Anyone who has played any Monster Hunter game will have probably noticed at some point that the ways these so called "monsters" act are strangely familiar, with their behavior being more animalistic than monstrous. This is without a doubt the thing...
It's the early hours of the morning on the eastern half of the new world continent and the sun is just beginning to rise over the sea, its golden rays causing the deep blue water to glimmer as the surface undulates. Beneath the waves, oceanic currents push nutrients up from the depths and distribute them across the landmass's coastline and the few surrounding islands.
As the currents flow from one point to another, one arrives at an island off the coast of the mainland, the waves crashing against the rocky shoreline before disintegrating into thousands of tiny droplets that are quickly assimilated into the sea. Constantly, the water collides with the stone, slowly eroding the seemingly unclimbable walls that surround the landmass's exterior, and creating areas where the vertical barriers give way to beaches, crevasses, cave systems, and pathways, granting access to the interior.
Despite its seemingly normal appearance at first glance, the true bizarreness of this island is beyond comprehension. The surface is covered by dense forest hidden between massive, twisting monuments of mountains, canyons, and cliffs. However, bordering these lush areas is a large expanse of desert created by the terrain and the rainshadow effect it causes, dividing the lowlands into two starkly contrasting environments.
Yet the strangeness doesn't end here, in fact, it's quite the contrary. Deep below the surface, volcanic chambers slowly morph the island's geography with their activity, pushing the towering mountains higher and transforming their peaks into a frozen landscape of ice and snow. In the lower portions of the range, a massive variety of land corals cling to the mountainsides, their growth fueled by the necronutrients produced by the rotting corpses beneath it.
Even though this is an island, it houses miniature versions of the environments found on the mainland, something that should be impossible. Although its specific and highly unusual geography does give some partial insight into this bizarre setup, it still doesn't explain how such a design could have begun. So many vastly different environments in such close proximities to one another shouldn't be possible. This island is obviously not like any other island. This landmass was created under some truly extraordinary circumstances; not formed by tectonic activity, but rather through the remains of the gargantuan shell of a Zorah Magdaros.
Having overshot its destination when migrating to the rotten vale to die, this ancient Zorah Magdaros was exposed to different founding species on its journey, picking up seeds, fungi, coral eggs, bacteria, and even the ancestors of the different kinds of Molies along the way. Upon arriving in the sea, the massive elder dragon was too exhausted to turn back and inside died where the island currently stands.
Because it died so far away from the Everstream, the Zorah Magdaros's bioenergy had nowhere to go, causing it to instead seep into the volcanic rock shell the elder dragon built over its lifetime, supercharging the ground and allowing the species that got carried away by the goliath to thrive, their populations expanding at an unpredictable rate. Once the base species of the island got a firm hold on this new and unusual land formation, it wasn't long before other lifeforms were attracted to it, and one of the first arrivals still visit this landmass on occasion.
As the sun continues to climb higher into the sky, it reveals the silhouette of a large creature gliding towards the island. Without a single wing beat, the animal approaches the coastline at surprising speeds while effortlessly moving above the sea's rising and falling waves. Reaching a massive seaside cliff, Blast, a female Bazelgeuse, flaps a few times as she prepares herself for landing, her feet soon touching the top of the stone formation.
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