Analysis of the Forgotten Beast Shash Ritasanan - By Urist MacNaturalist
The Beast that had been discovered underneath Rockcircle has finally been slain. The final dwarven death count, 43.
Victims where lured into the caverns upon hearing the voice of a female elf or dwarf, calling for help. Sometimes, the voices would sound like they where crying.
Deep within the beasts lair, a phospheressing figure would be seen, hard to make out the details. This figure has since been dubbed the "Puppet". Shash used this puppet to lure victims deeper and deeper into its lair, giving the more cautious a face for the voice.
Autopsy of the puppet has shown it to be the corpse of an elf woman, somewhere between 150 and 210 years of age, in an advanced state of mummification. The residual moisture in the caverns allowed phospheressing mold to form a colony on the corpse. The corpse does not appear to have been a victim of Shash. Rather, it looks as though the elf was murdered, and Shash merely co-opted the body for its own grim theater.
At the heart of the beasts lair is a massive, sound catching funnel made from the beasts webbing. The edges are extremely soft and smooth, and non-adhesive in their current state. Multiple smaller funnels branch off from the main funnel, each of these smaller funnels ending in a web encased skull. We are yet to finish catalogueing the full range of species that are represented by these skulls, however we have counted at least 37 previously unidentified species of cavern dweller so far. Without a doubt, Shash has been operating for a very long time.
Shash itself dwelt above this great funnel, its great spindly legs tugging at weblines hard as iron, expertly playing its web to produce the voices the victims heard. There are many webbing trails across the ceilings of the cavern around Shash's nest, which it used to travel around from. Caves in the ceiling have, until now, acted as its larder. It was by breaching these upper caves we where finally able to confront the beast on equal footing and bring its horror to an end.
The beast itself was a gigantic spider in form, although with a few adaptations. Firstly, it only had the one eye, which in fact acted more as an ear in the dark, being a giant gelatinous echo detection organ. Secondly, its exoskeleton is remarkably smooth. Odd for an ambushing predator, more so for one who dwells on the ceilings of a cavern, this adaptation appears to have been made to allow it greater ease of movement along its weblines, rather than for any extra grip or camouflage other forms might offer. Finally, the beast has two great pairs of antennae, which functioned to detect air currents at great distances, allowing it to monitor the presence of living creatures within the full range of its hunting ground, as well as the state of victims stored in its larders.
The investigation into the origins of this beast are still ongoing, however we have found no signs of reproductive activity as yet, so we have assumed the creature to be unique in its morphology.
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