Wednesday DE: Beasties

[galen_erso]

What unusual animals / fantastic beasts exist in your character's world, and what is their experience with those creatures?

For charries from a bog standard Earth: what are the strangest creatures they have encountered un Milliways or in somebody else's world?

And yes, I exist.

Comments

[configuration_birdwatcher]

Most of the animals in Bastion's world are pretty normal Earth animals, although it's not quite a bog-standard Earth. Ganymede is a minor exception insofar as he belongs to a made-up species of bird vaguely evoking a yellow morph of a cardinal or a white-eye (neither of which live in Europe, I feel the need to point out). His species, which canon doesn't name and I haven't named either, is more intelligent than either of those are really known to be; what I shoot for when I'm writing for Ganymede is that he's as smart as a smart dog, or a kind of ditzy crow, but not as smart as a macaw or a kea.

The species Ganymede belongs to also has to be on the longer-lived end of bird lifespans for The Last Bastion to be more than a couple years before Overwatch's present day, and I've already committed to it being fourteen years ago in Millicanon. Ganymede being vaguely teenaged actually isn't too improbable if we use cardinals as our model, since the oldest one with a known age lived to be 28 in captivity.

More prominent in Overwatch canon are the animal enhancement experiments from Lucheng Interstellar, performed at the Horizon Lunar Colony. I don't know why they needed to do that on the moon, but that's what canon gave us. The Horizon science team successfully produced around thirty genetically modified animals with humanlike intelligence, mostly gorillas but there was also a hamster that grew to nearly the size of a capybara and seems to age more slowly than hamsters normally do (he's the newest playable hero and he doesn't have much concrete info yet). The gorillas can also speak English, or at least Winston can, but it's beyond Hammond's ability. (Hammond being the giant hamster.) Winston absconded from the moonbase in a spacecraft of his own construction after the other gorillas violently overthrew the human scientists and took over. Then he joined Overwatch after he landed on Earth, and he ended up in charge mainly because he took the initiative to put it back together after it had been disbanded for a few years. So, long story short, Bastion's boss/CO is an unusual animal.

[bjornwilde]

Ahsoka and Sabine come from Star Wars, which has too many answers for this. Of the two, Ahsoka has had more contact with wildlife, especially convors. Sabine will interact with loth wolves but that's in the future. She's cautious and respectful of them.

Danny has fought a dragon and lives to honor its sacrifice.

[explosive_artist]

Thinking farther, Sabine has encountered many strange creatures. The purrgils (basically space whales) were awe inspiring, and the spider things in season 02 are creepy and a danger to be aware of, but it's still the loth wolves that captured her imagination. This could be due to their bearing and odd abilities, or her fascination with the bounty hunter Embo and his anooba.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

Oh, lordy. Um.

you got your giant mutant crabs (mirelurks), your giant moderately mutant bears (yao guai), deathclaws (how they got those from Jackson's chameleons I don't know but that's their canonical ancestor species), giant ants, giant fire-breathing ants, giant flies of several species, giant scorpions, giant bitey stinging insects of various species including the tarantula hawk wasps the size of ten-year-olds, roaches the size of human babies, mole rats the size of human toddlers, two-headed deer, two-headed cows, hybrids of coyotes and rattlesnakes (mad science at its finest), levitating vaguely alien things that are in fact gengineered flatworms, at least two different things called 'centaurs' which are actually humans forcibly bodily merged with either animals or other humans depending on which game you're dealing with, bighorn sheep about the size of musk oxen which give the distinct impression of having been designed by Mike Mignola.. I threw in a few extra mutant animal species when I had Ellen go to Point Lookout because I would rather deal with giant mutant walking catfish than the in-game enemies called swampfolk... oh, and in New Vegas there are the burrowers, which are mutated humanoids which are supposedly a massive threat to all of the southwestern part of the continent but you only have one guy's word for that. And there are a bunch of two-headed species of things like gazelles that survived the war in the zoo at Nuka-World. Also 'ghoulrillas' although tbh they look more like ordinary gorillas with a slight skin problem than actual ghouls, so I'm going to assume the people who named them were just being over dramatic. Oh, and I millicanoned that not everything mutated in the direction of gigantism; in Ellen's world the plural of 'moose' is 'mice' because they're now basically bite sized ruminant nuggets on the hoof.

