"How is he? Will my son ever recover from the bugs that turned his brain to mush?" The doctor pointed to where the thirty-seven year old was playing with toys on the floor. "It's been five years now and he has the brain of a child, give it another five and we can start the basics of teaching him magic again. He knows who you are but...but he will never have the same personality again, and by the time he regains all his magic skills at their former levels he will be in his sixties."
Musher Bugs are so called because they feed not on a person's physical form, but upon his or her thoughts and memories, devouring them seemingly at random, although good or important memories are seemingly targeted first, with memories of anger and horror left until last. It could be that good memories *taste* better to them then horrible ones, but given enough time, they will devour every memory that they can. To the naked eye they are invisible, with magical werelight or a pair of Aetheric Goggles they appear to be silver caterpillars with see-through wings. Each one generally is full for a day after taking one memory, but they live in swarms of thousands. What stops these swarms from leaving a country-wide plague of memory loss is that when not devouring memories, they need very high levels of magical radiation to stay alive in this dimension for more then thirty seconds or so. It is thought that they come from another dimension and can only enter this one when some magical spell gone horribly wrong has torn a hole between it and our one.
One place where they can be found is in certain deep pools within the Sorcery Springs Geyser Basin ;elsewhere they can only be encountered in certain magical craters caused by the megaspell wars of many centuries ago that destroyed the Old Order.
If someone is unlucky or stupid enough to get into a situation where they can attack him, he or she only has a short time to escape or the brain will be sucked dry of memories, living the person with the mind of a new born baby. Now, the brain is not physically damaged;individual memories can be restored quite quickly, as long as someone else knows then and can remind the afficted person of them. But in the case of a person left badly affected or mindless, the only way to restore their mental function is to teach them the simplest things and move on from there. If reduced to babyhood, they will regain skills at the same level as an average baby...crawling within weeks or months, getting a personality within two years, learning to speak once more, in a sort of reverse of Alzheimer's Disease. Within five years they will be like a young child, within thirteen, an adolescent, and so on.
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This article links to 2
- Aetheric Goggles Alongside Kassil linked by Cheka Man
- Sorcery Springs Geyser Basin Alongside Cheka Man linked by Cheka Man
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Now this is truly nasty. Seems to be something to inflict on a careless mage, or why there are so few archmagi. Or why an ancient civilazation fell in the first place. Do they attack all creatures equally or do they have a preference?
Phaidros, it seems you forgot to vote.
They attack anything living within their reach.
For some reason, that vote button does not appear on my browser, while it does automatically logs me in.
Aww. :(
My vote is for the first two paragraphs and the hope for more. You totally lost me on the last one and the post is better without it. That said, I really think it is a great idea. Especially leaving the horror till last. Great! I do have questions like how would you know they have these things? Some tell tale sign, rings on the neck, anything? Is there any way to get rid of them? But I can come up with that. I just love that core idea but I want more about it!
It is kind of a sparse and dissjointed submission, but the basic idea really got me. I like this alot, as said the core idea is fantastic as is some of the smaller details (that they are invisible),
I wonder what the going rate is for musher bugs in the arcane markets
Do they have any natural predators? Like for example an insectivore song bird that can see invisible creatures: http://strolen.com/viewing/Ghostchasers
Some spiders like eating them.
that actually came up?