The Body Illithid: Science of the Mind Flayers

If Dungeons and Dragons has ever touched your life, then you’re probably familiar with the tentacled, brain-sucking Illithids. Even in a fantasy world so rich in bizarre monstrosities, the Mind Flayers stand out as shockingly alien. Yet the Illithids are not without their parallels in the natural world -- and even in human civilization. Join Robert and Christian for a science-grounded look at everyone’s favorite Underdark horror.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from How Stuff
Works dot Com. A form slightly larger than Drifts, but
obviously humanoid, drifted around a nearby stalactite. Drifts kicked off

(00:24):
a stone to propel himself at it, drawing his other
scimitar as he went. He knew his peril a moment later,
for his enemy's head resembled a four tentacles octopus. Drifts
had never actually viewed such a creature before, but he
knew what it was. An ill apant, a mind flare,
the most evil and most feared monster in all of

(00:45):
the under dark. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your mind.
My name is Robert Lamb, and my name is Christian Sager,
and today we're talking about mind flares. That's right, you
get from that quote mind flares. For those of you
who aren't aware, we're really diving down the geek well

(01:06):
today to get a monster that we both love and
grew up with. But this is a creature that was
originally created for dungeons and dragons, right, Yeah. It also
has a long history that I'm just learning about in
the Final Fantasy games. And I imagine other other properties
as well. That that that's that were inspired by especially

(01:26):
early dungeons and dragons. Yeah. But so we're not just
talking about this because we're into geeky stuff, right, not
not that's like, yeah, we're using the mind flare as
a jumping off point to look at some really interesting
science both in biology but also a little bit in
technology today in the same way that drifts our hero

(01:50):
in the opening narration used that the stalactite as a springboard. Right.
So that was a quote from R. A. Salvatores Exile,
which is part of the Dark Elf trilogy. It's actually
booked two in the Dark Elf trilogy. Uh, you may
be familiar with this. If you're not, I'll give you

(02:11):
a quick primer. These are dungeons and Dragons based novels, uh,
set in the Forgotten Realm setting, based around this character,
dritzto Arden that is pretty popular with that crowd and
still still part of the property the board games that
come out. He's He's mentioned in the materials for the
Big Current under Dark campaign. I'm pretty sure they're still

(02:31):
coming out with novels with him in it too. Um,
and these I have a fondness for these novels because
they were like my way to wind down my brain
after doing too much research, either when I was in
graduate school or sometimes from podcasting. So I've read. I
want to say, there's like these books, and I've probably

(02:53):
read three quarters of them. Uh. Mostly I refer to
them as sword porn because there's just like whole sections,
like pages and pages where it's just describing like the
ways in which he moves his swords. I mean just
in this one paragraph alone, like they've had to mention
like the way he drew a scimitar and everything. But

(03:13):
mind flares are like the primary antagonist in this specific book.
So I pulled that quote and then there's another one
later on where I think that this contributed to the
lore surrounding them, so you know, we'll refer back to it. Yeah.
So see, we're using this this creature, this wondrous creature,
as as as an opportunity to discuss some some science,

(03:34):
and we're using science as a way to explain some
of the more fantastic aspects of this fictional monster. It's
kind of relationship we come back to time and time again, because,
as I like to say, no matter how fantastic, how
crazy the imagined monster is, you can you can almost
count on nature to have equal or surpassed it in weirdness. Yeah,

(03:59):
that's that's exactly what's so wonderful about using this for
an episode of the show. And I'd like to point
out that this is actually connected to two other things
that we do on Stuff to All Your Mind. The
first is obviously Robert's Monster Science that he's been working
on for years. If you go to stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com, there are I dare say a

(04:19):
hundred maybe monster science posts like you've covered almost every
monster in existence. Um well, well I wouldn't go that
far because they're pretty inexhaustible, but um yeah, the monster
the Monster of the Week post kind of like the
monster Science versions. And then there's the video series Monster
Science as well, which you can find there or you
can find while all the videos are on our Facebook

(04:40):
and our YouTube channel as well. Uh. But also you
and Joe are doing an episode coordinated with this that's
about mind control. Yeah. It's gonna be titled what Mind
Control feels Like, and it should be the episode that
follows this. I think this episode right here is coming
out on a Thursday, and the kind of the following one,
the mind Control episode, come out on who stay. But

(05:00):
it'll all come together, So brace yourselves, everybody. We're we're
really getting into it with minds, brains and actual brain
eating today. Yeah, because one of the things about the
mind flares, if you're not familiar and if you're not
familiar at all with the mind flares, just bear with us.
We'll get to the real science as well. But they
are not only these these octopus headed, purple fleshed evil

(05:25):
doers that live in the under dark, this vast subterranean
realm in the Dungeons and Dragons world. They are also
psychic or psionically gifted creatures that are able to just
dominate people left and right with their amazing psychic powers,
you know, throwing mind blasts all over the dungeon, just

(05:46):
really wreaking havoc. But that is their primary power, and
their finishing move is to grab ahold of you with
their tentacle mouths and suck your brain right out of
your head. It's like, uh, total kill, like instant kill.
I think if you get uh grappled by a mind
flare by the head or whatever. You know. They actually

(06:08):
not to skip too far ahead into their anatomy, but
they're generally represented as having um just four digits on
their hand, so they have three knuckles. And I was
thinking the other day, this would be perfect for a
t p K tattoo from my Flair or Total Party Kill.
That's you're like your thug mind flare, I like it,
I like But for those of you not from with

(06:29):
the game Total Party Killers, when the creatures in the
game were more specifically, the dungeon Master kills off the
entire party with a Generally, generally this occurs because the
encounter is not mathematically calibrated exactly. So yeah, so we're
gonna use these as a jumping off point. And you
guys are probably saying to yourselves right now, like, WHOA, Like,

(06:50):
this isn't what I signed up for. Just bear with us,
because the thing about mind flares in particular that is
really useful for stuff to blow your mind is they
were created for this game, and then it's been a
good almost forty years that people have been working on them,
whether it's in these novels that I mentioned earlier, or
for rule books or for video games or whatever. It's

(07:11):
it's kind of like Star Wars creatures. They've had like
more and more tagged onto their uh, fictional biology and
culture and philosophy over the years, to the point that
it's like it's this fleshed out world, you know, and
it's it's really fascinating what multiple people brought to the
table with it and how that then subsequently translates because

(07:33):
they were obviously inspired by you know, creatures from real
life or or philosophy in different cultures. Oh yeah, indeed.
I mean, and in so many cases, either the people
adding to the the mythos so say, the mind flares,
they either were directly inspired by natural world organisms or
they're just weird creativity managed to to parallel actual natural

(07:58):
world weird. That's the like somebody needs to do a
like a history of the mind flare creation book where
they like talk to all these people, because in front
of us here in the studio right now is Volo's
Guide to Monsters, and it has a pretty comprehensive, like
what almost ten page section on mind flares, more more,

(08:18):
I dare say, than real world encyclopedias have on some
of the real world animals we're going to talk about
in today's episode. But it's really impressive and I would
love to see how all these pieces came together. Yeah,
and I just came out by the way of anyone
out there is interested, Uh just can't just published now.
In terms of what we're not going to attempt to

(08:39):
do what we just mentioned here, We're not going to actually,
uh you know, go piece by piece through the generation
of the mind Flare, but we will just touch on
its origins, which go back to Gary Gygax himself, the
creator of Dungeons and Dragons. Indeed, he is the guy.
He's the guy who started the whole thing, and you've
got a nice quote from him here, specifically about mind flares. Yeah,

