Gallimaufry ('Mauf')

By Widdershins

• October 1, 2016

Age: 999 years, to the day

Gender: Other

Species: Non-Pony

Appearance: While I can't go into the three page thesis I have on the biological habits of hydras here, a short summary of that is that Hydri are not too far removed from trees. Given absence of disease or... self maulings, a hydra is functionally immortal. Trouble is, to work the massive needs of a hydra's body requires just about as much food as a typical town. A hydra takes a colossal toll on its natural surroundings, usually depleting it to a abandoned swampland, and the few times they've settled down too close to an inhabited village has led to the majority of the tales of monster slaying. <br /><br /> Gallimaufry stands at about 23 feet to its shoulders with its collarbone coming the the height of the eaves of most houses with its heads rising just above the roof. Its body is supported by two huge front legs shaped like trees with three claws on each that knuckle into, and claw its massive brown-green swampwater-colored bulk forward. As it lacks any rear appendages, the thick, scar-tipped tail is left to drag behind its disc-shaped body.<br /><br /> Each of its heads has its own color scales, which gradually turn from from the body's coat of brownish green to brighter as they go up the neck.Each head of the hydra is easily big enough for a grown pony to ride on. The corresponding names, colors, age of appearance and arrangement of heads will be placed down in the "Other section" where I have more room.<br /><br /> Each head has only enough brainpower to grant them their own thoughts, and minor physical control over their necks and body. There exists one large, massive super-organ behind the multi-chambered stomach and under the base of the tail that works the involuntary biological needs of the body and is the one part of a hydra that it can't regenerate.

Personality: It is rather hard to pin an organism ruled by committee down to a personality, but, for lack of a better word, Gallimaufry can be described as self-combative. It is not unusual for one head to lead an attack, only to get tackled & pinned by the head behind it or for another head to think differently at the last moment and turn the body around causing them to trip over onto their own necks and somersault themselves full circle. Each of the six heads share control over the two legs and as a result Gallimaufry has never eaten any meat that hasn't been dead for hours or flattened by his constant, uncontrollable thrashing. <br /> <br /> As a whole, Gallimaufry does want friends or at least company. But when a near thirty foot reptile is chewing through your barn silo or ripping off the back half of a restaurant to forage for food, you'd have to have no self-preservational skills at all to resist the urge to form a mob or vacate the town. <br /><br /> What with Mauf's height, each of its heads being in close proximity to each other & its tendency to try shouting itself down, Mauf doesn't hear or notice much that isn't part of it. This will usually lead to it trampling most ponies, buildings, & towns underfoot before it remembers what they were trying to do.

Backstory: Hydras have a very long & vulnerable adolescence. They are born from one single, abandoned egg and for the first decade in their "Spawn" stage of maturity they are pretty much just large snakes. As they grow up and sprout more heads through their "Runespoor" stage(from one to three heads, before they start growing their legs) they learn to cooperate their heads well enough to hunt, as each head has only enough intelligence to agree that all they care about is their next meal. <br /> <br /> Unluckily(or perhaps it was lucky, depending on your view) for Gallimaufry, a thousand years ago he was hit by a cascading wave of transforming chaos magic when he had only been out of his egg for a few months. As this magic hit him, and reorganized him, it blotted out his primal, animalistic, natural hydra mind and granted him his own autonomy and sentience to his yet-to-grow heads. Though this happy/unhappy incident gave the new hydra and its heads their distinct personalities & heightened intelligence, as the years came on and more heads piled onto the body a problem started to form. Mauf couldn't hunt for itself anymore. With its increasing bickering to add to its increasing size, there wasn't a creature alive that had the lack of brains to not see Mauf coming. As if it wasn't bad enough to resort to eating mud, rocks, and trees, each head had to agree that having five other voices screaming in your ear constantly wasn't the healthiest for any of the sanities. <br /><br /> While Mauf did try to avoid settlements, ponykind did tend to leave alot of their food & edible structures around and more then once did the hydra get chased off by angry mobs or roving knights. When one small fishing town had the good luck to decide better and abandon the town when it showed up, Mauf spent a few years haunting the ruins of the quickly demolished town and happened across a library of magical tomes. Blither, the eldest head, insisted on hording the books and over the next several years self-taught himself magic. After enough time theorizing over certain spells & convincing the other heads to focus long enough, Blither cast a spell on himself to temporarily separate his body into six pony forms and enabling itself to fit better into pony society, but more importantly, for each of them to have their time away from the rest of the "Family."<br />Still though, the rash, wild mind of a hydra still is apparent in each and they can't stay in any pony town for very long without picking a fight or wrecking something.