LSGL BRAINSTORM
W 01.23.08

PREMISE:  Develop the story at 3 levels:  (1) broad timeline, (2) significant incidents, (3) moment-by-moment texture/color.  See if I can go through entire “deep history” at moment-by-moment level...  Particularly trying to find out if the “why did this thing happen?” of a story can be resolved by looking closely at “how did this moment transpire?” / “how did it feel?”

1.  Other questions to address.
I’ve just re-read “At The Mountains Of Madness”...  It may be useful at this point to synopsize what happens in the story as it’s actually told.  Similarly, I feel it may be useful to describe the areas in which I’m already digressing from Lovecraft’s original, since I’m sure to soon be committing to  further digressions and innovations.

2.  How many wings do the elders have?
In re-reading the book, I found the definitive answer to the question of whether the elders have two or five wings:  they have five.  I’m referring to the book “The Annotated H.P. Lovecraft,” edited by S.T. Joshi (1997).  Page 274:  “Occasionally they accomplished long swoops with the auxiliary use of two or more sets of their fan-like folding wings.”  Thus, “two or more” clearly indicates that there were more than just two wings.  The book “Barlow’s Guide to Extraterrestrials” has an over all excellent illustration of the elders (“old ones”) -- however, I now have my proof that it is factually inaccurate in portraying only two wings.

3.  Elders weren’t really a warrior-based society
According to ATMOM as written, the elders didn’t really fight with Cthulhu.  There are three great conflicts with other species described:  the spawn, the shoggoths, the mi-go.  Cthulhu settled on earth and there was a sort of division of territories; R’lyeh sank, and the spawn disappeared.  Then, there was the “war of resubjugation” with the shoggoths, which the elders won.  Then the mi-go came to earth...  And while there was some conflict, it appears that the elders mostly just let the mi-go have the land masses -- they retreated to their underwater cities.  The one exception is the land mass of Antarctica, which was always a holy place for the elders.

The overall impression is that while the elders were masters of space flight and creating new life from protoplasm in the beginning, they were never really much of a warrior race.  For the most part they were content to surrender territories to the spawn and to the mi-go -- it wasn’t imperative for them to maintain global domination.  The shoggoths, it seems, needed to be put in their place because they had initially been servants -- so it was an intimate relationship, rather than a conflict with outsiders.

See, it seems that the elders defeated neither Cthulhu nor the mi-go.  They defeated the shoggoths...  But only temporarily.  This is problematic for my story.  (a) It makes them a more passive species...  When faced with conflict, it appears that they prefer (in essence) to draw up a treaty indicating national boundaries.  (b) The notion that the elders became “decadent” is less compelling if they weren’t strong before becoming weak.  There’s not enough of a dramatic shift.  In essence, Lovecraft says that they forgot about their previous science simply because the species was exceptionally old.  They also seem to have lost their prior mastery of art and science as the ice age descended.  They got dumber because it got cold?  Not exciting.

However, although it’s not “dramatic” enough for a short film, I think Lovecraft’s choices about the elders are interesting...  Aliens are ALWAYS conquerors in sci fi.  The notion of simply deciding to divide up land, each species living peacefully on their side of the border -- it’s unheard of.

The notion that the elders simply forgot their previous science is also interesting.  I don’t think it really makes sense...  It’s rather inexplicable that a species that has lasted a billion years on earth could just “lose” such knowledge.  And a billion years is only the time they’ve spent here -- it doesn’t count the time they spent in other solar systems, other galaxies, “other universes.”  I think the utter lack of causality here is a flaw in Lovecraft’s writing.  Granted, any explanation would likely be overly simplistic...  So maybe it’s better to leave the issue vague...  But Lovecraft doesn’t even really connect it to losing specific cities, or to the wars.  Are there no libraries??

4.  How were the spawn of Cthulhu (“the spawn”) defeated?
I just re-titled the previous point, and cut’n’pasted my original question here.  See, if the elders didn’t actually defeat Cthulhu in ATMOM, “how was Cthulhu defeated” becomes a somewhat moot point.  If I have the elders defeat him, I’m simply making something up at this point.