(09:00):
he said, quoth the mind Flare I made up out
of whole cloth using my imagination, but inspired by the
cover of Brian Lumley's novel in paperback edition, The Burrowers Beneath.
So I've never seen this before. What's it looked like? Um?
I looked at it, I will. I looked at the
various covers and the one that I think most modern
readers are used to is the one looks kind of
like an eye in the center of a nautilus, and

(09:22):
that one looks more mine flairy. Um. But the original cover,
the one that I think Guy Gas would have seen
just kind of looks like a silhouette of dark tentacles
rising out of a hill. But still I take the
man in his word, um lumly of course was Lovecraft influenced,
and there's definitely a lot of Lovecraft I and weirdness

(09:44):
to the mind flare. So just just as the fictional
race has crossed over from another realm in Dungeons and Dragons,
the very inception is sort of a cross pollination from
a different dimension of literary fannas. Yeah, I think you
could probably trace their origins all the way back to
of Craft's intense fear of sea life. So and just

(10:04):
to get this out of the way too, because again
I know a number of you maybe primarily familiar with
these critters from Final Fantasy. Are their properties e lit.
It is definitely a D n D property, right, They've
got the t M on that. Yeah, so you can't
just throw a lithids around another games or video games
or novels without you know, big Dungeon getting a cut,

(10:27):
but mind flavors you'll see elsewhere. Yeah, thats right. In fact,
we saw there was a paper that you found that's
stunning all about like the various types of sort of
cephalopod monster mollusks that show up in video games. Oh yeah, yeah,
it's an article um that was published in Geek Studies,

(10:48):
and I'll try to include a link to that on
the landing page for this episode. But yeah, just all
about weird squid and octopus monsters from sixteen videos. And
there was this amazing chart of all of the various ones,
uh down to their little like eight bit renderings, and
there's the mind Flare very recognizable in there. So yeah, again,
these are basically purple people with octopus heads. Their mouths

(11:11):
are like Lamprey's. We're gonna go through the anatomy pretty
carefully because that's how we're going to tie it into
real world science. That's right, all right, So let's dive in.
Let's talk about their origins real quick, which are of
course shrouded in mystery. So they're basically two origin stories
in play here. Most likely the mind Flares hail from
the far Realm, which is an alien dimension of cosmic

(11:32):
horror and the dn D universe, but there's also this
whispered rumor that from the future and perhaps even the
distant highly evolved state of humanoid life in the multiverse,
though I'm I'm not sure much doc is actually put
in that interpretation. I want to say that that is
that's the one that's heavily Lovecraft influence, because there's and
I can't believe I can't remember the name of the

(11:52):
monster from one of the Lovecraft short stories, but that's
one of the things from his This monster is from
the future and it's come back in time to sort
of right some wrong or something like that. And I
think this is again not there's no sources behind this,
but but if my memory is correct from playing D
and D for twenty some odd years, uh, their origin

(12:14):
story differs depending on which setting you're playing D and DAN. Well,
that's right, it's a it's a multiverse, and and of
course they also instill this in you. Your game is
not necessarily taking place in the same corner of the
multiverse as the campaign across across the Road. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So.
One of the really important plot points with the Lithids

(12:35):
is that in ages past they carved out an enormous
empire for themselves. What the cells, one that spanned whole
worlds and the material plane as well as other various planes.
They they had Slash have spaceships called no Alloyd's then
enable travel across the plains. But they've lost the technology
of their manufacture like any you know, decent elder race.

(12:56):
They've they've forgotten how to read kind of like relative
now out. But they built their empire mostly on the
back of psionically dominated slave labor. But after time, as
you know happens when you build your empire on slave labor,
the slaves rose up, they rebelled, and their their empire
felt to pieces, and so they had to go out

(13:17):
and just sort of find little corners to survive. And
and in particular they end up taking up in the
under dark. Uh and and here they end up, you know,
having more slave races, and each one they mess up
by just psionically dominating them, altering them, changing them into
whatever form suits the mind flares, and just just causing
lots of trauma and mischief, um, just across the world.

(13:40):
They remind me kind of of this ant that we've
covered on the show before. I'm gonna have trouble remembering
its Latin name off the top of my head, but
you might know it Court Accepts. Oh, yes, the Court
aceps U. Fun guy that end up growing in the
ants exactly. Um, so this this fun guy gets inside
these aunt brains and it's it sort of controls them

(14:03):
to take care of its fungal colony and allow it
to take the aunt resources and mind flair. I guess
sociology is somewhat similar. And that they they dominate these
you know, people of various D and D species, dwarves, elves,

(14:23):
human beings, whatever. Gift Oh yeah, the gift off touching
the gift here, and that they're the slaves that sort
of like work and do all the labor for the
mind flares. They even one of the things that the
slaves are known to do is they have to scrub
down the elder brain and get in massagy. Oh yeah,
and they all their brains important to that. That's the thing.

(14:45):
All the all these different elements that we're touching on here,
they might sound a bit like fluff that we're gonna
come back to them and discuss some science around them.
But real quick about the gift. The gift were the
the biggest mistake that they made. These were the thralls
that really os up and not only helped bring about
the follow their empire, but regularly now the Gift regularly

(15:05):
venture out from their astral plane headquarters to hunt down
and eradicate Elithid colonies wherever they can find them. And
that's one of the key reasons that elipids live and
you know, the safety and secret of the under dark
or other secluded places and in each separate colonies cut
off from all the others while while they calculate in
scheme and forgot how they're going to restore their empire. Right, Yeah,

(15:27):
So they basically like live in these like deep caves there.
It's like a it's almost like an ant colony, it is, yeah, yeah,
and it's all based around the center of this elder
brand I mentioned earlier, which we're gonna get into. Uh.
They but they yeah, they kind of like occasionally just
go out grab some slaves, pull them back in, and

(15:48):
like that's how their society runs. Yeah, it's gonna be
very helpful as we go far just to think of
them as youth social parasites. Yes, they write really like
they have two options. They either capture somebody and eat
their brain, or capture them and dominate their mind and
make them into a slave. Right, So either way, an
encounter with the mind flare is going to end up bad,

(16:10):
all right, So let's launch into their biology again. Bipedal
humanoid bodies, four tentacles, four claude digits per hand. Diet
consists mostly of psionic energy, with some additional sustenance stuff
from the gobble brains themselves. Uh. Now, technically speaking, their
troglophiles their cave dwelling creatures that complete their life cycles

(16:31):
in a cave, but they can also survive above ground.
Help me out with this. Troglo files is a real term. Yeah, yeah,
this is this is a real term. There's not a
dungeon dragon's term. This would be the the the natural
world classification for a creature like this, though, of course,
classifications are difficult when you're considering even fictional intelligent creatures.
You know, one that is choosing to live underground in

(16:52):
a subterranean environment for their own purposes, and now their
reproductive system is utterly bizarre. And yet uh, there are
real world examples that are almost as bizarre. Oh yeah,
I mean they're a real world example. When you start
looking at complex life cycles, you look at some of
the the parasite life cycles out there, and various insect

(17:13):
life cycles. They are not only just like a bizarre
circle of parasitic behavior, but also when you see branches
in the tree. And this is key to understanding the
mind flares, when you see various morphs that can emerge. Yeah,
so all right, walk us through this. All right, So
you have an egg. That's where it starts, an a
lipid egg, a mind for an adult mind flare. What

