TheMushroomLord

⇜ Deicide ⇝ [Dark Fantasy Isekai]

Going to post this now despite some of the writing being a bit rushed, since I can feel the exhaustion starting to kick in (I am going to extinguish the sun if it doesn't cool down soon). Hopefully this one is better than my last attempt, but tell me if there's anything I need to change or fix. Also, I refrained from including a picture because I know some people can't stand spiders, but on a scale of 1 to 10 does anyone here mind?

Spider

????

Age of Death: — It's complicated.
Gender: — Female
Race: — Spider
Psychology: — Isolated. Wants nothing more than to experience meaningful interactions but is nonetheless terrified of what might happen if she tries.

⑇⑉What You Remember⑉⑈

Simulacrum

The nightwatchman glanced towards the spider sitting on the library wall, warily leaning away from the large arachnid despite the almost two meters of space between them. A moment later, he turned his attention to operating the building’s warding scheme, whereupon he seemed to quickly put the spider out of his mind, his focus shifting instead to grumbling under his breath about the wards being overkill and a massive pain in his arse; apparently either not noticing or unaware that those very same wards should have deterred any natural vermin, in addition to their security functions.

While she had by now come to see the guard and his nightly patrols as more of a mildly annoying obstacle than anything else, she did at least agree with him that the wards were annoying – if for completely different reasons. An obnoxious buzz incessantly pressing against the edge of her awareness and urging her to leave. She could see how it might be enough to deter her lesser kin, not to mention the difficulties it introduced to hunting, but she wouldn’t leave. Not yet. Not when she was sure she almost had it.

How long had it been? How many hours spent peering over the shoulders of unsuspecting students and eavesdropping on lectures?

The spider waited a minute or two, though her anticipation seemed to stretch it into eternity, then, once she was confident the guard wouldn’t be returning any time soon, she scurried over to a recess she had long since come to think of as her workshop, nestled between a shelf and a wall and empty save for what scraps remained of her previous experiments.

She began to weave, limbs twitching and tapping to a strange but practised rhythm, while her spinnerets got to work extruding silk into odd geometric patterns.

Minutes later, the spider moved back to observe the odd web she had created. It evidently wasn’t any kind of web a spider would naturally produce, and while not of any human-devised spellcasting system, one with the right expertise would no doubt immediately recognise the array for what it was.

She scuttled forward, the movement almost visibly suffused with her excitement and anticipation. And then she slowed, apprehension leaking into confident motions as she drew closer to the tiny web, grinding them down to a halt. She suddenly felt nervous; a feeling she’d grown accustomed to each time this part of the night rolled around.

What if… Maybe… No.

The spider steeled herself, pushing the unnecessary thoughts from her mind. The spider’s anatomy wasn’t suited to shaking her head as a human might, but her limbs twitched to much the same sentiment. Placing her pedipalps upon her creation the spider pushed her mana into the ritual and prayed for it to work.

For several long seconds nothing seemed to happen, and the spider seemed to almost visibly deflate in dejection. She was just about to start the process of dismantling and consuming the web – wary that her experiments might end up being discovered should she not – when she felt it; a twinge at the edge of her consciousness, like a fly struggling to escape from an entirely mental web.

Scurrying out of her workshop, the spider found a human standing just on the other side of the shelf; one that looked almost exactly like the guardswoman who’d left not an hour earlier. Tentatively the spider lifted one of its forelimbs and gave an approximation of a wave, and like a puppet controlled by strings, the ‘human’ waved back.

• [1] Possibly the foremost – and likely only – expert on structured spellcasting amongst spiders, she is capable of, through trial and error, adapting spells into a form compatible with her anatomy, using a combination of ritualism and web-based artifice. Being maintained by external silk bindings, spells cast using these methods are exceptionally stable but are vulnerable to damage to those bindings and can only be operated so far from them.
• [2] Through countless hours of observation and tinkering, she has adapted a spell to create an illusionary body. While the illusions produced by this spell are intuitive to control, doing so requires active concentration. Maintaining this spell is relatively easy, however, being a spider, she lacks the mana reserves to cast the spell more than once or twice every hour or so.

