Chapter Text
Ever since the successful recon mission to another dimension, the world we live in was connected to the world the scavengers lived in. And the scavengers along with other organisms from that dimension crossed into ours. Though the organisms from the other dimension did not become established in the wild with stable populations, they became firmly established in our cities. The only organisms that became established within these cities were batflies, squidcadas, noodleflies, centipedes (called arcpedes), eggbugs, lantern mice, dropwigs, lizards, the scavengers themselves, and many others.
Squidcadas
One would think that because of the favorable conditions our cities had for these organisms, their populations in our world would explode. However, only the population of squidcadas did. Because of the abundance of food in the form of batflies, uneaten human food, stray pets, pigeons, fish, rats and the occasional baby arcpede, squidcadas faced no opponent in the skies above our cities. They coexist peacefully with noodleflies, which hunt larger prey than the squidcadas. In some cities, squidcadas have hunted feral pigeons nearly to extinction and have begun to take their place.
Noodleflies
After years of breeding and natural selection, people know not to mess with baby noodleflies, for their mothers are always closeby. Though they are passive omnivores that prefer to suck the sap out of trees, the juices out of fruits and the blood of fresh roadkill that they drag out of the street, noodleflies are intelligent enough to recognize faces and smells, and combined with the relentless stalking and eventual killing of whoever or whatever incurred their ire has garnered them a fearsome reputation. For example, the spoiled teenage child of what one might call a 'Karen' killed an already weakened baby noodlefly that was hit by a car unaware that the mother was watching. Several weeks later, during a baseball game the child was attending, the mother that now had two children picked the teen's face out of the thousands that were attending the game and killed him several moments after seeing his face. This incident has inspired several documentaries on the dangers of tampering with the new biota of the cities, including one titled "Motherhood Conquers All".
Centipedes
Several years of breeding and natural selection through the cities has resulted in the centipedes of the other dimension (called arcpedes by humanity) being found in relative abundance. These 'arcpedes' are named as such due to the fact that they utilize electricity. They are so common in fact that aside from the scavengers, the arcpedes are often the first organisms from the other dimension seen by people who enter the city. The arcpede's entire body acts as an organic electric coil which is capable of killing an elephant if the individual responsible is large enough, but only functions if both ends are connected to its prey. Certain individuals are also born with sets of wings along their body segments, but the energy required to fly stunts their growth, forcing them to grow to about as long as a car. In terms of size, individuals typically grow to as long as a bus, and though even longer individuals with shiny red carapaces have been reported, these sightings have never been confirmed. Though the adults are highly dangerous, individuals regardless of age are surprisingly palatable and nutritious when eaten. As a result, some homeless folks have set up various wet markets around the world that serve both centipedes and other palatable creatures from the other dimension, such as batflies, squidcadas, eggbugs, shellbugs (snails), lantern mice, dropwigs, lizards, and stillborn or dead noodleflies. This palatability has also given birth to the infamous Boston Crown Without Jewels, which is often considered to be the largest wet market ever founded.
Eggbugs
Known for typically carrying around six brightly colored eggs on their backs, the aptly named eggbugs are highly skittish creatures, and existing in the dimension of man did not help. They are typically scavengers and omnivores, eating uneaten human food, pigeons, rats, and other detritus in the city streets, including garbage and occasionally raiding wet markets in search of food. Eggbugs only drop the eggs from their backs when killed or when the eggs are about to hatch. If hatched from eggs that have been collected by humans, eggbugs are surprisingly loyal companions that have some of the behaviors of cats with the excitability of springer spaniels. Eggbugs are also the only organisms from the alternate dimension that have developed thriving populations in locations such as forests and deserts, though they typically prefer the former. In this case, they are considered a highly invasive species that are to be killed on sight and any eggs found in the wild either collected and brought into the city or destroyed. So far, only two such 'feral' populations of eggbugs exist in the dimension man lives in and are known as The Redwood Berrybacks and The New Mongolian Empire. The former has caused the extinction of one of the native species of animals in the Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park.
