Originally, I intended to call this post “Hydra Variations” or perhaps “Hydra ad Nauseam”, with the intent being that I would join SableGM in generating interesting and tactically unique variations on the false hydra.
But, given my predilections, it was perhaps inevitable that I would find myself more driven to dig into the mechanics and systemic details of how hydras work, than the more useful task of making something for direct use.
Still, I think hydras are something ripe for analysis, and like with antimemes in general, I find myself treading what feels like new ground in worldbuilding them. So I thought I’d share that.
In this essay, I will first I poke at the broad facts of the hydra and then dive into the details of its song. I will outline a life cycle for my own take on the false hydra before analyzing briefly the ways a culture might cope with having hydrae be a fact of life, then play with a few hydra variants and wrap up the post with a suspiciously short conclusion
Overview
What is a hydra? I’m going to assume some familiarity with prior literature here; the original post is rather dramatic, but if you’re already experienced that effect, we can summarize the false hydra as a monster that eats people and sings an antimemetically cloaking song that erases awareness of its existence and machinations. Oh, it also turns into a spooky mind-controlling god-beast later on, but I’d hazard that’s probably not what people find so captivating about a false hydra.
More than that, a false hydra is themed after a hydra; it has multiple heads. And it gets stronger as it eats people. Strong enough to soon threaten whole towns.
I’m fond of hard worldbuilding. Arnold’s post, and I don’t think this is insulting to admit, was probably more focused on being evocative in his description of the hydra than giving hard numbers and tables. Not to it’s detriment, but for my analysis, I’m going to dispense with the mystery. (Softness and mystique are properties of presentation, rather than worlds themselves; a concrete underlying reality known to the author doesn’t prevent them from limning it as maddeningly eldritch.)
There are a few questions we might pose after hearing about false hydras and wanting them in our settings.
Let me get my assumptions and prejudices out of the way first of all. I like reductionism. I like it when my fantastical elements are derived from fundamental laws, or the organic evolution of those laws. If I must say “a god did it”, there’s a reason the god did this rather than that, and I ask what else that implies.
When it comes to monster design, while it’s not easy to come up with a spooky monster — certainly not one as clever and compelling as the false hydra — I feel it’s conventional to come up with a spooky monster rather than a spooky niche. Why this matters is clear in the following line of logic:
Where do false hydras come from? Are they creatures that propagate themselves, rather than spell effects or some spontaneous generation arising from specific conditions (things which I have, in an unpublished post, called ‘universal entities’)? If they do propagate, do they breed or split or what? Even if they are universal, can the spell be modified? Can those conditions be altered? What I’m getting at is that if hydras are a category, rather than a platonic form of which no variance exist, then among those differences between hydras, we will find that some of them are stronger than others. Perhaps this one has a more potent song, or this one is more patient in its predation. True evolution requires inherited variation, but you still get selection effects without it. If hydras of this sort are harder to root out and kill, over time, you’ll have more of that sort and less of the sort easily killed.
And this is where niches matter. The hydra as presented is a pretty nasty monster. But how good of a food source are humans? Woodland critters would certainly put up less of a fight — and they’d be far easier to fool, you’d think. Does the hydra need to sing at all? It’s got to be tiring, maintaining that howl indefinitely — it’d have to eat less if it sung less, and it’d have to sing less if it ate less. Why set up shop in urban areas at all? Would it be viable to slumber under a road, waking up to nom travelers, perhaps singing away investigators?
The challenge of organic monster design is not just inventing something cool that works, but inventing something that works well enough you can’t modify it and get something that works better. If you can, then logically you’re going to end up with the other thing, so might as well focus on that.
This sort of analysis, I imagine, is what leads people to think analysis kills fun. “If we did that, there’d be no story.” It’s fiction, some insist, so say it Just Works and leave it at that. But these questions don’t kill ideas — they might look like challenges, but think of them as prompts. On the face of it, after all, that’s what they are. If you ask “why not just do this?” and it both a) follows from the premise presented, and b) is boring, or just less interesting than what you want, there’s no need to bind yourself to that logic. It asks why you can’t; the form of the question suggests there’s a reason. We’re making stuff up, so it’s a lack of creativity to shy away from making up a little more.
