BreadnoughtYou are on the archive wiki. The new wiki is here. Enormous and greedy, breadnoughts ooze and goo their way through the desert like psychotic hallucinations. No-one who meets them is sure of their actual existence: those lost in the desert report sightings of the amorphous, mountainous monstrosities, claim to have survived by slurping their foul slime; those living in more moderate climates never relate any encounter that did not end in town-engulfing disaster. The first kind of tale needs to be treated with caution: the slime they carry has been found to contain ramidophide, a substance so hallucinogenic it forms the basis of wham, and is worth its weight in radioactive carbides on the black market. Surviving an encounter out in the desert seems to imply having crawled for days in the moist excretion of the alleged breadnought, sucking in its life-giving moisture along with its poisons until the drug-induced ability to sense one's environs becomes powerful enough to find a way out. These not-so-reliable witnesses report following a heap of crusty muck larger than a small island through days and days of determined pilgrimage. They speak of seepages of gritty sludge, explosions of smelly gas, and occasionally of encounters with slippery creeps (called Reamers by the arising cults) who rise from the slime, wallop and speak in tongues. The second type of report is rare: breadnoughts seem unlikely to leave survivors, and the larger the breadnought the greater the area that is decimated by it. Rare escapees describe the foul-smelling heap, some as small as a house, some as large as the eye can grasp, rolling in from the horizon accompanied by a high-pitched squeal that never subsides. Anything caught in its path is assimilated in its murky gloop. Anything out of its path shrivels and dies from absorbing its poisonous emissions. Folklore speaks of those who ride the breadnoughts, impervious of the corrosive effects of its hide. Some claim the breadnoughts' supreme power can be reigned in by those phantasmal riders, to be used for conquest or punishment. Those who do often subscribe to Reamer worship and tend to be too strung-out on wham to say anything much sensible. There is a recorded case of Regis Bowden-Smygg, erst-while commander of the all-terrain velocipede following a breadnought for days, wrapped in layers of translucent cotton-ilk and breathing from a large tank. He claims to have witnessed a meeting of two breadnought beasts, their murky throes of passion, merging and subsequent rapture. He claimed in his memoir this was the origin of the Flomo valley, and the nineteen breadnought offspring that resulted were the cause of the Flomo calamity, in which every human habitation within 400 miles of the valley was decimated for no explicable reason. Since the rest of Bowden-Smygg's memoir deals with his unlikely sexual exploits among the mushroom people, this tale, however entertaining, is widely dismissed.
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