Slush Pile 9

Previously, on slush piles:

Slush Pile 1

Slush Pile 2

Slush Pile 3

Slush Pile 4

Slush Pile 5

Slush Pile 6

Slush Pile 7

Slush Pile 8

Sci-fi concept: "Commiserators" are paid to share customers' worst memories, suffer & empathize with them

Agnatic, adjective, related on the father's side - Agnathic, adjective, jawless - Agnathic kinship, the custom of the lamprey-men

A rabbit's paw, taken for luck - so lucky, in fact, that the rabbit lived on within the paw, regrowing its body teratomatically from the stump, inflicting accidents of horrible and exceptional luck on those near it

"the landslide that the travelers encounter at the beginning of Inferno 12 is a “ruina”: ruine are caused by Christ’s Harrowing of Hell, they function as Christological signposts scattered throughout the infernal landscape"
-https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/

Life-size wind-up dolls jitter into stalking pursuit and killing strikes for a few, mantis-quick moments - then, fist-wide moths hover down from the ceiling beams to turn their keys once more

People squatting in a squalid room, surrounded by stacked books of poetry - a few have empty eye sockets, scorched black to the bone, babbling nonsense - the others read to them, hoping to bridge the language required to describe what they saw

Science news - planet Theia buried within the Earth, also there's more water than there is in the ocean down there - hollow world confirmed
-sweltering geothermal fern-forests, ferns spore-like evolved into fungoid forms, dwarf-dinosaurs preyed on by gigantic Theian lifeforms

A conspiracy to murder the imagination

Anthrobots - made of human tissues - why human? druidic nature worship & degradation of sacred Man, probably

A necklace - lapis lazuli-shelled ammonite with gold wire-tentacles straining around its wearer's throat

Painting was invented by cyclopses - many, many years for perspective to be invented - the native land of the image is the flat plane

Urban haruspexy - divination through a city's guts

Assuming mountains are petrified giant tree stumps - where'd the rest of the wood go? What properties might these titanic vegetative ancestors have had - if they were truly vegetative at all (emergent sap-thoughts trickling through the xylem and phloem of the cambium)? Could their wood have been made into the beams that now support the unsustainable growth of the expanding Earth?

Variant of tarot used for communication with aliens - combining ambiguous yet dense symbolic, numerical, and temporo-spatial arrangements of archetypal sense-images

Yuppie furbabyism develops breed of dog nigh-indistinguishable from human children

Neo-furniture developed along the principles of the weighted blanket, the standing desk: the chair that sits on you, comfortably realigning your spine rather than providing a slacking support

"Ethical" riot control - porno-limbic laser streams insta-coom infoverload through your eye and into your brain

Dragons as the apex reptiles - cold-bloodedness conquered with inner fire - what then apex mammals? Fish? Etc., combining the greatest strengths of their kind and overcoming weakness

OK so it's a zoo but instead of exotic animals it's got clones of celebrity prets with instagram accounts
+ instead of physically being there it's a VR thing with drones noisily buzzing around the enclosures

Superhero setting: There's these engines at the poles that measure the mass and velocity of the Earth and make adjustments to each to make sure all the matter and energy conjured out of another dimension or out of the ether by superhumans doesn't throw the Earth out of its orbit

The grace-eater, who in opposite to the sin-eater damns the dead rather than salving them

Man who plucked a star out of the sky and replaced an eye with it, setting that eye in the star's heavenly place

Benzo-drug produced by gut bacteria (real science) - crops sprayed with engineered gut biome microfauna to narco-pacify populations from within

OK so it's those goats from a while back that the scientists were splicing with spider DNA to lactate silk for next-gen body armour but somone made cheese from it and now people are eating the cheese and becoming goat-man-spider hybrids

Zombies - a fear of conformity, asismilation, consumerism - their opposite? - mad scientists - the fear of exceptional genius set apart from "the herd" / the social contract

