(OOC) Spooky a modified '8', & Outrider's a whopping modified '12' - [1d10 plus closest city stat (Savannah +2) +2]
---------
The Spooky II's sensors find nothing amiss at the Northern vector and all previous data corroborated on the other vectors after playing a vast variety of sensors over the entire area.
'Radar' O'Reilly isn't so sure... It's nothing the little man can put a finger on either, thermals are ambient temperature, no bounce back from his modified 'fishfinder' sonar, and his newly cobbled together on-board radar is drawing blanks. But the prescient lil fart fidgets nervously, he peers out through his coke bottle thick eyeglasses and points to a unseasonable brown cluster of Georgia Pine.
"Cap, can we swing in closer to that stand of pines? I really don't like the look of them, they make my stomach churn."
The C.O. of the Pathfinder nods, the little man has shown an uncanny nose for trouble, both for where to find it and when to scoot to best avoid it.
As the Pathfinder closes to just under a kilometer out from the stand, everyone onboard nearly gags on an acrid smell, a combination of decaying vegetation and a fetid sulphuric/vinegar smell so putrid as to defy description.
Totally unlike the Valstrax ovoids; here lies a hollowed out sphere with multiple openings around the peripheries now lying empty and a trail of devastation leading away, all growth along said path is twisted and wrong as if whatever hand wrought it did so from spite and malice. The growths defy reason as if their genetic code was scrambled randomly and at the trails head is a transparent sluglike organism stretching out pseudopods caressing each tree and shrub encountered they shudder and convulse at the touch. A brown bear wanders too close, it shrieks its horror and rage as it too is altered as cancerous tumors replace flesh. What lumbers away is no longer recognizable as mammalian let alone ursoid.
The slug grows with each corruption, stealing and incorporating some of the organic mass. It grows larger and lighter, a transparent zeppelin full of threadlike mycorrhizoidal spores that begins conversion on a touch through its membranous cell wall. Even now, with visual contact and a clear target 'Radar' O'Reilly is unable to get -ANY- return on the sensors, the creature adjusts itself to match ambient temperature, it soaks every bit of the radar up leaving nothing to bounce back, it resonates to create sound waves that neutralize sonar pings. It is all but invisible to sensors while floating a few meters above the ground in plain sight.
The scene is like watching a trainwreck, it is hard to pull one's eyes away. It is useful this morbid fascination, it reveals that the organism shrinks away from exposed stone, a near ruined wire fence has the same effect. A small bubbling brook might as well be a security fence, it avoids it like a slug would salt.
-------------
The beast is one beyond most people's imaginings, but the spores are unique enough that 'Radar' O'Reilly associates them with a book recently read, Dragonriders of Pern, and the horror of threadfall. He coins the term Threadbeast, and without LOCCENT to assign a name it sticks for now.
