Meet Osiphus

There's a fairly common technique used in a lot of the movies we've all seen, where as the credits begin to roll, the camera slowly pans out from the final action scene. What begins as a narrow overhead view of the bad guys' corpse gradually opens up to show the burning car beside him, then the street and the surge of onlookers, then the city block, etc. Finally, just before the screen fades to black and the movie's title song kicks in, you've got the widest possible view of the entire city, with dark clouds of smoke billowing from the car that you can no longer quite see.


It's dramatic as all hell.


I'll introduce one of my "Aliens" in much the same way, starting with the narrow view and panning out to wide-angle.


Osiphus is one bad-ass mother-trucker. It's as big as an RV, looks like the mix of an angry bull and a gigantic space scorpion, and is essentially hell on six legs. On top of all that, it's older than the stars and virtually indestructable. To clear up any confusion, I'm referring to it as "It" for now, because to my knowledge, it has neither penis nor vagina.


<Pan Out>


Osiphus is actually only one-half of a symbiotic pair. The other half is Linegal (lin-a-GALL). If Osiphus is the brawn of the pair, Linegal is the brain. Problem is, Linegal has gone rogue and abandoned the symbiosis. Linegal has been running or in hiding for a few thousand years, and Osiphus has been hunting it's other half for all of that time. The hunt has spanned the galaxies and the millenia, but the chase is nearing its end.


<Pan Out>


The Osiphus-Linegal pair are but one of perhaps a hundred similar pairs that are sparsely spread throughout the Universe. Collectively, all of the pairs are the "Primordial", an ancient being that encompasses all of the lesser symbiotic pairs in a single collective conscience, or "hive mind".


Though the pairs act with autonomy, their thoughts and behaviors are subject to the influence of the collective conscience. There are elements of that conscience that want both Linegal and Osiphus destroyed - to sever the limb so that the body may be saved.


Osiphus is the hand. The Osiphus-Linegal symbiosis is the arm. The Primordial is the body.


Osiphus and it's hunt for Linegal are a key plot element in The Almoner, but it is not really a central character. Only one scene will be told through Osiphus' point of view, and that's the prologue.


And I'll be honest, trying to write even a single scene in the POV of the convoluted mess I've described above is proving to be a challenge. I may skip it for now, and begin writing scenes for the more central human characters with whom I can more easily identify, by virtue of them having penises and vaginas (though rarely both).