"When at last he reached the well,
an eternity of black,
he was trapped in his own hell;
the mirror showed him looking back."
-Mathias Jansson, Door to Insanity-
Aliases: Marmappa (Translated as 'Dreamfather' in Tamil, first known name given to it by humans), The Sleeper of the Clandestine, Shasheuss-Gux (Ahtna), Salmu Pulhu (Sumerian), Camazotz (Translated as 'Snatch Bat' in Kʼicheʼ), The God of Lonely Places, The Bedbug
Species: Primal Nightmare
Age: Ageless
Appearance: The Magna Pater, known also by an accursed few as The God of Lonely Places, takes the form of a slime slicked monstrosity whose proportions ridicule sense and extort terror. Its swarthy, mottled brown dermis lacks hind legs, its only limbs being two craggy arms adorned with thick, webbed wings which start at the wrists and annex to the base of a powerful, gorgon-esque tail. It has two thumbs on each side of its clammy hands, opposable to three fingers whose middle digit bears a claw eight inches long, twice that of its other claws. The span of its seven-digit webbed grip is immense, such that were it to grab a man about the waist with one hand its clawtips would touch. The wings each bear thirteen additional clawed phalanges extending several inches from its arms and flanks, which it may use to scuttle across surfaces in a way analogous to a centipede. In total it has 40 fingers.
Its head vaguely resembles the chiropteran caricature of a bulbous rubber dinosaur hand puppet turned inside out, whose distinctly malleable features shift and bulge in repulsive cooperation with unknown physiology operating beneath the flexible cartilage of its skull.
The Magna Pater wears a dripping, elongated maw tapering to a flabby lipped pucker. The pursed 'o' of its long, sucking lips can stretch back back into a dog-like simper to reveal muscular jaws packed tight with scalloped incisors and tombstone shaped molars.
Childhood fears, once long forgotten, echo dimly through the inky depths of its bugged-out googly eyes, skewing after anything unfortunate enough to call its attention with wet, saccadic twitches.
It can retire its bulbous eyes into their sockets upon closing them, such it would seem it never had eyes to start with. Just under its eyes is perked a crinkled leaf nose like that of a bat, aiding in echolocation.
Long crinkle cut ears are accentuated with tactile organs akin to those of a star-nosed mole, twenty mechano-sensory appendages flaring out in a seven inch diameter about each ear. It can move the sensory appendages at will, the gently waving finger-like organs evocative of a sea anemone in an ocean current.
A sharp, hollow tongue can extend four feet from its mouth, acting as a siphon to suck in blood. Dermal Lorenzini papulae, similar in appearance to the thousands of little tube-like stalks on a starfish, coat its skin and may protrude when needed. When inactive the sensory buds retreat into the body, leaving its flesh spongy and pocked.
The Magna Pater has a pair of retractable, double-jointed feelers on its muzzle below the eyes which can't be seen when fully withdrawn. The feelers are three feet long and are made up of thirteen cartilage joints. Hundreds of smaller inch-long antenna resembling spasming cricket legs haphazardly garnish the feelers from top to bottom, spreading when the feelers emerge and smoothing back when they retract. Both feelers narrow to a split, forming two soft, flexile prongs at each end.
Its ears, nose, mouth, and eyelids can fold and smooth down like vacuum seal flaps to prevent unwanted particles from gaining entry, rendering its head featureless. In addition its retractable eyes have vertical nictitating membranes. An arrowhead fluke adorns the tip of its tail and can narrow or widen at will.
The Magna Pater is an invertebrate, bearing no spinal column. From snout to tail base it's approximately nine and a half feet long. The tail is nineteen feet and each arm is 6'8" to the wrist. It weighs a total of 604 kilos.
(Drawing found in the desk of ten year old Vidya Singh, who went missing in Kanpur, India, two months after claiming to have seen a demon in his backyard.)
Sighting The God of Lonely Places is stressful enough to turn the hair of a common man gray over the course of a single hair growth cycle, and white by the second. Both the monster's eerily methodical form and seemingly undercranked kinesics exhibit an uncanny, stop-motion quality that offends the innermost sensibilities of any worldly organism. Deep-seated fears and insecurities refract through its eyes and flow unseen but not unfelt through its physical impression to form an instinctive insight within the victim, that they may subconsciously realize the Magna Pater is the sole vessel through which the worst of nightmares may be made both true and eternal.
With lulling mantis-movement this surreal non-animal becomes one with the chill breeze which laces through tree limbs and streamlines seamlessly into the clouded currents of rushing water. It splays out amidst moldy insulation within the deteriorating walls of boarded up, dilapidated buildings, lingers suspended halfway down in the twilit murk of lakes, curled into itself. It dwells in the secret places where man seldom frequents, and within secret thoughts. Lonely places at lonely times, revealed when one is filled with longing. A glimpse changes everything. It may have been accidental, or perhaps it wanted to meet. The Pull is mutual, a force that conjoines, draws together two parts of yearning.
It does not hurry but neither will it tarry. It comes when the time is right to complete its prey and until then contents itself with the solitude of tragedy. Each person lives within their own understanding, thus the Magna Pater occupies the same space as those left marred and alone by the cruelty of life. It crafts empty expanses and tight, snaking passages, and occupies them as it does the lonely spaces of the mind. It seeks out those fit to wander, the lost, the broken, drives them out of reach of the sun and sky by isolating their them from the perception of others, then it stalks and corners them in their own understanding.
When the final barrier falls, that of understanding itself, two become one and again must it find another.
Abilities
~Malocchio:
~Dream Feelers:
Theme:
Behavior: The Magna Pater is what slinks, obscured by shadow, through the minds of children of when the word 'monster' occurs to them for the first time in their life during dead of night. It is what makes newborn babies cry when they take that sensitive first breath and taste the grief-stricken reality this horror has burrowed into, a mango worm in our dog's hide of a world, a warning cast by nature itself in synchronicity with the presence of a lifeform within its midst that should never have existed. It's a parasite of the the human condition, an existential engine of dread and sorrow that glides silently through the black nether of conception.
It makes no noise, has no mercy, cannot be reasoned with, lives only to drain the blood, devour the flesh, and violate the essence of all living things it can bind within its greasy limbs. Despite its incalculable intelligence, it makes no attempt to genuinely communicate with victims. There is no desire for social interaction or personal expression, the monster constituting a life form beyond both concepts. If it does so choose to speak a word or phrase, it is with the incoherent language of dream-logic only made sense of by those detached from all waking reason, and submerged in the frightful arctic cold of an Epiphany ice hole.
It stalks all manner of prey and is particularly inclined to go out of its way to find toddlers and infants, to savage innocence itself, but it is also shy and despises the light. It prefers to remain in damp pitch-blackness, where no eyes may spy it and no natural light may fall upon it. Areas it has frequented for many years are imbued with a kind of negative fung shui. Homes it visits become known as haunted houses. A forest whose trees it has slipped between will achieve a reputation as a ruined land. Its lairs are moreso thickened with an underlying feeling of unreality, as if partly submerged in an eerie, malleable fantasy.
It frequently rapes and impregnates victims, keeping them alive until its malformed young are birthed in the form of countless elongated white maggots which finely swiss cheese the flesh of their mortal parent as they emerge from every pore and orifice. The Magna Pater eats both the victim and the offspring afterwards, doing these things not for food but to torment.
When it devours a cursed victim their consciousness remains forever corrupted and fused with the Magna Pater's, a demise that casts one into the boundless pit of one's own heart wherein time is replaced by perception, to behold the perfect nightmare for ever and ever.
The few who come into contact with it and live may never be the same as before, for above all else it is a creature of persistence, a malady made mobile. Even if one leaves the Magna Pater it'll never leave them. A variety of lifelong physical complications and psychological ailments stem from a meeting with it and it never stops hunting its prey, regardless of where they may flee. Additionally it will track down any living thing which leaves a scent on a victim. This leads to the Magna Pater consuming the families of those it hunts, along with anyone those families had come into recent physical contact with. Though one may travel often and abroad, once the it has has chosen a victim their meeting becomes fate. It could take days, weeks, months, even years, but eventually on some cold and moonless evening one will awaken to see a long, sticky face with dead eyes peering through their bedroom window.
History:
The Magna Pater is a reincarnating, primal monster representing the physical manifestation of an entity originating in and as a part of an eternal non-Euclidean nightmare bridging the boundaries of possibility, reality, and nonexistence. It takes the true form of a sentient nexus formed from the fever dreams of gods once dreaded, but now long forgotten, gods which have never been affiliated with a human realm. Imagination that outlived its creators, took root in itself as an unnatural conceptual paradox, and began infiltrating other universes like a quantum cancer. Its influence is subtle but strong. Even platonic concepts are susceptible to its infection.
The only factor limiting the creature's power is the strength of each universe's reality, defined by the potency of the residential dreamers and their perspectives. It has to follow the rules of a universe to gain access, and only then can begin slowly oozing between the lines with power gained from fear and pain, dissolving the barriers of notion keeping it from flooding in completely. It does so by initially taking on a physical form acceptable by the dimensional and natural laws present, albeit one made in calculation to submit all other lifeforms to its will as horrifically as possible. Through this physical presence it may gradually weaken the webbing keeping it out, its physical avatar altering mass perception bit by bit until the continuum breaks and it makes that reality its own, laying claim to every resident in mind, body, and soul.
The universe it found Earth in was different than any it had ever encountered. Humans, it soon learned, were special. Three dimensional animals on the cusp of the fifth dimension of possibility, governed by the fourth dimension of time, with such potential to learn yet still gain nothing. Humans became like catnip to it, with their unique self awareness and imagination. It concentrated most of its being into probing Earth, releasing its stranglehold on centillions of other realities in order to better feel and enjoy this prize.
As it turned out the monster was petty, its ambitions shallow. It grew to treasure the Earth, if only for the cruel pleasure it felt in bringing grief to the occupants. Each mind was its own microcosm of insecurities and negativity so satisfying, so complete, that the monster grew complacent, a hedonist of sadism which no longer sought to take even one more universe, not when it had found the perfect organisms to torture one at a time.
So, it became acquainted with mankind. The oldest literal translation of the creature's name, and the name of the nightmare (for it resides within itself) is that of the "Dreamfather". The ancients wisely avoided mention of its mortal titles in fear of drawing its acute attention from afar, instead referring to it as "The Sleeper of the Clandestine" or "The God of Lonely Places".
