1. The Beholder as a Being For-Itself
That the world is round is a solved problem — the deniers of such are of a much more recent vintage than you would expect and their assertions are completely dependent on measurements they have (badly) taken using modernistic tools. Everybody in fact realized it was round the minute they discovered drawing persistent parallel lines is impossible, so to argue otherwise requires some real chutzpa and/or apparatuses so arcane they unbend metal spoons.
Since the earth is round, it follows that the spirits of the earth would also be round. Not Rubinesque mother-goddess type spirits, river nymphs and oak tree girls. Rather the raw entropic energies that need ultimately consume the earth, pave it, mine it, dominate it until it is choking on its own insides pulled out and wrapped around the neck. Malignant eyebullies.
People think the Beholder is a sphere because of the eye is a sphere but this is neither sensible nor symmetrical. The eye is not a sphere at all (it being an oblate spheroid). The beholder, on the other hand at least according to the beholder and who would contradict him, is.
* Never you mind the earth is also an O.S .from all the spinning and such a bit squished on top and bottom. The earth thinks of itself as a perfect sphere and so we will refer to it and its inhabitant spirits by such a designation, otherwise their revenge would be terrible.
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| Ashkan Konarvar |
Yours truly, in in a comments section of a False Machine post concerning Supermarkets of Killerbees or something, offered the following unwelcomed advice, ". . . any trademarked eye-tyrant can be salvaged by switching the somatic anchor: Sniffers (Glomerulers), Lickers (Popeillae), Eiskalte Hände (Monarcholemmocytes)." Although I immediately regretted this unnecessary interjection, I believe the width of the statement is true.
Our flat-earthers so mentioned before, it should be said, are right about the whole Terran ROUNDNESS thing being an invention of the omnivore, as the more proscribed diet, be it of the herd animal or wolfpack, sets the mechanics of the food itself as the organizing principal of the universe and food is flat. The herbivore's "globe" then is an axis, the wheel of the year . . .
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| Age of Empires II |
There are likewise at any time simultaneous 3 corpseforms — the Steeplejack (the Old Man Underground), the Confidence Creature (Spidercow/Motile Stomach caught in its own labyrinth), and the Beatnik (free spirit dressed in threadbare but formerly luxurious coats). The 3 are ever antagonistic to each other, although their goals are distinct enough to rarely be at cross-purposes.
Imagine someone a little bit wobbly standing on their head, legs flicking about and adjusting mid-stand. If the stomach get seasick, it will cause the tower to topple, even if the legs are aerialist-ed out properly and the head is stable.
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| Tomislav Jagnjic |
Sun and Moon are about 3,000 miles away are both 32 miles across. The Planets are 'tiny.' Sun and Moon do Move, earth does NOT move, whirl, spin or gyrate. Australians do NOT hang by their feet under the world...this is a FACT, not a theory! Also a Fact the Spinning, Whirling, Gyrating Ball World Planet, Globe Idea is Entirely 100% now and at all times in the Past, a RELIGIOUS DOCTRINE...a Blind Dogmatic Article of Faith in the Religion for the Blind unreasoning beast of prey. - Charles Johnson
2. The Beholder for Others
We can't have all be pernicious corpsemakers be beholders, can we? Particularly when a fresh batch of Junior Associates might at any moment claw back even the cousins to this one singular cocktail of antipathos and apple cider vinegar, vaulting it shut behind Mickey Mouse I.P. apparatuses. Still, as shorthand, using the term negotiates the push-pull between the subtext (it's a beholder!) and the explicit ("it's a burning automobile and in the flames you see . . . 10 colors of flame, and it says, 'take off your sandals' and . . . save vs Spell or be disintegrated," pretty dandy.
Capital "v" Vistors, in fact, be they from enlightened planets or sidereal conquest dimensions, have been known to categorize a newly discovered world by its corpseworms ("wormblings"), accordingly:
(subject psychopathies adapted from Karen Mitchell's Psychopaths, Narcissists, Machiavellians, Toxic Leaders, Coercive Controllers: Subsets of One Overarching ‘Dark’ Personality Type?)
