The Fungus Monsters are a species of elemental creatures, in this case fungus-resembling humanoids. They inhabit a few islands of Candle Cove, and have never been seen in the Abyssal Kingdom.
Appearance[]
These are creatures of a hideous appearance, resembling little obese human torsos with a stitched navel, and hundreds of tentacles as "legs". Their right shoulder is infested with fly eggs and larvae, and the right arm is an earthworm. Their left shoulder is populated by smaller versions of the main fungus, and the left arm is the abdomen and head of a living fly. The head is a giant purple mushroom with two huge blank eyes, and a mouth with rotten gums and teeth. Randomly around the body, hair, saliva and pus appear, often forming greenish blisters.
It is unknown if the Fungus Monsters have genders or not, but there has never been any human in Candle Cove brave enough to find out. By agreement, it is accepted that they are genderless.
Behavior[]
Unlike others, Fungus Monsters do not seem to care about humans at all. They appear anywhere where there is red meat to eat and red wine to drink. For this reason, Candle Cove is full of superstition about red meat and wine. Some towns forbid these and burn them if they find some, and others prefer to eat and drink in small quantities, always hidden.
They are not noticeably intelligent, but rather perverted and immoral instead. Their only motivation is gluttony, and they usually laugh at others of their kind when they choke and die by eating too fast. They have been shown to take gluttony so far that, when the food is over, they start practicing cannibalism. If they ran out of brothers to eat, they start to rot and consume themselves.
No one dares to kill them or force them to go away, since it is well known that the mere fact of touching a Fungus Monster, or any food, drink or surface they have been in contact with, provokes irreversible and deadly diseases such as leprosy, the bubonic plague, or gangrene. It is better to let them stay until they run out of food, and they will just go away or die. After this, is extremely important and necessary to clean the place with bleach or acid.
Trivia[]
- It is highly difficult to find them in open nature. However, it is likely that they live in darkened, damp areas, as real fungi needs these conditions to grow.
- Their alignment with death magic does not seem related to the real death magic, since a true death-aligned magician cannot control these beings.
- They only appeared in an uncertain episode, where the main crew found that one of them had settled in the ship's hold and was drinking all the wine and infesting the rest of food with larvae. They finally managed to take it out of the Laughingstock by tempting it to catch a bottle of wine that they threw down in the water. Apparently, all the wildlife in that part of the sea died in less than two minutes.