RYE - A Petal Gifted

Consulting the Lifeweaver (Exploit the Jungle)

[Desired Species: Stealthy warbeasts to accompany chameleon skinks; animals capable of ranged attack; small 'attack dog' terrestrial or flying creatures (fast, agile, preferably pack-oriented); medium-to-large digger/tunneler species.

Rolling for primary focus, 1d4: 2, Ranged Attack Animals.

Rolling for secondary focus, 1d3: 1, Stealth Creature, Chameleon Skink appropriate.

Generating…

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Puum’kynzid glanced up nervously as they approached the pyramid-vault to which they had been summoned. Saurus stood all over it like vigilant statues that had been etched out of the stone, hefting great tower shields and halberd-rifles ordinarily reserved for the use of Temple Guard. Two of that elite subcaste stood sentry at the locked gate, their gaze peeling through Puum’kynzid as though they could see the fried grub paste the skink priest had eaten that morning. For an otherwise-unmarked building, it possessed a suspicious amount of security, which naturally made Puum’kynzid’s mind dart to whatever could be held within it that would warrant such precautions. There were many options, none of them good.

Still, there was no avoiding it - they had been summoned in their newly-appointed capacity as Tlaztzaq’tenzitzxakhanx’tec, head of the lizardmen’s attempt to study the behavior of their Eldar neighbor, to go within the pyramid and read out the contents of a tablet to whatever was inside. The sigils on the beaten gold shimmered and swam nauseatingly whenever they looked at them, but Puum’kynzid knew this for a spell commonly used to ensure that confidential messages were not exposed ahead of when they would ordinarily be seen - the message would be readable when it was time. Why such security was warranted for something within a temple-city, Puum’kynzid could only guess.

Gritting their teeth, the skink priest approached the temple’s entrance, stopping well short of the door and chattering a greeting to the Temple Guard that conveyed none of their uneasiness. It was important not to display any behaviors that could potentially be deemed suspicious around the guardian sub-caste. “Greetings, warden spawn-kin. I approach your guarded place by the will of the slann lord Mazdamundi, who was spawned fifty thousand, eight hundred and fifty four sun-cycles past. I am to pass within this temple and convey a message to its inhabitant.”

The saurus loomed like silent statues for a moment, and then a grating voice issued out from them - Temple Guard were adept at speaking without movement, so it was impossible to tell which of them had spoken. “Present authorized qipu to enter.”

Puum’kynzid nodded, keeping the motion smooth and steady. “I carry it on my waist. I will reach for it now.” They waited a moment, then slowly reached towards a pouch on their hip, rifling within before pulling out a dyed rope that was studded at intervals with shining gemstones of varying colors. The combination of different dyes upon the rope, and colored stones that interrupted the patterns of dye, could be translated into messages - in this case, confirmation that not only was Puum’kynzid actually here on behalf of a slann, but that they had been given permission to enter the temple. They held it up for the Temple Guard’s inspection, allowing the gems to catch the light.

The eyes of the saurus guardians glinted, and they thumped their halberds upon the stone in unison several times. The thick slabs of granite rumbled open upon hidden mechanisms, and they inclined their heads. “The doors will be opened in fifteen degrees,” one of them rumbled. “Exit attempts after this are not authorized.” Puum’kynzid murmured acknowledgement and nodded in thanks, and they walked into the temple, deliberately keeping their pace steady and unhurried until they were well inside and the doors had rumbled shut behind them. Only then did they allow their breathing to quicken slightly, the question of what awaited them surfacing once more in their mind. Fifteen degrees was the amount of distance the sun would move across the dry-season sky - no more than an hour. Whatever this errand was, it would have to be completed by then or the Temple Guard would not let them leave.

The temple interior was bare and unfurnished, little more than a series of plain stone rooms that led from one to another in a random-seeming pattern. There were no carvings dedicated to the Old Ones, no emblems or sigils of the gods, no sign that any other lizardman had been here in a slann’s age. The only embellishment were a series of slits that had been placed in the ceiling, letting in thin shafts of light that illuminated the dusty hallways. There was no noise, no tracks in the dust, no sign that anything at all was here.