Category I - Beholder (sight)
We can't use the name — so let's go instead with something really stupid: say, Eyetocrat. (Prismatic Wasteland makes another excellent suggestion — Panoptikhan — but the dumb is mimetically stronger than the clever). And then change the form so it's like just a bunch of dancing eyeballs (no stalks, no central orb, or maybe one implied by abscence). Keep the rest. Xenophobic octopus except all eyes instead of suction cup arms.
It looks at you. It hates you.
Psychopathies: Drive for Dominance, Grandiose Self-Worth, Explosive Response to Being Challenged, Vengeful, Lawless, Deny-Attack-Reverse
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| Laelanie Larach |
Category J - Overhearer (hearing)
The Savi all'cochlea. A court of snails. Ponderously slow, they want to know EVERYTHING about you. That you will ultimately be judged guilty is a foregone conclusion, but they are jurists of rare prudence and will not rush things. Their slime causes paralysis of the body (leaving your mouth free for confessions).
Appears as a ball of snails crawling around each other, one head at a time will emerge to ask questions, sliding across your body, or to summon witnesses (out of an always well-apointed network of spies). Shells optional, but if present, gaudy with gold-leaf.
Psychopathies: Sexual Boundarylessness, Facade of Normalcy, Chameleon-Like, Manipulative, Deny-Attack-Reverse, No Empathy
You are Josef K.," said the priest, and raised his hand from the balustrade to make a gesture whose meaning was unclear. "Yes," said K., he considered how freely he had always given his name in the past, for some time now it had been a burden to him, now there were people who knew his name whom he had never seen before, it had been so nice first to introduce yourself and only then for people to know who you were. - Kafka
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| Vladimir Petran |
Category K - Sniffer (smell)
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| Efrim Menuck |
Category L - Licker (taste)
Popeillae. Every living creature has a verdigris. The whisper of your caul at birth never fully washed away and built upon it like a city on the precursor city, layer after layer over a succession of fires, sackings, architectural catastrophes, colonial overlords. You know the whole "pain is weakness leaving the body" deal, the callouses/hats make the man. This.
The licker anoints you newborn unfiltered, its tongue rough removing EVERYTHING — the oil, the wards, the protective sarcasm. So exposed to the void, the resulting virginal being starts to leak almost at once, brilliant points of light. Everyone is a starchild. Everyone is a ticking bomb!
The licker is both a religious fanatic and powderman. The explosions to come are a means to an end and the end itself.
Psychopathies: Vengeful, Manipulative, Lack of Emotional Response, Unremorseful, Self-Interested, Brazen
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| Jamie Hewlett |
Category M - Eiskalte Hände (touch)
Monarcholemmocyte. A hand skittering around like a giant spider. It is a drainer of warmth.
It latches on, sinks its psychic fangs, and soon the afflicted doesn't realize it's there. The damn thing could be crawling around on their head singing (or rather, hissing) Shostakovich and they will deny there's anything weird. Possible pitch here for a level-drain mechanic* where for every level drained the subject gains one level of Attercoppe. Attercorpse?
*Someone, Basic Red? Goblin Punch? Lizardman Diaries? suggested a system for Undead to keep 'em nasty but not lose the XP entirely. I can't figure it out who it was, darnit, but I'm stealing it in good faith.
When the afflicted is truly under the Hände's domination, they will suddenly cut off one of their hands and send these out to continue the greater work. There's some kind of astounding migration going on across many worlds (see papilo danaus plexippus) that is a true wonder for its length and solidarity, although the host if freed may be less inclined to see the wonder. (Old school 40k Genestealer cults is another good point of reference). Some months after, the other grabber goes the same way, off and out.
Shortly after Antiochus Cyzicenus gained the throne he lapsed into drunken habits, crass self-indulgence, and pursuits utterly inappropriate to a king. He delighted, for example, in mimes and exhibitionists, and generally in all showmen, and devoted himself eagerly to learning their crafts. He practiced also how to manipulate puppets and personally to keep in motion silver-plated and gilded animals five cubits high, and many other such contrivances. - Diodorus Siculus
Psychopathies: Drive for Dominance, Predatory, Chameleon-Like, Dishonest, Brazen
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| Vitalfundamentals |
(Category H - Bee Holder) (proprioception)
An exquisite head of spit and pulp and anything else the critters come across. The nesting wasps work it and work it, refine it, embiggen it. It is fantastically lifelike. People will fall in love with it. It will fall in love with itself.
