2025 Jun 20: Oresians

 Oresians are strange, ethereal creatures that dance through a myriad worlds on rays of moonlight. Sometimes they misstep, and get trapped in our world. They don't tend to last long, given their physiology is ill-suited to a world with such rigid laws of physics, such caustic atmosphere, and such a sharp divide between dreams and reality. Still, they try their best to survive, and maybe on the night of the next full moon return to dancing across alien skies. But to do that, they need sustenance, and that can be a problem. They feed on dreams and aspirations, but unlike the more naturalized beings, they have no good way of extracting them from a person's skull, without opening it up and slurping down the brain. For a while they can subsist on animals, but the dreams of a goat or a rat can only go so far. Sooner or later they will try to take more sapient prey.

They look like giant masses of tentacles with translucent, insect-like wings and large compound eyes. No two are exactly alike, and when alive they seem to be constantly, subtly changing over time. The smaller ones are usually about a meter across, with the largest ones capable of growing to almost five meters. They have very few ways of overpowering a person, so they usually drift above them silently, waiting for their time to strike. Their touch can change what they touch to be more like them, born of dreams, more mercurial, with their form shifting and churning more and more, the longer the contact goes on. They use this to disorient their prey, wrapping them in their tentacles until their flesh grows too unfamiliar for them to fight back, and their skulls too weak to withstand the clumsy assault of the Oresian. Then they drink deep from the brain, their pale bodies turning pink from the blood. They of course vomit the brain matter out later, but for a moment, they experience the person they killed more intimately then anyone ever has. They then usually spend the next hour or so exhausted, overwhelmed, just looking at the sky in melancholy. This is when most of them get killed by the associates of the person they just ate. They are terribly easy to kill, their bodies getting irreparably damaged from thrown stones or fist strikes.