Difference between revisions of "The Glutton"

Revision as of 13:20, 4 July 2014

Description

The Glutton is a naked monster designed with only endless voracity in mind. Seen among his divine peers as the firstborn of the one they call The Creator, The Glutton appears as a body that blends two others, primarily. His upper half is that of a human male, though with extreme corpulence. The Glutton has what should be a white beard flowing over his upper body, although said facial hair is bedraggled and unkempt, twisted on itself and spread out in filth-stained strings and tatters. Below the lowest reaches of this ruined beard, a dozen mouth slits circle his overgrown belly and lower back. Each mouth hosts sharp teeth and a slathering, slimy tongue always reaching for more sustenance from the Sea of Sludge and Ale in which its owner floats. Unclothed male human anatomy is now unused and is, after fathering only three children, inoperable. The bottom half of The Glutton is that of a great, gray-and-brown mottled slug, given to the same bloated bagginess as the rest of the body. It trails a foul, gray slime across what it touches in its ale-soaked bed of rotten food and muck.

The entity's sole residence is known as the Sea of Sludge and Ale. It is an endless, and endlessly replenishing, lake of ale barely deep enough to come to The Glutton's lower gut; beneath that and piled up around is the detritus and waste associated with food mostly rancid. The Great Slug does not care for the state of what he eats and drinks--merely that he is always in the act of doing so in an attempt to quell his unceasing hunger.

Except for exceedingly rare instances, The Glutton lives alone. He has been visited by The Creator only rarely since his creation, most notably to set things right after he furiously ate two fellow divinities visiting his realm and threatening to take the pair of leech-mouthed infants hanging from his chest. Otherwise, the only other of his kind that he tolerates is his grown son, Libri, The Scholar.

As he lives alone, this Glutton is not an object of active, direct worship by any save himself; in fact, the only way it has ever interacted with any potential followers is indirectly, by being allowed to take on other forms and be known by those names and responsibilities instead of his natural ones. There were initially two.

The first form was the closest to its natural state: a giant, mortal, ravenous sea monster that eventually found itself unable to sustain its bodily demands for food. After attempting to feast and live as The Glutton's immortal body does, it starved to death, having eaten all viable food sources without leaving enough to supply for later wants.

The second was another divine appearance--that of Tubbius, posited to the Tubbian faithful as a god of growth and harvest that was an enormously fat, mountain-sized man with his lower half buried in the ground. Tubbius's chief religious scripture, The Folds of Tubbius, is superficially a book regarding ideal farming practices and an endorsement of eating and drinking very well, to the point of merry excess. It is more truthfully a book that very nearly forces its members to live by ideals of exaggerated corpulence and gluttony if taken literally without wavering--The Glutton's way of nudging a handful of earthly followers his way. Perhaps surprisingly, this incarnation has been reasonably successful, with a scattered handful of faithful churches across Amasynia and Myrken Wood.

With his primary body still feasting incessantly yet his spirit still wanting more, more, more, The Glutton was allowed to split another facet of himself into interaction with mortals--though, this time, not with humanity. Brief years were spent embodying another mortal form, this being that of a wild, gray sow pig. It is a common maxim among the divine that "The Glutton will have what the Glutton wills," and, in this case, the porcine incarnation threw itself completely into two things: its usual gluttony as to be expected and, given its female figure, motherhood, birthing over time an enormous herd of its own through considerable efforts. Legends of the Gray Pig and her feral litter spread enough through word of mouth, giving The Glutton one more indirect opening into the minds of humans. This led, on the Gray Pig's death, to an immediate insistence on the Creator to continue such a role in divinity. Such was ultimately allowed, leading to the second divine facet of The Glutton's usual self, known as Porcus, the Mother of Pigs.

With the passing of time would come two final forms of The Glutton, one divine and one human. The former would be Marta, a Mother Goddess worshipped only infrequently by human faithful. Being The Great Slug's wife and the mother of their three children, as dictated by The Creator, when this goddess of fertility and childbirth reached a disastrously low number of believers to the point of her near dissolution, her greedy husband again made insistence on The Creator, again with his usual threats of freeing himself and devouring his divine siblings and what he could reach of creation. Hesitant replacement and absorption of her role saw the plump, elderly matron taken on as a third--and final allowed!--divine representation of the larger Slug. After all, a mother of endless, human children would need to eat and drink a great deal, and The Glutton had, by this point, long proven himself in his quiet role as Porcus, the swine mother being venerated by pig owners around Myrken Wood and Amasynia and being seen as a pet to Tubbius without the Tubbians understanding the true relationship between the two entities.