However:  Maybe not.

In ATMOM we don’t get an explanation of why R’lyeh sank.  It just did.  However, I seem to recall that the event has received further explanation elsewhere.  What I recall is that even older gods appeared and vanquished Cthulhu.  For some reason, I think I recall that the opposing “god” was called “Nodens” -- however, I also think I recall that this name was perhaps coined by hack writers (August Derleth?) working in the Cthulhu Mythos after Lovecraft’s death, turning the story into a mundane struggle between good and evil.  This pseudo-memory can be checked on.  I could re-read “Call of Cthulhu”...  And look for reference in other Mythos stories...  “Dunwich Horror” is a possible source; I haven’t read it yet, but skimmed through some of the footnotes in “The Annotated Lovecraft” which look promising.  I could also check Wikipedia, which I suspect has a fairly concise entry that would resolve my question -- although, it might not be very exacting about what material comes from Lovecraft’s original works versus what has been generated for the “Call of Cthulhu” role-plalying system.  Anyway, this is a point for RESEARCH.

I said “maybe not” above because if Cthulhu was dispensed with by an even more powerful set of “gods,” then the question is raised:  how were they summoned?  What if it was the elder things who summoned them?

This wouldn’t be something found in the text -- but if the elders are contemporaneous with Cthulhu, then it wouldn’t necessarily break anything that’s already been established.  [As I’ve said in a previous brainstorming session, I’ve become somewhat nervous about making too big of a re-write of the story, knowing that my audience at the HPLFF are affictionados...  Particularly with the most important character of all -- Cthulhu.]

5.  Gods from beyond or gods from below
Two options:  The “Even Older Gods” either came from outer space / another universe, or they came from within the earth itself.

There’s a reference that’s particularly interesting:  “Of course, t he infinitely early parts of the patchwork tale–representing the pre-terrestrial life of the star-headed beings on other planets, and in other galaxies, and in other universes–can readily be interpreted as the fantastic mythology of those beings themselves; yet such parts sometimes involved designs and diagrams so uncannily close to the latest findings of mathematics and astrophysics that I scarcely know what to think.” (p. 269)  This suggests that the elders themselves may have crossed to our universe from another one, crossing dimensions 3-4 billion years ago.  If this is the case, then perhaps they have adequate knowledge to awake something even bigger than themselves “from beyond.”

[...Of course, now that I use those words, “from beyond,” it raises the idea that perhaps the elders could invoke something that is not from another mathematical dimension, but rather things that are all around us constantly but which are not within the parameters of our five senses -- as in Lovecraft’s story, “From Beyond.”]

The other option is that there are horrors that exist within the molten core of the earth.  There’s a footnote in “Annotated” that quotes from a letter Lovecraft wrote:  “What the thing was supposed to be, of course, was a region containing vestiges of some utterly primal cosmic force or process ruling or occupying the earth (among other planets) even before its solidification, & upheaved from the sea-bottom when the great Antarctic land mass arose.”  (p.330)  ...This jibes with references in ATMOM to there being something that washed down the river and into subterranean caves...  There’s something that even they fear that lives in the mountains beyond their plateau (the plateau of Leng?) -- which also exists underground.

[It seems to me that these most ancient forces living in the core of the earth must be same ones that the Great Race in “Shadow Out of Time” also feared, which in the climax come up from underground and chase the narrator through tunnels toward the earth’s surface.]

6.  The problems of invoking other, older gods
If I have the elders war with the spawn -- which at this point I’m fairly committed to -- then I need to be able to explain how the spawn were defeated.  There’s no way that the elders alone could defeat the spawn through mere military might -- laser guns, mobilizing the shoggoths to help, superior numbers, etc -- and having them win in that fashion would be a major violation of canon.  Having the elders invoke something more powerful than themselves is currently my only plausible solution...

