Ravenous Squid-Trees

What are you afraid of? Bacteria piloting fisher crows? Eldritch beings and/or cubes? The tenured hand of JUSTICE?

Forget 'em. More frightening than those, even more frightening than a nation of passive-aggressive shitlords, is the humble Ravenous Squid-Tree. Oh, I'm sorry, did I say humble? I meant fucking hungry.

Here, have some numbers, numbers are fucking scary.

• AES 939. Hegemon Aouwouou. Weight? 150 tons. Time for the squid-trees to rip the flesh from her motherfucking bones? 17 seconds. Seventeen fucking seconds.

• AES 956. Indiscriminate Countermeasure, Flandrean dreadnaught class warship. Monster runs on disdain and asynchronous energy, once took a direct hit from a Grim Weeper at terminal velocity without so much as a scratch. Sails over an uncharted grove of Ravenous Squid-Trees, sinks in under three minutes. Crew casualties: one hundred fucking percent.

"Yeah, yeah, whatever, we'll be okay because they're in the ocean." Oh yeah, you protruding turd? Try this one on for size:

• AES 963, Ulgravian zeppelin Whisper-on-the-grass. Cruising altitude: 10,000 feet. Suddenly this giant, telescoping tentacle fires two miles out of the water and punches through the gas bag. Whisper-on-the-grass spews horse methane all the way down into the waiting maw of a 3,000-foot-wide Ravenous Squid-Tree that had gone unobserved for too long.

That's right, the Squid-Trees evolve due to metafishics. That's probably the reason why dumping poison in Joran Lake did fuck all to clear them out. Lucky for us, Ravenous Squid-Trees are so territorial that different strains of Squid-Tree will go after each other, but unlucky for us, that just means whatever's left to deal with us is even more horrible.

If the Disarrangement Act ends up passing, then here's what you'll need to do: build some mountain ranges and pump the oceans into them. Drain the whole fucking planet. Put it through some kind of biofilter to prevent any seeds from making it through. You can make some aquariums for the whales and Panark Fleet if you really need to, but that's not the important point here. The important thing is to get those plant devils out in the open, okay? Once you've done that, nuke the fuckers from orbit. It's the only way to be sure. The whales can have their oceans back afterward.

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Gwen Hanson, PhD

There's quite a story behind the giant squid-tree that downed the Whisper-on-the-grass. Its discovery caused no small degree of horror from the international community, both on account of its existence and because of the implication that similar things could exist elsewhere in the ocean—and would, quite necessarily, occur in the last place you'd look. El Fauces del Diablo, or "the Jaws of the Devil," as the giant-squid-tree quickly became known, spurred unprecedented international collaboration on a global perception system (GPS). El Fauces itself merited a dedicated geosynchronous satellite for the specific purpose of ensuring the monster did not grow any larger, or else legs or wings or something equally horrifying. There was even talk of turning Taurus Research Station on the monstrous vegetation, but the Hegemony quickly put an end to that line of discussion by threatening to capsize whatever nation voted in favor—not their fleet, mind you, the actual nation. Though El Fauces survives to this day, there is an ongoing research project to study the Missing Sea in hopes of separating El Fauces del Diablo from the rest of the ocean.

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Dr. Herbert Jones
University of Eyesland
Professor of Cataloguing Various Things
Heinrich Stafford Chair of Arrangement
PhD in Miscenallia

Citations: Missing Sea / Taurus Research Station