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OCTOPIRE  CLASS: VAMPIRIC MYTHOS: In the silent embrace of the oceanic shadow zone, a glutinous mass lies dreaming. It has no bones. It has no blood. It stirs as formless as a vapor when hunger at last pries it from the icy deep, the darkness come alive to rob the light of its children. It is said that among the vampires of the sea, this hateful glue is all but unsurpassed in its capacity for thought. Even the smallest may dominate a legion of hapless vassals, and the eldest of its kind, rumored to achieve inconceivable proportions in the blackest pits of the abyssal trenches, may well be as gods to the uncatalogued - and perhaps uncatalogueable! - perversions of life that ooze and squelch their way through a world the very sun has long forgotten. MACHINATIONS: The Octopire spends much of its existence asleep, hovering motionlessly in deep, dark water. When it awakens, it initiates an extended hunt for sources of blood that can even bring it inland, slithering ashore like an empty skin possessed of will. It can deform its flesh with a plasticity far greater than that of the natural octopodes, and heeds few barriers between it and its next meal. If discovered by those rare few adversaries that may ever hope to vex it, it can issue forth a luminescent ichor that expands into a blinding, luminescent shroud of fog. The demon has no tooth, nor even the hardened beak of the natural cephalopoda. It is capable of drawing blood slowly, delicately through a pair of long feelers, thin as hairs, unseen and unfelt by a distant body. Its preference, however, is an absolute and rapid exsanguination by hundreds of flexible barbs, borne in rows by sinuous arms joined in an elastic skirt. The suffocating web encloses the prey like a second skin, and as the helpless captive struggles in a vacuum of flesh that is not its own, the horrid membrane floods with that precious sustenance once locked away in its rightful master's veins, stolen from a heart now weakly drumming its final, pitiful pulsations. To be eaten alive is more than terrible; to be drunk alive is inexpressible. VAMPIRE BITE: the bite of a vampire class drains blood or other vital fluids from living prey while establishing a long-term cerebral connection between vampire and host. OCTOBODY: the Octopire has an exceptionally elastic, malleable body. MOONBREATH: the monster can cloak its presence and disorient its enemies by generating a brightly glowing cloud of ink.   DESIGN DESCRIPTION: the Octopire resembles a cross between a cephalopod and a human heart. It has a large, meaty, saclike and reddish head, slightly pointed toward the back like an upturned strawberry, and criss-crossed with a fine network of thin, blue veins. On the lower, broader bottom of this sac are two big, spherical eyes, dark blue and clear like orbs of glass, each surrounded by concentric rings of flesh like a circular eyelid. A thick, blue ventricle-like tube sprouts from between the eyes, branching into multiple long, soft, squirmy tentacles. Another set of darker red ventricles emerge from behind this tube and split into more reddish tentacles. There are small, short, open-ended tubes and rows of pores on the ventricles, and some tentacles branch and split like veins. Both the blue and red tentacles are joined together by a thin, translucent red membrane of skin. The inner surfaces of this membrane and the tentacles are a slimy, deep purple flesh, and each tentacle has a single row of sharp, bone-colored barbs along its inner surface. Contents copyright Jonathan Wojcik
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