The single group to put as much of the truth together as possible (but still have a great many holes and misconceptions in their understanding!) is the Church of Tubbius, solely through the intervention of their Tubbius Regalis, their titular head and recognized embodiment of Tubbius: ]]Aloisius Treadwell]]. The Glutton's latest attempt to intrude on humanity was checked harshly by The Creator; Aloisius was born with no knowledge of The Glutton or any of its divine form. Only through meeting a group of traveling Tubbians in Myrken Wood and joining them did he reveal a glimmer of his past. The mischievous interference of Libri, however, saw Aloisius ultimately restored to full knowledge and capabilities. This would, of course, lead to considerable consequences for The Scholar, but with Councilor Treadwell already being in his sixties at the time of this revelation, he has been left to his own carefully watched devices.

Largely speaking, despite his knowledge of the truth, Councilor Treadwell is unable to act on that knowledge. Using gluttony-based magic would see no good for the people of Myrken Wood. Prattling about The Glutton or any of his forms with anyone other than a loyal Tubbian would lead to Aloisius being seen as a senile old fool at best or a dangerous madman at worst. Taking on the appearance of The Glutton for longer than a few moments would be disastrous, as has been shown on a very few, solitary occasions in Myrken's recent history. In short, The Glutton has what he wants: attention and another body to shovel food and drink into in a useless attempt to stop his incessant stomachs.

However, The Great Slug cannot have more than that, nor will he ever be allowed such. Despite his seeming brutishness and bossiness--and his misguided belief that he could, perhaps in time, unseat The Creator from power--he is truly very much stuck in his eternal position: a foul, fetid sea of beer and ruined food.

Background

Origins

Among the gods of his pantheon, The Glutton is seen as being the firstborn of The Creator, giving him a special place in terms of seemingly being allowed to get away with far more than his divine siblings. However, in truth, he is restrained tightly, never being given true freedom to reign or to usurp authority from his celestial father.

The Broken Dagger

The Glutton himself does not consciously set slimy pseudopod within the Broken Dagger or Myrken Wood with any manner of witnesses around, due to the many dangers inherent in being seen as the next monstrous target. Councilor Treadwell has only taken this form on three occasions in the past--two uncontrolled moments and one controlled but desperate and alone.

Once was when he was assaulted by an opponent wielding a magical blade in an otherwise empty, late night Broken Dagger. The shock of the serious injury saw him take on an incomplete transformation to The Glutton for a few moments until he recovered his senses and was able to flee the area.

The next was when a wave of Myrken's children was being marched toward the magically deceptive music being played by a monstrous Storyteller. Aloisius, in an effort to rush into the forest to save the children, found himself caught up in the fiddling creature's music. His bodily transformation forced on him, the one ton of Glutton bounded and slushed into the woods to devour whatever vegetation and animals it could grasp. It came back to its normal, Treadwell shape after gorging on much of the wildlife, only to have Treadwell nearly killed by Catch on the North Passage Down, having his guts cut open due to Catch's misguided belief that Treadwell was the fiddling Storyteller eating the children.

The final change was shortly after Treadwell's leaving the hospital from Catch's assault. His body grievously injured, he slunk away to the kitchen in his toy shop, locked and barred all entrances and shut the window shutters, and allowed himself the healing respite of turning into The Great Slug in order to feed on every bit of food and drink in the toy shop before returning to healed, recovered normalcy, snoring in his bathtub.

Otherwise, Treadwell has not and will not willingly attempt to change skins and shapes around other watchers within the boundaries of Myrken Wood.

The Present

The Glutton exists in a multiple-faceted framework. The primary form, The Glutton itself, floats in his Sea. The other three divine bodies--Tubbius, Porcus, and Marta--know of their place as portions and forms of The Glutton, although each is fully given over to its own requirements and interests. In short, they know where they stand, but they simply cannot care to change their roles in The Glutton's peculiarly selfish menagerie of bodies. Otherwise, The Glutton's mortal body, Aloisius Treadwell, has full recollection and awareness of what he is, but the Councilor is very much limited to virtually nothing in terms of what he can do with such knowledge. In Treadwell's daily life, The Glutton might as well not exist for practically all of the people he encounters--the only evidence of The Glutton in him being his endless hunger regardless of how full or fed he is.

Plots

Major plot events in which the character has been involved.