Simultaneously Manufactured And Miraculous. A Conscious Masterpiece Standing Before The Mercy Of Time.

Simultaneously manufactured and miraculous. A conscious masterpiece standing before the mercy of time.

How many people came together to see you completed? How much time and labor and sweat and toil did they give to bring you into their world? How much must they have found joy and purpose in trusting and sacrificing to something as beautiful and overwhelming as you? You, who meant so much to them.

Your brilliant, proud creators,

who designed you to suffer like no person could even comprehend.

Who sculpted out a destiny for you more fearsome than any Hell they could imagine.

You are both cell and prisoner.

Something else I really appreciate about Dib as a character, something I should have brought up ages ago,

He has more reason than any single person in the show to have a completely cynical and outright hateful reaction to aliens, not just for everything Irkens have put him through, but because he has been paranoid about all of the trope-typical conspiratorial hypotheticals about outer worlders as hostile invaders long before he ever confirmed any.

Amazingly and against what you expect, he seldom lets any of this actually express as a blanket bigotry against unfamiliar aliens on first encounter. The Plookesians appear and he’s still just wholly focused with Zim. The Meekrob show up to his place in Zim’s simulation and he’s understandably confused/concerned, but still leans toward trusting their spiel. I like to wonder whether he only reacted to Zim the way he did because of the latter’s obvious attempts to blend in and borderline threaten humans from the moment he opened his mouth, or if it was actually after learning about the Irken empire that he calmed down a bit, realizing there was an entire nuanced galactic ecosystem out there also facing his same problem.

Either way what I’m talking about demonstrated itself most strongly in these panels from the comics.

Grandmother’s Garden - Haunted Cities, Volume 4, Kitty Horrorshow

[Read the Holy Book]

You open to a random page:

"The boy came to a clearing, where a great bloated tick wallowed in a shallow pond, and he found that he could not speak, for She had filled his mouth with leeches as he was running through the swamp..."

You open to a random page:

"You will know you have come to the kingdom of the Hierophant, for the roaches will have the teeth of men, and the wasps will have not stingers but tongues, and the worms will twist themselves into knots until they are torn and bleeding..."

You open to a random page:

"Her mother, whose head was full of the Tattered King's perverted songs, shut the girl in the attic, where blood dripped from between the teeth of the mad-eyed rocking horse and the spiders laughed like murderers..."

You open to a random page:

"The Priestess sank into the mud, which whispered to her as it filled her ears, and she felt His oils and secrets slide across the wrinkled flesh of her brain, and she shivered, and the knife burrowed under her ribs..."

You open to a random page:

"And She waited there, beneath the soil and the loam, fed with meals of consecrated blood, and the teeth and sinew and seed grew within her belly as she moaned and prepared to birth a coven of new daughters..."

I played Tenement for the experience that Jacob Geller sold me on but I tell you I came back, time and time again, for that specific area. It’s a whole vibe of its own and it has stuck with me for over a couple years now.

That one npc in the sewers of the Tenement was really spitting when they said

“That room was mine. They had no right. I paid my rent for a hundred years, who the hell are they to force me out? My skin is in those walls. The carpet knows how I taste. So much of my flesh and blood and puke and mucous has gone down those drains, just clogging up the pipes. I'm caught in the room's throat. I'm a part of it. Sometimes I would push myself against the wall and my skin would start to melt and the wallpaper would knit its way around me.

Such comfort, such sublime assurance. I'm an electrician, god dammit. I sew nerve endings to I-beams and open eyes and make towers scream. They can't do this to me. I'll go to the housing authority, that's what I'll do. I'll show them all the scars, those teethmarks up and down my arms, and I'll tell them to go to my apartment and check its breath and they'll smell my sweat on it and they'll know that it's mine.

You can't just evict someone from a place like that and give it to someone else, it'll chew them up, and anyway it's MINE. I've worked hard all my life. I don't ask for anything except a home that keeps me in its mouth. Who the hell do you think you are?”

Every Dredge Aberration (2024), Part 7

A door opened, the wound left growing.

Along grotesque procession, the ichor’s flowing.

It seeps through rock to blacken the blue,

Molds flesh like clay, turns nightmares true.

It creeps in to stay, feeling, growing,

And bringing its tarnish up to you. ₊˚.༄

Clutching Nautilus ˚.༄

Encyclopedia #142

Aberrant form of nautilus

Description:

The hand of some forgotten sailor, taken refuge from an ancient storm. Today, at last, it comes ashore.

Comment: In this one image alone I find myself in desperate need to make a vital note for refernce- do not. DO. NOT. Perish at sea in the territory surrounding the Marrows. To not lose oneself to the depths is, yes, a sound goal for any who lend their soul from the safety of land and into the trust of crew and craft, but I’m speaking of a danger worse than drowning. Perhaps I am speaking of a threat more dreadful than death itself, still watching the ribbon light of the worlds splintering apart the dark. The Deep isn’t so wasteful of its catches as man. Once it clutches a gift from above, it only throws it back for a cost no sane mind could bear to pay. Even after all this time, are my hands forever to be ones that only take… because I fear the bite of what wants to be fed?

