[OOC: Interesting! See long OOC note at the end...]
Delegate Botris, Skena's stand-in, tried to suppress a guffaw, and quite failed. "Pffft. Tales of tentacled monstrosities would be things we would frighten our children with, if we had any children any more." ("That was in poor taste, Botris," Numilo hissed, but he didn't act as if he heard.) "I have it on good authority that they're just based on those 'familiars' the monkeys in Tsuirakushiti have started making for themselves. They're monstrous enough ... at least until somebody turns on their adult mode." The guffaw was back, and being non-Cimmerii, it deepened into a leer; it wasn't so much that he fancied experimenting with the adult mode himself, not being Rinkai, but seeing the rise it got out of Numilo might be the most entertainment he got all day.
Botris was to be disappointed. Numilo raised a hand. "Not so fast. There are tentacled monstrosities out there; we know this, even if the knowledge is not widespread. At the very least, the Tsuirakuans had to base their micro-tentacle monsters on something." The possibility that humans might be inventive and creative enough to come up with the concept on their own didn't seem to occur to him. He turned back to Drusia. "I would be most interested to hear your elaboration on the 'tentacled monstrosity' and your recommendation for dealing with the issues it poses."
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OOC: Dru has homed in on (and her two interlocutors have further focused on, to the exclusion of her real concern) something I've long wondered about in the Errant World: the natural/thaumatic history of tentacle monsters, micro or otherwise. It is tempting to infer the existence of macro tentacle monsters, not so much because humans couldn't imagine the micro variety as Numilo mistakenly thinks, but because there should be some genetic basis out there for a thing to shrink to head-fitting size and more or less domesticate. At the same time, the only time monstrous things have appeared at all in Errant Story is in the ravings of the Paedagogusi, whose view of the world is ... not necessarily accurate. Trolls, we have learned, aren't monstrous; they're just pre-human, but clearly sapient and human-like (and, judging from the ones we've seen, wiser than humans or elves about some things). Monsters are, in fact, so notably absent from the Errant World that I worry that we've busted canon in the game by introducing things like the Anuban swamp beast, Gornch lizard, galdy, silka, and so on.
We've been able to arm-wave away most of these monsters by sticking them in the Southern Continent, which Errant Story completely ignores. However, Numilo is right, the micro-tentacle monsters have to come from somewhere. But where? It would be nice to have some ideas about tentacle-monster ecology, both because of its role in what Numilo and his bosses decide to do (rightly or wrongly...) and because of the possibility of running into them again. All this needs to be done constrained by canon and game playability. Ideas?