Troll_Man

Serina: The Verminator

Added 2023-02-03 22:10:08 +0000 UTC

A large, badger-like descendant of the wormslayer living in the late hothouse era, this is a strange polar predator of the upperglades and night forest well-adapted for the months of perpetual darkness. During the summer, it lives as an aquatic hunter, using its extremely whiskers and bill to detect bottom-dwelling crustaceans, bivalves, molluscs, and slow-moving fish in the mud, which it can crush and devour with ease with broad keratinous teeth. With its relatively low metabolism, it can stay underwater for more than an hour at a time.

With the arrival of fall, the verminator undergoes a physical change with the end of perpetual daylight; its arms become stronger and more robust in both skeletal and muscle structure, the webbing on its feet recede and its down-like feathers lose their waterproof coating, as it switches to being a purely terrestrial predator. With most larger hunters migrating south as the herds of herbivores they depend on flee to sunnier pastures, the verminator can hunt with relative impunity. It is particularly good it sniffing out and digging up hibernating animals in their burrows.