Adventure: Monster Hunt

Location:

Scenario:

Alaska, Middle of Winter, Town of Ashridge

Someone’s been killing the polar bears around the area. Not saying a few less bears would be bad for the town, but you can’t go around hunting without a license. These cases are especially strange. Whoever’s been killing them has only taken a few parts directly from the bodies. Seems like they fancy their livers, hearts, brains, and eyes. There’s plenty of weird folk in town, and I’ve seen a lot of strange things in my years, but this has to take the cake.

The umbral hound is a quadrupedal creature from the Space Beyond Color, where it acts as a part of a delicate ecosystem. Moving in packs, the smallest form of the hound can be around the size of a wolf, while the largest can be as tall as a water tower when standing up on its hind legs. Averagely, the smallest version, the umbral pup, slips into our world from the gaps between corpses of murdered humans piled within the same grave. 

The hound’s chest is shaped like a man’s, but looks to be caved inwards, as if repeatedly beaten by a hammer. Each labored breath pushes the chest a foot outwards, taking on a new form per exhalation. The stomach of the creature seems emaciated, with what looks like organs pressed to the skin and sloshing about, however, one might soon find that this is but a single organ containing large quantities of chyme. The hind legs of the hound are shaped like that of a wolf while the front legs are broad shouldered, resembling human arms, with five long, noodle-like fingers and sharp talons pressed to the ground in a crawl. What one would assume to be the head is around two feet in length, and covered by a layer of skin that wraps tightly around like an uncircumsized penis. However, the umbral hound has no official head, instead keeping most vital organs compacted within a multipurpose prehensile nose.

Despite being a walking creature, the umbral hound is capable of detecting mass as it’s applied to the ground. It has trouble finding creatures that are indirectly on the ground, such as people in cars or on rooftops, however if they are less than or equal to 3 feet off the ground, it may still feel the subtle movements and heartbeat of its target. When this form of tracking proves to be unreliable, it exposes it’s prehensile nose, and uses its keen scent to track the target’s location. 

While exposed, the hound is easier to kill, however it’s sense of smell is extremely fine, and can sniff out a predator’s scent from a mile away. The hound only feeds on omnivores and predators. By studying the walking patterns and weight of its prey, the hound can discern herbivores, omnivores, and predators within its hunting grounds, however, when a new species enters the region, it is likely the umbral hound will attack in order to learn the species' eating habits.

The hound’s main tactic is to swim under the ice of rivers, lakes, and sea water, where it huddles into a ball. Waiting near holes in the ice, the hound secretes a warm, translucent gel with a pinkish hue, putting off the appearance and stench of a seal to attract large predators like the polar bear, killer whale, and humans. It’s nose is grey colored, with black spots around the nostrils, looking faintly similar to the head of an ice seal. When a surface dwelling predator attempts to strike the nose, the hound stabs it’s arm through the ice and rips the liver cleanly from the predator’s body, not before ensuring the pain of the attack puts the predator into shock.

From there, it disconnects it’s bones and slithers into the space between skin and muscle from the incision, removing the eyeballs from the skull, and sucking out the brain by squeezing it’s fingers into the prey’s tear ducts. The same substance the hound secretes contains an unworldly dose of chemicals. This substance acts as a bonding agent that both stretches the skin of the prey while keeping it from tearing. The same substance acts as an anesthetic, making the process utterly painless for the prey. The substance seems to produce two layers, the first sticking to the hound and forming a shell. The second moves beyond the hound, sticking to the area around it. When these two layers move against each other, they become slippery, which allows the hound easier locomotion through tight spaces.

The elongated fingers of the hound are lined not only with veins but dozens of esophagus. At the ends of the fingers, just below sharp talons, are what could be described as mouths. The hound feeds by pushing gulpy spurts of digestive enzymes out from the esophagus over the prey’s organs, melting them into a digestible-soup, which are slurped up into the esophagus. Like a human, this slurry is stored in the lower torso for digestion. Unlike a human, the unwanted materials are pushed into the hounds lungs and squirted out of the nostrils in a sort of fecal sneezing fit.

The skeletal structure of the hound is shaped not like the average beast, but segmented like a snake’s spine, allowing the limbs to easily twist and contort. The hound harbor’s traits from rats, possessing rubbery bones throughout the majority of its body, granting it the ability to fit through any space large enough to squeeze its nose through. The nose is about 5 inches in diameter, but can be squeezed down to 2 inches. By secreting enzymes while slithering about, the creature becomes alarmingly silent, able to move about densely populated spaces without detection.

When hunting orca whales, the hound feels the vibrations of the orca's sonar, waiting until the orca is making a beeline for the hound before unfurling its body, and slithering about the water. Yet another marvel of the hound’s secretion is it’s strange viscosity, attaching to the water around it and allowing the hound freedom of movement through the water as if moving on land. When striking the orca, the hound does not tear the liver from the body nor does it wait for the orca to enter shock, simply entering the body upon first contact by making a large incision into the skin around the stomach. From there, the hound moves beneath the dermis, utilizing the viscosity of its secretion to collect large pockets of blubber, pushing these pockets out of the incision en masse. This significantly slows the whale down as it begins dying of hypothermia, moving towards the surface in an attempt to gain warmth, and often beaching themselves in a panic.