Heartworm
Avatar of Jvan - the Emancipator - Holiest Mangle - Skinstitch - Our Lord Mutilation 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.
Gristle and fat.
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.
