Post by Subtleknifewielder on Feb 17, 2023 20:43:47 GMT
--General--
Full Name: Shru
Alias: If he has any aliases or nicknames, he does not know them, aside from the name of the human hunter whose memories he possesses--Drake Leontine
Age: 59 (since he gained self-awareness)
Residence: Pulic, specifically a swampy kingdom on the edge of the wasteland (came originally from Cauli)
Gender: Male (there's an interesting story behind that...)
Species: A fungal monster, specifically the kind nicknamed a fairy ring because that is what it resembles in its base, natural form
Alignment: Good, or trying to be anyway
Faction: What faction would employ a monster? He did make a deal with a small king of Pulic who wants to increase the size of his domain through less violent means, if that counts...
--Appearance--
Picture:
Physical Description: In Shru's base form, he resembles a very large ring of many ordinary seeming mushrooms, otherwise known as a fairy ring. The only outward giveaway that they might not be ordinary is that the ring is much larger than a typical fairy ring. Inside, the almost glitter-like spores that are released either at will, or when one of those mushrooms is cut, will also give it away, but if that is your first clue it's already too late if you are hostile. In short, he is a single big fungal colony disguised as many smaller ones, a good deal of him underground in this form. However, he can shift forms to a more roughly humanoid figure at least twice the height of the average man, though he is squat-looking from afar, thick around the middle with pale grey, leathery skin all over, very obviously still resembling a mushroom, just with what are obviously arms, legs, and a face with blue eyes and a thin gash of a mouth. The top part of his head is a massive mushroom cap that is red with white spots. At random spots on the main body (mostly on the limbs, but several on his back along what would be the spine on a human, as well), smaller mushroom appendages grow out of his skin topped by similarly colored caps to the one on his head.
Clothing: While Shru possesses knowledge of clothes, he has no need or inclination for such things.
Abilities
Physical Powers Select a maximum of 3, these powers must be linked to your monster physiology in some capacity, however they do not automatically need to have drawbacks
Ability name: Spore Cloud
Body part: Gills
Ability description: The gills under his mushroom caps, as mundane mushrooms do, can produce spores, which could in theory be used to create more of himself, however he opts not to do that. However, living organisms infected with the spores slowly start to feel compelled to return to him to either be consumed, or for him to cleanse the infected individual from his influence (which he may choose to do if he does not feel they should be consumed), the compulsion growing stronger the longer the infection goes untreated. It also grows harder for such an individual to attempt to harm him over the same period of time, and they may even feel compelled to defend him if someone else attacks. However, it is not difficult for others to cleanse a living being from his spores as well, given no more than three days has elapsed by the time a good dose of anti-fungal medication is applied. Before the spores are released, he can also apply a handful of other potential effects to them, from darkening them to serve as a smokescreen, brightening them into a rainbow-glitter-like appearance to serve as a distraction, making them a hallucinogen, turning them poison, or even making them harmless and edible if he chose, capable of producing perfectly ordinary mushrooms. Nearly all effects are things mushrooms are known for being able to do, or at least similar to what natural mushrooms have already developed to do, including medicinal properties. He cannot control where the spores go once released, however, nor can he just produce constant clouds of them whenever he wishes, needing to spend a little time growing more if he releases a full blast all at once, and thus has to be judicious in when and where he releases a cloud. He needs an hour to fully refill on spores.
Ability name: Malleable Flesh
Body part: Entire body
Ability description: Shru's mass largely has the consistency of rubber or leather, making him nearly immune to most blunt force attacks unless they are from an extremely superhuman source. It can also contort, contract, separate or congeal at will, in whole or in part--this is what allows him to form into the fairy ring, or the humanoid looking mushroom, or otherwise alter his shape, even allowing him to put on the affectation of scars, though those are purely cosmetic and have no effect on his capabilities. Needless to say, this is a versatile physical ability--aside from the durability it grants, it allows him to extend and manipulate pseudopod like appendages for a variety of complex tasks, should he know what needs to be done, up to and including hands that have fingers and opposable thumbs. While he cannot directly manipulate flesh that's been severed from the main body, he can reabsorb it if it isn't destroyed first, and has not been disconnected for too long, making it hard to harm him with cutting implements on top of the protection his skin provides, unless one can keep that severed flesh away from him for a time--though being fungal in nature, that risks the creation of another, entirely new monster like himself if enough mass was severed (it takes about one kilogram of flesh for the possibility to exist). Not something he is keen to have happen as he cannot guarantee his offspring will be as selective as he is about their diet. He cannot change his total mass by adding or subtracting unless he consumes more mass to add to his own.
