Jellyhead
"Jellyhead" started as an insult -- what the humans in the nether lands -- the nethermen call anyone from Hellsborough on account of the psycmasks, the the hive mind chatter piped straight into their skulls, and a compliance so total it barely counts as a personality any more. I used to file it under vocabulary, not bestiary. Then I watched a queue of forty of them turn to face the same doorway at the same moment, for no reason any of them could have told you, and understood why the file needed moving.
On a fed day, biofeed running warm through the mask line, a jellyhead is no trouble at all. Docile, orderly, pleasant even -- the sort of neighbour who'll hold a door. The hive mind keeps them content because content jellyheads do not ask questions about the mask, the feed, or where either one comes from.
It is the gap between feeds you want to watch for. Cut a jellyhead off from biofeed, whether it's a severed supply line or a mask running dry, and the compliance does not switch off. It redirects. Forty people who were content a minute ago become forty people with one shared, narrowing focus: getting the feed back, by any route, through anyone standing between them and it. They do not coordinate the way a mob coordinates. They do not need to. The hive mind is already doing the coordinating; it has simply changed the question it is asking them.
They are not strong and they are not fast, not individually. What makes a starved jellyhead crowd dangerous is that it does not stop, does not tire the way a frightened person tires, and does not register that it has lost. Whatever sits under the hive mind and does the deciding -- the molon-tor, if that's the word for it -- changes the subject when I ask it directly.
Field note: if you're near a mask queue when the feed line stutters, leave before it stutters twice. The second stutter is when they stop being neighbours.
| Type | Warden |
| HP | 2 |
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