Bestiary

Among the more easily overlooked Umbral natives, dataphytes are little more than mobile mouths with an instinct to keep the Umbra relatively tidy. Well, as tidy as a dimension literally formed of the stuff of nightmares can be, anyway. Although creepy, they pose little danger and don’t really mean anyone harm. Incapable of fighting, talking, or even autonomous thought, these entities aren’t even hard to destroy. Even in the Umbrae where they dwell, subtle Charms cloak their existence from all but the most accomplished eyes.

Dataphytes create what’s sometimes known as the thought-void: a swirling sense of forgetfulness that often misleads mortal creatures, especially when they venture into the Penumbrae and seek distant Realms. Essentially metaphysical bottom-feeders, dataphytes eat any “unattended” thoughts they can find. If you’re not concentrating on something, or giving it only a passing bit of attention, there’s a chance that thought might disappear into the smooth, seamless surface that somehow functions as the mouth of a dataphyte. To a dataphyte’s senses, most living creatures constantly leak thoughts, leaving disgusting trails for the spirits to clean up. And so, that’s exactly what they do: clean up your thoughts. Are you finding it hard to focus on the task at hand? You might have a dataphyte munching on your ideas. If you’ve

ever entered a room and immediately forgotten what you were doing, you've probably crossed paths with a dataphyte. That thing you swore you'd remember and then can't recall for the life of you? Om-nom-nom, as the saying goes. To be fair to the little critters, dataphytes can't eat anything you're concentrating on, and things that aren't thoughts (e.g. autonomic functions, like breathing) aren't snacks, either. Dataphytes, therefore, aren't harmful, really... just extremely unhelpful.

For the most part, people (Awakened and otherwise) remain relatively safe from these annoying little buggers. Every so often, though, someone or something sets thought-munching dataphytes loose into the material world; at such times, neighborhood or whole towns may grind to standstills as the inhabitants of those locales wallow in indecisiveness, perhaps (in rare, extreme cases) starving to death because folks can’t even decide what to eat or remember how to eat it. The Void Engineer Border Corps Division shows up when such incursions show up on their radar, and they capture or purge every dataphyte they can find. Theoretically speaking, even if the Void Engineers took any of these thought-eating aliens back to the labs for further study, those paragons of guardianship would never accidentally release any of their subjects back into the wild (or, so to speak, into the Wyld). They certainly wouldn’t theoretically create a larger, lethal version of the dataphyte and unleash it on the Deep Umbra. Of course they wouldn’t. Perish the thought...

Willpower 1, Rage 1, Gnosis 1, Essence 10

Charms: Disorient, Materialize, Memory Eater (consumes one random thought or memory, 1 Essence), Mind Speech (though they don't have much to say), Mislead

Materialized Attributes: Strength 1, Dexterity 2, Stamina 2, Use Gnosis for Social and Mental Traits

Abilities: Awareness 4, Brawl 2, Stealth 1

Materialized Health Levels: 2