False Machine: TitanSkull Hermit Crab

Friday, 11 January 2013

TitanSkull Hermit Crab

“O wherefore sleepest thou?

For Heaven is parted from thee, and the Earth

knows thee not”

This car-sized crab is noted for the strength and strangeness of its shell and the length and patience of its courtship.

As everyone knows the Titans, primordial beings of wild potency, ruled the earth in its chaotic age. They birthed gods, man-shaped Homo Divinus, stellar beings absorbed with human wants. These apparently inferior things outwitted and killed their mums and dads. And that's why the universe looks like us, governed by principals an ape can understand. Anthropic-Facism. Don't like the rules? Kill the boss, eat his bits, and remake things so you know what they are.

The bodies and blood of the titans went into making the sea, sky, earth and stars. The skulls were lost. Life hates a vacuum. A big crab lives there now.

The TitanSkull Hermit Crab is in the last and latest stage of it's development. It has moved through tiny ant skulls, rat skulls, monkey heads, babyskulls, man skulls, ogre skulls and giant skulls. This has taken a couple of millennia. It grows slowly and a good skull is hard to find. Now it is nearly ready to mate. This age of the world has reached it's end, in a couple of hundred thousand years mankind will have bollocked up reality so much the whole thing will decay back into primordial chaos. At this point the TitanSkull Crabs will begin the sex-lurch. This will be incredibly loud, the Titan Skulls that form their home will bang like solemn bongos rebounding through space and time. There will be little there to hear them, except for the neo-natal titans accreting in the chaos-flow.

If any Titans left a tale of the thumping beat that first a-waked them in the cosmic womb, none now live to tell of it.

By the time new titans have been born to rule all things the baby crabs are hunting out their first decapitated ants. Over the uncounted millennia of the Titans reign they slowly slowly grow, moving from skull to skull, waiting for the gods to be born.

Then things begin to happen very quickly. The gods rebel. The Titans die. The phenomological world is born from their flesh. The ascent of man begins. As the Titan Skulls sink uncorrupted in the ooze, the adolescent GiantSkull crabs gather and fight. The epic underground brawl leaves one crab for each available skull. And there they wait. Attending the decay of mankind, preparing for the apocalypse to mate again.

TitanSkull crabs have a bower-bird style mating ritual. The male creates a remarkable ossuary encrusted with notable skulls, polished with care and woven in beautiful strands. After the end of time, he dances like an old locomotive, this ushers the female towards his skull-mosaic cave. The tessellated head-bones may impress. If so, he has his wicked way with her in the night.

Because of this, one of the few things that can disturb the deep waiting of the TitanSkull crab is the presence of unusual skulls. High-Status hero skulls are good. Unusual head-shapes or bone-types are favoured for decapitation, polishing, and careful presentation.

The crabs are careful, fussy, slow and almost impossible to damage. They live inside the skull of something that fights gods. They are wise and experienced and will wait for a good brainbox to arrive. Animal but intelligent, they can trade, but the only thing they want, or have, is skulls in infinite varieties.

Each TitanSkull has slightly different properties. Though what powers they may hold, few can tell.

Whose skull is this crab inside?