Hellsborough Exposed

Rotty was never a species name: round here it covers anything vermin-shaped that turns up in numbers and clears a food source faster than it has any right to, whether slick with a hairless tail, grey and shaggy, or, in one woman's cellar, carrying too many legs to call a rat with a straight face. What unites them is method, not anatomy, and a swarm doesn't hunt so much as flood; I have seen a pantry in Wisewood stripped to bare shelving between one evening and the next murkrise, tins included, the tin openers left neatly behind because nothing in a swarm has ever needed one. Get between them and the food mid-strip and they simply route round you, over your shoes if that's the shortest path, which is somehow worse than being bitten. Everything else on the hungry rung works on the assumption that a rotty got there first: barkers follow a swarm for the noise, and the made pick over the gutters once it has moved on. If the scratching behind your wall stops the second you go quiet, it hasn't left. Pack the gap with wire wool by murkfall, not expanding foam.