Puum’kynzid padded onwards, tablet clutched tight to their chest. For a moment, the thought that perhaps they had been sent to the wrong temple crossed their mind, and the pendant bearing the symbol of Xhotl that hung from their neck began to itch. Knowing this sign for what it meant, Puum’kynzid glumly turned the next corner, ready to come face to face with whatever enigmatic mystery their fate had seen fit to have them confront.

The room ahead was mostly dark, with a single shaft of sunlight beaming down from the high-up ceiling. In this shaft, its roots digging loosely into a patch of dirt that had clearly been placed for it, was a small golden flower, its six butter-yellow petals outstretched to catch the light. It was innocuous enough, but it was also the only thing there. Puum’kynzid blinked in confusion, and took a step forward.

As the click of their claws tapping upon the stone rang out through the empty air, the plant’s head turned, and Puum’kynzid stopped cold. The flower was grinning, with rows upon rows of sharp, glistening teeth bristling inside a mouth-like cavity that had opened in the flower’s center. The plant was still no higher than their knee, but Puum’kynzid could feel the potency of the creature by the aura of dangerous energy that rolled off it like heat from a sun-baked stone. It was a sharp, actinic smell that they could feel stinging their scales, an apprehensive shimmering of the air that they could taste as rotten blood in their mouth. Whatever this flower was, it was dangerous, and conveyed the unmistakable impression that its many teeth were bigger than they looked.

”A visitor,” the flower purred, the Saurian words flowing off its tongue with neither hitch nor accent. Its voice was a low, rumbling grind, the voice of a creature many times its size. ”You smell different than the others. What brings you here, little morsel?” The knife edge of its mouth opened implausibly wide, exposing spans of teeth that were far too large to fit within its frame in any kind of plausible way. ”I find myself wanting, after such a long time without … company. Perhaps you are here to satisfy that need?”

Puum’kynzid suppressed a shudder, and cast their gaze down at the tablet they held. The protective haze over its contents had cleared, but before they could read anything, there was a flash of motion in their peripheral vision, and they grasped the wellspring of Ghyran in their soul without thought and pulled. A wall of thorns erupted from the floor in front of them, thick, cruel things that grew upon knotted, gnarled vines. Something crashed into the barrier with enough force to bow the thorns away, and Puum’kynzid was sent tumbling back, barely keeping hold of the tablet as they did so.

They came to a halt and looked up, and what they saw caused their planned response to drop from their tongue. The flower had vanished, and in its place was a monstrosity. Tree-trunk thick appendages strained against Puum’kynzid’s improvised barrier, each of them bulging with tuberous muscle and bristling with root-like filaments. A great green sac of tissue the size of a kroxigor comprised the thing’s main body, leading up to a distorted parody of a flower’s head, twice as wide as a skink was tall and covered with pockmarked, pallid, puce flesh that stank like rotting meat. A great chasm of a mouth yawned open like a ravening abyss, filled to the brim with gravestone teeth that ground and grated against each other as the plant-beast spoke. ”I have known the taste of every creature that was placed in the Garden, but I have been asleep a long time, and you are new flesh. I do hope you aren’t an unworthy addition.” Its root-like tentacles redoubled their push against the wall of thorns, which began to give way under the creature’s monstrous mass, vines snapping as they reached the limit of their tensile strength.

Puum’kynzid was no stranger to combat, but they vastly preferred to engage their enemies on prepared ground, at a comfortable distance, and from behind a well-trained creche of Saurus that they could bolster and reinforce with their magics. Subduing a monstrosity like this on their own was well outside of anything they desired to undertake, and even if they did, they still would not have delivered their appointed message. So instead of marshalling their magic against the gargantuan flower, Puum’kynzid again turned their eyes to the tablet they held, and read aloud the script they found there, even as more and more of their barrier gave way.

