Reef Back Whale
Forty feet long and over twenty tons, the Reef Back Whale looks less like a living creature and more like a piece of ocean floor that decided to move. Tens of thousands of iridescent red crystalline barnacles encrust its deep gray skin, giving the animal a stone-like appearance that has fooled more than one ship's lookout into marking it as a submerged reef. The barnacles share a mutation strain with Fireglow Algae and serve the same function: consuming radioactive material from the water and converting it into nutrients that sustain both themselves and their host.
The whale is a filter feeder, harmless by disposition, traveling between irradiated and clean waters to supplement its baleen diet with the radiation its barnacles process. It predates the Fall as a species and possesses what researchers describe as biological immortality; Reef Back Whales do not die of old age. They die from violence, from rare disease, and from the whaling expeditions that target them for the fortune they represent. A single adult yields meat for food, fat for lanterns, and medicines distilled from the barnacles, all totaling between twenty-five thousand and one hundred thousand UPP.
The catch is the alarm chemicals. When a Reef Back Whale is injured, its barnacles release a chemical signal that drives nearby predators into a frenzy. Razor Backed Anacondas, giant squid, massive sharks, and worse converge on the area, and those incoming predators ignore the radioactive whale entirely in favor of the smaller, more appetizing creatures nearby. Wounding a Reef Back is not the hard part of a whaling expedition. Surviving what arrives afterward is.
The whale is a filter feeder, harmless by disposition, traveling between irradiated and clean waters to supplement its baleen diet with the radiation its barnacles process. It predates the Fall as a species and possesses what researchers describe as biological immortality; Reef Back Whales do not die of old age. They die from violence, from rare disease, and from the whaling expeditions that target them for the fortune they represent. A single adult yields meat for food, fat for lanterns, and medicines distilled from the barnacles, all totaling between twenty-five thousand and one hundred thousand UPP.
The catch is the alarm chemicals. When a Reef Back Whale is injured, its barnacles release a chemical signal that drives nearby predators into a frenzy. Razor Backed Anacondas, giant squid, massive sharks, and worse converge on the area, and those incoming predators ignore the radioactive whale entirely in favor of the smaller, more appetizing creatures nearby. Wounding a Reef Back is not the hard part of a whaling expedition. Surviving what arrives afterward is.
