Hypothetically, a swarm of bugs that uses illusions to pretend to be human?
I have seen that isekai before.
If you wanted a swarm though, you could always go swarm mother isekai’d and then just start popping out child soldiers by the hundreds.
The idea I had was for a single initial bug, that ‘assimilates’ other bugs it comes in contact with, with the limitation that once assimilated the bugs need to stay in range of the swarm or fall comatose. I’m somewhat partial to the idea of something as universally unnerving as a swarm of bugs figuring out magic because it wants friends.
That said, if I am limited to a single bug, as much as I love cockroaches, I think I’d have to go with a spider instead. That fits the best in my mind.
Have a big kitty. Hope you have a big yarn ready.
Will makes this pretty later, have errands and work and moar writing to do stillllll.
Age of Death: — Older than her cubs, younger than Mother
Gender: — Female
Race: — Ti'kari
Psychology: — Now and always, until the moment she is required not to be, she is a watcher. She observes. At times, she merely stalks; at times, she prowls close and prods, paws, speaks, asks. Anything to satiate the curiosity of a stranger in a strange land. Few are the things that scare her, the jungle sovereign, aware of her power, and not aware of yours. She fights not for fighting's sake, but if claws are to clash, she intends to outlive you and yours. She has a duty, be that she cannot remember it, cannot hear Mother here. But once she remembers, she will act, as sure as the sun rises.
⑇⑉What You Remember⑉⑈
[She who hunts]
All she remembers is the hunt.
The soil underneath her paws, the silence and the sounds both, as the jungle held its breath, and her prey did not. Air escaped it in ragged wheezes, tore from its throat as screams and shouts and terror shaped into words she did not understand. There were those that would, those alike her prey, skin on two legs, but they no longer breathed at all, for she'd caught them a moment prior. They lay upon the jungle floor in her wake, feeding the very life they had tried to take. As she ran, their blood, still warm on her paws, imprinted warnings in the duff; stay away, for you are not welcome here, you who are not of nature and do not obey its laws. You take more than you are given, you take when you do not need to take, and you take, and you take, and you take. The Mother has asked kindly - now, she demands.
There was one final scream, one final swing of a limb torn from a tree, shaped and shaved and made sharp by hands that wanted to take all. They would take no more.
⑴ A body; a weapon: her weapons were not forged in fire, not conjured by a vile humoid mind, that which dreams of war and death and conquest. They cannot be cast aside nor stolen from her, and even fear of death shall not make them tremble. They're Mother's gift to her and her kind, so that she may run, and hunt, and feed her young, and be not tamed by Them who come with cages. Fangs to break bone, claws to tear flesh, muscle to carry her, a predator, to you, the prey.
⑵ A passenger; watchful: she is not alone. She never has been, truly, surrounded by life as she was, wherever humoid had not yet tread. Her jungle, ancient, boundless, was alive in so many ways beyond the comprehension of none but Mother, and it is what made it home. But this is different. 'Tis a presence inside her, lurking underneath her skin, breathing and stirring and bleeding out where her stripes run, dormant, always, except when not. And when it wakes, she sleeps, and her dreams are not of nature.
⑇⑉What You Don’t ⑉⑈
[What you took was not yours to take, nor mine to give]
It had troubled her for a time by then, the pain in her shoulder. Pierced by the wooden beak of a humoid bird, the kind they let loose from wood and string, coated in black when it flew, then red when it struck. It had hurt, but she had been hurt before. Pain had not slowed her, so she'd pounced, and then the humoid had hurt worse. But briefly; always briefly, for a single beat of the heart, and no more.
When it did not go away, the pain, she lived with it, hunted with it, did not know it might fester, worse than anything had ever festered, in the jungle, in nature, under Mother's all-seeying eye. She did not see the signs because she could not look; the crawling up of new stripes, from shoulder to neck, to her head, to her skull, to her brain, to her mind. To what connected her to Mother and all her children, all that was.
It is not of nature to hate, even when one breathes their last. Death has walked with her since she first pounced upon an unsuspecting rodent, since her teeth first tore flesh. She has heard its whisper in the wind, as its taken away the fear of a felled boar, the pain of a deer in her claws. It has taken of her kind, too; a cub before its time, an elder calling for an end. One ought not fight it, the one enemy for whom strength means naught.
Yet, she did. And as she trashed, in pain, in fear, in agony, the dark descending upon her fast, too fast, not from the sky but from beneath her own skin, consuming her, she knew, and it made her angry. Whatever the humoids did, whatever manner of death they wrought, it was not the death of the old or the ailing, it was not the snap of a neck or the closing of tired eyes. It was devouring by a power unknown. It was consumption, as one consumes their prey, but from the inside, and for a time longer than a single beat. It was not of nature. And in fighting it, in fighting Death, she, too, was no longer of nature.