However, if a new cosmic force is invoked, that creates further problems of its own.  What does it look like?  Am I introducing a new story element which takes us farther away from the story that I want to be telling?  Would there suddenly be more story elements to juggle than I can adequately manage -- the story becoming cluttered?  Am I just going to confuse the audience?

7.  What happens when you invoke a god to win your war?
If the elders invoke something bigger than Cthulhu to win their war, then there are a number of things that we need to see happen on screen.  We need to see either a ceremony with incantations or a machine which rips open space time to release something monstrous.  We need to see how this new being deals with various story elements...  It has to zap the minor spawn.  It has to make R’lyeh sink.  We have to see Cthulhu being trapped / struggling as the city sinks.  [Seeing Cthulhu struggle while his city sinks is a killer visual!]  We need to see the being also destroy a significant number of elders.  We need to see a number of the elders’ cities be crushed.  Count them:  invocation, spawn, R’lyeh, Cthulhu, elders, elder cities -- that’s at least six shots to animate...  And there probably needs to be two or three more:  showing the sky ripping open, showing a reaction shot from those that did the invoking, seeing the cloud/beings spread out, seeing it menace its first victims,  seeing the killing rage abate, seeing the rift in time/space close, surveying the destruction with dismay.

I guess as a first stab I’m imagining the Ultimate Gods as some sort of massive cloud that comes through a rip in the sky (sort of like in the 3rd season new Dr. Who episode “the drums”).  The ultimate power is something like lightning or an intelligent black killing gas.

8.  Benefits of invoking the Ultimate Gods
To introduce the Ultimate Gods would take the story in a very different direction.  But, let’s explore that direction and give it a chance.

Pros:  It wouldn’t necessarily violate canon.  It would have some killer visuals.  It’s a sub-story that can be told in a fairly straight-forward way.  In ATMOM, the elders are scared of what lives in the mountains of madness (which here I mean to indicate the mountains left behind when the moon tore away from the earth, 300 miles beyond the plateau of leng where the elders live) -- this would explain why.  The damage wreaked upon the elders would help explain how they were weakened to a point where they no longer had the power of flight and couldn’t seem to defend themselves against the shoggoths.

Unfortunately, the more that I think about this, the more I think that bringing in the Ultimate Gods would upstage the shoggoths.  After you’ve seen the Ultimate Gods in action, you have to think that they’re maybe going to return in Act III.  Shoggoths, as I’ve described things so far, seem to sit out the war entirely!!

9.  Demons raising demons
Also, while there may be some good visuals available through the Ultimate Gods sub-story -- particularly the defeat of Cthulhu -- the themes inherent in the story are actually pretty cliched.  The basic idea:  don’t invoke demons that you aren’t also able to put down -- or else you’ll pay.  True, it’s novel to a “raising demons” tale when its essentially other demons doing the raising...  But it’s still not a very rich scenario...

Well -- the more I think about it, there are ways that “demons raising bigger demons” could be enriched...  You could focus on the terror of invoking the demons -- knowing that you’re probably going to die in the process -- but being so desperate that it’s a last ditch attempt...  That’s a direction that would necessitate showing the spawn coming all the way into the elder cities...  Showing that the elders are on the brink of defeat, and are just that desperate...

OR, if this were more of a character-based story, I could have the war be at a point where you don’t know if the elders are on the verge of defeat or not -- so taking the greatest risk may or may not be justified.  [That feels like a very Battlestar Galactica story choice.]  The leaders make a choice, take a gamble, and you don’t know afterwards whether you’ve saved or lost more lives because of it.  It’s inherently intriguing to place yourself in the position of the leaders, trying to decide whether or not use of the ultimate weapon is justified...  Creating a powerful emotion re how confusing it is to have to make a life-or-death decision for thousands, not ever being able to truly know for sure if your decision is going to be the right one.

But, as I said, this story would really have to put the audience into the mind of the individual(s) making the crucial decision...  Which requires dialogue and character-building...  And sends my film far, far afield from the tale I really care about telling.

