30 Day Kaiju Challenge; Day 27; Hive Mind
Description: Several monsters have been described as strange, but the GraphVine is something else entirely. A gigantic slime mold kaiju, it changes shape and mass with whatever kaiju it has taken control of. Vine like structures allow it to use the bones it cannot digest as a skeleton and allows it to move across land features quickly.
Absorption: The GraphVine easily takes over a host, digesting and absorbing their biological parts and adding it’s consciousness to the collective it has earned through millennia.
Skeletal Usage: Unable to break down bone, the GraphVine structures itself as muscle like chords to use the skeletons as moving mechanisms for the colony.
Nigh Unkillable: The only way to fully stop the GraphVine is to eliminate it fully, making most mortal wounds like slicing jello that can seal back up together, allowing the GraphVine to take a large amount of punishment.
Easily Breakable: While the colony is near indestructible, tearing it apart enough would stop functions of movements within a skeleton host, reducing what it could do.
Landlocked: Ocean currents would slowly break it apart, scattering it to the wind. It heavily avoids water environments for this reason.
Backstory: Found in an ancient ruin in mexico of an undefinable origin, the GraphVine was nothing impressive as today. Collected from a human skeleton in a dried form, it was brought back to a lab in New York for intense study. When hydrated, the scientists were surprised to see it twitch back to life, and behave much more actively than any known slime mold. One foolish moment, and Dr. Leeroy McKinnens physically touched the GraphVine bare handed, resulting in the mold connecting and invading the mind and body of the scientist. Before he could be killed, the slime mold rose a hand of the doctor, and did something marvelous.
It spoke for the first time in thousands of years.
The GraphVine, as it identified itself as, was once a guardian for an ancient civilization, taking over invading monsters as sustenance and using their skeletons to help defend humanity from global events. It would bond with a human to communicate with them, and allow for easier balances. With the return of monsters, it wanted to help once more. Wary of it’s plans, they led it out towards the nearest dead kaiju, a fresh kill of a gigantic frog kaiju in the heart of NYC. It took little time to attach itself to the host, and within hours had reduced stinking frog meat with itself. Rising up from the resting point, it spoke through Dr. Mckinnens again, thanking humanity to allow it to return to its old duty, before lumbering off. It has appeared several times since then, assisting in more cantankerous monster battles and saving humanity. Their lookout on the beast is a tenuous one, with the fear of it taking over everything an unspoken worry among them.
How They Interact with Other Kaiju: They tend to live isolated from other monsters, knowing that the multitude of minds and strange appearance is off-putting to most. Those that it does interact with tend to be friendly ones, and only attacks those that wish to harm humanity.
Alright, so slime molds are some of the coolest microscopic hunters in the world, and damn was I wanting to do this one for some time. I found an old drawing from years back with the start of this idea, but this is the first time that I actually played with this concept. The idea of a orange snot textured, skeleton based monster helping humanity is something I would be alright with, and then did it because I’m a madman.