(17:37):
came first, the mind flare the egg. Now an adult
mind flare lays an egg. Yes, okay, so they lay
an egg. That egg hatches into an a lipid tadpole,
so little squirming us a tadpole, a little larval elithid.
Now from that point there are a few different things
that can happen. Ideally there there's a process called sea

(17:59):
morphous us and this is where adult mind flares would
come and pick up the little tadpole and implant in
the cranium of a captive humanoid, like a captive kind
of like psychically washed humanoid. And they usually you put
it through the ear. But there's a drawing in volos
guide of monsters of like it's very based on wrath
of calm of like the tadpole like crawling its way

(18:22):
up the face towards the eye socket of a victim. Yeah.
So yeah, that exact scenario. So one way or another,
they get that dust that puppy into the brain and
then it eats the brain, replaces the brain, and then
that host body becomes the new mind flare body. Go.
You know, I guess it turns purple, slimy, loses a
digit on each hand, gets pretty skinny. Yeah, and then

(18:42):
you've got You've got yourself an adult elithid that carries
on adult elipid business and eventually can go onto legs
of its own. Right now, there are two other possible
ways that this can go with the elithid tadpole. So
sometimes the elithid becomes a you lethar it. And this
is uh, this is essentially a super mind flare that

(19:04):
is going to eventually leave the colony with some other
mind flares, found a new colony and become its elder brain. Okay,
so it doesn't have human humanoid form. It's just like
the superpowered tadpole. It's a super powered tadpole still have
to be implanted into a humanoid, but it's destined to

(19:25):
be this uh, this this cedar of a new colon
and it will eventually grow into a giant brain right
once it establishes itself. Else and then the other way
that things can go is the elithid tadpole can become
a neolithid. And this is when they're nobody's taking care
of the tadpoles. Nobody, no mind flares are coming around
to look after them and make sure they're stuffed into

(19:47):
the right skull. In this case, they all freak out
and start eating each other, and whichever one is left
grows into a giant, powerful beast intelligence monster. Huh. Okay,
I have never encountered one of these before. It's is good,
it's like a level wow. Okay. But but what's going
on with both of these cases, and this is where
there's a there's a real world parallel that will will

(20:09):
break down a little a little more in a bit,
is that you essentially have two morphs springing off from
the tadpole. One is caused by negative environmental constraints and
that leads to the neolithid, and the other is positive
environmental constraints, which leads to the leth All right, so
I'm assuming this is dependent on like how many humanoids
are available for them to eat. Brains of or make

(20:31):
slaves into or or or whatnot. How big the cave
system is that they're living within. Yeah, it's it has
to do with population density in our real world examples
that will get to so you can think of it
in those terms like is the is the colony successful
enough to send off anything to found a new colony,
or is it even successful enough for the tadpoles to

(20:53):
continue to thrive or should they just all eat each
other out of you know, purely economic cannibalism, which is
the thing that happened in multiple species. Yeah, well right, right,
in real species, but also in this fictional when we're
talking about right, just in our real world, cannibalism is
always the most economic path to avoid wasting the energy

(21:15):
that goes into flesh. So we've mentioned this elder brain
multiple times, and basically I just said it's a giant brain.
But let's let's get a little bit more defined here
on this. Yeah, I mean, essentially, it's just a giant
brain in a Brian pool that is in charge of
the mind flare colonies see in the in the Drifts books,
it's in cerebral fluid. And I always wondered where did

(21:38):
they get all that cerebral fluid from like maybe they
eat the brains and then they like keep they drain
the cerebral fluid out to put in their little elder
brain pool that they've got. Now, they just had Amazon
weekly deliveries on sailing, Okay, yeah, well the two day
shipping on projects. Yeah, we gotta do it, even to
the under dark exactly. Yeah. So according to vote is

(22:00):
what's going on here with the elder brain is? So
is this to survive and to make the necessary meta
calculations in order, you know, to to to actually survive
and to eventually reclaim their empire. Uh, they've either evolved
or developed the elder brains and these are giant immobile
thought thought organs that flowed in tanks of Brian serving
as the mind Flares colonies, library of knowledge, a history

(22:23):
of past lives and a nexus of metacognition for the
individuals in the colony and each individual that is going
to employ non aliftid thralls as well. This reminds me
of in the Marvel universe, they have a similar thing
the Cree alien species, which I haven't seen a lot
of the TV show Agents of Shield, but I think
they show up in there, they're ruled by a thing

(22:45):
that's very similar to this, that's called the Supreme Intelligence.
It's kind of the same thing. It's just like a
big blob and like a giant canister of cerebral fluid,
and it's got some brain tentacles and the eyes in
the mouth. These don't have eyes in the mouth of
just brains, just big brains, and they do all sorts
of of you know, psionically powerful tactics against anybody that

(23:07):
threatens them. But we'll come back to the elder brains
in a bit, because there are actual parallels to discuss
with humans. All right, So that is the crash course
in the fictional elithics, and now from here on in
the episode, we're going to largely focus on what the
natural world, what real life biology can tell us about

(23:28):
what's going on with the elithids, and how we can
use the elithic examples the way to explore these examples. Yes,
so the way that I approached this was sort of like,
let's Frankenstein from the real world, a mind flare out
of what we know of how they're described, right, So
their biology, anatomy, all that stuff, like what's in the

(23:48):
real world that we can bring to our understanding of this.
And the first place that I went to was their
mouths because they are described as even though they've got
these tentacles, they're described as their specif cific mouths as
being like lamprey mouths. Lampreys, if you're unfamiliar, are jawless fish. Uh.
They've got these thorny, suction cup like mouths and they

(24:09):
are parasites much like the mind flavors and a lot
of the creatures we're gonna talk about today. They use
their mouths to attach to an animal's body and then
they cut with these teeth through surface tissue until they
reach the blood and bodily fluids of it um. They've
they're known to live in both coastal and fresh water.
They're kind of they look like eels kind of, but

(24:29):
they're not. They're fish. Uh. There's three types of them.
There's flesh eaters, blood drinkers, and just a type that
lives for three to seven years in a larval stage
and then they only live for six months as adults,
but they don't really feed. They just reproduce with other
lamp reas and then they die. So an equally weird
example from the real world. Now, there is an excellent

(24:50):
article on Wired fromen called Absurd Creature of the Week
the lamprey that just really dove deep into the lamprey's biology.
So I turned to that for a real deep description
of this mouth. What's going on with this mouth? Now,
flesh eater lampreys and blood drinker lampreys have different types

(25:11):
of mouth, So let's go with the flesh eater for today,
since we know that the mind flare is definitely using
it to eat brains. So they have a structure that's
like a tongue. These are lampreys, and it's called a piston.
It has this convex structure to it that moves both
side to side and up and down, basically gouging flesh

(25:32):
out of its victim, with a strong middle tooth attached
to it. And this middle tooth is shaped like a
U in the flesh eater lampreys and like a W
and the blood drinker lampreys. And for different reasons, when
one's better at like pulling flesh into the mouth, the
other is better getting blood flowing um. And there are

(25:53):
very much like other animals that we've talked about. When
we've covered vampires on the show before. They have glands
in their throat that secrete an anticoagulant and that helps
keep the blood flowing, help get stuffed down their throat. Uh.
In the flesh eaters, the anti coagulant glands are much smaller,
but they still exist. So presumably a mind flare would
have some kind of anticoagulant gland as well. Now, lampreys