“Floral emissary. You are hereby charged on this day, the sixty-fourth in the one hundred thirty-fourth solar rotation of the Mochantian solar cycle to be recorded in our archives, to fulfil the terms of the pact you were summoned and bound to enforce. Let it be known that Mazdamundi, the appointed voice of the Clear-Minded Communion of Sublimated Thought, has authorized this skink to serve as his representative in this instance, to be subject to both his responsibilities and his protections. The Slann do therefore call upon Isendral to act according to her terms, and for any representatives of hers to act according to their designated behaviors in the matter. A Petal is hereby invoked.”

At the last word, a pulse of invisible tension rang out through the air, and the flower-colossus instantly froze in place, its musculature trembling with suppressed energy. On its head, one of the bright yellow petals ringing its monstrous maw began to wilt, then shrivel with unnatural speed, quickly dropping off its head as nothing but a cast-off husk of rotted flesh. The plant-beast grumbled in obvious discomfort as this happened, its tentacles curling in upon themselves spasmodically. ”Very well,” it spoke, its gravelly voice dripping with bile. ”Speak your request.”

Puum’kynzid took a shuddering breath, and looked further down the tablet, where more text awaited. “You are charged to search the biosphere of this world and find the closest applicable species that is both capable of displaying ranged ambush predation and prolonged periods of stealthy navigation across a wide variety of environments. We seek a companion of war to assist our hidden hunters in their work of planning and executing covert operations.”

The flower’s teeth clenched, and the beast-s great head bowed, as if in concentration. ”A matter trivial enough to not require the Mother’s attention,” it rumbled. ”I will palpate, and see what can be found.” Its coiled tentacles unwound from Puum’kynzid’s barrier of thorns and plunged into the patch of dirt at the base of its body, the colossal plant not stopping until it had rooted itself firmly into the ground. It then stopped moving, and seemed as sessile as any ordinary plant once more.

Puum’kynzid waited uneasily for almost an hour, periodically reinforcing their thorn barrier as the minutes whiled away, just in case whatever happened when the flower had finished its … palpation would require time to react. Just as they began to glance anxiously towards the direction of the temple door, the flower stirred, its great head lifting and gazing eyelessly at the skink priest. ”Lower your wall, morsel,” it called. ”I have found what you seek, and the Mother would be displeased with me if I were to visit harm upon you.”

Puum’kynzid hesitated for a moment, then glanced down at the tablet once more. Subject to both his responsibilities and his protections. The word of the slann was paramount, their responsibilities unremitting. Puum’kynzid relaxed, and allowed the barrier to wither and fall away.

The thin filaments of flesh that covered the flower’s teeth peeled away. ”Good,” it growled, and then it retched. With great, hacking, phlegmy exhalations, it stretched its fibrous neck out, a thrashing bulge travelling up from its sac-like body with each cough. At length, it expelled its package, a thrashing bundle of what looked like animate vines thumping to the floor in front of it. ”I can smell your power, fleshling,” the flower said, its voice seeming weary. Indeed, its voluminous body was beginning to shrink as it spoke, its great mass shrinking in upon itself. ”You will be able to convey this sample to your masters yourself, yes? If you desire more of them, look in the slime trees to the north of Pahkypxi. I think I will rest now…” By the time it finished speaking, the colossal mass had gone, replaced once again by an ordinary flower, with the only sign that anything had happened at all being a single golden petal missing from its head.

Puum’kynzid was able to get to the temple’s exit just in time by transporting the odd creature the flower had disgorged inside of a sealed shell of magically-hardened bark and rolling it out of the door, which was helped somewhat by the fact that whatever it was seemed to have been put to sleep during the process of the flower transporting it through its guts. Explaining the process by which they had acquired the dormant ball of slick tentacles, let alone convincing the Temple Guard to let the both of them leave alive, took considerably longer - Puum’kynzid was obliged to remain under guard, both them and the creature bound in corded knots of twine, at the pyramid’s front step for the better part of a day until a skink oracle whose aura shone with the overwhelming presence of Mazdamundi himself made an appearance, and commanded Puum’kynzid’s release. Finally satisfied that all was well, the Temple Guard withdrew their halberds and freed the skink priest from their bindings.

