#limb types

Do NOT Amalgamate. Kill any who attempt.

While the Ascendant and Abstract breathe the natural power of life and arcana, these beings breathe fear and pain, they seek it out, they gorge upon it.

“No ‘species’ of yet that we’ve identified, each unique in its function, forme, and derangements. The category is built of twisted life who would disdain and disgrace every other. The most violent and vile, like a nightmare come crawl up from the depths. Some function in a more physical brutality, dragging creatures of all persuasions into their burning dens and rending every ounce of sweat and blind stress from their prey before consuming them alive, often from the edges inwards. Their strange magic keeping the poor wretch’s heart beating long past the point of natural failure. All suffering they drink in, and then the corpse, and then they make more of themselves.

Sometimes directly, a skinless arm twisting out of their abdomen, teeth sprouting as new armor from their back, their prey incorporated alive-in a manner of speaking. Or else they save up energy, over several kills, and they leave a disgusting little orb of viscera in a piping hot thermal vent. The scent of rot and frying flesh means that there’s an egg, and that you should go back the way you came.”

The first course of action upon encountering is to run, leave any who are downed and if a limb of yours gets fluid contact, either get accessed by an Officer within the first 12 hours or remove it yourself and give it unto the Guards. Should nearby Descendant even be suspected, contact local Queensguard immediately. Specialized crews or hunters of a certain quality will be dispatched to sort out the issue. Do not hunt them on your own, even for vengeance. You’ll just be more fodder for their ranks.

Our one singular solace is that they do not enjoy waterworks or the cooler temperatures, and will seclude themselves to the deeper magmic caverns by choice. All known brood sites have been long sealed and are monitored by remote sigils. Any areas with tunnels reaching above 121 C are immediately tagged and will be investigated by a heat-tolerant surveyor crew. Unlucky bastards.

“It is a strange instinct, to classify and approach all manner of life and beyond, in how best you can break them apart and make use of them.”

If the mages can manipulate a strange and unseen energy, what we call magic, then these beings are powered entirely by it. No spines or venous systems, no blood or hearts just a strange power pumping through their impossible, curving veins. They are energy incarnate, and one day soon we’ll figure out how to use them.

Surveyors have found depictions of the same Ascendant formes in deeper caverns than any outposts have inhabited within record. Some believe this implies a pre-cathedral religion, perhaps even pre-fall. Or maybe it’s just one of these freaks depicting themselves.

Regardless, these formes are the rarest in the depths, only a handful ever noted of each ‘species’. Absurdly powerful but they all choose to flee long before ever attacking, if we give them the chance to run. Amalgamation of their bodies is rarely attempted, though those in the black markets will buy up even rumored parts for great prices just to try.

“I have tried the taste of them, just once. I observed a scuffle between two kindred forms, hid away from the blasts of strange magic and skimmed the wreckage afterwards. I found what I think was a finger of sorts. It went to my half-gone pointer with a bastard (but well tested) stamp and I fell into a strange, sparking fever for days on end, before begging my brother to strike off the whole arm. It’s still in a box by my bed, the whole arm odd-twisted and translucent now. It holds no touch of rot, no sign of decay for the decade now it’s spent in there.”

All types of these carry companions with them, little orbing lights that flutter along and aid them when we attack, healing or taking blows. Perhaps others of their kind, the most numerous beasts assisting the rarer ones, each other species of this category whittled down to a vanishing few…

All creatures of this category once subdued, dead or alive, legally must be turned over to the nearest Queensguard outpost as fast as possible. So the category may be studied and better understood… In fact, there is a specific team of hunters in employ from the Capital, sent to hunt and harvest any they can find, well these beasts and another kind…

We can craft ourselves new perfect pieces, did you know that? So much simpler than sewing together fleshy castoffs to make a single cohesive limb. Such room for creativity, such impossible reach; their crafting can be simple and pure as spinning a pot out of clay, or as beautiful and laborious as carving veins out of marble.

