My characters, preferences and general goals lean HEAVILY towards things that might be described as 'torture porn'.
Please bear this in mind when interacting.
A hydra rests, perched on a rocky outcrop halfway out to sea. It is only as the camera draws back, panning across to scan the surrounding skyline, you realize, it is perched on the rubble and shattered metal foundations of the Statue of Liberty, it's belly swollen with the dissolving metalwork. One of the vast heads turns to look at the camera, dark humour and cold hunger alight in those glittering eyes.
Height
Foreshoulder to Ground: Approx 250 feet.
Length
Approx 1000 feet
Wingspan
Approx 800 - 1000 feet.
Currently Seeking:
The Hydra has two shift-colours, unlike most of their species which merely has one. Red and Ocher, Blood and Earth.
They are cunning, self aware, and even manipulative. They can speak any known language, and have a surprising grasp of various human languages. (IC only, player can barely comprehend English)
They are two halves of a single entity. While outwardly they appear almost as squabbling siblings, they are in fact a single personality with a united goal. Where they differ, usually, is how they each approach a given objective.
But make no mistakes, they SHARE that objective.
Although mutant hatchlings are not uncommon, Hydra variants have little chance of survival due to the instinct to devour the other hatchlings, usually resulting in uncoordinated heads attempting to eat one another, while a stronger, unmutated sibling takes the opportunity to stuff the mutant down its gullet.
In the case of Scoria_Biotite however, things came out differently.
Firstly they were part of a smaller than average clutch, giving them less competition in those early hours. Secondly, they hatched first. They in fact had three hours to come to the realization that they couldn't eat one another, and to begin integrating their mind/s. When the next hatchling broke its way free of the egg, they were ready, and gorged themselves.
When they emerged from the creche, they were seen as a second coming of the God, which the clan, and many clans, worshiped. They grew up in luxury, worshiped and loved by all. On the day they reached adulthood, (The hydra's first female heat), they were brought a pair of smaller dragons. The easy life they had lived had given them the chance to grow, and were already massive, almost two hundred feet muzzles to tail tip, and fifty feet at the shoulder, when this pair came before them. One was a criminal, who had slain a creche of hatchlings belonging to another female. The other, a male, had lost his life-mate in an accident, and wished to die.
Since murder was considered punishable by death, none could execute the baby killer. Usually such would become outcast, driven off after being crippled. And suicide was also forbidden, by the tenets of the God/s.
To the clans, the answer was obvious. The God had made the laws. The God could mete punishment and decide fates. The criminal would be slain for her crimes, the male... had a request. He wished to rejoin his mate, and thought he could do so by entering the God.
The decision each head made then defined them for the rest of their lives, and beyond.
Scoria took the male, with gentleness and love. He swallowed the smaller dragon slowly, savouring the flavours and the feeling of filling up with the life of another. One swallowed, the hydra was unable to move for three days, as the huge meal was digested.
Biotite took the female, with violence and pain. Over a day, the murderer was flayed, and stripped of flesh and organs, until only the lungs and beating hearts remained to keep her alive. Arteries had been sealed by red hot bronze, as Biotite fed, until finally, mercifully, her jaws crunched into the female's skull and ended her life.
From then on, they became the Mercy and Justice of their people. They updated the ancient clan laws, settled wars centuries old, and presided over joinings (weddings), and the disposals (Burials). But much of their rule was spent digesting meals.
Sometimes there came willing sacrifices, a dozen yearlings who wished to sing for the God in the afterlife. Both heads were kind that day.
Then the days of ending, when criminals of several clans were brought to them. Both heads were cruel that day, and following days, as they fed.
They could have grown fat and lazy as they grew. But instead, they worked, keeping up the strictures of the hunters, even running with them, joining the hunts of smaller, impoverished clans, their massive size allowing them to bring down the huge prey-beasts usually hunted by dozens of dragons. Throughout their life, they never stopped growing, some believe because of the massive amount of their own peoples flesh they ate.
By the time they finally died, the hydra was over five hundred feet in length, One hundred and twenty five feet at the shoulder. They could swallow a willing sacrifice whole, and still be able to hunt while the dying dragon writhed in their belly. But die they did. Age blunted their teeth and claws, their horns had grown to almost as long as a normal adult of their kind. As the light dimmed in their eyes, two yearlings climbed into their massive jaws, and into their gullets, dying together as the Gods last meal before their journey. After the hydra died, its flesh was lovingly stripped, and carried to all the clans. Every dragon for a thousand leagues fed on a tiny piece of their God, and took strength from it. The following year, Scoria Biotite's massive bones, formed of Bronze, were set in place over the entrance of the worlds first United Clan gathering.
Four thousand years later, the bones still stand, tended and cared for still, the center of a world spanning civilization.
After death however, the Hydra's soul did not simply vanish. Like a few others of their species before them, they found themselves in an afterlife. A wonderful place, with many new prey types and people and oh my...
They met their deity, or deities, in the forms of Obsidian and Sideromelane. To say they were disappointed to discover that their beloved God was firstly, not actually another Hydra, but two individual dragons, and secondly, barbaric, stone age, opportunistic con-artists, is something of an understatement. The two had achieved some amazing things, but only after their deaths, and only once clan elders had decided they needed something to introduce some semblance of law and peace.
They since then, have dedicated themselves to enjoying the afterlife as decadently as possible.
