Bathybius

Also known as the Deepmind, the Bathybius (pronounced /bəˈθɪbiːəs/) is an enormous sentient layer of oozy material that lies at the base of all the oceans of Dadauar. Anything entering the Bathybius will be engulfed and absorbed, adding to its substance and perhaps slightly to its mentality as well. There is evidence that the Bathybius gains the knowledge and skills of all entities it absorbs... and it's perhaps for that reason that it prefers to absorb sentient creatures.

On its own, the Bathybius, while certainly incredibly intelligent, is immobile and seemingly inert. It lies unmoving at the bottom of the ocean; it never surfaces, or even so much as extends a pseudopod. Perhaps it uses some magical powers, but if so they are powers with no immediately visible effect. It does, however, split off pieces of itself and act through them. These pieces, called deeplings, can take any form, and vary widely in their power and abilities. Deeplings may, and often do, appear human in shape, but they have the telltale watery colorlessness of the Bathybius itself--though that can be disguised through magic or cosmetics.

The Bathybius--generally through deeplings--is also able to infuse some of its substance into others, introducing some of the gelatinous matter of a deepling, or of the Bathybius itself, into some other living thing through its mouth or another orifice. A creature thus contaminated gradually takes on the same substance and characteristics of a deepling. Those changed in this way are known as "infected".

There are also strange creatures known as cahl-tein that seem to extend part of their bodies into the Bathybius, and that some believe, accordingly, to be agents of the Bathybius or somehow associated with it, but the true relationship between the cahl-tein and the Deepmind is unclear.

The ultimate goals of the Bathybius are obscure. The patterns of the deeplings' deeds seem difficult to fathom, and the possibility that not all deeplings are acting under the Bathybius's orders further muddies the waters. Some fear that the Bathybius eventually hopes to absorb all life on Dadauar into its own substance. Others are equally certain that it is gathering magical power, in preparation for some unimaginable cataclysm it intends to wreak when it has the power to do so. It could be that its aims are more peaceful, that all it wants is to gather knowledge and vicariously experience different lives through its deeplings--though few are sanguine enough to put much hope into that. In the end, though, nobody knows for sure what the Deepmind's aims are, except the Bathybius itself.

Attempts to communicate directly with the Bathybius have never proved successful. If it does have some form of telepathy, as many believe it must in order to coordinate the actions of the deeplings, then it chooses not to use it to converse with casual inquirers. It is certainly powerful enough to resist all attempts to read its thoughts directly. There are those who have claimed to have achieved some form of communion with the Bathybius--a few have even claimed to have been allowed to pass through its substance without being devoured--but these accounts have no independent corroboration.

One of the many open questions about the Bathybius is whether it is, in fact, one creature or many. Do all the consciousnesses it absorbs still exist inside it; is the thing that we call the Deepmind actually a collection of many minds working together, rather than a single entity? Or is it just a single entity; when it absorbs the minds of the creatures that enter it, are the individualities of those minds lost as they increase the Deepmind's intelligence? Some wonder whether, to some measure, both these possibilities may be true, that the Deepmind is a single, cohesive entity, but that somehow some vestige of all the minds that it absorbed still remain within it.

Another question is whether the Deepmind is confined to Dadauar. Certainly, there are no such entities in the oceans of most worlds of Qabede--but that doesn't necessarily mean that the Bathybius in Dadauar is unique. Maybe there are such entities in some other worlds, as well, and maybe, in fact, the Bathybius in Dadauar originated as a piece of an older version on some distant world that made its way here through the world-spanning waterfalls. Maybe, as vast as it is, the Bathybius as it's known on Dadauar is only a part of some much vaster organism, spread out over many worlds... or maybe it's one of a number of similar organisms, each of which have their own purposes and goals, and which may someday get into a war of which Dadauar may get caught in the middle...