Rooter
The first Wadsley Common rooter I saw close to, I took for an ordinary boar that had wandered off from someone's smallholding on the tops. It had not. It stood shoulder-height to my thigh, black-bristled, low to the ground, built forward into the shoulders and the tusks the way a shove is built forward into a wall. The tusks are the part everyone remembers afterward. I remember the eyes. Flat, black, and doing arithmetic.
Rooters dig, and digging is most of what they do with a day. They work the soft ground at the northern end of the common in long, patient trenches, turning peat and bog-silt over looking for whatever the ground has been keeping. I watched one work the same trench for the better part of a murklight without lifting its head once. Sometimes what surfaces is exactly what you'd expect from a peat bog - bone, bog-oak, a boot with a foot still in it if the peat's done its usual trick. Other times it isn't, and the rooter doesn't slow down to find out which. It will defend that trench past the point that makes sense for an animal its size, and it does not share the find with anything, including you.
It does not charge from temper. It charges from assessment, and the assessment runs to about four seconds. You will know when it finishes: either it pulls up short at the last stride -- a shove, a graze, nothing you won't feel by murkrise -- or it does not, and the tusks are in below the knee before you have finished flinching. I have watched the same animal do both, on two different walkers, inside a single week.
If you are carrying something a rooter has already decided belongs to it, it will leave a half-dug trench to come and get it. It does not matter what the thing is. It matters that the rooter dug near it once. Put it down and it will take the item and go back to work as though you were never there. The scrufftails that trail the diggings take whatever the rooters miss, and between the two of them the common keeps almost nothing buried for long. I have wondered, more than once, whether the rooters started out as somebody's escaped livestock, left too many winters on the tops for the murk to leave alone the way it leaves nothing alone that stays out long enough to be noticed. Nobody I have asked can tell me otherwise.
Related to the Wadsley Common rooter is the domestic rooter, bred down from the boar by nascenti scientists many eons ago. The domestic rooter is rarely found outside of Farantees owned farming operations, and is much smaller, rather docile and missing the tusks. Rooter meat is a staple of the Farantees menu and famously found in the semi-independent Béanies "Best Rooter Sandwiches in Town!"
Field note: if a rooter stops digging and looks at you, you have about four seconds to decide whether you are carrying anything worth losing. Decide quickly. It already has.
| Type | Hungry |
| HP | 4 |
Sign-up to see the Foked Stat blocks
Free eBooks & Games
