Rotty
Ask three different people in three different streets what a rotty actually is and you will get three different answers, and none of them will agree with the one I would give you. One says a slick brown thing with a hairless tail. Another says something greyer and shaggier with no tail at all. A third swears blind the one in her cellar had too many legs to be anything you'd call a rat with a straight face. All three are right, and none of them matter, because rotty was never a species name to begin with. It is what people round here call anything vermin-shaped that turns up in numbers and clears a food source faster than it has any right to. If it swarms and it eats, it's a rotty. Nobody has ever felt the need to be more precise than that. I am not about to start.
What actually unites them is method, not anatomy. A rotty works in a group, never alone if it can help it, and the group does not so much hunt as flood. Bin day on a street with an active rotty problem means bags stripped and scattered before the truck gets within two roads of the place, foil trays licked clean and left standing upright like nothing happened. They do not nest, not really. They colonise: a cavity wall, a void under a shed floor, the gap behind a chest freezer nobody has moved since 1994. The smell that space carries afterwards outlasts whatever finally shifts them by a good few months.
The bit that separates a rotty problem from an ordinary rat problem is speed. A house with rats loses food gradually and finds droppings and gnaw marks that build up over weeks. A house with rottys doesn't so much lose a stocked larder as wake up one murkrise and find it gone, tins included, and the damage left behind is the sort that normally takes a burst pipe or a burglary to produce. I have seen a pantry in Wisewood stripped to shelving as bare as a shaved dog between one evening and the murkrise after, tin openers left neatly behind because nothing in a rotty swarm has ever needed one. Get between them and the food while they are mid-strip and they will simply route round you, over your shoes if that is the shortest path. Somehow that is worse than being bitten.
They sit at the bottom of the hungry tier for a reason, and everything else on that rung treats them accordingly. A barker will happily work a street with a known rotty problem, because a rotty swarm in full flow is loud enough and distracted enough to be worth the walk. Made turn up in the same gutters for the same leftovers once the rottys have moved on, working the scraps a level down. Peewhit and moldenk give an active swarm a wide berth rather than compete with it. There is no dignity in fighting something for a chip wrapper. Rotty is the bottom of Hellsborough's food chain in the loosest, least respectable sense of the phrase, and the whole hungry tier above it is basically built on the assumption that a rotty got there first.
Field note: if you hear scratching behind a wall that stops the second you go quiet, do not assume it has gone. Block the gap it is using with something it cannot chew through by murkfall, wire wool packed tight rather than expanding foam, and clear anything edible off any surface it can reach before you turn in. A rotty swarm that finds nothing on the first pass generally moves on to a street that left the bins out.
| Type | Hungry |
| HP | 1 |
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