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Post by Alma on Apr 22, 2020 19:59:31 GMT -6
 Name: Marsh Level: 5.0 Loyalty: 5.0 Gender: Male?
Half-breed: Mangrove
Cunning: 2 Critter
Average Top Speed: 35 mph (swimming)
Special Requirements: Level 5 (to train)
Size Chart: 8
Power Levels: 8
Notes: None
Stamina: 9
Strength: 12
Resistance: 10
Dexterity: 6
Mentality: 3
Special Abilities: Aquatic, Chlorophyll, Jungle Dweller (Water)
Moves: Root, Depth’s Hold, Drown, Spore, Wave of Muck
Biology: There is a saying, which says: a rolling stone gathers no moss. Evidently it is not the case with floating stones, or rather, floating wood. Broad, heavy, incredibly large and impossibly strange, these half-breeds are no easy task for most trainers to take on. Even those who could claim extensive knowledge of either the pliathor or nyssa (or both) would find themselves at odds and ends when it comes to taming these flotilla forests. Mostly because there is nothing to, technically, 'tame'.
These guys have few enough needs and almost next to no requirement of care, so long as the waters in which they're situated have a nutrient rich floor. Most of the time they do not even move, or if so very gradually, preferring to have the currents slowly push them along, making small adjustments along the way. They feed on the sun and what minerals they can absorb from the river- and lakebeds through their roots, stopping only to dig themselves in for a feeding or resting.
Too large for most things to prey upon, too tough for others to even bother with, these half-breeds have next to no natural enemies and neither do they hunt for anything or -one themselves. Thus, a trainer who hopes to bond with one such beast must first manage to even achieve its attention - a task all the more difficult seeing as they seem more interested in what is below water in the sands than anything shouting words at them from the shore. But, patience and careful study can give a good enough trainer inklings on the mindset of these beasts. For one, their passive nature exists only so long as they are not irritated. It can take a while to force them from that state. This does not mean they are above acting upon it once they are.. After all, what better way to enrich soil than with organic matter?
Training List: [?]-Danger Sense(10) [?]- Hardy(5) []-Mindless Grind(Eternity) |
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Post by Alma on Apr 25, 2020 16:24:16 GMT -6
Long tendrils of roots wriggled into the silt below, slipping into the mud as easily as the worms they resembled. They dug deeper, not content with slipping only the fine hair-like edges out of sight, the surface of the mud twisting into a landscape of hills and valleys as more of the roots burrowed into it. When the thinnest root that could still be seen in the water was as thick as a man’s arm, they ceased their unnatural movements, only languidly swaying to some unseen current in the water.
When the roots showed no sign of freeing themselves, Haix pulled her head from below the surface of the water with a snort and a shake that returned some of the lake’s water to it. Standing up in the shallow water so near the shore, she looked back to the docks, gauging their distance from them and deciding that the crossbreed had stopped just in time.
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Post by Alma on Apr 25, 2020 16:24:41 GMT -6
The area allocated to those training aquatic beasts was not meager, it could not afford to be with beasts larger than her own having no other place to be trained, but the crossbreed had nearly blundered into the territory claimed by the massive floating constructs called ships. Had he been smaller, such an incident might go unnoticed, but a literal floating island blocking soft-skin ships would win her nothing but ire even if a crash was avoided. She had no wish to be chastised by whatever soft-skins owned the wooden hives or ran the docks.
He, the bloated hybrid of wood and flesh, would not know such things. If he was anything like her nyssa, a similarity that she was counting on in fact when the time came to train him, he would try to smash the ships out of the water once they had collided with him, if not seeking them out beforehand, and costing her more credits than she had ever carried.
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Post by Alma on Apr 25, 2020 16:24:51 GMT -6
The sheer size of the thing, though she had been informed it was indeed smaller than a full grown pliathor, was part of the reason she had chosen it. None of her other beasts could even come close to it, and the thought of having a mobile island had interested her. The reality of the beast had sobered her, for its size meant it would be forever confined to larger bodies of water and, in the territory of the soft-skin hive, that meant the lake and his tank back at the kennel. Even the river allocated to fishers, currently so stuffed with melting snow so that it roared and chewed its way free of its banks, would not find him easily fitting. Not that the soft-skins would allow a creature not on their list to ever journey there.
