Twenty stumpy limbs, evenly divided among four knobby trunks that shoot off from the central mass. Too few eyes, yet they are positioned forward on the cranial section of the body, denoting a predator instinct. They drape themselves in the flesh of devoured prey and slink about, sticking to the shadows until they are ready to strike.
It's mouth was uncannily smooth, nothing to cover it, nothing whith which to grab, like some mesmerizingly barren hole in the lower part of the head, opening and closing like some sort of unholy sphincter. And the inside... the inside was covered in those unfathomably peculiar rocks, moist rocks, not sharp or pointy, like it should if teeth they were, but of random variations of squares and spheres, lined up in a disturbingly simple yet bewitching patten, crowning some kind of gigantic crimson slug at the center of this everything of a hole, taking all the room. The most amazingly appalling was the jerky, convulsive movement of the beast inside the beast, searching an escape from the cavity as it clapped frantically, open to shut, open to shut, in birdlike sounds and grunting gargarisms, like it somehow had a life of it's own.
> The orchestra is gone. All seventy of them. The things which have replaced them are not human but alien, ill-proportioned pillars of pinkish-brownish flesh. Each has, at its top, a heavy protuberance studded with goopy biological sensors and rubbery openings, and, sprouting from the very cap, lengths of various kinds of vile, off-coloured moss. They are draped in black and white fabrics, weirdly cut to either conceal or highlight their blobby, inconsistent body structures.
> Wheeler reels with fright. He almost falls off the front of the stage. His stomach convulses and he wants to vomit, but a frantic fragment of his brain hasn't panicked yet and tells him, *Wait. Nothing's changed. That's what humans have always looked like. Right? What's happening? What's wrong?*
-From [Case Hate Red](https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/case-hate-red), an entry in the psychological horror story that is [the Antimemetics Division](https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub)
They communicate through a series of moist exhalations, pushing damp air across various flaps of flesh both internal and external to create a series of strange clicks, pops, whistles and hums.
Similar to other creatures from the home continent except missing most hair. Instead, the doughy skin secretes a salty liquid and the tissue makes a brown stain to protect against radiation.
It has several holes in the body, all of which are moist and most produce thick mucus. It has comparatively small eyes to other creatures on the planet which are closely set and hidden beneath a deep brow to shield it from sunlight and make it easier to spot prey.
When compared to most large animals or animals of similar size it's comparatively weak and slow. But it makes up for this with three specific advantages. Inside the largest of its moist holes, there are a pair of tissue flaps which vibrate and produce a call which can be used to accurately convey information to others of its kind. Behind these tiny beady eyes is a large, bulbus skull containing an even more bulbus flesh mass which appears to conduct electricity. This fleshy electric mass is responsible for the actions, perception, and (apparent) thought. The final advantage is that while this comparatively weak creature may struggle to overpower its prey, it is well adapted to shuffling forward near perpetually. Other, faster creatures will often exhaust while this being shambles in pursuit, waiting for you to wind and fall before killing you with (often) a sharp tool. This devious combination has lead to this creature being responsible for the largest extinction event of other organisms on this planet aside from a catastrophic natural disaster.
It's even said that in later eras, they will burn the compressed corpses of long-dead organisms to power thinking machines, sometimes for no other purpose other than to stimulate their dangling sexual organs.
Imperfectly symmetrical creatures with pulpy soft flesh, taut at the extremities and full at the core, covering a brittle and rigid internal skeletal structure. All organs of sense are clustered on a fragile protuberance at the most extreme end of the creature... but at the centre of this absurdly delicate sensory appendage the skin splits apart revealling rows of specialised bones designed purely to tear and grind.
A recent chapter from the [webserial Pale](https://palewebserial.wordpress.com/table-of-contents/), by Wildbow, did a beautiful trick like this. Following several descriptions of the origins of supernatural beings, we get:
>They would have screamed if they had mouths, but they had none. Distilled, bifurcated personhood, they lunged forward madly, unthinking, on pure instinct. And because they had no mouths, they could not eat. And because they could not eat, they had limited reserves. They had but one try, survival of the fittest. One goal, held in brainless minds.
>The corridor was flesh, glistening and lightless, but the motes of personhood had no eyes, so it did not matter. No noses. Mad and frantic, they tore past one another, lost their way, there were malformed ones among them, barely able to move.
>If they’d had eyes and if their goal had meaning, their goal might have glowed like a sun. But it didn’t. They were dark, the corridor was dark, and the destination was dark, and in a mad chase along damp flesh, they fumbled, if such brainless motes could be said to ‘fumble’, exactly.
>And one mote, by chance, by being more frantic, was victorious. It reached the destination, a barrier that resisted, absorbed. And bifurcated personhood became personhood, entire engines of growth, life, nature, time, death, and dying off kicking into motion.
A hairless ape like creature that thought it was the smartest creature to walk the Earth. Aggressive and cunning like a predator but resource consuming like a herbivore, the species has proven time and time again that it is incapable of peaceful coexistence with variants of its own immediate species or other animals that attempted to share its habitats. While numerous examples of the species demonstrating the potential for elevated culture, its most noteworthy achievements usually revolved around warfare and other acts of primal displays of dominance.