In Sumeria it was worshipped as an obscure and obscene deity to which countless sacrifices were made. Before the Seminole Wars it was dreaded by the Creek Indians, who gave it many names and forms as it was too wicked a thing to exist under any one description.
Miracles slowly died under its perverse aura and magic faded into fantasy. Even the most vile of supernatural beings balked at remaining on Earth with the Dreamfather made flesh, and the deities revered by early humans abandoned their native realms. Many tried to slay it over time, and now and then its terrestrial form did indeed die, but it was beyond the concept of finite.
In mortal death it can live again when one-hundred years of incubation within its true form has passed, though it can't retain the memories of its previous life, for in our universe birth means new life is created, not old life preserved. Only can the Magna Pater be permanently stopped if its pneuma, its true state of being, is destroyed. As in and of itself it exists as a self-made absolute transcending the abstract, the Magna Pater can be permanently slain in every capacity by a true and righteous heart striking it down with the passion of self sacrificing love.
Only a courageous warrior pure of spirit may end the nightmare once and for all. But such men are far and few between... So time passes, the world changes.
Blurry tales of the 'Traveling Hole' began to pop up in candlelit bedside yarns spun by superstitious housewives of the old country.
Out in vacant lots, under railways, through the boonies. Sometimes there are small caves or cracks only large enough to crawl through. Hidey holes, but it isn't usually people who hide in them. Cougars? Snakes? Yes, very often that's the case. But out there waits a different kind of animal.
There might be a hidey hole that wasn't there before, or isn't there anymore. A migrating hole. An opening to another place, a lonely place with a voice all its own. It's a tight squeeze but anyone will fit.
A soft wind churns out of the icy nether, a subterranean current that tousles the hair. It smells of mildew. One could hesitate, but the call of the secret is compelling. It knows you by name, beckons with fantastic mysteries. A lure, but not of the kind men set to catch fish. This lure pulls one down, not up.
The blue sky transitions into a black void. It is too snug to turn around. You can only back out, and all the while choose to either stare ahead or shut your eyes. To continue is to encounter a winding network, a sweating labyrinth of dolomite tunnels whose dimensions are identical to playhouse tubes. Some stretch for a hundred miles or more.
Each one leads to the same place, never back the way you came. The longer you remain in the tunnels, the more drunk you become. Your bearings fade, until there is naught but a dream of disorientation through which slip racing thoughts and memories, grasping for sense and finding only unease and confusion, a deep sea diver running on fumes.
The deeper you crawl, the more an oozing sweetness like that of a putrefying wound tints the air. The scent is not a physical thing, but scarce, indecipherable emotions. Echoes of anxiety so distant and dim they could've been mistaken for tricks of the imagination trickle along the damp walls. Perhaps sometimes the sounds are your own. Maybe not. Sooner or later, all will reach the end. For some it takes days, others minutes. The Lair takes many forms. A playroom, a cavern, a subway, a midnight forest.
At this point the muddled dream ends and what feels to be a sick hallucination born from a lucid fever begins.
The Sleeper of the Clandestine slumbers upon a towering butte of soggy bones, the bones of children, reigning over its decaying empire on a haphazard throne several thousand lives thick.
The dread form, glazed over with black corpse moss, starts moving for the first time that year. Like rusted clockwork gears, as a reptile out of the cold, it needs to wind up, warm up, shrug off the drowsiness of hibernation.
Bones can be heard rolling down the hill as the Sleeper stretches. It always moves slowly at first, even clumsily, taking its time. Trapped profoundly in a drugged animal haze of cold sweat, no loving green EXIT sign, no return to the waking world.
"Journeys end in lovers meeting."
-Shakespeare, Twelfth Night-
-Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House-
an eternity of black,
he was trapped in his own hell;
the mirror showed him looking back."
-Mathias Jansson, Door to Insanity-
Aliases: Marmappa (Translated as 'Dreamfather' in Tamil, first known name given to it by humans), The Sleeper of the Clandestine, Shasheuss-Gux (Ahtna), Salmu Pulhu (Sumerian), Camazotz (Translated as 'Snatch Bat' in Kʼicheʼ), The God of Lonely Places, The Bedbug
Species: Primal Nightmare
Age: Ageless
Appearance: The Magna Pater, known also by an accursed few as The God of Lonely Places, takes the form of a slime slicked monstrosity whose proportions ridicule sense and extort terror. Its swarthy, mottled brown dermis lacks hind legs, its only limbs being two craggy arms adorned with thick, webbed wings which start at the wrists and annex to the base of a powerful, gorgon-esque tail. It has two thumbs on each side of its clammy hands, opposable to three fingers whose middle digit bears a claw eight inches long, twice that of its other claws. The span of its seven-digit webbed grip is immense, such that were it to grab a man about the waist with one hand its clawtips would touch. The wings each bear thirteen additional clawed phalanges extending several inches from its arms and flanks, which it may use to scuttle across surfaces in a way analogous to a centipede. In total it has 40 fingers.
Its head vaguely resembles the chiropteran caricature of a bulbous rubber dinosaur hand puppet turned inside out, whose distinctly malleable features shift and bulge in repulsive cooperation with unknown physiology operating beneath the flexible cartilage of its skull.
The Magna Pater wears a dripping, elongated maw tapering to a flabby lipped pucker. The pursed 'o' of its long, sucking lips can stretch back back into a dog-like simper to reveal muscular jaws packed tight with scalloped incisors and tombstone shaped molars.
Childhood fears, once long forgotten, echo dimly through the inky depths of its bugged-out googly eyes, skewing after anything unfortunate enough to call its attention with wet, saccadic twitches.
It can retire its bulbous eyes into their sockets upon closing them, such it would seem it never had eyes to start with. Just under its eyes is perked a crinkled leaf nose like that of a bat, aiding in echolocation.
Long crinkle cut ears are accentuated with tactile organs akin to those of a star-nosed mole, twenty mechano-sensory appendages flaring out in a seven inch diameter about each ear. It can move the sensory appendages at will, the gently waving finger-like organs evocative of a sea anemone in an ocean current.
A sharp, hollow tongue can extend four feet from its mouth, acting as a siphon to suck in blood. Dermal Lorenzini papulae, similar in appearance to the thousands of little tube-like stalks on a starfish, coat its skin and may protrude when needed. When inactive the sensory buds retreat into the body, leaving its flesh spongy and pocked.
The Magna Pater has a pair of retractable, double-jointed feelers on its muzzle below the eyes which can't be seen when fully withdrawn. The feelers are three feet long and are made up of thirteen cartilage joints. Hundreds of smaller inch-long antenna resembling spasming cricket legs haphazardly garnish the feelers from top to bottom, spreading when the feelers emerge and smoothing back when they retract. Both feelers narrow to a split, forming two soft, flexile prongs at each end.
Its ears, nose, mouth, and eyelids can fold and smooth down like vacuum seal flaps to prevent unwanted particles from gaining entry, rendering its head featureless. In addition its retractable eyes have vertical nictitating membranes. An arrowhead fluke adorns the tip of its tail and can narrow or widen at will.
The Magna Pater is an invertebrate, bearing no spinal column. From snout to tail base it's approximately nine and a half feet long. The tail is nineteen feet and each arm is 6'8" to the wrist. It weighs a total of 604 kilos.
(Drawing found in the desk of ten year old Vidya Singh, who went missing in Kanpur, India, two months after claiming to have seen a demon in his backyard.)
Sighting The God of Lonely Places is stressful enough to turn the hair of a common man gray over the course of a single hair growth cycle, and white by the second. Both the monster's eerily methodical form and seemingly undercranked kinesics exhibit an uncanny, stop-motion quality that offends the innermost sensibilities of any worldly organism. Deep-seated fears and insecurities refract through its eyes and flow unseen but not unfelt through its physical impression to form an instinctive insight within the victim, that they may subconsciously realize the Magna Pater is the sole vessel through which the worst of nightmares may be made both true and eternal.
With lulling mantis-movement this surreal non-animal becomes one with the chill breeze which laces through tree limbs and streamlines seamlessly into the clouded currents of rushing water. It splays out amidst moldy insulation within the deteriorating walls of boarded up, dilapidated buildings, lingers suspended halfway down in the twilit murk of lakes, curled into itself. It dwells in the secret places where man seldom frequents, and within secret thoughts. Lonely places at lonely times, revealed when one is filled with longing. A glimpse changes everything. It may have been accidental, or perhaps it wanted to meet. The Pull is mutual, a force that conjoines, draws together two parts of yearning.
It does not hurry but neither will it tarry. It comes when the time is right to complete its prey and until then contents itself with the solitude of tragedy. Each person lives within their own understanding, thus the Magna Pater occupies the same space as those left marred and alone by the cruelty of life. It crafts empty expanses and tight, snaking passages, and occupies them as it does the lonely spaces of the mind. It seeks out those fit to wander, the lost, the broken, drives them out of reach of the sun and sky by isolating their them from the perception of others, then it stalks and corners them in their own understanding.
When the final barrier falls, that of understanding itself, two become one and again must it find another.
Abilities
In close quarters the Magna Pater is a biological weapon of mass destruction, and at range it annihilates minds with equal efficacy.
It can physically dominate any beast in the animal kingdom. Despite its preference for psychologically whittling its victims down until all semblance of resistance is extirpated, it exemplifies a perfectly brutal killer when forced into direct confrontation. Able to casually strangle elephants to death, separate their vertebrae, and twist their heads off with its tail, it can also wrench the limbs off polar bears with the brawn of its arms alone. Emulate oversized sternum shears, with its jaws it can rend open the chest cavity of a silverback gorilla like a Cracker Jack box. It can run down a cheetah the way a cheetah runs down a gazelle, using the phenomenal might of its tail and arms to propel itself.
With minimal effort it could slaughter any prehistoric animal in outrageously barbaric fashion. Such is its heinous ferocity in open combat that it could massacre the greatest human armies of old if it so desired, leaving endless fields of mutilated carcasses blooming rancid in the sun.
~Resistances and Durability: It can withstand the hottest or coldest inhabited planetary environments, able to easily outlast and outperform any Earthly lifeform known to science. Its body temperature adjusts to match its surroundings, with the aid of specialized glycoproteins in both its fluids and body which produce immensely powerful antifreeze molecules.
