OCTOBER REWARDS 10

vamoris 

A parasitic baby that remains in its mother's womb and continues to grow normally, until over time begins to take the mother's place in her own body, arms and legs. Which creates a horrible appearance of something inside that can be seen through the skin. (I've always had a little fear of the baby developing in a person's body. ^^ '')

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I mostly wanted to do some legitimate horror ideas this year and a lot of Vamoris' ideas made the cut because they were so disgustingly visceral. Thanks for the suggestions they were great monster design prompts!

This is a creature known as an Unborn or sometimes as a motherpuppet.

The world is surrounded by darkness. Steeped in warfare and violence, and the shadows have seeped into the ground, rotting the inside of this world from the inside out. A great many infections fell into the planet upon it's inception and like a sperm to an egg these cosmic nightmares fertilized the planet and grew. Some spoiled the soil and some spoiled the flesh. Aberrant corruption can appear in many shapes, many forms, and sometimes without warning.

The Unborn are creatures in a strange situation such as that. Aberrant infliction brought upon by some dark magic or unknown science. Perhaps the child was conceived at the sight of a great evil, or it was implanted within the mother as a part of a ritual. Science and the alteration of genes can also cause strange cases such as this to bubble to the surface.

The Unborn begin as a simple fetus that has been corrupted somehow, and becomes a parasite within the mother's womb. This causes the mother's pregnancy to become unstable and often times very dangerous. During this time the Unborn will begin fusing itself to the mother in various ways, and slowly but surely it will begin causing twinges and alterations in the mother's physiology through gaining control of muscles or bodily functions. From here it can go in multiple directions. In some cases the child will not make it and things will end relatively normally.

However in other cases the child may remain, fusing with part of it's mother and remaining indefinitely as it grows. It's mind will develop quickly and it will gain psychic capabilities that it uses through it's vastly pregnant mother. In many cases the mother does not survive this and will become brain dead, however sometimes the child will fully meld with the mother and take over her body, becoming somewhat deformed and twisted, the head, arms, and legs attempting to assume the same location and being crippled by it, but still possessing the psychic capabilities. In these situations the mother may grow an additional head beneath her own taking the place of her neck, or potentially somewhere else on her body. Alternatively the child may merge with the mother and leave her body in a state of pseudo pregnancy while heightening her mental capabilities to a superhuman level. The mother will always have side effects as if she were pregnant, and may think and learn with two separate minds or consciousnesses.

The example here however is of a fused Unborn. The child is slowly assuming the form of the mother, it's arms moving through her own, stretching the flesh and becoming one, though it seems it's fingers have begun to squeeze through her fingernails. The baby's head is colossal, taking up the entirety of her spread too thin womb and abdomen which it now uses as a protective layer. Possessing the proportionate strength of a baby, the Unborn can lift things much heavier than it should be able to and has an insane grip. It also does not ever go through synaptic pruning and as such it's mind is very acute and it can learn extremely quickly. They possess natural instincts similarly to a wild animal, and dangerous psychic powers, though they often don't have  a full understanding of much of these powers. 

Unborn don't live for a long time due to the strain they put on their mothers, and the dependence they have on their mother's bodies, and so they tend to die out after anywhere from a few weeks to a few years, though the Unborn that simply remain within the womb and meld with their mothers to grant them psychic capabilities can remain for many years despite their mother's large size. 

Geneticists and mad alchemists have created the Unborn in the past with their experiments, and they have manifested in the wild. Necromancers have also created undead versions of these creatures through their horrible experiments.