All living things can reach enlightenment, and when a fox does so they become a KITSUNE. The older and wiser the spirit becomes, the more tails it will grow, up to a total of nine magnificent bushy tails.

As their tails increase, so does their cunning. Kitsune can appear in human form as protectors, nuisances, enemies or even lovers!

This is the forty-fifth Creature Feature, created by Femiki in 2024.

The KRASUE was an innocent princess, burned alive for her dalliances, who now roams her homeland as a vengeful ghost! Her body was burned to ashes, but her guts still hold enough resentment to keep her afloat, and hateful!

This is the forty-fourth Creature Feature, created by Ticklish in 2024.

The white bone demon BAIGUJING lurks in the wilderness of the Gansu province, preying on any pilgrims and travellers who walk the long road from China to India. She is a master of disguise, changing her form to trick her victims, getting behind their guard so she may ambush them and feast on their flesh!

This is the forty-third Creature Feature, created by Ticklish in 2024.

Slithering through the Garden to offer up temptation is the DRACONCOPEDES! With the head and breasts of a comely maiden but the winding body of a serpent, this fell beast will offer you the world on a plate. Do not give in to her confusing charms!

This is the forty-second Creature Feature, created by Ticklish in 2024.

The MANANANGGAL is a vampiric creature, usually female, of Philippine myth. It has the bizarre ability to split its body into two and fly around with just its upper half, its entrails dangling about. It preys on couples and pregnant women, sucking out their blood with a mosquito-like proboscis. It shares all of the usual weaknesses of a vampire, but also dislikes spices and garlic.

This is the forty-first Creature Feature, created by Spacefish in 2024.

Wild man, beast man, best friend, it is the mighty ENKIDU! Born outside civilisation and tamed by its pleasures, Enkidu was chosen as the one man strong enough to dethrone the god-king Gilgamesh. Before long, Gilgamesh and Enkidu were going on adventures together, making out, and killing all sorts of monsters and trees.

This is the fortieth Creature Feature, created by Ticklish in 2024.

An unfathomable span of time ago, the ELDER THINGS spread their spores across our young Earth. Faint traces of their rule and their science remain today - in secret places that bend the human mind to its breaking point and in the twilight meta-realm between waking and dreams. Best to leave these mysteries buried, and to remain blissfully asleep.

This is the thirty-eighth Creature Feature, created by Ticklish in 2024.

That eerie glow, that hateful whine... is it a harmless firefly or is it the ADZE coming to drain you dry? These vampiric insects look innocuous enough until they bite, and take away the energy of their victims, who grow ill and stricken if their loved ones are unable to capture the Adze that bit them and force them to undo the curse they have cast.

This is the thirty-sixth Creature Feature, created by Ticklish in 2024.

These august spirits reside in the dangerous places - deep pools, treacherous rivers, jagged caves. They serve as stewards of the life, water and stones there, and deliver stern warnings to intruders to keep away from them - for their own good!

This is the thirty-fourth Creature Feature, created by Ticklish in 2024.

This is the thirty-second Creature Feature, created by Ticklish in 2024.

Striding eternally across the bone white cliffs of Sussex is the LONG MAN! He treads along the ley lines of the Earth, imprinting his memory in the chalk.

This is the thirty-first Creature Feature, created by Ticklish in 2024.

At the tail end of the dark age of the Kali Yuga, even the Buddha, 9th incarnation of Vishnu, became despondent. He forgot of the gods and the truth at the base of the universe and so the universe delivered a reminder in the form of the RAINBOW FISH. This leviathan swallowed the Buddha and took him down to the ocean depths. The brilliant scales of the monster, shimmering in all the colours of creation, reminded Vishnu of what he had lost.

This is the thirtieth Creature Feature, created by Ticklish in 2024.

A tall mysterious figure walks the Outback around New South Wales - the YOWIE. Is it a beast, is it a chocolate mascot, or is it the memory of the people who walked these lands long ago? Did the Yowie escape mankind or fall before it? Only time will tell.

This is the twenty-ninth Creature Feature, created by Ticklish in 2024.

There is treasure hidden deep within the honeycombed caves of Hastingues, stashed away in the days of the Franco-Spanish War. And there it will stay, for anyone who ventures into the caves to recover the riches will find themselves in the slimy, shaggy tentacles of the CARCOHL who sleeps under the hill. This enormous, shy snail can reduce a treasure-hunter to tatters in seconds. Let the past stay buried, and let the snail sleep on.

This is the twenty fourth Creature Feature, created by Ticklish in 2024.

With no head, no thighs and only one blazing eye, the KABANDHA suffers under a humiliating curse put upon him by the thunderbolt of Indra. He must live out his days as a hideous hermit until a hero brave enough to sever his arms can find him.

This is the twenty second Creature Feature, created by Ticklish in 2024.

