Greetings, most august and charitable readers, and a most enthusiastic welcome to the sixteenth column of our biannual series featuring the residents of Uncle Amblefaster’s Home for Unusual Beasts. Today we’ll be taking a look at our most famous resident, Krystalwing the Merciless.
Krystalwing seems to have come out of the egg with a somewhat rare recessive trait that left her upper thorax and main flight wings partially para-mineralized – and more rare still, the invasive mineral in question was adamant-232. This lucky set of advantages gave Krystalwing the edge she needed to survive her matriculating broodflight; when many of her slower siblings would’ve been caught and devoured by her mother; Krystalwing would’ve been a very unpalatable mouthful indeed. Unfortunately it also made her an obvious target in the wild and made camouflaging herself to hunt difficult, particularly from anything that can detect even basic levels of ambient riadioarcana. This made her both a visible target for faerie sport-hunters and relatively simple to capture alive due to long-term malnourishment.
Krystalwing spent the subsequent sixteen years of her juvenile instar in the care of the infamous Uncle Moonlovewingbranchdoveskystarmoontwilightshinemoon’s Mystical Beast Experience (which you may have heard of in recent documentaries). After the incident was over and the authorities came in to recapture the exhibits and arrest the surviving management, Krystalwing managed to slip the net and go ‘on the lam’ into the fertile and deeply-populated half-oxen valleys of the Barsoon Lowlands. Here she thrived for more than six years completely undetected by dint of consuming every single witness to her nocturnal predations on farms, ranches, and pastures, down to the last bone, thread of cloth, and drop of blood. Clever rascal!
At last Krystalwing was located when she ate a shepherd who was sufficiently stubborn and vengeful to leave a spectroplasmic entity, which haunted the roadside where he was consumed for six months until a passerby was able to alert nearby law enforcement. Their subsequent investigations and corresponding disappearance were made a matter of record, as were the animal control squad, the emergency riot team, and the first three military griffin-copters, and so after two and a half weeks of blood, death and fire Krystalwing was subdued with an ultracandescent hap-arctic missile to the jugular.
Adapting Krystalwing (who’d by then adjudicated to merit ‘merciless’ peerage after killing at least sixty different sapients without prejudice as to age, social status, or infirmity) to the new life afforded her at Uncle Amblefaster’s Home for Unusual Beasts was a bit of a challenge. For one thing, we only had a single ultramaximum-security enclosure available at the time, and it was occupied (see column 1: Qxxrjhjdsah the Barely-Containable), so suitable quarters would be costly due to both their necessary scope and the speed required. For another, her food requirements were unusual: due to the complex invasion of much of her digestive systems and upper book lungs by adamant supergeometrine masses (which began due to careless medical support by unlicensed handlers at Uncle Moonlovewingbranchdoveskystarmoontwilightshinemoon’s Mystical Beast Experience), Krystalwing now required flesh and blood from specifically sapient creatures to prevent much of her remaining body from fully transmutorphing into adamant and then rupturing with sufficient force to detonate every ley line and fairy circle in a million-cubit radius. This would not be an ideal outcome.
Initial care was provided by the kindly and motivated staff at Kercepholon’s Grasp leviathan-mending hospital, who provided the expertise needed to keep Krystalwing subdued in slumber and nourished on an intravenous diet of liquefied medical cadavers. Meanwhile, a state-of-the-art compound was created by a substantial charitable effort from Glormfoot Brobdingpants’ Extra-Large ‘Giant-Sized’ Constructions, which did necessitate Glormfoot himself working four sixteen-hour shifts in a row and the emptying of several quarries-worth of mettlemarble and aurichalcum for the fencing, substrate mesh, and ‘finite-sky’ aviary blindscape. Finally a sacrificial colony of mnenemical worm-people was installed in the location and given a careful selection of rich inner lives and subjective experiences to ingest and assume as their own so as to provide a suitably renewable, nourishing, and affordable faux-sapient food source.
Two years on and we’re proud to say that all the difficulties and hardships have been worth it: Krystalwing is as healthy and happy as she’s likely to ever be, although she will never be releasable due to her over-habituation in prior captivity and the strong likelihood of a class IIX Armageddon if she’s ever uncontrolled for more than sixty minutes. She will spend the rest of her four-kalpa lifespan in our care where she receives ample food, dedicated medical attention, and a safe home that can withstand the unnamed energies radiating from her every heartbeat.
I’m somewhat light on personal anecdotes involving Krystalwing myself, as I only began working with her last year after her principal caregiver quit to spend more time with his grandchildren. I can, however, confidently report that any rumours regarding her internal autocatalysis spinning up out of control are completely false. Instead it thrums steadily and smoothly, like a heartbeat. If Krystalwing the Merciless ever suffers a catastrophic humour imbalance that spins her and this entire care center into a catastrophic neogenesis – resetting the land itself back to the primordial youth of this plane, when matter was a suggestion and space a novelty – it will definitely not be by happenstance.
She could almost certainly do it on purpose, mind you, but I doubt she will. She REALLY likes it when I give her backskritches.