(26:18):
have two rings of structures inside the mouth that helps
them adhere to their victims through suction. One ring is
the oral fimbria, and it basically looks like little leaves
that are made of flaps of tissue, and these adhere
closely to the skin of the victim and they form
this tight seal. Like I mean, I've never been bitten

(26:41):
by lamprey, but I imagine, like from what I've heard,
there next to impossible to get off of. You. Like,
part of the country that I lived in for a
while in New Hampshire was right next to what was
called the Lamprey River, and so obviously there are a
lot of fresh water lamp freas in there. I never
encountered them, but you know, my understanding is, like you know,
you have to basically kill it to get it off
and then have it I think surgically removed. Um, so

(27:04):
it's it's clamped on their tight There's a second ring
in the mouth that is made of conical structures known
as papal a, and these help the lamprey actually sense
where best to attach themselves. So the blood drinking lampreys,
they're so sensitive with this region of their mouth that
they can actually use it to find underlying blood vessels

(27:27):
around victims. So this is like think of it as
like uh like radar almost right, Like it's a super
sensitive organ built into their mouth so they can find
the best possible place to clamp down and start chewing
and sucking blood or and or flesh out of you. Now,
they don't often go after humans. Don't be listening to
this and like free times. Oh boy, like that. You know,

(27:50):
that's pretty rare. I think it. It has happened obviously.
But fun fact that Joe actually told me about. I
was talking to him about this episode before we came
to the studio and he said, well, did you know
the his classic Joe He's got just like this ample
amount of weird knowledge. He goes, did you know Henry
the First died from eating a pie fell lampreys. And
I was like, what what are you talking about? Like
a lamprey pie? Yeah, And he was right. Apparently, King

(28:13):
Henry the First died from food poisoning when he ate
what was referred to as a surfeit of lamprey's in
a pie. His physician specifically told him not to because
like this is this is a bad idea, and he instead,
I think he was like sixty eight sixty nine. He was,
you know, for the time, quite elderly, but he was like, Nope,

(28:33):
I'm eating this pie flo lampreys. I can't imagine what
that tastes like. It just made me immediately nauseous when
Joe told me about it. But by all accounts, there's
there's multiple pieces of evidence that this guy ate a
lamprey pie. We'll have to hear from people who have
a culinary experience with lampreys. Yeah, maybe they taste great.
I don't know. I can't imagine that a creature that

(28:55):
solely subsists on just like hanging onto the body of
its victim and draining it of blood has got like
a lot of like good fatty flesh on it. For eating,
but I'm also a vegetarian. Now for the mind flares part,
of course, it's it's not so much about blood or meat,
it's about getting that brain. So so I guess the
idea here would be if we look at the lamprey,

(29:16):
it would be to either use some sort of specialized
tongue after attachment to either like cut its way through
an eye socket or some other natural uh the fleshy
gateway to the brain, or just like straight through the skull. Yeah.
The way I've always seen it drawn is from behind,
like the of mind flare, tentacles wrap around your face

(29:39):
from behind, the mouth attaches to the back of your skull,
and then presumably this piston thing is in their mouth
and just bores through your skull, and subsequently they just
chunk your brain up and suck it up through their mouth. Yeah,
leaving you with the head without a brain. All right, Well,

(30:02):
on that note, uh, let's take a quick break, and
when we come back we will explore more horrifying wonders
related to the elithid body as well as natural world organisms. Okay,
so we're back, Robert. You had previously mentioned the possibilities

(30:24):
of tadpoles in real life and in mind flare life
being cannibals. So let's talk about this all right, So
once more again according to to Volo's guided monsters and
elithid las eggs and protected pools and larval tadpole hatcheries,
all right, the tadpoles hatch and then they get turned
into adult mind flares, now tadpoles and abandoned pools. These

(30:46):
are pools that, you know, the mind flares that looked
after we're all slain by high level adventures or or
or gift coming in from from the outside, so there's
nobody to take care of them, so that what they
do is they end up eating each other until all
you have left is just one mutated survivor known as
a neolithid, and this just grows into a monstrous psychic

(31:09):
worm that's a danger to elithids and non elithids alike,
large powerful animal, minded monster with us with some signic ability. Okay,
so there are some real world examples of this, right yeah, yeah,
For the real world world parallel here would be tiger
salamander cannibal Morse. So the life cycle of the tiger

(31:31):
salamander features an interesting developmental fork an egg can develop
into a normal larval tadpole or into this cannibal morph
see now, under normal circumstances, tiger salamat or eggs developed
into normal tadpoles and then into normal adult tiger salamanders.
But if the population is too large for the available environment,

(31:52):
so like they're in a small pool or something, uh,
then consistent tactile interactions with other tadpoles cause m with
the eggs to develop into tadpoles with larger heads, bigger mouths,
and more well developed teeth. And I'm definitely picturing like
a baby is you know more? Yeah? So yeah, it's
basically the scenario is not to personify uh that you know,

(32:17):
non human non intelligent um relationships here, but it's almost
like there's a there's somebody in charge of all, right,
we've got too many, we've got too many salamanders in
this pool. Let's just make one that's really good at
eating all the other all the other salamanders. Uh. And
so basically they have a built in population control system

(32:38):
larva on larva cannibalism. If the broodpools overcrowded and the
resources are too scarce, then some tadpoles physically transform in
order to better gobble up the others. That is absolutely terrifying.
Let's back up for a second here, let's imagine let's
apply this to human beings. Imagine there's a nursery and
it's you know, at the hospital, and it's got all
the babies in their little beds, and one baby grows

(33:03):
a little bit larger. Its head gets bigger, it gets
this huge mouth, and it grows well developed teeth, and
then it proceeds to crawl around the nursery and eat
some of the other babies. That's basically what we're talking
that's the basic scenario here. Yeah, now, and uh and
and after this calling is done, the the cannibal MorphOS salamander,

(33:24):
it keeps its large head and bigger mouth, but then
goes through its diet normalizes, and it goes to a
normal life cycle. I'm trying to imagine like the animal
documentary that's narrated by like Morgan Freeman or Sigourney Weaver
or something, and they're like, and here we have the
tiger salamander eating all of its fellow tadpole babies, and

(33:45):
it's just like, well that that's exactly the kind of
thing Attenboro would hit us with Attenborough would love it,
that's true, and I would have to I would have
to immediately skip the track for my son, as would
watch the nature shows. Um, now let's turn to the
neil with it. So, Yeah, the neil that you can
look at and say, this is essentially a cannibal morph.
This is one tadpole eating all the other tadpoles and

(34:06):
then growing into this giant thing. So if we're to
use nature as our guide here, we can only assume
that the neolithid morph once served in evolutionary purpose, allowing
a tadpole pool to survive in times of chaos or abandonment,
absorbing the nutrients of its fellow tadpoles with just pure
economic ruthlessness, just like the cannibal morphs of tiger salamanders. However,

(34:29):
with the mind flares, you can definitely say that the
neolithid is something of of this stigial thing, right, because
there's there's no information any of the books I looked
at that that let us know that. Then the neolithid
continues the alipid race in any way, shape or form um.
It's not going to develop into as far as I
can tell, it's not going to develop into an adult

(34:51):
mind flare. So this is perhaps in a you know,
a fitting accident for a species that has manipulated other
species and itself for so long. Under normal condition, larger
tadpoles would would be killed and they certainly would not
be permitted to mature into a kneel with it, right yeah.
I would imagine like in the mind flare society, this

