Homunculi are matter made to think it is human. Without stem cells, this is mostly eerie golemesque simulacra - little balls of hair with looping mouths and eyes that serve no real purpose; bubbling, dribbling people of almost-flesh that dissolve into piss when you cut them through
There are four orders of homunculi, as follows:
maybe it'd look less creepy with a perm?
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Scrapthings and Scrapelings
A knot of hair, a drop of spit, a carefully folded fingernail. Any part of you will do, really. Obedient but with little intellect; a microcosm, a parody of the real self. Often pretty cute, like the dust sprites in Ghibli, scurrying around carrying tiny letters or eavesdropping on your enemies. Sometimes massive; a ghostly heap of transparent skin flakes or a clawing tumbleweed of frizzy hair
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Excreta
It's easy to make enormous shitsacks without ever murdering anyone, but they have a stunted, primordial intellect; gut flora trying to replicate human intelligence.
Piss makes things even stupider though - almost no actual human dna in there, just ghost impressions from their time passing through you. Least comprehensible, incapable of performing complex tasks, heaving breaths of burning alkali
A favoured party trick is to grab the saliva from the tip of your tongue and drag up by that thread all the contents of your stomach; a wriggling babyform of acid and bile that screams and wails and tries to crawl back down the nearest throat
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okay who put teeth in the shit golem
not funny guys
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when bae give you that look like
"i'm gonna burrow veins into you like roots in soft soil" |
Bone, Blood and Bloat
The first time you'll be able to craft independently intelligent servants. You probably shouldn't though. Whatever fraction of their form is directly from you is the fraction of your intellect they may develop. The smarter they are the more of a cunt they become, the more likely to stab you in the back
- Bloodbags are most common, being easiest for a lone practitioner to harvest. They tend to be persistent, but learn slowly
- Meatwads you can make out of only a few corpses. Maybe a pig if you're desperate. Prone to brutish anger
- Fatstacks are often found in whaling ports, though adipose tissue is easy to grow if you've got an appetite. They tend to melancholy
- Skeltal Men, requiring bone marrow, are most rare. They are dense with sense of self, craving cruelty and competition
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True Homunculi
Made out of eggs/sperm/uterine lining, they look like a younger, hotter you, and have one of the below traits:
(based on highest stat? i leave it 2 u decide ur destiny)
- Magic. Alter self, acid splash, cause mutation, etc, at will (int)
- Psychic. Levitating, throwing things around. Maniacal laughter collapses into agonised sobs (wis)
- Supernatural beauty and charm. Evident insanity doesn't stop you wanting to do what they say (cha)
- Perfect form. +4 to all stats, +4 bonus to everything (dex)
- Cancerous. Prone to the whole 'Akira flesh beast' thing, they are only mostly in control (str)
- Immortal. Not actually immortal, but they heal all damage they take the next round (con)
If you can mix your own eggs with your own sperm, they get all of the above and probably inspire an inquisition
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| mother's milk is red today |
Whatever you make them out of, at least 1% of a homunculus' volume must be from the caster (often just a drop of blood), or 10% if you want to actually control them. You can mix and match ingredients, with the majority of their form deciding their powers and a small bonus for including more powerful components. Usually you'll use this to, say, build a bone homunculus out of a couple of still-living victims and a pint or two of your own blood, rather than using your own skeleton
You need at least 30kg of matter for a 1HD, medium-sized homunculus, an eighth as much for something small, or eight times as much for something large, etc. Chances are the first True Homunculus you make will be a perfect, post-human brain genius, and also 2 inches tall. For reference, a human body is around 30% meat, 25% fat, 15% bones, 7% blood. Your hair weighs about a quarter kilo, you excrete about a kilo of piss, and one of poop, each day. An ejaculation weighs about 15g so you have to cum like 2000 times to make a 1HD True Homunculus. Seems about right. The average discharge of menstrual fluid is 35g, so you're going to have to fuck with your cycle to make any real progress there either.
For those looking to really play god, there're always teratomas. Constructed from entire ovaries/testicles, these are a mass of cells that, not knowing what to grow into, try to grow into everything. They will expand when fed almost anything biologically adjacent, but blood works best. Preferably your own, to keep things stable. Your baby teratoma will develop fluid-filled cysts as it grows, and if a large cyst occurs there is potential for the production of a fetus. Keeping a teratoma in the sweet spot is difficult. If poorly fed - too varied a diet, too much of someone else's blood, too hot, too cold, etc - its cysts will spawn merely flawed mutants and fleshbeasts, creatures more readily obtained by other means. If overfed, allowed access to a water supply or charnel house perhaps, the teratoma is likely to go full katamari, rolling around squelching up cows and spitting out hiveminded homunculi.
