#warp hallucigenia

[skywing206]

MMX OC LINEUP (minus their creators Im still working on that lmao) and also Earthrock Trylobyte

[shootertron-stuff]

Royal Mail Ships of the Great Warp Storms

I was inspired by a post positing potential names for RMS Titanic sister ships if White Star had kept to their naming scheme and made more Olympic oceanliners.

A lot of them sounded like Chaos spaceships. Perhaps the "Royal" in "Royal Mail Ship" refers to being under a daemon prince.

The RMS Septic and RMS Carcinogenic are two Death Guard mail and passenger ships themed after deep sea life. The RMS Septic looks like a dead whale and the outside is covered in space barnacles that can survive in the tides of the Warp. The inside contains animals such as bone-boring worms, polychaetes, sea cucumbers, octopi, and isopods. It smells really bad.

The RMS Septic's sister ship, the RMS Carcinogenic, looks like a shipwreck that has been on the bottom of the ocean for at least a century, covered in rusticles and more sea critters. It's also very stinky. There's also crabs, lots of crabs. Not just actual crab, but crab-themed furniture, crab-themed kitchenware, sculpted crabs on door handles...

The lodgings on the two ships are the most luxurious available by Death Guard standards. Despite everything looking like it's been at the bottom of the ocean, there's a grand staircase, a dance hall, a gym, a swimming pool, sports rooms, gardens, a grand dining hall, room service, and Art Nouveau-style furnishings.

The food, though, will give you food poisoning and/or cancer. If you're on board the RMS Carcinogenic, you may turn into a crab, or multiple crabs. But it's alright, you won't die.

As passenger ships go, the RMS Septic and RMS Carcinogenic are the safest around. Construction-wise, the ships have more safety features than average, and are designed to take a beating without falling apart. Nobody has ever died onboard even though you're guaranteed to catch at least one disease.

While they're pretty slow compared to ships aligned with the other gods, they're exceptionally reliable, and you and the mail are guaranteed to get where you need to go...eventually. Even if you don't look quite the same as you did when you boarded.

The RMS Probiotic is also a Nurglite ship, but themed around a swamp. Try the kombucha! It's got billions of microbes.

The RMS Parasitic gets around by hitchhiking on larger ships, like a remora on a shark. Somehow, it hijacks the brains of the crew so they go where the crew of the Parasitic wants to go. Once attached, it's nearly impossible to pry it free or break open. The attachment method that lets it hang on without being jolted off is a top secret.

The RMS Hallucinogenic are two identical ships owned by a Tzeentchian warband. One will make you trip balls, while the other has a 50% chance of turning you into a hallucigenia, the Cambrian animal. This is referred to as "getting shrimped".

Both ships have a habit of picking up stranded spacefarers or people fleeing warzones, people desperate enough to take the chances of losing their humanity. It's common for one of the Hallucinogenics to arrive at port with the swimming pool filled with hallucigenia, the passengers who didn't get shrimped instructed to gingerly transport the passengers who did. There's a reason the pool water has the same composition as Cambrian seawater.

The final destination of shrimped passengers is a marine sanctuary world somewhere in the Great Warp storms, where they will live out their lives in peace, at least until something eats them.

The RMS Plutonic looks like a regular Khornate ship on the outside, with red paint and lots of spikes. On the inside, it looks like a volcanic zone, with extreme heat, magma tunnels, lava flows, and volcanic rocks. Owing to the nature of Chaos ships, the Plutonic doesn't fall apart from all the molten rock inside of it when by all means, it should. All the furniture is made of rocks. All the amenities are combat-themed. You have to kill and cook your own meals.

Perhaps it's a good idea to only mail heat-resistant materials on this ship.

The RMS Dramatic is a Khornate ship that only hires the worst drama queens as its crew! Everything is a big deal to them! If you complain about the food you get food thrown on your lap. If you look at the crew wrong you get thrown in the brig!

Sometimes the crew has gotten in trouble for tossing mail out of the airlock because they got mad.

The ship is known for causing drama when it arrives at port, for one reason or another. Explosions, fistfights, missing passengers, near collisions...

The RMS Unrealistic manages to sail despite looking like it shouldn't. It looks cobbled together, or too big and awkwardly shaped to hold together in flight. Looking at it, one feels like when a work of visual fiction has a certain art style, and an object from another series with an completely different art style is inserted into it.

Onboard, the laws of physics become wobbly. The floor becomes the ceiling, and passengers may get turned inside-out. It's good not to have realistic expectations for what may happen to you!

Nobody knows anything about the RMS Enigmatic. All the reviews are very vague about what the onboard experience is like, but somehow tickets get sold. People who've seen the ship dock and take off can't remember what it looked like. As soon as passengers get off they forget everything about the ship. They usually agree that it was a nice experience, though.