Snails
Among the myriad of creatures that colonized man's cities, shellbugs (snails) are the ones with a reputation that one would call neutral at best. Shellbugs are simple creatures, feeding on algae and garbage at the bottom of lakes and the shorelines of cities, and if they're located in sewers, their diet is mainly whatever gets flushed down the toilet. Despite this, these 'sewer gremlin' specimens seem to be no worse for wear, and instead seem to be thriving inside man's sewers. Most people will advise against picking them up, as shellbugs can create a nasty burst using pressure alone without harming themselves, with injuries from this ranging from broken hands to even decapitation. As a result, shellbugs tend to be left very much alone by the general populace. But that doesn't stop the occasional mischievous member of a scavenger tribe from dropping them into dumpsters before people put trash in them.
Lantern Mice
Lantern mice are nocturnal creatures, preferring to come out when light levels are very low. Because man’s cities are flooded with light 24/7, lantern mice rarely ever come out, instead opting to live alongside the shellbugs and black lizards that call the sewers and subway tunnels of man’s cities home. Lantern mice are scavenging creatures, preferring to eat fallen fruit, garbage and carcasses. They can also get by on substances that would poison earthly lifeforms and even organisms from the dimension they are native to, so eating whatever edible thing they find either on the ground or floating through sewer water is not only very easy for them, but costs less energy than going to the surface to find food. Though underground habitats for lantern mice have been built by people who felt bad for the conditions lantern mice live in and have been colonized by these creatures, a vast majority of lantern mice in mankind’s dimension live their lives in the tunnels of man perfectly fine.
Dropwigs
Ever since their establishment in the world of man, dropwigs have been the bane of urban explorers and common folk worldwide. They are notorious among humanity for taking objects and placing them right under where they're due to strike and attack anyone unwary enough to walk under them to either pass by or pick up the bait. Dropwigs also set up breeding colonies hundreds strong in certain buildings, but these colonies typically coalesce once a year during the winter months. And though extermination efforts have been attempted in the past, dropwigs always seem to pop back up in cities they were thought to be extinct in. They have been compared to meal beetles in this aspect. This attribute was among one of the causes of the near collapse of the Kim regime in North Korea following an incident known as the Assembly Hall Massacre, where a dropwig breeding colony set up shop in the Mansudae Assembly Hall and resulted in the death of several government officials, including the ruler at the time, Kim Yo-Jong. This particular breeding colony has since been unintentionally relocated to the Kumsusan Palace of the Sun, which is now declared off-limits when the colony (which has grown larger) gathers.
Jetfish
Jetfish, being strictly aquatic creatures, were limited in their colonization in man's cities and world. As a result, the jetfish colonized the sewers and artificial lakes and rivers in cities and occasionally seas. As a result, they only proliferated in the Mediterranean Sea, the Yellow Sea, the Sea of Japan, the Great Lakes, and the East River plus its other connecting rivers. In the sewers, though they just barely get by just fine, albino variants are found in them more frequently. Though jetfish are occasionally caught as bycatch by fishing boats, this has not made any noticeable impacts on their population. While their unique shape makes them a favorite for public aquariums, some aquariums do not house them due to their jetting behavior, while others have removed them for legal reasons. One such legal reason happened with the South Carolina Aquarium where a jetfish named Sally that was located in a tank with an open top that people could look into jetted out of the water and smacked a small child in the face. With its entire body. Though the aquarium is still open to this day, it has experienced a dramatic drop in visitors following the incident, even with the tank containing Sally now being covered with reinforced glass.
