The Soli:
Description
The dessicated humanoid shape standing before you has a carapace of sand-blasted, dry and cracking, skin. It stares directly up at the blazing mid-day sun with its exposure-melted eyes dripping down the sides of its hideous face. Its tongue is long and lizard-like, constantly darting between pointed fangs; tasting the dry air. As you approach, it seems to snap out of its stupor, as if startled awake. It lurches towards you and makes a dust-choked attempt to scream something. Its arms end in elongated, withered hands complete with over-long yellowing and chipped fingernail. It approaches, lashing out at you, and makes slow progress through the sand with its stiff legs.
If you run now, you will have survived your first encounter with a Soli. If you choose to stay and fight it, or stare in awe, you might not be so lucky.
Details
Going through The Soli Transformation is likened to becoming a Vampire of the Desert. The Soli survive by absorbing UV Rays from the Sun, which they are completely and utterly enthralled to. They wake each day with the rising of the Sun, and fall to the ground when it sets. Typically, they will lay on the ground staring into the Sun with their melted eyes.
Sometimes, if they become too covered in sand or a living being is sensed, they will slowly rise to their feet. If a living being is present, they will attack until they can no longer sense it or it has been killed. If the being is killed it may contract a mutated version of the Vampirism Disease known as The Soli Transformation, where, upon exposure to sunlight, the Vampire becomes a mindless slave to the Sun. It is unkown what would become of a Soli transformed at night, since they are inactive at night.
They seem to be unintelligent at first, but it is theorized that they are actually just blissfully ignorant of most things. When oberved out of range of their lizard-like tongue's sense of smell, they have been seen smiling, attempting to laugh, even slowly twirling in circles as if in some sort of zombie dance. A possible explanation is that the Sunlight causes extreme euphoria in Transformed individuals.
The Soli can sense living beings like most undead, and see them as a threat.
Special Notes
If a Soli can pin you, it will attempt to cough in your face and blind you with the sand lodged in its throat and nostrils.
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? Responses (10)
A Vitamin D vampire... nice twist. (Although *something* vampire is a bit cliche.. this is a intresting subversion of the trope.)
2/5. (Because vampirism is troped to hell and back.)
Made me smile, the euphoric aspect and the image of them dancing around and trying to laugh.
This started out really well....then a photosynthesising vampire......I got nothing against cliche but why does the vampire attack the living? This whole thing is just a mess,
a sunbathing monster could be fun,
people cursed to an endless state of sunstroke could be a darkly humorus bit of foreshadowing for a desert encounter
flesh eating undead sand traps are not without there uses....though wouldn't these things hate being buried...
so would these start their day walking east then around noon turn about and start heading west?
Also at least on this planet (and I will go so far as to say this universe) vitamin D is not produced by the sun and thus not absorbed by people. UV rays trigger the synthesis of viatmin D from cholestrol/sterioid precusors. Does this mean that the Soli also need a healthy diet of cholesterol?
So you got a lot potential here but no meat to it and a best this would be a minor addition to any game. . .which is fine if the idea was interesting or really tightly brought together.
The Vitamin D was an afterthought, I did a quick google search of what the Sun provided for us and Vitamin D seemed to bne the top answer. I didn't delve too deep into the matter. It could just as easily be the UV Rays themselves that these creatures crave.
As for why it attacks the living, well, it wouldn't be much of an encounter if it didn't. But, the reason I would give it would be because of the 'scent' on the living. Or, since you mentioned it, Vitamin D. The Soli can sense the Sun creating Vitamin D in the living, and it drives them into a frenzy when nearby.
What about the basic notion that the corporeal undead very very much hate the living?
Now there's a zombie for the desert regions! I wonder where the first of these creatures came from. Was it a sun worshiper, that received too much of sun's goodness? A victim of a curse? An experiment? We might never know. They are more like zombies, since they don't feed on their victims in any special way, so the vampire is just one of the many fun names for them.
Perhaps they are so enamoured with the sun rays, that they are jealous of anyone else bathing in them, thus attacking anything on sight. If that is true, one could find two of these highly territorial creatures and lure them to each other, letting them fight it out.
And as Scrasamax has noted, undead don't necessarily need a special reason to hate the living. If one is still required, it could be the faint disturbing memory of the former life, that they cannot handle.
(Oh, and psst: check the newlines.)
They are blind, I assume? Does water hurt them?
I'm asfraid this is not up to your usual standards Pieh - the formatting is odd and distracting, along with some significant typos. That said, I like the idea of this 'anti-vampire'.
Please clean up the formatting and I'll give you the vote it deserves...
Update: Finally got around to fixing the formatting. It got messed up when I pasted from notepad, which I had to do due to an error when originally submitting the sub. I thought it was fine, but a few people seem to think it detracts from the sub. So, voila! Also, feel free to point out an annoying typos: There is no longer a spell checker on the submission page and for some reason Firefox's doesnt like that type of textbox. I hope all is well now.