>>6077262The puppeteers are creatures of landscape and architecture, never satisfied with the structures or wilderness around them. They are most at home in the Demon City, where raw material abounds and the climate suits their taste.
In their quiescent state, these demons resemble fist sized masses of knotted hair glued together by phlegm and bile When stirred into motion, the hair unrolls into dozens of spindly legs ending in small black feet. The central knot, the size of a coin, reaches heights of 50 or 100 yards. Their gait gives the creatures their name. Rather than moving in any synchronized fashion, the terminus of each leg gathers itself and springs, moving more or less in the direction the demon desires. The overall impression resembles that of an insect swarm with an unstable speck located high overhead. A wild puppeteer, freed for some reason to wander the world, often has infants in various states of dehydration and starvation curled up in several non-hopping legs. Puppeteers adore tiny children but have no interest in caring for them.
Those who have seen a puppeteer at work report a chaotic and almost comical process of change. The jerking, uncertain legs coordinate in a bizarrely short span of time to build walls or towers from scattered stones or fencing from fallen wood. They tear trees and shrubs from the earth, kick them from limb to limb to limb while other feet scrabble to dig holes, and then replant them. A puppeteer can pass from one end of a village to the other within a day, shattering some homes, creating others, carrying buildings and their foundations to new locations and using spare pieces to build a sheltering wall around the whole. With the right raw materials, a puppeteer can build siege equipment or defenses almost as fast as it can walk across them.
For the most part, structures built by hopping puppeteers are clean of taint. The slime that covers these demons clings to the puppeteers surprisingly well. Only a few thin trails slide off while the demon hops. Though vile, this substance has narcotic and addictive properties that certain wealthy mortals appreciate. The ultimate end to such addiction, as the need for puppeteer ichor grows, is to swallow a quiescent demon. This usually leads to the addict’s death.
Puppeteers do not like being summoned. A puppeteer can kick a sorcerer who fails to control it from one foot to another for hours, until the battered body has no life in it. Then, it will rearrange local habitations to its inhuman aesthetic until killed or banished.
Other notes: When engaged in its craft, a single puppeteer counts as a workforce of 10.
