CLASSIFICATION

Symbiotic Parasite / Two-Body Cooperative

STATE

Observation Ongoing

NAME

un-ban-ull-co

APTERA_NOTE

A round helmet, and inside it, a single skull. The neck is purple, glistening like a brain. Black coat, purple gloves — not bad taste, I'll grant.

Look closer, and it is not one creature but two — a skull, and the body that wears it, moving by some private agreement between them. Whether to call it parasite or partner, even I am unsure. Conversation gets through only by way of the skull. A bright, childish voice carries out, muffled, from inside the glass helmet. Its movements are oddly frugal, unhurried.

Its talk is cheerful, careless — the very picture of a scatterbrain. And yet, in its doings, it misses nothing. It finds the weakened, and first takes their pain away. Eased, they begin to hand themselves over — body and all. To swap out the inside so casually, all the while wearing that cheerful face — that is the trouble with it. A word of caution: if that thing is ever kind to you, run.

When hungry, it feeds from anywhere on that gluey body of its. It folds its prey in, takes it within, and slowly dissolves it inside. Curious to a fault, and not at all particular. — I have watched it swallow even the little slime it shares the house with. Whether they live together as friends, or it merely sees food, it does not seem to trouble itself to tell apart.

Before long the inside has been swapped out, and it walks through the crowd wearing an innocent face. — Come to think of it, that little one in the borrowed skull (APT-014) wears this thing's remains, too. Which it met first — the living one or the corpse — I couldn't say.

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