BONUS MONSTER 01:
Wheeltoothed Neurophage
BRAINSLARK
Created by Jonathan Wojcik, stats by Bonnie Saucier
This monster is shaped like a rotifer with a pair of exceptionally large, glassy bubble-like eyes on its upper surface. One end of its tubular, segmented body tapers into a tail-like "foot" with two sucker-tipped toes, while its front end flares horizontally into two flaps covered in fine teeth. Jagged, clamplike jaws can be seen inside its translucent form, behind its eyes. Hairs sprout in clumps from wartlike protrusions that grow in rows down its sides.
BIOLOGY:
This ectoparasite was designed for the sole purpose of collecting samples of brain tissue from living subjects, and employs sophisticated electroreception to identify synaptic activity from afar as it springs and jets through the air by its tubular leg, tracking neural oscillation like a guided missile. Attaching to the target first by its labial palps, it shaves through protective headgear and epidermal tissue with rippling whorls of scalpel-like teeth before engulfing as much of the subject's cranium as its elastic oral cavity can accommodate, then employs its iron-laced inner jaws to snip a single hole through protective layers such as bone or biometal. A pair of retractable, wiry tendrils proceed to invade the wound and carve out a suitable bolus of cerebral tissue, which the creature extracts or "slarks" via concentrated suction force as it pumps its telescopic body. This degree of tissue loss is of considerable inconvenience to most monsters or metahumans until they can regenerate, but can be outright life-threatening to retrohumans or other nonmonstrous fauna, and small enough prey items are simply devoured whole.
The entire process from attachment to cranioslarktion takes mere seconds before the monster, now slightly too swollen and heavy to leap away, simply retracts into a tight ball and rolls or bounces back to its favorite roost. Its own Green Goo nanomon matrix keeps its meal alive and fresh until digestion can begin, during which the matrix records any salvageable information in the sample's neural pathways to a new, tiny ganglia cultivated from its tissues, effectively archiving the pilfered piece of mind - genome and all - to a heavily compressed and inert backup. When an aging Brainslark fills with enough ganglia to impede physical function, it repurposes each collected gene sample to gestate a single embryo, bloating with larvae until its body finally explodes.
BEHAVIOR:
The Brainslark was designed by early Mortasheen geneticists as a crude means of harvesting data where neither the quality nor completeness of individual samples is of meaningful concern, sometimes released simply to turn a rodent infestation into a few hundred quick, disposable cell cultures. While still just as useful to this day, feral Brainslark are considered noxious enough that their effective management is a study unto itself. Dozens of competing "slarkzappers" continue to flood the modern marketplace, but Brainslark populations are increasingly wise to the many ways these high-voltage traps attempt to imitate a vulnerable brain.
Not equipped to utilize collected data for itself, a Brainslark's intelligence is still generally well below average, and a Brainslark already "locked on" to an appealing enough brain shows little concern for what exactly the brain is attached to, how dangerous it may be, or what else might be standing in its way. Through sheer lack of interest in any other subject matter, it seldom even sees fit to learn more than the word "brains" in any given mode of communication, expressing its few distinct feelings only by varying the inflection.
A Brainslark tightens its muscles as it approaches its target, contracting into its more spheroid configuration as it prepared to "pounce," and its eyes illuminate with excitement in proportion to its appetite. The resulting image of a brightly glowing, hovering bulb is consequently recognized by cultures throughout Mortasheen as visual shorthand for catastrophic ignorance.
Concept Notes:
I meant to add a simple, straightforward "brainsucker" to the Mortasheen world since well before I ever started work on the book; a small, pesky monster streamlined down to the barest brain-sucking essentials. Wanting this to be suitably fun and memorable, I must have gone through hundreds of designs that mostly hovered around gooey, bug-eyed, mollusk-like forms, a lot of which kept morphing into blatant knockoffs of my favorite Ugly Stickers design, which are still viable monster concepts to flesh out for another time, but didn't feel original enough for this first small, dedicated brainsucker:
It was only maybe months ago that I finally gave up on trying to perfect a "Brainsucker" in time for the book altogether, until I idly doodled a mutated rotifer, one of my favorite animals, and realized only later how perfectly a rotifer's body plan would be for something that violently sucks basically anything out of anything. With rotifers being model science lab specimens, they couldn't have been a more perfect fit for the concept of a low-level, verminous cerebrovore that gives Mad Scientists a hard time.
GAMEPLAY BLOCK:
What does all this stuff mean? You'll just have to get the book! If you're intimidated by the lengthy formula of its second ability, rest assured, the majority of monster abilities are quite a bit simpler. Everything in [brackets] is just one of the game's ability blocks, used together to build monster abilities, and it takes a lot of them to translate the flavor of Brainslark's feeding mechanism into play mechanics. Its ability to suction onto its prey, eat smaller creatures whole, and yield useful data to the player are all represented here, and are all useful to different play scenarios. Bioconstructs are also unique in having quirks, which are otherwise a feature of player characters. A quirk is both a mechanical property and a roleplay prompt that can be written as anything at all; a little slogan, quote or reference implying something about the character or monster's personality, and it enhances die rolls for situations where the quirk is deemed thematic enough. Maybe we'll get more into how the mechanics work further into the month!
That's our first free bonus monster; 30 more days are to come, but maybe more than only 30 more monsters...
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