Weighers (Leeches)
Wherever weighers (leeches) may be on Earth, the corpses of the animals they drowned will not be far behind. Out of all of the organisms from the other dimension, weighers are by far the most widespread, having colonized every last permanent source of freshwater in the world, including rivers, lakes, and swamps. Their larger cousins, the sea weighers and the jungle weighers, are also as prevalent, but the former are most heavily concentrated in the coastlines of the Indian subcontinent, while the latter are most heavily concentrated in especially humid areas. Weighers congregate in groups of up to ten, with sea weighers and jungle weighers being in groups of five. They have fine control over their buoyancy, and use this control to their advantage when attacking prey, attaching to it and becoming heavier in an instant, instantly submerging unwary prey such as seabirds. Once a prey has drowned, weighers will drain their catch of bodily fluids before swimming away. Though larger seabirds have learned to feed on these weighers, this newfound predator has only slightly decreased their numbers. Weighers on earth have learned to not go after both aquatic creatures and marine mammals for obvious reasons with the former and the fact that it both takes too long and there's usually not enough weighers around to weigh one down with the latter. Weighers have also been involved with numerous incidents where swimmers or people who ended up overboard were drowned, with these incidents being too numerous to list just one.
Grappling Worms
Typically found in high up places where the hope for landing on solid ground is unreliable at best in their home dimension, grappling worms not only survived in the native dimension of man, but thrived. Grappling worms earned their name due to the unique adaptation of being able to fire two retractable probosci from both ends of its body. These probosci, though one is used for feeding, effectively anchor a grappling worm between two walls or poles and can stretch five times its body length. These probosci are so strong that a single grappling worm can suspend ten tons in weight effortlessly. Anything over this will cause them to release and fall. Since their introduction into man's cities, there is no such thing as a short supply of grappling worms. Though solitary in their home dimension, grappling worms native to man's dimension now congregate in groups called 'jungle gyms' that can sometimes reach up the entire sides of two buildings side by side. These gatherings are popular among parkour experts, as it allows them to scale otherwise unscalable buildings.
Garbage Worms
Like weighers and jetfish, garbage worms are among the few organisms from the other dimension that live on Earth in areas that are not considered urban. To be more specific, while weighers have freshwater sources such as rivers and lakes and jetfish have certain seas, garbage worms have colonized places such as landfills and junkyards with very little competition aside from scavengers and other organisms that occasionally find themselves there, including lizards. Garbage worms are typically passive, if bizarre-looking creatures that will occasionally snatch up rats and pieces of debris up to the size of a car door before retreating underground for minutes at a time and retreat underground if approached. Their behavior of snatching debris has given them a bit of a bad name due to some occasionally snatching away phones right from the hands of the unwary, never to be seen again. However, if attacked, the garbage worm turns from passive to violent in an instant, and will either fling their attacker up to twenty feet away or attempt to drown them if water is nearby. Many careless humans have lost their lives to garbage worms this way, and most people advise against bothering them as a result. Some places these creatures inhabit have even installed fines for harassing garbage worms.
Hazers
Hazers, due to their highly sensitive preferences in terms of water to live in, are rarely found in the wild on Earth and are most commonly seen in aquariums and in the possession of fishkeepers. Though squid-like in appearance, hazers have more in common with lantern mice than actual squids. When thrown or killed, hazers spew out a navy blue cloud of gaseous ink that analysis has shown to be composed of countless gametes suspended in water droplets. Thrown hazers rarely survive this process, but ones that do are found more often on Earth. Hazers are also amphibious, using a series of muscular feet similar to those of gastropods to ‘hop’ around and typically in the direction of bodies of water. On Earth, hazers are typically found in public swimming pools globally (including mysteriously appearing in pools aboard cruise liners) and in the rivers of certain tropical cities, including Key West. Hazers are active predators, eating prey items that can range in size from the size of a scallop to the size of a 10-month-old baby. The latter end of the size range was, unfortunately, realized in 2068 when a baby of a similar age was left unattended in a public pool in Chile that was labeled ‘hazer-friendly’. One of the hazers was known among visitors for nipping the fingers of swimmers. As some put it, one moment the baby was happily floating in the water comfortably seated in a swim ring, the next moment the baby was out of the ring and underwater with the hazer eating its legs. Since this incident, strict regulations have been placed on ‘hazer-friendly’ pools, including not allowing anyone under 13 into the pool for safety reasons and not feeding the hazers human food. Unfortunately, the aforementioned baby did not survive the incident.