So, why does the hydra eat people — wouldn’t wild animals or livestock be a better food source? An easy answer, I feel, is relating it to that defining feature of the hydra. The song is antimemetic, it manipulates knowledge, and do you know what creature has more knowledge than anything else?
Suppose the hydra eats people because the psychic energy in brains is what enables its song. Suddenly, we have a niche it can’t just slide out of. If it stopped eating people, it wouldn’t be able to sing. If it stopped being able to sing, the predation style it’s designed around falls apart. It becomes a common predator: and we already know successful predators look nothing like this rhizomatic monster.
The remaining objections instead feel like ways to fill out the world. The hydra that sleeps under the bridge is a different niche than the one that roots beneath a town. They can be different species.
This is, I think, not quite yet as far as you can go just taking false hydrae for given — after all, the original post is sparse on details of false hydra reproduction, which might be interesting, and there’s always the question of how many heads a hydra tends to grow, and how fast, and how does this relate to its power. (Is it a great many, or is it, as the post at one point suggests, as few as seven?)
Hydra Song
But before I get into any of that, I want to dig in before I built out. Just what does a false hydra sing? What grants its these antimemetic properties? Like most treatments of antimemes, the false hydra is rather conceptual. It erases knowledge of itself. This makes sense to a human, but not to universe. A reductionist is left wondering how it knows what knowledge to erase, and what mechanism undergirds it. Brains aren’t like file systems or security cameras, and there aren’t conveniently marked knowledge neurons you can zap.
Does its song affect multiple brains at once? Can you record it and play it? It’s tempting to make the “song” a purely psychic effect, and maybe there is a psychic component (we already supposed one, I recall), but the original post quite plainly treats it as a literal sound: earwax blocks the song.
Given how different brains are, I think the most reasonable approach is to make the brain do the work. How?
A false hydra constantly sings of its existence and those it has killed. This is a trap, a kind of memetic comb. The very notion is poison. If you understand it, if it sparks recognition, if you can put the pieces together, the hydra’s song eats them. The song is pain. You, your very cognition, flinches from it, and any thought that might lead back to it is excised, just as self-protection. The song, its qualia, is fragility and brittleness, rotting and cracked and rusting. What it touches turn to dust; the connections and associations are pruned. The fittest adaption, the only mind that can survive, is one to whom the hydra and its litany of crimes — its existence foremost among them — is distant, meaningless noise.
You forget the hydra because you keep noticing it. The hydra trains you ignore it.
And when it burns away memory, in those ashes it leaves little hooks. Dead associations that come to back life if you find your thoughts prompted back toward the hydra. You remember the song first. And so you listen for the song. And you hear it, understand, and forget.
Perhaps it’s called a false hydra because trying to cut off a head spawns more. Not because it’s immortal — it’s quite weak, or it wouldn’t try so hard to hide. If you find it anyway, it will be scared and hungry, quite hungry. There aren’t many faster ways into its maws. If you found it, not by chance wandering, stumbling upon it, but thinking around its suppressive litany, then by the ensuing thorough examination of your brain, it learns how you did it. If you devised a pretext, an indirection to let you think about it, it’s one more verse in the song now. The problem grows.
(Does the hydra eat you, or are its myriad heads each a victim reborn, mind turned to a screaming psychic outlet?)
They say false hydrae are born of lies. That’s nonsense. False hydras are born of truth. They are truth — truth the mind will do anything to not accept, truth society and conformity thereto demand we not accept. False hydra are real, it says.* There is one here right now*. The hydra never lies; we lie to ourselves.
It’s not about falsehood. It’s about cognitive dissonance.
So where do hydras come from? Depends on the world. Perhaps they are dissonance elementals. Whether that means they are born from paroxysmal throes of dissonance and disbelief or are merely attracted to them, is up to you.
Why would it need existing dissonance, though? Think of it hydra starter. Someone pathologically consumed by delusional disbelief gives voice to the hydra before it has a mouth to sing. When this patient zero comes to the hydra, nascent, headless, if they become the first head, perhaps it’s even consensual. Feed me, it might say, and I’ll make sure everyone believes you.
(“Be honest,” folks say, “or the hydra will eat you.” Not for lying — for believing the lie.)
So that’s the content of the song. Still, how does the hydra sing? What are the precursors to the sound? What is the minimal hydra song?