(35:12):
isn't always a good thing, right yeah. It kind of
deviates from your normal routine. It would be like it
would be exactly like if humans could do this, you
would you would know, never, never, always space your babies out,
don't let don't put them too close, or you're gonna
end up with a cannibal morph baby. And then what
are we going to do about that? You know? Well, so,
I this isn't directly related to the cannibalism thing, but

(35:35):
I found an interesting article about tadpoles that I just
wanted to throw in here as well to try to
understand the neolithids. So, according to research that was published
in apparently tadpoles can see if you attach eyeballs to
their tails. What now, this is utterly bizarre? Why what

(35:56):
what I'm wondering, is like, you know what the working
conditions are like in this laboratory. But basically it was
compelling to scientists to study because they wanted to learn
how much a tadpole brain could interpret sensory data. So
they took the African claw frog Xenopus lavists I believe
that's the Latin pronunciation. They took their tadpoles and they

(36:19):
grafted eyeballs onto their torsos and tails, and then they
removed their original eyes. So that's the part to me,
I'm like, what mad science is this? That they're just
like plucking eyes out of these creatures and then pasting
eyes onto other parts of their body. Yeah, who's the
awful under dark monster here? Yeah, exactly, this is very
This is the kind of thing mind flares too. Yeah. Um.

(36:40):
Then they gave a tadpole vision test, and the way
that they did this was they illuminated half the area
that the tadpoles were in with red light and half
with blue light. And in the red light, the tadpoles
would get electrocuted, they'd get zapped with electricity. So again,
more torture, right, and we've already yanked your eyeballs out

(37:01):
pasted them onto your tail. Now we're gonna zap you.
But apparently some of these tadpoles would go over to
the blue light area because they knew that it was safe.
So the scientists determined some of them could actually see
with their eyeball tails because they stayed in these safe
blue areas. So the researchers basically argued, this is evidence

(37:24):
that the brain in general is remarkably plastic in its
configuration for different body arrangements, like especially at tadpole stage,
when it's so um, you know, you're at the beginning
of the life cycle, it can adapt quickly enough to
like somehow rewire, so it can attach to these eyeballs

(37:46):
that are just not supposed to be there um. And
this is what allows mutations in all kinds of body plans,
not just in frogs and tadpoles, to still work with
the existing anatomy. So the basic idea here is like,
if there's some kind of a mutation in a single organism,
it can adapt quickly, or its brain can adapt quickly

(38:08):
because like it's designed to be so I don't know, flexible. Literally, Well,
that's that's wonderful because this not only gives us a
little more information about tadpoles and how they work, but
again it shows it supports the theory that mind flayers
are essentially us. Yeah, very much so. And I think right, like,
can imagine there, here's your D and D campaign, right,

(38:30):
you have you have to hear some adventurers. You have
to sneak into a mind flare cave, take some of
their tadpoles, and then pull their eyes off and rejection
their tails and perform this experiment in uh in D
and D time. So we'll see what kind of odd
results that would have. Now we're talking about brain eating
monsters here, so so one of the most obvious areas

(38:52):
to to to explore here would be what animals eat brains?
And it's a trickier scenario than we often think because
they're playing almost eat brains, humans eat brains. Totally. Yeah,
I mean, this is gonna have forever scarred me. But
growing up Jeverisy Faces of Death No, I mean, I'm
very familiar with them by reputation they were You're lucky

(39:13):
they didn't. But there was one of the like bootlegged
VHS copies that I saw back when I was god
it must have been like fourteen or fifteen years old. Uh.
They they did the thing where they put the monkey
in the middle of the table. The table has like
the circular entry, and you hit the monkey on the head,
open up at skull, and people eat the brains. This

(39:33):
would be the very thing that was referenced in that
awful scene in the second Indiana Jones movie. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And if you wonder why I'm a vegetarian, that was
probably the beginnings of it right there. Yeah. God, what
what an odd I want to go back and watch
that movie sometimes, but don't. There's so much weird xenophobic material. Yeah, yeah,

(39:56):
it's Yeah. I feel sorry if our list wars are
out there and you know what I'm talking about. But yeah,
so there are a lot of examples, plenty of animals, birds,
humans that eat brains, right, But to understand the mind
flare affect on, uh, the humanoids that they're eating the

(40:18):
brains of, I turned to a couple of specific creatures
that I think will help us out here, because one
of the things about the mind flare is that you know,
in in a in a very fantasy way, it eats
psychic energy. And of course there's no real parallels to
that in the in the real world. Otherwise, they're definitely

(40:38):
eating the brain and nothing else. So the way to
describe this in biology would be to say that they're
I obligate, I guess neurovores, And it's difficult to find
anything like that in biology. But you have a couple
of pies, I do, yeah, all of them much smaller

(40:58):
than the mind flare. The first is and again help
me with my Latin here, I think it's neglia foul Larry.
This is referred to in English as the brain eating
amba uh and this amiba is the primary cause of
the infectious disease ambic men and joe encephalitis, which is

(41:19):
also referred to as just PAM P a M. The
amiba can exist in different kinds of environments, sometimes in soil,
sometimes in fresh water, and that's where it becomes trouble
for us as human beings. Or it can exist in
the human central nervous system. Now, these infections are really rare.
Well we're about to tell you, like, don't get super

(41:39):
freaked out. It's soup. It's incredibly rare. But when they
happen of the time, it's fatal, Like If you get
one of these amiba in you, you're pretty much done
for this is this is rolling a one on your Yeah.
The CDC actually estimates that there were a hundred and
thirty eight cases of pam AND reported in the United

(42:01):
States between nineteen sixty two and Okay, so that gives
you an idea of how rare it is. Of those,
only three of the patients survived. Uh so, how do
you get it? You're all probably immediately going, oh, well,
I don't want that. How How how do I stay
away from that? Well, usually it's from engaging in recreational
water activities like swimming or diving. So you know, you

(42:22):
basically have to stay away from water fun if you,
if you, if you want to totally avoid this thing.
The amiba enters the human body through your nose and
it attaches itself to the epithel cells that line the
inside of the nasal cavity. Then it migrates to the
nerves that are situated in the nasal area. Eventually this

(42:43):
reaches the central nervous system of your spinal cord and brain,
and it induces your body's immune system to activate macrophages
and neutrophils to combat infection doesn't feel good. And here's why.
The amiba itself, this is the airy mind flawery. It
has food cups on its surface that allow it to

(43:05):
capture its own food resources, and this is everything from
bacteria and fungi to human tissue if it's gotten up
your nose. In addition, it produces cell destructive molecules that
destroy the membrane structure of nerve cells. So the combination
of these two things make it really effective at inducing

(43:25):
severe nerve damage. It eventually will destroy your entire central
nervous system. This makes them a pretty serious public health
hazard um because they can be easily acquired. You know,
you just swimming along, you get one up your nose
and boom, and then they're associated with this really high
mortality rate. Now, the symptoms don't show up until about

(43:49):
two to eight days after infection, and they include the
following and this is I think we can use these
as probably an idea of what symptoms would be like
of uh be either being under the thrall of mind
flares or during the process of your brain being consumed. Okay,
so as they're sucking that brain, just beginning to suck

(44:09):
it out. I guess, so sudden headache, that's a that's
an obvious one, right, high fever, neck pain, nausea, vomiting, ryanitis,
light sensitivity, and eventually seizure, seizures in a coma. So alright,
mind flare is probably doing this much quicker than the
brain eating amiba is right, But that's a basic idea,

