Name: The creature is nameless. It changes from story to story. “Handyman” is just what I call him outside of stories.
Gender: N/A, though in casual humanoid form it may be referred to as a male.
Note: Handyman is not meant to be a normal gladiator. He is a plot device, a catalyst. He is made so that you can develop your own character. Through his physical strength he bottlenecks your character into a situation where they fight against themselves, not against him. You needn't even show him in your story.
The Handyman is humanoid in shape. Its
skin is black, dry and leathery. It does not bleed save for a slow black ooze. When 9ft tall, its arms are 7ft. When 12ft, its arms are 9ft.
Head: The Handyman’s head is a large, spherical fist made up of thousands of tight-knit fingers. Its eyes are circular nails ingrown into its head, the cuticles at the bottom, giving it a ‘happy’ appearance. Trickles of foul-smelling black ooze come from where the nails dig in. It has a “smile” which dominates half of its head. The top and bottoms of the mouth are filled with pale yellow fingers that individually jerk and twitch, letting out clicks for sonar. It is incapable of changing facial expression.
The mouth, internally extending down its whole body, is a sheath for a long tentacle-like arm which takes place as a tongue. The tongue has the appearance of red, raw meat, white tendons running its length. It can grow long, microscopic fingers on its surface that can dig into a person’s skin and connect to their spinal cords. Though sometimes it is able to open its mouth, it often has to manually break it open or slam it shut, breaking its head in the process.
Body: The creature’s back is a multi-elbowed arm joint, each elbow being able to bend up to 90 degrees in any direction. The creature is casually slouched over. The upper half of the back has a “ribcage,” which are eight large fingers folded together. This is used to carry unconscious victims. The back also serves as a sheath for the creature’s tongue.
Legs: The legs of the thing are at a consistent thickness, the same as that of the back. Its “pelvis” is just two shoulders that connect the legs to the bottom of its body. Its feet are either large fingertips, for sneaking, or hands for maneuverability.
Arms: The creature’s arms can be any size below its max, being able to reach mere inches in length. Its upper arms grow slightly more thicker as they reach the elbow, and the forearms grow far thicker as they reach the hand. The fists of a 7ft arm is about 1ft thick. These arms have no wrists, instead focusing on gripping strength.
[/spoiler]
Arm Creation: Handyman’s entire body is constructed of fingers, hands and arms. It is able to summon fingers, hands and arms from anywhere on its body, except it cannot grow arms on arms. When at a casual height of 9ft, the arms may reach up to 16ft. At a casual height of 12ft, they may reach up to 21ft. They can be summoned either slowly or fired out of its body, which is useful when it summons the large, heavy arms.
Its whole being is a hivemind of arms. Because of this, alongside its 360-degree sonar, each arm can be controlled individually with great dexterity, though they are still large and slow. Also, it is capable of regenerating itself due to being constructed of summonable arms.
Mind invasion: By attaching its tongue to the back of a sapient creature’s neck, The Handyman is capable of sparking a lucid dream in the mind of the creature. It has power over this dream relative to how much fear and paranoia the subject is in at the time. It then uses the creature’s mind against itself in order to destroy it mentally. After this, the victim is left comatose until it eventually expires. It does not die outright.
Immortality: The creature has “lived” since time immemorial. It can be subdued with utterly immense power, or the far more conventional way, beating its mind invasion.
Senses:Handyman’s entire range of senses are centered around the ‘teeth’ fingers in its mouth. Through clicking, they grant it sonar, giving it a limited area of 360-degree vision. Through their sensitivity, they can sense changes in air currents. They, along with its tongue, are the only truly sensitive parts of the creature’s biology. Every part of its body other than its teeth is incapable of feeling regular pain. If need be, it would tear off its own arms and break its own bones and not flinch.
Darkness: The creature has some limited illusionary power within darkness, mostly around itself. For example, it can make one area seem darker than normal so it can hide, or it may stand in a darkened forest and camouflage itself as a tree trunk.
Height: Casually, the creature stands at any height between 9ft and 12ft. If it abandons its legs for arms, it can stand up to a bit under 30ft.
Grip: The creature’s large hands have immense gripping strength, made to practically solidify its fists when clenched. It can squish tank armour like tin foil, and snap trees under its grip.
