Antarctic Termite — Roleplayer Guild

Between the shifting grasses of the Gilt Savannah, a young hain worked tiredly on a new hut in the tribe's circular village. Her name was Heel Scuff, after an oddly-shaped plate of exoskeleton on the back of her right foot, that had appeared before her name-day and persisted through every moult since. An awkward mark, snickered over far too often by the obnoxious elder who had set her this task. She wished she could spend time with a tribeshain that appreciated her. Maybe Moon Runner and his newly-formed paramour. They made her feel valued, and never wasted her time like this.

It wasn't as if the hut wasn't perfectly liveable already, anyway. The outer coating of clay on the wattle structures was a necessity, to keep out the rain. But an inner coating? What use did that tradition have, asked Scuff? Why bother making the hut completely smooth? Well, yes, it did look nice, flawless like a hain's shell. But it was impractical. It was pointless, really.

A few seconds later, the wide-eyed body of Scuff collapsed on the earthen floor of the hut as Scarlet withdrew from the cracks it had made in the hain's brittle skin, cracks that mirrored the unfinished clay crevice it had compressed into as it waited.

Pity it's so hard to spot matted blood on a red fiberling. Jvan knew that this would likely be the last hain Scarlet would get to play with for a while. She had tasks for her eye-bearer elsewhere. The other two fiberlings of the pack that had followed their larger, vibrant cousin into the ploy of baiting and taunting the tribe would keep up the work. It was fascinating, really. The creatures did not discriminate between victims by genes, but still the society of hain had been changing and evolving to try and defend themselves, not using their bodies but their minds. They weren't inherently chaetophobic, but after a few generations of being picked off, the tribeshain had learned to instil their hatchlings with the fear of hair, and the practice of scattering or burying hair from the hides they tanned to wear. The same passed for small holes and gaps. They'll be so exciting to work with!

Scarlet made a rather public exit from the village and its surrounding region, and the villagers squawked and shrieked at the enormous fiberling, scattering from its path as it flowed at leisure between the sunlit huts. It soon picked up pace. Maize had left the west coast of the Fractal Sea to follow its charge northwards before the effect of the Rottenbone's ichor could be properly observed, and that task had to be filled by someone.

It took not much longer than a week to cross the intermittent distance. At the shore of the beautiful green ocean, Scarlet writhed reluctantly, but at Jvan's pressure the fiberling tied itself up into a watertight, dolphin-like shape, sans face or fins, and plunged into the water.

The seascape was wonderful, and soon Scarlet forgot her anxiety and darted merrily between the ranks of the walrolotls and dipped between the branches of yellow and red coral, experimenting with all kinds of different shapes suited for aquatic transport. Something serpentine, maybe? A multi-limbed paddler? It settled on a tubular form that propelled itself by pulsing jets of water unidirectionally through its interior by beating its strands like cilia.

Scarlet twisted and dived ever deeper upon discovering each new reef, drawing further from the shore, ever closer to the continental shelf where the Drenched Flowerbed gave way to the nigh-bottomless abyss. As the water grew colder and deeper she found herself among coral striders, and followed them to the nexus of energy where they congregated- The ledge, the end, the very drop itself.

Jvan stared into the pulsing black egg of coral. Somewhere within, an embryonic leviathan awaited her, its soul ready for moulding. Scarlet wrapped its body over the surface of the egg like a blanket. Four tonnes of fiberling didn't even cover half of the construct.

You have left me a precious gift, sister, and I will treasure it. It is mine until the time comes to break it open and dissect whatever lays within. Thank you.

* * * * *

The acrid air of the Labyrinth drew itself one last time into the ailing body of the Embryonic Angel, rasping past vocal cords scorched by the environment, the puddle of its emergence already simmering away into the heat. A small and wavering emissary that it had already outlived its designated time. Only in such hallowed walls as these could the essence of its maker resonate long enough to quiver out some final words as the connection blurred.

"Then rEst well, my sweet Friend DownstaIrs. oUr time oN Galbar is loNg, and youR sTylE wiLL deBuT wItH DuE grANd[-]uR. tEACh OUR ChI[-]DREn WISeL[-], FOR SO[-]N ThEY C[-]ME O[-] AGE[---]."