Coalescipedes
Coalescipedes are, individually, among the smallest creatures to have originated from the other dimension, with a single individual being roughly the size of a housecat. However, coalescipedes are rarely found all alone, and if you find one, there’s a non-zero chance that there are others nearby. Coalescipedes display a unique form of swarming behavior by attaching themselves to others of their kind, forming what are called ‘conga lines’ by humans. On their own, coalescipedes are skittish creatures that shy away from the light and get by on small insects, but in ‘conga lines’ they lose this aversion to light and can mob and overwhelm creatures the size of elephants. Genetic evidence has shown that at some point, the ancestral arcpede evolved from a mutation where several coalescipedes were born merged together at the head and butt. On Earth, coalescipedes have taken up residence in urban areas that do not receive much light such as sewers, large basements, abandoned subway tunnels, and artificial habitats made for lantern mice. Their swarm-dependent light aversion has given rise to several urban legends surrounding them, with some such legends claiming that during blackouts, coalescipedes can form ‘conga lines’ of over a thousand individuals. While in reality, coalescipede ‘conga lines’ rarely reach longer than thirty individuals, a ‘conga line’ that was a hundred individuals long was reported during The Rio de Janeiro Blackout of ‘87, where the ‘megaconga’ was found clambering atop the Christ the Redeemer statue to get to a cyan lizard.
Porcupine Spiders
Porcupine Spiders are larger, non-swarming relatives of the coalescipedes that have survived fairly well in the world of man. Like the coalescipedes, porcupine spiders prefer to live in areas that do not receive much light, but their preferences are much broader than their smaller relatives, being found in areas with dim light such as theaters, museums, and certain maintenance tunnels. Despite what their name suggests, porcupine spiders do not have any ability to spin webs and have six legs. Porcupine spiders are stealthy hunters, leaping towards prey without warning from seemingly illogical angles and appearing to vanish into the darkness once prey is caught. Despite the loss of their swarming behavior, porcupine spiders instead hunt as packs of up to seven individuals, rarely hunting alone. If one member of the pack is downed, another member can bite the downed member with highly specialized fangs which essentially act like defibrillators, temporarily reviving the downed spider for up to five minutes. These revived members split off from the pack to seek shelter and heal their injuries, only truly dying if subjected to flashes of light from the fruit of certain plants from the dimension they hail from. They are also highly protective of any claimed territory, killing or driving away anything that intrudes on their stomping grounds regardless of light level. This behavior was first displayed on earth in 2071 at a kindergarten that had become the nesting grounds for a pack of porcupine spiders overnight. About an hour into the day the students and teachers arrived, the pack was disturbed from their slumber and attacked both staff and student alike. Twenty people died that day, with three quarters of them being students. After the incident, the pack was exterminated, and protocols were put in place in schools across the globe to ensure another incident like that didn’t happen again.
Spitter Spiders
Spitter Spiders are solitary relatives of the porcupine spider named for their unique method of hunting prey. Spitter spiders first stalk prey from a distance, and once close enough, they fire projectiles towards their intended prey. These projectiles have sharp mouthparts and have an organ that takes up much of their interior that is filled with a chemical several times stronger than propofol, a chemical that was supposedly involved in the death of Michael Jackson. After some studies, it was revealed that spitter spiders live in a symbiotic relationship with a distant relative of weighers from the other dimension. These ‘dart maggots’ get some of the spitter spider’s food in exchange for the spitter spider getting prey in easier ways. On Earth, spitter spiders share a wider range of environments than porcupine spiders, as they are more tolerant of light. Spitter spiders are known for resting atop the roofs of skyscrapers, and being knocked off from such great heights barely fazes them. Most spitter spiders are in captivity on earth, as hospitals have found a way to use the chemical the ‘dart maggots’ create as an anesthetic to put patients under before surgery. About 30% of all spitter spiders on earth are considered ‘wild’, and some of them are ‘dart farms’ that escaped from hospitals that use them for their dart maggots.