Murmurtwist Colossus

A murmurtwist colossus, also known as a murmurtwist, is a massive agglomeration corrupted blanks.
Murmurtwists and worse things stalk the unstabilized regions of Unallocated Space, hunting amongst the quantum chaos and shattered remains of unfinished instances for other blanks to corrupt, consume, and add to their own hideous volumes. What sets aside murmurtwists from the other abominations is the fact that murmurtwists, for whatever reason, retain a potent capability to use The Word despite their decadent, insane nature. This makes murmurtwists extremely dangerous to any travelers in Unallocated Space who stray too far from the usual inter-instance routes. Indeed, part of the Allocator's work involves hunting down such formidable entities and putting them to rest, recruiting other powerful blanks from time to time to aid in this important mission.

Basic Information

Anatomy

Murmurtwist colossi have no set physical form, resembling more or less chaotic masses of blanks fused together in a semi-liquid fashion, though there are a few notable trends murmurtwist anatomy follows.
For reasons believed related to the structure of The Word, murmurtwists tend to be somewhat radially symmetric, often resembling massive sea stars or medusae from a distance. Murmurtwists tend to move about on numerous tentacle-like 'legs' within a gravitational field, though they always float through the air when encountered in the relative gravity of Unallocated Space. They often have a hole or 'mouth' at their centermost point; 'prey' are forced into this aperture before being ground to a pulp to release their blanks for absorption into the mass.
Like the data cancer that they are, there is no known maximum size for a murmurtwist. Most murmurtwists are around 15' across at their widest points, though individuals have been found to be as small as a person to as large as a passenger aircraft. This size is directly proportional to the number of other blanks a given individual has consumed; a large murmurtwist represents not only a danger to dataspace travelers, but a site of extreme metaphysical anguish where whole families, cities, nations, or worlds have collapsed as a result of a lack of discipline in the use of the Word.

Genetics and Reproduction

Murmurtwists are created when one or more blanks are fatally exposed to the influence of The Word in an uncontrolled manner. The blanks, corrupted and broken, may become fused together under certain conditions, creating a twisted, barely sentient creature incapable of re-entering their instance's cycle of death and rebirth.
Even this circumstance will not necessarily create a murmurtwist, however. A murmurtwist is only created when the resulting amalgam both retains a pre-existing ability to manipulate The Word and evolves a desire to increase its own power through consumption. This is more likely to happen when the fused individuals were 'sorcerors', scientists, and certain types of spiritual seekers, all types of individuals likely to learn enough about their own minds to potentially brush upon the secrets of using The Word. Sociopaths, misers, gluttons, and lecherous are also more likely to become murmurtwists when fused in this fashion, as all of these are consumed with desire to consume and hoard through various means.
Thankfully for the residents of the Matrioshka Multiverse, murmurtwists are not known to directly reproduce. That would require giving up part of one's own mass - something no murmurtwist will ever intentionally do. It is rare, but not entirely unheard of, for murmurtwists to accidentally create more of their own kind by destroying opponents with The Word such that the victims are themselves corrupted and meet the critera to become a new murmurtwist. These foundlings rarely survive for long, however, as they become more mass to augment that of the parent unless they can escape in short order.

Dietary Needs and Habits

All other blanks are potential prey for murmurtwist colossi. A murmurtwist is always hungry and always seeking to grow by consuming a new blank and adding it to the collective mass. Worse, murmurtwists possess fragmented memories from each constituent blank, making them capable of utilizing complex tactics and even various deceptions to get close enough to prey to strike. For example, a murmurtwist of around human size (typically an early life stage) might use the Word to weave an illusion around itself, taking the form of a beautiful woman to lure in male Unallocated Space explorers; the illusion is shattered, however, when the woman opens her mouth too wide to bellow incoherent Word fragments that shatter the mind and turn the victim's blood to acid.

Additional Information

Uses, Products & Exploitation

While it is an extremely ill-advised idea to do so, 'spell'-casters in various instances have summoned various forms of corrupted blanks into their instances as servants or to fight on their behalf, and murmurtwist colossi are no exception. Murmurtwists called into an instance are terrifying beings of apparently mystical power, often being percieved as demons or cosmic horrors from relevant local mythologies. Calling forth a murmurtwist is never a sure thing, however, and neither is the summoner's control over the creature once it has been summoned. The appearance of a murmurtwist of any size in an instance is almost always followed by a period of anti-occult backlash in the cultures of that instance - assuming any extant cultures are not destroyed by the misbegotten thing that has been called into their midst.

Symbiotic and Parasitic organisms

There is one known murmurtwist colossus created from an entire pocket instance, accounting for more than 10,000 individual blanks and fed further by its use of The Word to convert the inanimate matter of its own instance into more blankstuff to consume. This hideous, carnivorous dwarf planet is so large that it is unaware of its own internal ecology, which includes smaller murmurtwists and other forms of corrupted blanks that fill every concievable niche. This aberrant world's infobiological cycles are powered not by sunlight, as they are on terrestrial worlds, but by parasites eating away at constantly regenerating growths within the largest murmurtwist colossus as it gnaws at passing bits of its home instance's debris field.
This location is so extremely dangerous to outsiders that the Allocator has simply isolated it in its own pocket of stability - an instance unto itself - instead of attempting to destroy it yet. The Committee on Instance Design Standards (ComInDs) looks upon this place as asort of world-building experiment in its own right, with members like Patricia Wixtaki noting that, grim as it may be, this truly titanic murmurtwist colossus and its various parasites serves as an example of the ways in which life can persist and evolve in even the most extreme of environments.

Genetic Ancestor(s)

• Blank

Related Ethnicities

• Hybrid Blank