#Centipede Tango Tek au

[evilrat-sabre]

Hermit a day May - Day 23 - Tango!

Okay so, I am biased okay? But I just think Zombie Tango is the best headcanon ever and I will die in this hill.

Also I gave him makeup privileges, he deserves it.

[azzayofchaos]

A scene from Chapter 12 of Tango's Castle of Cards by @evilrat-sabre

Go read it! It'll make you laugh, It'll make you cry, maybe it'll make you do a little dance of joy!

Link to the whole fic here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/47184307/chapters/118884370

A close up with a softer light to it that I enjoy quite a bit!

[evilrat-sabre]

CTT LETS GO

BOX I LOVE YOU

violence.

in reference to this

@evilrat-sabre i didnt post these ever so im posting them now.

^ responsible for the violence about to ensue.

[tavi-on-the-3ds]

Hermits a day may #23! Tango of the Tek variety

I've been trying to stick to Canon and popular fanon for this, but I am so in love with @evilrat-sabre 's centipede tango au that I had to reference it somehow

I was tempted to draw him in his decked out 2 skin, but I felt the drawing already leans too heavily into blue tones and so felt it needed to be countered with some red

[evilrat-sabre]

Centipede Tango Tek - CTT Au Master post

This is my master post about my Tango Tek is a Centipede AU/Headcanon, but now with more coherent thoughts of what I want.

TW WARNINGS: Zombies, Insects, Body horror, Gore, Low self esteem and mental health problems. (If you think I should add another tag pls let me know, this is my silly au I don't want to cause distress to no one.)

Note: As I am writing some things may change, so I will update this note with the date I last changed something here. (08/08/2023)

I swear it's not that bad, but messing with zombie characters gets messy very fast.

In this AU main plot I have:

-Tango is a parasitic modded mob that should not be a player but is.

-He specifically is a Centipede that lives in dead corpses and is basically like a zombie with guts that attack if the main body is damaged/destroyed. 

-Here is a link for a text book description I made of his species.(Somethings I wrote there are not up to date with my current headcanon.)

-Tango being a sentient being and a player, he mostly functions like a zombie hybrid player ex.Cleo and Zloy

- He has two bodies : His decoy body (The corpse of a permadead player he rides) and his real body (His centipede one)

-His two bodies are code linked. Let me explain: Tango Tek code will only show right when he is “complete”, when he is separated his close name tag glitches and Tango appears afk in an admin screen. He will only respawn if his real body is damaged and as his decoy body is a literal corpse, it will only repair itself when the damage taken caused a respawn death. Any other type of damage taken in his decoy body he has to repair it Himself (this type of damage and repair, applies to most undead players, Cleo is one of them.). If Tango is killed without his decoy body, the decoy body will not respawn with him, he has to go fetch it.

- Just to be clear, Tango didn’t just found a random corpse and started riding it, His decoy body is with him since he first “spawned”, He woke with all the information that a fresh new player needs to knows, but instead of the corpse receiving it, what got it was the vermin inhabiting it.

-One thing that makes him stay awake at night is the fact that, he already had a years long register from before he spawned, he had money, he had a Hypixel account and he had a name: Tango. He added the Tek latter, because of a dear friend of his, that is until now the only important OC I dared to put in this AU.

-Tango Spawned in an residential world where being a hostile mob hybrid wasn't looked upon with good eyes, so since early he learned to use makeup and clothes to pass as a mostly human player.

-He spend weeks of his early days training his fine motor coordination, so he can pass as a clumsy human and not a decaying corpse being controlled by a insect (It's like playing cuphead with your keyboard slightly upside down) 

-He spend years isolated in single player worlds, because of the fear of what he is and what would be done to him in the case that other people discover.

-His eyes are red, because his decoy body doesn't have its eyes anymore, so he just uses his own real body to cover it. When someone asks why his eyes are weird red swirls, he just says he was cursed by the "universe".

-This "he is a bug, that rides a dead body and is basically a zombie, but he is disguized as a human" thing, may have started as a form of defense to not suffer from the discrimination that aggressive mob hybrids suffered in that era, but with time it turned in a type of self hate. Even when compared with other zombies and undead hybrids, he can see he is not the same and this really bugged him. He can only say that his red eyes (that are a literal part of his real body) are a curse of the universe too many times, until he started to believe it himself.

-So his disguise turned more permanent than it should. It's been some decades and no one really knows the truth, the only one that really knows is himself "Human" if asked Tango Tek.

-As I said it started as a means of protection, but even when the wheels turned and the ones that were the real problem now are a minority, Tango still is hiding. He knows he is an anomaly, that he should not be capable of thinking of feeling! Someway in his path he started to think of himself as a monster, as an unlovable being and even when he entered Hermitcraft, a place where everyone is accepted, he continued to hide. 

-Now more than his self hate, he has fear: fear of being lonely again, of his family (his only family) hating him for what he is (he hates what he is, he wish he could be normal).

-Tbh he should see a therapist, the really angst part of this AU is Tango's poor mental health state, he is so blinded with his own fallacy, that he is a wrong unlovable monster, to notice that his friends and family never would trade him for anything else.

-This type of self hate is something that builds slowly, but Tango has decades of auto inflicted isolation to construct this narrative. Believe me, Isolation does things to a person's mental state.

Some little curiosities:

-Tango is a make-up guru as a moving plot point, he uses makeup to cover his undeadnes.

-Since he entered Hermitcraft his makeups started to become more and more detailed, he had a few hiccups in the path and Impulse has a lot of blackmail from his failed attempts.

-Because of his "is a bug riding a dead body" thing, he doesn't have a very fine motor skill, so he can't really do things like sewing or anything that requires a good working set of fingers. (His makeup is mostly a exception because he had years to really refine his ability to paint his own face)

-He does his red stone using mostly his real body, he puts the rough components in place with his decoy body and then uses his real body to do the finer connection and setup of the machines. 

-This means that when he does redstone his decoy body just lay where Tango put it before he goes to “redstone world” (anyone who finds it would think that Tango has permadied), he escaped a lot of close calls since entering hermitcraft.

-Fun fact, because he is a anomaly in the code his decoy body and real body are counted as one in his code, and because his decoy body was originally of a human player that permadied, his code when superficially looked just says that he is a human (it makes easier to lie to admins)

-Because of his "bugged" code, he can only access his inventory while riding his decoy body, so it can be tricky if Tango is separated from it.

-Tango can talk as a bug, It's harder without proper vocal cords and has a clicking intonation to it, but he can speak. It comes from nothing and he really doesn't wants to talk how it works.

-As I said previously, Tango is the name of the permadied corpse, the Tek is something that he put after. (Tek is the onomatopoeia of the clicking sound he does when happy. It is too a type of “happy greeting” between bug players)

-Tango has proper formal admin training, he has gone to Admin school and has a degree.

List of fics I am planning to do or I did already in this universe:

-Tango needs Cleo's help with undead things and its forces him to reveal more than he has revealed in a long time: Everyone always forget that corpses have a lot of things to say. (One shot)

-Someone finds Tango's body when he is redstoning things and now everyone knows: Tango’s Castle of Cards.(4/5 chapters still incomplete I am working in it I swear)

-Scar backstory

-Cleo and Tango go shoping in the Zombie market.

-Tango and Zed discover a thing

-Tango and Vintage beef bug friendship.

-Tango and Hypnotized visit a graveyard.

[evilrat-sabre]

Thanks a lot for giving me brianrot to centipede!Tango. Now you have me on the palm of your tiny hand

Hehe. We got another one, boys!

(Glad you are liking it, This au is very beloved to me)

[evilrat-sabre]

OMG YES

Kneecaps? I don’t need your kneecaps. You can keep then.