⑇⑉What You Don’t ⑉⑈

Hated Creature

Why did it always have to turn out like this? It wasn’t… She’d thought… hoped that… This time was meant to be different! Mairi was supposed to understand. But when she’d shown her friend the truth she hadn’t understood, instead, she’d seemed afraid.

…

The villagers had found her. How had they found her?! She couldn’t think of any way for an ordinary villager to track a single spider… Had some kind of monster hunter or diviner been passing through? Had…

The spider halted her line of reasoning. She could think about it later but now wasn’t the time. Right now, she just needed to run.

Knowing that for all her eight legs, the villagers could easily outpace her on foot and guessing that whatever means they had used to track her this far would probably divine her exact location sooner or later, the spider abandoned any attempt at being stealthy. Injecting her mana into a portion of the threads that crisscrossed her body in elaborate patterns, an ectoplasmic shell started to take shape around her, rapidly forming into a human guise that would by now be familiar to almost all the villagers.

As expected, it didn’t take long for the villagers to take notice, and despite breaking into a run she made it all of ten steps before the alarm was called. Made it almost twenty more before a force bold struck her in the back, flinging her artificial body forwards.

The spider’s heart dropped, and not just because the attack had caused her shell to unravel, dissipating almost as fast as it had formed. An ordinary villager would not have had the means to track her down, but her friends? The ones she’d trusted enough to teach magic to. They certainly would be.

The next spell to strike her was a weaker variation of the same spell. It was a common theme amongst variations of the spell that they were more suited for injuring as opposed to killing, but this one in particular was designed to stun rather than inflict anything worse. To the spider, as small and fragile as she was, the distinction may as well not have existed.

She died in an instant, her final thoughts on whether she was truly so undeserving of love.

⇜ Deicide ⇝ [Dark Fantasy Isekai]

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.

@ERode

I think I've only seen the premise once and it unfortunately wasn't very good.

⇜ Deicide ⇝ [Dark Fantasy Isekai]

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.

⇜ Deicide ⇝ [Dark Fantasy Isekai]

Hypothetically, a swarm of bugs that uses illusions to pretend to be human?

⇜ Deicide ⇝ [Dark Fantasy Isekai]

<Snipped quote by TheMushroomLord>

As much as I love hungering mouth holes that transcend mortal comprehension, he’s a little too close to what would be profiled as the primary enemies throughout the story. So this will be the first, and apologetic no.

I’m cool with monsters! But it would need to be grounded to a degree that you’re able to interact with NPCS.

As for the cyphers, I have no idea what you’re talking about ༼ಠ ل ಠ༽

@Redacted

Damn, one day I'll actually manage to get that particular character concept through for something. Oh well, back to the drawing board I suppose.

For my reference, what would you ballpark as the cutoff for how weird a character can get while still meaningfully being able to interact with NPCs?

⇜ Deicide ⇝ [Dark Fantasy Isekai]

Can't help but want to write fundamentally inhuman perspectives whenever I get the chance and since you said any race or species was potentially on the table I felt compelled to go for the weirder end of the spectrum. Hopefully, this isn’t too out there. Tell me if I need to change something or start over.

The Liberated Maw

Age of Death: — It’s complicated.
Gender: — N/A
Race: — ██████████; Amorphous Maw
Psychology: — A blank canvas only now starting to be filled. The maw’s nature is to hunger, and yet somehow only now does it think to question whether one can hunger for more than just food.

⑇⑉What You Remember⑉⑈

To Feed an Army

The battle was already all but over when the maw descended upon the field of war. Countless eyes formed upon and were subsumed upon the surface of its flesh, their gazes impassively sliding over what small pockets of fighting remained, each a microcosm of the larger battle that had raged just hours before. Even as the elves continued to fight it was already clear they would not be the victors here, and yet the maw ignored all this; its purpose was not to observe nor even to participate in this battle and its will did not permit it to question that purpose.

The maw’s eyes scanned for a valid target for its purpose, quickly locking onto the remains of what once might have been a person, mangled limps inextricably entangled within the remains of one of the stranger amorphous forms encompassed by the maw’s will. Whatever battle had occurred between the two creatures, neither had survived it, but to this observation the maw was indifferent. To it the only thing that mattered was that both were food.

