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1ore · 1 year ago

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of course i continue to rotate that beast in my mind. tamahuaq thoughts because i can't catch a break to draw hardly anything of substance

It would be very funny if Tamahuaq’s ability to parasitize others was limited to gods, endlings, and mages, because they all have exposed/dissociated “souls” to some degree, and Tamahuaq eats god’s blood i.e. “souls” i.e. metaphysical bodyjuice. One (1) human normie walks into Old Sond and the plantfungus loses it. doesn’t know what to do. Heterotrophs are so SCARY!!!!!!!!!!!

Tamahuaq’s emotional world is made of many bodies that are only kinda assimilated into one body. I think it is big enough that it can’t really afford to centralize physically or mentally. So it can pass around impulses and selectively access information from different parts of its network, but if one daughter colony is cut off from the main mass, that physical/emotional/mental space is typically lost to the rest of the body.

Being a part of Tamahuaq is frightening, not because one is a passenger to its hunger against their will or anything like that, but because Tamahuaq is like an echo chamber for one’s own fears and desires. Most of the gods imprisoned in Sond are already resentful of their wardens, if not certifiably off the shitts in pain, so they are already primed to lash out. but they don’t realize how far they’ll go until they’re taken out of it.

IDK how the endlings extract gods and other beings from Tamahuaq, but I think it might be as simple as cutting off that “limb” and peeling off as much plantmycelium as they can. At a certain point, there just isn’t enough Tamahuaq to functionally feed anymore. I think Tamahuaq (or rather its satellite flesh?) self-terminates or jumps hosts when it can no longer justify hitching a ride on that particular host.

The constant risk of losing satellite limbs brushes shoulders with its need to explore and forage, so it has become very efficient at partitioning itself into smaller spaces using simple directives and selective memories to puppet a scout around. A lot of these satellite bodies carry a basic compulsion to get back to the rest of the body at some point, but are also less coordinated and easier to dissociate.

Because of the Boiling Rage shared by its primary food source, Tamahuaq is thought to be hateful and angry and generally motivated by revenge. But it isn’t, inherently. It is apparently able to exploit anger and other emotions-- or at least transmit emotional memories-- but whether human emotions are intelligible to it, or it has just learned thru pattern recognition how to get what it needs is hard to say. It does have its own interior emotional world, but it has been largely diluted by its hosts (and is difficult to understand outside of basic needs like “I don’t want to die” and “I am so hungry all of the time”) For his part, the Tamahuaq depicted in oral tradition is anthropomorphized and has ~human-like motivations.

(in reality Tamahuaq is like a vessel of the pain of his ancient enemy, the very first endling, beloved folk hero twisted by resentment when betrayed and locked up in Sond as Tamahua's keeper. but we will not discuss him further.)

When the endlings do finally succeed in cutting out the “heart” of Tamahuaq—its original body and the closest thing to a central “brain” that it has—the rest of it rapidly dissociates into smaller and smaller functional parts, and decays. Tamahuaq’s psyche also shrinks in a rather violent and disorienting way, as trahearnexpy finds out. This sudden smallness is AHHHH VERY SCARY to the plantfungus, and it loses many of its formative memories that have been scattered across this wider network. Its sensory world shrinks, too, in that its funnie plantmonster body is experiencing the world thru touch, taste, smell, and some rudimentary thermoception, where it used to be able to sense. Probably anything it wanted. I think this is part of why it clamps down on tree boy and does not let go. You WILL interpret the world for me (because im too scared and small ahhhhhh I cant do it myself )))): )

eventually it learns the power of love and being small, but in the mean time it is so scared of heterotrophs. It is so scared of heterotrophs. It is so scared of h

#girl you ARE heterotrophs.#monomyth tag #sure. at this point whatever #1ore doesn't want to use her art blog

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