Ability name: Cleansing
Body part: Skin
Ability description: Through contact with his skin, Shru can slowly cleanse the aura of death from around himself and breathe new life into his surroundings, slowly reclaiming land that is marred by death with new life at the rate of several square yards per day (more if he is particularly well fed at the time, and the rate is also increased the longer an area has been under the influence of this ability). As a mushroom, it is natural to him to consume dead things, and give their essence back to nature. It is through this ability that he can also heal those who have been sickened with natural poisons and toxins, as well as bacteria, not just his own spores, by secreting the natural antidotes to whatever might be ailing them (or in the case of his own spores, simply nullify them by touching the afflicted individual). He cannot affect viruses, nor can he heal injuries, and reclaiming land requires him to remain in one area for a time to fully take effect.
Spiritual Powers Select a maximum of 3, these powers are supernatural effects you have consciously developed with your mystic energy, and do not need to be linked to any specific thing so long as they logically make sense for your monster to develop.
Ability name: Familiar
Ability description: Shru can connect his mind to an individual (sentient or beast) who has eaten part of his flesh, or been infected with his spores, and view the world through their senses--touch, taste, smell, sight, sound. While he cannot compel them to act exactly as he wishes right off, he can offer suggestions once they start to feel the instinctive compulsions to return to him. The longer they have been infected the more direct influence he can extend over their mind and actions.
Ability drawbacks: The fungal monster cannot extend his influence across continents, or really from any distance more than ten miles away. The more intelligent an individual is, the harder it is to exert any kind of influence until the infection has spread. He also cannot read their mind, merely borrow their senses.
Ability name: Memory Thief
Ability description: While most monsters just absorb the spiritual energy from those they consume and evolve that way, Shru can do a bit more--he can mentally sift through the memories and capabilities of his food, and retain not only the raw power, but some of their skills, abilities, or memories.
Ability drawbacks: He cannot retain everything from those he eats; he must pick and choose which skills he wants to retain. He can retain many memories to the point of even having his personality be influenced by theirs, but skills and abilities he must be much more choosy with, depending on how powerful they are and how ingrained in his prey's physiology they are--and if they are especially powerful, he must choose between them and retaining any memories. And though he always gets something from everything he eats, the longer a thing has been dead for, the less of their skills and memories he can take for himself. Lastly, if he loses a significant portion of his flesh, this power risks inflicting him with more than just a power loss, but the loss of memories and abilities gained this way. If this lost mass is consumed by someone capable of stomaching him and not being subsumed, that individual may gain the memories or abilities he has lost.
Ability name: Will-o'-the-wisp
Ability description: An ability Shru developed in conjunction with some of his spores' natural capabilities--he can create optical illusions, bright and distracting lights, and even small but complex illusions, even making himself seem to glow in the dark. He cannot utterly change the landscape, but he can hide or add a few critical details to suit the impression he wants a person to have. He can also add auditory components to the illusions to complement what he is trying to show. A bird call, a twig snapping, a wave beating on the shore.
Ability drawbacks: For now, this ability is limited in scope. He is limited to affecting only his immediate surroundings, things like casting doubts on his exact positioning or hiding the presence of, say, a tripwire or other small trap. On the auditory side, he cannot imitate voices, only natural sounds, nor can the sounds be deafening, yet. He cannot affect any other senses.
--Important Information--
Personality: If one had to pick a single word to describe Shru, it would be--curiosity. He is possessed of an insatiable curiosity to learn about the world around himself, and continue to add to that knowledge by nearly any means, so long as it causes no overt harm to another in the process. However, underneath that curiosity, is a sense of guilt, for subsuming and eventually consuming the hunter he ran into on the first talon of Cauli, as he now knows the humans refer to it. After the first, he refuses to consume any but those who prove violent toward their fellows in anything but self-defense, unless they are already dead by other means--or if he was forced to kill them to defend himself. However, he will go out of his way to avoid outright fighting humans where possible, not only because they are dangerous to mess with, but because, again, he feels they do not generally deserve to be hunted just for consumption. Plus, while he could consume their memories if he ate them, that would be the end of their possibilities. He sincerely hopes to one day more effectively be able to communicate with humans, to better facilitate understanding and the satiation of his curiosity--as well as make up somehow to the family of the hunter he absorbed, but as yet the ability to speak refuses to evolve into his repertoire.
Likes: Learning, growing, and changing, seeing what all he can do as he grows in both size and power.
Dislikes: Feral monsters that only think of their own belly and immediate self-gratification, and humans that prey on their kind not unlike other monsters prey on them. He also dislikes this feeling of guilt he's been inflicted with for so long that he cannot shake himself of.
Strengths: His intelligence, and the skills he has absorbed from those he has eaten over the years--also extreme patience learned from his time as an ambush hunter.