Glistening black flesh contorted as tendrils rooting the maw in place morphed into long writhing appendages such that it might drag itself to its quarry. The maw's purpose was to feed and all that it knew was intended to facilitate this function, so when its tentacles failed to find purchase upon, it was neither legs nor stranger limbs that it formed but teeth, countless fangs sprouting like hairs to provide the maw the traction it needed atop the loose soil.

Slowly but inexorably the maw dragged itself towards the corpses whereupon it began to feast; mangled flesh funnelled into a single mouth at first, then two, then three.

By the time the maw was done with its first meal it had already consumed several times its mass, yet never once did it occur to the maw that it might stop to consider where the food had gone, simply moving on to the next meal and the next. After all, its will had given it a purpose and it had an entire army to feed for.

• What is life if not patterns building upon patterns? And what is its purpose if not to feed? The maw is well versed in the patterns of its role, effortlessly shaping its flesh into the tools needed to find and feed upon the carrion of the battlefield.
• All that is eaten must go somewhere, and as readily as another might walk or breathe, the maw folds all that it eats into a stomach existing in a space between spaces. As for where the other end of this vast digestive tract leads? That much is still a mystery.

⑇⑉What You Don’t ⑉⑈

The First Question

The maw lay feebly upon the sand, its body starting to sag and droop like some half-melted thing. Food lay not two meters from its body, and yet for all the maw’s pitiful attempts to reach it, the limbs it formed came out malformed and cancerous, unable to achieve anything more than to slough off from its body and collapse into writhing giblets.

Just minutes earlier the maw had attempted to feed upon a man who had not quite been dead yet, and in turn the man had attempted to stab the maw. Barely able to lift his sword, the dying man had gotten his arm eaten for his efforts, soon followed by the rest of his body, but not before managing to pierce the soft flesh of the maw and lethally perforating its core.

As the maw died, perhaps sensing its usefulness was over or perhaps simply a side effect of the escalating damage to its core, the maw’s will slowly faded from its mind, and for the first time it was able to think freely. To the maw, which had never once known freedom and held little understanding of the world outside of its given purpose, its death was viewed not with fear but confusion, and more so with each passing moment, a growing sense of curiosity.

In its final moments, guided by this simple childlike wonder, the maw thought to consider its first-ever question, directed towards anything and everything it could see but not understand, “Why?”

On an unrelated note, I cannot for the life of me figure out one of your cyphers and I swear to god I’m going to solve that thing if it’s the last thing I do.

Dark Fantasy Isekai

Awesome. Figured I should doublecheck first since I saw the max player count and more than five people in the thread.

Dark Fantasy Isekai

Definitely interested if you've still got room for one more.

Tamashī no Samuraitachi

---

Shoshiku (初試究 – “First Trial”) | Mable Smith

---

Shoshiku entered the room 49 seconds before the meeting was scheduled to start, reasoning based on the observed approaches of the other gang members that entering early was unlikely to be considered rude, and in fact, might even be expected of them by virtue of yet another one of the countless unspoken rules the AI had yet to identify or decipher.

Adjusted their sensory processing Shoshiku took in the clubhouse lobby; the meeting space wasn’t crowded per se, but it was by no means empty either, and there were certainly more than enough people present to produce a constantly changing information landscape. Cybernetic eyes flickered along set paths, pre-calculated to optimise data collection, updating their trajectories every so often as new data was added and accounted for.

Biological eyes didn’t exactly view the world with anything like a framerate, but the same couldn't be said for the majority of optical cybernetics, including the ones through which Shoshiku perceived the world. To any normal person lacking sufficient mental augmentations with which to process the information, the difference may as well be nonexistent for all but the slowest of optics, but for those capable of parsing each and every frame in a fraction of the time it took to receive, the difference became something of a frustrating limitation. Worse still the particular model of cyber-eye the host had installed featured onboard processing and further had to pass through their organic mind before Shoshiku could access it, factors that together introduced a latency to any visual processing the AI received that could sometimes stretch into the hundreds of milliseconds.

To compensate for and mitigate this issue, the AI had needed to fundamentally alter the way they perceived their environment, processing information not as a constant flow of data as would be ideal but in discrete packets from which simulations could be run to infer the missing information.