We can call it the fnote (after fnords — I don’t usually appreciate silly, punny names, but this one is pithy). This sound, clearly heard, is pure aversion — the sonic equivalent of bitrex.
Is the fnote sonic, or psychic? Would a sound designer experimenting eventually discover it? I want to say no, both because that injures some of the mystique, and because, as a reader pointed out, if they did discover it, wouldn’t they just forget it? With enough engineers, enough time, it’d surely have to stick once, though, right? And there’s some unique possibilities here. (Consider: songs, movies, or games incorporating antimemetic passages as part of the intended experience? Too strong to be pleasant, perhaps, but people drink coffee.)
If it must be sonic, I’m inclined to make it contingent and historical, not derived from human biology. We’ve already mapped sounds onto meaning, so how about language’s shadow? Could there be a transformation of words to some anti-utterance that yields anti-meaning?
For those with some understanding of audio (or who just want a more concrete audiation), one possibility is a fundamental, biologically-grounded fnote waveform, some a highly distorted timbre. It could be partly or entirely outside human hearing (we feel the lowest, inaudible notes, the interferences from the highest highs can make a difference — this is why hifi has a sample rate greater than 20k). The hydra’s fwords (sorry) could be algorithmically produced by modulation (FM, in my experience, produces spookier sounds than AM) of the soundwaves of normal words — the result would be a sound a human could not make. If the FM were light enough, it might even be intelligible as speech.
Still, maybe the fwords are just a target, and the hydra’s psychic effects do the work of erasing fworded cognition. Saying too much more pins down the setting more than necessary.
The key is that as you’re first learning a language and culture, you’re subliminally inculcating vulnerability to a class of fnords. This has other ramifications for those without fluency. Children (the emperor’s false hydra, anyone?), foreigners, perhaps even the merely neurodivergent, would be resistant to the hydra’s song. Maybe this is why it only strikes in small towns.
It’s at this point that I feel two pulls dividing me. I have some commitment to the source material, and so I want my hydra to remain a hydra, this manyheaded monster. But there it’s some allure in having a cognitive dissonance egregore, a mass possession like anomalous peer pressure.
If each victim of the hydra becomes a new head, it’s tempting to make these heads merely metaphorical — there’s something ungainly about imagining a town with hundreds of screaming flesh trees. And there’s questions of acoustics — sound falls off with distance, and if the hydra has such a large population of heads, could they be more effective if they followed people around, whispering to them, rather than being massive loudspeakers?
Perhaps the necks are very long, and better thought not as trunks, but as snakes or vines, creeping throughout the town.
If we wanted specific numbers, the loudest birds can make sounds in excess of 100 dB, and I can find a few claims of people hearing roosters for hundreds of meters. Another comparison point is foghorns, which can be heard for a few km away. I’d probably make a hydra song at full stridor audible within 1 km in perfect conditions (line of sight, clear and dry air, etc.), and in practice, more like 100–200 meters. Perhaps less if there are many heads focusing their ministrations on more selective groups. Of course, such a specific focus on ranges probably invites consideration of speed. There’s not a great comparison point for a something with anatomy like a hydra, but if we’re leaning on the snake look, something around 10 km/h or 3 m/s (speed of a moderately fast snake) doesn’t feel too unreasonable.
There’s another issue with a many headed hydra, though. One of the central limitations of the false hydra is that while it’s eating it’s not singing. Does it take many small mouths to eat one person? Does the requisite focus of processing the brain distract the hydra from its complex song?
This brings us to the question of how much a hydra sings. With the adaptation model, where brains are trained not to think of the hydra, it follows that the longer you’ve been exposed to hydra song, the less it must sing to you. Also, there are pesky details of how exactly the song poisons you memories — does it require attention, such that enough distraction prevents you from processing the fwords? Or, depending on how credulous you are of subliminal processing, perhaps the fwords have an effect even then. Does the hydra song take an unseen cognitive toll on the populace, such that there’s a baseline level of distraction everyone is operating under?
The original post suggests that the hydra is rather fast-acting. Some of this does fall out of my model — the song trains you to listen for it when you’re made to recall the hydra, allowing it to take effect on-demand. But perhaps a little slack can be allowed. How much effectiveness does the hydra really lose, if there’s some lag? After all, how long can a person go without a quiet moment to think, for their thoughts to wander? And as soon as they do, the song washes away their memory.