The only organism which approaches (but does not exceed) the Magna Pater's vitality is the tardigrade, a micro-animal able to withstand 6,000 times atmospheric pressure, endure 1,000 times the lethal radiation that a human can, and immediately undergo reactionary chemobiosis to become immune to deadly toxins. The Magna Pater has five pseudohearts behind its circulatory system, the only effective way of killing it being the destruction of the brain, which is buried beneath layer after layer of densely wadded muscle and cartilage.
Akin to certain reptiles, any limbs separated from the Magna Pater's nerve endings will proceed to react to stimuli and be capable of independent motion for up to two hours. Most often this results in the severed limb maintaining a 'death grip' on something it has captured, or attempting to capture whatever touches it, via a reaction similar to the Palmar Grasp reflex found in infants.
If the Magna Pater's head is severed, it can retain consciousness for up to two hours due to its self-controlled metabolism and ability to survive without oxygenated blood. It can sustain a high rate of strenuous activity for months on end and can fight for any duration of time so long as it has a food source to draw energy from.
Its body is naturally insulated against electricity, to the point of shrugging off multiple lightning strikes. Two billion joules of sustained electric energy gives it but a cute tingly feeling even without insulative mucous factoring in. It processes pain in a manner entirely different from Earthly creatures so that it doesn't experience any physically or mentally distracting negative sensation. It knows when it's been hurt, and the knowledge itself is sufficient to influence its decision-making if need be.
As for the Magna Pater's physical durability, its body is tougher than an industrial tractor tire as per the physiology required to thrive in the deepest parts of the ocean and in space, withstanding a minimum of 1,000 times dynamic atmospheric pressure. When its muscles are contracted to full hardness, it can endure 6,000 times the pressure at the cost of its mobility being reduced to no more than a sixth of its maximum efficiency. It takes roughly two seconds for the Magna Pater to harden itself to this extent, and another two seconds to return to its standard physiology. It can isolate and contract individual muscles to harden specific points.
~Its dermal Lorenzini papulae and papillae coated ear appendages function as a superior evolution of Eimer's organs, working as electroreceptors and touch receptors with mechano-sensory fovea. It may use them for electrolocation to find the bioelectric fields of targets immune to infrared, detect electrical signals in muscles (permitting it to respond nigh simultaneously to the motions of its prey), follow hydrodynamic or aerodynamic trails, smell underwater, perceive pressures including seismic wave vibrations, and to circumnavigate the globe. The range for detecting life forms via electrolocation is 1,200 meters, and the range to read their muscles is 600 meters. In regards to following dynamic trails, its range is 2,000 meters. Unlike lesser organisms with actual Eimer's organs, attacks to its nerve fibers won't cause shock or death to the Magna Pater.
~Keen hearing and sonar. It's echolocation has a maximum distance of 8,000 meters and can detect objects moving towards it at half the speed of sound. Its hearing, augmented by auditory fovea, is so good it may locate a victim through many leagues of dense forest and with its back turned. Anything faster than its echolocation it can sense almost instantly via air pressure gradient, if not with its ears then with its papillae. In this way the Magna Pater can perceive and properly gauge the velocities of objects moving at massively hypersonic speeds.
~Lungs: The Magna Pater has three lungs and specialized vocal organs, whose purpose is not respiration but to aid in the generation of sound. It may imitate and manipulate any sounds it has heard before with flawless precision, and at volumes of up to 200 decibels. This is loud enough to hemorrhage organs or create enough pressure from further away to cause blood embolisms and induce cardiac arrest. It can simulate a small explosion with its voice, making it virtually unapproachable by mere mortals.
Likewise it can inhale with greater coercion than an industrial pneumatic vacuum, and with its puckered lips can suction the meat off a victim's bones and drink their organs.
~Dream Logic: As its very existence is perception-based, it is capable of twisting reality under certain circumstances when being watched. Namely, it can entirely vanish behind any near or far visual barrier which is perceived as being relative in size to itself regardless of actual proximity. Were one to hold up their hand next to the monster, and were a large building a mile away visible, the monster could move behind either the raised hand or the distant building as if either object were right next to it.
Likewise it could bound over a mountain or dart behind a door. If the monster had been noticed but isn't being perceived, it can bypass space to appear from any suitable shadow or obstacle that'd been observed by its victim. If its victim runs away say, towards a door, it can cause the door to shrink away even as it inexorably closes in on its prey, its grasping arm swiping closer, growing larger, as if stretching through a fisheye lens.
While it's certainly possible to be faster than the Magna Pater, one with fear in their heart may never outrun it. It pursues with a relentless tenacity fueled by the very doubt in the mind of its prey.
~Life: It can survive in any sort of atmosphere which supports life, or in the void of space. It gains energy from a form of oxygen independent phagocytosis, digesting biological matter to power its body instead of breathing.
~Crypsis: Its mucous can muffle any minor sounds it may make when prowling and cloaks its scent. It has no object reflection either, thus it cannot be filmed or seen in a mirror. The Magna Pater is also utterly immune to any magical or supernatural detection that doesn't naturally or scientifically originate within the five known senses. That is to say, it cannot be located via any kind of sixth sense.
One may still detect it supernaturally, so long as said form of detection is directly based from sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch. Sensory fields relying on electricity, magnetism, chi, telepathy, and the like are all wholly ineffective, even if the field is translated into one of the five senses by proxy. Sonar can detect the Magna Pater, because it directly relates to hearing. Seeing through the mind's eye, however, does not count as a direct correlation to sight. Rather than resulting in a blank spot in the midst of such a field, it would simply be as if the Magna Pater was never there.
~Heat pits: Can detect all forms of heat and energy, similar to infrared in snakes. This includes light. The heat pits are located on the inner linings of its mouth, nose, and ears.
~Fluke: The flexible broadhead fluke at the end of the Magna Pater's tail measures ten inches in length and five in width. It can narrow down to a stabbing point or flatten out almost to the sharpness of a blade. As with the rest of the Magna Pater's body the fluke can soften or harden, and when hardened it can resist pressures upwards of 88,000 psi. At full swing it can fold a train car down the middle or impale a grown man like a fish on a pike. When combined with the bonding power of its mucilage, it can flay open victims and drag out their innards.
As a secret weapon it can thrust its fluke into any material pliable enough for penetration and excrete overlapping layers of mucous which undergo rapid phase changes as it withdraws, the nanowalls forming a mortiferous blade of sinister luster and variable proportions.
This ability, the 'Incubation Sheath', could allow the Magna Pater to plunge its fluke into a living body and turn them into an improvised scabbard from which it may promptly extract an omniphobic blade whose edge is honed to a single hydrogen atom.
Glistening with liquid death, this eldritch Excalibur can carve up an engine block akin to warm cheese without losing its edge due to immensely strong intermolecular bonds. With surgical skill the Magna Pater can mince its enemies into geometrically flawless cubes, disregarding logical durability entirely by cleaving through cell membranes and DNA molecules alike.
~Tongue: Can draw blood from a wound through its tongue like a syringe, enabling it to drain a human body as quickly and thoroughly as a fat kid with a juice box at lunchtime. The tongue itself is a powerful muscle which can choke victims to death, terminating in a hypodermic-like tip made of the same chitin as its claws. It can also squirt, inject, and spray saliva at pressure washer velocities, or launch its tongue out like a harpoon (in the manner of a chameleon) at speeds rivaling modern crossbows.
~Natural weapons: Its teeth and claws, whetted to a scalpel-sharpness, are composed of a complex chitin and protein polymer superior to a Humboldt squid's beak and approximately six times more durable by weight than high grade steel. With these savage weapons the Magna Pater is more than capable of tearing apart Kevlar bulletproof vests.
It wields a bite force of more than four times that of the strongest recorded bite measured from a Nile crocodile, and its broad, spade-shaped incisors end in savage mamelons purposed for shearing through bone and muscle. Its tombstone molars can pulverize bowling balls or reduce solid iron to hot shavings.
Its tail has around 200,000 muscles, flexible enough to delicately pick up small pebbles, strong enough to grind masonry stone to powder, and fast enough to accelerate to whip-like striking speeds from a stationary position, enabling it to break the sound barrier at the fluke. It can launch up to fourteen strands of mucous like a golden tailed gecko, with a range fifteen times that of its body length. The mucous emitted by its tail in this manner can amount to up to eight liters of the substance being cast out at a speed of up to 70 MPH. It can control the force with which it ejects the mucous.
~Can freely bend its entire body like rubber or stiffen to become hard. It lacks bones, instead maintaining its shape through different varieties of tensile muscle and cartilage. It's entirely multi-jointed and able to twist any part of its body 300 degrees in circumference. It can stretch itself out and double its body length, and often does so when squeezing through narrow openings. It can achieve three extra feet of arm reach in a pinch, and may pass through any gap its ductile head can fit through. At best it's able to squirm through most commercial pet doors or wall vents.
~Hibernation: It may enter a state of metabolic stasis which can last for decades. It retains a higher dimensional consciousness and spatial awareness during this "hibernation", and may awaken when it pleases.
~Sense of smell: It can track down victims thousands of kilometers away merely by scenting them on the clothing of its prey.
~The Pull: The Magna Pater and the places it most often visits bear an atmosphere which faintly arouses a victim's morbid curiosity when nearby. This doesn't work if one is aware of the monster's presence. As an example, were the Magna Pater to be waiting outside of a locked window, the victim may feel vaguely compelled to go to said window and look out, but not unlock the window after sighting the horror beyond it. The monster can decide whether or not a victim feels the "Pull". It has scarcely an effect on those with a strong will and a firm grasp of what is real, since the Pull is predominantly meant to snare children.
~Intelligence: The Magna Pater is preternaturally sentient with countless millennia of experience as a highly prolific interdimensional serial killer. It can grasp all languages and never makes the same mistake twice due to a perfect memory. It wields an instinctive transcendental knowledge of the physics and metaphysics of every reality it inhabits, as well as a profound understanding of the native psychology and biology. It can discern the mechanics of virtually any conceptual structure it encounters in moments. With a reaction speed of 1 millisecond and a brain analogous to an alien supercomputer, its intellect is without equal in all the natural world.
~Can immediately regenerate from wounds by consuming blood, bone, and flesh. The amount of mass healed is proportionate to how much is consumed, I.E one pound of food to replace one pound of damaged tissue. It can selectively heal different parts of its body, and any excess food it eats is stored for later regeneration. It can hold up to 110 kilos of food in its stomach.