Weaknesses: Being a fungal monster, his biggest weakness is fire and extreme heat--they will be guaranteed to thoroughly destroy his flesh, and obviously being consumed by someone or something immune to or capable of fighting off fungal infections will do the same. While dehydration and subzero temperatures will not have the same immediate, drastic effect, they will force him into hibernation similar to cryogenic suspension and slowly inflict damage over time the longer the exposure lasts. Saltwater in any great quantities also tends to be poison to him. Basically anything that is known to kill normal mushrooms will hurt him. Also, while he can read, he cannot talk.
Skills: Reading, writing, and understanding human speech (things he picked up from the first human he consumed), basic skills with several melee weapons.
Talents: He is very, very good at studying his surroundings, and perceiving every aspect of them. In a human, it would be called hyper-awareness. In the same human, he would also be said to have a mind like a steel trap.
Motto: Good things come to he who waits.
Goal: To eventually evolve to the point of being able to look perfectly human, and pass among them, and even speak, making himself indistinguishable from one of them.
Music Video:
History: Shru started life as just another unintelligent monster. Who knows how long he spent in the marsh of the first talon of Cauli? But he was deemed harmless by a hunter who was there to hunt and subsequently consumed for nourishment, unknowingly setting in motion a chain of events that would lead to him gaining intelligence and self-awareness, and more importantly, empathy. But before all that, the hunter known as Drake Leontine went about his business, and eventually returned to the continent of Certa. Before he could return to his home in Pulic, however, Shru's own ability was turned against him, consuming him from the inside out, and from that event, the mushroom gained sentience, and an awareness of exactly what he had done--he absorbed every moment of the feeling of dread that Drake had felt right up to the moment the man's mind had died, and shuddered, not just metaphorically, but literally.
At first, it was simply the desire to avoid that absolute, mind-numbing dread that led to him to avoid feeding on sentient creatures again for a time. But then, as he processed more of the memories, and covertly observed humans passing in the distance from where he had chosen to take root for a time, he realized something else. For whatever reason, the action just felt--wrong. But he had no way of expressing this, no way of rationalizing this. It just felt wrong, not instinctively wrong, but morally wrong. In truth, what had happened was he absorbed not just Drake's memories, but his conscience as well. And as the man's last thoughts had been of a family he would never see again, so too did they occupy a large portion of Shru's thoughts, leading him to linger on the edge of the wasteland just outside the borders of Pulic, instead of just moving on.
In fact, he settled down quite near the road, to give it a long think, turning his thoughts mostly inward and giving the outside world barely more than a cursory glance now and then with one of the many mushroom heads that formed his fairy ring shape. He did slowly subsume anything that died in his vicinity, but he needed to devote no conscious thought to that, and most of them were too weak and unintelligent to give him more than a mild power boost, nothing else that was useful. He's not sure how long it was before a clamor he could not ignore roused him again.
What he saw when he turned his senses outward again was a small caravan under attack by a pack of a dozen vicious-looking horse-sized creatures with mouths full of needle-sharp teeth and far too many rows of them. Their hides were armored with some kind of scale, making them resemble slightly overgrown and misshapen crocodiles. Even as he watched, he saw one go down while they swarmed the last of the escort vehicles. The screams he heard from inside the vehicle were what convinced him to take action, and slowly he uprooted himself, forming into his large, singular humanoid form, lumbering toward the fray. In just a few moments after, he was among them, releasing a cloud of spores that they breathed in before any could realize how dangerous they were. He connected briefly with the mind of one creature, and through its own sense of touch, gained an awareness of a weakness on its underbelly, a small vulnerable section of flesh not covered by those armor plates. A tendril of his flesh shot out, flipping the beast over, while another grabbed a sword from a fallen guard and thrust it into the weak point.
He had no time to feel triumphant, as the cry of the mortally wounded beast, along with its death throes, drew the attention of its mates, who had finished off all but the occupants of a single vehicle, the one that had been at the center of the caravan. And so, the remaining crocodile monsters swarmed toward him, their collective hissing like the sound of a thousand angry cats. He was able to snatch another with a tendril and do the same to it as he had the first, and knock a couple more into their fellows, tangling them in angry lumps of armored flesh and teeth, but that still left five to swarm him as the other four recovered. The first bites felt like mere pinpricks, these teeth meant more for piercing and grabbing than tearing, but the pain still woke him to a sense of danger as more than one of them started viciously shaking their heads back and forth trying to rip some strips off his body.
Dropping and rolling allowed him to wind most of his attackers, but they were too well armored to simply be crushed, only stunning them long enough for him to pry off their jaws one at a time--but he was able to take a few teeth that had ripped out of their mouths, and pierce another through an eye and thus the brain behind that eye. It writhed, and lay still, while he fended off the remaining ones with the sword in one hand. One sword was not enough, however, and he fumbled for another, the blades proving capable of at least deflecting bites, if not breaking the teeth behind them.