I like that this offers yet another means (albeit ineffective) of combatting the hydra: keep yourself distracted, unable to process the song, and prolong your gnosis a little bit longer. Perhaps you have a little grace period always — if the hydra has killed particularly many people, it could take a while (minutes? longer?) to loop over its entire litany.
On another note, this does raise the question of the sort of long-term cognitive effects of hydra song — does it permanently impair cognition? Does the brain become so dependent as to suffer some manner of withdrawal? It does suggest that, once you’ve been exposed to hydra song, even if you escape, the next hydra you encounter will click into those newly worn grooves so easier.
But are people likely to encounter a second hydra? I suppose that requires some thinking put towards the ecology of hydrae. It also requires some thought towards a criticism I’ve seen expressed even in places where SableGM’s post was praised.
This isn’t worldbuilding. It’s excellent monsterbuilding, but other than some hints here and there, little focus has been put into thinking about what a world with false hydras looks like. (Obviously, these posts don’t do that because it’s not their job; they are RPG supplements, things for GMs to plop down in their worlds, and the more assumptions you make about what a GMs setting looks like, the more work you create for them when those assumptions break down. But I’m not a GM, I’m a writer, so I don’t care. It’s something there seems to be an audience for, anyway.)
One curious thing to note about my version of the false hydra is that it’s oddly antifragile (or would the word be iatrogenic?). Knowledge should be power, but having the concept of a false hydra just gives it more hooks to hide. If you know what a false hydra is, it can sing I am a false hydra.
Still, is there anything you can do to keep your town from being eaten by a false hydra? For that, it’s as good as time as any to collect this all together into something more coherent.
The Common Urban Hydra
Hydrastridor oblitus begins as a microscopic egg. There are eggs everywhere in the soil — a mature adult will lay billions of them. Most are eaten or degraded without reaching conditions to hatch, or soon after. After hatching, the H. oblitus flukes live like a common earthworm. They sense sapient minds, however, and will crawl towards the nearest concentration of them. If it meets any conspecifics, they will fight and the victor consumes the loser. For this reason, they tend to avoid aggregating. They never stop growing. They fear the light, and so long as it remains near a population center, it flees approaching minds — until it grows large enough to eat one.When it does, it enters the second stage of its life.
After consuming its first sapient mind, it grows the first head, becoming a juvenile medusa rather than a larval fluke. It cannibalizes the brain, and through exploration of its neurology, it derives its first litany. Each litany acts as a verse in the hydra’s song. The sound is almost indescribable and imperceptible, but has a semantic content. What it is exactly depends on the sapient consumed. Always the litany answers, conveyed with the understanding of the consumed sapient: “who am I?” Depending on the species, age, and rank of a hydra, answers may be more detailed, and it may also include answers to questions such as: “What killed me?” “Why am I here?” “How did I get here?” “What does the song mean?”
The hydra is not intelligent, only instinctually groping around in brains and parroting what it finds there. However, the hydra’s litany must be what the sapient believes to be true. Although other sapients cannot consciously recall perceiving the song, they may subliminally understands the litany — if, that is, they would have understood the consumed sapient explaining the same thing. Linguistic and cognitive barriers may reduce or negate the effectiveness of the litany — but not psychological or social barriers. What matters is that they understand what it says, not believe it.
Hearing the song while near the hydra creates a block. This block can be the thought of the litany’s content. Thinking about the block causes a brief moment of confusion and distress. This is relieved if the victim thinks about anything else. Blocks can have varying strengths — at the highest level, the victim has no choice but to forget. As lower strengths, the victim might retain a vague sense of what was thought about, but lack desire to continue thinking about it, or they might retain most of it, but further thought is fatiguing, plagued by a sense of wrongness, missing something important, and lacking confidence.
When a block is thought about, any thoughts that lead to, resulted from, or happened alongside the block are also blocked with less strength, especially if those thoughts feel related, but even if they aren’t. When the victim sleeps, blocks wane slightly in strength, and any incidental blocks (caused by spurious associations) are removed. Because sleep allows for memory consolidation, new blocks can be created, much in the way sleep can allow insightful connections.
