CLASS: BIOCONSTRUCT
BIOLOGY: Feeding exclusively on starches and sweets, the Skultivator's sugary, gelatinous bodily waste fills its own specialized cranial dish with a sweet, nutrient-rich growth medium ideal for fungi, bacteria and Fectoid nanobodies. Integrated with its hyperparasitic phagocytes, any microorganisms collected by the monster become dependent upon its gel matrix for sustenance and lose any capacity they may have had for independent sentience, macroform construction, contagiousness or any self-replication outside of the Skultivator's body, but can nonetheless debilitate a host for up to 24 hours. A Skultivator may deliver assimilated pathogens directly through contact with its sticky, malodorous tongue, but takes special pride in what it refers to as its "fruits:" adhesive, explosive clots of mucous tissue and microbiota it congeals in the back of its throat and can detonate remotely, splattering their surroundings in a noxious cocktail of disease. BEHAVIOR: The Skultivator is endlessly fascinated by microbiology, pathology and a variety of medical topics. It gets along famously well with Fectoid, Fungoid, Wormbrain and Plagueman allies, provided they can tolerate its often overbearing interest in their own biological processes and personal lives. APPLIANCE: Competitively, the Skultivator is a "jack of all trades" in the art of pathogenic combat, surprising the opponent with less virulent but more controlled strains of almost any known pathogen. Usually incapable of sharing the same host, Fectoids replicated by the monster can even be mixed and matched into a wider variety of unusual afflictions, and its explosive polyps can remain viable under conditions usually inhospitable to naked microorganisms. Though records are incomplete, Skultivator are believed to have been engineered by the same entity or entities who developed the first Fectoids, and remain invaluable in the research and management of microbial life. MICROBIAL ASSIMILATION: a Skultivator suffers no ill effects from bacterial, fungal, protozoan, or Fectoid contamination, but integrates the microbes with its own system. INFECTIOUS TONGUE: with a slurp from its tongue, the Skultivator can infect an adversary with any disease or combination of diseases it has collected in a less virulent but fast-acting state. PATHOPOLYPS: The Skultivator can expectorate sticky, gelatinous globules packed with microsymbionts and detonate them on a whim.   Contents copyright Jonathan Wojcik
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