Wednesday, January 16, 2008

An Odd Creature.

This office gives up. Now, for something entirely different.

I will describe a creature to you. It is not humanoid - this being a primary concern of its creation - rather existing in a shape best compared to the naga - with a snake-like lower body, and a torso that bends backwards to seat the upwards-facing, heavily armoured head. (The top of the body is actually a really good place to put the head, for anything that depends on sight. The eyes need to go there, because that's by far the best vantage point, and then the brain really needs to go there too so that reaction time can be high enough. (Probably.)) Were this creature dependent on smell, or taste, its head might be elsewhere; but it is not.

The creature's main method of manipulating its environment - to kill, eat, etc. - is through its grasping arm/tentacle. It has one only, on its right side (though there are uncommon, left-armed mutants, perhaps 4% of the population), the main body of which comprises a five-foot long grasping tentacle, roughly a foot thick at its middle point. (All proportions are given for the adult.) This arm is fractal - in its middle, two smaller arms fork off at forty-five degree angles, each two-and-a-half feet long and half a foot wide at its middle. These are equivalent to human arms for many purposes, being of similar dimensions. From these each sprout two smaller tentacles - very large hands, perhaps - which sprout two more, very small tentacles - fingers, of sorts - from which sprout little grasping hooks.


The creatures evolved with such a heavily armoured, upward-facing cranium because all their enemies attack from above. A sort of bat-analogue, with long, raking talons, that tended to strike from above was this particular species' bane, though they became one of the first to die out when the species developed tool-making skills. (Spear beats talon.)

I have little more to say of it, for the moment, than this: surely, it needs a name. Perhaps the Infiniciliate? I invite suggestions.

1 comment:

Kelsey said...

That is awesomely original! The name is usually given by the first people to discover the thing, so to know its name, we'd need to know the demographic of these people.