Thank you so much!!!!

Dillema, give me your kneecaps

Tw: Bug

Alr Sabre, how about I keep my kneecaps and you get this hastily drawn 30 minute completely unrelated centipede drawing?

Please it's 2 AM i was gonna go to bed, but then i saw my kneecaps threatened ...

[evilrat-sabre]

Centipede Tango anyone?

[evilrat-sabre]

So I was thinking about CTT again....

False spines feed on player code, thus destroying the player, yeah?

And Tango doesn't seem to have this same need, presumably because he himself is a player.

Does this mean that there's some sort of instability in the code of typical false spines that player code mends? And because tango has his own player code his is more stable? Like. If you can't buy player code, home made is fine

Uhhh let me think this response...

(Here I go spend the next two hours in this lol)

I think you got it slightly wrong, It's not that they feed in player code,

They feed in player flesh.

Rotten player flesh.

....

Rotten player flesh is surprisingly hard to come by, Players when dead don't leave corpses (unless it's a modded world that makes the remains stay), they just vanish into code and respawn in their set respawn anchor.

Even when Permadeath there is a chance that you will not leave a corpse behind, because Permadeath is when your code is soo scrambled that it can't go through respawn anymore, so it often happens after your corpse already vanished into code.

One thing about the False-Spine is that they are dumb, like not like dumb dumb, but like they are bugs, they have a Bug brain, they work in the "I need to survive" way, It just eat, sleep and repeat. Ya know?

They have one of the most overpowered powers you can have: code manipulation. They have the potential to pull the fabrics of the universe around them, and they do it, but not to it's full potential, they don't have complex thoughts to understand this.

The False-Spine only use their powers for mostly three things.

One: to pull holes through servers, there is a reason that a nom-modded world can be infested by these things. When there is no more food on the server they are in, they just jump to another one and start again.

Two: For the zombification thing, they need rotten player flesh to survive, so they just.... Uhhh how do I explain this? Like a lot of times I describe this like, they have this venom (I call it a venom, but it is more like a computer virus. The F-S produces it and spreads it) that jumps starts the process, so for the Zombification to start the false spine needs to bite a player, then this player will become a zombie and if they bite another player, this player becomes a zombie too. This is how they get food, they fundamentally change the player code in a way that it permakills the player and at the same time preps the corpse to be eaten and controlled by the False-Spine.

Three: This is not a norm, as not all False-Spine do it, but they can lock the server, sometimes they will just scramble with the server code, making it harder to enter and leave the world, making it easier to trap their food where they can't escape.

All of this is things the False-Spine does using their code manipulator power, they do it instinctively, they do not think about it, because they don't need too.

Then comes Tango.

He is an anomaly.

He wasn't supposed to be a player, but he is.

He has all these terrifying powers and an mind capable of using it to its full potential. (Our luck is that he is a very nice guy)

One thing you got correct is that Tango being a player he doesn't need to eat the same things he would, had he not been a player.

He doesn't eat Rotten player meat, because he doesn't need it. He can eat all normal coded food, even if with nom-coded food he still has some problems.

(Just to be clear, coded food is the food you can craft, the ones we have in Minecraft. Nom-coded food is the one you go through the trouble of cooking and preparing yourself.)

Just to put in perspective of how powerful code manipulation really is: A code manipulator can easily overthrow an Admin, It can permakill a room filled with powerful beings with just a snap.

Code is everything, players are code, blocks are code, mobs are code, every entity that rules a part of the universe are code. Code manipulators are truly terrifying beings.

I want to put a quick note here, that I am not a fan of extremely overpowered characters. When I realized the potential of the powers I gave Tango, I was already too deep in the mud lake that is CTT to change.

But the thing is, Tango is not ignorant about all of this, he knows what he is capable of doing, and he is fucking terrified of himself.

The man doesn't want all this power. He wants to play silly games and spend time with his friends. He has gone through all the trouble of doing admin training, so he could know what he should and should not do with his powers.