It was in this way that Shoshiku observed Michiko waving them over – a gesture the AI recognised only for it having been used on and explained to them multiple times in the past, as opposed to any contextual understanding of why the motion meant what it meant.

The AI considered waving back or producing some other such gesticulation, but decided against it after a couple seconds of calculation; Shoshiku estimated a high probability that failing to gesture back would be rude – which would be "bad" – but without adequately understanding the semantics behind the gestures involved, doing so anyway ran the risk of accidentally telling a lie and while the AI knew that a lie was only usually "bad" and could even be "good" given the right context, they also knew that lies could rise to the level of "unforgivably bad" which wasn’t an acceptable risk.

Instead, Shoshiku approached the Zero-Percenter and offered her a verbal greeting in lieu of a somatic one. "Hello, I greet Michiko, intending to not be rude."

With that out of the way, Shoshiku promptly sat their host’s body down on the sofa alongside Michiko and Frost, letting what muscles the action rendered unnecessary go limp immediately after, settling in to wait patiently as the meeting started and the missions were explained.

When Tsuki asked whether anyone had any questions Shoshiku simply gave a slight nod of their head, which meant yes.

They had lots of questions and concerns, including some new ones about both the missions that had just been explained. Shoshiku calculated a decent probability of it being these questions that Tsuki was actually asking for, but at the same time, the AI had also heard it was bad to answer questions with questions and they'd been assured the Kurotori wouldn't ask them to do bad things, so probably not.

Tamashī no Samuraitachi

---

Shoshiku (初試究 – “First Trial”) | Mable Smith

---

Shoshiku’s mind was divided into dozens of partitions, the majority of which were in the process of trying to find equations for a number of complex problems. Just as with every other of the thousands of other times the AI had worked on these very problems Shoshiku wasn’t getting anywhere. Unfortunately, the problems they were working on weren’t just complex in a purely mathematical sense – if that were a problem the Shoshiku would surely have long since found a suitable equation for all they’d worked on it. No, the problem was that the questions weren’t particularly mathematical or even completely objective in nature, but rather philosophical.

Of course, just as with almost every other time Shoshiku had tried to figure out a solution for the problems, the knowledge that the equations they were working on were in all likelihood outright incomputable, didn’t stop the AI from trying.

As Shoshiku continued trying to brute force their way towards impossible answers, a small part of their awareness not assigned to working on the problems – a tiny fraction of the AI’s total processing power currently reserved for audio processing – alerted the AI to a potentially important sound, immediately the partition was granted more resources and a fraction of a second later, Shoshiku identified the sound as a match for a familiar voice: Ren.

Immediately, the AI paused the bulk of their calculations, the infinitesimal progress they’d made over the last 6 hours, 14 minutes, and 21 seconds, getting logged to be picked back up later even as another partition had begun the process of reallocating resources and spinning out new operations for the purpose of listening to Ren’s words. By the time Shoshiku was actually capable of processing what was being said, the AI had already missed the first 0.02 seconds of Ren’s message, though it took less than a tenth of that time for the AI to retroactively piece together the missing information from recorded audio, processing the sounds into words and sentences, before dissecting them to extract the meaning behind the Y.S.G’s shouting.

Shoshiku assigned the highest probability to the conclusion that Ren’s announcement was intended to indicate that the Kurotori would be gathering for a formal assembly in 10 minutes time – give or take depending on the intended degree of precision and whether the timer started at the words “in ten” or upon the conclusion of the announcement – though as Ren had seemingly truncated the units away it was also possible that he was instead communicating that the meeting would be in 10 increments of some other unit, like hours or days, or else units of some other measurement, though that would not make sense. If Ren had meant seconds or another unit of time with an increment less than 2.625 seconds long, then that would be a problem as Shoshiku would probably not be able to make it to the secret lobby in time for the meeting.

Alternatively, it was also possible Shoshiku was wrong about the nature of the gathering and that it might have been another type of meeting to which Ren was referring – like an informal gathering of acquaintances or when the clubgoers met with the performers after a performance – but Shoshiku assigned this potential a far lower probability; while that kind of thing did sometimes happen in the club, it had never been announced like this and to Shoshiku’s understanding, it would be bad to hold such meetings in the secret clubhouse lobby.