Blocks also wane when calmly thought about — but because the sensation of thinking through a block is so distressing, and their subject matter is often innately stressful, the opposite is more likely: when a block is associated with unpleasantness, the block persists or even worsens. At the victim hears the song more, the blocks are reinforced and deepened. At extremes, thinking through a block might entail physical damage. Whenever the hydra is consuming a sapient or changing its a litany, it cannot sing. When a victim cannot hear the song, blocks wane in strength.
As it consumes more victims, it becomes more familiar with their shared language, and enriches its litanies, up to a limit. Each head can remember a litany about as long as a book page. More heads means more can be blocked, granting the hydra cover for more victims and thereby more heads. The gains compound, but its abilities to gain heads initially is slow and risky. It mainly haunts the locations where its victims died — anyone who comes looking for them will hear its song, and be warded away. It times its early predation so that new victims are consumed when no one new comes looking for the last one. In this way, it grows more heads, and its song becomes more refined, louder.
This defines the second stage of its life: weak and vulnerable, the hydra risking death with each sapient it attacks. Its necks are too short to take it very far, and its song covers too small an area, its litany too sparse to offer much occlusion. As it grows longer, it begins creeping out of its hiding spot at night. Not to search for new victims, but to acclimate the population to its presence, to spread its influence. It appears before new minds, and sings to them. Night after night, for months, this continues until the hydra need not fear encountering minds that have never heard it, and has grown vast enough not to fear an individual attack. This is the trigger for its most dangerous third phase. At this point, it begins to properly infest, its length creeping throughout the town like a vine even in the daylight, its song heard all hours of the day. More heads emerge. It begins produce eggs, and laying them by the million. It feasts.
This soon leads to the decadent final stage of the hydra, where growth slows and reverses as there are no longer enough people in the town to sustain its metabolism. It begins to starve and wither. The populace will be picked clean, but before the end, perhaps a few will flee the desolation. They will have no memory of what happened, and may prefer not to think on it, but with no song to prune them, they could reconstruct what happened, perhaps when questioned by the authorities. Perhaps this reconstruction is more confabulation, informed by mythology, but cultural knowledge of false hydrae will evolve. Most H. oblitus individuals are killed when decadent, about to die to natural causes. It lays too many eggs for there to be any hope of finding them all — and it sows them deep in the soil where fire cannot touch them. The town will be barren, all minds reaped, so when they hatch, the young will crawl, unseen, to the next town.
Post-Hydra Culture
So where does that leave us?
Flatly exterminating the hydras seems like a nonstarter, given their fertility. And their tendency to look for population centers before emerging doubles as a check against them hunting sapients to extinction, too. So, hydras must be a fact of life, at least until civilizations grow quite advanced. How would a clever population mitigate this?
There are simple, obvious interventions that make a hydra’s job harder: traveling in groups, making friends who live far away from you, who would notice your disappearance yet be out of the hydra’s reach.
But there’s not much satisfyingly clever about that. A more general solution is to realize the problem. The False Hydra targets sapient knowledge. That’s the battlefield it’s chosen, and you don’t let you foe chose the battlefield. To change the field, though, we have to remove one side of the equation: we can beat it with sapient ignorance, or nonsapient knowledge. As we’ll see, a workable solution is to use both.
It’s easiest to explain the latter. See, the hydra makes you forget, but it doesn’t affect records. At the extreme, self-mutilation is always an available option. The problem, of course, is how to use these records when interpreting them gets you immediately whammied with the effect again. The answer is the former.
The hydra can’t make you forget your plan if you plan has nothing to do with the hydra. It can be superstition, unbreakable habit. Being done without knowing why is usually a failure mode of tradition, but here it’s a feature.
Putting all of these together, we can make a toy sketch of the form an anti-hydra immune system would look like. Perhaps a holy book says something like:
If you haven’t seen someone you care about in some time, scratch your arm. If you feel like you’ve forgotten or lost someone, scratch your arm. If you see a foul snake, scratch your arm. If you have forgotten something, lost time, see scratches on your arm you don’t remember making, scratch your arm. If you see someone who should scratch their arm fail to do so, scratch your arm. Always scratch, even if it draws blood. When you find what you’ve lost, when you see a snake killed, when things make sense, rub oil on your arm to mend the scratches.