With all the remaining crocodiles focused on him, and Shru's actions showing how to beat them, three guards poked up out of the remaining vehicle and started taking shots with their weapons, and one using some sort of ability to freeze the creatures' legs to the ground, one at a time, long enough to start picking them off. They were down to five before they realized what happened. One of them took those guards by surprise and lunged, chomping the power user in half while the remaining guards frantically stabbed it to death through the eyes. However, in its death throes two of them were crushed outright, and another mortally wounded, while Shru finished off the remaining creatures. And then, all was still. Shru rooted his feet, releasing tendrils through the ground into the flesh of the slain creatures, and any of the guards that lay on the ground. He felt no guilt about consuming that which was already dead, but even as he did that, one more face peered cautiously up out of the vehicle's hatch, to watch, fearful but curious, as Shru began evolving, realizing he could do more with his spores--and that he could remove their taint from those he did not wish to affect. Already the man, a king, was wheezing from having breathed them in, and Shru reached out to touch, calling the spores within the man's body back to him from the contact.
It was this gesture that finally convinced the king that this fungal monster was not here to eat him as most monsters might do. In fact, having gained more knowledge from the guards he was consuming, said mushroom monster realized that in this king, laid an opportunity, and hopefully, he scratched some words in the dirt in a basic form of writing, hoping against hope the man understood. Fearful, but swallowing that fear, the king climbed out of his vehicle entirely, and a pact was born of that moment as he saw that the land outside was more fertile than it had been the last time he had been this way. The man's kingdom was poor in resources, being right on the edge of the wasteland, and deducing that Shru was behind the change, he agreed to give the monster knowledge in the form of books, and the occasional criminal condemned to death, in exchange for Shru just doing what he naturally did--convert dead land to fertile farmland once again.
Both parties walked away from that day a little happier than they had been. It wasn't until the man was gone, that Shru realized maybe he could have used this as a means to do something about Drake's family...but now it was a bit late to call the man back, as he had returned to the safety of his kingdom. Shru mentally sighed, and settled himself into a nearby bog that had little more than a few scraggly trees and desperate blades of grass as vegetation, using his recent glut of power to kickstart the conversion process. Once again he settled himself into a fairy ring, but with at least one mushroom always keeping an eye on the nearby road to watch for other travelers, and others keeping an eye out for more possible monsters like those crocodiles, that might make this bog their home...
Stats
Level - (3) Your level represents your overall ability in comparison to others. These levels grant a general sense of your character's overall strength in comparison to others. Each level up is a larger gap than the last. (the gap between a 4 and a 5 is larger than a 1 and a 2, and the gap between 6 and 7 even greater still). Which is not to say a level 4 cannot beat a level 5 under the right circumstances (or any other example, 3 beating a 4, 5 beating a 6, etc...).
Stat Graph
Physical
Strength - (3) pretty self explanatory here, how much you can lift, how hard you punch, etc...
Speed - (2) Also pretty simple, some people are faster than others, especially in this world where mystic energies can enhance your speed or reflexes greatly.
Durability - (8) both a measure of how long you can fight without getting fatigued, and just how much punishment your character can withstand before going down. If the monster has defensive scales, quills, etc... this stat will also determine exactly how durable/potent those features are.
Skill - (5) How good you are with your physical features. How efficient are you with your strikes? Perhaps you can fire quills out and strike a bird down mid flight? Maybe you can use your tail as an appendage, or perhaps you can use tools just as effectively as humans. This stat reflects that.
Spiritual
Intelligence - (3) very self explanatory for the most part. This stat also affects how much information you can get out of me or a mod in various situations. An intelligent character will notice more of the results of their actions for example, or be better at sizing up an enemy NPC, getting more accurate and precise information on their stats. An unintelligent character may misjudge an enemy, or perceive their actions and the results of them incorrectly (or simply not notice things). This also innately affects a monster's instincts as they respond to their environment far more than humans might.
Intelligence serves a secondary function for monsters. More intelligent monsters often develop the ability to control less intelligent ones through verbal or telepathic commands. The more intelligent the monster the stronger this ability becomes, enabling them to affect more monsters at once and exert greater degrees of control. On the flip side, the intelligence serves as a defensive against this kind of control.
Mystic - (7) The amount of mystic energy your body produces and/or can access. This stat is like strength, but for your abilities
Channeling - (7) How well you can utilize your Mystic Reserves efficiently. It tends to act as a form of endurance for your abilities, but it can also be utilized to grant an increase to your physical abilities. Monsters passively enhance their physical abilities with this stat, and as such they can be far stronger than their appearance might imply.