(44:31):
you know, unless they have different culinary styles. You know,
maybe there's some of them. Maybe they like to eat slow. Yeah,
I mean I was reading the geek Out a little bit.
I was reading that supposedly some mind flares experiment by
say subjecting their they're they're victims to musical thoughts or whatever.
Like they'll they'll they'll want a certain mind state before
they eat it because it had just take later. Interesting, Okay,

(44:55):
so they go to like they go to like a
special school, like learn what specific thoughts to beam into
the brain before they eat it. Yeah, if you want
your your brain meal to be more a little like
a veal and wanted to be a sushi, you know
that depends. Huh. Well again, I want to remind everybody
the brain eating amba is pretty rare. It's so rare

(45:17):
that no clinical trials for developing treatments even exist as
often Usually if it's found, it's treated with something called
Ampho terrison B, which is an anti fungal drug, as
well as a variety of other antifungal drugs. And I've
got some examples for you. In fact, these are the
three survivors in the US, um one of the Now,

(45:39):
there's been seven survivors in the whole world. Three in
the US. One of them was a nine year old
girl in California who was infected in nineteen seventy eight,
and she caught it by swimming in Deep Creek Hot
Springs in San Bernardino National Forest. She was treated with
exactly what I just described. They gave her Ampho terrison
B some their antifungal drugs intravenously, and she beat it

(46:03):
and lived through the experience. Now, two other children were
reported survivors of this just in two thousand thirteen, so
just three years ago, and they were twelve and eight
years old. And a twelve year old first contracted it
at a water park that was near Little Rock, Arkansas.
So don't think to yourself like, oh, this is only
if I swim in like natural water, because apparently they

(46:25):
got it at this water park as well. Uh. In
addition to the anti fungal treatments that they usually give,
this girl was so bad off that they had to
subject her to induced hypothermia to reduce her brain swelling.
So this is pretty nasty disease. Um. But also, you know,
let's keep it in mind when we're thinking about boy,

(46:46):
this mind flare. It's got its lamprey mouth attached and
it's piston drilling through my head. What's that going to
feel like? So this would be an example of a
creature that certainly doesn't depend on human brains at all
exact but this is it. But it also gives us
an example of what brain eating in the real world

(47:06):
consists off. Yep, we have a couple other examples here too.
The next one is neurosist curosis, which is a type
of tape worm that usually lives in pigs. This is
very stuff to blow your mind. You must have covered
the pork tapeworm. Uh. Pork tape worm produced larva that
can latch onto cranium, whether it's a pigs cranium or

(47:27):
human cranium, and they show up as large white cysts.
They usually disperse through a pig's blood stream. So when
you're eating undercooked pork, you could be eating their larva.
Uh So when they enter a human, usually from eating
undercooked pork, they still flow through our blood stream and
they get stuck inside the fluid filled cavities in our brains.

(47:50):
These can lead to a coma loss of motor functions,
violent seizures, or blindness. And the reason why they're eating
holes in your brain. Now, my understanding of this scenario
is that essentially you have a parasite that is lost
in an unfamiliar host exactly, Yeah, and it's just doing
what it thinks it's supposed to do and it results

(48:11):
in this. Yeah. Now, it's unlike the amiba. This is
more common than you might think. It's estimated that two
thousand people have them in the US, in twenty nine
million in Latin America. Now, these are just pork tape
worms going about the regular business, not not necessarily getting
lost to winding up of the brain though, Yeah, I

(48:32):
believe that's true. Yeah, which can be right, It can
subsequently lead to that. The other one that's related to
this similar effect, very different being is prion disease. And
we've we've talked about this occasionally on the show um Prions.
There are a variety of fatal neurological illnesses that are
associated with them. They are abnormal proteins and you can

(48:56):
both inherit them or have them transmitted into your through
infected animal tissue. They result in symptoms of dementia or
a taxio, which is impaired motor control, and they eventually
lead to death, and it can take anywhere from weeks
two months. UM. You might have heard of this as
Kreuzfeld Jakob disease. Uh, there's also new variant Kreutzfeld disease,

(49:20):
crew Gerstmann Stralser, Shinker syndrome, and fatal familial insomnia. So
all of these are caused by prion proteins in the brain. Yeah,
Kuru in particular is the one that is associated with
traditional acts of funeral cannibalism um in in certain parts

(49:42):
of the world. And yeah, exactly what Papa New Guinea.
It leads to disease. Yeah, so all of us are
probably most familiar with these from the animal form that
we referred to as mad cow disease. It's caused by
a similar thing with prions. Now we've known about this
in sheep and goats. For hundreds of years it referred

(50:04):
to as scrappy in sheeps and goats, but we didn't
know that it was actually transmittable until the nineteen thirties.
So basically what happens here is these diseases are caused
by proteins that are misshapen um and that's why we
refer to them as prions. They clump together and proliferate
by inducing shape changes in our normal proteins, and this

(50:28):
causes sponge like lesions in the brain that disrupt brain function.
So there's your three examples. You get the prions, the
pork tape worm, and the brain eating amiba. Basically, you know,
very different kinds of creatures that can get into your
nervous system and wreck havoc, but good examples of probably

(50:49):
what's going on with mind flare consumption. Alright, we're gonna
take a quick break and we come back. We're going
to compare the elpids to a certain tongue eating pair
of site. So we talked about this earlier, but the
creation of the mind flare, and it's I guess lore

(51:14):
throughout the last forty odd years is so amazing that
they've actually come up with a detailed process with its
own title called ceremorphosis, which is basically the the idea
of how it reproduces parasitically, right right, Yeah, it's that
example we talked about earlier. The the little tadpole is

(51:36):
shoved up into the cranium and then it eats the
host brain and it attaches there to the brain, storm
swells up, grows into the new brain for this body,
and then transforms the body. Now here's a here's a
nerdy little bit that I remember about illids. Sometimes when
they do this, they take on like mental ticks from

(51:59):
the host the they grow within. Uh. And this is
considered like social flaw. It's like a it's a real
like bad sign of manners in mind player society, so
they try to hide it from the rest of their speechies.
So like let's say, like, um, all right, We'll use
Joe as an example. Let's say Joe has like a
tick where he picks at his fingernails, and then they

(52:20):
insert a mind flare tadpole into Joe. It eats his brain,
it turns Joe into a mind flare, regrows as his brain,
but it may still have that tick. Where it picks
at its fingernails, but it has to hide it constantly
from other mind flas or else they'll they'll be like, oh,
there's something off with you. You're not mind flairery enough.
You didn't discard uh, the human shell that you're so

(52:44):
it's so you're weak because you're in a since you're
letting your your clothing control you. Yeah, yeah, exactly, Alright,
So you're probably wondering, well, this sounds just monstrous and
off one of the worldly. What's what possible parallel was there? Well,
there's a wonderful one and in the form of Simothia Exigua.
Oh yeah, this is a Stufftabiliary Man classic. We talked

(53:05):
about this one on the Strain episode. Yeah, this is
the tongue eating ice a pod. You might be familiar
with these from a movie that came out a couple
of years ago. It's a found footage horror movie called
The Bay, and I think the premise I watched it
a while ago, but the premise was something like, there
was some kind of pollutant in the waters around this

