Deepest one (SLASH'EM)

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For the monster in dNetHack and its derivatives, see deepest one (dNetHack).

A deepest one, h, is a type of monster that appears in the Lethe patch, SLASH'EM, SpliceHack, SlashTHEM, and Hack'EM.

Deepest ones are a type of huge amphibious humanoid that are tougher variants of deeper ones: they are strong like deeper ones and thick-skinned in addition to their increased size, and are overlords to their kind. Tame deepest ones may turn traitor.

Deepest ones have two claw attack and a strong bite attack, and possess poison resistance and cold resistance.

A deepest one corpse is poisonous to eat. In SLASH'EM and SlashTHEM, eating a deepest one corpse or tin always grants poison resistance, while in SpliceHack and Hack'EM doing so grants 29 (+22%) additional poison resistance.

Generation

Randomly-generated deepest ones are always created hostile. A deeper one can grow up into a deepest one—in SLASH'EM and SlashTHEM, the change in body size will not break any currently worn suit of armor.

Deepest ones can appear among the random h that are part of the first quest monster class for Cavepeople and make up 24175 of monsters that are randomly generated on the Caveman quest.

Origin

The Deep Ones are creatures in the Cthulhu Mythos of H. P. Lovecraft. The beings first appeared in Lovecraft's 1931 novella The Shadow over Innsmouth, but were already hinted at in the 1917 short story "Dagon". The Deep Ones are a race of intelligent ocean-dwelling creatures, approximately human-shaped but with a fishy appearance, and the males would regularly mate with human women against their will, creating societies of hybrids along the coast.

Despite being primarily marine creatures, Deep Ones can survive on land for extended periods of time and possess biological immortality, never dying except by accident or violence. The Deep One portrayed in Dagon is of a vastly larger size than the roughly human-scaled beings seen in Innsmouth, and the wider Cthulhu Mythos implies that Deep Ones continuously grow throughout their lives, hence their size changing when they grow up in SLASH'EM and other variants.

Encyclopedia entry

For eighty thousand years Pth'thya-l'yi had lived in Y'ha-nthlei,
and thither she had gone back after Obed Marsh was dead.
Y'ha-nthlei was not destroyed when the upper-earth men shot death
into the sea. It was hurt, but not destroyed. The Deep Ones
could never be destroyed, even though the palaeogean magic of the
forgotten Old Ones might sometimes check them. For the present
they would rest; but some day, if they remembered, they would
rise again for the tribute Great Cthulhu craved.

[ The Shadow Over Innsmouth, by H.P. Lovecraft ]