Full Name: Shru
Alias: If he has any aliases or nicknames, he does not know them, aside from the name of the human hunter whose memories he possesses--Drake Leontine
Age: 59 (since he gained self-awareness)
Residence: Pulic, specifically a swampy kingdom on the edge of the wasteland (came originally from Cauli)
Gender: Male (there's an interesting story behind that...)
Species: A fungal monster, specifically the kind nicknamed a fairy ring because that is what it resembles in its base, natural form
Alignment: Good, or trying to be anyway
Faction: What faction would employ a monster? He did make a deal with a small king of Pulic who wants to increase the size of his domain through less violent means, if that counts...
--Appearance--
Picture:
Physical Description: In Shru's base form, he resembles a very large ring of many ordinary seeming mushrooms, otherwise known as a fairy ring. The only outward giveaway that they might not be ordinary is that the ring is much larger than a typical fairy ring. Inside, the almost glitter-like spores that are released either at will, or when one of those mushrooms is cut, will also give it away, but if that is your first clue it's already too late if you are hostile. In short, he is a single big fungal colony disguised as many smaller ones, a good deal of him underground in this form. However, he can shift forms to a more roughly humanoid figure at least twice the height of the average man, though he is squat-looking from afar, thick around the middle with pale grey, leathery skin all over, very obviously still resembling a mushroom, just with what are obviously arms, legs, and a face with blue eyes and a thin gash of a mouth. The top part of his head is a massive mushroom cap that is red with white spots. At random spots on the main body (mostly on the limbs, but several on his back along what would be the spine on a human, as well), smaller mushroom appendages grow out of his skin topped by similarly colored caps to the one on his head.
Clothing: While Shru possesses knowledge of clothes, he has no need or inclination for such things.
Abilities
Physical Powers Select a maximum of 3, these powers must be linked to your monster physiology in some capacity, however they do not automatically need to have drawbacks
Ability name: Spore Cloud
Body part: Gills
Ability description: The gills under his mushroom caps, as mundane mushrooms do, can produce spores, which could in theory be used to create more of himself, however he opts not to do that. However, living organisms infected with the spores slowly start to feel compelled to return to him to either be consumed, or for him to cleanse the infected individual from his influence (which he may choose to do if he does not feel they should be consumed), the compulsion growing stronger the longer the infection goes untreated. It also grows harder for such an individual to attempt to harm him over the same period of time, and they may even feel compelled to defend him if someone else attacks. However, it is not difficult for others to cleanse a living being from his spores as well, given no more than three days has elapsed by the time a good dose of anti-fungal medication is applied. Before the spores are released, he can also apply a handful of other potential effects to them, from darkening them to serve as a smokescreen, brightening them into a rainbow-glitter-like appearance to serve as a distraction, making them a hallucinogen, turning them poison, or even making them harmless and edible if he chose, capable of producing perfectly ordinary mushrooms. Nearly all effects are things mushrooms are known for being able to do, or at least similar to what natural mushrooms have already developed to do, including medicinal properties. He cannot control where the spores go once released, however, nor can he just produce constant clouds of them whenever he wishes, needing to spend a little time growing more if he releases a full blast all at once, and thus has to be judicious in when and where he releases a cloud. He needs an hour to fully refill on spores.
Ability name: Malleable Flesh
Body part: Entire body
Ability description: Shru's mass largely has the consistency of rubber or leather, making him nearly immune to most blunt force attacks unless they are from an extremely superhuman source. It can also contort, contract, separate or congeal at will, in whole or in part--this is what allows him to form into the fairy ring, or the humanoid looking mushroom, or otherwise alter his shape, even allowing him to put on the affectation of scars, though those are purely cosmetic and have no effect on his capabilities. Needless to say, this is a versatile physical ability--aside from the durability it grants, it allows him to extend and manipulate pseudopod like appendages for a variety of complex tasks, should he know what needs to be done, up to and including hands that have fingers and opposable thumbs. While he cannot directly manipulate flesh that's been severed from the main body, he can reabsorb it if it isn't destroyed first, and has not been disconnected for too long, making it hard to harm him with cutting implements on top of the protection his skin provides, unless one can keep that severed flesh away from him for a time--though being fungal in nature, that risks the creation of another, entirely new monster like himself if enough mass was severed (it takes about one kilogram of flesh for the possibility to exist). Not something he is keen to have happen as he cannot guarantee his offspring will be as selective as he is about their diet. He cannot change his total mass by adding or subtracting unless he consumes more mass to add to his own.