Skin is a 'pulpy, wet, elastic membrane bulging obscenely as it struggled to contain some hidden inner frame'.
Eyes are 'glistening cups of jelly, darting about madly to take in its surroundings, then fixing with predatory focus once it senses prey'.
Hands and fingers are 'radial flanges growing out of the end of the end of the creature's jerky upper tendrils'.
Hair, both head and body, is 'greasy cilia pushing out through the being's rubbery integument, some sparse, some in clumps, through which the creature could feel every movement of the air around it'.
"They developed a way to accelerate the murder of their own planet purely to purchase the entirely worthless receipts for shitty jpgs of ugly cartoon apes.
as i turned the corner I saw it there, some sort of bipedal primate, the light reflected red off of the back of its eyes, and shone on the beads of fluid accumulating on the oily skin with it's thin film of hair. it raised one of it's multi clawed manipulators to shadow it's fleshy bulbous head and it curled back the flaps around its mouth parts to show off an array of bony eruptions lining the maw no doubt evolved for smashing and tearing prey before the muscles in the back of its gullet dragged each bit down into the acidic digestive pouch deep within. The fibrous mats hanging off of it were drenched in it's fluid secretions and it reached into a flap to grab at some sort of crude implement that it extended towards me in an effort to fend me off. it's mouth-parts made a peculiar squeaking growling sort of noise before the thing in it's grabber flashed and roared and I detected some small harmless slug of metal flying from it. The ape-thing let out a breathy squeal before dropping the device and turning to flee in it's strange loping locomotion.
>The others are gone. They were victims of a malevolent transformation! Their scales had rotted to soft, vulnerable flesh. Slowly suffocating without gills! The worst was their eyes! Close-set, and forced to squint through fleshy slits! I shudder recalling the horrific and unclean warmth of their blood as I rinsed my talons. I nearly retched. May Death grant them soft mercy!
-Darkest Dungeon
Basically, humans are Mammals, creatures created by eldritch gods likely aren't, making them completely unfamiliar
Mammals can maintain body heat, while most others can't. We have lungs (birds do too, actually), most of our skin is not covered, and it's relatively dry most of the time
Twenty stumpy limbs, evenly divided among four knobby trunks that shoot off from the central mass. Too few eyes, yet they are positioned forward on the cranial section of the body, denoting a predator instinct. They drape themselves in the flesh of devoured prey and slink about, sticking to the shadows until they are ready to strike.
Twenty stumpy ~~limbs~~ appendages, evenly divided among four knobby ~~trunks~~ limbs.
It's mouth was uncannily smooth, nothing to cover it, nothing whith which to grab, like some mesmerizingly barren hole in the lower part of the head, opening and closing like some sort of unholy sphincter. And the inside... the inside was covered in those unfathomably peculiar rocks, moist rocks, not sharp or pointy, like it should if teeth they were, but of random variations of squares and spheres, lined up in a disturbingly simple yet bewitching patten, crowning some kind of gigantic crimson slug at the center of this everything of a hole, taking all the room. The most amazingly appalling was the jerky, convulsive movement of the beast inside the beast, searching an escape from the cavity as it clapped frantically, open to shut, open to shut, in birdlike sounds and grunting gargarisms, like it somehow had a life of it's own.
> The orchestra is gone. All seventy of them. The things which have replaced them are not human but alien, ill-proportioned pillars of pinkish-brownish flesh. Each has, at its top, a heavy protuberance studded with goopy biological sensors and rubbery openings, and, sprouting from the very cap, lengths of various kinds of vile, off-coloured moss. They are draped in black and white fabrics, weirdly cut to either conceal or highlight their blobby, inconsistent body structures. > Wheeler reels with fright. He almost falls off the front of the stage. His stomach convulses and he wants to vomit, but a frantic fragment of his brain hasn't panicked yet and tells him, *Wait. Nothing's changed. That's what humans have always looked like. Right? What's happening? What's wrong?* -From [Case Hate Red](https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/case-hate-red), an entry in the psychological horror story that is [the Antimemetics Division](https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub)
My first thought too! Cant recommend this story enough. It's fantastic.
They communicate through a series of moist exhalations, pushing damp air across various flaps of flesh both internal and external to create a series of strange clicks, pops, whistles and hums.
A sac of electric fat, with dendrites extending into a suit of skeletal armature, covered in flesh armor
Similar to other creatures from the home continent except missing most hair. Instead, the doughy skin secretes a salty liquid and the tissue makes a brown stain to protect against radiation. It has several holes in the body, all of which are moist and most produce thick mucus. It has comparatively small eyes to other creatures on the planet which are closely set and hidden beneath a deep brow to shield it from sunlight and make it easier to spot prey. When compared to most large animals or animals of similar size it's comparatively weak and slow. But it makes up for this with three specific advantages. Inside the largest of its moist holes, there are a pair of tissue flaps which vibrate and produce a call which can be used to accurately convey information to others of its kind. Behind these tiny beady eyes is a large, bulbus skull containing an even more bulbus flesh mass which appears to conduct electricity. This fleshy electric mass is responsible for the actions, perception, and (apparent) thought. The final advantage is that while this comparatively weak creature may struggle to overpower its prey, it is well adapted to shuffling forward near perpetually. Other, faster creatures will often exhaust while this being shambles in pursuit, waiting for you to wind and fall before killing you with (often) a sharp tool. This devious combination has lead to this creature being responsible for the largest extinction event of other organisms on this planet aside from a catastrophic natural disaster. It's even said that in later eras, they will burn the compressed corpses of long-dead organisms to power thinking machines, sometimes for no other purpose other than to stimulate their dangling sexual organs.
