Cookie Fiend
Cookie
Fiends in the Elmo savannah
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Cookie FiendCookie
Fiends in the Elmo savannah
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The Cookie Fiend - a
subsophont creature roughly square when viewed from above. A typical
adult is .4m across the 'flats' by .1m high with eight .5m legs offset
along the 'front' and 'back' edges. Its tan skin is semi-smooth, with
scattered photoreceptors that look all the world like a chocolate chip
in a chocolate chip cookie.
For all its innocuous appearance, this is the dominant predator in
desert-to-dry conditions on Elmo, its home planet in Auriga. It is a
pack hunter, capable of long distance 45 KPH 'running' with short
pogo-ish jumping sprints approaching 100 KPH for less than a minute. It
uses a tactic similar to wolf pack hunting, tiring the prey via the
chase. Rather than finishing with a scrum, however, the cookie fiend
charges in, pogoing in at speed to land on the prey, bringing their
digestive system into contact and releasing a moderate potency
bioactive acid, beginning the digestion of the prey.
As multiple members of the pack disgorge their acid loads, the prey
tends to fail rapidly, turning into something along the lines of a
goo-pile, which the cookie fiends then absorb for nourishment.
Their environmental pressure developed several defensive strategies
against such actions, but in areas where there are no such defenses the
cookie fiends are pestiferous in the extreme. They are capable of
obtaining sustenance from many biochemical patterns, including baseline
terran stock, long enough to cause significant havoc.
Eventually biochemical incompatibility will cause severe problems even
for the adaptable cookie cutter metabolism, but generally by that time
the damage is done. Colonists on Elmo (a middletech world aligned with,
but not a member, of the Orion
Federation) have suffered considerable
losses among domesticated species of various kinds.
Due to the lack of certain natural contaminants (primarily a moderate
arsenic level), cookie fiend young are born at a higher rate off their
planet, but do not gain the full size of their parents and seem to
suffer from hyperaggressive tendencies when among non-cookie fiend
beings. It is not uncommon for them to be killed off via
nutritional deficiencies or lack of resources due to
overpredation.