10.  The role of the shoggoths in the war with Cthulhu
So, I have to put aside for the moment the question of how the war with Cthulhu was won...  Heck, maybe I can even just show the war happening, and then omit its ending...  Fast forward from a time of war to a future epoch...  I guess I have to ask myself:  What is the purpose of the deep history?

One possible answer:  to explain the relationship between the shoggoths and the elders.  If that’s so, then it’s perfectly legitimate to cut out everything in the deep history that doesn’t pertain to showing the relationship between shoggoths and elders -- and I gain guidance in generating scenes.  I’m no longer interested in telling the whole billion+ years from the time that the elders arrived on earth to present -- instead I’m only interested in those incidents that illuminate turning points in the elder-shoggoth relationship.  [Thus, 2 new questions:  What are other possible purposes of the deep history?  What are the turning points in the elder-shoggoth relationship?]

OK, good ideas to pursue -- but for the moment let’s stay focused on figuring out what the role of the shoggoths in the war with Cthulhu was.

Options:
(a)  The shoggoths essentially sat out the war, acting as simple house servants / field slaves for the elders.

(b)  The shoggoths gained new powers for the sake of taking care of the elders’ cities while they were away in foreign lands and in outer space fighting with the spawn.

(c)  The shoggoths were given no particular extra intelligence during the war, but they were put to use as weapons, essentially as gelatinous tanks.  [Won’t work if the battle is in the air -- but could be functional either on the ground in a battlefield (still doesn’t explain why the spawn can’t just fly away), or in enclosed spaces like in a city or in cave systems.  The idea of having the shoggoths fighting the spawn inside hallways and caves suggests visual scenes.]

(d) The shoggoths were not merely weapons of war, they were instrumental in saving the elder cities from defeat...  A secret weapon against the spawn.  [This raises another intriguing question:  which is more fearsome -- the spawn or the shoggoths?  Sort of like “in a fight, who would win:  batman or spiderman?” -- and it’s a pairing that I don’t think Lovecraft fans have ever really contemplated.  “X vs. Y” is an inherently interesting scenario.]

11.  The role of Cthulhu vs. the spawn
It's pretty obvious that the shoggoths don't have the power to defeat Cthulhu himself -- but against the smaller spawn, maybe.  [I really ought to do some RESEARCH on the spawn of Cthulhu -- I think all that I know about them probably comes from the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game.]

This raises a question about how much I ought to focus on the spawn's king.  I have a killer image in mind -- though one that I'm not sure I can accomplish -- where we see Cthulhu crawl over the horizon of the moon, essentially as big as the satellite...  And the spawn, like a swarm of hornets, come flying past him from the moon.

...So what if that were all that we ever saw of Cthulhu?  If we didn't see him ever actually land on earth, didn't see the building of R'lyeh...

[Wow -- if I were going to really engage with Cthulhu as an opposing force, then how he came to build a city on earth becomes a huge problem...  Unless it's originally a space city, sitting on a sphere, which lands in the ocean.]

What if we don’t see Cthulhu on the battlefield, standing a mile high, head distant in the clouds and out of focus due to the haze of the distance...  Or Cthulhu struggling as his city sinks into the ocean, vanquished by the Ultimate Gods.

I think these four moments that I’m pointing out are the key instances of Cthulhu’s interactions with the elders...  To an extent, he’s perhaps as disinterested in them as the elders are in human beings.  His minions, on the other hand, might be dispatched to eliminate any meddlesome inhabitants on earth...  So we might have a chance to see them destroying other earth lifeforms -- which sets the elders up, to an extent as defenders of earth... So we root for them as good guys.

12,  Why colonize earth?
What is Cthulhu’s interest in colonizing earth?  What are the elders’ stake in colonizing earth?  Both species are, it seems, originally evolved from oceans -- so they are interested in a planet with great amounts of water.  Yet, simply because the planet is inhabitable, that doesn’t really explain why the species move from one planet to another.

