Let's Play Monmusu Quest: Paradox [part 2] - 16: Plansect Village

<- Previous: School of Nope

After proving Mephisto is, surprise surprise, in league with the devil, we now have to carry out a mission for her.  Plansect, the original Forest of Nope, is in civil war, with insects and plants happily munching each other.  Someone should make a spin-off game – Plants vs Zombies Insects: An XXX Parody.

Plansect Village can be found on the map as a big tree to the west of Grand Noah.

Warning: Forest of Nope ahead

We’re barely through the entrance gates when Lily and Rooty attack us.  Both of these were in the original series.  Lily kills you by wrapping her petals around you and absorbing all your juices.  Rooty does the same with her roots.

It's not just your semen she's drawing up...

Probably a good idea not to die to them then.

Despite the hostile alraune-type monsters running around, Plansect is still a village of sorts.  You can use a harpy feather to warp here and it has NPCs in the form of a blacksmith and mermaid merchant on the south side of the central lake.

Left: Blacksmith & Merchant.  Ahead: Alraune Priestess & Canaan Sisters

Amira is even hiding here at the end of a passageway to the south that curls back close to the entrance.

The area around the lake is safe.  Outside of that and we’re open to attack from various horny plant-type monster girls.  I say horny, but it’s hard to tell given that most of them seem to want to eat us or grow mushrooms out of our bodies.  They are also all repeat girls from the original series.  The only new one is a spunky l’il mushroom gal that appears to be a daughter of the original parasol mushroom girl.  It’s a Delphinus, so if you were expecting horror extra from Matango, you’re not going to be disappointed.

The angels are worse...

Someone asked to go a bit more in detail on the Bad Ends, so I’ll try and do it for at least one girl per post.  For this one it makes sense to go with L’il Shroom as she’s the only new monster girl in this section.  Her temptation move is to smother our dick in soft mushrooms.

For her Bad End she hugs us close and buries our dick in her ‘flesh hole’, which I presume might have been a vagina at some point.

Mushroom sex

After getting us to come, she’s eager to use that semen to make us her seedbed.  As she’s a fungus that means…

She grows on you after a while...

Uh oh.  Yup, it means growing all over us with nice soft fungus.

A little too much growing on you

Maybe, it’s not that Bad of an End.  Luka seems all happy and comfy and is spraying tons of spunk into her.  Then the spunk runs out and we sort of... rot.  Not nice, L’il Shroom.  Not nice.

L'il Shroom, I thought you were one of the nice ones...

Burn.  All.  Mushroom.  Girls.  On.  Sight.

Given the variety of the monster girls, recruiting everyone here is easier than you might think.  Rooty and Lily are recruited as a pair.  The others are also recruited as group of four (similar to the fairies and zombies).  No new group scenes from what I can see.  Toro Toro Resitance obviously kept Delphinus busy populating the Tartarus regions with fresh horrors.

The quest NPC is another returnee from the original series – the Alraune Princess.  You can find her in the centre of the village here:

Plansect Village's Chief - the stress is making her unwell

Behind her are the Canaan sisters that also showed up in the original series.  They’re here as mercenaries and not interested in talking to us.

Time to find out what’s going on from Priestess.  The plants are tired of the war even though they appear to be winning.  The insects have been pushed back to a mountain in the south.

(You can visit this location before talking to Priestess.  The main entrance is blocked by a horde of plant girls and hornet girls fighting each other.)

Machine translation is also a little sketchy again.  This is what I think the Priestess said, but it might not be totally accurate.

Plants and insects have always been a bit tetchy with each other.  They were at civil war before, and then Alice 17th came along and bashed everyone’s heads together and forced a ceasefire.  The ceasefire didn’t hold because two of Black Alice’s fake gods turned up to stir things up again.  These are the jaguar god, Tezcatlipoca, and the feathered serpent god, Quetzalcoatl.

More of Black Alice's fake gods

(who also happen to be real Aztec gods, although your value of real may vary depending on what you believe)

As with the Aztec deities that inspired them, Tez and Quetzie don’t seem to like each other much.  It’s not long before they’re fighting and dragging the plant and insect girls into their squabble.  Plants are forced to align with Tez and the insects behind Quetzie.  And they’ve been at war ever since.

They don't like each other

Priestess asks which side we want to support.  So, another pick-a-side to determine which girl joins the harem.

Well, not quite.

There is a 3rd option where you can go talk to the insects to get their side of the story.  Select this one.

Now it’s time to visit the Red(?) Mountain to talk to Queen Bee.