Transporting the tentacled creature to an appropriate holding pen where it could be safely contained and studied was an endeavor in and of itself - the thing’s gelatinous body seemed to lack any rigid skeletal structure, and thrice it slipped its bindings and attempted to make an escape, stopped only by the overwhelming telekinetic grip that Lord Mazdamundi channeled through his oracle. Eventually they were able to transport it into the beast pens and the care of the priests of Ghur, who cowed it into submission with a single potent glare.

Though they very well could have taken their leave and gone back to Tlaxcuaqatl, the temple the slann had assigned to them, Puum’kynzid petitioned to stay and assist with the process of examining the beast. They argued that their ability to magically examine the creature’s internal structures would surely prove useful, and that perhaps during their next communique with Isendral, having some knowledge of it would prove advantageous to the interests of the lizardmen. In truth, they did not wish to have their memories of the flower come back to them too swiftly, and going back to Tlaxcuaqatl would almost guarantee this. The seniormost Ghur priest, a grizzled, centuries-old skink named Salkuchuna, looked them up and down, conveying without words that he knew Puum’kynzid’s real reason for staying, and nodded.

Salkachuna was an old hand at taming even the unruliest of Lustrian wildlife, and taming the creature to the extent that it no longer actively attempted to flee took him little more than a few hours, though bringing it up to the standards of a proper warbeast would be a much longer process. After a stint of several days in which he gradually conditioned the creature to consider Hexoatl as home through a mixture of mundane behavioral reinforcement and applied amber magic, the Ghur priest left it in the care of Puum’kynzid and his junior acolytes, traveling north and east to Pahkypxi, where more of them could supposedly be found.

While their elder was off procuring more samples, the junior priests of Ghur busied themselves examining the creature, using Puum’kynzid’s abilities liberally to ascertain its health, capabilities, and disposition. It was a middling-size creature, with the priests theorizing that the average adult stood no higher than a skink, not counting the reach of their tentacles, and the largest would be perhaps half the size of a Cold One. The species possessed almost no fixed skeletal structure, and could inflate themselves with air as a threat display as a result, gulping down air until they reached almost twice their normal size, stretching their skin thinly. This also allowed them to squeeze through deceptively small crevices, a fact that made it quite hard to find if it was feeling uncooperative. Anatomically, they were quite simplistic - large, dark eyes and a gaping, toothless mouth were the primary features on their smooth-skinned heads, which led down to a blobby body that was festooned with long, sticky tentacles the creature used to move. Thorough examination revealed smaller tentacles on the creature that were still growing at a slow, if steady, pace. Intrigued, Puum’kynzid scanned the creature’s body many times with their magic, and determined that the species continually developed more appendages as they aged - a useful way to tell how old one of them was at a glance.

The team of beast handlers took to calling the creature Huantzitli, for it was an ambush hunter, spending all the time it could tucked away in narrow crevices or upon high branches, or in impromptu webs composed of a sticky mucous that it secreted. This substance was key to its hunting methods - the Huantzitli would find an ideal hiding spot, somewhere with a high vantage point, and remain still until it spotted a meal. Then it crept towards its prey, using its subtle coloration, flexible body, and sticky appendages to approach its target from unexpected angles. Once close enough, it spat a great gob of its mucous upon its prey, tangling it up in slime that quickly hardened to stone-like strength upon contact with the air. Then the Huantzitli would drag its victim to an accessible location and wait, allowing the second function of its mucous to work - the stuff was very lightly corrosive to flesh, and over the course of several hours, a creature immersed in it would be dissolved into a nutrient soup that the Huantzitli would then suck out of the empty husk. The creature’s preferred hunting grounds around Hexoatl quickly accumulated a collection of these mucous shells, which resembled their former occupants in shape - something of a ghastly warning to any unwary rivals.

