The Strange
A thonik looks like a particularly dense area of chaotic fractal pattern undulating through the Strange.
When it attacks, it's easier to distinguish as a separate entity. An aggressive thonik appears something like a "sheet" of flexible fundament, shot through with undulating mouthlike openings that appear, disappear, open, and close in rhythmic pulses. The thonik is a predator of the dark energy network, and it feeds primarily on background energy fields of the Strange, but it rarely passes up the concentrated energy associated with cyphers, artifacts, and the bodies of living creatures.
Certain entities of the Strange can tame thoniks to docility with a touch. For instance, Chaosphere hierarchs have been known to wear thoniks as cloaks that self-animate and attack aggressors without any need for direction from the wearer.
A thonik preferentially absorbs the energy of a cypher, of an artifact, and of a target's life force, in that order. Usually.
Motive: Hungers for energy
Environment (the Strange): Anywhere
Health: 22
Damage Inflicted: Moderate wound (5 points)
Movement: Short
Modifications: Attacks, initiative, and stealth as level 5 while in the Strange.
Combat: A thonik attacks by attempting to wrap its sheetlike body around a target. On a successful attack, the thonik inflicts a moderate wound (5 points), and the target must make a second Speed defense roll or become wrapped in the thonik's undulating body.
On subsequent turns, a thonik can automatically deal 5 points of damage (that ignores Armor) to the wrapped foe. As another option, it could automatically absorb the energy of a cypher carried by the wrapped foe. Finally, it might choose to suck energy from an artifact carried by its prey; when it does so, it permanently doubles the artifact's chance of depletion.
A successful attack against a thonik wrapped around prey splits the damage equally between both thonik and prey.
On her turn, a wrapped target's only physical option is to attempt to break free as her action, which she does if she succeeds on a level 5 Might-based task.
Interaction: Thoniks are about as intelligent as animal predators, which means that while they can't speak, they could be conditioned by a determined PC trainer to serve as defenders of a given territory, to avoid attacking certain individuals, and so on.
Use: The PCs find the interface to a previously unknown recursion in the Strange. Guarding the interface, however, is a pack of thoniks.
GM Intrusion: A character wrapped inside a thonik becomes panicked and confused, and he gains a factor of alienation.