Then there are creatures even stranger: beasts that are half one thing and half another. I have seen a many-legged insect as large as a bear, with scything limbs, which had fallen on one of my men and was feeding upon his opened guts. Others of us have seen creatures like sheets of skin shaped like men, or a towering beast that looked as if it had been made from the guts and gore of a hundred victims. Once, a woodsman of stout demeanor fell into a wizard's pit, where he encountered a creature he described as a deer's head propelled by the legs of a silverfish. It sucked the juices from his eyes and fouled him mightily with some kind of ichor. Three days after I rescued him, I did him the favor of sinking a knife into his kidneys, for he had gone mad.
— Vampire: The Dark Ages — House Of Tremere
Six elevators contained small babies that seemed to explode again and again, scattering bladed blood-red shards. A giant rabbit with oversized teeth, a woman with a scorpion sting curved from the small of her back, a child with three heads — vampire, zombie, werewolf — a shade of something terrible, a ghostly figure surrounded by fumes that must be toxic, a minotaur with a monstrous phallus, a woman with writhing snakes instead of pubic hair, a man with steaming pipes inserted into his chest and flames in his eyes, a dog with the head of an alligator...
The horrors were endless and almost beyond imagining, and Marty and Dana held each other tighter as their elevator was carried through the impossible space.
The horrors were endless and almost beyond imagining, and Marty and Dana held each other tighter as their elevator was carried through the impossible space.
The dissection and classification goes slowly. What manner of creature would need a beaked mouth, a hooked sucker-maw, and a double handful of maxillipeds? And several organs once removed simply will not stay put in their designated piles - not until you start staking them to the deck, anyway. By the end you have a new appreciation for what astonishing contortionist-acts Mother Nature can perform under duress. And you have enough spare parts to open an avant-garde restaurant, besides.
