#his arm doesnt get absorbed or anything but it is in a scuffle with this creecher that it gets knocked into a tear in reality and it

[albatris]

OK SO

THIS TURNED INTO AN UNINTENTIONAL RAMBLE the floodgates were opened I am very sorry

(and also trigger warning for body + existential horror and violent death)

at the start of ATDAO Jacob Greer is involved in a tragic interdimensional mishap that yeets him into an unreality BUT there is also another guy involved in the accident who is definitely in the process of getting yeeted into an unreality but he kinda only makes it halfway

so he leaves behind the lower half of his body pretty much which kind of just flops onto the ground from his car and spills some organs out and Tris is like "cool well that's an image that will haunt my nightmares from this day forward but at least I can be pretty sure this is the most traumatic thing this particular corpse will do to me" and he is of course WRONG

the thing about unrealities is they're essentially just stacks of interdimensional energy from all kinds of sources just goin round and round in a blender and things get WEIRD real fast 'cause you've got all these competing and contradictory laws of reality fighting to exist simultaneously. and anything inside the space, dead or alive, can't really exist there for long without getting tangled up with some real bizarre energy

and THIS poor motherfucker gets seized by some whacked-out energy that more or less just takes over his body and keeps it spasming and twitching and dragging itself around the place and ARGUABLY right on the very brink of death but Not Allowed To Die. n is just slowly and inescapably morphing into something monstrous and inhuman

what's this guy's deal? well, here!:

it is presently barely recognisable as a person

it has amalgamated and will amalgamate various other creatures and objects into its mass. just sucks 'em right up. as a result, this thing has, like, bird beaks and bits of fur and extra lifeless eyes just kind of sticking out of its fucked up flesh

if you do not touch it, it will leave you alone. it will not hunt you down, it does not care that you are here. it is just a bundle of pulsating flesh and extra parts and limbs bent the wrong way scuttling aimlessly around

if you DO touch it it will flip the fuck out and try to fucking kill you and absorb you. why? maybe it's angry. maybe it's frightened. maybe it's hungry. maybe it's just responding to sensory input. maybe you're just in a fucking nightmare hell dimension don't ask me

it still has an intact human voice box, which it will use to moan and scream

as far as horror goes he's a bit cliche but I think every surreal hellscape deserves a little creecher and I have fun with him

is this thing alive? is it sentient? is the original person still in there, no matter how twisted and deranged? is it simply a lifeless empty body now being jerked around by weird violent energies that burrowed in and made a home?

scientifically, logically, this is a dead guy. there's no one home in there. this guy got sliced in half, he was probably dead before he hit the ground and long before the energy got all up in his personal space. but like. this IS an unreality and things do NOT work right here, including human bodies and time

Tris firmly believes the half-corpse creature is Alive, and that it's essentially this guy's human soul trapped in a monstrous body that is not allowed to die, stuck in an endless cycle of pain and terror reliving the moment of its "death" over and over whilst screaming out for help

Tris is also prone to projecting lots of big emotional feelings onto situations and is under a lot of stress right now

I will not say one way or the other whether he's right. I don't actually know the answer myself! what fun

what this horrid little guy does is hmmmmmm..... well, I included him for a few reasons, first and foremost because Hell Yeah That's Freaky

and also because he's involved with some real rough character-arc-y spoiler things that I will not tell you

n also, because he helps establish a few key facts about the unreality, the first and most obvious being that it is a Very Very Very Bad Place For An Organic Human Body To Be

him showing up marks the halfway point of the unreality, and also where the story takes a well-earned veer into..... about as close as ATDAO gets to horror, though the majority of the horror is less Ooh Spooky Monster and more existential lmao

but ya, so, the unreality gets. progressively stranger and less stable the further you go. goes from Hey This Isn't So Bad to deeply unsettling uncanny valley territory to some sort of surreal nightmare zone. n like, ok, it's unstable at its edges, yes, but it also has to do with the fact that the longer you spend in there, the more your own senses and physical properties and relationship with reality start to unwind

you can FEEL your senses altering and your physical body changing and you're experiencing reality in a way that will be completely incomprehensible to you the second you leave, you look at yourself, you look at the wild unstable space around you, you look at this heaving mass of once-human flesh and bone and blood in front of you, knowing it's becoming increasingly warped and twisted as time wears on, and you think to yourself, well, this doesn't exactly fill me with confidence for my future now does it

another thing this lil creecher does, particularly if you lean towards the idea that it is entirely lifeless and non-sentient, is uhhh..... this guy helps establish the unreality not as something malicious or evil that wants to hurt you personally, but simply as something Inevitable

does that seem contradictory? maybe, seeing as this guy does a hell of a lot of damage and tries to kill my protagonist

but like. the unreality is just one little segment of gigantic grinding machinery - there's no malicious intent, it's not hunting you or targeting you, it doesn't even know you're here. you can't outsmart it or outrun it or reason with it because it is Everything. it's gonna twist you beyond recognition. it's going to crush you. it can't hear you, not because it's choosing not to, but because it simply doesn't have the capacity to

n this creature has been caught up in the gnashing gears of this reality, it's slowly being pushed further and further away from its human roots, n it just stumbles around aimlessly until it bumps into something, and even when it attacks you it's just regurgitating this empty mockery of human pain and fear that in all likelihood are just echoes of its last living moments. it's a product of a reality that Doesn't Care and It Does Not Care

or, I suppose, if you do believe the human soul is still kickin in there somewhere, then it's the sheer agony and terror of being trapped in and entirely at the mercy of this unfeeling cosmic machinery and watching yourself unravel with no escape

either way, y'know, not ideal

and lastly.......... oh, it's fun just to toss a weird little guy in there. my best writing advice? just toss in a guy

thanks for coming to my ted talk

thinkin about him...........

(the fucked up unreality half-corpse creature)