I remember one time while writing chapter 3 of ,TCC, I had just finished Scar's pov and I was like, let me reread this to get a feeling of the whole product. I reread and I just thought to myself: Well fuck, This is Tango, this terrifying beast that Scar fears for more than reasonable and justified reasons is Tango.

I think this is it for now.

But I just wanna mention one thing, I think it's funny that with your assumption about the code feeding, you somehow kicked directly in another au/headcanon of mine, without meaning. I truly love code word building!

As always thx for the ask! I am always here to talk about CTT and my other aus!

[evilrat-sabre]

Hey guys, here I come again with art for my fanfic Tango Castle of cards!

Chapter 8 is out and I couldn't hold myself and I did a cute drawing of a scene that bring me great happiness!

[evilrat-sabre]

OH MY

I adore this thank you so much!

I am beholding

So I’ve been reading the Centipede Tango au by @evilrat-sabre , so I decided to draw the guy

[Day 081]

[evilrat-sabre]

So hey guys I drew this scene of Tango's Castle of Cards chapter 5, because I wanted to do my Void Creature Keralis design, so here is he and Centipede Tango as a bonus.

[evilrat-sabre]

I don't know if someone already asked this, but is it okay if I write a fic based on your centipede Tango AU? With credits, of course

YES, PLEASE.

Feel free! I love seeing other people's take on Centipede Tango!

[evilrat-sabre]

Tw. Insect, beheading, blood.

So uhhhhh... I got possessed? I have this specific scenario where CTT gets his decoy body beheaded, but like it doesn’t damaged his real body so now he has a problem and is probably pissed and bullying the person that beheaded him to help. (I have two Ideas for this scenario, one is the head games and the other are Grian’s life series, so like it would be someone that he knows and not an actual threat.)

But yea. This lives rent free in my head.

[evilrat-sabre]

Me and @a-plethora-of-peters have been bouncing at each others universes for a little time now and I am just having the time of my life, so I did this drawing because Tango to Tango conversation is fun as hell.

The magma cube Tango is from Peter's fic I Am Creation, Both Haunted And Holy

And the "Zombie" Tango is from my AU Centipede Tango Tek that has fanfic called Tango Castle of Cards.

[evilrat-sabre]

I made a text for my Tango is a Centípede Au, explaining his species like if it was a scientific notebook

TW: Insects, gore(flesh, bones, etc.), body horror and corpses.

What is Tango Tek? Well he is a player, but he is a bug too. Not a bug like a glitch on the code thing, but a literal insect, specifically he is a type of Centipede. 

The scientific name of his species in official reports from the "Official registry of modded mobs" or "ORMM" is Rubrumequitarecadaver, that is a subspecies of the Falsusproculspimae especies. 

The popular name that players call this type of mob is the False Spine Parasite.

The Falsusproculspimae in his juvenile form looks similar to a normal Scolopendra viridicornis with its only differentiation being its white color palette and porous chitin that makes it unnervingly similar to a human bone.

The Rubrumequitarecadaver is slightly different, it has a red color palette similar to blood, having its chitin softer than its counterpart, feeling almost flesh-like. 

Either of them are described as disturbing for most players to see, having an uncanny similarity with the mangled parts of a body.

For this Insect to grow to its mature form, it needs to find a corpse, when found it will eat all internal organs with exception of the nervous system, them in a span of hours it will grow to a length that can get to 7 or more meters, making it too long to survive in the wild by itself, but with the perfect length to wrap itself in the nervous system where it will use his neurotoxin to stabilize the internal rotten and get control of the motor functions of the body, from there it will act like a normal zombie mob, with the differential that when its host is destroyed the insect will attack the responsible for it.

Juveniles of this species are mostly inoffensive to normal players, only zombie hybrids or players rotten-like have to let their eyes open because they can be targeted by one of these unnerving creatures as their new host.