#Petrolodon

[teratoscope]

Petrolodon

You sweep your mag rifle left and right, pinging your comms for the sixth time. No answer. The ground squelches beneath your boots. Each step you take has to be carefully planned and tested—thin patches in the fused plastic abound, and too much weight will plunge you into the putrid, briny water. If Ven was around you could just sonar-sweep the terrain and he’d mark out the rough patches, but he was the first to go. Everything here undulates. There’s no solid foundation that any of this is built on; just places where the morass has clotted thick enough for a body to linger for a while. You pick your way up a slope, towards where the garbage piles highest. You realize your mistake when you reach the summit. Below, the beast drags Wat’s bloodied body, half-stripped of his combat webbing, into the open mouth of its sun-bleached pastel den, where the writhing shapes of its pups wait panting. It fixes you in the gaze of a dark, salt-stung eye and its hackles rise, half-transparent scales rippling over its dark bulk. Muscular paws, half flipper and half shovel-claw, send up plumes of trash as it charges and dives seamlessly into the base of the mound where you’ve taken a position.

HD 6 MV 90’/150’ swimming/120’ burrowing AC 15 AT mighty jaws (2d6), claw x2 (1d8) Special ablative scales, antifreeze blood

Ablative scales—Any kinetic damage dealt to a Petrolodon is halved. This effect ends when the Petrolodon is dealt 8 or more damage in a single hit before the armor is figured in.

Antifreeze blood—Petrolodons are immune to harm and action penalties from conditions of terrestrial severe cold, and cold-based weaponry always deals the minimum possible damage.

The Petrolodon’s designers had a problem with the amount of waste plastic the human diaspora left behind; of the many engineered species documented in the Reconquista, an impressive majority have been engineered to consume, metabolize, and synthesize petroleum products, often through direct symbiotic partnership with a modified strain of ideonella sakaiensis. The Petrolodon is simply the largest and most aggressive of these species, as they are derived from apex predator pinniped stock.

Since the introduction of the Petrolodon and its partner species, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch has dwindled in size; it is projected to vanish altogether within the next thirty years. This has had several curious knock-on effects, largely on local indigenous human economies.

While generally Terran Reclamation Army representatives are encouraged not to indulge the cultural coping mechanisms of feral humanity, it pays to be familiar with the conventions when the need arises to play along. The increasing rarity of “pearls”—pellets of plastic worn into spheres by tidal forces and deposited onto shorelines—has made them a commonplace exchange marker in indigenous trade ways, while the shells and scales of plastic-eaters are often prized for their difficult-to-replicate shapes and their relative ability to take a hit and hold an edge. The synthetic scales of a Petrolodon are among the most valuable of these, and are often worked into symbols of office and battle regalia, as they’re taken as a marker of the bearer’s martial prowess, disposable income, or skill as a thief. On this note, it is wise also to keep in mind when among humans born in the gravity well that they have not retained the same notions of property that we maintain on Freestar One, and will have no compunctions about stealing what they can’t trade for. However, such groups tend not to take it personally if you steal things back.