274 - The Jungle of Kled

Otherspace: The Jungle of Kled

Hot, fetid and swarming. The Jungle of Kled is inhospitable to long-term survival. Constant growth, rot and decay in a sea of impenetrable vegetation, it reeks of life and death. A soup of virulent diseases that would baffle medical science. Predator and prey locked in ferocious evolutionary conflict. By comparison the staid and sterile environments of the liveliest cities are terrible bastions of stasis. Truly dead excepting where nature manages to inevitably bleed through, to consume and transform back into the cycle. Life is constant change, adapt or die.

Travelling to the Jungle of Kled
Discovered in the late 1960s by members of an itinerant hippie commune, the Jungle of Kled (named after an affection for H.P. Lovecraft’s The Silver Key) can only be accessed within a man-made structure reclaimed by nature. By chance, experimentation with psychedelics and lucid dreaming allowed their minds to enter as their bodies slept. Aside from rumour and hearsay the only record of the techniques they practiced is a poorly mimeographed pamphlet, all but three copies either destroyed by their creator or gone the way of all ephemera. One is in the hands of a small group of homeless urban spelunkers caught by a cultish fascination in the promise of a world that at least seems honest in its hostility.

Thanks to modern developments in pharmaceuticals there is another option. People under the influence of drugs which cause somnambulism can physically enter the Jungle while resting in the same places. This is unwise. Unlike entry by dream the only exit for sleepwalkers is to drug themselves into oblivion again and pray their sleeping bodies can find the real world before the inhabitants of the jungle find them. However it does allow them to bring things back.

The Landscape of the Jungle of Kled
The Jungle is a bounty of constant change. A sea of boundless green so thick it’s often hard to tell whether it’s day or night. The ground carpeted with leaves and vines concealing twisted roots and muddy sinkholes. Hold still long enough and the vegetation will grow around you, snaring you. Landmarks are ephemeral like sand dunes rolling in the wind.

Heat and humidity are constant and punctuated only by sporadic and torrential rain. Insects that defy taxonomy buzz lazily through the air, eager to nibble or lay larvae in your flesh. The cries and bellows of prey and predator echo without indication of direction or distance. Animals mutate - over generations measured in days and hours - into shapes stranger than any seen in reality.

Underneath, in places, are the swallowed husks of civilization. Ozymandian relics that occasionally jut through the canopy like an exposed skeleton. They offer dubious shelter, dangerously unstable and attractive to local fauna. As their real world counterparts crumble into dust the jungle versions of these places are pulled back into the earth by nature and forgotten in the intense rush.

Dream Death
Travel by dreaming is less dangerous than visiting in the flesh but has its own hazards. Death while dreaming in the jungle permanently deprives a person of their ability to enter a rapid eye movement (REM) sleep state. The good news is that it won’t kill you the way sleep deprivation inevitably would, some people go for decades on REM-suppressing dosages of antidepressants with no ill effects. The bad news is that you will never ever dream again and struggle to hold on to magickal charges.

Someone who has experienced dream death leaks magick like a sieve. Every time they fall asleep, even for a moment, any charges they’re holding vanish along with consciousness. Deliberately putting off going to bed will delay this loss but unless you spend them it’s inevitable.

One other side effect of dream death is that any changes to your dream self caused by the fruit of the lamb are now gone for better or worse. Physical changes remain.

The Fruit of the Lamb
The object of most experienced jungle traveller's journeys, the rare fruit of the lamb grows in pairs from low-hanging vines in a shady grotto. At the centre of each leafy ear is a piece of pink, fleshy fruit that squeals like sizzling meat when bitten. It tastes just like its namesake and has miraculous, horrifying effects.

Consuming it feels invigorating, the experience has been likened to methamphetamine with a similar hangover. Wounds close, clumsily healed over with scarred pink flesh, but tear open again without rest. The body ripples and changes in chaotic spasms. New limbs, eyes sprouting compound facets like a fly, the loss of six inches in height are just a few of the unpredictable mutations people have experienced. Some are more or less subtle. A few are beautiful, many are monstrous.

For those eating the fruit while physically present effects carry into the real world. Dreamers who try it find their dream selves are warped but their physical bodies remain the same. This isn’t pleasant, conversion disorders and problems with proprioception are common outcomes of a mismatch between the physical body and mind. It’s possible (but unlikely) that pre-existing conditions could be “cured” the same way.

Apex
A creature of lamarckian consumption, the Apex looks like a transparent, beaked blob just over a yard wide supporting itself by dozens of thin, chitinous tentacles. Entirely carnivorous, it is defined by a unique ability to temporarily extrude pieces of animals it has eaten from its gelatinous body. Venomous stingers, wings and the faces of dead friends begging for help are just a few of the things that have been witnessed.

It loses these abilities after it metabolizes the nutrients from each of them, enforcing a frenzied pace of constant hunting and eating to stay at the top of the food chain. Primarily an ambush predator, its style and intelligence fluctuate with its most recent meals. Two people have had conversations with it after it ate their companions. Surprisingly witty and urbane, it knew all the things the dead did and more.