-> Next: Insect Mountain

Japanese Mushroom People and Ghost Ships: The story of how I rediscovered William Hope Hodgson

I was a voracious reader as a child.  My school had a small library and I devoured all the horror, fantasy and science fiction I could find.  I loved (and still love) scary short story collections.  There were two stories I remember as really scaring the bejeebers out of me.

The first featured a remote part of rural America being slowly corrupted by a blight that came from a meteorite.  This blight took the form of a strange colour and caused plants and animals to grow in bizarre and horrifying ways.  I remember the plight of the hapless farming family, unable to leave despite knowing the colour is slowly consuming them from the inside.  The ending is unsettling as well.  On one hand it seems like it’s over—having eaten its fill, the colour shoots back off into space—but on the other the narrator reports seeing a residue still present at the bottom of the well.  Worse, the whole area is going to be flooded and turned into a reservoir, potentially spreading the contamination further.  For a child used to ghost stories with nice neat endings, an ending that implies it might not be over, that it might, in fact, get much much worse, gave me shivers.

Most horror aficionados will immediately recognise that as HP Lovecraft’s classic: “The Colour out of Space.”  I didn’t know who Lovecraft was at the time, but when I bumped into his work—and the Cthulhu mythos—again later, it was no great surprise to learn he was the writer responsible for a story that had left a mark on me.

The second story was about a group of sailors that found a queer abandoned boat.  The boat is floating in a patch of scum and covered all over in strange fungal growth.  As the sailors climb aboard, the sense of something being wrong deepens.  Below the decks they think they hear what sounds like the pumping of a great heart.  Then the fungus starts to move.  One man is gruesomely consumed and the others barely escape with their lives.  Worse, this is not a story that ends with the monster meeting a final and fiery end.  The narrator ends his story and the reader is left with the knowledge that the fungal ship is still out there.

Trying to identify this story was more of a puzzle.  Sadly, back then I was too young and stupid to actually pay attention to the names of the writers who provided me with these wondrous stories.  Or in this case even the title.  I knew it was a story about a creepy boat covered in man-eating fungus, but as I couldn’t remember either the writer or title, and had not come across it since, I figured this was going to be one of those pieces of nostalgia forever lost to the mists of time.

And so time passed...

Recently I watched the cult Japanese film “Matango.”  Fans of Kenkou Cross’s Monster Girl Encyclopedia will recognise that name.  It’s used for this entry:

No, not that Matango...

I don’t know if KC took the name from the film or both have the same roots in Japanese mythology.  (On a tangential note, Alraune, another frequently appearing monster girl, comes from German myth, and the Hanns Heinz Ewers novel of the same name has also spawned a few films)

Matango is an odd 1963 Japanese film where a bunch of characters get ship-wrecked on an island.  The interior of the island contains lots of strange mushrooms and they find the wreck of a research boat covered in strange fungal growth.  They avoid eating the mushrooms at first, but then food supplies run low and the horror kicks in when they discover eating the mushrooms turns you into a mushroom person (with appropriately icky slow transformation)

So far so Japanese.

Except it isn’t.  The plot is based on the short story “The Voice in the Night”, written by the English writer William Hope Hodgson.

“...boat covered in strange fungal growth.”  Could this be the mystery author of the mystery story that scared the bejeebers out of me as a child?

And indeed it is.  After a little digging through Hodgson’s bibliography and the wonders of out-of-copyright work being made available on the internet, I was able to rediscover “The Derelict.”

You can read it here.

“All about him the mould was in active movement. His feet had sunk out of sight. The stuff appeared to be lapping at his legs and abruptly his bare flesh showed. The hideous stuff had rent his trouser-leg away as if it were paper. He gave out a simply sickening scream, and, with a vast effort, wrenched one leg free. It was partly destroyed. The next instant he pitched face downward, and the stuff heaped itself upon him, as if it were actually alive, with a dreadful, severe life. It was simply infernal. The man had gone from sight. Where he had fallen was now a writhing, elongated mound, in constant and horrible increase, as the mould appeared to move towards it in strange ripples from all sides.”

Brrr.  Yep, still as creepy as I remember.

Hodgson came before HP Lovecraft and while his work lacks the core cosmic bleakness saturating Lovecraft’s works, he’s worth checking out if you like old weird horror.  His books can be found for free at the Gutenberg project here.  He also created the supernatural detective Thomas Carnacki.

And that, through a rather convoluted path, is how I rediscovered the stories of William Hope Hodgson, a writer who scared the bejeebers out of me as a child.