Cha: An Asian Literary Journal

Fiction / March 2016 (Issue 31)

Egg Tarts

Below is the unabridged and unannotated transcription of a page from Encyclopedia Apocrypha Edition II (c. 2347) under the vowel Er and reappearing under the vowel Gal, detailing the mannerisms and speculations surrounding a creature which might or might not exist, or have existed once upon a time, although it does not matter either way. Several allusions to factual and reputable authorities have been made therein; however, they in no way affirm any of the text's groundless statements and half-witted coinages.

Egg tarts, or Gaellus Gaelcocktus Ebulis (sic.), is a species of diurnal, carnivorous, parasitic invertebrate, with a reportedly ravenous appetite and a corresponding penchant for tearing off the noses of any unfortunate enough to chance upon its hideouts. They resemble in every way harmless and skillfully molded and baked egg tarts which were until recently a delicacy on the menus of certain Oriental states, the names of which have either been lost to time or have been omitted here for copyright reasons.

Unlike most invertebrates, egg tarts possess what some might call a skeletal or even spinal structure, which supports and maintains the shape of what would otherwise be a misshapen gelatinous puddle of fluid mildly resembling egg yolk. This vertebrae-like structure is roughly hemispherical with a flattened bottom and is composed solely of treated and solidified flour, which serves as a shell not unlike the serous membranes coating every organ in the human body. Considering the primarily liquid nature of egg tarts innards, it is not at all unwise to assume that once deprived of their vertebral shells, egg tarts are unable to survive.

The feeding routines of egg tarts have been widely documented and discourses on the matter can be accessed in the archives of the Knaywal Institute of Genomatics. Egg tarts follow a strictly carnivorous diet and prey on a wide range of living organisms, including, but not limited to, simian, mollusk and avian. The main criterion for its predation appears to be the position of its food source, which is to say, whether or not the prey is within the marked borders of the egg tart's place of residence. Suffice to say, egg tarts are extremely territorial predators that assail any breathing fauna or flora that enters their field of vision, which, as a side note, is a hypothesis that has yet been validated.

Egg tarts are known to hurl themselves at faces, or any surfaces perpendicular to the ground and with apertures available for the insertion of tendrils. They then proceed to assimilate the cutis and subcutaneous tissues of their prey with the aid of several spurts of aqueous toxins which function in a manner not unlike that of enzymatic tenderizer. This is immediately succeeded by an amoeba-like extension of pseudopods which invade the now eroded pores on the face (or other surface) of the prey. It is not known whether this was a modus operandi which evolved during the course of natural selection, or more likely, during the three hundred and thirty-three years of I.P.T. It is also not known what form of operation the pseudopods undergo within the body of the prey, though it is known without any doubt that at the end of such processes, the cerebral cortices of the prey cease to hold any sway over its body, and so long as an egg tart remains attached to the face of its prey, it can manipulate the prey's body as a possibly permanent, parasymbiotic extension of its own.

This bodily function of egg tarts, which many have depicted as being methodic and anthropomorphically efficient, has raised many questions on the sentience of the species, leading to several human rights movements in Ushene advocating the admittance and integration of egg tart-infested humans into communities which previously held a puritanical stance towards such parasitic hosts.

Conspiratorial bioentanglementalists (pronounced "bio-an-tango-mental-ist") believe all egg tarts are the spawn of an extraspatio- or -temporal-terrestrial entity named "Yolkemono" which is generally believed to be a portmanteau of the "yolk" in "egg yolk" and "化け物" (pronounced "ba-ke-mo-no"), the equivalent of "monstrosity" in the archaic tongue of a remote stratovolcanic archipelagic sovereignty. However, a belief being a belief, this hypothesis is without any intersubjective phylogenic evidence, which in the least ideal of instances might even refute this claim. The observed occurrences which supposedly confirm this hypothesis have mostly been exposed as elaborate hoaxes or too circumstantial to be of any value to scientific inquiry. Theories on the origin of the species are thus left largely to the fields of fringe science, and certain institutes are even known to prohibit any experimentation in that direction, out of procedural gamesmanship, but also due to the risks such endeavors may entail.

A list of See Alsos attributed to this entry in later editions of Encyclopedia Apocrypha (III, V, XI and Pocket Edition 2, 3 and 4) have been compiled and attached to this excerpt:

See also Cameronian Facehugger or Xeno Visoteges