Psychopathies: Grandiose Self-Worth, Uncompromising, Predatory, Sadistic, Facade of Normalcy, No Emotional Response
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| Kobayashi Eitaku |
3. The Third Ontological Dimension of the Beholder
Survey of world 9e984b3-g48 for the purposes of mapping cluster satisfactoriness for precious yellow-metal agriculture. This is a I-L-K post-gygaxian-multimodal-mid-high-fantasy crypt planet. Extremely toxic.
It's important to note that any of the 3 Wormbringers are unlikely to be the principal mover and shakers per se in their subjacent zones. They act are more as a malign background radiation. Stan Lee trotted out all over the Marvel Cinematic Universe by his handlers. Zelig the human chameleon sexually harassing the extras. A squat chromium man deliberately turning a ship to the rocks by stepping over to one side at the keel.
If your not an extraterrestrial, you can refer to the worms as Upper, Middle, and Lower Corpseworms.
a. Steeplejack (aka Status Dissident) (aka the Creep Executive)
Mike Moorcock got the direction of the arrow wrong. All aspects of order and Law emerge from the top and move downward on a ladder. But at the bottom someone is waiting. Here is the fruit of knowledge of good and evil, two bites in it, dropped in horror at their nakedness and left to rot. And rot it did.
The upper corpseworm directs events through destabilization. He is a chimney-feller of societies, an upside-down Fred Dibnah. Philosophical. Plain spoken, but in an archaic way, low speech made fancy by the passage of time. He removes the bricks from the base and inserts his own men, exiles from the upper echelons who have descended with him face first. Start a fires on the ground level and eventually the chimney's supports will burn up and bring everything down around them.
Sure, you could use sledgehammers, "Mad men with no props, nothin', just chop the bottom out like a tree, and they don't know to an hour when it's gonna go, just keep bashin' at it." But this approach is abominable to the steeplejack.
Henry IV to Prince Hal, "By what bypaths and indirect crook’d ways/ I met this crown." Hal, "Cool. Here I come for that Glass Graduate's throne in France."
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| Catherine MacBride |
By way of example:
Beholder Adversary
Citadel: the Cork
The City is made up of all the cities you can cram in at once. Any little thing that you ever saw or happened to you or someone you know or might have half-remembered — in it goes — to be digested to a sludge and amalgamated like a mysterious McDonalds fallen out of the sky and into a hunter-gatherer's ravenous anabolism.
If you were from there, you might understand the context of these many disparate items (silver-gold foil wrappers, ketchup packets) strewn about, how the weird stuff connects, or at least did before the sinew between points was reappropriated into solvents, or even how in not connecting now they seem spooky. But you aren't from there. Nobody is from there.
Rather, as the cost of transportation falls to zero and less than zero, the periphery which provides the city with raw materials is overwritten inside out. The city doubles back on itself. It's a spindle torus.
The beholder is the lemon shape at the center. He leverages the mechanics to unmake them.
Agents are in place. Remove a loose brick to hide stolen gold and a blinking eyeball chastens, fie! Shaken, you stumble into a bar, but in the dark liquor a hostile pupil gazes back. As the city cedes territory to what's outside it, everyone taking the elevator forgets there are stairwells.
Sure, in the absurdly spacious sewer, dark elves grapple for dominion against psionic skulls scorpatori (mind flayers to you lot), but their territorial squabbles are immaterial to the larger project. So too the courtly intrigues of the Duke's sickly but more intelligent young brother against the crown. So too the inquisition.
They want to remake the city in their own image. The adversary wants only to level it as an affront to his own, perfect design.
b. Confidence Creature (aka Gaster Gangster) (aka the Long Khan)
Against this pulsing all-consuming maw stands the stomach itself. It gets sick on being fed its own entrails, as even the blood slaked vampire stumbles around the slaughter scene chewing his fingernails, moaning "the horror, the horror."
