Today's entry was originally going to be combined with another, but I simply had too much to say about both. Not to be confused with the Celestial Minions or Emissaries, the Celestial Children are a type of kin with a body like a deflated garden slug, a big round head like a baby and two little pudgy arms that taper into wiggly, curled little tentacles! You'll also notice what look like a pair of scrappy, vestigial "wings" on the back, almost like a couple of pale, branching veins.

The face of a Celestial Child has no features other than a vertical seam that continues down its "neck," and what look at first like four large, puckered, pale suction cups, but on close inspection, each sucker resembles an entire small octopus arm, curled into a loop and fused in place, as though these would have become four cephalopod tentacles if the creature had continued developing.

The children crawl slowly, little hands held up like they're begging for a treat, and are another enemy that won't always attack you until you're mean to them first. If you ARE mean to them, which is terrible by the way, they can spit up a corrosive enzyme, and when you get close enough, they can split open from head to sternum to reveal one long mouth cavity filled with needly little fangs!

There's even a pack of slimy babies you can fine creeping through the Upper Cathedral Ward, totally ignoring you. Once they reach a dead end, they look like they're "praying" in the direction of the Lumenflower Gardens, where you can face the Emissary. Do they share similar origin? Yes and no, probably. We know that the Emissaries and Minions were humans, most likely orphan children, and something from the lumenflowers accelerated the development of their implanted parasites.

The Celestial Children are not part of the development of the Minions, bearing much closer resemblance to what we're going to review in our next entry, though their creation may possibly involve similar methods. The only solid lead we really get comes from Arianna, an NPC implied to be a sex worker who can be sent to one of the two "safe havens" in a game where you probably already knew that would turn out to be a lie.

If Arianna is sent to the chapel, she'll begin to suffer severe pain after you kill poor Rom, which as you know only hastens the cycle of the Blood Moon. Later, she'll be missing from her usual place, a trail of blood leading out of the chapel and into a crypt...

You'll find Arianna weeping over a tiny, bloody new Celestial Child, which sits watching her in confusion. Killing the poor baby gets you one of the three Umbilical Cords in the game, but doing so also kills its mother.

Arianna is actually of Vileblood descent, like the "vampires" at Cainhurst, but we don't know for certain if this phenomena is limited to her kind. We do see a couple of dead specimens elsewhere in the game, and tomorrow's review will shed a little dash more light on the situation, but it seems fair to assume these creatures generally begin their existence as human embryos. Some think Great Ones themselves impregnate humans with these "larvae," resulting in what might seem at first to be some sort of holy "virgin birth," while others think their development is induced artificially by the Healing Church, but perhaps both can happen.

Only one thing is for sure: the Celestial Children are almost certainly one of - aw, heck - they're probably THE cutest things of all the many cutest things that populate Bloodborne. It's not ethical to create one, no, so I wouldn't do that, but I mean, if they're just going to get thrown out in the street anyway I'll adopt every one of them.