(1d20 rumors about the) Medusa Men

1.  That the less fair sex among the medusa race (which must surely exist, as a posit of the doctors of comparative physiognomy) tend towards natural reclusiveness on account of their unlovely appearance. 
2. That the female medusas, famed for their dangerous beauty, are likewise repulsed by this.
3. That it is thus explained all the stories told by besotted adventurers at inns, that they blindfolded made love to the poison-gazed women, and felt the snakes snapping at the sweat on their necks.
4. That the above is romantic bluster, and that there is a more parsimonious explanation to be found for the misshapen creatures known to bow and scrape before the stone queens. That for every man or beast or tree so petrified, so an equivalent amount of shale or dirt or coal is carnated.
5. That the souls of such victims are encased in the misshapen medusa-men.
6. That to save someone from petrification, their stony counter must be annihilated.
7. That to save someone from petrification, their stony counter must be rescued from medusal servitude, treated well, nurtured, until it grows into the original.
8. That the misshapen medusa-men do not bear the souls of the petrified, but are travelers from another world.
9. That the medusal world is a reverse of our own, as the stony counters are mockeries of petrified victims; that it is a world of present absences and absent presences. That there planetary pockets of air rotate and revolve through an infinite expanse of meat, and that on the inner surface of these pockets mineral men plow fields of blood in hopes of growing edible stalagmites, and ply shale boats over snake-cilia seas.
10. That the medusa herself comes from this world as well. That she does not avert her gaze from mirrors for fear of an end, for in fact she longs to return home, but out of duty. A medusa who is determined by a star chamber of stone serpents to have allowed herself to return voluntarily is punished, forced to remain in the grotesque form of muscle and bone forever, whereas if it is determined to be an accident, she may be promoted from iron to crystal and enjoy a retirement on a country estate. That they, homesick, subconsciously look for ways to be “accidentally” “defeated” in this wise.
11. That the petrified are not deceased, but only parted; for they sojourn in the medusal world. That the only way to “save” them is to wait to let them finish their business there, trundling on granite legs across an epidermal plane, and rap their obsidian knuckles on the cartilage door of the House of Passage.
12. That many sages have wandered into the bowels of the earth to be seen by the medusa and wrest secrets from her world, only for her to lean in, eyes closed, and offer them a welcome embrace, as if she knew and endorsed their purpose, and bit their neck hundreds of times in a second with her hair. That her hair’s venom offers visions of such a world, but that it is false.
13. That through the petrified body of such a one making a sojourn, one may not communicate, but through a statue of their likeness, one may, though the other world may peer through it as well. That this was the origins of idolatry in a society whose lone religion before was the vision quests of its thinking class into the stone-as-flesh world, and their medusa tutors, who were our patrons once but have turned to other projects in our maturity.
14. That to gaze into the eyes of a medusa-man, whatever its origins, is to return it to stone. That this creates an equivalent amount of flesh from nearby stone and that thus a single medusa-being (perhaps the double of a mouse) is very useful to a sculptor or architect, for it may be repeated for as many occasions as result in something with eyes. That the only reason this is not more widely known and used is the trade secrets of masons, which will make them a great power in latter days, and the rareness of medusas.
15. That the only reason repeatedly petrifying and awakening and petrifying one’s one little flock of medusa-men or -mice or -mites is not more widely known and used is that it is a terrible idea, a swift form of ocular toxification. That little nodules of gypsum flower within one’s stomach and brain with each locked gaze, and that many a delapidated alchemist’s tower may be found with strewn with lumpy architectural experiments, feral homunculi, and the calcite corpse of an alchemist.
16. That the stones which look to be in the likeness of bone beneath the earth or on cliff surfaces are not the long-weathered bones of dead species, as the superstitious surmise, but the premonitions of ones to come. That geology in her wisdom has crafted them to be awoken by the Medusa’s in breeding pairs, when their gaze extinguished those whose place they will take.
17. That medusas thus listen with seismograph, bite themselves with their hair, and blast with dynamite into deeper caverns still to ascertain the divine will of geology, for they are the midwives and executioners of her will. That they under heavy hoods walk into taverns and ask stout-hearted women and men to undertake some task of doom to recover a certain stone or plumb a certain depth, that they may hence know what species or people is to be ended, and which to begin.
18. That medusa-men are not always so ugly. That sometimes their shapes come out quite human, and their “memories” too. That this is why some of those stout-hearted folk in taverns long to traverse deep beneath the earth, though they cannot explain why.
19. That if such a one meets a medusa’s gaze, he will not turn to stone, but to god, higher version of himself, or medusa.
20. That the male sex of the medusa race does indeed exist, and that if they had bodies, they would be quite beautiful. That they are charged with the petrification and carnification of not species but ideas, and that for the sake of mercy they remain in slumber or meditation, turning their conceptual gaze towards nothing. That various improvements and innumerable apocalypses could be won by whispering the right words in their nonexistent ears, tempting them towards the destructive act of particular consideration.