We know that the elders reproduce by means of spores, but that because they are so long lived, they don’t choose to do so very often.  If they are already established on other planets, why move further outward, expanding to other planets?  To an extent, that’s the same has having more children.  We know that the elders are scientists -- so their colonization might be part of a broader effort which is guided by exploration, rather than conquest.  This could be a fundamental conflict between the elders and the spawn:  science versus conquest.

Is it too comprehensible to the human mind to say that the spawn simply want to “control” earth?  I think I find it more intriguing to suggest that they somehow want to transform the universe...  I begin weaving a story where they need to arrange whole planets into “alignment” (compare to “when the stars are right”) in order to weave a web of gravitational forces that will “destroy” the universe...  Perhaps even better than planets, they move stars and black holes to create incomprehensible multi-dimensional geometries which act like “spells” connecting our universe with other dimensions / universes / realities.

13.  Origins and religions of the elders and spawn
So, I think I like this idea...  That both the elders and the spawn are significantly powerful that their ambitions are not measurable on the scale of individual planets -- rather, they have two substantially different relationships to the universe as a whole -- and the power to make good upon their plans.

For the spawn, perhaps the ambition is to actually eliminate the universe -- not piecemeal, but by somehow causing the very fabric of space-time to dissolve, so that existence winks out, having never been, and never to be.  The sort of religion / belief system (possibly accurate!) which makes bringing the universe to closure is suitably inscrutible.

The elders, on the other hand, perhaps have an ambition to “know” the universe...  Envisioning themselves as the sensory tendrils of a transcendent mind the size of existence itself.  Perhaps their species was born in another universe, and crossed over into this one long ago, for the sake of exploration.  Perhaps...  But there is a distinction made between the elders and the spawn, where Cthulhu is described as being less material -- being composed partly of multi-/trans-dimensional substances.  So, although there is mention of the elders coming perhaps from other universes, I am prone to think that they originate in this one -- albeit in a whole other galaxy -- and that they simply have an awareness of other dimensions and the permeability between this one and those.

Given the creatures described in “From Beyond,” it wouldn’t be too big a stretch of the imagination to suggest that the elders have either built machines like the one central to that story -- or more likely yet, the “extra senses” afforded to them by their poly-chromatic head cilia probably afford them direct consciousness of certain nearby realities that humans don’t see.

We might envision “reality” as being an onion with multiple layers -- our own at the very center.  The more strange a creature, the further away from the center it hails from.  For instance, the elders are in touch with the things “from beyond” that are all around us...  And Cthulhu travels through parallel dimensions that are beyond the immediate powers of the elders to reach...  But there are great primal forces lurking inside the earth and beyond even the dimensions where Cthulhu treads, which are stranger and more powerful than all else.  (Presumably a creature must be as powerful as these in order to straddle so many layers of reality...  There must be beings that exist equally far away -- but which are not powerful enough to exist simultaneously on our plane.)

14.  Giving the shoggoths a voice
Back at the end of page 5 I took a break and went on a walk, where a fascinating possibility occurred to me.  In the beacon’s telepathic message, the language of the elders is automatically translated for us.  We know that the shoggoths gained the speech of their masters...  So what if we were able to hear the shoggoths speak?

This suggests a new possible ending for the film.  Perhaps the beacon’s message cuts off before completion in Act II...  I, the filmmaker, have action cut back to the present day world, where something is stirring outside the cave...  Perhaps I would do this by interspersing things a little -- showing locations in the past, then switching to the elder’s POV in the present -- going back and forth two or three times, until we arrive at the Act III stampede sequence that I’ve mostly completed.  And then...

Then, at the end of the film, just as Carl’s about to die, we switch back to the concluding words of the message...  The present-day red shoggoth transforms in aspect to a beacon-recording of the shoggoths in the past, saying something to the effect of:  “We will repay slavery with genocide.  We will hunt you down to the ends of time.”

