>>5411054>>5411056>>5411057>>5411059>>5411080>Bobbing with the eb and flow of maddened tides, a Flounder Feeder strays dangerously close to the ice. The radiation is merciless, yet it and its pack have been at this altitude for almost a full local day. Cancer is rare among them and the energy fuels many subtle reactions that leverage the tiniest portion to render ambient carbon into useful calories, but they are burdened with something worse than external sickness or starvation. Themselves. At the slightest cellular deviation from the norm, a rabid immune system devours the perpetrator and doesn’t stop there. Almost every Flounder Feeder now bears pale rashes all across their cartilage, a subdued hint of a far more destructive process beneath. The Flounder Feeders have evolved their radiotrophic shells to a degree of functioning they previously sorely lacked. This has reduced the threat of radiation by absorbing some of the solar taint around them, processing a fraction of it, and disposing of a significant amount of the rest in their waste. This, on average, manages a full twenty percent of the Flounder Feeder’s nutritional needs and renders the radiation itself three to four local days slower to accumulate to the point of inflicting lethal cancer.
The Flounder Feeders have also evolved an innate countermeasure for cancer and may have overdone it. In the frigid, radioactive, toxic waters of the planet’s ocean, microbial life is sparser than it is on most lifebearing worlds and the overwhelming majority aren’t adapted to cause contagious sickness in some part of the thinly spread, sparsely populated narrow band ecosystem. While some diseases do exist and the warp very occasionally rears its ugly visage, the Flounder Feeder’s revamped immune system was largely a fluke. Rather than wait for the Flounder Feeder’s health to deteriorate before acting, its once-weak, now explosively strong immune cells preemptively destroy every cell that shows deviation from a specific, set standard. Unluckily, they tend to catch far more than necessary in the crossfire and after being initially agitated, these cytokine storms almost never calm down.
On one cracked pincer, the immune response is extremely successful in that for the first time, most tumors are destroyed if, when, and where they take root within local days, but on the other, they’ve been replaced by something worse. Although a subtle, if not outright desirable effect, their hostility extends to the Latchers the Flounder Feeders have been supplementing their diets with for myriad generations, causing an almost total scarcity of what was once a reliable food source. Even worse, some uncommon cases see a birther’s immune system breaching the walls of their birthing sack and killing the young as a perceived foreign, hostile presence before they can mature.
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