[Cosmosdex] The Universal Encyclopedia
[Cosmosdex]
Siren
The Criers / False Victims
Siren
Art by, Festerday
- Strength-1
- Intelligence-3
- Charisma-1
- Endurance-4
- Agility-10
- Luck-5
Type: Manipulative
Danger Level: Medium
Commonly Infects: Sirens appear to have no preference for who they kill and who they infect, though they disproportionately prefer infecting victims as opposed to killing them outright.
Attack Method: If attempting to infect a victim, sirens will bite once in range and then run away as fast as possible. To kill a victim they use their long claws to rip open vital arteries and then flee, watching the victim bleed out from afar to know when it is safe to feast.
Summary: An eerie clockwork that calls out to their next victim. Should anyone, typically someone of a kind heart, heed their call and approach them, they will be bitten. Within the next few days, they too will be calling out for help from those willing to listen. Should the rate of sirens in an area reach a high enough level, they will become bolder and outright attack before fleeing to safety.
Original Creator: Atomic
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.Physical Description
Sirens don't look much different from the initially infected person. They will grow long claws as time goes by and if they remain unbroken, they can end up reaching down to the floor. While sirens look normal, they move in often slightly strange ways. Their facial expresses come off as forced and unnerving. Overall they have been described as uncanny, a being pretending to be the person they've infected.
As sirens and other clockworks rarely if ever groom themselves, over time the siren's clothes, if it was wearing any, will become tattered and they will frequently start to gain a strong odor. Some sirens have been seen stealing clothes off of killed victims or sloppily washing up, but these are in the minority.
Behavior
Typically dormant until activity dies down for the day, sirens are known to lurk dark alleyways, abandoned buildings, and deserted streets. While mostly an urban clockwork, they can be spotted in rural and in the middle of absolutely nowhere in sporadic cases.
The siren call is what sirens do about every 5 to 20 minutes while seeking prey. They yell into the air a phrase such as "Help me!", "Hello?", "Come here!", "AAAAHHHHHH!!!", or a plethora of other common phrases to get the attention of any onlookers. Should no one show interest the siren will wait before calling again. If someone does show interest the phrases will get more complex, though will still show signs of being disoriented statements that don't fully make sense together, an example would be "Come here! Help! Come look at this! I'm hurt! Please, help me! Hello? Can you come here? I'm in so much pain you have to help me!"
Siren calls are made of phrases the host knew that the host considered extremely important. As such, a multilingual host would make a siren who yells out in many different languages even if it would be appropriate to only scream in one in a specific area.
Once anyone has decided to approach a siren, the siren will quickly bite or scratch at the person before running away if attempting to infect them. If they are going for the kill, they will slash their long claws at a vital system on the person, most commonly the neck area, before fleeing as they wait for the person to bleed out. Outright murders from sirens are rare, as eating, and thus integrating flesh would destroy their disguise. Due to this sirens will slowly waste away as their body becomes nothing more than skin and bones.
The only time sirens will actively become violent is once there are too many sirens in the area. Once sirens can hear the calls of others, they will consider the area heavily infested and gather together. The sirens will then look for single people and small groups walking in the streets, mauling a few and infecting the rest to make more sirens for the next hunt.
While hunting in groups sirens will still scream for assistance, even as they slash and bite their victims.
Small towns have been found to be infested by sirens. Travelers entering them recall an eerie silence followed by a hundred screams for help from the darkest parts of the town.
Subtypes
Parthenope: This subspecies of siren, instead of asking for help, will seek out situations where people need support, such as the homeless, people hurt in accidents, or people escaping from house fires. They will yell out words and phrases they associate with assistance, such as "I'm here to help!", "What do you need?", "Come with me!", "It's safe over here, come!" for a few examples. Once the person is in range, they will attempt to find a way to bite or scratch the person with their claws to infect them. Should the person not run away after this they will genuinely try to take them to a location they consider safe, but only as a means to protect the infection building up in them. Once the person is in a situation they feel is safe, or they are shooed away early, the parthenope will run away from the location like a typical siren.
Special
Slight Intelligence: Sirens are more intelligent than the average clockwork. They can remember relationships they had with people before their illness took over. As such a siren may walk outside their old workplace while requesting help, frequently calling people by name. Sirens who do this have a much higher infection rate than sirens who don't as people are more willing to approach a friend who has been missing for weeks as opposed to a stranger in an alleyway.
Trivia
• Sirens are one of the most common clockwork strains, with a reported 10% of all cities having at least one case of a siren every year. Thankfully the infection rate of sirens is rather slow, at only about a single person a day per siren. This means that as long as siren awareness programs are put in place sirens are typically located within days of the first infection and eliminated before more than 50 people can get infected. Due to this slow infection rate and easy removal, many cities opt not to contact notail or other clockwork removal groups, as the ideology of those groups is typically to "burn it all down" which would kill far more innocents than the current method.
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