Pale stalks parted the captain's hair, folding out from his head, questing like fingers. The captain was gone; he'd been hollowed out and worn like a hat, just long enough to gestate a kray. ~a passage from the Myth of the Maker
Long ago, the Betrayer showed the kray a way to get past the Seven Rules that kept other Strangers out of Ardeyn in return for their aid. These creatures have plagued Ardeyn ever since.
As inert seedlings, kray can sometimes find entry on their own, but they usually require someone native to the recursion to bring them in. After a kray seedling makes the transition into a recursion, it can drift on the wind until it finds fertile ground. In this case, fertile ground means a living creature.
Kray are living extensions of something that is far too big and powerful to gain entry into Ardeyn: the kray broodmother, which is nothing less than a planetovore. The kray broodmother lurks in the Strange, in a region called, appropriately enough, the Kray Nebula.
Even larger kray exist out in the Strange, but luckily those kinds haven't yet entered any known recursions around Earth.
The Strange
A kray seedling that takes root in a living creature needs to gestate for only a few minutes before spitting out a kray scurrier: part crayfish, part spider, and all nightmare. A kray scurrier's body is about the size of a human head, but despite its relatively small size, the creature is an amoral and fearless predator with one goal: eat from the flesh of the recursion where it finds itself. A kray scurrier usually doesn't have to eat much before it molts to become a larger kray drone.
Motive: Hungers for flesh
Environment (Ardeyn | Magic): Usually in the Borderlands or Green Wilds, alone or in scuttles of up to ten
Health 12
Damage Inflicted: Moderate wound (4 points)
Armor: 2
Movement: Short
Modifications: Speed defense as level 4 due to small size.
Combat: A scurrier's main mode of attack is its pincers, which it can use to attack a single foe in immediate range, even if the scurrier moved on its action.
A scurrier also possesses a precursor drone stage web attack that can be used every other round to attack a target in long range for a moderate wound (4 points). A victim hit by kray scurrier webs can't move or physically attack, but he can spend an action attempting to break free (a Might task).
A scuttle of four or more kray scurriers can focus on a single target and make one attack as if they were a level 5 creature, inflicting 8 points of damage.
Interaction: A kray scurrier doesn't communicate, and it tries to eat anything that talks to it. Before a scurrier sprouts, it attempts to make others believe that the body it resides in is still the person or creature it was before.
Use: A large family of farmers in the Ardeyn hinterlands has become infected, all except a young boy, who has run away. PCs might find the boy along the way to another adventure and hear how his parents and siblings "aren't the same as they used to be." That's because they're all being puppeted by kray scurriers.
GM Intrusion: One or two more kray scurriers appear, hatching from nearby NPCs that no one realized were infected.
The Strange
When a kray scurrier eats enough, it molts (over the course of one round) and, from a space too small to hold it, a kray drone emerges. A kray drone's torso is human-sized, but when standing on its many legs, it's two and a half times taller than a human. The front two pincers have spinnerets on the end and each can spray webbing. Anything fully cocooned in kray webbing is either deleted from existence or hideously changed.
Motive: Collapsing recursions for the broodmother
Environment (Ardeyn | Magic): Usually in the Borderlands or Green Wilds
Health 19
Damage Inflicted: Moderate wound (5 points)
Armor: 3
Movement: Short
Modifications: Speed defense as level 4 due to size.
Combat: A kray drone can propel a spray of webbing from each of its spinnerets, attacking up to two creatures within short range as a single action. A web attack does damage and catches the victim, who can do nothing other than attempt to break free. For every turn the victim is caught in the web, he takes 5 points of damage from being cocooned.
A victim killed in kray webbing becomes fully cocooned. If the cocoon is later scraped away, what is left resembles nothing of the victim. He has been either deleted from Ardeyn or changed in some horrifying way (turned to slime, stone, into a swarm of kray scurriers, and so on).
Interaction: A kray drone is intelligent, but it's not conscious like a human being. It's capable of trickery, deception, and even mimicking conversation as a means to an end, but there is no mind inside, just a complex series of drives and needs, all of which point toward collapsing any recursion it finds to make way for the kray broodmother planetovore.
Use: A kray drone is wreaking havoc in a neighborhood of a large city. Pleas for aid come from all quarters.
Loot: A cypher or two can sometimes be pried loose from a kray drone's corpse.
GM Intrusion: The PC moves into a net of kray drone webbing that she did not see and is caught.