With ideas of fishing from the back of a creature that could net its own catch while in the middle of the raging river destroyed, that left her little use for him.
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Post by Alma on Apr 25, 2020 16:25:05 GMT -6
His plant half had solved that issue with the news of the upcoming tournament. He was obviously part nyssa, the tree-like growths erupting from his back a clear indication of indication of that, even had she not found what creatures had served as his base, and the pit had written back to inform her that he would be allowed to enter the plant-creature tournament if she so wished. And while she had avoided the pit for its magics, well, she had risked going in there with Iago and Gala, risked allowing them to rend and drain her heart in payment if she failed.
The island could afford to die a few times to specialized beasts of the soft-skins, and she could tolerate watching the soft-skins preen themselves over his death as if they, not their beasts, had slain him. The prizes the pit rewarded its entertainers with were just as valuable as those found in the contests, and she intended to at least earn a few credits for her work.
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Post by Alma on Apr 25, 2020 16:25:16 GMT -6
Letting soft-skins kill the island repeatedly for pay was not the only reason he had been brought out that day. There was the small matter of the guild.
It had been simple enough to join, a letter sent in with a list of the beasts she had trained, a letter in return welcoming her to the guild, a quick visit that had seen her leave Hopper so that any messages could be sent directly to her. And the guild had a billboard in the back that informed her of the many training challenges available, including one that was listed as an assignment rather than a challenge, its paper crisp and fresh compared to the longed list beside it.
From there she had decided what she would train the crossbreed first, both useful bits of conditioning that she had commonly seen in the pit. And, as a bonus, with that particular set of training it would not matter that the crossbreed, roots deep in the mud and leaves held high, might ignore her.
((Marsh-6.0))
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Post by Alma on Apr 25, 2020 16:25:29 GMT -6
The current assignment for the guild demanded that a beast be taught to sense and avoid the first strike in any battle and to never allow itself to be frightened into making mistakes. The latter of the two would be simple enough, the crossbreed’s refusal to move whenever it found a good patch of dirt working in her favor. As for the first, nearly every piece of training she found suggested blindfolding the creature and chucking things at it.
What was thrown at the beast changed with its size. None had spoken of anything even close to a pliathor in size, nor how to blindfold something that would require yards of broad fabric not to catch and slide off in the water. Of course, with the way he was built, eyes placed on his lower jaw to better see what swam below it, she doubted it would prove to be much of an issue.
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Post by Alma on Apr 25, 2020 16:25:57 GMT -6
What might have been an issue was his parentage. The nyssa portion was unimportant, for though oak nyssa such as her own might have enjoyed smashing things, they responded well to training regardless of how little socializing they had up until that point. There were other nyssa that were less obedient, less willing to learn from those who had failed to raise one from their sapling days, but she had assumed, from his coloring alone, that he would be more closely related to an oak.
Regardless of which breed of tree-beast that had formed part of him, he was much larger than Vice, dwarfing even the oak nyssa without regarding its long length. She was looking forward to the day that she was able to climb on the false branches and find if they bled sap or blood when cut.
Then again, she had still not dared to even directly touch him.
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Post by Alma on Apr 25, 2020 16:26:30 GMT -6
His nyssa heritage had not been all that gave him his massive size, and the knowledge of what creature made up his other half would have given her pause even had she not watched her oak nyssa smash various beasts into the ground. A pliathor, a giant snake without venom. They did not need it, the stories of ships trapped in their coils and dragged below were easy enough to believe when she had seen a full grown one at the pit years ago. They were rumored to be temperamental and vicious, and only those who had the experience of dealing with them when they were young could safely train one.
But other than his size and length, there never had been much of a pliathor in the crossbreed. Even now, with a large amount of new sights for him beneath the waves, many of which she assumed a pliathor would prey upon, he did nothing.
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Post by Alma on Apr 25, 2020 16:26:44 GMT -6
The only movement from him above the surface was that of leaves rustling in the wind, and the lap of water against his sides as it tried to force its way over his body. She was not particularly interested in crawling along the shallows with her head beneath the surface, quite certain that the movement of the roots were nothing more than a trick of the light and the current tugging at them.
