Name: The Hlífir

Age: Disputed (See Ancestry)

Gender: The gender its victim finds most attractive.

Ancestry/Ethnicity: The Hlífir guards the planet Orontis from being exploited for its natural resources, as the old Earth was. Some claim that the geneticist-voyagers spliced it together from flora and fauna that are native to the planet. Others say it is a hallucination induced by the gas that is released if Orontis is mined, logged, or polluted.

Physical Attributes: The Hlífir generally does not leave survivors to report its physical attributes. Artists tend to portray it as an attractive woman in a mask of living butterflies, surrounded by Orontian flowers and birds. However, this dates back to a sketch by Arion Cloverfield on the back of a napkin after a drinking game that the Golganites call Pickle Your Liver. (Arion lost the contest and later went mad; it's said he wanders around Orontis waving his napkin sketch and calling the Hlífir's name.)

Education: The Hlífir learns from each victim. It can cuss, pray, and bargain in sixty-six dialects of Galactic Common, as victims do. It also adopts their hairstyles and fashions in its down time, using materials it finds in Orontian forests. Its squash blossom peacoat is said to be quite fetching.

Career: Protecting Orontis.

Personality: When it's not pursuing a victim, the Hlífir is curious and playful. It has been known to sneak into Second Colony ships and play with children who are too young to speak. It also studies the faces of sleeping humans so that it can imitate their appearance with future victims.

With victims, it prefers non-violent methods such as seduction and scare tactics, but it will resort to violence when necessary. Generally it prefers them mad over dead.

Quirks: The comms staff at the Second Colony swear that the Hlífir sneaks in at night and sends bizarre messages to other planets: "Send pizza!" "Where is the pizza?" "I do appreciate a pizza" and so on. No one is sure what a pizza is or why the Hlífir might want one.

Skills: Adopting different faces and voices, learning languages, moving swiftly, meeting every desire of its victims

Interests: Communication devices, everything beyond Orontis that it will never know

Hobbies: Learning songs it overhears from Second Colony music-boxes, making new outfits

Likes: Orontis, the very old and the very young, butterflies, the outdoors, pizza, warm weather, naps, the First Colony ruins. It likes small furry creatures like beebils, but they always run away.

Dislikes: Pollution, construction equipment, weapons, crowds, tight spaces, synthetic materials, the effects of Orontis's second moon

Strengths: Intuitive, fast learner, ferociously strong. Rumors of flesh-dissolving acid and strangling vines have not been confirmed.

Weaknesses: It longs to know what lies beyond Orontis. If you promise information--or better yet, to take it away--you will definitely have its attention. Whether you can handle the attention of the Hlífir is another question.

Fears: Fire, mirrors, the destruction of Orontis, invasion, smoke, closets, underground spaces

Aversions: Metal, plastic, alcohol, engine noise, pictures of itself, Golganite drinking songs

Other Abilities: The Second Colony comms staff say the Hlífir can solve any puzzle if you leave it out overnight, and if you stump it, it will still be there working in the morning. Adrastus Major has been leaving out puzzles for seventeen years in hopes of seeing it.

Special Powers: Its greatest power is its ability to fascinate entities of all species across the homeworlds. This draws adventurers to its remote corner of the galaxy--the very opposite of the effect it would like to have. The Hlífir would like to know you, but the planet it loves is safer if you forget it exists.