from the river could be extracted and mixed into the soil to boost vegetable growth further. The Voots grew to become a mighty tribe in the region, and the spring feasts of winter roots and vegetable sprouts were legendary in the area. There, raging, hormonal hesnouters would rip each other to shreds over the hands of the finest shesnouters.

“HEAR ME, ANAT’AA!” roared Drukpuul the Fat. He was an elephant of a hesnouter, standing nearly three metres tall and blocking the boiling sunlight for much of the crowd. He raised his arms to the sky and shook with seizuric movements, eyes rolling back in a berserking trance. “LIGHT MY FIRE – INFERNALISE MY SOUL! HELP ME SWALLOW LIFE AS YOU DO!”

“HEAR ME, MISRI!” bellowed his opponent, Four-Tooth Zkrooth, swinging his club around with reckless abandon. “BLOOD WILL BE SPILLED IN YOUR NAME TODAY! FILL ME WITH YOUR FURY SO I MAY FILL YOUR OCEAN! RAAAAAAARGH!”

From outside the ring, hundreds of hesnouters were squealing and beating their chests (and each other) in rabid support of their respective favourites. Curses and death-wishes were spat between crowd and gladiators in broad daylight like they were ragged breaths. As the gladiators unleashed their rage upon one another, the crowd collectively cheered their bloodlust to the blue-domed heavens, the hot wind of the coming summer rolling over them in a tide of sweat and temper.

It was a weakling among them that saw it. Spregk by name, he was the smallest of a litter of four brothers, almost a runt. Stupid and frail, the mob of grunting, squealing hesnouters was the only place he could ever let loose his rage at how he had been born, the injustice of his existence, without being walloped by his elders and juniors alike, and even shesnouters at times. 

As his heart strained and his body heat climbed steadily over the point of no return, the violence of the crowd grew fuzzy in Spregk's flapping ears, the sound slowly subsumed by a singular ringing. He staggered. He felt drunk, as though he had eaten ten-day-old fruits. Everything blurred. He saw double.

Spregk's head lolled up to the sun above, and he saw its true face.

[colour=thistle]"HOW HOT AND PUNGENT YOU SNOUTERS ARE,"[/colour] said the smiling sun. [colour=thistle]"YOU CRY TO EVERY GOD BUT THE ONE WHO RISES BEFORE YOU. TODAY I WILL COOL YOUR BROW AND WASH YOU CLEAN. AND YOU [B]WILL[/B] REMEMBER ME."[/colour]

There was another sound, rising up behind them. It was hidden under the roar of the brawling crowd. In his delirium Spregk could no longer hear them, but he could [i]feel[/i] this. It was coming close.

[colour=thistle]"YOU WILL REMEMBER ITZALA."[/colour]

It was the Lick. The river was surging, rising up like a farm-canal overfilled, a great muddy rush. Spregk saw tall, big snouters waist-deep in the water. He saw them screaming but did not hear them. The masses didn't even look- their backs were turned to the river.

[colour=thistle]"I MELTED THIS ICE JUST FOR YOU, SPREGK. IT CAME A LONG WAY FROM THE POLAR SEA. YOU WERE LOOKING SO THIRSTY."[/colour]

The first mud-brick hovel collapsed in the flood, reduced to wet straw and sludge. Spregk saw a nursing mother torn from her snoutlets by the force of the current.

[colour=thistle]"AREN'T YOU GRATEFUL?"[/colour]

[hr]

The bend in the river that had caught the corpses would later be called Blowfly Gulch, so many were the stinking cadavers heaped up by the flood. Rotting flesh sloughed from their bones and pooled together, seeping rancid greenish juice and maggots, polluting the Lick for a mile. In this bend alone lay hundreds, and thousands more were starving for want of unspoiled grain. Everything they had was rotten: their food, their clothes, their guts, their spirits. No tribe, storm, or giant had ever slain so many Voots, so quickly, as the First Great Flood. 

And yet, despite the veritable calamity that had reduced the Voots from a dominant power in the region to a flea no bigger than the likes of the Dapps or the Quoms, this did not deter new settlers from claiming land by the Lick; in fact, with the Voots out of the way, more tribes poured into the valley like it was a flood all over. Tribes like the Pates, the Croopuls, the Nu-Voots and the Vlokks (to name a few) tilled and fought over the ruins of Vootland.

The bull, who had decided to pass the spring in the area, had heard about the calamity and journeyed across the rolling fields to the broken land. On his travels, he had encountered small Voot enclaves of vagabonds and ruffians, shadows of greatness who robbed hunters and farmers for a living. To him, they pleaded, begged - why had the calamity struck? What had been different? What in their traditions had upset Itzala so?

“Fools!” the bull had shouted to the cowering masses. “To think my powers conceived such mindless bumpkins!” He had slapped the nearest unfortunate soul so hard the boar fellow had crashed to the ground. “Have the shelves of fat you call a forehead blinded you completely?! Itzala obviously did this for one reason!”

The fearful onlookers had awaited the answer with baited breath. The bull had scowled them all into the soil and clenched his fist in front of him.

