The Wine Taster

Suppose you’re at a party, or any kind of social gathering for that matter, and you see one person among the crowd wearing a strange mask, sipping from a glass of wine, and seemingly focused very intently on you. Maybe you turn to someone you know and ask what the deal is, but when you turn to look back, they’re gone. You’ve just been a victim of the Wine Taster.

The Wine Taster is an Unsettling Oddity, a being who exist solely to cause confusion, create insecurity, and make people ill at ease. These sorts of emotions cause the psychic plane to roil and bubble, generating the energy on which the Oddities feed. While more predictable entities might try to create outright fear in their victims, the Oddities look down on those as lacking in subtlety. They’re the snobs of the mystical entity set.

As with last week’s entries, I’m exploring characters who would exist in the world of the Secret Government Robots comic, in which the Oddities are one of SecGov’s fellow weird governments.

The Sword-Snout

In the forests of Upper Canada a most strange and monstrous creature has been reported. Hunters have spotted a large rodentlike beast, the size of a wolf, but with a blade protruding from its face. It has been seen running through other animals, such as deer, rabbits, or even birds. It has been seen feasting on their remains. But no hunter has reported being attacked. Or at least, none that has ever been attacked has managed to report it.

This one was at least partially inspired by a recent few hours I spent reading about Fearsome Critters. I like that sort of thing. After I’d done the sketch, I figured it would be a good opponent for Horribloid.