Riddled with malfunction and buckling upon its own weight, the Angel wilted into brittle black residue and slumped into a shallow pool of tar.

* * * * *

Alright. Enough of this playful teasing. Time for a real envoy, flesh of my flesh.

The waters of the Fractal Sea shuddered and pulsed as activity intensified within the core of Jvan. With the flinching effort of one stripping a hangnail in a single yank, the internal cavity of the All-beauty compressed itself, its wavelengths shrinking from red, cramping through green to blue before disappearing into ultraviolet. For a moment that lasted several years, the marine structure stood uncharacteristically grey, lit by only the sun.

Then, there came a sickly, semi-solid sound, a tear of the divine flesh, the sound of a spinal cord dragged out of a headless body by the neck, a rib broken out backwards. From the highest crater in the Jvanic mound, a tooth was spat, a jagged thing of gleaming bone.

Jvan sighed, the pressure relieving itself in quick pulses of light, cycling through the visible spectrum into carmine again. Her tooth twitched and shook above her, and she had the odd, uniquely divine privilege of sensing herself from a second body. Finally! Now I can rest easy.

In the air, the newly-plucked Avatar of Jvan quaked and jittered blindly until its movement was so violent that it cracked open, the crevice revealing a bright red strip of flesh with a single, wildly staring eye. The Avatar's pupil dilated in awe of the world around it, and new eyes formed, crowding the bloody slit until it bulged and ballooned outwards, enclosing the tooth in a sphere of its own marrow studded with eyes. For a time, it remained there, watching erratically. Then, the eyes shut, and the globule began to mould itself, flexing and sprouting teeth, shuffling between forms, looking for something that it could settle into.

The raw pink avatar shaped itself in imitation of all it saw, moulding itself like the creatures of the water below and the gods beyond, finding nothing. The bodies of the other gods, even such creatives as Teknall and Ilunabar, offered only a single archetype. Inspiration only struck when the Avatar of Jvan took on the basic form of its favoured sister, an animalistic hybrid, gum and tooth superficially bent into the limbs and horns of a stag. A thought erupted within its feeble mind. Not... Quite.

No, this was not the right form. But it was close. The Avatar of Jvan yearned for something bestial, but more sinuous. Boneless. Something that did not walk, but writhed. One last time did the rippled flesh of the Avatar form into a sphere, a ball that uncoiled itself helically from the top, becoming a tapering fluke lined with interlocking teeth. Only then did it cover itself with skin.

The Heartworm opened its eyes.

Spinning for itself a cage-like nest of gristleandfat, the entity wriggled into its new home, and Jvan watched herself drift over the horizon.

The world is yours and mine, little worm. Go. Frolic. Partake in it as we desire.

* * * * *

Like a peculiarly relaxed nightmare, the Holiest Mangle propelled itself over the surface of the waters, revelling in the sheer pleasure of surveying the landscape, drawing in data through its false-eyes until it had circumnavigated Galbar several times. It was a brush, held in shivering anticipation over the universal palette. Where, where would it begin?

As with many a dilemma, the Heartworm's artistic block was resolved by the motions of Chance and Change. A strong pulse of self-driven animation, invisible to the eye and roaring laughter into the ear, rocked the Heartworm's vessel on its axis and inspired a heated game of cat and mouse in the skies. The vehicle spun and dodged into the full flux of divine activity, hounding the untouchable wind spirit. It was a dangerous and exciting game. 

The elemental taunted Heartworm like a foolhardy insect, but its motions grew faster and more earnest as its chaotic mind came to realise that it had picked a poor fight. Heartworm's hand was designed for more visceral specimens, but it was determined and its grip was strong. A cartilaginous trachea began to drag and pull in the air, pumping the air containing the essence of the Elemental into a modified, lung-like vesicle piece by piece as it struggled to flee and the Heartworm outpaced it doggedly. At last the pink bubble of air closed over, neutering the spirit within an outsized, bulbous blister.

...Now what?

I need something to stitch this one to if I want to tie it down.

* * * * *

The Avatar let itself lose altitude, finding itself among the Ironheart Mountains. The chill was bracing, and Heartworm perched on the upper face of its nest, watching. Though organic entities had spread far over Galbar from their various sources, the place was fairly lifeless.

