#love how my tag for beingverse is literally a get along shirt joke

[banyanas]

Oh, very likely! Beings are living, well, beings. They evolve like any other species, although only a handful of them actually reproduce (and even then, it’s like... budding, or asexually-reproduced spores) and live on such a fantastically stretched-out timeline that evolution of these species is so slow it may as well not be existent. Give it another trillion years to see real changes.

But since the point is that they can indeed adapt... most of the time they would target specific kinds of Beings. More sedentary ones that are still weak enough to actually get into, like planets or moons or nebulae. I can see some that adapted to send out ‘dummy spores’ to draw the fire of the other Being, and while it’s busy blasting that out of existence for daring to trespass on its territory, the main body of the parasite can slip in. There’s also just... targeting ones that are asleep. Canon Being on the moon-base didn’t notice that there was literally an aurora-Being on top of it for years, and it was screaming.

I have a question about Beingverse. Could there potentially be parasite Beings? And, branching off of that, how big would they be? Like would their prime host be species like the Goats or Hat kid's species, or something bigger, like Snatcher or the Twilight Goat, or would it be a really big being, like Time?

HI HI SORRY THIS TOOK SO LONG TO ANSWER I have swiss cheese brain and also was toasted at a crispy 3-digit temp for a while but I’m better now and ready to rumble. And by rumble I mean Beings are already pretty wack so parasitoid Beings are gonna be kinda nightmare fuel-y.

So! First off, on the terms of unconventional (ex: not really what you think of when you think critter or monster), we already have an example from Duality:



“Stupid. Of course her ventures out of Earth’s space led her straight into a Being’s territory- the kind that grew between realities like mycelium grew through walls, pulling its prey through its weave to dump them into other realities to die. Admittedly, it probably would have paid her no mind if she didn’t have Snatcher with her.”

Very, very passive hunters, but a huge pain to deal with because they’re not exactly in a form where you can kill it dead the traditional ‘tear it apart with teeth and claws and your domain’ way. Parasite Beings would probably be similarly difficult to deal with despite being comparatively weaker than, say, planet-Beings or black hole Beings. Like trying to kill a cloud of spores.

So! There are two routes we can go with parasites: those that infest mortals, or those who infect other Beings.

For the mortal route… it’s probably like a really weird sentient tapeworm whose strings vibrate in an odd way, and instead of infesting a person’s gut, they infest whole populations of people, strung from life force to life force and feeding on it. Entire planets seemingly struck with an untraceable wasting disease, driving entire peoples to extinction… nobody ever accused Beings of thinking small. Satisfied for at least a couple dozen thousand years, the parasite moves on.

Beings that infest other Beings… oh boy. I’d imagine this happens far more rarely, since Beings are indeed sentient and think alongside being insanely territorial, so any parasite that gets close enough to be sensed by the intended target probably would get essentially sandblasted into nonexistence. But if one does manage to sneak in, well. I’d imagine they’re far more threatening to young Beings, unaware Beings who used to be mortal. Watch out Snatch-man, there’s far, far scarier things out there than yourself, and you can’t even see some of them…

(A planet lurching under the zombie ant effect until it freezes, and though the spores and reaching fungal fingers aren’t on a plane of existence most can see, there’s still something off enough that interstellar travelers opt to avoid the area. It’s for the better they avoid the Being’s now-corpse, because the Beings that actually reproduce are often the most insidious.)