Arguably each corpseworm in its own way is a transformer of matter. The transformation by the steeplejack is like an 80s movie, moving things UP and DOWN a hierarchy ("You know you really do look a lot better without all that black sh** on your eyes . . ."). The confidence creature, in contrast, shifts matter horizontally, the old cups and balls routine (thimblerig to make it sound more medieval), maneuvering the eye (or ear, or sniffer) away from the object it is attempting to track. The cinema is early 2000s where every movie has a twist ending. Your attention obeys your expectation, ala Northrup Frye: "An original painter knows, of course, that when the public demands likeness to an object, it generally wants the exact opposite, likeness to the pictorial conventions it is familiar with."
The Confidence Creature directs events through deconstruction. (dare I say . . "disruption?") In the Green World, the carnivalesque, nothing means what it means, or rather, it means that and many things more besides. Ever read a badly drawn comic book you can't tell the characters apart? Superman is all of a sudden everywhere! The Creature covers itself in glitter. Then it covers everything else in glitter. Where's Waldo now?
Reality is what you can get away with. Anything contains within it any other thing. All you gotta do is dial in to the correct zone of fidelity.
Komal is the essence of the All, as it were. He is maintained by substance. He eats. He eats the real. To be explicit, he eats the realists . . . inasmuch as we maintain that we alone are real we should, to be consistent, admit that we alone are proper food for Komal. Sometimes, as to-day, we find other food for him. - Jav of Lothar
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| Russell Moreland |
To illustrate:
Popeillitian Crimelord
Citadel: the Spiderweb
We'll have to blindfold you, bind your wrists. Now spin you around (counterclockwise). Follow the steps — count them, but not in numerical sequence. Count like a toddler. Five-three-nine-four-six-one-eight-seven-two to the left, then hop forward two and then duck an imaginary bird. There you are.
The goblin market. The Fat.
One can purchase anything here if you know its name. It's the In-N-Out secret menu times a million. Take a cockney rhyming slang dictionary, use those. "I'll have some ducks and geese," will get you throwing stars that wax and wane with the moon. "A cut of rabbit" an envelope written by the future you in a cipher you'll invent ten years forward.
Goblins are the perfect henchmen for a Licker. They are slippery little guys, and don't build up a patina with the rapidity that other critters do, so they are easy to clean. Also, they are all connected, a hive mind.
You know already not to eat any of the sweets and savories on offer at the market, nor to take anything for free (exchange, either of coins or more esoteric denominations - memories/curses/butterflies-in-the-stomach maintains better equilibrium and doesn't entrap you the same way). But it's hard not to get the goblins to keep on touching you, crawling all over you.
Their hands are moist. Their hands are all an extension of the licker's tongue.
He'll summon you eventually. You'll wander into a cafeteria, despite being careful to keep your hands in your pockets. Refusing the food will at that point be out of the question. You already ate the food, by following the prescribed rituals to arrive. You were OUTSIDE. Now you are INSIDE. It's like being a tadpole being swallowed by the shore and it finds out it was a frog all along.
He'll shrug at you apologetically, sipping lassi through a straw. "This is a Sicilian coin. The Sicilian people say, "A big man knows the value of small coin." My friendship is a small coin but it is all I have to offer you."*
(*David Mamet and Shel Silverstien, Things Change)
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| Arthur Rakham |
c. Beatnik (aka Elephant Terrible) (aka Trigger Hippie)
What people miss about chaos is how light it is on its feet. Inquisitor Thrax idly tracing curlicues in a contraband desk and suddenly he's a tentacled terror, vital organs straining against his armor, it feels HEAVY. You can't look at it like that. That is cause and effect, not chaos. Don't think the mother xenomorph. Think of the chestburster puppet squirreling off on wheels, the horrified cast covered animal organs.