~Wings: The membrane of its wings is far tougher than Kevlar and can comfortably stop bullets from a .950 JDJ hunting rifle. The maximum wingspan of each arm when stretched is comparable in surface area to a queen size blanket, and the membrane itself is as thick as a padded backstop mat. The membrane is composed of specialized nerve and muscle fibers which can expand, contract, and move freely with incredible strength, more than enough to hold and break the bones of virtually any mortal creature it catches. As could be assumed from the crushingly powerful phalanges ridging the wings, they aren't at all meant for flight but to allow the monster to both guard against particularly dangerous attacks and to catch and smother prey. It can secrete vast amounts of mucous from the membrane as it can from every other part of its epidermis, thus by flapping it can quickly coat its surroundings in dense layers of treacherous slime.
~Force Multipliers: It can lash out with its arms at a velocity of twice its typical travel speed from a stationary position, or about 180 MPH. The speed of its tail can be increased by fifty percent, the speed of its arms doubled, and the arm strength quadrupled by applying the destructive power of its wings as if they were massive triceps, though this would prevent the wings from performing auxiliary functions.
It's maximum ground speed, when applying its arms, wings, and tail is 125 MPH, though it usually sprints at 90 MPH to conserve energy and hide its true potential.
~Stomach: As evidenced by its ability to immediately digest whatever it eats, the Magna Pater's stomach utilizes a lethal super acid which dissolves organic matter in seconds. Though typically this acid remains in the stomach, as the Magna Pater cannot mass produce its acid as easily as its saliva or mucous, it still weaponizes this asset. It can turn its stomach inside out to engulf difficult prey and digest them externally, a feat most consistently displayed by certain species of sea snails and starfish.
~Sex: The Magna Pater is able to reproduce with any organism larger than three kilos, regardless of gender or lack thereof. This serves no biological prerogative. Its brood are stringy, three inch maggots which emerge en masse from patches in the victim's skin three hours after mating, and die only minutes after birth.
~Mucous: The Magna Pater's most versatile and powerful asset. Its body mucous and saliva contain anticoagulant, cytotoxic, and bufotoxic properties. Those whom it bites or claws will suffer gradual necrosis, unstoppable bleeding, and fast-acting, nightmarish hallucinations. Supernatural forms of healing are drastically hindered where the Magna Pater's mucileage is concerned, the anticoagulant preventing magic from clotting or regenerating blood cells, although the monster is immune to its own toxins.
The speed at which the bufotoxins take effect depends on how close the wound is to the head. As an example, were it to jab one of its claws into a large man, it would take roughly several minutes for the poison to take effect from a foot wound, and several seconds if the wound was near the head. Were the Magna Pater to inject a victim with its tongue (which can mass produce large amounts of saliva), a blue whale would succumb in less than a minute if it were pierced in the center mass. The toxin has a median dose of (LD50) of 1–1.3 ng/kg, making it a top contender for the most potent toxin in the world.
The molecular structure of the mucous is subject to change over a set period of time, the Magna Pater capable of regulating the viscosity to allow the substance to be extremely slippery or adhesive. The mucous at its stickiest can bind the strongest of Earthly creatures, deaden the momentum of impacts, and tear off the skin and muscle of any victims that are unfortunate enough to come into contact with it. It can solidify into a hardened form three times stronger than graphene and bring a powerful hydraulic press to a standstill, yet become superomniphobic in the same second and cause large masses to slip and slide with but a single degree of elevation. The victim's flesh is certain to give out before the mucous does.
The mucous is flame-retardant, boasting a stupidly high melting point and repelling most structural changes instituted by outside forces. So long as it has the mucous to do so, it can endure military flamethrowers, oil fires, or a napalm bombing. It can endure temperatures of up to 7,900°C before losing integrity. The mucous is also scentless and masks odors, provides an extraordinarily high resistance to electricity due to its non-conductivity and insulating properties, and resists freezing in temperatures as low as -273.15°C. When at its stickiest, it bonds on a molecular level to whatever it touches.
The Magna Pater's body is the sole exception, the only matter the slime doesn't fuse molecules with. Instead the slime clings to the monster like a layer of firm glue, and is released from the Magna Pater's body when more layers of mucous are secreted beneath to uproot the first layer which may be set to phase change. In a word, this means the monster may "slough" off mucous to avoid compromising its motion. After four hours have passed, any secreted mucous will 'slip' out of being, evaporating into nothing as it phase changes out of reality itself. Due to this it's nigh impossible to keep a sample of the substance for study.
A hundredth of a second is the shortest amount of time these phase changes may occur and up to ten timed phase changes may be pre-instituted to take place within volume of mucous over a period of up to four hours.
It can convert and secrete up to twenty percent of its body weight in mucous at a rate of 29 liters per second, provided the entire body is producing the mucous. It becomes significantly physically faster when empty (by 25%) and may regain mucous weight by consuming biomatter.
It can physically dominate any beast in the animal kingdom. Despite its preference for psychologically whittling its victims down until all semblance of resistance is extirpated, it exemplifies a perfectly brutal killer when forced into direct confrontation. Able to casually strangle elephants to death, separate their vertebrae, and twist their heads off with its tail, it can also wrench the limbs off polar bears with the brawn of its arms alone. Emulate oversized sternum shears, with its jaws it can rend open the chest cavity of a silverback gorilla like a Cracker Jack box. It can run down a cheetah the way a cheetah runs down a gazelle, using the phenomenal might of its tail and arms to propel itself.
With minimal effort it could slaughter any prehistoric animal in outrageously barbaric fashion. Such is its heinous ferocity in open combat that it could massacre the greatest human armies of old if it so desired, leaving endless fields of mutilated carcasses blooming rancid in the sun.
~Resistances and Durability: It can withstand the hottest or coldest inhabited planetary environments, able to easily outlast and outperform any Earthly lifeform known to science. Its body temperature adjusts to match its surroundings, with the aid of specialized glycoproteins in both its fluids and body which produce immensely powerful antifreeze molecules.
The only organism which approaches (but does not exceed) the Magna Pater's vitality is the tardigrade, a micro-animal able to withstand 6,000 times atmospheric pressure, endure 1,000 times the lethal radiation that a human can, and immediately undergo reactionary chemobiosis to become immune to deadly toxins. The Magna Pater has five pseudohearts behind its circulatory system, the only effective way of killing it being the destruction of the brain, which is buried beneath layer after layer of densely wadded muscle and cartilage.
Akin to certain reptiles, any limbs separated from the Magna Pater's nerve endings will proceed to react to stimuli and be capable of independent motion for up to two hours. Most often this results in the severed limb maintaining a 'death grip' on something it has captured, or attempting to capture whatever touches it, via a reaction similar to the Palmar Grasp reflex found in infants.
If the Magna Pater's head is severed, it can retain consciousness for up to two hours due to its self-controlled metabolism and ability to survive without oxygenated blood. It can sustain a high rate of strenuous activity for months on end and can fight for any duration of time so long as it has a food source to draw energy from.
Its body is naturally insulated against electricity, to the point of shrugging off multiple lightning strikes. Two billion joules of sustained electric energy gives it but a cute tingly feeling even without insulative mucous factoring in. It processes pain in a manner entirely different from Earthly creatures so that it doesn't experience any physically or mentally distracting negative sensation. It knows when it's been hurt, and the knowledge itself is sufficient to influence its decision-making if need be.
As for the Magna Pater's physical durability, its body is tougher than an industrial tractor tire as per the physiology required to thrive in the deepest parts of the ocean and in space, withstanding a minimum of 1,000 times dynamic atmospheric pressure. When its muscles are contracted to full hardness, it can endure 6,000 times the pressure at the cost of its mobility being reduced to no more than a sixth of its maximum efficiency. It takes roughly two seconds for the Magna Pater to harden itself to this extent, and another two seconds to return to its standard physiology. It can isolate and contract individual muscles to harden specific points.
~Its dermal Lorenzini papulae and papillae coated ear appendages function as a superior evolution of Eimer's organs, working as electroreceptors and touch receptors with mechano-sensory fovea. It may use them for electrolocation to find the bioelectric fields of targets immune to infrared, detect electrical signals in muscles (permitting it to respond nigh simultaneously to the motions of its prey), follow hydrodynamic or aerodynamic trails, smell underwater, perceive pressures including seismic wave vibrations, and to circumnavigate the globe. The range for detecting life forms via electrolocation is 1,200 meters, and the range to read their muscles is 600 meters. In regards to following dynamic trails, its range is 2,000 meters. Unlike lesser organisms with actual Eimer's organs, attacks to its nerve fibers won't cause shock or death to the Magna Pater.
~Keen hearing and sonar. It's echolocation has a maximum distance of 8,000 meters and can detect objects moving towards it at half the speed of sound. Its hearing, augmented by auditory fovea, is so good it may locate a victim through many leagues of dense forest and with its back turned. Anything faster than its echolocation it can sense almost instantly via air pressure gradient, if not with its ears then with its papillae. In this way the Magna Pater can perceive and properly gauge the velocities of objects moving at massively hypersonic speeds.
~Lungs: The Magna Pater has three lungs and specialized vocal organs, whose purpose is not respiration but to aid in the generation of sound. It may imitate and manipulate any sounds it has heard before with flawless precision, and at volumes of up to 200 decibels. This is loud enough to hemorrhage organs or create enough pressure from further away to cause blood embolisms and induce cardiac arrest. It can simulate a small explosion with its voice, making it virtually unapproachable by mere mortals.
Likewise it can inhale with greater coercion than an industrial pneumatic vacuum, and with its puckered lips can suction the meat off a victim's bones and drink their organs.
~Dream Logic: As its very existence is perception-based, it is capable of twisting reality under certain circumstances when being watched. Namely, it can entirely vanish behind any near or far visual barrier which is perceived as being relative in size to itself regardless of actual proximity. Were one to hold up their hand next to the monster, and were a large building a mile away visible, the monster could move behind either the raised hand or the distant building as if either object were right next to it.
Likewise it could bound over a mountain or dart behind a door. If the monster had been noticed but isn't being perceived, it can bypass space to appear from any suitable shadow or obstacle that'd been observed by its victim. If its victim runs away say, towards a door, it can cause the door to shrink away even as it inexorably closes in on its prey, its grasping arm swiping closer, growing larger, as if stretching through a fisheye lens.
While it's certainly possible to be faster than the Magna Pater, one with fear in their heart may never outrun it. It pursues with a relentless tenacity fueled by the very doubt in the mind of its prey.
~Life: It can survive in any sort of atmosphere which supports life, or in the void of space. It gains energy from a form of oxygen independent phagocytosis, digesting biological matter to power its body instead of breathing.
~Crypsis: Its mucous can muffle any minor sounds it may make when prowling and cloaks its scent. It has no object reflection either, thus it cannot be filmed or seen in a mirror. The Magna Pater is also utterly immune to any magical or supernatural detection that doesn't naturally or scientifically originate within the five known senses. That is to say, it cannot be located via any kind of sixth sense.
One may still detect it supernaturally, so long as said form of detection is directly based from sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch. Sensory fields relying on electricity, magnetism, chi, telepathy, and the like are all wholly ineffective, even if the field is translated into one of the five senses by proxy. Sonar can detect the Magna Pater, because it directly relates to hearing. Seeing through the mind's eye, however, does not count as a direct correlation to sight. Rather than resulting in a blank spot in the midst of such a field, it would simply be as if the Magna Pater was never there.
~Heat pits: Can detect all forms of heat and energy, similar to infrared in snakes. This includes light. The heat pits are located on the inner linings of its mouth, nose, and ears.
~Fluke: The flexible broadhead fluke at the end of the Magna Pater's tail measures ten inches in length and five in width. It can narrow down to a stabbing point or flatten out almost to the sharpness of a blade. As with the rest of the Magna Pater's body the fluke can soften or harden, and when hardened it can resist pressures upwards of 88,000 psi. At full swing it can fold a train car down the middle or impale a grown man like a fish on a pike. When combined with the bonding power of its mucilage, it can flay open victims and drag out their innards.
As a secret weapon it can thrust its fluke into any material pliable enough for penetration and excrete overlapping layers of mucous which undergo rapid phase changes as it withdraws, the nanowalls forming a mortiferous blade of sinister luster and variable proportions.
This ability, the 'Incubation Sheath', could allow the Magna Pater to plunge its fluke into a living body and turn them into an improvised scabbard from which it may promptly extract an omniphobic blade whose edge is honed to a single hydrogen atom.
Glistening with liquid death, this eldritch Excalibur can carve up an engine block akin to warm cheese without losing its edge due to immensely strong intermolecular bonds. With surgical skill the Magna Pater can mince its enemies into geometrically flawless cubes, disregarding logical durability entirely by cleaving through cell membranes and DNA molecules alike.
~Tongue: Can draw blood from a wound through its tongue like a syringe, enabling it to drain a human body as quickly and thoroughly as a fat kid with a juice box at lunchtime. The tongue itself is a powerful muscle which can choke victims to death, terminating in a hypodermic-like tip made of the same chitin as its claws. It can also squirt, inject, and spray saliva at pressure washer velocities, or launch its tongue out like a harpoon (in the manner of a chameleon) at speeds rivaling modern crossbows.
~Natural weapons: Its teeth and claws, whetted to a scalpel-sharpness, are composed of a complex chitin and protein polymer superior to a Humboldt squid's beak and approximately six times more durable by weight than high grade steel. With these savage weapons the Magna Pater is more than capable of tearing apart Kevlar bulletproof vests.
It wields a bite force of more than four times that of the strongest recorded bite measured from a Nile crocodile, and its broad, spade-shaped incisors end in savage mamelons purposed for shearing through bone and muscle. Its tombstone molars can pulverize bowling balls or reduce solid iron to hot shavings.
Its tail has around 200,000 muscles, flexible enough to delicately pick up small pebbles, strong enough to grind masonry stone to powder, and fast enough to accelerate to whip-like striking speeds from a stationary position, enabling it to break the sound barrier at the fluke. It can launch up to fourteen strands of mucous like a golden tailed gecko, with a range fifteen times that of its body length. The mucous emitted by its tail in this manner can amount to up to eight liters of the substance being cast out at a speed of up to 70 MPH. It can control the force with which it ejects the mucous.
~Can freely bend its entire body like rubber or stiffen to become hard. It lacks bones, instead maintaining its shape through different varieties of tensile muscle and cartilage. It's entirely multi-jointed and able to twist any part of its body 300 degrees in circumference. It can stretch itself out and double its body length, and often does so when squeezing through narrow openings. It can achieve three extra feet of arm reach in a pinch, and may pass through any gap its ductile head can fit through. At best it's able to squirm through most commercial pet doors or wall vents.
~Hibernation: It may enter a state of metabolic stasis which can last for decades. It retains a higher dimensional consciousness and spatial awareness during this "hibernation", and may awaken when it pleases.
~Sense of smell: It can track down victims thousands of kilometers away merely by scenting them on the clothing of its prey.
~The Pull: The Magna Pater and the places it most often visits bear an atmosphere which faintly arouses a victim's morbid curiosity when nearby. This doesn't work if one is aware of the monster's presence. As an example, were the Magna Pater to be waiting outside of a locked window, the victim may feel vaguely compelled to go to said window and look out, but not unlock the window after sighting the horror beyond it. The monster can decide whether or not a victim feels the "Pull". It has scarcely an effect on those with a strong will and a firm grasp of what is real, since the Pull is predominantly meant to snare children.
~Intelligence: The Magna Pater is preternaturally sentient with countless millennia of experience as a highly prolific interdimensional serial killer. It can grasp all languages and never makes the same mistake twice due to a perfect memory. It wields an instinctive transcendental knowledge of the physics and metaphysics of every reality it inhabits, as well as a profound understanding of the native psychology and biology. It can discern the mechanics of virtually any conceptual structure it encounters in moments. With a reaction speed of 1 millisecond and a brain analogous to an alien supercomputer, its intellect is without equal in all the natural world.
~Can immediately regenerate from wounds by consuming blood, bone, and flesh. The amount of mass healed is proportionate to how much is consumed, I.E one pound of food to replace one pound of damaged tissue. It can selectively heal different parts of its body, and any excess food it eats is stored for later regeneration. It can hold up to 110 kilos of food in its stomach.
~Wings: The membrane of its wings is far tougher than Kevlar and can comfortably stop bullets from a .950 JDJ hunting rifle. The maximum wingspan of each arm when stretched is comparable in surface area to a queen size blanket, and the membrane itself is as thick as a padded backstop mat. The membrane is composed of specialized nerve and muscle fibers which can expand, contract, and move freely with incredible strength, more than enough to hold and break the bones of virtually any mortal creature it catches. As could be assumed from the crushingly powerful phalanges ridging the wings, they aren't at all meant for flight but to allow the monster to both guard against particularly dangerous attacks and to catch and smother prey. It can secrete vast amounts of mucous from the membrane as it can from every other part of its epidermis, thus by flapping it can quickly coat its surroundings in dense layers of treacherous slime.
~Force Multipliers: It can lash out with its arms at a velocity of twice its typical travel speed from a stationary position, or about 180 MPH. The speed of its tail can be increased by fifty percent, the speed of its arms doubled, and the arm strength quadrupled by applying the destructive power of its wings as if they were massive triceps, though this would prevent the wings from performing auxiliary functions.
It's maximum ground speed, when applying its arms, wings, and tail is 125 MPH, though it usually sprints at 90 MPH to conserve energy and hide its true potential.
~Stomach: As evidenced by its ability to immediately digest whatever it eats, the Magna Pater's stomach utilizes a lethal super acid which dissolves organic matter in seconds. Though typically this acid remains in the stomach, as the Magna Pater cannot mass produce its acid as easily as its saliva or mucous, it still weaponizes this asset. It can turn its stomach inside out to engulf difficult prey and digest them externally, a feat most consistently displayed by certain species of sea snails and starfish.
~Sex: The Magna Pater is able to reproduce with any organism larger than three kilos, regardless of gender or lack thereof. This serves no biological prerogative. Its brood are stringy, three inch maggots which emerge en masse from patches in the victim's skin three hours after mating, and die only minutes after birth.
~Mucous: The Magna Pater's most versatile and powerful asset. Its body mucous and saliva contain anticoagulant, cytotoxic, and bufotoxic properties. Those whom it bites or claws will suffer gradual necrosis, unstoppable bleeding, and fast-acting, nightmarish hallucinations. Supernatural forms of healing are drastically hindered where the Magna Pater's mucileage is concerned, the anticoagulant preventing magic from clotting or regenerating blood cells, although the monster is immune to its own toxins.
The speed at which the bufotoxins take effect depends on how close the wound is to the head. As an example, were it to jab one of its claws into a large man, it would take roughly several minutes for the poison to take effect from a foot wound, and several seconds if the wound was near the head. Were the Magna Pater to inject a victim with its tongue (which can mass produce large amounts of saliva), a blue whale would succumb in less than a minute if it were pierced in the center mass. The toxin has a median dose of (LD50) of 1–1.3 ng/kg, making it a top contender for the most potent toxin in the world.
The molecular structure of the mucous is subject to change over a set period of time, the Magna Pater capable of regulating the viscosity to allow the substance to be extremely slippery or adhesive. The mucous at its stickiest can bind the strongest of Earthly creatures, deaden the momentum of impacts, and tear off the skin and muscle of any victims that are unfortunate enough to come into contact with it. It can solidify into a hardened form three times stronger than graphene and bring a powerful hydraulic press to a standstill, yet become superomniphobic in the same second and cause large masses to slip and slide with but a single degree of elevation. The victim's flesh is certain to give out before the mucous does.
The mucous is flame-retardant, boasting a stupidly high melting point and repelling most structural changes instituted by outside forces. So long as it has the mucous to do so, it can endure military flamethrowers, oil fires, or a napalm bombing. It can endure temperatures of up to 7,900°C before losing integrity. The mucous is also scentless and masks odors, provides an extraordinarily high resistance to electricity due to its non-conductivity and insulating properties, and resists freezing in temperatures as low as -273.15°C. When at its stickiest, it bonds on a molecular level to whatever it touches.
The Magna Pater's body is the sole exception, the only matter the slime doesn't fuse molecules with. Instead the slime clings to the monster like a layer of firm glue, and is released from the Magna Pater's body when more layers of mucous are secreted beneath to uproot the first layer which may be set to phase change. In a word, this means the monster may "slough" off mucous to avoid compromising its motion. After four hours have passed, any secreted mucous will 'slip' out of being, evaporating into nothing as it phase changes out of reality itself. Due to this it's nigh impossible to keep a sample of the substance for study.
A hundredth of a second is the shortest amount of time these phase changes may occur and up to ten timed phase changes may be pre-instituted to take place within volume of mucous over a period of up to four hours.
It can convert and secrete up to twenty percent of its body weight in mucous at a rate of 29 liters per second, provided the entire body is producing the mucous. It becomes significantly physically faster when empty (by 25%) and may regain mucous weight by consuming biomatter.
~Malocchio:
The Magna Pater may use this power by shutting down all its senses other than sight. It can keep the Malocchio active for at most sixteen seconds and cannot use it again until the same amount of time has passed. For example, if it only uses it for ten seconds and then deactivates, then it must then rest its eyes for ten seconds.
Before it uses the Malocchio, the intended victim(s) will have a brief premonition of the peril to come, the impending breach of natural law forecasting a gut instinct to flee. Those who meet the monster's gaze and see the Malocchio will witness a backscattering of the Dreamfather's true essence and an ethereal connection will be made. It's a thoroughly foul experience with no proper comparison, though it could be (vaguely) referenced as psychic rape, a direct violation of the psyche by a strange, predatory id.
Afterwards, each time the victim goes to sleep, they will enter a trance and begin moving in the general direction of the Magna Pater. They always awaken at the time they ordinarily would, thus resulting in victims routinely finding themselves standing in random gullies and barren roads during the wee hours before cockcrow, alone and miles away from home.
The Magna Pater can see with the eyes of its prey whenever it uses the Malocchio, at the same time if there are multiple victims. By using the Malocchio on one who is already cursed, the victim's sight will be replaced with that of the Magna Pater's until it deactivates its eyes. As it shares the sight of any victims cursed by the Malocchio, this enables it to mix and match the eyes of any marked opponents or claim new victims by proxy, simply requiring them to look into the eyes of a victim whilst the Malocchio is active.
Furthermore, a victim of the Malocchio is highly subject to the Magna Pater's dream manipulation, to be described later.
The only way to break the Malocchio is to kill the Magna Pater's physical body. Those who seek confrontation and are found wanting, despite their other virtues, are destined to meet the most illogical conclusion of their arrogance. Whether it be by physical necessity, mental capacity, or spiritual fortitude, any warrior who still bears but an iota of doubt, fear, or weakness will come to grasp the true definition of despair. As is the penalty of the first sin, so is the unforgiving truth of the Magna Pater, such that one must overcome their own self first and the dualistic abomination of the Earth next, and only then hope to endure this entity's merciless countenance without succumbing to the loss of self that has been dreamt of but never humored, the unholy kismet of an end without end.
The Malocchio is an initially passive curse that has few immediate negative effects unless the victim is entirely under the influence of the Magna Pater's biological hallucinogens or has had their subconscious completely dominated (they would need to be fully lost within the recesses of their consciousness after ego-death), in which case the victim enters a 'waking dream' and may be immediately taken into the monster's nightmare whereupon their mind is forfeit. If the bufotoxins haven't taken full effect then the victim will be considered only partially dreaming.
The Magna Pater may influence the biological hallucinations it causes but the level of influence depends progression of the bufotoxins. Similarly it can somewhat control recollective hallucinations, but again this depends on the susceptibility of the victim's mental state. The vast majority of the time its hallucinatory influence is indistinct, from a faint shadow of something amiss to a frightening twist of logic, imagination, or memory. Most of the time the victim can still act reasonably within their circumstances up until they reach the point of disassociative fugue, where shortly ahead lies the bend of no return.
As a side effect, looking into The Magna Pater's Malocchio for too long can result in the victim's body becoming riddled with cancer at a later period in time, I.E developing prostate or skin cancer two years after the encounter. This is because prolonged exposure to its aberrant pneuma induces mutations in the victim's DNA. It takes roughly seven seconds of eye-to-eye contact (does not have to be constant) before the dormant cancer cells begin taking root.
It has been said that the eyes are the windows to the soul. Regardless of whether or not this is true, the eyes of the Magna Pater are moreso a two-way mirror, comparable to peering into the blackest depths of the self, far past the reach of conception wherein the distant terrors and whimsies of ancient memory, modern life, and hazy fantasy intermingle.
Fleeing through a steamy jungle, tropical flora bobbing as bare feet pound past, the blue sky flickering by, chased by an unseen predator, pulse racing, a tremor in the heart, a tingle of dread in the spine as it is realized, cover is an illusion and fleeing is futile.
Warm viscera wrenched from a still-heaving carcass by something much larger, much more powerful.
The sounds of traffic, of horns, the keening whine of an obligatory ambulance, a body still torn apart but this time on the road, not the floor of an uncanny jungle, intestines smeared into ocherous skidmarks by a tire and legs twisted with skin split at the seams. Always there is something larger, much more powerful...
Such is only the tip of a strand of conceptualized ultra-reality that could be glimpsed from a brief look into the Magna Pater's eyes during the Malocchio, lasting but a moment but feeling like a lifetime, representing an entire genetic history of condensed fear. In the face of such a thing, before the fact, one is compelled to look away. Such is why one is provided the strong, anomalous instinct to avoid the stare of the Magna Pater.
To some, this can prove a saving grace. To others, taking their eyes off the road presents a destination as of yet unimagined. As with all decisions in life, it depends. Such is the great and terrible capacity of the Malocchio, that of perception, that of creating one's solitary truth out of wild notion.
It is not uncommon for those who've made eye contact and lived to suffer from severe PTSD or age prematurely from the anxiety of the experience. As previously mentioned, many who gaze upon the monster as a whole may later develop shocks of white or gray hair, this being far more likely should they experience the Malocchio as well.
It's able to travel to any reality or dimension withholding a victim of the Malocchio, by way of entering through their subconscious and manifesting nearby and out of sight. It cannot use this to reach a victim it already shares a realm with. There's no escape once it has violated the sanctity of a victim's essence, for through the Malocchio it conceptualizes a victim's unique antipathy and, in a way, conjoins with their psyche. Just as you cannot flee from yourself, so is the lurid presence of the Magna Pater which, like fear itself, must be confronted before it can be overcome.
Those that are physically consumed by the Magna Pater whilst cursed by the Malocchio, although their sanity may be intact until the moment of death, will have their consciousness absorbed into the metaphysical innards of the God of the Lost, fated to writhe amidst a schizophrenic flux of debauched memories and nightmares everlasting.
Before it uses the Malocchio, the intended victim(s) will have a brief premonition of the peril to come, the impending breach of natural law forecasting a gut instinct to flee. Those who meet the monster's gaze and see the Malocchio will witness a backscattering of the Dreamfather's true essence and an ethereal connection will be made. It's a thoroughly foul experience with no proper comparison, though it could be (vaguely) referenced as psychic rape, a direct violation of the psyche by a strange, predatory id.
Afterwards, each time the victim goes to sleep, they will enter a trance and begin moving in the general direction of the Magna Pater. They always awaken at the time they ordinarily would, thus resulting in victims routinely finding themselves standing in random gullies and barren roads during the wee hours before cockcrow, alone and miles away from home.
The Magna Pater can see with the eyes of its prey whenever it uses the Malocchio, at the same time if there are multiple victims. By using the Malocchio on one who is already cursed, the victim's sight will be replaced with that of the Magna Pater's until it deactivates its eyes. As it shares the sight of any victims cursed by the Malocchio, this enables it to mix and match the eyes of any marked opponents or claim new victims by proxy, simply requiring them to look into the eyes of a victim whilst the Malocchio is active.
Furthermore, a victim of the Malocchio is highly subject to the Magna Pater's dream manipulation, to be described later.
The only way to break the Malocchio is to kill the Magna Pater's physical body. Those who seek confrontation and are found wanting, despite their other virtues, are destined to meet the most illogical conclusion of their arrogance. Whether it be by physical necessity, mental capacity, or spiritual fortitude, any warrior who still bears but an iota of doubt, fear, or weakness will come to grasp the true definition of despair. As is the penalty of the first sin, so is the unforgiving truth of the Magna Pater, such that one must overcome their own self first and the dualistic abomination of the Earth next, and only then hope to endure this entity's merciless countenance without succumbing to the loss of self that has been dreamt of but never humored, the unholy kismet of an end without end.
The Malocchio is an initially passive curse that has few immediate negative effects unless the victim is entirely under the influence of the Magna Pater's biological hallucinogens or has had their subconscious completely dominated (they would need to be fully lost within the recesses of their consciousness after ego-death), in which case the victim enters a 'waking dream' and may be immediately taken into the monster's nightmare whereupon their mind is forfeit. If the bufotoxins haven't taken full effect then the victim will be considered only partially dreaming.
The Magna Pater may influence the biological hallucinations it causes but the level of influence depends progression of the bufotoxins. Similarly it can somewhat control recollective hallucinations, but again this depends on the susceptibility of the victim's mental state. The vast majority of the time its hallucinatory influence is indistinct, from a faint shadow of something amiss to a frightening twist of logic, imagination, or memory. Most of the time the victim can still act reasonably within their circumstances up until they reach the point of disassociative fugue, where shortly ahead lies the bend of no return.
As a side effect, looking into The Magna Pater's Malocchio for too long can result in the victim's body becoming riddled with cancer at a later period in time, I.E developing prostate or skin cancer two years after the encounter. This is because prolonged exposure to its aberrant pneuma induces mutations in the victim's DNA. It takes roughly seven seconds of eye-to-eye contact (does not have to be constant) before the dormant cancer cells begin taking root.
It has been said that the eyes are the windows to the soul. Regardless of whether or not this is true, the eyes of the Magna Pater are moreso a two-way mirror, comparable to peering into the blackest depths of the self, far past the reach of conception wherein the distant terrors and whimsies of ancient memory, modern life, and hazy fantasy intermingle.
Fleeing through a steamy jungle, tropical flora bobbing as bare feet pound past, the blue sky flickering by, chased by an unseen predator, pulse racing, a tremor in the heart, a tingle of dread in the spine as it is realized, cover is an illusion and fleeing is futile.
Warm viscera wrenched from a still-heaving carcass by something much larger, much more powerful.
The sounds of traffic, of horns, the keening whine of an obligatory ambulance, a body still torn apart but this time on the road, not the floor of an uncanny jungle, intestines smeared into ocherous skidmarks by a tire and legs twisted with skin split at the seams. Always there is something larger, much more powerful...