“You can build yourself now, a piece made of kinder minerals, learn to love all crystal and earth that’s not the one tearing you apart-well you can’t build it yourself of course, we have the Craftsfolk for that”

It began with creatures that crawled up from the mines, animated so thoroughly with magics we had never before glimpsed in the world above. No veins, hardly any internal systems, but still functional formes. Creatures of many shapes and locomotions, some malleable as mud, and oh how we wanted those limbs. Bodies once thought impossible, of smoking coal, crystal, hooked hagstone or even lava, somehow they live and somehow now, we can become them.

Even more of a learning curve than the plants, no xylem or phloem, no cells at all, direct nerve to spell contact, maintained for all life, drawing from your own personal energy.

The greatest scientific advancement of this past century, instant power for those whom cannot comfortably hold magic. A shockwave in your wrist, three drills within your ankle, an arsenal hidden perfectly behind a thin golden veil. The ideal limbs for a surveyor, a fighter, a surgeon; the highest Queensguard built up to be walking tanks. With a shiny enough outer cover they are the new favorite of the capital folk, though they more often forgo the options of weaponry for simple hidden lighters or cubbies for your coke. It hardly matters that you lost your limb from Calcar or a pissy wife if your new one looks this good.

A bastard version of the Metalloid class has existed in the mining companies for a good few centuries: a sigil with the simplest of stamp moves, base ambulating spells with a single trowel or pickaxe affixed to your stump. You can’t feel anything from that kind of ‘limb’, or but that’s probably for the best.

Metalloid beasts do exist, but solely by our own hand. Contraptions in the wild that have slipped away from their crafter’s village, from supervision and intended purpose. From there on you cannot predict the false-beast. They follow jolts in their wires, or have been co-opted by other ‘creatures’ who desire a frame to ambulate. There are no laws against hunting any metal creature under the earth, you may kill and take from them as you will. Though many sad freaks in the engineering guilds tend to build these creatures with a penchant for combat, so come prepared for some nasty tricks.

A metalloid limb crafted for you alone will serve you perfect, last ever long and grant you many electric boons, for a peak market price of course. Attaching a pre-owned limb however….from wandering shambles otherwise, you are truly rolling the dice. You are handed a secret arsenal which you can discover only in the scramble for life or death, some of which may trigger, perchance, against your will.

“How to make a plant grow when the Sun has left us behind… Many starved and choked on ill-thought experiments as we tried to figure that one out. There was life that thrived already in the caves, and fed well its intended inhabitants, but for the utter volume of new human life, we needed to change things fast.”

Lampenflora twisted to greater heights, surviving crop seeds were kept barely alive by the hard-wrought magic that granted us pseudo-solar radiation. Then the small fixes, faster and faster, Constellatials and their grander cousins–built, if rumour is to be believed, from scraps of slain Ascendants–and then we were all farmers again.

Fungi are tucked within this category alongside the obvious plant-folk and other beasts of the brambles... Specifically, those who grow large and angry enough to be worth harvesting, and if the breed is raised right, they are all relatively low cost. Easier than any flesh beasts, they have no inherent need of light, nor food to compete with us or other livestock for. They simply require a fitting substrate to work off of. The first limb farms at all were filled with mushroom creatures of all sorts and formes, but only a few lasted, held limbs that could actually keep strength and fully integrate. Regardless, they are a useful group. Indeed their smaller, stationary cousins provide faint light for most of the underground, and the rare species that do not relish in killing us, can make for a quite stable food source. You do not get far in this new world, distaining the mycons.

Creatures from the developing grow-space (those nutrient-rich moist caverns that would one day be “The Greens”) each species pulled from there helped to push the bounds of what Amalgamation could truly be. Limbs that came already imbued with life power, who kept it, grew it even, across any distance post-severing; and that brought something new too. Magicians loved the little tricks those creatures used to get away: quickening steps or merging with the mossy walls or healing themselves of the wounds just dealt.