The SLIMY GENTLEMAN is famed across their home nation of England, a fixture of stage and screen. The dapper mould is a savant at everything they put their mind to, and their adoring audience agree. They have to. There is simply no way to ignore the Slimy Gentleman and their great, great deeds. There is no option to look away. We have to watch, and applaud. Forever.

This is the twenty first Creature Feature, created by Quet in 2024.

The malevolent CHUPACAPRA is a scourge of farmers across the Americas! These elusive fiends can suck the life's blood out of a goat as soon as a rancher's back is turned. If one should happen to catch this monster in the act, the very sight of its scaly skin, quivering spines and red eyes will haunt you forever!

This is the 20th Creature Feature, created by Ticklish in 2024.

Sleep well, but not too deeply, and certainly not on the floor. For that is when you make yourself a target to the malevolent TOKOLOSHE, a hairy little man who snatches the lives of sleepers!

This is the nineteenth Creature Feature, created by Ticklish in 2024.

Once a fair river goddess of Roman Britain, now twisted by centuries of neglect, the NENE HAG tortures and devours the souls of those who drown within her waters.

So keep your feet on the ground and do not trust the current, lest you spend a short eternity in the Hag's hateful embrace!

This is the eighteenth Creature Feature, created by Ticklish in 2024.

Fear the night! That is when the evil shapeshifting POPOBAWA turns from a man into a bat-winged horror! Keep a careful eye on your friends and neighbours, for any one of them could become a devil of rampant appetites when your guard is down...

This is the seventeenth Creature Feature, created by Ticklish in 2024.

The unstoppable mechanical automaton Talos is the guardian of the island of Crete. No ship escapes Talos' piercing glare, and any sailors foolhardy enough to disobey its bullhorn warnings are tossed aside like children's bath toys!

This is the sixteenth Creature Feature, created by Ticklish in 2024.

Ethical Considerations

The part of the interrogations that weighed heaviest on my heart was when I left the Stranger alone with the tree.

It was the 40-year Gently Plum that I had often taken shade under as a child. The committee had transplanted it within the walls of the fortress for the final test in the battery for the Strangers.

They usually performed well for the earlier stages of the interrogation - they would eat the food we gave them if they were hungry enough, though their manners were atrocious. The speaking test was less conclusive: they could not understand us but when they were entered into the chambers in pairs they directed their gibbering sounds more to each other than to the administrators. I believe that they use those sounds to communicate. Fertility tests were muddled until we found one with a peculiar amber meal lodged inside of it: one that seemed to have congealed in the rough shape of the Stranger’s body. Briefly, there was excitement among the committee for redemption, that maybe what we had thought was an amber meal was the true form of the creatures and that the callous, rakeless exterior was only sort of shell or cocoon, but the only amber meal we found was inert and insensible. We concluded that it was instead an internally-situated soft joey that might mature into a full Stranger.

The procedure for the final test was to simply leave the Stranger alone with the Gently Plum for a full day. We would observe their behaviour from the elevated platform above the walls. The tree was pre-marked on its north-facing aspect with intriguing but not over-old marks, in a pattern simple enough for an infant to understand.

But however many Strangers the scouts had brought over from the mainland, none of them added to the marks on the Gently Plum. No elaborations on the cross, no deepenings, sometimes not so much as a curious touch.

Often they climbed the tree. Strangers are very good climbers, and of course we oiled the walls before each interrogation, so the tree might have looked like an escape route to them. In the most heartbreaking cases they would tear branches off of the tree, or use their horrid weight to bring down a bough, to use as a profane kind of weapon against me or the others. In these unhappy events, my colleagues on the wall were forced to blow a thimble of paralytic spores towards the offender. There was something utterly tragic about their extreme reaction to the powder - they tensed so hard that their internal skeletons cracked and their mouth-claws crumbled, their throats brought to their fullest volume of complaint before their breath ran out.

Witnessing this makes it hard for me to retain the neutral attitude my role requires of me. Nobody would be more pleased than I to see the Strangers demonstrate a base level of humanity but I am beginning to feel it might be a lost cause. I petitioned the committee for an extraction, for I could not endure the insults heaped upon the Gently Plum. I asked for her to be transplanted back to the North Shore where she belonged, and after that the interrogations were much simpler.

A curse has settled across an industrialised nation that has grown fat on evil. The curse targets the children, as so many curses do. The stricken child will hunger hotly for highly processed carbohydrate products. The tragedy is that this is considered normal, and even encouraged by a nation where the curse has taken root, so the craving is able to grow deeper and stronger until the child bursts entirely out of their skin! What emerges is a monstrous bee creature, bound by nature to lust always for sugar! What devil has infested the hearts of the young?

This is the fourteenth Creature Feature, created by Ticklish in 2024.