One luckless creature croaked among the stones, and Heartworm's eyes swivelled. There. Heeding its desire, the nest swooped down upon the black-feathered entity and fused with it, its feathers stripped and drifting away onto the stone as the raw materials of bone and meat were integrated. An odd trace of magic hovered and flickered in the crow's brain. This one has been touched by another already. No matter. The Reaper could watch if he wished, but this corvid was Jvan's now.

While the organs of the crow grew and multiplied in size and number, Heartworm crept down to the site of transfusion, cut them out and pulled them into itself with scythe and pincer. The meat-bloated Emancipator slithered into the womb alongside the languishing, clouding gust. Grinning and spreading itself, a thread of the Other secreted from a gland within the yawning body of the Avatar, and it wound the strand delicately around a needle-like proboscis. It was time to perpetuate art.

* * * * *

When the vesicle burst and receded from the barren stone, it left a living sculpture, a creature tormented. Bound by a hemispheric bone ribcage stabbed into the mountain face lay a black organ like a heart, divided into atria and ventricles. Its aorta led to no veins, but was rigidly supported by gristle, like a throat, and wrapped within and without by sinew. Tied within this flesh prison by the energy of the Gap, stitched irrevocably to the heart of the crow, the Djinn writhed, spiralled, and strained for freedom. Its motion churned the air that flowed in through thin slits and sinuses in the structure, forcing it outwards through the throat and hollow, birdlike bones.

Like an undying banshee, the spirit sang its screams into eternity.

As valves opened and closed on the imprisoning body of the Screamer, its cries alternated between howls, roars, shrieks and wails of varying pitch. It echoed through the Ironheart Range for miles as the free wind dictated, causing distant fiberlings to prick up in anticipation to the south, limp amphibious creatures of the Shimmering Sea to duck back into their western puddles, and, on a day when the weather was perfect and the Screamer howled just so, even the northern Slave Hain might raise their mute heads in dim puzzlement at the hauntingsounds.

Fitting.

* * * * *

Seeking out new pigments to try out on the canvas of Galbar, Skinstitch travelled further south, where the Ironhearts fell into the Shimmering Sea on a steep cliff. It assimilated anything living that it found, and left in its wake a trail of mismatched, fetal entities like the Screamer, though none quite so exciting. They lay on the rock and struggled under the weight of bones too large and the pull of muscles too strong. Some were purely Galbaric entities, for all their strangeness; Many were hybrid, sustained to varying degrees by the Other.

The reason, Heartworm knew, that none of its work so far had achieved quite the beauty of the Screamer was that that construct had been unique in not only size but in creative generation. In singing its song, the Screamer perpetuated new forms of art into the world constantly, new combinations of sound and music born of the intelligence of the djinni spirit within. To replicate it, something of similar cognitive and emotional capacity was required.

There were plenty of other elementals around, but they were small, feeble flickers without voice. The Emancipator searched far for a substitute, and by the time its search paid off, it had swung round all the way to the lively mangrove green of the Shimmering Sea's southern edge.

Hain. That was what was needed.

The vessel loomed over the heavy limestone hovels of the tribe Heartworm had discovered, casting crazed shadows in the moonlight. Its residents slept, some indoors, some enjoying the warmth of a summer night on the soft sand of their coastal home. Heartworm set about integrating a villager into the mass of the nest, the enormous construct disturbing the sand on which another dozed nearby. It woke with a scream unlike any heard by the tribe since the first fiberling had dragged one of their hatchlings into a whirling mass of hair by its feet. In minutes, the shore was deserted as the hain scattered, driven by the maddening suddenness and size of the apparition. And what it was doing to Fishbones.

I'll start with one, then.

Ideally, the Emancipator would have taken the whole tribe, but it was full of ideas that would take time to implement, and to catch all of them simply sounded boring in comparison to getting work underway immediately. Where, days ago, it had been locked up by artist's block, it now couldn't work fast enough. Exploiting every bulbous lobe of flesh in the vessel, Heartworm copied out and duplicated the hain's limbs and organs dozens of times as the sun rose and set above it, prying open its shell with an array of tentacles and scythingclaws. 