The RMS Erotic is adults only and mainly delivers sex paraphernalia such as dildos, vibrators, buttplugs, whips, paddles, erotic publications etc. It is a Emperor's Children vessel, so most likely highly unethical things happen onboard!

The RMS Alcoholic is filled to the brim with booze. Its cargo hold contains all manner of alcoholic beverages, and every level of the ship has a bar or pub. For humans, there's drinks from different worlds, made from all sorts of different plants, and even drinks from the distant past, for alcohol can make its way into the far future through Warp portals.

For transhumans there's stronger drinks: warp moonshine made from jet fuel and tortured souls or something like that.

The crew has high alcohol tolerance so its okay if they drink on the job.

The RMS Pathetic looks pathetic, like its sagging. All the decor is depressing and the crew are bummed to be there. It's populated with sad, droopy daemons that look like they came out of a Salvador Dali painting. The food is bland and sad looking. Legend says the ship used to be prouder, but Perturabo yelled at the captain and it hasn't been the same since.

The RMS Elastic stretches and bounces back as it moves, like a giant rubber caterpillar. Onboard everything acts like rubber. People, furniture, machine components. Somehow all the machine components stretch like rubber and still work. The food is different types of taffy and gelatin. It's the place to go if your body needs to be stretched out.

Executions of unpopular public figures are a common sight on the RMS Antagonistic. It's one of the main attractions, and passengers will cheer on the brutal deaths of awful people from places they've never heard of before while wining and dining. It's obvious they deserved punishment!

The ship is equipped with a full weapons array, and captain will divert the ship to engage in space fights with people who obviously deserve to be fought if the mood strikes.

[vampiretime]

Prologue: Mark my Words

One day, 521.1 million years ago, a lone Figure came shrieking out of a rift in the sky. He fell headfirst into a vast ocean, sending out a cloud of bubbles, boiling water and reality-warping particles, causing the biggest extinction event the Cambrian period would ever see. He was about 30 meters underwater now, and could see the rift in the sky slowly closing behind him. He made a motion equivalent to a shrug, as it was his intention to get “trapped” on this planet in the first place. His home world was boring and this planet, on this plane of existence, was teeming with potential. Well, it was teeming with potential. He looked at the creatures around him, floating vacantly toward the surface. All dead.

“Oops,” he said.

He swam deftly for about 12 miles until he came into contact with his first living creature. It was about a meter long, a twelfth of his height. It propelled itself through the water by undulating flaps on either side of its body. Its eyes were composed of thousands of lenses, and he thought he could tell it was assessing him with an intelligence he had never seen. Primitive but calculating. He extended a tendril toward it, hoping to make a connection. He made a connection, alright, as the thing swam to the tip of his appendage, opened its disc-like mouth and bit him. The Figure laughed and swatted the creature away. Pain was foreign to him, but he got the feeling that this planet revolved around it. “That little bastard was trying to hurt me,” he thought bemusedly.

He watched the thing swim away and decided to follow it. Not as himself though. He looked down at where the creature bit him and closed his many eyes. Within seconds, his body had morphed into a body like that of the creature. A female, he now understood as he took stock of his own body sensations. Something about his internal body map told him he could have offspring if he wanted to.

“How interesting,” he mused. “Maybe I ought to find a mate.”

So he swam after his newfound friend, hoping she could show him a healthy creature to mate with. He swam up beside her, thinking she’d be pleased to see him. But he could tell she was anything but. She charged at him, biting at his fins, making it hard for him to keep swimming.

“What’s wrong with you,” he cried, “I just want you to show me around!”

But the she-creature would not give up.

Finally the Figure broke free of her bite and turned back into himself. He wrapped his tendrils around the she-creature and pulled her apart, tossing the two weeping halves of her body to the side.

He sulked in confusion, frustration and grief for a moment, for he had killed his only friend, not just on this planet but in the whole multiverse. He tried to remember what he had read about Earth. His kind had been monitoring it for some time, but no one had ever come here, and had certainly never disguised themselves as Earth creatures, living in cognito among them, like he was planning to do. No, the old fuddy duddy bookish types were too cowardly for that.

But the behavior the she-creature had exhibited was something he remembered as being called “territorial.” For some odd reason, the creatures here could be defensive about everything, food, mates, and even living space. On his home world, his kind tended to help each other rather than attack, he thought smugly. But I suppose they can be territorial about ideas...those old-timers don’t want me to do research this way because it’s not how they want to do things. If that’s not territorial, I don’t know what is.

Suddenly something caught the Figure’s attention deep deep below him. Movement. He swam down until he saw the source: tens of thousands of little creatures with eight pairs of slender legs, a pair of claws and dozens of spines.