Ability name: Cleansing
Body part: Skin
Ability description: Through contact with his skin, Shru can slowly cleanse the aura of death from around himself and breathe new life into his surroundings, slowly reclaiming land that is marred by death with new life at the rate of several square yards per day (more if he is particularly well fed at the time, and the rate is also increased the longer an area has been under the influence of this ability). As a mushroom, it is natural to him to consume dead things, and give their essence back to nature. It is through this ability that he can also heal those who have been sickened with natural poisons and toxins, as well as bacteria, not just his own spores, by secreting the natural antidotes to whatever might be ailing them (or in the case of his own spores, simply nullify them by touching the afflicted individual). He cannot affect viruses, nor can he heal injuries, and reclaiming land requires him to remain in one area for a time to fully take effect.
Spiritual Powers Select a maximum of 3, these powers are supernatural effects you have consciously developed with your mystic energy, and do not need to be linked to any specific thing so long as they logically make sense for your monster to develop.
Ability name: Familiar
Ability description: Shru can connect his mind to an individual (sentient or beast) who has eaten part of his flesh, or been infected with his spores, and view the world through their senses--touch, taste, smell, sight, sound. While he cannot compel them to act exactly as he wishes right off, he can offer suggestions once they start to feel the instinctive compulsions to return to him. The longer they have been infected the more direct influence he can extend over their mind and actions.
Ability drawbacks: The fungal monster cannot extend his influence across continents, or really from any distance more than ten miles away. The more intelligent an individual is, the harder it is to exert any kind of influence until the infection has spread. He also cannot read their mind, merely borrow their senses.
Ability name: Memory Thief
Ability description: While most monsters just absorb the spiritual energy from those they consume and evolve that way, Shru can do a bit more--he can mentally sift through the memories and capabilities of his food, and retain not only the raw power, but some of their skills, abilities, or memories.
Ability drawbacks: He cannot retain everything from those he eats; he must pick and choose which skills he wants to retain. He can retain many memories to the point of even having his personality be influenced by theirs, but skills and abilities he must be much more choosy with, depending on how powerful they are and how ingrained in his prey's physiology they are--and if they are especially powerful, he must choose between them and retaining any memories. And though he always gets something from everything he eats, the longer a thing has been dead for, the less of their skills and memories he can take for himself. Lastly, if he loses a significant portion of his flesh, this power risks inflicting him with more than just a power loss, but the loss of memories and abilities gained this way. If this lost mass is consumed by someone capable of stomaching him and not being subsumed, that individual may gain the memories or abilities he has lost.
Ability name: Will-o'-the-wisp
Ability description: An ability Shru developed in conjunction with some of his spores' natural capabilities--he can create optical illusions, bright and distracting lights, and even small but complex illusions, even making himself seem to glow in the dark. He cannot utterly change the landscape, but he can hide or add a few critical details to suit the impression he wants a person to have. He can also add auditory components to the illusions to complement what he is trying to show. A bird call, a twig snapping, a wave beating on the shore.
Ability drawbacks: For now, this ability is limited in scope. He is limited to affecting only his immediate surroundings, things like casting doubts on his exact positioning or hiding the presence of, say, a tripwire or other small trap. On the auditory side, he cannot imitate voices, only natural sounds, nor can the sounds be deafening, yet. He cannot affect any other senses.
--Important Information--
Personality: If one had to pick a single word to describe Shru, it would be--curiosity. He is possessed of an insatiable curiosity to learn about the world around himself, and continue to add to that knowledge by nearly any means, so long as it causes no overt harm to another in the process. However, underneath that curiosity, is a sense of guilt, for subsuming and eventually consuming the hunter he ran into on the first talon of Cauli, as he now knows the humans refer to it. After the first, he refuses to consume any but those who prove violent toward their fellows in anything but self-defense, unless they are already dead by other means--or if he was forced to kill them to defend himself. However, he will go out of his way to avoid outright fighting humans where possible, not only because they are dangerous to mess with, but because, again, he feels they do not generally deserve to be hunted just for consumption. Plus, while he could consume their memories if he ate them, that would be the end of their possibilities. He sincerely hopes to one day more effectively be able to communicate with humans, to better facilitate understanding and the satiation of his curiosity--as well as make up somehow to the family of the hunter he absorbed, but as yet the ability to speak refuses to evolve into his repertoire.
Likes: Learning, growing, and changing, seeing what all he can do as he grows in both size and power.
Dislikes: Feral monsters that only think of their own belly and immediate self-gratification, and humans that prey on their kind not unlike other monsters prey on them. He also dislikes this feeling of guilt he's been inflicted with for so long that he cannot shake himself of.
Strengths: His intelligence, and the skills he has absorbed from those he has eaten over the years--also extreme patience learned from his time as an ambush hunter.