Such is only the tip of a strand of conceptualized ultra-reality that could be glimpsed from a brief look into the Magna Pater's eyes during the Malocchio, lasting but a moment but feeling like a lifetime, representing an entire genetic history of condensed fear. In the face of such a thing, before the fact, one is compelled to look away. Such is why one is provided the strong, anomalous instinct to avoid the stare of the Magna Pater.
To some, this can prove a saving grace. To others, taking their eyes off the road presents a destination as of yet unimagined. As with all decisions in life, it depends. Such is the great and terrible capacity of the Malocchio, that of perception, that of creating one's solitary truth out of wild notion.
It is not uncommon for those who've made eye contact and lived to suffer from severe PTSD or age prematurely from the anxiety of the experience. As previously mentioned, many who gaze upon the monster as a whole may later develop shocks of white or gray hair, this being far more likely should they experience the Malocchio as well.
It's able to travel to any reality or dimension withholding a victim of the Malocchio, by way of entering through their subconscious and manifesting nearby and out of sight. It cannot use this to reach a victim it already shares a realm with. There's no escape once it has violated the sanctity of a victim's essence, for through the Malocchio it conceptualizes a victim's unique antipathy and, in a way, conjoins with their psyche. Just as you cannot flee from yourself, so is the lurid presence of the Magna Pater which, like fear itself, must be confronted before it can be overcome.
Those that are physically consumed by the Magna Pater whilst cursed by the Malocchio, although their sanity may be intact until the moment of death, will have their consciousness absorbed into the metaphysical innards of the God of the Lost, fated to writhe amidst a schizophrenic flux of debauched memories and nightmares everlasting.
~Dream Feelers:
The function of Magna Pater's feelers is to palpate dreams and taste the most intimate fears of its prey. When the feelers are extended it can perceive the dreams as well as the subconscious mind of every creature on the planet. The Magna Pater's range of actual influence may be limited to a thousand miles, but the concentration is in excess of planetary psychics. It can manipulate dreams, but the influence decreases the further one is from the Magna Pater. If a victim is cursed by the Malocchio, it increases the monster's effective range by a factor of ten, I.E one-thousand miles would become one hundred if the victim were cursed.
It cannot directly read minds through one's subconscious but it may perceive any recollections that are significantly joyful or traumatic, that is to say one's formative memories, as well as manifestations of deep rooted uncertainties and insecurities. This distressing faculty represents the favored domain of the Magna Pater, a cancerous entity who in essence personifies phobia, trauma, and the affliction of consciousness.
It is unable to discern the location of a physical being through their subconscious, however it may feel the indeterminate spatial relativity of one consciousness in approximation to others, thus enabling it to understand which minds are closer and which are further away. It would not know where or how far a cognizance is from itself, but it would be able to detect that it was nearer than a different cognizance.
When within a thousand miles it can only very slightly alter a dream, almost imperceptibly. At three-hundred miles it can turn a good dream into an uncomfortable one, or make an uncomfortable dream into a nightmare. When the target is within a hundred miles, the Magna Pater can easily cause nightmares and even night terrors, but can't entirely influence the contents of the nightmares or dictate exactly how they proceed. It can also wipe the memory of said dreams before the victim wakes up and ascertain with perfect precision when the victim will awaken. After months of continuous pestering, it can also impress early onset Alzheimer's and dementia onto victims at this range.
Within a few weeks of exposure at this range it may induce controlled narcolepsy in victims and impair their motor functions, as well as cause momentary lapses in judgement.
The Magna Pater is responsible for the majority of fatal road and industrial workplace incidents, having caused an indefinite number of meaningless deaths across the world, most of which are attributed as freak accidents. It's fond of suffusing premonitions of an awful death into the heads of its victims as they sleep, plaguing them with the notion of a self-fulfilling prophecy until they're on the verge of a nervous breakdown, before orchestrating them childlike in their helplessness to their ghastly end.
So it is that blue collar workers on a regular basis are mangled into statistics from afar by this perpetual motion machine of human tragedy.
When the Magna Pater is within thirty miles or closer, it can manipulate dreams entirely and force the unconscious victim to witness any scenario it desires. Unless the target has immensely potent and self sustaining mental defenses sufficient stop planetary-level psychics (psychics who can, in the least, influence minds from across the distance of a medium diameter planet), the nightmares may unequivocally result in the victim reverting into either a permanent vegetative state or violent lunacy, immediately losing their mind from fright as the Magna Pater fully claims them as a part of its transcendental nightmare. It may also inflict them with overnight Alzheimer's and dementia, entirely deteriorating their mental faculties over the course of a single dream.
Also it may directly assault a victim's subconscious at this distance, slowly coercing them into a waking dream wherein it causes severe disassociation. This can result in the separation from certain emotions, shifts in mood, depressing or influencing imagination to cause paranoia and self-doubt, difficulty concentrating, lapses in memory, vivid reminiscent and auditory hallucinations, and ego death.
The longer a victim is subjected to this subconscious attack, the more pronounced the effects are. From this it can be inferred that the Magna Pater is accountable for a myriad of schizophrenia cases and has largely contributed to the prevalence of mental illness in general, causing untold harm throughout history and the world.
A victim would immediately notice the effects from the moment the assault begins, though it wouldn't constitute a hinderance until approximately two minutes in, wherein the victim may begin to feel uneasy and uncertain. after five minutes they would begin to feel detached from their surroundings and emotions, and might begin either losing old memories or strongly recalling them. It would be difficult to focus, though still possible.
After ten minutes the effects become severe. Victims might begin losing their cognitive grasp, suffering intense negative emotions and detaching from positive ones. Memories would seem to phase in and out of being, simulating an intense breed of deja vu occurring with such potency it could feel as if the victim is reliving their past or a long forgotten dream, mistaking their current setting for another, misplacing their sense of self, or transitioning into an earlier self as if having lost their position in the spacetime of their life, only their base character and instincts left to guide them
Within the order of fifteen minutes the victim is likely to suffer ego death and/or fall deep into a full recollective hallucination. While this ability is extremely effective against the unwary, those of indomitable will, awareness, and focus can take up to twice as long to affect. That being said, when the Magna Pater is in a state of stasis its reach and potency is doubled, thus it can potentially negate many advantages of an exceptionally strong will and reduce weaker minds to gibbering, confused wrecks over several minutes.
Despite the reach and force of its ability, rather than induce mass psychosis and carve wide swaths of carnage and terror, it bides its time and deliberately focuses on the individual to isolate and macerate them on the most personal level possible. Each and every consciousness constitutes a reality unto itself to savor, even those already annexed by societal influence. If anything it considers minds unbalanced by bias as succulent as fresh fruit, for concepts and fears left unaddressed provide it with many points of leverage from which it may tip one's sanity to the brink.
It cannot directly read minds through one's subconscious but it may perceive any recollections that are significantly joyful or traumatic, that is to say one's formative memories, as well as manifestations of deep rooted uncertainties and insecurities. This distressing faculty represents the favored domain of the Magna Pater, a cancerous entity who in essence personifies phobia, trauma, and the affliction of consciousness.
It is unable to discern the location of a physical being through their subconscious, however it may feel the indeterminate spatial relativity of one consciousness in approximation to others, thus enabling it to understand which minds are closer and which are further away. It would not know where or how far a cognizance is from itself, but it would be able to detect that it was nearer than a different cognizance.
When within a thousand miles it can only very slightly alter a dream, almost imperceptibly. At three-hundred miles it can turn a good dream into an uncomfortable one, or make an uncomfortable dream into a nightmare. When the target is within a hundred miles, the Magna Pater can easily cause nightmares and even night terrors, but can't entirely influence the contents of the nightmares or dictate exactly how they proceed. It can also wipe the memory of said dreams before the victim wakes up and ascertain with perfect precision when the victim will awaken. After months of continuous pestering, it can also impress early onset Alzheimer's and dementia onto victims at this range.
Within a few weeks of exposure at this range it may induce controlled narcolepsy in victims and impair their motor functions, as well as cause momentary lapses in judgement.
The Magna Pater is responsible for the majority of fatal road and industrial workplace incidents, having caused an indefinite number of meaningless deaths across the world, most of which are attributed as freak accidents. It's fond of suffusing premonitions of an awful death into the heads of its victims as they sleep, plaguing them with the notion of a self-fulfilling prophecy until they're on the verge of a nervous breakdown, before orchestrating them childlike in their helplessness to their ghastly end.
So it is that blue collar workers on a regular basis are mangled into statistics from afar by this perpetual motion machine of human tragedy.
When the Magna Pater is within thirty miles or closer, it can manipulate dreams entirely and force the unconscious victim to witness any scenario it desires. Unless the target has immensely potent and self sustaining mental defenses sufficient stop planetary-level psychics (psychics who can, in the least, influence minds from across the distance of a medium diameter planet), the nightmares may unequivocally result in the victim reverting into either a permanent vegetative state or violent lunacy, immediately losing their mind from fright as the Magna Pater fully claims them as a part of its transcendental nightmare. It may also inflict them with overnight Alzheimer's and dementia, entirely deteriorating their mental faculties over the course of a single dream.
Also it may directly assault a victim's subconscious at this distance, slowly coercing them into a waking dream wherein it causes severe disassociation. This can result in the separation from certain emotions, shifts in mood, depressing or influencing imagination to cause paranoia and self-doubt, difficulty concentrating, lapses in memory, vivid reminiscent and auditory hallucinations, and ego death.
The longer a victim is subjected to this subconscious attack, the more pronounced the effects are. From this it can be inferred that the Magna Pater is accountable for a myriad of schizophrenia cases and has largely contributed to the prevalence of mental illness in general, causing untold harm throughout history and the world.
A victim would immediately notice the effects from the moment the assault begins, though it wouldn't constitute a hinderance until approximately two minutes in, wherein the victim may begin to feel uneasy and uncertain. after five minutes they would begin to feel detached from their surroundings and emotions, and might begin either losing old memories or strongly recalling them. It would be difficult to focus, though still possible.
After ten minutes the effects become severe. Victims might begin losing their cognitive grasp, suffering intense negative emotions and detaching from positive ones. Memories would seem to phase in and out of being, simulating an intense breed of deja vu occurring with such potency it could feel as if the victim is reliving their past or a long forgotten dream, mistaking their current setting for another, misplacing their sense of self, or transitioning into an earlier self as if having lost their position in the spacetime of their life, only their base character and instincts left to guide them
Within the order of fifteen minutes the victim is likely to suffer ego death and/or fall deep into a full recollective hallucination. While this ability is extremely effective against the unwary, those of indomitable will, awareness, and focus can take up to twice as long to affect. That being said, when the Magna Pater is in a state of stasis its reach and potency is doubled, thus it can potentially negate many advantages of an exceptionally strong will and reduce weaker minds to gibbering, confused wrecks over several minutes.
