I love reading setting threads
May. 17th, 2012 07:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
farlaThey are roughly humanoid, but obviously not human. They don sports jerseys, suit jackets, windbreakers, they tie shoes to their 'ankles' by the laces, and can make some basic language-like sounds. And they try to infiltrate into human groups like this. They will knock on the door of your safehouse, a twisted 'help' coming from whatever hole they spew sound from, but everyone knows it's one of them. If, for some reason, you let them in, they will do their best to blend in, they won't hurt anyone. They might start to try and use some piece of human technology, a radio, a padlock, a cash register, an aerosol, something, anything, only to fail and ask for 'help' from someone. If a group of them find a lone human, they will do the reverse, take the human into one of their safehouses, and try to get the unfortunate person to show them how to work things. Every time the group runs into one, they are a little better at looking and acting human. This one can talk just like us, albeit with a limited set of phrases, the next one had shoes and trousers on, the next has a gun, empty, but it still points it at you and pulls the trigger, and the next has a still bloody human face strapped to its head, and so on. This is if a group of them runs into a lone human, or if one of them alone runs into a group of humans. A lone one of them running into a lone human will probably do nothing more aggressive than just follow the human, copying what he or she does, only responding with violence if attacked, never initiating. A group of them will fight with a group of humans.
On one hand, having one of them in your group might be a good thing, since they seem to know fairly well how to deal with all the mist-things you encounter. On the other hand, they are creepy as hell, and are definitely trying to learn as much about you as you are trying to learn from and about them and other mist-things. And the group will have certainly seen what they do to humans when they beat us in a fight, awful things.
My first thought was how creepy it would be to have these broken nightmare things running around trying and failing to be people. But then the part about them actually learning very fast made me think of all the times characters try to infiltrate monster groups by clumsily disguising themselves, including covering themselves in corpse parts. If I was writing about people dealing with monsters, they wouldn't really be capable of understanding or learning, their attempts to interact would stay as uncanny and wrong as the rest.
And if I was writing about a species that's ultimately comprehensible and is making these mistakes just out of inexperience and rushing, I think I'd make the monsters the humans. Has anyone ever written that story?
On one hand, having one of them in your group might be a good thing, since they seem to know fairly well how to deal with all the mist-things you encounter. On the other hand, they are creepy as hell, and are definitely trying to learn as much about you as you are trying to learn from and about them and other mist-things. And the group will have certainly seen what they do to humans when they beat us in a fight, awful things.
My first thought was how creepy it would be to have these broken nightmare things running around trying and failing to be people. But then the part about them actually learning very fast made me think of all the times characters try to infiltrate monster groups by clumsily disguising themselves, including covering themselves in corpse parts. If I was writing about people dealing with monsters, they wouldn't really be capable of understanding or learning, their attempts to interact would stay as uncanny and wrong as the rest.
And if I was writing about a species that's ultimately comprehensible and is making these mistakes just out of inexperience and rushing, I think I'd make the monsters the humans. Has anyone ever written that story?