When a priest sees someone with scratched arms, there are rites that should be performed. They will pray, console, and perform various rituals which may be useless. When a priests see many people with scratches on their arms, they consult the holy book, or roll dice as a form of divination. It will never talk about hydras, only foul spirits and energies. There will be many prescribed rituals to banish these spirits: requiring people to travel in groups, gathering crowds to hunt snakes. Some of those with scratched arms will be exiled, or the priest will have runners carry a request for prayer to a regional arch-priest. When too many have scratched arms for too long, the town must be evacuated entirely.
I don’t think that’s the most plausible culture to develop, but it may grant intuition for the dynamics it should have. Recognition of the problem must be abstracted, ingrained, indirect. That it would have false positives is a bit of a feature. (Perhaps this is why the scholars, as Arnold K, suggests, believe false hydrae are a myth.) The response to a false hydra should be distributed across a system, in a such way that it’s fair to say the people aren’t reacting to the hydra, the society is it.
This is a hard thing to elucidate, essentially by design: if I could give you a workable example of such a society, work you through the logic of how their culture deals with a false hydra in the short space I have here, why would people in such a culture not figure it out themselves? It has to be unnecessarily complicated, difficult for one individual to wrap their head around, or it won’t work.
(I’m reminded of — was in in SCP fanfic? — where an antimemetics team had to build a machine to combat a threat where no one involved in the construction should be able to figure out what the machine was for.)
Suffice to say, it’s all a bit counter to the aims of my (ideally accessible) blog post.
There’s a cheaper cop-out, though. If the hydra works through psychic means, would a trained psychic not have some capability to resist the song? If the world has magic, as the implicit setting seems too, would there not be spells to resist the song?
An issue with this approach is that it’s boring: it negates exactly what’s interesting about the hydra. One way to get creative with this is to dig into how the song is resisted. Deafening yourself is the standard approach, but what about removing your ability to understand speech in general? What if it negates only the antimemetic effect of the hydra’s song (i.e., congrats, you now have an eldritch monstrosity screaming at you constantly)? Or, how about the old standby for antimemes: a mnestic effect, that instead inhibits your ability to forget. You won’t forget about the hydra, now, but you won’t discard the useless junk thoughts and momentary associations, either.
There are (or should be) fully oblique ways of affecting a hydra, too. Doubtless there is a climate the hydra prefers, and lands which no know their predations. Perhaps it cares about the soil it grows in as well — but there’s something uncompelling about a culture resisting hydrae with agriculture, or worse, hydra pesticides. But ecology can have a more direct effect: the hydra is quite a lot of meat hanging out in the open. What eats a hydra? Is it anything a culture could tame or seek the presence of? Or perhaps it uses its psychic/sonic abilities to remain unthreatened — but then are their “mindless” or magic resistant creatures that are undaunted? Perhaps not, and scavengers wait for it to die first. (Could the thing that eats most Hydrastridor be their very young? Worms — and larval Hydrastridor are worms — love something to compost. And a decadent hydra would have so little fitness to gain except by investing in progeny already begotten.)
There’s not much left to discuss in the broad strokes, but that note of anti-hydra traditions suggests an interesting case to analyse — a certain hydra variant found in SableGM’s post
The Divisive Liar Hydra
Beginning life much like the Common Urban Hydra, Hydrastridor mendacius divergence once it attains its first head. Rather than erasing knowledge of disappearances, it foments unease and division in a populace. Where H. oblitus combs knowledge out of your head, H. mendacius is a teasing feather’s touch. It sings of imagined crimes, sows forgotten grudges, and while the content of these will fade like a dream, the sentiments it inspires linger and accumulate. No one will investigate this new disappearance, because everyone hated her. No one will report a new disappearance, because the authorities are all out to get you. If trained hydra specialists will come in, without careful consideration they could mistake these fleeting memories for sign of H. oblitus.
It’s for this reason the thing is otherwise called the false false hydra. The name is somewhat misleading — the resemblance to a false hydra must be quite striking, or no one could mistake it. The H. mendacius is commonly characterized by inserting, rather than removing memories — but if that were all it did, who would be fooled? Against a false hydra you forget you are dealing with a false hydra. Thus, this hydra must be capable of erasing more than just the memories it fabricates.