The horse is supposed to canonically be extinct in North America at this point in the setting's history. There's a tie-in comic that shows a cavalry charge, but there are a huge number of continuity errors in that comic and the game designers said the horses weren't supposed to be there. I favor the fan solution to the issue, which is to say that there was a cavalry charge, but the NCR soldiers in question were mounted on two-headed cows. For some time cats were thought to be extinct in the setting, too, but they appear in Fallout 4 and look quite normal. I am going with the fan proposal that one of the Vaults in New England consisted of a number of little old ladies and a lot of cats each, and this Vault only opened relatively recently.

... I forgot the mirelurk kings, which in 3 and New Vegas are mutated snapping turtles that look like Lord Voldemort had a baby with the Creature from the Black Lagoon. The things called mirelurk kings in Fallout 4 are a lot spinier and weirder looking. Also there are the plant creatures in Vault 22 in New Vegas, and... well, there's a bunch of species out there that I don't have a full tally of.

Ellen has fought and killed a lot of these creatures. She has also broken at least one Brahmin to the saddle and owns a small herd of them; Fawkes is looking after them for her back in the Capital.

[cottoncandypink]

Oh god

I'm pretty sure "all of them" to some extent. The boogieman and monsters in the closet and under the bed or creeping outside the window are things every child has to deal with at some point. Hiking is the most dangerous thing a person can do, unless they know how to deal with wendigos, trolls, bigfoot, the rake, or any number of other monsters that live in the woods.

The SCP Foundation has entire warehouses full of creeps that want every human being in the world dead.

Every now and then, some asteroid will hit Earth and bring some mutant horror, or some disease will break out and cause some mutant horror, or some bioweapon will be released that causes some mutant horror.

Then there are the werewolves. And the vampires. Werewolves are a little less stressful to deal with, since they're only dangerous once a month, but anybody you meet after dark can potentially be a blood-sucking creep.

And we can't forget those science weridos who like to create monsters just for the hell of it. They almost always seem to escape and mess up somebody's day.

That's not even getting into all the demons and eldritch abominations out there. There are lots of them, suffice to say.


Wilford's dealt with a good deal of monsters, both personally and professionally. He kind of got a bit pigeon-holed into covering paranormal topics after he broke the Slenderman story, but it wound up being fun and gave him an excuse to be reckless and idiotic, so he stuck with it and made a career out of going out and finding monsters to poke with a stick. The day he can actually expose Bigfoot for tax evasion will be the day he announces his retirement.



Basically, the fact that anybody ever makes it to adulthood is a miracle.

[fairy_fixit]

Fairy Fixit and Amascut's canon has a mix of bog standard Earth critters and fantastical critters, and a whole bunch that fit in the space between. It is justified by saying that the younger gods brought in many of their favorite fauna and flora to populate Gielinor when they decided it would be an excellent planet to settle and start a possibly interstellar or multidimensional empire from. Many gods had the same idea, though. Secondly, many worlds which the gods could have pulled settlers, flora, and fauna from had been terraformed/settled in a human diaspora initiated and encouraged/enabled by one of the older young gods, who happens to be an ascended human himself. Canon insists, though, that the human homeworld is not Earth and that Earth isn't even part of the canon multiverse (Britain still exists, somehow). The human homeworld is Teragard, a cold world that is maybe an ecumenopolis?

But anyway, there are completely normal cows, sheep, butterflies, rabbits, chickens, dogs, wolves, bears, fish, sharks, crocodiles, vultures, etc, but cats, penguins, polar bears, seals, walruses, and various non-human simians seem a lot more intelligent than usual. Zanarian cows and sheep are also intelligent for some whimsical-ass faerie magic reason? The big cat species are not bog standard Earth varieties, there are normal looking rats and rodents of unusual size, same with spiders (some of that is due to spiders from the spider dimension), hellhounds, hellcats, and hellrats but no hellrabbits, unicorns but no horses, exploding chinchillas, giant eagles, giant lizards, fire breathing salamanders, and then there are the completely fantastical fauna and standard fantasy intelligent species such as goblins, orcs, elves, ogres, trolls, demons, angels, vampires, werewolves, zombies, birdpersons... and then the magical space gem wizards that Amascut hates so much. Amascut herself is an unusual ascended not!cat and the fairies are fungus/insect symbionts.