“Now this is more like it!” he said. “These look to be about the least territorial species I’ve ever seen!”

He swam closer, put his face inches from the swarm and wrapped a tendril around the spine of a creature on the periphery.

“Just going to borrow this, old chap.”

He broke off the spine and closed his eyes as he held it tighter and tighter until he was an adorable little squirming freak. And for 100 years, he continued to live with the Hallucigenia until he predicted that they would evolve in a direction he didn’t care for. So for the next several thousand millenia, he hopped from species to species. Ate among them, migrated among them, had sex among them, lived among them.

300,006 years ago, he encountered his first human as a mosquito in what is now Cameroon. He was flying about, having the time of his life, eating his fill of blood to feed his brood. He could feel plasmodia inside of him, and knew whichever creature in the food chain he bit next would be the next step in the life cycle of the parasite. It made him proud to be the only mosquito in the whole world that was self aware. He landed on an animal that had the capacity to walk upright, which caused him to stop and assess. Clearly her lineage had been descended from primates, but he saw a new idle cleverness in her. She was laying on her stomach, face dangling over the water of a puddle of water. The Figure paused on her shoulder and tried to see what she saw. She was gazing, just gazing, at herself, ceaselessly. Her hands trailed the cool water and she marvelled at her reflection, not even what it represented, but the reflection itself. Her eyes darted around, studying every distortion of her form. This went on for about twenty minutes before she felt him on her shoulder and tried to slap him with those incredible, sculpted hands. He flew off haughtily.

“Stupid creature,” he grumbled. “Just gazing into the puddle like that. Her species will be extinct within the next hundred years, mark my words.”

He didn’t have any other notable human encounters until 7198 years ago when he heard stirrings that humans might be the most interesting creature on the planet: one that builds civilizations, just like his ancestors had Back Home.

At the time he was living as a gazelle living near the Mesopotamian river. Gazelle sex was thrilling enough to keep the Figure coming back for more but he was tired of eating so much grass. And he was sick of those pesky ape creatures that hurled arrows and spears at him. One day he was eating some plants he particularly liked on the edge of the river when a huntress shot an arrow at him from 10 feet away on the opposite river bank. It hit him in the flank and he charged, running in three different directions before deciding on one. But by the time he decided, the huntress was upon him with a dagger. His physical vessel was panicking but from all this he was getting an idea...if you can’t beat them, join them. He looked into her eyes which gave her pause. She cocked her head and regarded him. While her guard was down he shed his body and grew to his natural 12 meters tall. The woman screamed until he hushed her with his tendrils.

“I just...need…this.” he said, gently sucking out some of her blood with one of his tubules. He slowly shrank as he slid into his new human suit. It happened to look exactly like the huntress, which would never do if they were to exist in the same village, and he had no desire to kill her.

He looked at his reflection in the river and slowly mushed his face around a little. He looked at her.

“How do I look?” he said, doing a spin for her.

She had been staring at him in utterly stunned silence, but slowly found her voice.

“I will tell everyone what you are,” she said quietly.

“What?” the Figure looked confused.

“I WILL TELL EVERYONE WHAT YOU ARE!” she yelled, rising to her feet.

“Tell them what?”

“That you’re a shapeshifter. That you’re evil.”

“Then you’ll have to tell them your secret too.”

Before she could ask what he meant, one of his spines from his old form sprang out of his back and pierced his human skin. As the rivulet of blood flowed down his arm, he jammed the bloody spine into her mouth. She startled, spitting and cursing.

“It’s too late, my dear,” said the Figure.

The huntress was doubled over in pain, feeling as if her insides were turning to liquid.

“What did you do to me?”

“For millions of years I’ve been alone on this planet. Now I finally have someone like me,” he said, smiling.

The huntress cried and prayed to her ancestors as her body contorted and the hallucinations started to come.

“What did you do to me?” she wailed, and passed out cold on the riverbank.

When she woke up the Figure was sitting next to her, still human-shaped. She gazed into his face, which was a badly stretched version of her own.

“I was wondering when you’d wake up,” he said.

“What happened?”

“You’re like me, now, I’m afraid,” he said, still smiling.

“What do you mean, like you?” she asked.

“Just try turning into someone else.”

“Someone else?”

“Yes, make your face into another’s.”

“What sort of riddle is this?”

“Not a riddle, a command. Do it, now.”

She furrowed her brow and obeyed. She looked away, and when she looked back at him she was wearing the face of her father.

“Look at yourself in the river,” the Figure said.

She did and cried out.

“What’s your name?” he asked her.

“Aya,” she replied, weeping fearfully.

“Aya....you can call me Virulence. We’re going to have so much fun together.”