Odd:  Despite having contemplated a version of the story where Act II is told from the shoggoths’ point of view, I’d only imagined the shoggoths ever delivering a voice-over on an essentially separate visual history...  I hadn’t considered until today the idea of the shoggoths speaking directly, in a present tense, to their masters the elders.

The way that I’m imagining this working is that the shoggoths sent out a world-wide transmission to the remaining elder thing -- and so what we see in the beacon’s message was not recorded by the shoggoths for posterity...  It was a message that they transmitted and that the elder things recorded, and have included in their own transmission in order to communicate to those who might find it what happened to them.

I don’t see that there’s any way that I can have the voices of the shoggoths appear anywhere except in their final damning transmission -- in the rest of the deep history we never get to listen in on conversations...  Either there’s one elder who’s delivering a report of what’s just happened, or we’re receiving a sort of holographic telling of the history of the elders, inside of which the final words of the shoggoths echo with particular clarity.

15.  How did the surviving elders come to be hidden in the cave?
This is really two separate questions...  I have yet to truly sort out how it is that the elders in my film survived the genocide...  But I also remain unclear about how the elders in ATMOM survived.

In ATMOM, it seems most likely that the elders we happen upon came to rest where they were during the war of resubjugation.  The primary evidence for this is that several of the elders heads have been torn off -- which, we know, is how the shoggoths attack.  On page 315, there’s this phrase about “certain  very vivid sculptures of the Old One’s history in the Permian age 150 million years ago” -- which, coming before the mi-go’s settlement of earth, should be just about right, in terms of placing the war of subjugation...  But elsewhere we learn that the city is a relatively new one -- only 50 million years old, and that the survivors were entombed only about 30 million years ago.  So the timing doesn’t make any sense...  And if we are to assume that this group of 14 elders were attacked by the shoggoths -- why aren’t they all fully dead?  Were some merely injured?

Another explanation for the survivors in ATMOM:  They were explorers in the lower caves (which didn’t show up until later in the city’s history) -- and perhaps ran into the dark thing that came from the mountains of madness, which even the elders fear.  Seriously, I’m tempted to email S.T. Joshi and ask his opinion on the matter -- because I’m at the point of thinking that Lovecraft didn’t actually have a reason for why these elders survived...  They just did.

Perhaps a piece of the puzzle is that they froze?  Clearly part of what revives the elders is being exposed to light and heat...  So, maybe eight of the fourteen were merely injured -- and over time even healed from minor injuries...  But they were in a deep state of hibernation after they got cold.

Yet another explanation:  The strange wide cave that the survivors were found in has lots of fossil animals in it.  How did they get there?  They have strange marks on them -- which suggests to me that they were hunted and eaten by the elders...  Could the survivors essentially be in a big sewer, where carcasses get washed, and where they accidentally became trapped?  It doesn’t seem plausible that the elders were responsible for all of the fossil remains found in the cave, fossils that seem to come from a wide expanse of history.

I come back to wondering...  How did the elders get in that cave in the first place?  How did the animal carcasses get in the cave?  Were the shoggoths perhaps living in these caves already?  There are mentions of the plateau being “honeycombed” with caves...  The tunnel floors are free of dust; steep ramps are “ribbed” rather than having stairs; and we know that the shoggoths served for much of the construction of the elders’ cities...  It makes me wonder if the shoggoths are able to burrow through stone with some sort of acid secretion...  Perhaps they were building up power in the underworld...  So that when they finally overwhelmed the elders in their underground city -- their one final retreat -- it wasn’t difficult to cut off all the exits.

16.  The shoggoth underground
The notion that the shoggoths built up their power in secret before massacring everyone in the elders’ underground city -- it’s interesting.  It might potentially change how I portray the shoggoths’ uprising.  The way that I described it in my most recent script this past fall, I talked about the shoggoths “rising up everywhere at once.”  This suggests that the shoggoths were able to communicate with one another in order to coordinate a simultaneous attack...  But there’s no notion that there was a lot of planning, preparation, and strategizing.  There’s no sense that the shoggoths patiently waited, building up their numbers until they had armies on hand.