... and Evil Chicken is an evil chicken of unusual size and intelligence of course.

It would have been easier to link to some beastiaries like http://runescape.wikia.com/wiki/Bestiary or http://runescape.wikia.com/wiki/Slayer_monsters oh well

[oldmancreed]

Tess' favourite is the space whale. Sadly, she didn't get to communicate with it, but it was there and she saw it.

Rose has encountered nothing out of the ordinary in her world. At Milliways, she'd have to say Alec, who was very kind.

Kylo sees all kinds of creatures roaming space as he does. Some of them even fight for him. No negative experiences so far but chances are there will be.

Creed tends to be the unusual creature. He's met enough mutants and such in his home world that he doesn't really care about unusual anymore.

[strongest_faith]

Alec is from a bog-standard Earth as far as fauna goes, but he's been up against a lot of demons that are pretty animalistic.

Middle Earth is relatively normal in terms of animals as well. The strangest would likely be the mumakil, which are like giant war elephants, and the fell beasts of the Nazgul, which are sort of...flying...dragon...lizard...gross things.

Orpheus has all the bog-standard Greek myth creatures. He kind of liked Cerberus, himself.

[sunbaked_baker]

Yay for existence! :D!

If there is a myth or legend about it, it probably exists in Sunshine's world, to the point where she's found it much easier to list what isn't in her world. They've got vampires, weres of all sorts, endless varieties of demon, plus all the pixies, peris, faeries, ogres, trolls, gremlins, wights, zombies, wraiths, lamias, incubi and succubi, kelpies, the blessedly rare dragons, and even urban legends and rumors of fallen angels. Her experience with the Others, as they are collectively known by humans, has mainly been limited to Part-Blood Others (those who are part-human and part-Other) and vampires. Her experiences with the former have, on the whole, been much more positive than her experiences with the latter. As for the strangest creatures she has encountered in Milliways, Rae once encountered a (possibly the) minotaur in the Milliways labyrinth. Unless Slenderman counts as a creature, in which case he takes the cake.

Yrael considers himself a fantastic beast, thank you very much comes from the Old Kingdom, which has the bog-standard Earth type animals, plus the various creatures and constructs of Free Magic. Some of the kinds we see in canon include:

--Stilkin: approximately the appearance of a woman, with two rows of sharp, silver or black teeth, a grey and yellow striped tongue, silver fire eyes, and elongated arms that end in hooked claws like a praying mantis

--Hrule: a large creature with black eyes with violet pupils, a wide mouth with shining black teeth, long neck, thin and cylindrical torso with a cross-hatched, violet hide, long arms with barbed, club-like hands, backwards-jointed legs ending in hooked hooves

--Ferenk: an elemental of stone and mud, with a mouth of pure darkness and a tongue of silver fire, generally a scavenger

--Hish: small, vaguely-humanoid but impossibly thin, with flesh of swiftly-swirling mist and bones of blue-white fire.

Hedda Winchell's world appears bog-standard Earth on the surface, but figures and creatures of various mythologies still exist where there is belief enough.

[i_am_your_host]

I'm trying very hard to remember if Emcee has encountered anything more creaturely than a vampire in Milliways, and I'm blanking (the heat has melted my brain). A demon rabbit, once, in the dark, and from a distance, probably. He's never been to the stables or the Labyrinth. He hasn't even met Yrael in his cat form.

Pam: werewolves, shapeshifters, faeries, maenads, witches. She hates them all.

Cassidy: an arse-faced kid in the comics the strangest thing he ever saw was the vampire bog hag that bit him, but I don't know if they'll translate that to the show. Also, he's hallucinated unicorns and leprechauns, though he swears they're real.

[mogget_cat]

"He hasn't even met Yrael in his cat form."

*wide eyes*

.... we should remedy this. >__________________>

[i_am_your_host]

I so very much agree!