Moon-Misers
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"You open the box, and something climbs out. Something has a glistening carapace the colour of smoked sapphires. Something is made almost entirely of legs. Too many legs."[1]
Moon-misers are mysterious, insectoid creatures that reside on the roof of the Neath. Their colossal size and bioluminescence makes them visible from London, which has led Londoners to call them "false-stars."
Biology
"A moon-miser! They live on the roof – you know, the false-stars. Shed their carapaces and glim falls. And on the roof they stay. Even the Masters understand that. Their exudations – well, the informal name is 'moon-milk'. Horribly dangerous substance. Powerful, though."[2]
Moon-misers appear to be insects with many pairs of legs, many eyes, and hard chitinous exoskeletons.[3] They use their powerful legs to walk along the cavern's roof.[4] Much like the Rubbery Men and the Flukes, the moon-misers hail from the planet Axile, where they were used as mounts.[5] They were likely brought to the Neath by the Bazaar long before the time of the First City, along with other Axiles, and have since colonized its roof. Their blueish glow is known as moonish light, and it turns apocyan when reflected off the crests of the waves of the Unterzee.[6]
Moon-misers are a source of a few particular substances. Their shed chitinous exoskeletons fall to the Unterzee, and the pieces are called glim.[7] Glim is used in jewelry, or burned as a light source, which makes it emit noxious fumes.[8] But the most valuable product from these creatures is moon-milk, a substance which causes the imbiber to fall madly in love with the first thing they see, be it a person, an object, or even a color.[9] This obsession fades over years, though, and is shallow in comparison to real love. Perhaps a hybrid between a moon-miser and a human could produce a variant more amenable to human digestion, creating an effect indistinguishable from true love... [10]
The matriarch of the moon-misers is the Moon-Mother.[11] She is so large as to be confused for a great stalactite, and her glim carapace is notably darker than usual.[12] Starved Men have hollowed out her insides, and practice their Shapeling Arts within her using her amber secretions.[13] The servants of the Moon-Mother have retained more sanity than most of their kind, and tend to her well-being.[14]
These beings' reproductive cycle is as strange as everything else about them. One is born each decade or so, and for this to happen, the false-stars must align into a particular arrangement known as the Counterfeit Constellation.[15] The child is coerced from the womb using the Song of Birthing, customarily sung by the Moon-Mother.[16] The infant feeds on nectar extracted from stalactites by its father (the jellied remains of some burrowing ceiling creature, perhaps),[17] and must be swaddled in its mother's silk while its carapace develops.[18]
The Masters and The Misers
The value of Moon-misers and their myriad secretions has not escaped the attention of powerful parties in the Neath, including the Masters of the Bazaar. There are those among them who would use the power of moon-milk to further their own goals for London, and those who would work to oppose them.
Among them, the Master Mr. Fires has a particular use in mind for the moon-misers. As part of its many schemes to ensure that London remains in the Neath indefinitely, it plans to use moon-milk to taint London’s supplies of love stories with artificial love, so that the Bazaar cannot extract any more usable stories from it or future cities.[10] This behavior has frequently put it at odds with Mr. Winess and Mr. Spices, who largely take up the responsibility of collecting love stories of all sorts for the Bazaar, and they take their job very seriously.[19]
Nevertheless, its plan is doomed to failure, as the effect of moon-milk is more akin to a shallow obsession than to real love. For its plans to work, it requires a more potent version, so it has set up the Orphanage as a testing ground for the effects of the milk, and has attempted to breed a human with the moon-miser it has locked up in the basement.[20][21][22] Hopefully, the resulting hybrid will produce a more potent milk, with an effect indistinguishable from true love.[10]
Another Master, however, has seen a different potential use for the substance. An Exiled Captain of Hell’s Aristocracy is willing to trade use of their army in exchange for a sample.[23][24] So Mr. Stones has abducted a small moon-miser from the roof and locked it inside a heavy iron box, along with a collection of Fourth City love letters it stole from Mr. Fires.[23][25][26] If this scheme comes to fruition, London will be razed to the ground by devils, forcing the Bazaar to steal a sixth city ahead of time, and leaving Stones one step closer to its ultimate objective: returning to the High Wilderness.
Astrology?
UNDER CONSTRUCTION
References
- ↑ Open up, Fallen London
- ↑ An authority on the matter, Fallen London
- ↑ Talk your way in, Fallen London
- ↑ Light Fingers: Lonely as a Cloud, Fallen London "A moon-miser crawls ahead, all gleaming glim, its powerful legs splitting into the roof to keep it from falling."
- ↑ A fellow spirit recognised, Fallen London "You mount the glistening carapace of your miser and ride forth."
- ↑ Echo Bazaar Facebook, Facebook
- ↑ Glim-fall!, Fallen London
- ↑ Eminently respectable?, Fallen London "Anyway, the moon-misers exude this stuff. Moon-milk. Acts like one of those love potions out of a silly romance tale."
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 Draw out as many answers as you can, Fallen London "[Moon-milk] is not a convincing forgery; it creates only a shallow obsession that fades after a few years [...] [The Hybrid's] milk is more suited to human ingestion. It will be be able to create something indistinguishable in all meaningful ways from true love..." Cite error: Invalid
<ref>tag; name "Ultimatum" defined multiple times with different content - ↑ The list, Fallen London "You have to get up there somehow, and find a moon-miser brood mother. They're easy enough to spot, twice the size of the others and more legs."
- ↑ Light Fingers: The Citadel, Fallen London "The Static Star is not a natural formation of stone, but of a darker, mirror-like glim. Indeed, it is not stone at all: it is the Moon-Mother."
- ↑ Peer in the Amber Chamber, Fallen London
- ↑ Bring the Starved Men what they need, Fallen London
- ↑ What does she mean about the stars aligning?, Fallen London
- ↑ Ask about the Song of Birthing, Fallen London "The Moon-Mother sings the Song of Birthing to induce the larva to emerge. An otherworldly sound. I doubt a human throat could ever reproduce it."
- ↑ Something to feed it?, Fallen London
- ↑ Something to wrap it in?, Fallen London
- ↑ Fires' next move, Fallen London "And [Mr. Fires]'s always messing with the love stories. Wines and Spices do most of that work, and they fair hate its guts. But Fires is subtle enough, and they can't do much against it in the open."
- ↑ Sneak your way in, Fallen London
- ↑ Charm offensive, Fallen London
- ↑ Ambition: Light Fingers! - Meeting Doctor Vaughan, Fallen London
- ↑ 23.0 23.1 The devil you don't know, Fallen London "No box means no moon-milk. And that means our exiled captain won't provide it with the troops it wants." Cite error: Invalid
<ref>tag; name "devils" defined multiple times with different content - ↑ Fires' next move, Fallen London "So. Box is opened. Our box. No more. Disappointed. Didn't need glim. Needed moon-milk. Devils interested. Valuable trade opportunity lost."
- ↑ Open up, Fallen London "You open the box, and something climbs out. Something has a glistening carapace the colour of smoked sapphires. Something is made almost entirely of legs. Too many legs."
- ↑ Fires' next move, Fallen London
