User blog:MaidenClaire/Calithse

A simple, vastly overcomplicated attempt at getting an idea out of my head. As you can see it's gotten way out of hand very rapidly.

Overview
Calithse (pronounced whichever way seems correct and most exotically-fitting to you) is some giant mutant centipede-like creature with some truly ridiculous abilities and probably little appeal but what the hell. She's supposed to be a fairly flexible hybrid that you can either build as a melee mage, tanky AD dps or a straight tank, with a basic emphasis on mitigation through armour and base damage reduction rather than exclusively stacking a metric fuckton of health and regen.

The main gimmick here is the careful management of a stacking tanky melee-enhancing buff, individual stacks of which can be spent to enhance or slightly alter the workings of her other abilities, in a fashion sortof slightly analogous to Fury empowerment or a temporary Evolution.

She has a dash, a medium CD gap-closer for an ult, many aoe doodads, and a few interactions with AP (on her main damage-dealers), AD (on a couple of skills to help with bruisering), health, and armour, and a possibly overpowered passive that hopefully encourages closeness to her allies which is always helpful (which is why the radius is smallish).

Calithse is a work in progress, numbers will be off and are broadly total ass-pulls, things will be under or overpowered, and as it stands just generally this is going to be a rough draft no matter how many times it gets edited, so please bear that in mind. This is just for fun.

I'm absolutely serious there are many numbers here and I've crunched precisely ZERO of them.

Lore
Deep beneath Valoran, far below that world of human and yordle and twisted Zaunite creation alike, below the earth and rock, the chasms of humming crystal still alive with the echoing chimes of the last Rune War, and lower and lower, and deeper. Deep beneath Valoran, beyond light and sight and sound of the world above, out of reach even to those insidious monsters whose homes lay scattered in the Void, there stretch thousands upon thousands of miles of alien architecture.

Catacombs of such scale that the golden towers of Demacia would barely sit at half their height, walls thick and so very old that pulse with faint traces of ancient, unknowable magic, the very heartbeat of this dark and hauntingly quiet underworld. It is a dead place, truly dead, its air a soup brewed from the stench of a thousand years of rotting flesh, and hunger, such deep and pure and mind-shattering hunger bounces from every corner, every nook and every cranny and whispers into your mind 'Death'. There are no words, not as such, but the ancient echo that fills the ears and the mind and could very well be your own heartbeat offers up only that one. Solitary. Thought.

Momentary glints of dying magic light these tombs with a spark, a flicker of ocean-blue candlelight in the deep dark, and in that small window you see the black eternity of a vacant eye-socket stare back at you, and you see the air filled with ash, and the walls lined with crumbling broken bones, and the floor is slick and shiny and sanguine, and your heart drops through to the centre of Runeterra itself when you hear a single gurgling shriek in the impossible distance. In a place this dark and quiet and old. A place that should be dead.

These were the thoughts of Calithse, the Grand Burrower, broodmother and very last of the great crawlers, those who skitter in the darkest of places and fear no other. And so too were they the final thoughts of her brothers and sisters, those mothers and fathers too of countless thousands of their own, before they succumbed to the silent madness, and readily slaughtered one another and stood to be slaughtered, rather than fall to the nameless dark they found. To see such behemoths of teeth and razored claws and tons of sheer unstoppable force frozen in fear is, in itself, and was to Calithse and her daughters as they clambered and ran and fled from their own screams, beyond utterly terrifying. The hollowed bodies of the others, dragged and scraped and still dripping rich with moist flesh, lay not far from where they first fell, though what or who moved them remains to be seen, and they now line the walls, and their armoured husks prop gently ajar doors which should never have been opened.

Calithse and her brood scattered and hid, and died, and with her own quivering warbles she commanded her nightcrawlers, her dwindling sons and daughters of the deep, to dig, to scratch at the great ceiling of their world, to find hope, to -- at the very least -- escape the nameless dark for just one more day. They dug, ever faster, ever more desperately, ever more recklessly as their numbers shrank and the dying cries of their own kind began to catch up with them, they moved the foundations of Valoran without a single eye looking back, their frantic claws and strained minds unwittingly steering them to a source of great power. By the time the Burrower's armoured bulk crashed up through stone and earth and marble and struck sunlight in the gateway of the Institute of War, the tunnel beneath her had fallen silent, and eerily still, and the exhausted, drained bodies of her children tumbled lifelessly back down into the clutches of the nameless dark. With mute sadness and a solemn rage she raked her mighty claws against the earth one last time, but could not bear to watch as the doorway to her forgotten home collapsed in on itself. Into the Institute she staggered, the last of her kind but for the eggs in her belly, drawn to the alien powers of the Summoners residing within, and to these mortal gods -- in her indecipherable chirping tongue -- she offered herself.

Weeks later and with the nervous co-operation of Runeterra's finest linguist-magi, her offer was accepted.

Ability Details
CA$