The Matter of the Strangers

I was there at the welcome party when Teroyd returned to us from the mainland. Their account was thorough and fresh, and they related it to us all through the celebration and graciously repeated it for weeks afterwards. They held back no detail, no matter how small or shocking.

And of course, soon the whole island was humming with the report. You were just as likely to hear a recount of it at the mealtimes of the Northern families as the Southern ones. But among all the trials and travails of Teroyd’s journey, that one appalling aspect lasted the longest in people’s tellings:

They don’t rake the bark.

Teroyd went to pains to state that they certainly have trees on the mainland - even more varieties than the ones we know, in fact. And the trees did grow near people, it’s just that the people of the mainland - according to Teroyd - never were seen to scour them.

They said that, early on in their travels, when they went to rake the bark, either for dawnrake or everake, that the men of the mainland would make loud banging sounds and chatter excitedly, as if they wanted to startle Teroyd away from the trunks.

On further observation, Teroyd saw that these faint milk men would pass by trees and ignore the bark altogether. On the rare occasions they saw the people touch the trees at all, the soft, limp protuberances on the end of each small manus made no mark. In their long, sad expedition, Teroyd found no sign of intent on any tree. In desperation, they climbed high up in the branches, thinking perhaps they had found a nation of perverts, but even among the leaves, there were no furrows, no cratches, no hashploughs, not even a tipe.

We had thought that the scant few people who washed up here from the mainland had been cruelly banished for their deformities, or had been disfigured in some barbaric punishment, but Teroyd insists there is a deeper horror out there: that for them, there is no digging through the chalky outer layer of a kind tree, no catching of the claw in the soft flesh below, no sharp exhale of scent on the uplift or the sweet tinkle of sloughspecks at their feet. They don’t know the language of the marks and their flat paws smell only of their own dirt. They talk of the stars in terms of the pungent milk they make, they name the world for the lifeless dirt.

How can they express even the barest sign of kinship or intelligence, having never raked the bark? Can they be said to even be truly alive? Surely on the mainland there can be no real people, just mechanisms inhabited by a slow trickle of instinct. They stagger through a world they can not commune with, their minds full of nothing but holes. All meaning seeps out of their brains and trails behind them on the ground they hold so dear.

So fellows, I will cast my vote for extermination. It will be an act of mercy, or gardening.

This cursed wretch must roam the world, warning others of the misfortune that befell him when he shot and killed an albatross on a sea voyage. No gathering or wedding feast is safe from the Ancient Mariner crashing in to moan his sad tale of woe. Oh no, he won't leave!

This is the twelfth Creature Feature, created by Ticklish in 2024.

This ugly brute with shoes as broad as boats has challenged you to a race. Surely you can outrun a lumbering, bedraggled oaf like him? Why, you would bet your life and the life of all your men on it. It's not as if the fool who keeps stopping to eat blackberries is the King of the Fae in disguise or anything like that.

This is the tenth Creature Feature, created by Ticklish is 2024.

Certain agencies have become aware of your curiosities, your unconventional interests. A gaunt man with a muscular face hidden behind dark sunglasses wishes to speak to you about your recent experiences. You have a strange feeling this may have happened before, perhaps in a dream... The man insists on entering your home. His smile is not a smile.

This is the eighth Creature Feature, created by Ticklish in 2024.

The Scissorman is coming! This sadistic tailor delights in punishing children in the most horrific fashion known to his art - amputating their thumbs with one savage chop of his shears!

So be good, and be quiet, lest the Scissorman comes to add your thumbs to his macabre cabinet!

The sixth Creature Feature, created by Ticklish in 2024.

The Mean Green Mother is an opportunistic weed borne on stellar winds. If it happens to take root in a civilisation with an inequitible economic structure, it spreads rapidly through its existing commerce channels, growing and multiplying until it sucks its host world dry.

This is the fourth Creature Feature, created by Ticklish in 2024.

The Green Man is the spirit of spring, of renewal, of the dark places from which the earth grows. Though he brings life and vigor to those he favours, anyone that trespasses upon his sacred spaces will know the wrath that turned back glaciers. Respect the Green Man and his season or you will find yourself drowning in the mud and the muck.

The third Creature Feature, created by Ticklish in 2024.

The Australian Drop Bear is a terrifying and elusive creature native to the eucalypt forests of Australia. These fierce predators earned their name due to their habit of dropping from the branches onto unsuspecting prey passing beneath them. With their powerful arms and razer sharp claws, they often half strangle their victims to immoboilise them before delivering a fatal bite.

This lost beast has only been found by the most dogged of hunters in the most remote twists of the Congo River. Its horned head is atop a huge, muscular body. Docile when threatened, few have survived after rousing its fury.

The first Creature Feature, created by Ticklish in 2024.

This cat is having a cigarette to collect his thoughts. You may collect him, and who knows where he may lead you?