Technological Terror
"Despair, so the old tomes say, is like water.
It runs clear and strong at first, flows where resistance is weakest,
and gathers in brackish, filthy pools in places where the universe's light fails to reach.
One can only speculate on what manner of inhabitants such pools might have,
and what terrifying hungers they may be subject to."
-Excerpt from "A Darkness Beyond Darkness", by Lirka Ka
OUT OF CHARACTER INFORMATION
- Intent: To create a Force-sensitive monster for the Dzara.
- Image Credit: Link and Link
- Canon: N/A
- Permissions: A Darkness Beyond Darkness
- Links: N/A
- Name: Star-Haunt
- Designation: Semi-Sentient
- Origins: The Dzara
- Average Lifespan: Seemingly indefinite, so long as they feed regularly.
- Estimated Population: Scattered
- Description: Evil, semi-spectral tormentors that serve the Dzara.
- Breathes: N/A
- Average Height of Adults: 2 meters
- Average Length of Adults: N/A
- Skin color: Typically pink
- Hair color: N/A
- Distinctions: Ethereal, freakish creations of the Dzara, these beings create their "appearance" in the minds of their enemies.
- Races: N/A
- Force Sensitivity: All
- Terrifier: Star-Haunts very literally feed on fear. They require no physical sustenance as such, instead subsisting on the Force-echo of their victims' misery.
- Ethereal: Star-Haunts strongly resist most forms of physical harm, particularly small-arms weapon fire and melee weaponry.
- It's Okay To Be Afraid: Star-Haunts are natural illusionists and telepaths, and excel at demoralizing, debilitating, and otherwise tormenting organic opponents.
- Flame Eternal: Star-Haunts are exceptionally vulnerable to incendiary weapons. When in doubt, burn it out.
- Banished: Star-Haunts cannot exist within, or harm those who exist within a Force-Nullifying effect.
- Diet: Fear
- Communication: Telepathy, can learn most spoken languages.
- Technology level: As with many Dzara-made creatures, Star-Haunts possess no real technological capability of their own. They will utilize technology if available, but generally prefer their own natural abilities.
- Religion/Beliefs: N/A
- General behavior: Star-Haunts are most often found lingering in places steeped in past suffering or misery, and can often create such places themselves. They feed on the fear and pain of their victims, and to this end serve the Dzara as interrogators and guards.
In its relatively short time as a Sith power bloc, the Dzara has been responsible for a number of horrifying creatures. While most of these serve some conceivable purpose, just as many seem to be designed only to disgust and terrify.
So it is with the Star-Haunt. The terrible processes that are used to create such a creature can only be guessed at. While the method may be unknown, the maker is not: the Dzara use these creatures as guards, shock troops, and torturers.
Star-Haunts excel at all of these roles, particularly the latter. All Star-Haunts are Force-sensitive, seemingly without exception, and wield their abilities with an easy, careless grace.
Invariably, these abilities are used to torment, terrify, and harm. Star-Haunts are natural illusionists, using this capability to wrap themselves in ghastly appearances.
In their rarely-seen natural form, Star-Haunts resemble a humanoid brain and spinal cord, often trailing a bundle of free-floating nerve filaments. They appear to lack a digestive system, sensory organs, reproductive organs, or any of the other hallmarks of saner life forms. Likewise, Star-Haunts appear to not require air, sleep, food, water, or any of the other typical needs of living things.
However, they most often appear entirely differently to their victims, preferring to display themselves as ghastly, mutilated corpses, hideous specters, or other visages of death.
In either case, these entities appear to be entirely unaffected by gravity, and whether in atmosphere or vacuum, they are able to fly under their own power.
Star-Haunts exude an aura of supernaturally-intense, Force-generated terror which, combined with their ghastly appearance, ensures that most life forms cannot bear to be in their presence. A single one of these creatures can send forth an overwhelming wave of telepathically-projected panic; a group can render a sizeable area all but uninhabitable.
This is intensified by these creatures' ability to "pollute" their environs with Dark-Side energies. Places stalked by these spectral horrors are intensely unhealthy even for non-Force-sensitive individuals to linger in too long. Prolonged exposure can lead to emotional instability, auditory and visual hallucinations, violent insanity, and eventually, self-harm.
This miasma of psychic despair lingers long after the Haunts have moved on, potentially rendering a given locale unusable for the foreseeable future.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Star-Haunts feed on their victims' sorrow and pain. Their mastery of illusion and telepathy are such that they can distort their victim's perception of time, dragging them through a seemingly-eternal positive feedback loop of suffering and horror. There are few worse fates imaginable.
Even those freed from the so-called "Haunt's Embrace" are seldom the same after. Victims often report that the experience seemed to span decades or even centuries, and many of the Haunts' victims simply die of stress-induced cardiac arrest before their misery can reach its zenith.
As such, Haunt victims are most often identified by the classic chemical markers of a heart attack, the total lack of outward injury, and the expression of near-inhuman fear that distorts their features.
As such, and as noted above, these creatures are often used to torment particularly-unfortunate victims, and it is a rare individual who can emerge from this process alive and sane.
Physically, Star-Haunts are extremely resistant to most forms of physical damage. Slugthrowers and blasters are so ineffective as to be inadvisable, as are most other forms of energy weaponry. Strangely, and despite the creatures' possession of a semi-solid physical form under the omnipresent illusion of spectral ghoulishness, all but the most potent of man-portable weapons do not even induce a pause in the monsters' advance.
There is one noteworthy exception: fire. Flame weaponry is notably effective against Haunts for reasons that remain somewhat unclear. A direct burst from a flamethrower or incendiary explosive often results in the creature dropping its illusory appearance, and shortly thereafter expiring with an earsplitting, inhuman wail. While few creatures enjoy being engulfed in flames, Star-Haunts seem particularly harmed and disrupted by such weapons.
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