The Chicken Heart That Ate the World
Damned If Anybody Knows What This Started Out As
Corporeal Forces: 6 Strength: 12 Agility: 12
Ethereal Forces: 1 Intelligence: 2 Precision: 2
Celestial Forces: 0 Will: 0 Perception: 0
Vessel/6, Charisma -2, Toughness/2 Body Hits: 168
Skills: Dodge/6, Fighting/6, Move Silently/3, Tactics/6
Songs: Corporeal Healing/6, Numinous Corpus/6 (Acid)
Discord: Ugly/6, Vulnerable/3 (Extreme Flame and/or cold)
Have I ever mentioned that Sparky shotguns Maalox?
Well, can you blame him? Just when he thinks that he’s got a handle on things, something like this comes boiling out of the woodwork. The worse bit? Sparky was sure that radio plays were safe! Vapula’s always been a visual sort of Prince; take away the eyeball candy, and surely he won’t get any ideas.
Oops.
The worst bit is, not even Vapula was really able to tell a frantic Sparky just what the Hell this thing is made out of. The Chicken Heart That Ate the World isn’t Undead; it isn’t a construct; it certainly isn’t celestial and/or ethereal. If he didn’t know better, the Balseraph would swear that it’s just an incredibly disgusting, foul-smelling pile of chicken heart tissue that’s somehow learned to move around and eat things. Of course, if things were that simple, Sparky wouldn’t have that annoying triple eye tick problem…
Needless to say, the Damned thing isn’t easy to put down. It’s not quite as problematical as, say, a Shoggoth (theoretical physical similarities aside); the CHTAtW is vulnerable to cold and heat and not immune to bullets. Unfortunately, it has to be extreme heat, bitter cold and/or lots and lots of bullets. And you had better get every single atom of the stuff, or it’ll just come back after it eats enough mass. Cleaning it all up took forever.
And, of course, once he finally got all of it, Vapula absolutely refused to let him annihilate it. Apparently, the Genius Prince thought that it was ‘cute’. Thankfully, Sparky was allowed to dump the CHTAtW into a thirty-gallon drum, seal it and put it in corporeal cold storage (in every sense of the term). Not an optimal solution, but better than nothing…
What do you MEAN, the storage facility the CHTAtW was in got trashed during the last Lightning raid?
No, just leave the case of Maalox on the desk.
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I first heard the tale of the Monster Chicken Heart fifty years ago on Bill Cosby’s Wonderfulness album, but I believe it is actually older than that. The original episode was broadcast during Arch Oblor’s run of the LIGHTS OUT radio show circa 1940. CHTAtW really has an impressive pedigree, if you think about it.
On a personal note, my music teacher in freshman year of high school had been a class mate of Bill Cosby at Temple. During our first week of class, he made a point of teaching us how to imitate the sound of the monster chicken heart beat and then gleefully unleashed us on the rest of the school and our unsuspecting families, chortling with unholy glee the while.
And people wonder why I speak of my alma mater as a prep school for Miskatonic U.
You’re reminding me of a couple of songs I heard on Dr. Demento: The Cockroach T
Damn flaky browser and laptop, decided it wanted to post Right Now. Anyways, via Dr. D: The Cockroach That Ate Cincinnati and The Eggplant That Ate Chicago.
Dammit. First it posts before I’m finished, then it eats my full post reply. ANYWAYS. The Cockroach That Ate Cincinnati and The Eggplant That Ate Chicago.
Well f*** me. Feel free to delete all this and I’ll re-comment it. Bloody hell.