Atmosphere: This is a passive effect of Handy’s presence. Within a good distance of the creature, the atmosphere becomes drowsy, though as you get closer to Handy you start to feel more unnerved, even if you don’t know that it’s there.
Arm forest: The ‘Arm forest’ is the creature’s way of forcefully changing the scenery around it. This does not happen often, due it it only being possible in a wide open space during night, and if the creature is somehow cornered.
The arm forest is achieved by the creature’s feet penetrating the ground until they hit a dense, solid surface such as a rock bed. Then the creature’s head flowers open, revealing rows of ‘teeth’ as well as a sucking void at the center. (This is because the ‘arm forest’ is just Handy syncing the world around it with its pocket dimension.) A white mist starts flooding from the void and swamps the ground. After this, massive and elbowless arm trees start breaking up from the ground, as tall and as thick as forest trees. The ground then starts to grow thousands of fingers, and the trees grow arm-like branches.
The purpose of the forest is to massively intimidate or to entrap. This forest does not try to kill, it merely tries to subdue, like a massive, sapient spider’s web.
Light: Though the creature’s body does not feel conventional pain- bludgeoning, cuts, etc.- it feels pain from light. Soft light, like that of a candle, feels like pins and needles. Daylight feels like being submerged in battery acid. Light also has the effect of slowing the creature down more and more, up until it becomes strong enough to entirely paralyse. A flashlight could paralyse whatever area it shone on. If you sleep with the light on, you’re untouchable.
Mind invasion: When within the creature’s implanted nightmare, you are put onto a playing field where your only enemy is yourself. By facing your fears and reclaiming your own mind, you can force the creature out. Not only does this cause the creature to run away and to leave you alone, having its own mind destroyed in the process. Winning also has the added benefit of completely removing the fear you fought against. Scared of spiders? It will use spiders against you, and if you beat it, you will wake up no longer scared of spiders.
Mind: The creature eats a mind once or twice a year since its body is incapable of permanently holding one. When its body runs out of a mind, either from starvation or having its mind invasion defeated, it loses its consciousness and retreats away to a dark cave to go inert.
Senses: The Handyman is blind and is incapable of sonar through transparent surfaces. Its ‘teeth’ are also very sensitive, where even throwing water on them could discombobulate it. Its teeth and tongue are capable of feeling conventional pain.
Intelligence: Its intelligence rivals that of a dog or a toddler. It is incapable of complex thought or communication. It can understand tones of voice at most. Its memory is usually allocated only to its victims. When it comes to humans it is capable of identifying males and females, and it identifies age by height. Meaning adults are full-sized humans, children are half-sized. (It would think a midget a child.)
Speed: When casual, the Handyman walks using only its legs. They are not made for combat, they are more like extensions of its back where it can directly sync its pocket dimension, hence the arm forest. The creature’s joints are able to be dislocated (and relocated) easily, so walking at any speed faster than a walk could risk its knees breaking.
When no longer casual, the creature becomes clumsy and sluggish. It can achieve bursts of speed by launching itself, but at this stage it’s just a rampaging mess.
Arm forest: During the arm forest, the creature’s head is incredibly vulnerable as many “teeth” are exposed. It must also keep constant contact with the dense underground surface, meaning one of its feet must always be in the ground, which greatly limits its speed. It also cares less about its immediate surroundings, meaning it won’t use the arms on its body for offensive purposes. It would also attempt to keep away from the enemy until it knows that the enemy is completely subdued.
The earliest recorded knowledge of this
creature is a symbol found in ancient cave paintings. Because it was often drawn alongside sleeping cavemen, it was thought of as a sort of death symbol, but was later learned that it was actually a drawing of the creature. Drawn as a warning.
Symbolism of the creature has arisen many times in past history, most visibly in multi-armed deities. Shiva, Brahma, Vishnu, heavily found in Hindu gods. It is often associated with immense power, destruction, death, or creation.
Some believe that it was this creature that gifted fear to the world, so that living things would have self-preservation and could flourish. It granted fear so that its flock would watch itself, and so whenever it was hungry, it would go forth and take away a bad sheep that abused the gift of fear, so that the flock may carry on in peace.
“We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.”
