Aching Vyrm

Physical Properties

The aching vyrm is a diminutive redform vyrm with two to three pairs of limbs, downturned blank eyes, and dull red stripes contrasted by the sickly green color of its eyes, teeth and short tongue. Its skin is pleasantly soft, but sweaty and feverish to the touch. Its flesh is red and sinewy, while its small, vestigial body cavity contains thin, wormlike green organs. Its top jaw is toothless, with only its bottom jaw having rows of evenly spaced teeth, just blunt enough to have difficulty piercing human skin, and its eyes perpetually weep humanlike tears that tend to seep into its environment over time. Its odor is briny and unpleasant.

Aching vyrms handle changes in environment quite poorly, with heat causing its soft skin to become squishy and malleable, and cold freezing it over time. Injuries to the aching vyrm open and weep gruesomely in a sudden explosion of simultaneous injury, cuts spontaneously generating several more around them and bruises blooming into a swollen mess. This process stops after about a second. After this point, its very slow, but present, regenerative ability kicks in, stitching over its violent injuries with rough, pale scar tissue.

The aching vyrm speaks through choked, hissing sobs that only incidentally resemble a human voice.

Generation

The aching vyrm generates in a wide range of locations, but tends to prefer places with low lighting and relatively little human activity. It is further attracted by lack of noise and damp conditions. Basements, storage rooms, and abandoned houses are all likely locales for an aching vyrm generation event, while alleyways and empty hotel rooms are less likely to host them, but still possible. In these locations, the aching vyrm appears in a limbless, wormlike form, which bloats to full size in a series of restrained movements, as though it is being pushed, but not toppled, by unseen hands. This process takes about an hour, and ends with the aching vyrm's legs stretching from its body and lifting it onto its feet.

For the first minute-or-so of its life, the aching vyrm is unbothered and almost serene in its peacefulness and wandering of its surroundings. This period of relaxation ends after 78 seconds, at which point the aching vyrm suddenly gasps and collapses, suddenly overtaken by its characteristic agony.

Behavior, Effects

The aching vyrm spends its life plagued by intense pain, particularly in its stiff, tender limbs. The lightest bump to its knee can cause the vyrm to recoil and sob, and every step it takes is wracked with pain. Due to the immense difficulty of movement under these conditions, it prefers not to move at all, and spends a majority of its life lying limply in the place where it last collapsed, its raspy crying often belying its position well before anything else. It expresses a personality only in idle taps of its claws or the occasional nudge of its snout against nearby objects.

Occasionally, however, environmental conditions necessitate movement, and it is at these times that the aching vyrm stumbles back onto its feet and begins to limp along. Its thick tail drags behind it as it walks with a sloped back and an unsteady gait. It moves very slowly, and can rarely manage longer than fifteen minutes of movement, at which point its legs give out and it collapses where it stands. Because of the limited nature of its movement, aching vyrm can be found in a plethora of different locations, even those it cannot normally generate in.

By necessity of its mostly-immobile nature, the aching vyrm's territory is very small, and almost never overlaps with that of another vyrm. When it does, the miserable aching vyrm is either actively avoided or swiftly killed by the other species.

Behavior w/ Vyrmseers, Potential Uses

The aching vyrm is ambivalent towards if not somewhat distressed by vyrmseers. Its sobbing quiets to whispering levels in the presence of a vyrmseer, and though it prefers to remain in place for as long as possible, if approached too closely or threatened, it will clamber to its feet and begin to move away.

Proximity to the aching vyrm causes sharp pain in the joints and back, the intensity of this pain fluctuating with the movements of the vyrm. A limp and undisturbed aching vyrm causes very little pain; at most it produces a mild, tension-like ache. A moving aching vyrm, however, produces severe, stabbing agony in the limbs, the pain comparable to having a knife embedded into each joint. This "pain mirror" effect is stronger in younger aching vyrm and tapers off as the vyrm ages. 5% of aching vyrms also produce a feeling of nausea as they move, comparable to motion sickness.

Despite the pain produced by the aching vyrm's movements, a chemical it produces in its wormlike organs acts as a powerful anesthetic in humans.

Aging, Death

An aging aching vyrm moves less and less frequently and for shorter and shorter amounts of time, eventually becoming entirely incapable of standing. It is due to this that aching vyrms die more frequently to other vyrms than they do natural causes. If it is allowed to live to the very end of its lifespan, it dies with a final spluttering exhale, any new limpness of its body difficult to observe due to its nature. Its body slowly shrinks and flattens down into a sort of papery skin, which crumbles into reddish powder at the slightest touch or breeze.