(53:26):
coastal town. It caused the the isopods to mutate, uh,
and so they started infecting human beings instead of fish. Yeah. Now, luckily,
luckily they don't actually affect humans. But there hasn't been
a lot of new research published on these creatures. It's
it's they're they're quite rare. They're possibly popping up more
these days due to over fishing. But essentially what you

(53:49):
have here, this is the scenario. Is we understanding, This
little crustacean sneaks in through the gills of a fish,
It sets up shop on the host taste buds, and
then there's there's only so much room and a fish
is on a fish mouth, so you can imagine what
the the louse's first meal is. It has a tasty
helping of tongue juice, starts sucking on that tongue juice,
and once the loose drains the tongue of enough blood, uh,

(54:12):
it attaches itself to the atrophied stump of the tongue
and essentially becomes the new tongue for the fish. And
every time the host opens his mouth for a meal,
the loos, you know, helps itself to a little food
on the way down. Yeah, you can easily u find
a Google image search of what these things look like.
There's plenty of pictures of people prying fish mouths opening

(54:34):
you can see the little isopod inside. Yeah, every time
I show my wife it, she just goes like she
does the voice of the isopod saying like hello, like
this is peaking out from inside this fish mouth. Fun fact,
not these specific is A pods that that it regrow
as tongues, but other is A pods can grow to
be over two point five feet long. And uh, these

(54:56):
aren't the tongue replacements. This that these are the kind
that scavenge the carcass is of whales, which we've talked
about before the show as well. Yeah, so these are
really I mean, I don't I don't know how to
describe isopods verbally on the show, but they're real creepy
looking critters. And just imagine them crawling along the corpse
of whale, just slowly chewing their way through it. Yeah,

(55:16):
to drag in another fictional comparison, they remind me a
lot of the Gartham from the Dark Crystal, the big
beetle creatures. Yeah, yeah, that's a good Yeah, that's a
good example. So with Samothia exegua, you have a creature
here that that mainly you know sucks on tongue juice
attaches itself to the stump, while the elithid tadpole goes
far beyond that. The the elithid tadpole is replacing the

(55:39):
central organ of the nervous system. Uh. And it's it's
quite appropriate to think of this as an act that
just kills the host, but it really serves as a
sort of of of parasitism. The body continues to live,
albeit in a different form, and many natural world parasites
inflict behavioral and physical changes on their hosts. It also

(56:00):
gives us a rough evolutionary idea of where the elithids
came from, or would have come from in a natural system,
right brain replacing parasites that eventually transcend into something greater. Yeah,
So I mean, if you really think about it, like
they have to even though like mind flare is best
operate on the dark and hide an attack, they have

(56:21):
to come into contact with other humanoid species because otherwise
they're just going to only exist as tadpole form, right,
they have to. They have to use humans for bodies,
they have to use humans for food. It's yeah, because also, yeah,
you can think of it this way. So the parasitic
form that goes inside the host is physically eating the

(56:41):
brain from the out, from the inside out. But then
as adults they have to crack open skulls and get
brains um, you know, in a different way. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
I wonder what happens if a mind flare eats a
prion infected brain. That would be that would be an
interesting plot point. Infected brains and how maybe they can

(57:02):
detect them and know not to them. Maybe that's it.
That's like the oh, it's like it's like an alien
three when they the aliens don't attack Sigourney Weaver because spoilers,
she's got one of them in her. But like the
mind flares will like kill everybody except for one person,
and it's because they can sense that they've got, you know,
either pryon related disease or like a pork tape worm

(57:24):
or something. But this would be a wonderful plot for
anybody out there who's putting together a campaign. Imagine a
scenario in which the big breath that the mind flares
are facing, or perhaps the the methodology that's being employed
by their enemies is a pry on. It's being induced
to the populations that the mind flavors depend on for
food mad mind flare disease. Alright, but we've got some

(57:47):
more biological parallels specifically with locusts. Right, Yes, so remember
the oleithard that we have mentioned earlier. Yeah, this is
the super mind flare. So again, the scenario here is
you have tadpoles growing into adult mind flare if everything
is going like normal, but then there's an exceptional mind
flare adult who starts rivaling the elder brain. You know,

(58:12):
they they're they're disagreeing on everything. And finally the elder
brain says, all right, go do your own thing, take
your followers, get out of here, start your own colony.
And that's what happens, seeds a new colony. And again
you can think of this as a morph a version
of the species that's going to go out and uh
and and found a new colony. Okay. And the best

(58:34):
example that that I came across to to discuss this
is that of the desert locust. So desert locust feature
both a gregarious and a solitary morph. A gregarious morph
arises as a response to population density. It's more adapted flying,
so it can it can get the heck out of
that immediate area, go off and help found a new

(58:55):
population of desert locusts. So I think that's what we
have we have here with the olythics. You have a
model that closely resembles morse that developed due to population
density in order to spread out and establish new community.
So in this case, it's it's the idea there's there's
enough of them around that it means that the population
is healthy, the resources are abundant enough, and the colony

(59:17):
can actually uh you know, depart, splinter and form new
populations of the species. Now, what's inherent about that, especially
for these mind flares, is that they're hermaphrodites, so they
don't need mates in order to create more mind flares.
So I was thinking about this, I was like, all right,
her map preditic reproduction is is definitely a real thing.

(59:39):
But let's look to another example to try to figure
out how that would work with mind flares. And the
one I turned to was C. Elegants, which is a
type of nematode of roundworm or thread worm uh and
it lives in the soil, usually sometimes rotting vegetation, and
it basically feeds on bacteria and they're they're very primitive,

(01:00:00):
but we human beings study them a lot, and why
because they share essential characteristics with human biology, So you know,
they're great for studying the effects of certain things on
without doing it to humans. Or I don't know, ferrets,
which are another sort of I guess if you're thinking
about it in terms of evolved life forms higher up

(01:00:21):
the chain that has human characteristics. Except some of c
elegants are self fertilizing hermaphrodites, just like the mind flairs are. Uh,
And the way that they do this is they cleave embryonically,
So I would assume this is something that happens in
the mind flare. It proceeds through morpha genesis, and then

(01:00:43):
they grow into an adult. Now we've been told by
Volo's Guide of Monsters that mind flavors lay an egg.
But this is all right, not trying to be grossier,
but I'm trying to figure this out. Right, you go
through ceremorphosis, changes your body, turns your head into an octopus.
Presumably it creates some kind of orifice that you can

(01:01:03):
lay an egg through. Yeah, I would guess so, or
it's utilizing an existing orifice in some way. Shape or form. Okay, Um,
but I'm wondering if maybe what's happening is it's because
it's creating its own eggs. It's it's cleaving embryonically inside
of itself, laying that as an egg, and then that

(01:01:25):
egg hatches, proceeds through morpha genesis, and then goes through
the ceremorphosis procedure that we've already described right now. See,
elegants also has only male counterparts. So there's hermaphrodites and
there's males, but there aren't females. It's kind of fascinating.
Most of their volume when you look at their anatomy,

(01:01:48):
is taken up by their reproductive system. So you'd have
to imagine maybe mind flares would be the same way.
Like other than the big head, everything from the neck
down is reproductive system. Yeah. I mean, they probably don't
need much in the way of a traditional digestive system
because they're only getting a limited amount of sustenance out
of that brain. Yeah. Um. And then and then who
knows how they defecate. Maybe they just they're always coming

(01:02:11):
in slime, so maybe they just maybe they just secrete
it through their wars. Well. Um, the sea elegance of
their nine hundred and fifty nine cells, three hundred of
them are neurons. This sounds about right for a larval
mind flare, especially if it's you know, primarily using its thoughts,
its brain, it's thinking capacity. See, elegans also have neural structures.