“You forsook farming for fighting!” With that, the bull had conjured forth his trusty stalactite, which since last time had acquired a shovel-like head fashioned from dense, broad bone. The snouters shuddered as one when they saw it. Its likeness had been quoted in stories whispered ominously by the riverside, tall tales spun by only the most tabloid of daffotales:

The Hoepebreaker.

The fear took stronger root. There were many snouter shoulders in that hoe head. The bull had then, with a single strike of his weapon, turned all but one of the refugees into black, fertile soil, the kind which would have taken centuries to cultivate. To the final survivor, a small and hapless shesnouter, he had given a message:

“Tell the valley to never give up the field for glory ever again. I will be watching.”

After sending her on the way screaming, the bull had turned his eyes to the sky. Raising his hoe to the heavens, he shouted, “ITZALA! I know you’re hiding in that burning lake! Show yourself!”

The day dimmed, as though under cloud, though there was none. The rich black earth dried and cracked, and the cracks spoke with the voices of the snouters that had died to produce it. [colour=thistle]"Ah, Hummusaharrqawatrr, you old cow… there is no lake. No glittering stellar pasture in heaven for you to return to. The dreams of infancy are far behind us now. I have found richer waters."[/colour] The clay smiled, its cracks growing broader at his hooves, a ragged net with Hummus at its center. [colour=thistle]"They were having such fun, Hummus. How cruel of you to snatch that away!"[/colour]

"Yeah? Well… Shut up!" started the bull and then paused. The pause overshot the rhythm of a good follow-up, but eventually he added. "Now listen here, you clod! They deserved it. Even a flood is just temporary - get up, shake off the water and go back to the field. If you can't do that, you have no place being a farmer." The bull gave a normative snort and patted the head of his hoe into his free palm.

[colour=thistle]"Indeed. A flood is merely a passing thing… for the survivors."[/colour] The earth contorted in a drunken swirl, faces of the myriad dead rising and sinking under the mud. 
[colour=thistle]"And there will always be survivors, a new generation to till the mud their mothers died in. To till and till and never escape the wrath of my capricious river… You have cursed these people far more terribly than I. Fret not, young ox! I come to [i]congratulate[/i] you, not chastise you."[/colour]

The bull snarled, but lowered his hoe. With a sharp glare, he raised a finger and stuck it in a nostril to dig around. "You have an odd manner of congratulations," he muttered. A booger the size of a grape stuck to his finger nail and was promptly smeared across his front teeth. "But thanks. I do try."

The words hung limply under a hot bright sun. Summer heat rose from the dry black soil. There was no one there but the bull. He looked around and blinked. With a disappointed huff, he shuffled off with a sneer on his lips.

"That damn sun…"

[hider=Sumsum]
Hummus tries to teach goblins to farm, but because they have no tools, it takes a lot of time and effort. Plus giants keep eating the goblins. Tired of the goblins being useless, Hummus makes snouters, pigfolk who have innate knowledge of farming and are really fucking hormonal. 

Time passes and the Striped Lands have filled with all sorts of farmer societies, some of them snouters. We focus on the Voot tribe of snouters celebrating spring season with a gladiatorial festival. Then Itzala curses the river they have settled by, the Lick, to flood capiciously. The Voots are washed away and replaced by other tribes eager to work their land. When Hummus is approached by leftover Voots, they ask him why they had been punished so. Hummus tells them it was because they didn’t farm enough and kills them. Then Itzala shows up, trolls him and disappears. Hummus walks away dejected.
[/hider]

[hider=EmPEE]
Hummus 11MP:
2MP: Create offshoot of Beastfolk, the Snouters: Snouters denote a specific subrace of beastfolk that have an innate connection to agriculture and the farmed soil. Their mighty snouts make for a natural farming tool that can till soil, move rocks and remove roots and parasites, while their muscular and fatty bodies provide the power and energy needed to toil for hours on end. The indomitable fire within them had been amplified with Hummus’ rage, making them an inherently territorial and aggressive subrace that is prone to fits of fury and infighting with kinsmen. Males can grow almost twice as large as females, and will in mating seasons grow a natural armour of cartilage under their skin to fight other males. Duels in snouter societies are therefore common, and gladiatorial festivals regularly occur around the spring mating season. 

1MP for subrace-wide, inherent knowledge of agriculture which they can pass on to others. 

1MP Curse of the Bull: Always a little angry, even when happy. Furthermore, all snouters are bound to their land in spirit; any snouter who ventures too far away from their farm for an extended period of time will feel an existential dread and longing for hearth, home and harvest. This compels them to eventually turn home.

4MP: Create godbane artifact, the Hoepebreaker. The Hoepebreaker is the most powerful hoe in the Galbaric universe, fashioned from the Stalactite That Dug the Underground and the shoulder blades of a hundred disobedient mortals of all kinds. When used as a tool, the Hoepebreaker can till whole fields in minutes, but leaves the user feeling just as exhausted as though they had spent hours. When used as a weapon against mortals, a single strike blasts the mortal apart, turning their scraps into fertile soil. Against gods, wounds inflicted with the Hoepebreaker smell like cow dung.

End 5

Itzal

Start 5

1 Might: Curse the River Lick with capriciousness. Although extremely fertile, any given year could be plentiful, a drought, or a flood, all impossible to predict and the latter two extremely lethal.

End 4
[/hider]