Archive for Creatures

The Elder Things bred shoggoths to perform any number of duties, from protectors, to workhorses, to, believe it or not, companions. The companion was a smaller shoggoth, bred for a limited intelligence and telepathy that allowed it to read its master’s emotions and react to them.

With the revolt against their masters, the majority of the companion shoggoths were destroyed by their larger cousins as a matter of survival of the fittest.  However, a small number survived to the present day. Enter Chopstick and Samantha.

Janet was a lot different after the procedure. Those first few months were tough, and I hate to say that. You’re torn between being overjoyed that they survived, but the side effects are really troubling. The memory gaps, that odd feeling of detachment, that blank stare and lack of facial expressions. It’s like, “congratulations, your wife beat stage IV pancreatic cancer and now here she is, except she barely remembers who you are, who anyone is, and cognitively most of her brain has gone into reset mode.” Sorry. Yeah, it was hard, but she learned to walk again, learned to read again, remembered more and more about her life, remembered me. Is she the same woman I married? No.  Oddly in a lot of ways she’s better. To be honest, but I’m not the same man she married either. Life, in general, changes you, and something like this, being so close to death and then saved by this miracle treatment, yeah, expect some big changes.  

Actually a form of proto-shoggoth, symbiotic shoggoths are the creations of experimentation. They are a hybridization of shoggoth protoplasmic matter and human tissue, originally designed to seek out cancer cells in a human body and destroy them. After countless failures, a variety of these specialized cells (named Recaptive-28) were created that did, in fact, remove all traces of cancer from a human body. What no one, not even the scientists who created this treatment understand, is that what most consider “side effects” are actually a new state of being. 

It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train—a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and unforming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter.

H. P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness (1931)

That’s the eye-witness description we find in “At the Mountains of Madness” for the terrible shoggoths, horrifying bio-engineered life-forms that H.P. Lovecraft name dropped in his other stories “The Thing on the Doorstep” and “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.” However, their creators, the Old Ones (later rechristened Elder Things so as not to confuse them with the Great Old Ones) designed the shoggoths to be a kind of endlessly repurposable biological construction equipment. 

“Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes – viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells – rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile – slaves of suggestion, builders of cities – more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative!”

The shoggoths were an endlessly adaptable life form that could act as a crane, an earthmover, a bulldozer, steamroller, or even (one supposes) weapons of war when the Elder Things warred with some of the other early inhabitants of the Earth. They were never meant to be able to chose what shapes they took, that was for their masters to decide, but like the quoted passage says, they developed independent intelligence and an agenda all their own, quite reminiscent of the common sci-fi trope about artificially intelligent robots and computers gaining consciousness and turning on their creators. 

It was around 4:30am in the bus station located at Melnea Cass Boulevard & Madison Avenue in Boston. Several scantily clad women were standing on the sidewalk, some visibly digging at invisible spiders. Bit by bit, cars containing single men pulled up, and the women left…only to return a short time later. A girl in a leather jacket, pleated plaid skirt, and auburn pixie cut was gone the most, seconded only by a young woman with locks the color of orangish flame wearing only black negligee. A blonde woman who could be otherwise cosplaying Uma Thurman from Pulp Fiction down to the hair cut and bare feet had grown frustrated and restless, keenly aware of the current trade of the night. Finally, she stormed off down the street, passed the intersection and after walking past the homeless shelter, turned the corner onto Albany as a tall, lithe redhead clad only in a stained grey thong bikini.

In nature, many opportunistic predators evolve to take the form of their prey. Examples of this include the fireflies of the genus Photuris that emit the same photonic signals that females of the genus Photinus emit as a mating signal. The same can be said of the shoggoth. As humans are the top species on this planet and account for a great deal of it’s biomass, specializing in preying on them has been the niche of several species of predator. As such, it makes sense that a quickly adapting species such as the shoggoth would use mimicry as a predation strategy. 

The Le Fear Fatal takes the look of, including replicating clothes, a sexually available female.  They’re not very sentient in any humanly recognizable way, with intelligence on par of an African Grey Parrot. As human society progressed, they adapted to the more common courtship patterns they observed in their new natural environment: a concrete jungle.

We’d been chasing reports of a condor for over week when we saw it, soaring high above us on the thermals rising out of these canyons. It looked massive from here, and our photographer struggled to track it. We needed pictures to see if it was banded, part of a breeding program, or a wild born animal we hadn’t yet identified in our conservation efforts. Suddenly our photographer screamed and dropped his camera. He curled into a ball and started babbling about blinking eyes and slavering mouths. He said it wasn’t a condor. He said a lot of things, but we didn’t believe him then. I wish we had.