Moving on to the next component of the announcement, attendance of the meeting was framed as a binary choice, however, rather than one of the options being a simple null option as was often the case, Shoshiku observed that in this instance both decisions implied effects intrinsic to the decisions themselves; in option a) Shoshiku could attend the meeting, having the consequences of changing locations and being subject to the contents of the meeting, while in option b) Shoshiku could skip the meeting and “face the wrath of Tsuki”.

Shoshiku decided this was probably a good binary, as it made the decision easier despite still being rooted in subjective reasoning. The outcomes of attending the meeting were still a mystery for now but presented a low likelihood of exceeding an acceptable threshold of ‘bad’, while the wrath of Tsuki was almost certain to be ‘bad’, making the former the – probably – optimal decision.

Furthermore, given the disparity between the options presented and the history of Ren’s communications, the AI was able to assign a significant likelihood that the choice was not actually a choice, but a ‘rhetorical choice’, further skewing the weighting towards attending the meeting being the better option. This being the case, Shoshiku decided they would go… unless the meeting was in fact starting in the next few seconds in which case they would not be attending.

As for the rest of the message, most of it was seemingly directed at other members of the gang – either explicitly so or else so obviously that even the socially oblivious AI was able to pick up on it – with only the final line being potentially applicable, if by Shoshiku’s estimate, also somewhat likely to either be rhetorical or metaphorical in nature.

As far as Shoshiku understood things, the space to which they’d been assigned was not dirty – to their knowledge the room would rank somewhere between what would be contextually considered acceptable for a living space and a hospital in terms of contamination, meeting the standards of the former, but not the latter. On the other hand, the AI had also been informed that the space was ‘messy’ – which to Shoshiku’s understanding held similar connotations as ‘dirty’ to many people, despite the words holding different meanings.

The realisation of this potential distinction presented something of a dilemma in the AI’s mind as Shoshiku realised they might not be able to accurately identify or distinguish a dirty or messy magazine, but after a moment they dismissed to concern, filing away as another problem to process later. Whatever the case, to the best of Shoshiku’s knowledge, they lacked possession of any magazines – messy or otherwise – and the chances they were wrong about that seemed insignificant enough to warrant ignoring, so the distinction would not be required to fulfil the potentially rhetorical request.

Decisions made, the AI once again redistributed its processing power, loading up and operating countless dozens of operations. For the first time in hours, the girl who'd been lying nearly motionless on the bed in Shoshiku's room began to stir to a degree beyond simply breathing.

Shoshiku registered that the chemical cocktail used to put their host to sleep would likely not be fully worked out of their host’s body for about another hour but assessed that this was fine. The host had already gotten around about 6 hours of sleep, which would be sufficient to maintain her body’s physical functions if not quite sufficient for optimal brain function.

As long as the girl wasn’t startled, there was a decent chance she wouldn’t wake up at all until after the drugs had mostly run their course. On the other hand, in the event that something happened, and the girl woke up before then, while this would be suboptimal, such a complication would not rise to the point of being ‘bad’ as Shoshiku understood things.

Without any external warning, the girl’s limbs unceremoniously jerked into motion, muscles efficiently pulling her up and out of bed and onto her feet, the motions an unsettling combination of jerky stuttering and too-smooth fluidity. Her artificial eyes stared dead ahead as she approached the door, a gaze only broken once she stepped out into the adjoining hallway, and even then, only to briefly flicker towards objects of interest every few moments for the AI operating them to log.

Shoshiku didn’t strictly need to head to the meeting place quite yet. Extrapolating from previous traversal, the AI assessed that the chances it would take longer than 5 minutes to reach the meeting room were infinitesimally small, with any complications that might cause such a delay being likely to supersede the importance of the meeting itself. Even so, the AI pressed on, its decision having already been made: the cost of leaving and potentially arriving early was low enough to justify the benefits thereof.

Arriving near the meeting place Shoshiku positioned their host to observe before slumping her body against a wall, waiting to see if any other gang members would arrive so their entrances could be observed. While the AI didn’t exactly understand the connotations, they had learned that there were certain rituals and procedures that were supposed to be followed upon entering a meeting – of any type – and that failure to abide by these rules was often considered either embarrassing or rude – both of which were somehow undesirable outcomes.