...The more I think about it, though, it’s a particularly strategic time for the shoggoths to strike -- when the city has moved underground, and can easily be surrounded.  The sense that the shoggoths control the caves is further enhanced if the elder survivors accidentally stumbled upon the shoggoths’ secret lair 30 million years ago...  If all the carcasses in the wide cave were being caught and eaten by the shoggoths, I’d have to reinterpret the marks that are on the bones...  But why didn’t the shoggoth eat the elders?  Why didn’t they make sure to finish them off?

There are stalagmites/stalactites covering the elders bodies, which the humans have to knock out of the way -- a testament to just how long the elders have been buried there...  Perhaps there was a cave-in?  Which both trapped them for millions of years, and ironically kept them from being outright murdered by the shoggoth that attacked their party...?  That may be my best explanation yet.

Still, the more I look at the shoggoths, the more questions I’m forced to ask...  I’m realizing I’ve done very little to characterize them, other than to point out that they’re slaves...  Still, if I hadn’t thought there to be pockets of UN-resubjugated shoggoths living in the earth, it’s understandable that I would have assumed all aspects of the shoggoths lives were controlled by the elders -- thus only the elders’ habits being necessary to study...

17.  How do the shoggoths reproduce?

18.  What do the shoggoths eat?

19.  Why did the shoggoths wait as long as they did to attack?

20.  How do the shoggoths coordinate their attack?
It’s implied in ATMOM that the city we are seeing is the last outpost of the elders...  But we know that there were lots of other cities, too...  Why should we not think that there are more elders surviving underwater somewhere?  It seems that the shoggoths waited for the moment when they could completely overwhelm the elders, in an enclosed cave underground...  But is this really an accurate interpretation of Lovecraft’s writing?

Here is a questions I ought to be able to go back and check in the book:  Was the city on the plateau of Leng (which is only 50 million years old) the very final outpost of the elders?  If that were the case, then it might make sense that the shoggoth’s moment to strike had arrived.

Another question:  Did it say in ATMOM that prior to the war of resubjugation, shoggoths got loose in the world?  If so, then I have to wonder:  What made the elders think that they had truly re-subjugated all the shoggoths?  Wouldn’t it make sense that at least a few would escape and remain living independently in hiding?

So, suppose that a population of shoggoths remains in hiding, undetected, for approximately 120 million years -- between the end of the war of subjugation and the final fall of the elders perhaps as little as 50,000 years ago (?)...  How could the shoggoths actually accomplish that?  Was it all about their ability to burrow underground?  If so, what did they eat?

And given that the war was 120,000 million years ago...  That’s revenge being served very, very cold!  It seems like there must be some sort of precipitating event...  Perhaps the elders discovered the existence of the underground shoggoths, and began preparations for another round of genocide -- but they underestimated the size of the shoggoth population, and the weakness of their own position...  So rather than be slaughtered again, the shoggoths overcame a aeons-old fear and struck back at their former masters...

This sounds plausible...  The hitch being that Lovecraft talks about how the shoggoths after the war of subjugation were given greater intelligence and language...  Which seems to have brought about the elders’ downfall.  Thus, Lovecraft seems to be saying that it wasn’t an underground of runaway slaves that brought about the bloody revolution -- it was the houseslaves.

So, what if I posit that there are two populations of shoggoths -- the free shoggoths living underground, and the smarter shoggoths that still live within the elder’s city...  Contact between the two populations might lead to the smarter ones mobilizing and leading the more numerous hidden shoggoths.

Poetically, there’s something very interesting about the shoggoths being given speech...  Not just talking back to their masters, but talking amongst themselves.  It’s sort of like Babel in reverse.  When the babbling (gibbering) shoggoths suddenly found a common tongue, that’s when they were able to build their metaphorical tower:  toppling the elders.