How to make Chimera Palamonicana

...Lets shorten his name to Chimera for the duration of the thread, ok?

I want to make this guy High Octane Nightmare Fuel. If I cannot succeed at anything else other than making Chimera frightening, I'll be happy.

Chimera is a creature made from six corpses and one named character all smashed together and combined via a demonic egg that gave the creature its abilities. Chimera was "programmed" with attributes of the bat, the snake, the lion, the electric eel and the deer.

He has no bones in his body, and is just muscle kept together and orchestrated by a brain in the torso. Its neck can twist around like an owl's, its arms can hyper extend backwards, it can bend its back to unnatural angles, and its mane is actually just a lot of furry eyelids that can open up to reveal large bloodshot human eyes.

It is well over 20 feet tall, and if you cut it apart, it could either recombine, or the part you cut off will gruesomely mutate and attack you and then recombine with the main form. Needless to say, its The Implacable Man Up To Eleven.

Is that good enough, or should I add anything?

sounds good enough. I assume you want him to be somewhat vincible.

Sounds creepy, but why no bones? That would make it hard to move. Besides, the corpses already have bones in them; why would you specifically de-bone them?

Also, I personally don't find electric eels very intimidating.

You know, without bones the creature can evoke the phrase "It should not be!" Becaue it stands tall, yet, has no bones.

Rather than having nothing where the bones are, this thing essentially has tight packed tissues and nerves that all directly connect to the mind, essentially letting this thing, because there is nothing to stop it from twisting around, make some damn eerie movements.

The named character who was put into this monster was alive at the time. Imagine how it would feel to have all your muscles, etc separated from your bones...

yeah, this thing is a wellspring of extremely unsettling imagery...

Give it a gruesomely poisonous bite and make its touch electrifying.

Your chimaera would be pretty frightening, from what I picture of it. But its fright mainly comes from its being formidable. Let's try upping its horrifying nature per se.

What happens when you combine all these beings together so unnaturally? It's going to be in both high confusion and pain; its nervous system is failingly trying to adapt to sensations and motor control. Add to this, a suffering screech composed of all its host creatures' voices, along with quasi-erratic movement hinting at its torment.

That is horror creature.

edited 30th Sep '10 12:49:14 PM by QQQQQ

One way to make something scary is to not show too much of it for as long as possible.

Even if that creature you just described is super horrifying (which it is, props), only dropping vague hints as to it's nature from time to time will allow the reader to fill in the blanks, and prevent the monster's appearances from becoming stale.

Of course, that works a lot less if they only appear once, so another idea might be first person perspective so we can feel the fear they cause.

Wait, that typically relies on blurring details as well...hmmm...

Well I guess that's the only suggestion I have then. Vague hints and glances of something scary, as well as examining it's aftereffects, tend to be pretty scary.

Sorry, I'm still not satisfied with the bones thing.

With a few exceptions (your tongue, mainly), human muscles can only pull—they can't push. If two different muscles pull on opposite sides of something rigid (a bone), you get motion. But without the rigid object, a muscle contraction would just make a spasm. Your creature would just lie there twitching.

And then there's the weight issue. Your creature is big. Without sturdy bones to support it, it would collapse in on itself. Muscles can't support weight.

Your creature is plenty creepy already. I don't think giving it bones should be a big problem. You can make them weird bones and bone fragments attached to each other in unnatural ways.

oh, alright, maybe then we can just magic handwave it away, since there is not much in my verse that can be scientifically explained. Though if science ever does come into play, then, yeah, bone fragments pushed together in awkward, very distortable ways.