She was surprised he had failed to inherit an obvious hunting instinct when one of those used to make him was such a powerful predator, but the tree growths erupting from its back and the roots plunged into the dirt below apparently was enough to keep him content. The few tidbits she had ever seen him take into his mouth rather than sink to the soil below in his pool required her to shut off the overly bright light that shone above it.
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Post by Alma on Apr 25, 2020 16:27:21 GMT -6
She would rather train him back at the kennel in the future. She could only ensure that the soil had been flushed away and the light dimmed into uselessness there. Then again, she was tempted to only train at the kennel if just to spare her the difficulty in transporting his bloated bulk to the docks. The tunnels and pipes wide enough for his bulk were made for things capable of swimming far below the surface, and he has clearly shown his preference for keeping his back dry at all times.
He had shook himself upon resurfacing, flinging a storm of water from his body once the base of his trunks were exposed to open air. Water had still dripped from his leaves minutes later, causing a swarm of ripples that were mostly obliterated by his wake. She let the annoyance of the soft-skins caught by the mist drip away in much the same way.
((Marsh-7.0
Haix-212.0))
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Post by Alma on Apr 25, 2020 16:27:33 GMT -6
Where the water tunnel opened up to the lake was not meant for beasts to linger, the risk of collision between massive beasts already irate from their forced ejection was too great. It looked solid, crafted from metal and stone, but warning signs made it clear that it was the responsibility of the owner to get the creature out of the way promptly. The spot that the creatures were spat into lacked any good soil, the bursts of water scraping away all but the heaviest stones. The crossbreed had found it out fairly quickly, his wiggling roots finding nothing but water and stones too hard to easily pierce, and set out on his own.
Dragging the supplies behind her, she had managed to keep up with him as he did not so much as swim but drifted away from the main docks. The weight she dragged only seemed to grow as the wheels hit the sand, leaving furrows in the wet sand as she sought to keep up.
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Post by Alma on Apr 25, 2020 16:27:49 GMT -6
Not having known what to expect from the crossbreed in open waters, and hoping to avoid the strutting soft-skins that claimed the lake as their territory, Haix had applied for the crossbreed to be moved as close to dawn as she could manage. Luckily for her, the only soft-skins that had been in her way had been at the docks themselves, leaving her free to chase after the floating island on deserted beaches. Despite his slow drift, Haix was hard pressed to keep up with the crossbreed, forced to follow the path of the bank as the crossbreed drifted in a mostly straight parallel line.
He stopped several times for reasons she did not question at the time, taking the brief breaks to catch up and catch her breath. He never lingered for long, though the first time she had opened one of the containers and had to scramble to reseal it when he resumed drifting.
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Post by Alma on Apr 25, 2020 16:28:25 GMT -6
At later stops, when she was afforded enough time to stand and wait, she had taken to dipping her head beneath the surface of the lake. The water was clear enough for her to watch the long tendrils that hung from the sides of him writhing like a nest of snakes as they dug into the mud below, sending up a cloud of dirt that hid their lowermost parts. Every time the roots were then drawn free of the mud. Haix could watch them trailing the mud like they were dissolving if she kept her head below the surface too long, forcing her to run back to the cooler before resuming the chase.
Only the longer rests saw her checking the status of his roots, otherwise she merely fretted over the container and its contents. More than once she imagined the contents had begun to slosh as she dragged it, and she could only hope he would find his preferred spot soon.
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Post by Alma on Apr 25, 2020 16:28:35 GMT -6
The weight of the cooler as the cheap plastic wheels dug into the sand rather than roll was growing heavier with each stop, and each drift took them closer to the river mouth that marked the end of the training beach. If he tried to continue past it, mindlessly probing at the mud as he went, she would need to find some way to stop him. Preferably before the dock soft-skins noticed and swooped in to buzz around her and her beast, risking damaging him without a second thought.
In terms of how to stop the beast if he kept going, she had only the supplies she had dragged with her. The cooler’s contents might enrage him and send him closer to shore, but she was sure she could outmaneuver him on dry land. The long tendrils that hung from him would not be nearly as helpful as legs, and, of the two creatures the creature had been made from, the land dwelling one was not known for its dexterity.
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