Weaknesses: Being a fungal monster, his biggest weakness is fire and extreme heat--they will be guaranteed to thoroughly destroy his flesh, and obviously being consumed by someone or something immune to or capable of fighting off fungal infections will do the same. While dehydration and subzero temperatures will not have the same immediate, drastic effect, they will force him into hibernation similar to cryogenic suspension and slowly inflict damage over time the longer the exposure lasts. Saltwater in any great quantities also tends to be poison to him. Basically anything that is known to kill normal mushrooms will hurt him. Also, while he can read, he cannot talk.
Skills: Reading, writing, and understanding human speech (things he picked up from the first human he consumed), basic skills with several melee weapons.
Talents: He is very, very good at studying his surroundings, and perceiving every aspect of them. In a human, it would be called hyper-awareness. In the same human, he would also be said to have a mind like a steel trap.
Motto: Good things come to he who waits.
Goal: To eventually evolve to the point of being able to look perfectly human, and pass among them, and even speak, making himself indistinguishable from one of them.
Music Video:
History: Shru started life as just another unintelligent monster. Who knows how long he spent in the marsh of the first talon of Cauli? But he was deemed harmless by a hunter who was there to hunt and subsequently consumed for nourishment, unknowingly setting in motion a chain of events that would lead to him gaining intelligence and self-awareness, and more importantly, empathy. But before all that, the hunter known as Drake Leontine went about his business, and eventually returned to the continent of Certa. Before he could return to his home in Pulic, however, Shru's own ability was turned against him, consuming him from the inside out, and from that event, the mushroom gained sentience, and an awareness of exactly what he had done--he absorbed every moment of the feeling of dread that Drake had felt right up to the moment the man's mind had died, and shuddered, not just metaphorically, but literally.
At first, it was simply the desire to avoid that absolute, mind-numbing dread that led to him to avoid feeding on sentient creatures again for a time. But then, as he processed more of the memories, and covertly observed humans passing in the distance from where he had chosen to take root for a time, he realized something else. For whatever reason, the action just felt--wrong. But he had no way of expressing this, no way of rationalizing this. It just felt wrong, not instinctively wrong, but morally wrong. In truth, what had happened was he absorbed not just Drake's memories, but his conscience as well. And as the man's last thoughts had been of a family he would never see again, so too did they occupy a large portion of Shru's thoughts, leading him to linger on the edge of the wasteland just outside the borders of Pulic, instead of just moving on.
In fact, he settled down quite near the road, to give it a long think, turning his thoughts mostly inward and giving the outside world barely more than a cursory glance now and then with one of the many mushroom heads that formed his fairy ring shape. He did slowly subsume anything that died in his vicinity, but he needed to devote no conscious thought to that, and most of them were too weak and unintelligent to give him more than a mild power boost, nothing else that was useful. He's not sure how long it was before a clamor he could not ignore roused him again.
What he saw when he turned his senses outward again was a small caravan under attack by a pack of a dozen vicious-looking horse-sized creatures with mouths full of needle-sharp teeth and far too many rows of them. Their hides were armored with some kind of scale, making them resemble slightly overgrown and misshapen crocodiles. Even as he watched, he saw one go down while they swarmed the last of the escort vehicles. The screams he heard from inside the vehicle were what convinced him to take action, and slowly he uprooted himself, forming into his large, singular humanoid form, lumbering toward the fray. In just a few moments after, he was among them, releasing a cloud of spores that they breathed in before any could realize how dangerous they were. He connected briefly with the mind of one creature, and through its own sense of touch, gained an awareness of a weakness on its underbelly, a small vulnerable section of flesh not covered by those armor plates. A tendril of his flesh shot out, flipping the beast over, while another grabbed a sword from a fallen guard and thrust it into the weak point.
He had no time to feel triumphant, as the cry of the mortally wounded beast, along with its death throes, drew the attention of its mates, who had finished off all but the occupants of a single vehicle, the one that had been at the center of the caravan. And so, the remaining crocodile monsters swarmed toward him, their collective hissing like the sound of a thousand angry cats. He was able to snatch another with a tendril and do the same to it as he had the first, and knock a couple more into their fellows, tangling them in angry lumps of armored flesh and teeth, but that still left five to swarm him as the other four recovered. The first bites felt like mere pinpricks, these teeth meant more for piercing and grabbing than tearing, but the pain still woke him to a sense of danger as more than one of them started viciously shaking their heads back and forth trying to rip some strips off his body.
Dropping and rolling allowed him to wind most of his attackers, but they were too well armored to simply be crushed, only stunning them long enough for him to pry off their jaws one at a time--but he was able to take a few teeth that had ripped out of their mouths, and pierce another through an eye and thus the brain behind that eye. It writhed, and lay still, while he fended off the remaining ones with the sword in one hand. One sword was not enough, however, and he fumbled for another, the blades proving capable of at least deflecting bites, if not breaking the teeth behind them.
