Quoted By:
[3/3]
During your patrols you pass by a great many of these exhibits, making the rounds both the grand passages wide enough for the giant steps of the Dragon to walk and observe his prizes but also the lower thin passages between each enclosure where authorised slaves tend the exhibits, clean waste and feed the inhabitants a variety of meat and plant probably no less varied than the palace kitchens themselves. How in the Pit they manage to do so without being ripped to shreds was first beyond you, but after a while you see it for yourself that most enclosure’s with a particularly hostile inhabitant contain side enclosures that the captive is either lured or prodded into for maintenance to occur. Your duty, it was made clear, is to check the authorisation of these menagerie keepers and search the contents of their packages. It was definitely made clear to you that your duties do -not- include entering the exhibits themselves or jumping into any of these deathtraps to fend off a slave unfortunate enough to be caught by one of the many deadly predators present. Not that it happens today, but apparently it isn’t unheard of… On a break, you did ask one of the other guards, a towering Tempest Islander with a wide smile of white teeth, whether any of these creatures had been known to escape their exhibit. The man smiled wider and signalled something in Battle Cant that you didn’t understand, but the rest of the varied guards on break seemed to find quite humour.
While your patrols take you around the breadth and width of the Imperial Menagerie, your usual posting at sentry is adjacent to an exhibit within clear view of your post. It hosts a creature that you would otherwise never have the opportunity to see up close, at least living. And you have little else to do whilst standing sentry and scanning your sector other than to study it, and its behaviours, at length.
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I will also take write-ins if anons have a particular monster in mind, or suggestions for the specimen type they vote for.
> Another monster native to the wild environs of your Cantonian homeland, particularly Fallavon but not unheard of in any given Duchy. [Cantonian specimen]
> A creature said to be found in the Scaled Hordes that periodically prowl, or migrate, en masse across the Slithering Wastelands. [Wasteland specimen]
> A creature whose appearance is so bizarre, and origin so far flung, that if you had heard a man tell of it you would have scoffed at the notion of its existence. [Exotic specimen]