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Robert J Oppenheimer on the atomic bomb.[/spoiler]
Simple-minded. Likes to play with childr
en (they view it like an imaginary friend) and has a great fondness for them as they appear to be the only creatures not innately terrified of it. It has some form of morality, only haunting those that have harmed children. It migrates across the world constantly, occasionally making temporary homes in caves. It never lives in one area longer than a decade.
“Haunting” is the creature’s hunting tactic. This takes place over several weeks. It starts off by stalking the potential victim. If it accepts the haunted as the victim, it starts to directly affect their lives. It sews seeds of paranoia in the victims. Leaving doors open, moving objects when they don’t look, like what you’d expect out of a ghost. The only way you can know it is there is if you pay close attention to the sounds of the background and hear a gentle clicking. It takes great care in never showing itself to the victim.
Eventually the victim’s mind is marinaded in fear and paranoia, which makes the eventual mind invasion so much more successful. When it has fed, it leaves the body there for others to find, and it quietly leaves and migrates to another area.
The creature is casually calm and incapable of feeling anger, but when cornered it can become incredibly annoyed and fearful, making it lash out.[/spoiler]
Eye-hands: If its senses are blocked off, it sprouts pale grey arms from its “eyes” and feels about like an insect.
Humanoid shape: When casual, The Handyman maintains a humanoid look, walking on two legs. When cornered, it ditches the humanoid shape and takes to becoming a swarm of arms one could only describe as “Lovecraftian.”
Excited: When excited, the creature’s head can start to vibrate and shake, and it may start thumping the ground.
Arm dissolving: When the creature’s arms are severed, the lost limbs eventually dissolve into the ground or evaporate into the air.
Joints: The creature’s joints are dry and rough, causing grinding sounds whenever it moves and the occasional jerky movement.
Mindless state: When mindless (after losing its mind) the Handyman retreats to a dark area like an abandoned building or a cave, and remains inert until rediscovered. When confronted in its mindless state, it becomes horrifyingly brutal and becomes an incredibly destructive force, chasing down its prey blindly. Then it attempts to feed again. It’s easier to fight back during this state, as long as the whole feral-like attitude didn’t scare the victim half to death. It most likely would, though.
A crackling sound echoed around the fore
st, originating from the campfire that three kids surrounded. The fire was quite visibly dying out only leaving a little bit of light behind, the brightness slowly succumbing to the cold, apathetic night air. The adult of the party- Dave- went to his truck to get some firewood. He won't be gone long; but he'll be gone long enough for a story.
"Dave's going to be at least ten minutes going to his truck gettin' that firewood. So how about... a ghost story?" said Ted, the eldest of the three at a mighty 14 years old.
"What? No! We can't do that! Dave forbade us from telling scary stories! It's hard enough sleeping out here in the forest, anyway. The tents are too-"
Tara, twelve years old, was suddenly interrupted by Jack, a boy of the same age.
"Quiet down with yer darn' complainin'. It's been ages since I 'eard a good ghost story. 'Ave at it, Ted. Don't let mopey here put yer off."
Tara went "Hmph." and curled up a bit. Jack, a weird little boy with a love of talking funny, just made himself slightly comfy. Ted paused for some effect. The fire crackled a little less now, so the perfect atmosphere for a ghost story dawns.
Before saying the first word, Ted darts his eyes left and right, seeing if Dave was anywhere near; hard to tell, though. The clearing they were in was surrounded by tall, dark trees. There was a small path leading through the trees that went to a little area where the truck was parked; it was a good five minutes walk there and back but it was easy to see the path when you were in the forest.
"Well," started Ted "have you heard of the murder of... Benny Mills?" The other two shook their head; Tara unenthusiastically, Jack quite the opposite. "Benny Mills used to live a few miles away from here, you know. He lived in a cottage on the other end of this very forest, and he lived alone. The only person who really knew him was his landlord. They were good friends, often seeing each other on the weekends for poker, drinks, and so on. It was all fun and games for ol' Benny, until the scratching started."
Tara tried to conceal her shudder, and she thought she did pretty well. She didn't, though. Jack was already wrapped up in the story and Ted was having fun reciting it from his memory.
"Every night at Benny's house, there were scratches at his bedroom window. You'd think it would be a wolf or a stray cat, but he di