(01:02:34):
These are just in nematodes, mind you that include sense
organs for taste, smell, temperature, and touch. They don't have eyes,
but they do respond to light. Hopefully nobody starts sewing
eyes onto these guys anytime soon. But they they're responsive
to light as well. Uh. And they move by flexing
and relaxing their dorsal ventral waves along their body to

(01:02:56):
propel themselves along. And this was how I was imagining
the mind flare. Larvae must have to have some kind
of locomotion, right, whether it's moving through cerebral fluid that
it's swimming around in, or it's crawling up into somebody's skull.
So it probably does a similar thing right by flexing
and relaxing until it burrows up in there and eats

(01:03:17):
the brain. So I think c elegants as a nematode
is a pretty good start. There's lots of hermaphroditic creatures
out there that we could look to. But this seems
plausible for how the mind flare I guess the reproductive
part inside the actual adult mind flare's bodies working. Yeah, yeah,
I think that's an interesting spin on it, and certainly

(01:03:38):
fleshes out something that at least in the guides I've
looked at, they don't really put a lot of detail into. Right, Yeah,
that's probably a little too much for your average A
D and D reader that's in volos Additional Guy, the
Midnight volos Erotic Guide the Monsters. Um, Okay, so we've

(01:03:58):
talked a lot about this on the side, but let's
really get into it. The elder brain. So can imagine
like if we just had rather rather than like, um,
a boss at work instead, where your boss's office is,
there's just a big baby pool that's filled with cerebral

(01:04:19):
fluid and a giant brain, and that's what tells you
what your duties are for the day. I'm picturing it
right now. I mean I could probably get behind it
after after a while. Yeah, yeah, you could trust an
elder brain. Yeah, I mean that's the older brain. Who's
who's gonna question the alder brain, but you, I certainly
wouldn't know, but Drid Stowarton did. That's a spoiler for

(01:04:41):
that book Exile. Uh. Speaking of which, Yeah, so this
is actually a quote from it, and I'm going to
give you a little bit of an idea of from
the pros what they're like. The inside of the giant
stone structure was ringed by balconies and spiraling stairways, each
level housing several of the mind flares, But it was

(01:05:01):
the bottom chamber, unadorned and circular, that held the most
important being of all, the central brain. Fully twenty feet
in diameter, This boneless lump of pulsating flesh tied the
mind Flare community together in telepathic symbiosis. The central brain
was the composite of their knowledge, the mental eye that

(01:05:22):
guarded their outside chambers, in which had heard the warning
cries of the illaphid from the drows city many miles
to the east. To the Illatids of the community. The
central brain was the coordinator of their entire existence and
nothing short of their god. Thus, only a very few
slaves were allowed with this special tower, captives with sensitive

(01:05:46):
and delicate fingers that could massage the illiphant god thing
and soothe it with tender brushes and warm fluids. So
it's a little insight into what goes on with the
older brains with gotta keep the elder brain well scrubbed.
It's like constantly, like at a day spa. Yeah. So again,

(01:06:08):
you get back into this idea that either they developed
this over time or they evolved to have the elder
brain as part of their their biology essentially um but
part of their They're just there their life cycle. I
tend to like the idea that they they developed it
or they turned to it after the fall, because the

(01:06:29):
mind flares endlessly plot the restoration of their empire, and
to do so, they have to maintain a perfect balance
of secrecy and exploration, ever clawing out the shortest, safest path,
much like the Spacing Guild and the dude yeah yeah,
can't make big risks because because if they don't pay off,
they could lose everything. So to survive and to make

(01:06:50):
the necessary meta calculations here, the elethids have this elder
brain uh again, giant immobile thought organ in a tank
of brine. It's the in these library of knowledge, a
history of all their past lives. When they die, their
their their own brains are returned to the elder brain.
It's a nexus of metacognition for the individuals in the colony,

(01:07:11):
and likewise kind of serves the thralls as well. You
know what that sounds like to me? What cyborgi ism? Yeah,
except for it's using organic material It sounds very much
like what we talked about in our episode on cyborganism. Yeah,
I mean, I couldn't help but think about human computing.
The entire system resembles in many ways human information networking

(01:07:32):
systems and the ever evolving supercomputers that manage it. But
the externalization and interconnectivity of thought, and as we drift
ever closer to the technological singularity, when computer super intelligence
truly eclipses that humanity, it seems like we could be
approaching our own age of the elder brain, right, Yeah,

(01:07:53):
I mean, well, think about it the cloud, the way
everyone talks about the cloud, we're just like offloading and
nation to the cloud. And I don't know, I mean,
I guess we do have like people whose whole job
is to maintain the cloud. I don't know that they're
necessarily giving it a delicate finger massages, but you know,
they work inside these data centers that house all this information.

(01:08:16):
That's our version of the elder We put all of
our human knowledge into it. We put all these details
about our daily life. Even when we die, information about
us lives on. Yeah. Yeah, I mean what yea, what
is the internet? What is the cloud? But an elder brain?
And you know, the more I think about it, I
would I think I'd be okay with trusting. I'd be
I feel safer trusting the world. Do an elder brain

(01:08:38):
or or in the human variation here, a super advanced
artificial intelligence. Yeah, so you're ready to give up to
sky neet at this point, You're like, maybe it'll do
a better job than we have. It's kind of the
sky net situation, right because the mind flares are saying, look,
we screw this up. We're done, We're doomed, we're done.
So let's let's let's have this elder rain that's going

(01:09:00):
to take care of all those choices for us, and
this way we can survive and maybe even rise again. Yeah.
And so I'm trying to think to like parallels of this,
if you you know, like so in the stories of
mind flares, basically they'll protect the elder brain at all costs. Uh,
it's you know, as you mentioned earlier, I think it's

(01:09:21):
a pretty high level monster to fight an elder brain
or something, right, It's pretty like they'll just like psychically
wipe you out if you try to hurt them. But
but like, imagine if you just destroyed the Internet, you
just took out the cloud. Now, I know that's like,
you know, pretty much as much fantasy as mind flares
at this point, right, But like the world right now

(01:09:43):
without all of that data backed up that we've got
would be an utter chaos, And so what are we
gonna do for now? We're going to protect it at
all costs, right, That's like information is our primary resource
right now. Kind of crazy. Yeah, you sound like a
modern human, you also sound like a mind flare and

(01:10:04):
saying that, which brings us back again to this area,
this idea that the mind flares are essentially us. They
may have tentacles, they may eat more brains than we
do on a daily basis, but they're essentially humans with
a with a very similar reliance on information and informational systems. Um.
So think about that the next time you encounter one.

(01:10:25):
You know, no one of your adventures. Yeah, absolutely, be
a little bit more humane with the mind flares that
you may be attacking. Yes, in humans before before you
rule your initiative and I think twice all right, So
there you have it mind flares. So this was an
episode that was a little bit of an experiment for us,

(01:10:46):
and we had fun. But obviously we want to know
if you had fun too, if you liked this kind
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(01:11:08):
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related content, role playing related content, let us know. Uh.

(01:11:31):
And if there are any specific examples that we talked
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that you would like to see explored in greater depth.
That's the kind of thing we can do as well.
And as always, if you want to reach us in
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(01:11:53):
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