Thanks to the recommendation of a friend, I'm doing Mutation March! I had a lot of fun with Mermay last yea, so I'm looking forward to this (though I almost missed it, I totally forgot today was the first haha)! And just for fun, I'll be writing a tiny story for each entry! So without further ado, please enjoy!
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“Kraken”
“They couldn’t believe their eyes, at first. Something had to have been wrong with the drone, faulty wiring or some such thing. By all accounts it didn’t make sense. They found the thing during what was supposed to be a routine survey of the Biodiversity of Hydrothermal Vents, a quick trip around one of the larger Black Smokers in the area, 5,000 meters below sea level. Droves of Blanket And Blue-Ringed and Giant Pacific Octopods, Cuttlefish (Flamboyant or Otherwise), Paper Nautilus and Megapinna Squids. It was a veritable garden of cephalopods, a majority of the creatures so impossibly deep into a place where they shouldn’t even be able to exist. Let alone the thousands of miles from some of these animals native ranges, the pressure and heat alone must have been able to turn the things to pudding. And yet, there they were, flocking around the things incomprehensible heft like tentacled disciples awaiting a sermon. They took a skin sample, somehow. It’s vacant gaze fixed on nothing in particular and yet so pointed, so pensive. Nobody on the team could shake the feeling that it let them take it. When analyzed, it made no sense. There were fragments of DNA from all kinds of different Orders, Genera, Species. There were rumors, about government testing or toxic waste spillage or rogue meteorites. No answers came. The only thing agreed on was that the thing seemed to embody the *concept* of cephalopods itself. It was only the first.”
Truly inspirational.