Dreamtime: The Lurker

The following astral experience happened a couple of nights ago. I wanted to share it initially, but I see I needed to wade through some murk first. Now I feel ready to share it.

Insert a sigh of frustration here as I try to find an image that looks like what a lurker looks like. There's nothing there. I mean, yeah, it looks a little like the aliens from Alien, but it also really doesn't. And then trying to find an image that properly encapsulates how creepy an abandoned spaceship is. And I cannot. So, we will have to make due with this image showing what reminds me of a scene from Fallout 4​. It will have to do for atmosphere.

As you can guess from my preamble, we're going on a spaceship adventure.

Awareness picks up somewhere in a cafeteria. There are steel tables everywhere, and the scene reminds me a little of the kitchen in Jurassic Park, with all the shiny steel equipment hanging on the walls, the rolling carts (that don't roll anymore), chairs. Most everything is upset and knocked over. There are cables hanging down, parts of the ceiling missing. Water dripping in places.

I'm with my Taygetan family, and we're on an abandoned spaceship. There are four of us, and one outside holding the fort (and scanning the ship relentlessly). The lights don't work, except for maybe one or two every other hallway. It is so damnably creepy in there. And silent. Except when it's not silent. Sometimes you can hear electrical buzzing. Sometimes you can hear equipment still running. Sometimes there's water flowing. In the walls, on the walls, on the floor. Sometimes a fan with a bad ball bearing comes on, and you can hear it squealing or rattling.

We pass through other corridors, and I find myself holding someone's hand. Yes, it's that unsettling, I want to hold someone's hand. Eventually, we come across a medical tank that still has a person floating in it. The fluid has turned a sickly green, and our lights shining through it look otherworldly. The person in the tank is missing their lips and half their face. I think they were in the middle of healing before the ship lost power--or whatever happened.

It begs the question: what ripped up this person's face?

We hear a scuttling, fluttering sound somewhere in the walls. I hate this sound. It reminds me of giant cockroaches. The only man with us knocks on the wall. The scuttling speeds up, then dissipates. It goes lower in the ship. He's frowning.

I hear a voice on a communicator come in from our ship outside. It's Seraphel. He says, "There's a lurker crawling around the walls right where you are." This makes us all take a deep breath, because nobody likes dealing with these things. I haven't seen one before, but I can already tell that I'm not going to like it. "I'll see if I can push it into the engine room."

We go through the ship some more, making our way down to the engine room. Discussing how we're going to trap this thing. There are, it seems, containment shields (this is the word that keeps coming to mind) around the engines that still work. Or we hope they still work. They're there to protect those in the engine room from getting destroyed by the engines, and to keep the engines from destroying the rest of the ship when they initiate a jump.

As we go, we stop by several rooms. We start piecing together some weapons. I ask the guy with us, "How do we kill this thing?"

And what follows is mostly a paraphrasing of what was said. But essentially, we can't use conventional weapons, because the carapace on the thing reflects ballistic and plasma bullets ("bullets"). So, we're going to have to go a little old school and stab it with something insanely sharp. We pick up metal poles that are part of some broken shelving, and then in the maintenance bay, we grab triangular cutters. These cutters...hmm... They're made of some material that's as sharp as obsidian and stronger than diamond. They look kinda like scissors, but the blades are octahedron shaped. Like two flattened 3D diamond shapes.

We lash them to the poles, and make our way to the engine room. What follows happened too fast for my mind to record, unfortunately. I remember the lurker scuttling across the floor, and then suddenly it was hiding around the engines, and then it was jumping in the air, and finally we get it cornered in a the containment shield. We count to three, and all four of us stab the thing together. It makes this awful shrieking sound, and I think I'm screaming as I stab it, because my god I hate cockroaches.

What does a lurker look like? Imagine a praying mantis body the size of a person. Add a scorpion tail with a pincher on the end. Change out the mantis legs for cockroach legs with four, flexible prongs for feet--it can grab with these. Change out the mantis head for a centipede head. Cover the back with a carapace like a stag beetle. And make it blackish brownish grossish color. It doesn't spit acid, but its bite is poisonous. And then go throw up in the corner at the hideousness of this thing.

We regroup in a lab a few floors up. There's further discussion, but mostly we're hugging each other because that was...awful.

I wake.

I'm wondering where the hell this thing comes from now, and I'm seeing a dark planet with deep jungles and these little sheep-like creatures the size of a pig that look a bit like a gummy bear or a tardigrade. That's this thing's food. I see it picking those things up like we'd pick a grape. How did it get onto spaceships? Does it like space? I think it likes darkness, moisture, tight spaces, and squishy warm creatures to eat. Which means most mammals. All things a ship provides.

Ugh. I'm going to go cleanse myself now. I hope you enjoyed.

I thank you for your time. Adiamas.

​--Kyriel