If H. oblitus is a creature of dissonance, H. mendacius is a creature of paranoia. Mimicry isn’t a necessary part of its strategy, but it’s a unfortunate convenience that fear of false hydrae plays so well into its plans. Triggering false hydrae response simply misdirects attention: investigating fictional disappearances instead of the real ones, placing faith in fleeting memories because why would the hydra eat them unless you were on to something? It’s amusing that the simplest defenses against false hydrae are exactly those the false false hydra so easily undermines: gathering in the safety of a group, and trusting someone distant who would catch oddities in your behavior or your disappearance. But if one went hunting for hydra, you’d certainly recognize the look of H. mendacius. It’s smaller, more retiring than the false hydra, and sadly, the place you’d find it is exactly where you’d care least to look: near the latest pariah singled out by its induced paranoia.
Bringing it altogether, the things that make you vulnerable to H. oblitus is homogeneity, insularity and rationality — both as knowledge of false hydrae, and the tendency towards skepticism and rationalizing. The things that make you resistant to H. oblitus is interconnection and diversity and strong shared traditions with willingness to adhere to them without intellectual understanding.
What makes you vulnerable to H. mendacius? The picture aren’t quite inverse of each other — they are things that might make you resistant to both — but there’s definitely axis on which resistance to one trades off against resistance to another.
In correspondence, SableGM has proposed a mechanism which resists both: something as simple and old as census will detect the unexplained population dips from hydra predation. Censuses are slow, and hydra lifecycles are even slower, but knowing hydrae are in a region means you can warn the towns. When the traditional anti-hydra rituals are invoked, perhaps there are regular headcounts at town meeting (though against a false false hydra, might such a gathering risk inciting a riot?). The headcounts could be done by a impersonal mechanism — stones placed on some complex balance scale, perhaps, which allows you to compare the currents counts to previous counts. With enough security, this is proof of disappearance (though folks will deny, rationalize, or avoid thinking about it and what it means). The count serves another purpose, too: imagined people invented by a false false hydra will never have been counted.
Hydra Ad Nauseam
I’m not going to go on and analyze & rework every hydra SableGM proposes, partly because I don’t want to steal content, but also because his other hydrae cannot be explained by the fnote mechanism. A generalized model of magical cognition could work something out, but that’s not something this post aims to be about.
The festering hydra is perhaps the only other in that article which fits cleanly into this model, as it’s a plain old memory scrubbing like the vanilla hydra. So, just for fun, I thought I’d share the first hydra I came up with after reading that post, essentially the foil to the festering hydra.
Parasitic Hydra
Hydrastridor horribilus begins as cysts that contaminate the soil like any helminith. Rather than living as an earthworm, the parasitic hydra flukes are tiny pale things that burrow into the flesh. They sing minutely to mask themselves from your awareness, but you will notice yourself getting sicker and sicker. Your nose will run, you will vomit, sweat, cry, and more. There will be worms in your fluids, and they can sense you (their brethren, rather) and will crawl back toward you. The longer this goes on, the more worms there will be squirming in every discharge. Their singing affects only you — others can see the worms, realize you’re infected, and probably piece together it’s a hydra.
The worms can and will infect others. And if anyone in town’s ever heard of or dealt with a festering hydra, they can easily grasp how dangerous these things could get. They might think to treat it like a festering hydra, and quarantine you. This is a mistake.
As the weeks go on, the worms grow larger and colonize your intestines, where they fatten and fuse into a kind of many headed tapeworm. This is hidden, even to doctors who might be examining your condition. To appearances, your sickness will clear up, and fluids will look healthy, finally free of the pale worms. You might think you’re cured, and those who quarantined you will think they’ve contained it, beaten it.
But it’s a mature adult now. It waits, murmuring a quiet song from within your gut as you reintegrate into society. It might wait months, years before it strikes, its heads rousing and bursting from your flesh. It’s larger now, and the song can affect others.
You don’t even notice the creature with toothy mouths that snake out from beneath your clothes. It feeds and grows and maybe you’ve just put on some weight. You don’t notice the people closest to your disappearing, either. So many people abandoned you in disgust after the sickness. You don’t notice how people you pass by get sick with that same illness you suffered so long ago, and if you do, well, it’s long been out of your system by now, isn’t it?
(Tapeworms lay hundreds of thousands of eggs each day. The parasitic hydra is quite modest by comparison.)
You see, the thing about parasitic hydra larva is that they come in genetically identical broods, genets, which are selected to infect one host. The larva knows how to find its clones — in a sense, they’re a part of one individual. That’s why they crawl back to you. They work faster together, and can grow into a bigger, stronger adult hydra the more of them there are in one host.