Fantasy crop - citrus fruit cultivated to be pretty much entirely an oil-heavy rind - cuisine of cultures that cultivate this crop have intense sour flavour disfavourable to outsiders (who the cultivators racistly refer to as "puckerlips" and suchlike)
-ultra-spicy peppers cultivated as chemical weapons - ditto cashews for poison
-little terrestrial hermit crabs that use pistachios and acorns for their shells

Fire giants, azers, and other such heat-resistant sorts likely introduce new forms of forging - reaching into the fire and incandescent metal with bare hands - perhaps pattern-forging by folding the metal like origami

Alien organism with "teeth" of salt or suchlike, produces such osmotic pressure as to rupture their prey from within when punctured

Moose are scary, there should be more moose monsters - at least a moose monster - camels too, to a lesser extent - like a camel with long hard humps that walks swaying side to side and it can swing its humps like flails

Some snakes never stop growing throughout their lives - some lobsters too I think - near future, gene stuff pans out better than AI, people injected with snake/lobster genes with heads cut off and set on life support, fed data and zapped until their gross giant brains output sage decisions

Life is fire, fire is life: https://youtube.com/watch?v=_GLb0s-FfZU&t=7s&pp=ygUXd2h5IG9ubHkgZWFydGggaGFzIGZpcmU%3D

Static is the electrical form of the tiger, lying latent to pounce (what?) - ambush predator variant of the usually-blatant lightning elemental, hides within solid matter, sensible only by hairs standing up near it

Modern horror funnel scenario: characters are porch pirates who stole the wrong package from the wrong household, package was necronomicon or somesuch, very cursed & difficult to get rid of, agents pursue them with horrid fate intended

The wicked trinity: the world, the flesh, and the devil

Re-proliferation of dialects, slang, etc., in response to AI wordslop, censorship, universal surveillance, deliberate becoming-unintelligible - unalive retromerk, deeprave skib ups the lam - perhaps abandoning spoken/written/otherwise electronically-replicable language entirely for in-person sign language

Pigs rapidly become feral in the wilderness - bigger, hairier, more aggressive - pigspliced people thriving in the breaking-down borders of industrial civilization, able to assimilate into barbarity or fade back into urban cores, bio-guerillas

Technomartyr cyborcas released by Greenpeace in opening move of war across all oceans

Monster that looks like a giant eye floatie, refracts light into attacks, demands attention, its own image reproduced endlessly in works of art

Books are carefully folded forests
Void of autumn
Bound from the sun
―Saul Williams

Demons possess like prions fold, pattern passing over living substance and making it killing matter

The Eld-Mare, the original ocean from
which all others flowed, now only a ghost drunk with ancient dead

Like cold branding changes the fur which grows atop it, culture which domesticates giant insects figures out way to carve their shells such that the carvings remain through molts - ruins littered with decorated husks, guarded by a now-titanic centipede or scorpion or somesuch with the faces of long-dead rulers stretched to monstrous distortion across the beast's bulk

You can make charcoal by putting wood in a microwave. That's kind of cool right?

(Twitter): modern dystopian sci-fi bad because people just lapse into pastiche of nazi germany & soviet union, or just reference other fiction, rather than understanding & extrapolating society as it actually, currently exists - Children of Men good, because it's the modern day but enworsened

Law-Chaos alignment somewhere between political and magnetic polarization / both at the same time, a force in a cosmos wherein physics are simultaneously expressions of ideas and vice-versa... a sufficiently strong expression of Law or Chaos gives rise to its opposite, balance of nature-which-is-intellect-which-is-nature
-referring back to above flat-plane-painting idea - the plane is an actual D&D plane, the skin/veil of the astral, cosmic ink/pigment seeping through the planar canvas to make perceptible forms for the entities of pure abstraction pressing in from beneath/beyond

Emissaries of the Interior Rakshasanates have their fingers broken and bent backwards to resemble their masters. They are of course attended to by mobs of lesser functionaries who perform every task an emissary might've needed hands for.