Salkachuna returned after almost three years with more than a hundred of the Huantzitli in tow, all perfectly attentive to him and following his orders as smoothly as any properly-trained (and motivated) Carnosaur. The veteran beastmonger had found a population of the beasts exactly where Isendral’s flower-thing had indicated - north of Pahkypxi, there was a particular species of tree that had bark composed of a thick, gelatinous substance. The Huantzitli laid their eggs in this substance when bodies of water could not be found, and tended to make their nests within them as well, forming webs of thick mucous within their branches and feeding off of their pulpy fruit. They were prolific breeders when their mating cycle came about, and Salkachuna had watched as the creatures found a suitable body of calm water, or a slime tree if that was not available, and embedded thousands of eggs within bundles of specialized mucous where they would have enough moisture to keep the slime from hardening. The species was hermaphroditic, and while pairs of Huantzitli did tend to fertilize each other’s eggs, the creatures were capable of self-procreation if it should come to it. Once the eggs were fertilized and secure, the parents paid them no heed, leaving their offspring to fend for themselves.

The eggs fed off the nutrients in their parent’s slimeballs over the course of a few weeks, and were immediately subject to a cannibalistic feeding frenzy once they hatched, perhaps a few hundred tadpoles surviving this process from a nest of thousands. They made their home wherever the parents had laid them, perhaps the size of a finger with only three tentacles to propel themselves through the water or slimy treebark. They were hunted during this time, by each other, their older kin, and the many other creatures that called their nesting grounds home, with only the most cunning surviving. After roughly a year, those few dozen who survived long enough to attain eight tentacles and grow to the length of a skink’s forearm left the pond or tree in which they had been born and began a more arboreal existence, reaching the peak of their average adult size in another year or two. Another huge fraction of them died during this adaptation period, leaving an average of six to ten Huantzitli living to full adulthood out of a clutch of ten thousand or more eggs. Nine in ten of these clutches never made it to the tadpole stage, for the nutrients housed within were a prize for any hungry amphibious opportunist. In a jungle as fierce as Mochantia, this sufficed to keep their population stable provided there was enough food, and Salkachuna had followed the growth and development of several clutches, cowing the most promising of each crop and taking them back to Hexoatl with him.

With a sufficient stock of creatures to be able to organically develop proper training protocols, and an ample amount of data collected about their internal functions and best practices to keep them healthy, Salkuchuna dismissed Puum’kynzid, bidding the Ghyran priest to carry a report to the temple of Lord Mazdamundi and request that a creche of chameleon skinks be assigned to him for pairing, as well as a cadre of builders to properly refurbish the beast pens so as to be able to house the creatures. Before they went, Puum’kynzid extended an offer to magically neuter the majority of the Huantzitli so their prolific breeding would not see them outgrowing their assigned space. Salkachuna declined this, citing the need to maintain sufficient genetic diversity in their population if the needs of the slann meant that some time passed before the tentacled creatures were included in the spawning matrices. The Loquatl, for instance, were maintained at a sustainable population in their aviary, but the oldest captured specimen had begun to show signs of aging-related degeneration, and would likely perish soon.

“Too many is not a problem,” Salkachuna rumbled with a pragmatic air. “In the worst case, it makes providing feed for the rest a simpler matter.”

New warbeast gained: Huantzitli, the Vine Stalkers!

Huantzitli are like a nightmarish cross between a frog and octopus that use dozens of sticky, slimy tentacles to clamber around like a spider. They can squeeze through incredibly small spaces, construct webs of mucous to use as impromptu vantage points, and spit said mucous in corrosive globs that swiftly harden into a stone-like substance, dissolving the flesh of their prey. They will be used to accompany the chameleon skinks of Hexoatl in their duties, and to the other cities of the lizardmen once they are incorporated into the spawning pools. This incorporation project has additionally been discounted due to the usage of a Petal.

Glossary: Tlaztzaq’tenzitzxakhanx’tec: Translated literally, this means Clear Mind Who Knows The Words of The First Instrument of Justified Vengeance’s Capture. More comprehensibly, its sentiment means something along the lines of “Lead Elf Translator”. Refers to the head of the lizardmen’s Eldar-oriented diplomatic corps.

Tlaxcuaqatl: Temple of Learning About Others, roughly translated.

Huantzitli: Swampy-Jungle-Hunting-Beast.