Despite the reach and force of its ability, rather than induce mass psychosis and carve wide swaths of carnage and terror, it bides its time and deliberately focuses on the individual to isolate and macerate them on the most personal level possible. Each and every consciousness constitutes a reality unto itself to savor, even those already annexed by societal influence. If anything it considers minds unbalanced by bias as succulent as fresh fruit, for concepts and fears left unaddressed provide it with many points of leverage from which it may tip one's sanity to the brink.
Theme:
Behavior: The Magna Pater is what slinks, obscured by shadow, through the minds of children of when the word 'monster' occurs to them for the first time in their life during dead of night. It is what makes newborn babies cry when they take that sensitive first breath and taste the grief-stricken reality this horror has burrowed into, a mango worm in our dog's hide of a world, a warning cast by nature itself in synchronicity with the presence of a lifeform within its midst that should never have existed. It's a parasite of the the human condition, an existential engine of dread and sorrow that glides silently through the black nether of conception.
It makes no noise, has no mercy, cannot be reasoned with, lives only to drain the blood, devour the flesh, and violate the essence of all living things it can bind within its greasy limbs. Despite its incalculable intelligence, it makes no attempt to genuinely communicate with victims. There is no desire for social interaction or personal expression, the monster constituting a life form beyond both concepts. If it does so choose to speak a word or phrase, it is with the incoherent language of dream-logic only made sense of by those detached from all waking reason, and submerged in the frightful arctic cold of an Epiphany ice hole.
It stalks all manner of prey and is particularly inclined to go out of its way to find toddlers and infants, to savage innocence itself, but it is also shy and despises the light. It prefers to remain in damp pitch-blackness, where no eyes may spy it and no natural light may fall upon it. Areas it has frequented for many years are imbued with a kind of negative fung shui. Homes it visits become known as haunted houses. A forest whose trees it has slipped between will achieve a reputation as a ruined land. Its lairs are moreso thickened with an underlying feeling of unreality, as if partly submerged in an eerie, malleable fantasy.
It frequently rapes and impregnates victims, keeping them alive until its malformed young are birthed in the form of countless elongated white maggots which finely swiss cheese the flesh of their mortal parent as they emerge from every pore and orifice. The Magna Pater eats both the victim and the offspring afterwards, doing these things not for food but to torment.
When it devours a cursed victim their consciousness remains forever corrupted and fused with the Magna Pater's, a demise that casts one into the boundless pit of one's own heart wherein time is replaced by perception, to behold the perfect nightmare for ever and ever.
The few who come into contact with it and live may never be the same as before, for above all else it is a creature of persistence, a malady made mobile. Even if one leaves the Magna Pater it'll never leave them. A variety of lifelong physical complications and psychological ailments stem from a meeting with it and it never stops hunting its prey, regardless of where they may flee. Additionally it will track down any living thing which leaves a scent on a victim. This leads to the Magna Pater consuming the families of those it hunts, along with anyone those families had come into recent physical contact with. Though one may travel often and abroad, once the it has has chosen a victim their meeting becomes fate. It could take days, weeks, months, even years, but eventually on some cold and moonless evening one will awaken to see a long, sticky face with dead eyes peering through their bedroom window.
History:
The Magna Pater is a reincarnating, primal monster representing the physical manifestation of an entity originating in and as a part of an eternal non-Euclidean nightmare bridging the boundaries of possibility, reality, and nonexistence. It takes the true form of a sentient nexus formed from the fever dreams of gods once dreaded, but now long forgotten, gods which have never been affiliated with a human realm. Imagination that outlived its creators, took root in itself as an unnatural conceptual paradox, and began infiltrating other universes like a quantum cancer. Its influence is subtle but strong. Even platonic concepts are susceptible to its infection.
The only factor limiting the creature's power is the strength of each universe's reality, defined by the potency of the residential dreamers and their perspectives. It has to follow the rules of a universe to gain access, and only then can begin slowly oozing between the lines with power gained from fear and pain, dissolving the barriers of notion keeping it from flooding in completely. It does so by initially taking on a physical form acceptable by the dimensional and natural laws present, albeit one made in calculation to submit all other lifeforms to its will as horrifically as possible. Through this physical presence it may gradually weaken the webbing keeping it out, its physical avatar altering mass perception bit by bit until the continuum breaks and it makes that reality its own, laying claim to every resident in mind, body, and soul.
The universe it found Earth in was different than any it had ever encountered. Humans, it soon learned, were special. Three dimensional animals on the cusp of the fifth dimension of possibility, governed by the fourth dimension of time, with such potential to learn yet still gain nothing. Humans became like catnip to it, with their unique self awareness and imagination. It concentrated most of its being into probing Earth, releasing its stranglehold on centillions of other realities in order to better feel and enjoy this prize.
As it turned out the monster was petty, its ambitions shallow. It grew to treasure the Earth, if only for the cruel pleasure it felt in bringing grief to the occupants. Each mind was its own microcosm of insecurities and negativity so satisfying, so complete, that the monster grew complacent, a hedonist of sadism which no longer sought to take even one more universe, not when it had found the perfect organisms to torture one at a time.
So, it became acquainted with mankind. The oldest literal translation of the creature's name, and the name of the nightmare (for it resides within itself) is that of the "Dreamfather". The ancients wisely avoided mention of its mortal titles in fear of drawing its acute attention from afar, instead referring to it as "The Sleeper of the Clandestine" or "The God of Lonely Places".
In Sumeria it was worshipped as an obscure and obscene deity to which countless sacrifices were made. Before the Seminole Wars it was dreaded by the Creek Indians, who gave it many names and forms as it was too wicked a thing to exist under any one description.
Miracles slowly died under its perverse aura and magic faded into fantasy. Even the most vile of supernatural beings balked at remaining on Earth with the Dreamfather made flesh, and the deities revered by early humans abandoned their native realms. Many tried to slay it over time, and now and then its terrestrial form did indeed die, but it was beyond the concept of finite.
In mortal death it can live again when one-hundred years of incubation within its true form has passed, though it can't retain the memories of its previous life, for in our universe birth means new life is created, not old life preserved. Only can the Magna Pater be permanently stopped if its pneuma, its true state of being, is destroyed. As in and of itself it exists as a self-made absolute transcending the abstract, the Magna Pater can be permanently slain in every capacity by a true and righteous heart striking it down with the passion of self sacrificing love.
Only a courageous warrior pure of spirit may end the nightmare once and for all. But such men are far and few between... So time passes, the world changes.
Blurry tales of the 'Traveling Hole' began to pop up in candlelit bedside yarns spun by superstitious housewives of the old country.
Out in vacant lots, under railways, through the boonies. Sometimes there are small caves or cracks only large enough to crawl through. Hidey holes, but it isn't usually people who hide in them. Cougars? Snakes? Yes, very often that's the case. But out there waits a different kind of animal.
There might be a hidey hole that wasn't there before, or isn't there anymore. A migrating hole. An opening to another place, a lonely place with a voice all its own. It's a tight squeeze but anyone will fit.
A soft wind churns out of the icy nether, a subterranean current that tousles the hair. It smells of mildew. One could hesitate, but the call of the secret is compelling. It knows you by name, beckons with fantastic mysteries. A lure, but not of the kind men set to catch fish. This lure pulls one down, not up.
The blue sky transitions into a black void. It is too snug to turn around. You can only back out, and all the while choose to either stare ahead or shut your eyes. To continue is to encounter a winding network, a sweating labyrinth of dolomite tunnels whose dimensions are identical to playhouse tubes. Some stretch for a hundred miles or more.
Each one leads to the same place, never back the way you came. The longer you remain in the tunnels, the more drunk you become. Your bearings fade, until there is naught but a dream of disorientation through which slip racing thoughts and memories, grasping for sense and finding only unease and confusion, a deep sea diver running on fumes.
The deeper you crawl, the more an oozing sweetness like that of a putrefying wound tints the air. The scent is not a physical thing, but scarce, indecipherable emotions. Echoes of anxiety so distant and dim they could've been mistaken for tricks of the imagination trickle along the damp walls. Perhaps sometimes the sounds are your own. Maybe not. Sooner or later, all will reach the end. For some it takes days, others minutes. The Lair takes many forms. A playroom, a cavern, a subway, a midnight forest.
At this point the muddled dream ends and what feels to be a sick hallucination born from a lucid fever begins.
The Sleeper of the Clandestine slumbers upon a towering butte of soggy bones, the bones of children, reigning over its decaying empire on a haphazard throne several thousand lives thick.
The dread form, glazed over with black corpse moss, starts moving for the first time that year. Like rusted clockwork gears, as a reptile out of the cold, it needs to wind up, warm up, shrug off the drowsiness of hibernation.
Bones can be heard rolling down the hill as the Sleeper stretches. It always moves slowly at first, even clumsily, taking its time. Trapped profoundly in a drugged animal haze of cold sweat, no loving green EXIT sign, no return to the waking world.
"Journeys end in lovers meeting."
-Shakespeare, Twelfth Night-
-Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House-
The Magna Pater's Arenas-
Cape Coral Canals
A labyrinthine network of waterways that've claimed an unusual number of victims over the years. From boat crashes to accidental drownings, to unexplained disappearances, more darkness than depth lies beneath the oily waters of the canals.
A labyrinthine network of waterways that've claimed an unusual number of victims over the years. From boat crashes to accidental drownings, to unexplained disappearances, more darkness than depth lies beneath the oily waters of the canals.
The Tubes
Garish plastic tubes in primary color pastels, as far as the eye can see, suspended over a limitless ball pit
Strange sucking sounds, a blind, heavy fumbling, something's coming closer through the balls, through the tubes. A dream of scrambling, creeping, sneaking, hiding, always moving. A new home.
Garish plastic tubes in primary color pastels, as far as the eye can see, suspended over a limitless ball pit
Strange sucking sounds, a blind, heavy fumbling, something's coming closer through the balls, through the tubes. A dream of scrambling, creeping, sneaking, hiding, always moving. A new home.