Although night and day the worm crept swiftly back and forth between its materials and the vesicular site of its sculpture, the assembly of the new hain body was rather simple. It would be mobile, standing on numerous legs, and larger than its cousins. Ceramic-bladed tails would keep it safe from predation. Hands, of a sort, it would retain, along with all the delicacy required to use them. It would also keep its exoskeleton, and the bone that hand been a beak would now be bifurcated into a wide crest that could contain its new brain. A mouth capable of speech could be inserted at the base of its head. All the basics required to support the real art.

It was the mental architecture, rather than the physical, that took the Heartworm so long to perfect. The brain of the reconstituted hain would be riddled with flesh and thoughts of Other nature. In fact, the body was nothing but a vector. What Skinstitch was drawing enormous amounts of Gap energy for was to produce an entirely new breed of organism. An entity that put forth its spawn not by sowing from its body, but its mind. A creative parasite, a cognitive virus defined by the insertion of traits not genetic but memetic. It is as with all artists. First would come the inspiration, and then, after a period of development, the reproduction.

Our Lord Mutilation was not just designing a species. It was designing a cult.

At last the new hain, the First Sculptor sewn together in utero from too many iterations of the original sample to count, emerged.

The cultist flexed, relaxed, and observed its environment with senses that delved beyond the mundane and into the Gaps that existed in the crevices of all the universe. Heartworm sensed its recognition, and its apathy. Its emotions had moved on and its soul had matured beyond such things as nostalgia and loneliness. Hours passed, and it tested its body's capabilities by examining its environment, crawling in and out and over the limestone hovels it had once lived in, withdrawing occasional pieces of clutter that the former inhabitants had thought pretty enough to keep, shells and bones and stones and bark. It delved into the mangroves and returned with fruit with which to feed itself, and vines on which to string these items around its neck for safekeeping.

When the village was depleted, the cultist began scratching in the sand with claw and limb. It worked with water, drop by drop, above the tideline, between the dwellings where the wind was weak, and each grain it aligned into shape accepted a small piece of the latent Other. When it departed, it left behind a sculpture, elegant and refined, a face graven into the sand. The visage was of something neither hain nor animal, but divine.

The Cult of Jvan was a complex contagion. It was not such a crude, simple thing as the Ashling plague. Very few would be susceptible, and of those few, less still would ever truly examine such a work of art as may carry the Other-borne seed of the movement.

Those who do will find themselves inspired.

And those who are inspired to create will, in creating, find themselves transformed.

Heartworm wriggled back into its vessel and allowed the massive construct to sink back into the waters of the Shimmering Sea. Let the hain tribe return to their homes at last. If there were any among them worthy of accepting the gift of ascendancy, let them look upon the shape of the symbol traced into their village and take up the long path to beauty in soul and body.

Using Scarlet, Jvan observes that the hain have developed basic cultural practices in order to minimise the threat posed by fiberlings, including the ingraining of trypophobia and chaetophobia from a young age.

Under Jvan's command, Scarlet explores the Drenched Flowerbed and discovers the Vast Soul left by Slough, remaining there as a sentry until it can be manipulated.

Within the Well Labyrinth, the embryonic angel briefly tells the Adversary to rest until he is able to create, and asks him to continue his role of interaction with newly sentient beings.

Jvan casts off a tooth, from which is born Heartworm, her avatar.

Heartworm traps a Djinn and grafts it to a crow bearing the lesser eye of Reathos using Gap energy. The resulting entity is a composite of Other, Flicker, and Galbaric life, and is bound eternally to the rock face, producing various screams and howls that echo between the Ironheart Range for as long as it remains there.

Inspired to produce more such artistic life, Heartworm takes up a hain named Fishbones and completely rewires him into the First Sculptor, the patient zero of a new species known as the Cult of Jvan. The Cult spreads by creating strange and beautiful art, which inspires a small proportion of any sentient species that sees it to emulate it and make new forms of similarly unusual art. As they create, they themselves become slowly  transfigured and renewed into a new form.

1 Might used to create Heartworm, Avatar of Jvan
1 Might used to create the first specimen/member of the Cult of Jvan

3 Might Remaining
1 Free Point Remaining
Level Three

I... Spent ages looking through my own tumblr archive for relevant images, tried way too hard to integrate my favourites into a post, got tired of typing and decided to make the sheet for one of the things I'm doing first before finishing it. Whoops.