Ozempic & gene-editing lead to birth of "Fat" as a culture (compare/contrast with "Deaf" in the wake of the hearing aid) - aquahumanoid truefats return to the seas, hunted by skinny beautiful whalers for the coagulated microplastic pearls in their flesh

Basilisk image - pattern which hacks brain through eyes, visual cortex
-Basilisk fragrance, roots into the amygdala and hippocampus through your nose, traps you in memory or forces confabulation

Terra preta, but it's the other kind of preta

Cursed sauna, melts those within - the weaker melt first, are sloshed onto the hot stones, the vapours of their vitality inhaled by the remainder

Word Corner
Utamaddanu - Yemeni, to "become citified", to reach a level of participating in a sophisticated, assimilated fashion in urban social life
Perse - Of a very deep shade of blue or purple
Fossick - To search for something amongst other things, to look for gold or valuable stones, especially in places where these things were once dug from the ground
Apocatastasis - The restoration of creation to a condition of perfection
Hapax Legomenon - A term of which only one instance of use is recorded
Xoanon - A primitive image of a god, carved, especially originally, in wood, and supposed to have fallen from heaven
Bosky - Wooded; covered by trees or bushes
Putuponesian - think this was in Finnegan's Wake
Baprouzie - I don't have a names section in this slush pile but if I did Baprouzie would be in it - here's another one: Lysao Soad - Tol Gabrais
Quillon - The guard of a sword or other bladed weapon designed to protect the hand from harm
Hypnopompic - Relating to the state immediately before waking up
Tonus - The constant low-level activity of a body tissue, especially muscle tone
Chifir - An exceptionally strong tea, associated with and brewed in Soviet and post-Soviet detention facilities such as gulags and prisons
Peradventure - Perhaps/uncertainty or doubt as to whether something is the case
Ratiocination - Reflection on the ratio, the sum of experiences common to normal minds
Moire - Silk fabric that has been subjected to heat and pressure rollers after weaving to give it a rippled appearance, having a rippled, lustrous finish
Charivari - Also shivaree, chivaree, skimmington, was a European and North American folk custom designed to shame a member of the community, in which a mock parade was staged through the settlement accompanied by a discordant mock serenade
Jowlobby - A name in search of a monster, oft confused with the Jabberwocky
Phyllotaxis - The botanical study of mathematical patterns found in stems, leaves, and seeds
Chirognomy - The study of the hand in order to discern a person's nature or future events
Sellsoul - A mercenary warlock
Brume - Mist/fog
Esker - Also called eskar, eschar, os, asar, osar, or serpent kame, a long, winding ridge of stratified sand and gravel, examples of which occur in glaciated and formerly glaciated regions of Europe and North America. Eskers are frequently several kilometres long and, because of their uniform shape, look like railway embankments.
Entablature - A horizontal, continuous lintel on a classical building supported by columns or a wall, comprising the architrave, frieze, and cornice
Chifforobe - Also chiffarobe or chifferobe, is a closet-like piece of furniture that combines a long space for hanging clothes (that is, a wardrobe or armoire) with a chest of drawers. Typically the wardrobe section runs down one side of the piece, while the drawers occupy the other side. It may have two enclosing doors or have the drawer fronts exposed and a separate door for the hanging space
Worrigal - A large, ferocious dog / a lion-like cryptid
Muskeg - A North American swamp or bog consisting of a mixture of water and partly dead vegetation, frequently covered by a layer of sphagnum or other mosses
Algobloom - Like an algal bloom, but it's digital content on the internet instead of algae, choking out alternative products/works/ideas - the first AI boom was a real algobloom, companies gutting their human workforce for much cheaper yet infinitely less-competent language models - some of these companies still exist, as ghosts or echoes, surviving fully virtually in some backroom server sustained by scams and forgotten subscriptions