ENTRY 07: WANDERING NIGHTMARES




Today's monsters are also known as "scurrying beasts," but they aren't part of the actual "beast" category at all. A "Scurrying Beast" is rather a clump of what appear to be malformed, melded human corpse parts, kind of like a wet shower drain clog with skulls in it, and it comes in two sizes!



The common scurrier is just a little fella, or fellas, a ball of rancid old carrion with a few pathetic, twisted limbs to jerk itself around on. And it's not an enemy, not really anyway; it won't ever do anything but try and run away from you! It doesn't always respawn, so you only have one chance to kill every scurrying beast you see, but why WOULD you?! I mean, there's rewards and all, so you probably have to if you want to survive, but can you LIVE with yourself, is what I'm saying. They only wanna scurry! Don't bully them!!!



The bigger, heftier version is the one sometimes distinguished as a "wandering nightmare," though sometimes this is treated as the species name for both variations. The bigger fellas are in a heavier, globbier, more sluglike mass that drags itself around, but they aren't nearly such pushovers as their little baby brothers; they still only act in self defense, but they're actually fairly deadly!

If not beasts, though, then what are they?

The smaller variations, disquietingly enough, make similar sounds to the Messengers, so it's possible that they're actually made from Messenger corpses, or perhaps even what happens to Messengers infected by the blood plague? That might not make a lot of sense, though, and doesn't explain why there are larger versions made of more human-sized carrion.



The One Reborn is a boss formed from innumerable corpses fused together into one giant, undead monster, evidently some final but failed attempt to create a Great One (more on that later) from humanity. Its visual feel isn't exactly quite like that of the scurries, but it's the only other thing in the game that's just a blob of dead people.



There's another creature that may be related to this process, too; the Gravekeeper Scorpion. It's shaped like a scorpion, and behaves like a scorpion, but up close, it appears to be made entirely of corpse parts, even having a stretched-out humanoid face on the top of its head. Or maybe it's a giant scorpion sort of "wearing" corpse parts? I guess it's hard to say for sure, but both the scorpion and the One Reborn are confirmed to be creations of the Pthumerians, a cult warped into pale, emaciated, subterranean ghoul-people by their contact with those Great Ones we just mentioned.



So we know these goth shut-ins had a grand master plan to build a new god out of dead people, and it stands to reason they didn't dive into a project that ambitious without a lot of practice. The scorpions may be one of their more successful and useful experiments, but we've possibly seen the rest of their discarded warm-ups wandering, sometimes scurrying around the city.


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