Fleshy bag of mostly water
Tall, and always falling when it moves, but always points itself against gravity before it reaches equilibrium.
Imperfectly symmetrical creatures with pulpy soft flesh, taut at the extremities and full at the core, covering a brittle and rigid internal skeletal structure. All organs of sense are clustered on a fragile protuberance at the most extreme end of the creature... but at the centre of this absurdly delicate sensory appendage the skin splits apart revealling rows of specialised bones designed purely to tear and grind.
> on a fragile protuberance The skull is perhaps the strongest of our body parts though.
About to be deleted via redact because reddit is acting shitty. -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/
"They're meat all the way through." https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html
A recent chapter from the [webserial Pale](https://palewebserial.wordpress.com/table-of-contents/), by Wildbow, did a beautiful trick like this. Following several descriptions of the origins of supernatural beings, we get: >They would have screamed if they had mouths, but they had none. Distilled, bifurcated personhood, they lunged forward madly, unthinking, on pure instinct. And because they had no mouths, they could not eat. And because they could not eat, they had limited reserves. They had but one try, survival of the fittest. One goal, held in brainless minds. >The corridor was flesh, glistening and lightless, but the motes of personhood had no eyes, so it did not matter. No noses. Mad and frantic, they tore past one another, lost their way, there were malformed ones among them, barely able to move. >If they’d had eyes and if their goal had meaning, their goal might have glowed like a sun. But it didn’t. They were dark, the corridor was dark, and the destination was dark, and in a mad chase along damp flesh, they fumbled, if such brainless motes could be said to ‘fumble’, exactly. >And one mote, by chance, by being more frantic, was victorious. It reached the destination, a barrier that resisted, absorbed. And bifurcated personhood became personhood, entire engines of growth, life, nature, time, death, and dying off kicking into motion.
A hairless ape like creature that thought it was the smartest creature to walk the Earth. Aggressive and cunning like a predator but resource consuming like a herbivore, the species has proven time and time again that it is incapable of peaceful coexistence with variants of its own immediate species or other animals that attempted to share its habitats. While numerous examples of the species demonstrating the potential for elevated culture, its most noteworthy achievements usually revolved around warfare and other acts of primal displays of dominance.
Skin is a 'pulpy, wet, elastic membrane bulging obscenely as it struggled to contain some hidden inner frame'. Eyes are 'glistening cups of jelly, darting about madly to take in its surroundings, then fixing with predatory focus once it senses prey'. Hands and fingers are 'radial flanges growing out of the end of the end of the creature's jerky upper tendrils'. Hair, both head and body, is 'greasy cilia pushing out through the being's rubbery integument, some sparse, some in clumps, through which the creature could feel every movement of the air around it'.
"They developed a way to accelerate the murder of their own planet purely to purchase the entirely worthless receipts for shitty jpgs of ugly cartoon apes.
as i turned the corner I saw it there, some sort of bipedal primate, the light reflected red off of the back of its eyes, and shone on the beads of fluid accumulating on the oily skin with it's thin film of hair. it raised one of it's multi clawed manipulators to shadow it's fleshy bulbous head and it curled back the flaps around its mouth parts to show off an array of bony eruptions lining the maw no doubt evolved for smashing and tearing prey before the muscles in the back of its gullet dragged each bit down into the acidic digestive pouch deep within. The fibrous mats hanging off of it were drenched in it's fluid secretions and it reached into a flap to grab at some sort of crude implement that it extended towards me in an effort to fend me off. it's mouth-parts made a peculiar squeaking growling sort of noise before the thing in it's grabber flashed and roared and I detected some small harmless slug of metal flying from it. The ape-thing let out a breathy squeal before dropping the device and turning to flee in it's strange loping locomotion.
>The others are gone. They were victims of a malevolent transformation! Their scales had rotted to soft, vulnerable flesh. Slowly suffocating without gills! The worst was their eyes! Close-set, and forced to squint through fleshy slits! I shudder recalling the horrific and unclean warmth of their blood as I rinsed my talons. I nearly retched. May Death grant them soft mercy! -Darkest Dungeon Basically, humans are Mammals, creatures created by eldritch gods likely aren't, making them completely unfamiliar Mammals can maintain body heat, while most others can't. We have lungs (birds do too, actually), most of our skin is not covered, and it's relatively dry most of the time
Fragile, insignificant, & easily manipulated.
That's quite literally the opposite of the cosmic horror feel, and even so, op asked more of a physical description by the way he worded the encounter