"Everyone was wearing raincoats — we should have been a little suspicious" - Sigourney Weaver
The Beatnik directs events through debarrance, wherein the unclean is fenced out. Secure the perimeter with a flaming sword turning in all directions. He moves through the environment without touching it at all, a cosmic dream child running through the dandelion field in whose seed pods are scattered everywhere where they'll grow up into horror-plants. Any romantic comedy with a manic-pixie girl will have her at some point relate HOW she got that way, most probably some deep wound that she doesn't want to deal with. "I don't have to think, I just have to do it, the results are always perfect." (For the sake of the strained taxonomy I'll call these 90s movies — emotional damage as the driver).
Sure enough, there is some sort of profound rupture at the heart of this corpseworm. The Beatnik believes he is Maiar sent across the sea or an extra-terrestrial crash-landed or a deactivated super-weapon. All these things may be true all at once. If you don't rope off the VIP area, the energy will inevitably dissipate; the water will seek its own level. A running tap doesn't overflow and make the floor collapse until you've plugged up the sink. Otherwise, you'll just have an astronomical utility bill.
The Beatnik is a creator of pocket dimensions, wielder of the Lego Movie's kragle gun. Pinner of insects.
While the (a) Steeplejack is horrified that anyone would deviate from his perfect form and undertakes to burn to cinder the world causing this harm, and the (b) Confidence Creature sees in other creatures vehicles for the transport of contraband, the (c) Beatnik believes that all other beings are illusory, ghosts, or some sort of memetic virus.
Furthermore, he is dead set on ripping the veil away. "Through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered. I have fought may way here to the castle beyond the goblin city. My will is as strong as yours, and my kingdom as great. You have no power over me."
This will lead inevitably to exorcisms. Who is exorcising who?
I think about Jeff Bezos a lot. So, he's about 10 years older than I am. I'm 55. I need to pee all the time. So, Jeff Bezos REALLY needs to pee all the time. And he presides over an empire of hundreds of thousands of workers who are not allowed to pee. And if you felt that when a driver or a warehouse worker needed to pee it was like when you needed to pee, you would have to let them pee. - Corey Doctorow
Case in point:
Glomeruline Forfendite
Citadel: the Island
There is the Ocean. And there is the NOT Ocean. The salt laps at your door.
Nose Gandalf keeps the Shire as his own personal high-single-A baseball farm-system. None of the grim badness touches in his domain, but don't let him catch your scent, or you'll be carried off for purposes uncertain, no matter how many times you insist, "We don't want nay adventures here, thank you!"
Note the preponderance of burnt offerings, wickermen and calves both, leveraged to throw old Corpsecrow off the hunt. If he identifies you as TALENT you're lost.
Then maybe he disappears for a while. Everybody starts to relax, integrate into the larger world. This situation can't last - you're an island or you're a seamount, and a seamount starts loses letters until it's just the undifferentiated Caribbean.
Then there's another guy who shows up. Sharkey ran this model before somewhere, the Horselords as his hobbits. Call it a lateral promotion. He's maybe less travelling circus and more suit and tie, but Yuppies and Hippies are imbibing the same wheatgrass. Ask Tom Wolfe. Ask anybody. All that matters is the Grave External Threat, the hive monster encroaching on paradise that must at all costs be repelled.
Tossing minions willy-nilly into the grinder is not an issue. The Forfendite believes all beings are all part of himself, after all. And only a child cries at a haircut. A lot of times he needs it. This is your basic congressman-stops-by-the-peace-cult-compound-to-check-up-on-a-constituent-and-suddenly-out-come-the-semiautomatics-and-cyanide deal. "Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed."
But . . . spoiler alert — the Bad Dark? It was the Forfendite the whole time. Nobody else exists. It looked like Mithrandir was fighting a Balor, but he was only a chimpanzee posturing before a mirror.
"Ever learn a new word and suddenly see it everywhere? That word was there all the time: you just didn't notice it because you didn't have a distinction-meme for it. If you start using it, or tell a friend how odd it is that you've been seeing this word all over the place, you've just spread [it] to another mind." - Richard Brodie
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| Peter Saul |
2. What form will the successor worm take? Subtract down the ladder by steps according to your die roll:
