We are a hive mind. What one sees, all see. What one hears, all hear. What one smells, all blame on Unit XG47 (bottom right). As we traverse the cosmos in our Hyperdimensional Omniphasic Meditation Chamber, we seek the collected knowledge of the entire universe. Oh, and a tiny crowbar.
In Dungeons and Dragons there’s a monster called a cranium rat. They’re rats with big bulgy brains. Alone, they’re just marginally smarter rats. The thing is, they’re psychic. As you get more in one place they get smarter and smarter. In the PC game Planescape: Torment there are so many of these in the city of Sygil that they attain super-human intelligence, becoming a collective being called Many As One. Imagine standing in an underground cistern turned tiered gallery, seeing thousands of eyes gleaming in the dark, and hearing a menacing voice that comes from inside your head.
This version is a whole lot cuter.
I didn’t play much Planescape in my D&D days so my knowledge of it is sketchy at best but I feel like I might want to go back and read up on it after reading your post about the cranium rat. Sounds like good stuff.
I remember Planescape: Torment, and yeah, Many-As-One, the cranuim-rat hive-mind, was pretty scary, especially since the dangerous thing about the cranuim rats is they didn’t just get smarter in groups – they even gained the ability to cast spells! And the more of them in the group, the more powerful their magic – the advice you are given in-game is that if you find a dozen or more cranium rats in a group, RUN for your life and don’t look back.
A dozen of them is already enough to fry you to a crisp, so happening on a collective of maybe a thousand or more? Pick your next words carefully, because Many-As-One can read your mind if it wanted to, or simply just melt your brain out of your ears. And it is implied that Many-As-One isn’t even the only cranium rat collective down beneath the city, or even the largest one. And did I mention they also keep company with were-rats?
All things considered, I’ll take these cute hamsters instead…
I wanna know what shade that lip color on the bottom one is. (Guessing it’s from Urban Decay and has the word “rodent” in the name…)
Hamster Leeeeps Peenk
👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
I wanna boop all those noses. 🐹
Me too, bop the noses and give kisses.
I bet there’s another one or two stuffed in the back!
Squeeeeee!!!! 😁
Ive seen this before and its too cute! Having had many hamsters, yes—they do things like this!
And – obviously – resistance is futile.
It’s my dream to one day have this many hamsters.
And what would the collective noun for this many hamsters be? An EarPod?