Baths - A village of macaques enjoy exclusive access to an onsen through a high pass on Nobunga peak. Harmless, small, they softly close their wrinkled red eyes and bask lizardlike in the bubbling eggshell-colored eggshell-scented pools. Innocents, like cherubs in their garden, protected by golems of scalding igneous rock who love the macaques and who heat their pools; they will assemble if they sense violent intent and fill your lungs with boiling water. TREASURE: luminous natural bonsais growing from the rocky soil; string of garnet beads lit with inner fire, enshrined and hidden, a symbol of the golems’ pact and their shem.
Typewriters - Disease-afflicted or mind-controlled apes gather here and scrabble on reams of smooth brown bark with cochineal ink, random words and letters pulled from the land of Dream, the fuzzy overlap of primate noospheres allowing some half-conscious kinesthetic understanding of the human written word to leak through into the minds of these poor creatures. They scribble nonsense as they dream, feverish and sweating on soiled carpets of leaves. It would take months to sift through all the garbage and scraps but there are true secrets written here; pure coincidence, or messages sent through dream by agents unknown?
Ghouls - Prions tear through the psyche and pneuma of any unfortunate primate who consumes his brother’s meat. At the eastern end of Deepest Uhgumgoh, the island’s canyon where ghosts bounce as echoes and shadows blister skin - at that end, a valley surrounded on three sides by sheer cliffs, writhes the ghoul pile, held in check by a crystal pane of force which stretches from wall to wall, visible only where the dust has settled, a miracle working placed by the greatest wizard of all monkeykind - the bright-mantled chimp, with stars for eyes and a new-moon-mouth, ascendant a century ago to Outer Space riding atop his glowing comet-wife - Marvelous Japes, may he someday return!
For now we have only his artifacts and works to remind us of his glory. The ghoul pile is one of these. Spiritual prions have misfolded these apes’ souls and have rendered them invisible to their assigned psychopomps, unkillable by any known means. Now they thrash behind the glass, endlessly eating each other as they attempt to satiate themselves, minds lost, and sometimes a newly-fallen cannibal joins the raving mob, dropped over the side of the cliff via trapdoor gangplank by Monkeyville sheriffs, eyes downcast.
Tides - Here do the littoral kingdoms of Crust and Bivalve hold dominion. Amidst piles of leafy seaweed roam slimefooted spiral snails (monkeys harvest their love darts and insert them subdermally, causing paralytic relaxation and euphoria; highly addictive). Spiny mussels lurk, waiting to envenom the offending foot. The Houses of Cancer engage endlessly in cold war-style espionage for territory, prestige, slaves, and mating rights, while maintaining plausible deniability and friendly-enough surface relations. Crabbish misdeeds too-poorly covered up to be ignored are brought before the Barnacle Congress, a jury of five hundred sessile politicians adhered to a flat jade slab. At low tide, they listen dispassionately to both sides; at high tide, they adjourn to discuss the case amongst themselves beneath the waters, cirri fluttering. As the sea recedes again, the crabs gather to hear the barnacles’ judgment, honored as a keystone of stability in their world of betrayal and sabotage.
A QUEST: Occasionally, a committee of barnacle congressmen must take leave of the sacred slab and address some diplomatic issue far afield. Usually they recruit a trusted bailiff (traditionally an elder lobster, 9+ feet long, with tiny skittering isopod attendants on the carapace) to host and transport them, but this is a sensitive matter affecting all exoskeletal kind - they have caught wind of a renegade antinatalist cult led by hermit crab alchemists developing a hyper-concentrated, WMD-level mega-acid in a secret sea cave, which if released would spread along the coast of Monkey Island and melt every scrap of chitin and calcium carbonate alike. Kind of a Cuban missile crisis situation. Their culture makes them so insanely skilled in subterfuge that there is no knowing which crab is an agent of this cult; and really, who might blame them? Exhausted and beaten down by a life of ceaseless suspicion, shifting allegiances, innocent larvae snipped in the night by silent long-stepping spider crabs, one less rival to worry about, a supposed friend pulled apart behind a rock and left to the gulls. Might we too desire to wipe clean the slate, to erase the entire cursed Gomorrah?
The barnacles ask for your help. They will burrow into your skin and cement themselves to your shallower bones - the elbows and knees, the ankles - hidden beneath your clothes. They will need you to take frequent dips for them to feed. You will take them on a coastal journey; they will whisper directions. If they sense any betrayal they will rip themselves free, taking mashed chunks of your body with them. At the cave, it is your job to contain the acid. The barnacles will speak of a brighter future for Cancer, of fraternity, and some hermit crabs may be swayed to rejoin the fold, but unless there is real social change for these people something is going to snap, even if this specific disaster is averted.
(The PCs could risk a last-minute dive into the acid, suffering terrible burns and potentially disfiguring themselves but it is perhaps the only way to betray the barnacles and live; they can twist their cementaceous filaments with massive torque at a moment’s notice, and they are coordinated, so the only way to kill them and survive is sudden, full-body immersion. The acid is alchemically engineered to inflict maximum damage on exoskeletal beings but is less effective against mammalian skin cells.)
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