Those boons would sometimes come along with their flesh. Sudden incantations with their instincts already honed, adhered to someone who previously had no skill for magic at all. The Greens became the homeland for burgeoning mages soon after, and save a truly worthwhile cause, they are rarely ever permitted to leave it.

Skitter and crawl, click-clack through the depths. Likely one of the first types of organisms to ever traverse these caverns, beyond the simplest of greenery and microscopic life. These exoskeletal freaks have become quite well adapted to life down here–and big, some have also gotten big. Fine navigators with the faintest light or even none at all, they crawl and dig, wrap the hooked ends of strange feet round the rough edge of a stalagmite. Take one on and you’d be among the best suited for cavern life, but less so for some other aspects…

Insectoid systems need rearranging, workarounds for bodies not especially used to breathing thru their skin. Hemolymphatic systems worked hell on the original stamps, made them change their route-pathing to a new series of checks and choices for the desired limb. It was a far more fitted style of setting, actually adapting to what systems are available where the limb connects. This process allows for a far more quick Amalgamation, mostly safely, even with some new creature that you are perhaps the first to ever see or kill.

Though somewhat in-fashion in parts of the Greens, insectoid limbs typically belie desperation, or moreover that is the stereotype. Perhaps you couldn’t afford your original choice? Some bit of you rotted off faster than expected? Perhaps you just needed those legs for your work in the mines, and company subsidies would only cover what works best for them.

Unless you jump fully into the aesthetic, chase several matching legs and wings for the complete build, then it is seen as almost surely a mistake. Something you had to do rather than chose to. There are some attempting to change that image of it: some naturalists, low mages and the like, perhaps some stranger fashioneers. For now though, a cricket leg is something you gnaw on at the market or crush underfoot, and only ever feed your own blood into when you really really have to.

One of the more wide-ranging of the categories, originally just encompassing non-human mammals (those largely being creatures of the old kingdom who survived the call along with us and a select few warm-blooded inhabitants of the depths). Then we widened our view a bit more; essentially all species who can easily integrate with our nervous systems, whose hearts pump red blood that will bow down to ours with a little push.

“We must appreciate all things similar to ourselves, as these caverns expand ever deeper and we come to contact with ever stranger and more wretched beings below.”

The name has long been pushed for a change, given how much of early literature just slings ‘beast’ at anything that moves and tries to kill you. At the very least surveyors long for solid categories between ‘this will attach to your leg easily’ and the exact species and breed in question. Perhaps someday, but for now no queen yet has ever shown interest in changing it.

This is always the best option of course; even before the fall we could take bits of ourselves to share with others, or occasionally they would be taken against our will… But bodies often reject what is not there to begin with, sometimes they will even reject their own selves. The world above did not prioritize the fixing of that (as magics and certain tonics can now so easily allow) they had little need to, comparatively. The work could only be truly explored once that wider world was gone.

The first Queen had many to work with, broken bodies and sudden amputees crushed between rubble and stalagmites. Some cursed her, called her a witch, but she would save any who permitted to pass under her knife. She fixed up those she could with their own flesh, and when one eventually passed, or decided they could not take the wretchedness of our new home and gave up their breath, she could use those even better.

Your own blood flows into another’s veins, dominating it, wiring it into itself, blood and marrow converts to your own. Flesh be rendered subservient to yours and your central systems now knowing it forevermore, knowing not to attack its own tools. In time your forme shall know the new appendage as its own self, no matter its shape and origin.

But sometimes it is not simply blood to blood that must be mastered, beyond simple types, nerves must be fixt, they run into the stamp burn, convert to their own, nonsynaptic orders, for all the limbs that followed that were not a fellow hominid. All that is your own need not be yours, the impulse to grab, to stab, to grasp, converted to water vascular systems, rotted tendons, twisted twig or even stone. Welcome new flesh in any forms, even devoid of flesh itself, such is the gift of our once and ever Queen.