Ka-Chew-Ka

The Mystic Swimmer

written by Gabriel Komisar

A magnificent, translucent octopus that swims through, air, earth, and water alike as though all matter were one continuous ocean. Her skin shines through like dust motes in sun, but glows with a shocking bioluminescence after dark. When she is not drifting through our reality, changing minute laws of nature and physics as she sees fit, she seeks shelter in a parallel bubble universe all her own.

The Power

Even the most studied Monster Specialist can only guess at Ka-Chew-Ka’s full power, but it is abundantly clear that the mystic octopus can shrug off laws of physics like scarves in the doorway after a cold winter’s walk. Sometimes, in places she has been, little rules are bent permanently; a crop of wheat will continue to ripen all year, a pond and its contents will drift in bubbles above the ground, or a villager will awaken to a new color they’ve never seen before, speckling the hyacinths and trees. These things, once shifted, go on indefinitely. The pond in question, one just outside of Culium-Mals, floats to this day.

People

The people of Culium-Mals call Ka-Chew-Ka a guardian though her true motives are far more elusive. She and the city share a deep bond, after the incident described in its entry. Occasionally she will travel along the path of the train, dancing around it and shimmering through its smokestack. Like the locomotive city, Ka-Chew-Ka is almost always on the move, even drifting as she sleeps, and in this way the Rail Riders see her as a kindred spirit—a traveler among travelers.

Once a year the Culiumian will celebrate their mutual disaster with Ka-Chew-Ka by launching fireworks on a clear night. The octopus will dance through them, the pyrotechnics complementing those parts of her that glow in the night while illuminating the rest of her. It’s the clearest the Rail Riders can see their guardian, and the most she will ever permit herself to be seen.

Notable History

Ka-Chew-Ka does not experience linear time as we do, but as one continuous ocean. It has been said by some of Ald Amura’s oldest denizens that she visited them at a young age, floating playfully around them like an old friend, only to regard them as strangers half a century later, seemingly meeting them for the first time. Kai Du’Ha, the first Monster Care Specialist, spent much of his life waiting for his first meeting with Ka-Chew-Ka, having met her several times already in a sequence even he could not entirely comprehend. That meeting came on the last day of his life, and it is said that Ka-Chew-Ka was the last guardian Du’Ha saw before he passed, just as he was the first human she saw after she was born. The way she had regarded him in their earlier encounters, with rapturous delight over meeting a long-lost friend, came into sharp relief for the Specialist as he passed.

Epic Destiny

One of our oldest tomes tells of Ka-Chew-Ka’s passing in the time of steel. Her death, which has already occurred, is a great shame, a lasting scar of our people’s folly. It is the hope of some specialists that as she swims through reality, shifting the ebb and flow of physics around her, perhaps there is some way this eventuality can be altered, that with the right intervention she could drift to our past and convince us to put down our arms even sooner than we did all those centuries ago.

Wounds

Her smooth drifting becomes a confusion of halts and judders, phasing in and out of reality, smashing into mountains, trees, and homes with no control.
Gravity fails around her, becoming heavy enough to push villagers to the ground or light enough to lift huts off their foundations.
Her bioluminescence fades making her completely invisible; the plants she passes through begin to blight; humans grow sick and pale.
Those around her are trapped in a temporal loop of several minutes, repeating over and over.
Clouds turn a putrid black near her, their rain scorching.
The sight of her causes instantaneous short-term memory loss.