Stormsheep and Mantis Shrimp

Stormsheep and Mantis Shrimp
http://falsemachine.blogspot.com/2013/01/stormsheep- and- mantis- shrimp.html January 21, 2013
Stormsheep (Fulgeroids)
Imagine the tangle of glass left in sand when lightning strikes.
Now imagine it moving, squirming and birthing itself

out of the granular quartz. Stretching like a deer foal
and picking its way on spindly tubular limbs. Migrating
somewhere under the earth.
Now imagine walking through an underground
nightmare for a month then hearing, up ahead, the
sound of a party in a wine bar. The plinking and
tumbling of glass. Mutterings. A kind of vague ultra-
high-pitch whine like a mosquito in a jam jar. You turn a
corner, look down, and there they are. Spindles and
bulbs of rippling processioning beaker-ware. Glass-
marked in primary for the taint in sand that made their
flesh.
The Stormsheep are blobs and twists of living glass
with startling synthetic-bright shades within. They
flock in fractal patterns, migrating carefully, touching
the wall.
Miners hunt them for the ore-scent pulling them to metal as it winds its veins beneath the earth.
They gather in herds around the slight twists of silver and iron that root down from the
mountaintop. And, sometimes, around thick and silicised waters. They are waiting for a storm to
summon lightning from below.
Lightning strikes up, not down. Watch it in slow motion and you'll see. Zeus was a target. This
planet is a battery. The storm makes negative one sky-bound pole and electrons1 rampage in a
flicker up out of the iron heart of the earth. On its passage it collects spiritual, magical and physical
impressions and leaves these written in the glass of the Stormsheep before the air absorbs its
pure distilled remains.
They are a kind of detrius, but do not know this.
Each one has a sort of memory map inside, made
of the lightnings path as it burrowed up out of the
slow epochal magma storms, seeking the sky
above. A genetic vertical geography encoded in an
instant. It may be this recall that makes them seek
out the deeps.
They follow lines of electric conduction, when the
strike occurs above they taste it with their glassy
limbs. It fills them with electricity and geospiritual
calm, this makes them less dangerous.
If you find the Stormsheep hungry, they will sense
the electricity and memories inside your head and,
in famine-struck madness, attempt to feed. The
use of metal weapons is not advised. Metal armour will reverse or invert your AC. Don't get wet.
The glass limbs need not touch you, they can summon forth the electrical impulse within you from
a foot away. The corpuscles in your arterial blood spin madly on their axis. Each one becomes a
tiny generator. Veinous blood is safe, the iron is dull in its cells.
Stormsheep summon electricity from your flesh. (When they attack, you roll to hit, use your CON
modifier, add their HD bonus. If you hit, electricity leaps from your flesh, connecting with its
outstretched limb. It burns you and sends you into stroke-spasms.)
If they get close enough to touch they will try to eat the electrical memories in your brain and
spine. This will kill, or mind-blank you. It poisons them. Stormsheep that eat human thoughts
stagger, crazed and maddened like cows with CJD. So by defending yourself you are also
protecting them. There is no way to explain this to them.
If you meet sated Fulgeroids, happy and fat, things will be different. They will gather in weird
neuronal constellations in the dark. Exchanging silica dreams with thick blue twig-shaped sparks.
The blue electrical charges sputtering amidst them hum and pulse in cryptic configurations. Sages
read the crackling magnoglyphs to discover secrets. The conditions are dangerous and uncertain.
Sages often need protection, from the Sheep, and from whatever else wants those secrets kept.
Each Fulgeroid carries inside it, coloured by metallic taints, a map of the path the lightning took
that made it. This 3D tangle of shades shows unknown route not trod by man. If you can work out
where it fits in the endless warrens of night. This makes Stormsheep bodies quite potentially
valuable. They are difficult to retrieve whole, as the creatures splinter on all but a critical killing
blow, but the corpses have been known to show the way to secret treasures and hidden lands.
For this reason they are sometimes guarded by hidden Knotsmen.
1- Whatever the fuck they are, I've never seen a clear explanation.
Mantis Shrimp
This predatory amphibious leopard-

sized shrimp usually draws no benefit
from it's invisible flesh. That's why it
hunts the sighted.
The shrimp descends from tiny
translucent ancestors that lost their
pigment in the dark. Not just the skin,
but the flesh inside went blank. Holding
in your hands a bowl, full of water, with
the shrimp inside, you shine a light. All
you see is the misty shadow of the
beast on the bowl bottom, the creature
itself is nearly invisible.
It's larger cousin uses the same
transparent flesh to gain a brutal
advantage against light-bearing prey. It can't be
seen. Only the shadow on the cave wall, like the
shadow of glass on a dining table. (Triangulate your
lanterns.)
Sighted prey is rare underground, but there are just
enough functioning eyeballs down here for the
shrimp to carve out a small evolutionary niche as an
ambush predator.
It tracks the party underwater, following the
glimmers of their lights caught in the surface flow.
Waits, observes, then pounces on the weakest,
dragging its catch into the black.
The Mantis Shrimp likes killing. This isn't just about
food. It's the only shrimp anywhere near the top of
a food chain and it kills for fun and pleasure when it
can. Bodies have been found in parts, with i will cut your penis of f ...
extremities removed and scattered, or piled in
delicate heaps as territory marks. A pile of wet
fingers or nibbled ears on a prominent rock can mark its hunting ground.

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Stormsheep and Mantis Shrimp

http://falsemachine.blogspot.com/2013/01/stormsheep- and- mantis- shrimp.html January 21, 2013

Now imagine it moving, squirming and birthing itself

This predatory amphibious leopard-

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