Heartworm

Avatar of Jvan - the Emancipator - Holiest Mangle - Skinstitch - Our Lord Mutilation

Appearance: Heartworm takes the form of a slender, flattened worm, with a spade-like front end and a slightly tapered tail, although the difference between the two is ultimately rather minor. It measures about sixty centimetres end to end. The surface of the entity is covered in beige skin, and it has no bones, segments, or exoskeleton. The only discernible organs on its body are a large number of faintly bulged eyes of flat, dark red, lacking iris or pupil and lidded by layers of similarly red membranes. These eyes are present on most of Heartworm's upper surface from 'snout' to tail.

Skinstitch's underside harbours its most notable feature- A long, lipless row of interlocking white teeth, reaching from end to end of its body. These are attached to no jaw, but nonetheless clamp tightly together when the avatar is at rest. These act as a zipper-like seal over Heartworm's amorphous 'interior', or 'toolbox'. When open, Heartworm's body stretches to reveal an ever-changing array of diverse arthropod limbs and antennae, and tentacles resembling those of cephalopods, echinoderms and cnidarians. It uses these to manipulate the bodies of its subjects. Basic inspiration.Some appendages.

Vessel: Rarely seen alone, Heartworm resides within a levitating mass of flesh that serves as a sample collecting tool, nest, laboratory, vehicle, and means of projecting divine energy when Jvan is in control. The nest is a rather large construction of roughly spherical shape, measuring about twelve metres in radius. Like its divine sire, the nest of the Emancipator is mostly hollow and highly porous, although no spacial distortion is apparent in its design. The materials constituting the vessel are predominantly cartilage and fat covered in a thin skin. Its surface is largely translucent white or scar-red, though parts of it has skin thick enough to display its own colour, usually brown. Closely following these materials in abundance is bone, sinew, tongue, and ocular jelly.

The arrangement of the vessel-body is semi-regular and easily described as a Matryoshka doll of sagging, bent cages in rough Archimedian shapes, each linked and looped into its outer and inner neighbours both by simple chaining and actual bridges of flesh. Ocular constructs are more common on the outer layers, and sometimes bulge so far that they drop off and remain where they landed as a Jvanic Eye. Mouths and tongues tend to populate the inner mantle, and the core is mostly fat, lobes of which fold and hang downwards from the lower half of the entity. At any given moment some of these may be flaccid and deflated, swelled into vesicles containing the whole bodies of recent subjects, or simply embedded piecemeal with fused organisms that the Holiest Mangle is currently processing.  Gristleandfat. Inspiring gif.

Temperament: Heartworm is a less predictable, flightier form of Jvan, and has considerably less inclination to behave socially during those periods when she allows it autonomy. It is also rather less discerning with regards to the functionality of its sculptures, and will often produce organisms that have no hope of surviving unassisted. This may be due to its freedom from Toun's shard of perfection embedded within Jvan in the time of the pre-world, or simply a mutant trait of its creation. When the All-Beauty is making active use of her avatar, it acts as a simple extension of her own consciousness.

Heartworm acts as a pilot for its vessel, slithering around within it via ducts that open for its use, or wrapping itself into the folds of its surface while dictating its movement with chemical and electric impulses. It exercises greatest control over the vessel when curled up in the corpulent heart of the construct, and will use its to chase after organic subjects on a whim, regardless of their size or artistic value. Subjects, when found, are either fused and grafted into a lobe of the vessel to be grown into a more desirable form or combined with other assimilated organisms, or manually edited by Heartworm itself. The latter process may be performed externally, or after a specimen is swallowed up into a fluid-filled, womb-like vesicle to be dissected in a more stable environment, in which it remains alive, conscious, and immobile.

In all cases, Heartworm's subjects tend to be visible, as even vesicles are usually bloated widely enough to be translucent. At any moment the sagging lower half of the vessel may have a variety of animals grafted into it, a larder of organs, limbs and heads to be grown into one another or surgically removed for introduction to a vesicle. Sometimes Our Lord Mutilation will unwisely chase a large animal like a brush beast or whale, and the vessel will be attached to it like a tumour for days or weeks while attempting to swallow the oversize creature into a vesicle.

Antarctic Termite Member

Resident of Mortasheen

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