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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jeffwik" data-source="post: 4603227" data-attributes="member: 9739">DAY ELEVEN, morning. After an additional day of recuperation, we head back out into the unknown. Our planned course will take us west, into unexplored territory, then north to the colony of New Hope. The territory to the west is as hilly as the fungal wastes to the north, but without the fungus covering (though to hear Drahz the prisoner describe it, the fungus is still present, just buried beneath layers of mineral deposits and dirt... a theory we lack the resources and time to test). At some point we will swing north, and travel the rest of the distance to the University of Planet, and the colony of New Hope. This will permit us to travel as far from the Hive as possible, and likewise we will avoid the mindworms for at least part of the journey (I do not know whether the fungal covering extends, or breaches the surface, further out in this direction, only that it is not present in the immediate vicinity of Valley).It seems we scarcely returned to the relatively safety of Valley before we must once more venture out into the wilderlands. Our previous expedition met with hardship, but great good luck also, and revelation upon revelation. What awaits us to the west?DAY ELEVEN, midday. At least part of my question is answered. To the west there are packs of strange beasts I will now attempt to describe. They are bluish in color, distinctly moreso than the blue-brown dirt that covers the hills on this region of Planet, and they are about the mass of a human, though proportioned very differently: their six legs are slung low and their torso is close to the ground. They do not look insectoid, but are closer to lizards or mammals, though they correspond closely to neither. Their overall shape is not unlike that of the goats we herd in Valley, but larger and more muscular, plus of course the extra two legs. They have no heads, no eyes or ears, and no mouth that we could see, only a small nub where on a mammal there would be a head. Cutting one open, one finds no Planetpearls in evidence, but instead a hard lump of nerve tissue near the nub, at the base of the spine, which reacts faintly to psychic energy. I took one as a sample to study more carefully later. Also, close anatomical examination reveals a hidden mouth and gullet in the chest, which is almost invisible when closed. When the pack of them attacked us, they fought with long claws at the ends of their front two limbs, not with the mouth.Given their odd number of limbs, I dub them sextellegers. They bear faint resemblance to the aberrant creatures called "displacer beasts" I was taught about, but I think this is only a superficial resemblance, and that the sextellegers are not refugees like us and the goats from Toril-that-Was. Can they be native Planet life? It seems strange that they could exist in the same ecosystem as the fungus, but perhaps the mindworms limit themselves to only a fraction of Planet's surface -- certainly there is little evidence of the fungus here, a scant ten klicks or so from Valley.DAY ELEVEN, midafternoon. Another pack of sextellegers has fallen upon us. They travel in large groups, it seems, and swarm opponents when they can. This pack was led by a pair of much larger sextellegers, perhaps mature adults (in which case, I shudder to think, we have mainly fought juveniles only). It seems strange that these pack predators could exist without any prey species, but we have seen none so far; perhaps they subsist on something that hides when it smells folk approaching? I do not wonder, now, that the first expeditions decades ago into this region did not return; this land is at least as hostile as the fungal waste.DAY ELEVEN, dusk. I stand on the banks of a river -- a river, a body of fast-moving freshwater leading down to the ocean; it is something I have never expected to see with my own eyes. Beyond the river, we can see a forest! A forest of trees such as we have never seen before: tall, straight-trunked trees without spreading branches, just with tufts of large broad leaves spaced evenly up the trunk. All of us are eager to investigate -- Cadre as much as any of us -- but we cannot cross the river here, and from this vantage point we can see all the way down to the place where it meets the ocean; there is nothing for us in that direction. Instead we shall turn north, up the river, and find a shallow place to ford it.</blockquote>

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