How to catch: Tread the Gales, where the water shimmers black, and welcome this oceanic mistake’s homecoming with the powers of your infused winch. While the advanced hoist can accomplish the same thing, I do note that the winch has a 10% faster fishing speed and can be obtained for a lower investment cost.

Vagrant Sollasina ˚.༄

Encyclopedia #143

Aberrant form of sollasina

Description:

Five sensing spears quiver and guide. Two stalks erupt from the shell, with eyes to see the unseen.

Comment: I see strange directions for this ancient’s evolution to choose. It is impossible to know what the creature has been shaped to detect, whether it is desperate to find, or avoid what it senses. A fun side fact more about its untainted relatives is that there was once found a fossil of this genus found in England, given the actual species name “Sollasina Cthulhu”.

How to catch: This is another dweller of polluted patches. Switch to an advanced rod designed for shallow casting.

Bifurcated Gar ˚.༄

Encyclopedia #144

Aberrant form of abyssal gar

Description:

A once strong body now divided, clinging to life through coiled channels of blood and bile.

Comment: A living testament to how the strength of the whole is only meaningfully counted by the strength of its bindings. A poetic art piece from the Deep, this metaphor for our dance- a glossy sludge making traffic between two halves of what once touched.

How to catch: You will not only need the aid of equipment specialized for casting through the corrupt oil, but also with the length to reach the abyssal depths. As such, the infused hoist is the only candidate for the job.

Slivering Lancetfish ˚.༄

Enclyclopedia #145

Aberrant form of lancetfish

Description:

An outward reflection, turning, coiling inward. The thrust of introspection, lost to self-obsession.

Comment: And so the spiral, well… spirals. There’s nothing to be said to add upon this concept, but it’s one of my favorite new discoveries since the rig was revealed. It checked off for both fantastic and dreadful even at first glance.

How to catch: While lancetfish are an elusive deep sea predator, unusual seismic disturbance has brought them to the cliffs with the other out of place fish. Any advanced rod for coastal catching will do.

Splintered Crab

Encyclopedia #146

Aberrant form of rock crab

Description:

Amber glue holds shattered fragments. A deep dweller cracked from the pressure.

Comment: Another turn, another puzzle to this creature’s characterization as literal or figurative. Already this transformation from shell to stone is strange enough, but the crab’s insides of sap reveal a whole other layer of impossible anatomy. For what it could be, the market has definitely lowballed the fisherman on what payment they offer for even one of these. Still, at least one specimen must be brought to the Painter at Little Marrow, going toward the ability to use Maple Orange pigment for your vessel customizations.

How to catch: Rock Crabs will readily be taken up by crab pots in the Gale Cliffs region, lurking depths shallower than 25 meters.

Cortex Decorator

Encyclopedia #147

Aberrant form of decorator crab

Description:

Folds of orange tissue tower from its head. Scything limbs administer the structure.

Comment: A delightfully skin-crawling addition to the day’s catch. Taken by the encyclopedia’s word, the skittering one has sculpted the very mound protruding from its own carapace. To what ends, it can’t be known. Either way, one of these is the other half of the requirements for Maple Orange boat paint.

How to catch: Before leaving the Cliffs, it is well worth investing into obtaining a Mouth of the Deep crab pot, which will be invaluable to helping catch larger mutagenic crustaceans such as these. The item goes a long way to allowing the player to keep investing research parts into engines, rods, and nets at this stage, rather than the expensive crab pot upgrades that otherwise would be needed for effective harvest of this size of crab and up. Shares a region with the rock crabs and their own aberrant, albeit preferring much shallower water. Keep your crab pots to 5 meters and below in the Gale’s bay.

Cystic Trilobite ˚.༄

Encyclopedia #148

Aberrant form of trilobite

Description:

An ancient infection, carried through time. Impatient in dormancy, it rises from the rocks.

Comment: One of the most eerie things the first beings who study the Deep and its influence is to realize, we are the last beings to have caught its attention. The forces beneath these waves have been awake longer than we can fathom.

How to catch: Any functioning crab pot, placed between 0-50 meters of depth by the cliffs, always in the oil slick, will have a chance at yielding one of these. For best chances, stick to a depth of 25 to 50 meters, to avoid wasting trap slots on the native crabs.

A. True. True.

B. listen forget the lift to the airport; everyone knows damn well that for Zim that shrimp would dive onto a freaking grenade & Zim would also absolutely ask him to dive onto a freaking grenade. But he would not accept that ride.

In other Q&A notes, at one point Jhonen described Skoodge as "the kind of guy who would drive you to an airport" and I've never heard a better description for Skoodge's entire personality