Tuesday, June 7, 2022

D12 Answers to the Question: How Does This Monster Perceive You?; Or: A Response to a Comment by Spwack on Another Post


1.
Imagine an ocean: full of colours, full of motion, full of life. Now imagine a mote of ice drifted into that ocean, and was freezing everything around it into its same dead stillness. The ocean is Chaos. The ice is Order. It, as a monster, is a thing of Chaos. You were born of Order, of higher powers' shaping, structuring, contextualizing, optimizing - and everything you touch comes away with the taint of that monadic web. The monster weeps as it claws out your guts. It damns itself to save its moral universe.

2. Inversely to your actual moral & aesthetic character - it's got a troll-shard stuck in its eye that makes it see fair as foul and foul as fair. Muddling sorts and worse could receive a warmer reception, or you could attempt to pluck the shard from its eye to cure it.

3. In the same way it perceives itself - as a swarm of atomistic meat-particles temporarily in proximity to each other due to emergent particulate behaviour. The spilling of blood and rending of limbs is thus no more meaningful to it than a gust of wind stirring up a pile of dust.

4. As an easy mark out of their depth in a resource-deprived environment. It rationalizes that at least it'll be nicer in conning you or preying on you than the next monster.

5. As an ancient, ancestral foe, with the both of you caught up in a crimson tide of a blood feud. Peace may be temporarily permitted if presented as a delay to build up forces, or to work against a mutual, worse enemy.

6. With a sensitivity to noise well beyond human capacity. Have you ever encountered someone who snorted, or yawned, or ate in an annoying way? To them, you're like that a hundred times over. The gurgling of your gut is an airhorn in their home. Your breathing and farting and sweating is audio-torture. Morally, they may not want to kill you - but you're making it so hard not to.

7. It sees time as a solid block, all moments existing at once, a totally-determined five-dimensional structure, with the two of you stuck within like hot dogs in aspic, twirling about each other in a dance that was always meant to be.

8. As a maddening ambiguity that pains it to even attempt to unravel or comprehend. In truth, you carry with you a cloud of surface-pollen and -spores, to which it is terribly allergic. This allergy causes its brain to swell and derange its thinking while you and your lingering traces are about.

9. To its infrared-sensing pits, used to the cold and darkness beneath the earth, you are a sunken sun, shining with hot-blooded incandescence. Its religion holds you to be the same. In its mind and in its sight, you are a god who has descended to sacrifice your light and life for the good of the world. You might fight, you may demure, you may flee, but by a thousand years of myth and history it knows the role you are fated to play.

10. As an intensely-demanded commodity, an ermine that just stumbled in front of a hunter. It's got nothing against you personally, but it could make a lot of money off you if it brings you back for processing.

11. As an agent of a foreign (yet still underworldly) enemy of theirs - your bumbling about a mere ruse to throw off the scent. Guilty of collaboration until proven innocent, by lash and thumb-screw and trial by fire.

12. Like a plate of sauce-slathered ribs to a starving man, you smell irresistibly delicious to it.

4 comments:

  1. This is a very gameable way of framing things.

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  2. There is a certain existential horror to some of these: a creature that by its very nature, its very mode of perception, has no choice but to destroy human beings. I almost prefer the idea of being just seem as food because at least you could probably feed it something else.

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  3. I'd love to see more. This is really genius.

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