With all the remaining crocodiles focused on him, and Shru's actions showing how to beat them, three guards poked up out of the remaining vehicle and started taking shots with their weapons, and one using some sort of ability to freeze the creatures' legs to the ground, one at a time, long enough to start picking them off. They were down to five before they realized what happened. One of them took those guards by surprise and lunged, chomping the power user in half while the remaining guards frantically stabbed it to death through the eyes. However, in its death throes two of them were crushed outright, and another mortally wounded, while Shru finished off the remaining creatures. And then, all was still. Shru rooted his feet, releasing tendrils through the ground into the flesh of the slain creatures, and any of the guards that lay on the ground. He felt no guilt about consuming that which was already dead, but even as he did that, one more face peered cautiously up out of the vehicle's hatch, to watch, fearful but curious, as Shru began evolving, realizing he could do more with his spores--and that he could remove their taint from those he did not wish to affect. Already the man, a king, was wheezing from having breathed them in, and Shru reached out to touch, calling the spores within the man's body back to him from the contact.
It was this gesture that finally convinced the king that this fungal monster was not here to eat him as most monsters might do. In fact, having gained more knowledge from the guards he was consuming, said mushroom monster realized that in this king, laid an opportunity, and hopefully, he scratched some words in the dirt in a basic form of writing, hoping against hope the man understood. Fearful, but swallowing that fear, the king climbed out of his vehicle entirely, and a pact was born of that moment as he saw that the land outside was more fertile than it had been the last time he had been this way. The man's kingdom was poor in resources, being right on the edge of the wasteland, and deducing that Shru was behind the change, he agreed to give the monster knowledge in the form of books, and the occasional criminal condemned to death, in exchange for Shru just doing what he naturally did--convert dead land to fertile farmland once again.
Both parties walked away from that day a little happier than they had been. It wasn't until the man was gone, that Shru realized maybe he could have used this as a means to do something about Drake's family...but now it was a bit late to call the man back, as he had returned to the safety of his kingdom. Shru mentally sighed, and settled himself into a nearby bog that had little more than a few scraggly trees and desperate blades of grass as vegetation, using his recent glut of power to kickstart the conversion process. Once again he settled himself into a fairy ring, but with at least one mushroom always keeping an eye on the nearby road to watch for other travelers, and others keeping an eye out for more possible monsters like those crocodiles, that might make this bog their home...
Stats
Level - (3) Your level represents your overall ability in comparison to others. These levels grant a general sense of your character's overall strength in comparison to others. Each level up is a larger gap than the last. (the gap between a 4 and a 5 is larger than a 1 and a 2, and the gap between 6 and 7 even greater still). Which is not to say a level 4 cannot beat a level 5 under the right circumstances (or any other example, 3 beating a 4, 5 beating a 6, etc...).
Stat Graph
Physical
Strength - (3) pretty self explanatory here, how much you can lift, how hard you punch, etc...
Speed - (2) Also pretty simple, some people are faster than others, especially in this world where mystic energies can enhance your speed or reflexes greatly.
Durability - (8) both a measure of how long you can fight without getting fatigued, and just how much punishment your character can withstand before going down. If the monster has defensive scales, quills, etc... this stat will also determine exactly how durable/potent those features are.
Skill - (5) How good you are with your physical features. How efficient are you with your strikes? Perhaps you can fire quills out and strike a bird down mid flight? Maybe you can use your tail as an appendage, or perhaps you can use tools just as effectively as humans. This stat reflects that.
Spiritual
Intelligence - (3) very self explanatory for the most part. This stat also affects how much information you can get out of me or a mod in various situations. An intelligent character will notice more of the results of their actions for example, or be better at sizing up an enemy NPC, getting more accurate and precise information on their stats. An unintelligent character may misjudge an enemy, or perceive their actions and the results of them incorrectly (or simply not notice things). This also innately affects a monster's instincts as they respond to their environment far more than humans might.
Intelligence serves a secondary function for monsters. More intelligent monsters often develop the ability to control less intelligent ones through verbal or telepathic commands. The more intelligent the monster the stronger this ability becomes, enabling them to affect more monsters at once and exert greater degrees of control. On the flip side, the intelligence serves as a defensive against this kind of control.
Mystic - (7) The amount of mystic energy your body produces and/or can access. This stat is like strength, but for your abilities
Channeling - (7) How well you can utilize your Mystic Reserves efficiently. It tends to act as a form of endurance for your abilities, but it can also be utilized to grant an increase to your physical abilities. Monsters passively enhance their physical abilities with this stat, and as such they can be far stronger than their appearance might imply.
