The Grand OC SII: The Re-OCening: Week 29: UNINTELLIGIBLE!

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The Grand OC SII: The Re-OCening: Week 29: UNINTELLIGIBLE!
#95
RE: The Grand OC SII: The Re-OCening: Week 12: PUZZLE!
Username: Schazer
Name: Cursive Herbalism - An Inkwiree's Impressioned Guide to Florae Calligustrada, by Peripatus Plex
Species: Book(wurm)
Gender: Nope
Color: Inkstain

Description: A quarter-tonne of translucent gel in the shape of a snake, or maybe it's a millipede with a disproportionately wide snake's head. Like many Pages of the message-goddess Inkwire, it's open to interpretation. Embedded in its head is a large, hardcover book - the pages within are askew and mismatched in places, like a not-quite-cleaned-up stack of field notes. Whispers of ink sometimes drip out of the book and leak out to the wurm's surface, sprouting into ink-black plants. These are sparsely distributed all over its body, but are predominatly found atop its head and along its spine.

Of ponderous and mostly-affable disposition, this wurm loves attention being lavished on it but is reticient - stubborn, even - when folks are impatient to extract information from its book. Gaining its favour is easiest with an offering of fresh vegetation, the harder-to-acquire the better. Its language is pictorial and often necessitates a fair bit of creativity when communicating complicated ideas; its handwriting is atrocious.

Bookwurms are named after their tome of possession - this particular specimen as known as "Cursive Herbalism, living edition", "Cursive" to those who work with it, and occasionally "The Cursewurm (of The Shrine of Articles)".

Biography: Wurm egg glue is the preferred binding agent of bookmakers, thanks to wurms' affinity for written text - slather a hard cover's inner spine with it and you've got the perfect note-collater for folks on the go. Curing the eggs into the right kind of inert state is a time-consuming process, making Guild-issue bookcovers prohibitively expensive for some - like one travelling priest-artist of Inkwire, who spent his early adulthood illustrating various plants found on his travels.

Peripatus shelved his illustrated guidebook when he founded the Shrine of Articles, giving a still-living egg in the cheap binding plenty of time alone to subsume its book and comfortably fill out the storeroom it was stashed in. Bookwurms are considered pests, mostly. Cursive's host book wasn't the typical wurm-fodder, with its text in barely-decipherable shorthand and its contents predominantly pictures, Cursive's poor comprehension of non-pictorial alphabets reflects its upbringing.

Any other denomination might've killed the wurm, but newspriest Plex adopted the thing as a symbol of Inkwire, and let it protect the Shrine's archives after moving the collection of picture books elsewhere.

Weapons/Abilities: Cursive's gelatinous body recovers rapidly from most injuries - bodily cavities quickly fill with a mesh of saliva-like strands. This happens to its mouth as well when it leaves it open too long, which would be inconvenient if it actually ate. Glows in the absence of other light sources, and attracts small insects.

It absorbs and digests any organic matter which sticks to it and can't struggle itself free - plants and sessile creatures are easiest, large and many-limbed animals the toughest for it. Whatever it digests, it faithfully records in its mawbook.

Anything noted down in the book this way can be "printed" later, composed of a black ink which stains every damn thing it touches. It won't print things which aren't plants unless specifically requested, which is great because ink-animals are just as mobile as their originals, and several orders of magnitude messier.


Messages In This Thread
RE: The Grand OC SII: The Re-OCening: Week 12: PUZZLE! - by Schazer - 05-09-2016, 07:17 AM