This is why the larva don’t hide themselves from others — getting quarantined facilitates its life cycle. The more hosts a parasitic hydra spreads to, the weaker and easier to handle it is.
Babbler’s Hydra
Well, I’m on a roll now, so what’s the harm in a few more?
So far, our hydrae have operated as if a hydra’s song was something irreplicable to us, that the tones are far outside our vocal repetoire. What if they weren’t? Hydrastridor glossalalos can imitate voices as adeptly as any parrot, but rather than intelligble speech, it gibbers, speaking in tongues — forked tongues. The result is a kind of virulent echolalia, a lyrical earworm that’s as much meme as antimeme.
Unlike other hydras, H. echolalos lacks the ability to powerfully project its song, and grows few heads. It relies on sapients for transmission of the litany. This is both its strength and its weakness. So much conventional reasoning about the range and limitations of hydra song breaks down: usually, having a close relation to other town offers some safety, but against the babbling hydra, anyone you’d reach with runners or messengers will thereby be exposed to the song, echoed like gossip.
Still, the weakness of this transmission is there’s only so long a song can be for people to still remember all its lyrics. H. echolalos has much shorter litanies than other hydrae, and growing more heads is little help in expanding it. It might be able to trip up anyone looking for it across the whole country, but its ability to cover up evidence is so much more impotent.
Dithering Hydra
Hydrastridor paradoxum is, some argue, a complex of multiple species. Each employ various disparate strategies, but these behavior patterns are unified by some commonalities. Core of all, H. paradoxum coerces sapients into feeding it and protecting it. Hydrae are not intelligent, but the key feature that lets H. paradoxum imitate intelligence is a novel application of its song. Rather than suppressing general beliefs, it erases specific episodes. This way, it gains an uncanny ability to “predict” sapient behavior, by forcing ignorance of previous encounters.
The simplest tactic of all is mere threats. After eating a few people, and some trial and error, it finds a way to convey Feed me or eat you, and someone willing to do that. Eventually that person refuses, or gets caught, or the hydra gets hungry enough to eat them anyway. The right mix of selfishness and competence needed to help the hydra isn’t found in everyone, but perhaps some would be better incentivized by something more utilitarian: the hydra captures a man’s family, and conveys that he must bring one sacrifice — anyone — or the hydra will eat all of them.
At some point, perhaps after that dread question (“why would the hydra prefer one person to many?”) prompts the awful conjecture, or when the investigators come knocking, it’s revealed that the deal wasn’t so simple. If the man is willing to sacrifice one for many once, the hydra can pump arbitrarily many sacrifices by erasing his memory.
It can dazzle victims with its prediction, and can stimulate awe just as other hydra stimulate dissonance. How many would sacrifice if the god-hydra told them it knew they’d give in sooner or later? A mature hydra could devour the whole town, and if it already has a few heads, it’s only a matter of time till it reaches that point. How many would sacrifice if the hydra said that sacrifice meant they’d be spared when that time comes? Perhaps its devotees might even plead morality with it, argue out of its wrath — its mindless reptilian eyes understanding none of it, only the psychic touch that brushes away memories or provokes awe.
The human element would give this hydra a fair latitude of cover. At first blush, it might just look like a serial killer, or it’s a conspiracy all the towns’ elders keep secret. It’s almost enough to wonder if this hydra even needs to eat the memory of its victims.
And so on…
What about a hydra that doesn’t eat the memory of its victims at all? Or rather, only a small part. With a false hydra, you forget its victims ever lived. With the anti-false hydra, you forget its victims ever died. There’s no investigation, because there’s no worry that something is amiss.
What about a vegetative hydra that splits, rather than growing from flukes until it dies? What about a hydra that travels? What about social, cooperating hydrae?
But this article is running rather long. Essays are supposed to have conclusions, but it’s hard to tie this one together when there’s no sweeping bottom line it’s driving at. Throughout, my ideas serve as something of a starting point — questions and heuristics for thinking about fitting false hydrae into a wider setting. I’ve given most of the tools and analysis I can offer for that project. Having done that, I think the only real ending this line of thought can have in your hands. Go make your own hydra, or fiddle with the ones I’ve presented, or — did I forget something? Where was I going with this?