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| Yep, checks out. |
Ok, here's the deal: it is known to the Sidereal Opsits of Rensz, whose gorges are forever exposed from a lifetime spent directing their tearful investigations towards the stars, that dense and dim singularities sit in the great void beyond the sky and consume. Worlds and stars. Light. Everything. The works! It is known to the Opsits as well that on rare occasions these singularities meet and devour each other. What is not known to the Sidereal Opsits of Rensz is that such meetings effect the birth of an old-wives' bugaboo: the tugbody. When two of these devouring cataclysms cross paths in the emptiness of space, someone somewhere who went to sleep (demi-)human wakes up as a child of the hungry singularities: a tugbody.
It's one of the universe's most touching mating rituals: as two black holes circle and drink each other, spacetime yawing and disintegrating around them, parsecs away some blameless sentient putz emerges from a good night's sleep an agent of their propagation. The universe, man.
By day the tugbody resembles the man or woman it was. Mostly. If it's in a town fulla 7, 8, and 9 CHA duds it'll bide its time until a charismatic adventurer passes through (charisma being, after all, another form of gravity). But something is off. It smiles a little too much. It repeats what you just said, not all the time but enough to notice. Doesn't blink much. Wait, come to think of it, did that merchant at your table ever blink? It will offer secrets, favors, trenchant gifts; things the PC's might want. Dear PC, don't accept these, even one! The moment you do, you are prey. If you glance back as you leave the tavern, it is looking at you.
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| Like this, JUST like this. |
That night it comes for you as a perfect, inky human, nude and decisive with impossible joints. Vocalizing softly, it will attempt to devour the PC with the highest CHA and subdue others but now it will take what it can get. A gravitational creature, it adds/subtracts its victim’s CHA modifier to its gulping attempt. If it succeeds in devouring its victim it closes its eyes and lips beatifically – at last! – as the poor soul kicks and screams repulsively in the milkrubber distension of its gut, and then... gone. The tugbody immediately teleports to its lair to digest. The victim drops to the floor alive and undamaged where a second ago the tugbody stood or crouched -- a miracle? Alas, no, they are star-sick.
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| And then this, sorta. |
In 1 hour, 1d4+4 discrete points of starlight appear on the victim's body. Any oldwife or stooped elder could tell you in the candlelight that the victim has to hunt down the slumbering tugbody before the sun comes up or they are doomed. You've gone star-sick, luv. Outrace the sun for your soul. They're close: the victim has 2 days to kill the tugbody in its lair, or at midnight on the 2nd day the victim is yanked screaming into the firmament by the glowing napes of its star-sickness, like a marionette violently recalled to its puppeteer, to form a new constellation. Simultaneously, the tugbody molts. Its sloughed leavings skim the ceiling of its lair and then ascend slowly but purposefully into the night sky quite as if in pursuit of its starbound quarry. It leaves behind 1 marble-sized pitblack sphere weighing 800 lbs. This Singularity Pearl is valuable, worth 4d100gp x4 to transmutationists and alchemists, x2 to general wiz-holes and shrewd warlordy types, and x1 to randos like a vain noble. Pain in the ass to haul around, but the mind whirs at its potential uses. The abrupt new constellation will be visible to any astute skywatcher, among whose number are (of course) the Sidereal Opsits of Rensz. They chirrup and weep dispassionately as they record this astral development in the damp of their clay archival ceilings.
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| Constables I'm tellin yinz, he went up dat way. Yellin and glowin n'at. |
The victim retains a type of locked-in, diffuse consciousness as a constellation: dimly aware of floating in a vacuum, unable to move or act. Eventually they can feel powerful moaning tugs from a great distance as something dense, hungry and familiar draws ineluctably closer in the void.
***
I reckon the tugbody is more fluff monster than gameable monster right now, but up next I'll make BRIEF vague gestures at a statblock, some hooks, rumors, spoors, lair bla bla.
