concept: false centaur-symbiote that wears man-skin upper garment/costume
description: bipedal symbiont rides on/attaches to horn-feeler of rugose, headless quadraped symbiote.
Wears syntha-skin (or real) human covering over top. Not at all a convincing disguise. Arms bend like mantis. All-black eyes. Sense organ tendrils poke through mouth-slit of garment.
Likes relatively dim, cool, humid environments.
Very touchy-feely.
stats for CT:
TBD but I think I will start by making two animals. They gain a gestalt intelligence when in close contact.
Quad body has armor equal to jack. Hooves.
More notes:
Mocking horses took to wearing man-skin very soon after first contact with humanity. Their first man-skins were peeled from the corpses of human explorers, but the mocking-horses soon developed synthetic versions.
Human scientists debate whether the skin-wearing is religious pantomime, instinctual mimesis, a threat, or a diplomatic gesture.
What is known is that the creatures refuse to take off the man-skins in their dealings with humanity, and simply do not respond to questions or complaints about the garments.
Mocking horses appear to be able to exchange complex loads of information by intermingling sensory tendrils. They sometimes attempt to ''French-kiss'' humans, though xeno-scientists don't know how much information the aliens really get from this action.
They don't speak, but do utilize a sign language and a tapping code, the latter of which is easily adaptable to radio comms with a tactile pad device as a receiver.
tech level:
When first encountered by humans, these aliens seemed to be primitive trogloxenes. They carried only simple slug throwers and blades as weaponry.
But the mock-horses reverse-engineered the gear and the vessel of that first, doomed Scout team with a skill and rapidity that no primitive race should have been able to muster. Likewise, the synthetic man-skins they created indicate a higher than initially suspected tech level.
HX note:
The only reason the third mission to the mocking horses wasn't a punitive expedition is that the Scouts' flight recorder/mission recorder recovered by the second team showed the first team died of an alien pathogen after a life support system failure, and not at the hands of the mocking horses. The aliens skinned the dead scouts, but no one can say for sure if that was malicious.
description: bipedal symbiont rides on/attaches to horn-feeler of rugose, headless quadraped symbiote.
Wears syntha-skin (or real) human covering over top. Not at all a convincing disguise. Arms bend like mantis. All-black eyes. Sense organ tendrils poke through mouth-slit of garment.
Likes relatively dim, cool, humid environments.
Very touchy-feely.
stats for CT:
TBD but I think I will start by making two animals. They gain a gestalt intelligence when in close contact.
Quad body has armor equal to jack. Hooves.
More notes:
Mocking horses took to wearing man-skin very soon after first contact with humanity. Their first man-skins were peeled from the corpses of human explorers, but the mocking-horses soon developed synthetic versions.
Human scientists debate whether the skin-wearing is religious pantomime, instinctual mimesis, a threat, or a diplomatic gesture.
What is known is that the creatures refuse to take off the man-skins in their dealings with humanity, and simply do not respond to questions or complaints about the garments.
Mocking horses appear to be able to exchange complex loads of information by intermingling sensory tendrils. They sometimes attempt to ''French-kiss'' humans, though xeno-scientists don't know how much information the aliens really get from this action.
They don't speak, but do utilize a sign language and a tapping code, the latter of which is easily adaptable to radio comms with a tactile pad device as a receiver.
tech level:
When first encountered by humans, these aliens seemed to be primitive trogloxenes. They carried only simple slug throwers and blades as weaponry.
But the mock-horses reverse-engineered the gear and the vessel of that first, doomed Scout team with a skill and rapidity that no primitive race should have been able to muster. Likewise, the synthetic man-skins they created indicate a higher than initially suspected tech level.
HX note:
The only reason the third mission to the mocking horses wasn't a punitive expedition is that the Scouts' flight recorder/mission recorder recovered by the second team showed the first team died of an alien pathogen after a life support system failure, and not at the hands of the mocking horses. The aliens skinned the dead scouts, but no one can say for sure if that was malicious.
Last edited:
