Dragon penis / Shambling mound
Chris_Chinn:
So. Mimics. Is it really all that helpful to appear to be a treasure chest in terms of survival? I mean, wouldn't make more sense to appear to be a carcass or something that scavengers would eat, thereby getting more dungeon calories than waiting for humanoids?
Or is it that it needs humanoid brain matter or something?
Chris
Moreno R.:
What about the most terrible creature, the one feared by adventurers everywhere? The RUST MONSTER?
Seeing that this creature eat rust, how could it find food before the Iron Age? How can it survive eating only iron and oxygen?
And why it has a propeller at the end of its tail?
Ron Edwards:
The mimic isn't too hard, I think, because we have to face the fact that they are engineered organisms, magical biotechnology if you will. A whole bunch of them, including all the things which look like floors, ceilings, walls, clothes, and so on. Maybe even the piercer and the whatever-it-is, the stalagmite equivalent.
Who knows, maybe an "eat the adventurers" dungeon was engineered in the past, and the critters turned out to be annoyingly capable of subsisting and dispersing elsewhere.
Also, as a side point, beware of regarding evolutionary theory without technological meddling as some kind of engineering project. Creatures can only refine existing phenomena via natural selection; they don't "get" something because they "need" it. Remember that "best of a bad job" concept? It actually applies to every feature of every organism. Nothing is successful, either individually or at the species level. The question is whether it (feature or species) has failed yet. So it's not meaningful to speculate that a given subject for imitation would have been a better "choice," because there was no choice involved - if the creature evolved something, it's because whatever it had before that included the variation that could lead to that something.
The rust monster deserves a close look. As a prologue, it doesn't eat rust, it rusts metal.
Point #1
It may interest you to know that oxygen is frankly poisonous: oxidation is horribly destructive to most chemical compounds, and releases a ton of energy when those compounds are disrupted. When conducted in a volume-constricted space, this is also called "burning," or "explosion." The slower form, corrosion, isn't any good either. You don't want oxygen anywhere near your tissues unless it's tightly regulated via binding compounds, buffered solutions, and reactions via a series of enzymes which control the rates.
We and many other creatures breathe oxygen for a single, sole physiological function: to burn stuff called pyruvate. We can run very basic metabolism without it, splitting simple sugar into pyruvate and using the released energy for cellular fuel. But we also have a secondary metabolism which burns the pyruvate and allows even more released energy to be grabbed up for fuel, getting more bang per unit sugar. We use the oxygen to do the burning, and you can bet that the minute that's accomplished, we eject the noxious stuff out of the cells and out of the body as fast as possible (that's carbon dioxide). Many of you may know that this secondary metabolism isn't even actually conducted by us, technically, but by endosymbiotic organisms that we harbor inside our cells, the mitochondria.
The chemistry is called exergonic coupling: you break and/or burn a larger compound, grab that energy, and use it to build something called ATP, which is then the direct fuel for anything you want to do that can imaginably be called living (i.e., cell function & activity). To do anything, you break ATP; to put ATP back together, you have to do the break/burn thing again with new input of the exterior fuel substance.
Anyway, all I'm really saying here is that the rust monster has clearly found a way to turn rust (which is merely oxidation) into the first step of exergonic coupling, in an analogy to the way we break and burn sugar. Arguably, all it really needs is the right enzyme to make the iron + oxygen combination vastly more likely, i.e., faster. The antennae are the site for the seizure of the released energy, and they are for damn sure hyper-acidic to facilitate the process. Oh, and because I haven't mentioned it yet, iron is not a compound, technically, but iron atoms can have their elecrons seized, then "replaced" by bonds with oxygen.)
Now how about that tail? Metabolism (the shorter name for the specific exergonic coupling that characterizes most cells) has an interesting side effect, because in order for it to work, a lot of the pirated energy must be lost in highly entropic form, i.e., heat (or if compressed greatly, light).* Most creatures lose this heat as fast as they produce it, with no effect on body temperature. Some of us don't lose it fast enough for this, generating (or better, retaining) body heat due to slower rates of loss. It may interest you to know that birds and mammals play a risky game by generating extra heat through excessive metabolism, with several benefits but with certain specific problems like our brains being nigh-cooked all the time (when too hot) and our overall functions being vulnerable to hypothermia (when too cold).
My point here is that the rust monster must be generating terribly dangerous amounts of heat via this enzyme-driven rapid rusting process, and needs either a certain body area to shunt it to, or some increased surface-area to slough it away, or both. The propellor on its tail is a thermoregulatory heat-remover, with the interesting secondary tactic of spinning as a way to convert and lose the heat as kinetic energy and also through increased convection. I'd be interested to know how the heat is shunted from the beast's nose to its tail-tip.
Point #2
As for the issue of how the rust monster can do this as a means of subsistence, I draw your attention to the fact that many creatures have multiple sources of food, and although one of them may be especially interesting to us because it's our stuff or bodies being eaten, that doesn't mean it's the creature's only way of doing things. Also, the rust monster can certainly utilize ferrous ore deposits, which are probably a reliable energy source, and which is probably why we find them roaming the bowels of the earth rather than, say, swarming human foundries and armories as pests. Adventurers' equipment would be the equivalent of a handy, easy, unexpected snack.
Best, Ron
* This is why life, or specifically metabolism, is not and has never been a "reversal of entropy" as idiotically claimed by Isaac Asimov and as more recently parroted by pseudo-intellectual Creationists. Metabolism is quite tightly and consistently yoked to the second law of thermodynamics, arguably hastening the net process of sunlight slowly converting to heat.
Marshall Burns:
So, I was thinking... Borges' Book of Imaginary Beings discusses both a leucrotta and a crocrotta, but no mention is made of the latter in the Monster Manual. This has led me to conclude that the crocrotta went extinct. Would you care to speculate why the crocrotta died out while the leucrotta thrived, and perhaps on what role the leucrotta's penchant for devouring shields might have played in the process?
If you're not familiar with Borges' book, I can look up the relevant passage and post it. It's quite short.
Ron Edwards:
It amuses me to include Borges as a "contributor," i.e., further creative constraint to this interesting blend of creativity and stupidity I'm messing with here.
Provide the quote!
Best, Ron
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