And so, she hated.
@TheMushroomLord
Everything looks good other than her skills being far too powerful for someone with minimal memory of their previous life. If your character had a spell book with hundreds of pages, they’ll be brought back with some rudimentary knowledge of magic and sparse memory of what was on a few pages.
In the sheet layout it says “ In detail, what does this memory teach your character about themselves, and below in the bullets list what skills these are expressed as. Players will begin with one memory, and as they progress they will accumulate more.”
You’ll gain more memories and knowledge as time goes on.
 N A M E : Unknown A G E O F D E A T H : Unknown R A C E : Human G E N D E R : N/A P S Y C H O L O G Y : They are full of wonder and fascination, hold an appreciation of life, but do not shy away from death. They are inclined to protect, help, and guide. Theirs is a duality: kind yet merciless, naive yet wise, patient yet decisive. | W H A T Y O U C A N R E M E M B E R : S E R V I N G G O D I N A G O D L E S S W O R L D  A realm of light, order, purity. Celestials, the symbols of constancy resided in a dimension which was paradoxically amorphous, ever-shifting, each iteration as brilliant as the other. Not one of them knew when they had been created, or how, or where their creator was. Yet all of them held the intrinsic understanding of their raison d’être. To uphold equilibrium, the foundation of existence, they did their part so the scales did not tip too far in either direction. In a world with no god nor archfiend waged an endless war between angels and demons. Good versus evil, light versus darkness, selflessness versus selfishness. Those were human terms, mortal attempts at understanding the sublime, unknowable design. Heavenly beings did not need to think, or to ponder, only to act. The diligent, timeless cogs in the grand wheel of space, time, and everything that was. They were just one such being, doing as was required. Dedication was a matter of course. Their utmost effort was expected, and they provided. As long as they did not stray from the charted course, all would be well. [1] Spectral wings. Once, they were able to traverse realms, and cross dimension within the blink of an eye. Residing in a fleshly shell, all they can muster now is to call upon a set of spiritual wings. For a short duration, the summoned appendages grant them flight. In those brief moments, they are imbued with a near-weightlessness, moving with the ease of one who was born to fly. [2] Light magic. A remnant of their divine powers, they can conjure light. It can be a gentle, calming glow as well as a burst of blinding, scorching heat. When wielded to injure, it can damage creatures corporeal or not. W H A T Y O U C A N ' T R E M E M B E R : T H E D E A T H O F A N I M M O R T A L An eon of fulfilling their duty, unflinchingly, unquestioningly, but by no means thoughtlessly. Somehow, somewhere along the line, the unthinkable happened. The perfect being who by their nature could not change – should not have been able to change – developed, grew. Something new formed in them. A feeling. Curiosity. As with all anomalies among the celestials, this deviancy was their undoing in the end. As with most such transgressions, it started with the tiniest of steps. A slight detour here, a benign moment of lingering there. Lending an ear to prayers instead of immediately offering them upon the altar of The One Who Was Gone. Taking the most infinitesimal peaks into the souls of the deceased before they were sent off on their journey to the afterlife. Step by step, without an inkling that what they were doing might be considered treasonous, they found themselves in too deep to stop before it was too late. Once, they did the one thing they should not have ever done. Once. They intervened on the behalf of a mortal, not from a vast distance realms apart, but directly. They answered a woman’s desperate call for help. As soon as their being interacted with hers, they came to a realization. Oh. It had been a ploy set up by demons. They, the masters of desire, had intuited a change, an opportunity. They had directed a stage play for their benefit. Well, it was a play only from the devils’ point of view. From the woman’s, it was a horrific, heart-wrenching reality, and she could not help but enact the given role of a maiden in distress. She had prayed and prayed, until her lips were chapped, until her throat cracked and bled, until her voice was lost, until her mind begun to fray, until there was an answer. Their timeless enemy had sensed their presence. They took the chance, and slew the woman the instance their soul came in contact with the woman’s. When that happened, the two were one, sharing all between each other. Just like humans weren’t meant to experience eternity for they would be driven mad by it, neither could an immortal bear the weight of a finite life perishing. It was overwhelming; the sensations, the grief, the guilt, the lost joys of past. As the woman died, so too did the angel expire. So, this was what death was like. Following that thought was a twofold regret. One, that their foolishness had cost their allies a valuable asset, which would shift the balance of their eternal war for a few centuries at least. Two, that the very moment of learning, the culmination of their change was so short lived. Gone and there before they could properly grasp it. Yet that moment had been as rich as hundreds of thousands of years of their stagnant existence. How would it have been had they more time?. For the first time, they experienced longing. Desire. Want. The wish to live. |
@Festive I never asked, so I hope you don't mind me stealing borrowing that code :P
N A M E :Unknown
A G E O F D E A T H :Unknown
R A C E :Human
G E N D E R :N/A
P S Y C H O L O G Y :They are full of wonder and fascination, hold an appreciation of life, but do not shy away from death. They are inclined to protect, help, and guide. Theirs is a duality: kind yet merciless, naive yet wise, patient yet decisive.W H A T Y O U C A N R E M E M B E R : S E R V I N G G O D I N A G O D L E S S W O R L DA realm of light, order, purity. Celestials, the symbols of constancy resided in a dimension which was paradoxically amorphous, ever-shifting, each iteration as brilliant as the other. Not one of them knew when they had been created, or how, or where their creator was. Yet all of them held the intrinsic understanding of their raison d’être. To uphold equilibrium, the foundation of existence, they did their part so the scales did not tip too far in either direction.
In a world with no god nor archfiend waged an endless war between angels and demons. Good versus evil, light versus darkness, selflessness versus selfishness. Those were human terms, mortal attempts at understanding the sublime, unknowable design. Heavenly beings did not need to think, or to ponder, only to act. The diligent, timeless cogs in the grand wheel of space, time, and everything that was.
They were just one such being, doing as was required. Dedication was a matter of course. Their utmost effort was expected, and they provided. As long as they did not stray from the charted course, all would be well.
[1] Spectral wings. Once, they were able to traverse realms, and cross dimension within the blink of an eye. Residing in a fleshly shell, all they can muster now is to call upon a set of spiritual wings. For a short duration, the summoned appendages grant them flight. In those brief moments, they are imbued with a near-weightlessness, moving with the ease of one who was born to fly.
[2] Light magic. A remnant of their divine powers, they can conjure light. It can be a gentle, calming glow as well as a burst of blinding, scorching heat. When wielded to injure, it can damage creatures corporeal or not.
W H A T Y O U C A N ' T R E M E M B E R :T H E D E A T H O F A N I M M O R T A LAn eon of fulfilling their duty, unflinchingly, unquestioningly, but by no means thoughtlessly. Somehow, somewhere along the line, the unthinkable happened. The perfect being who by their nature could not change – should not have been able to change – developed, grew. Something new formed in them. A feeling.
Curiosity.
As with all anomalies among the celestials, this deviancy was their undoing in the end. As with most such transgressions, it started with the tiniest of steps. A slight detour here, a benign moment of lingering there. Lending an ear to prayers instead of immediately offering them upon the altar of The One Who Was Gone. Taking the most infinitesimal peaks into the souls of the deceased before they were sent off on their journey to the afterlife.
Step by step, without an inkling that what they were doing might be considered treasonous, they found themselves in too deep to stop before it was too late. Once, they did the one thing they should not have ever done.
Once.
They intervened on the behalf of a mortal, not from a vast distance realms apart, but directly. They answered a woman’s desperate call for help. As soon as their being interacted with hers, they came to a realization.
Oh. It had been a ploy set up by demons. They, the masters of desire, had intuited a change, an opportunity. They had directed a stage play for their benefit. Well, it was a play only from the devils’ point of view. From the woman’s, it was a horrific, heart-wrenching reality, and she could not help but enact the given role of a maiden in distress. She had prayed and prayed, until her lips were chapped, until her throat cracked and bled, until her voice was lost, until her mind begun to fray, until there was an answer.
Their timeless enemy had sensed their presence. They took the chance, and slew the woman the instance their soul came in contact with the woman’s.
When that happened, the two were one, sharing all between each other.
Just like humans weren’t meant to experience eternity for they would be driven mad by it, neither could an immortal bear the weight of a finite life perishing. It was overwhelming; the sensations, the grief, the guilt, the lost joys of past.
As the woman died, so too did the angel expire.
So, this was what death was like.
Following that thought was a twofold regret.
One, that their foolishness had cost their allies a valuable asset, which would shift the balance of their eternal war for a few centuries at least.
Two, that the very moment of learning, the culmination of their change was so short lived. Gone and there before they could properly grasp it. Yet that moment had been as rich as hundreds of thousands of years of their stagnant existence. How would it have been had they more time?.
For the first time, they experienced longing. Desire. Want. The wish to live.
@TheMushroomLord
Much better, I typically don’t recommend putting all of your eggs into one basket but that’s dialed back enough for me.
