Sidestory: The Zhayvin Files: Trolls

                                    

                                          
AN: Hoping to resume posting more substantial chapters soon.

* * *

Classification: mega-humanoid aberrants.

Colloquial names: trolls.

Origin: Earth's trolls appeared several billion years ago, though those who mostly inhabit the Clusters predate the planet and/or universe, depending on the case, by eons.

Description: most trolls, several metres tall and appropriately broad, with muscular physiques (though some can end up corpulent due to their eating habits, this does not actually diminish their physical prowess, and sometimes increases it). They are humanoid, with skin that is several centimetres thick and usually covered in something meant to increase its resilience: scales, knobby protrusions, layers of slime and so on; troll skinn varies in colour and texture in accordance with their environment. It is not unknown for trolls to lose their scales and blue complexion and instead become green and warty when moving from rivers to swamps, for example.

Though most trolls have large fangs, noses (which has drawn several unflattering comparisons between them and the proboscis monkey) and pointed or triangular ears, there are some that simply resemble larger humans without features stereotypised as monstrous (in regards to facial features, mostly; river trolls still possess scales and fins at their joints, mountain trolls still have skin whose texture resembles stone, and so forth).

Behaviour: trolls do not generally behave too differently from humans, an aversion towards the sun aside, although groups of them in certain regions ave displayed a ravenous, greedy attitude and a lack of patience towards anything that does not bring them immediate gratification. Almost all of them, however, display a fascination with places of crossing, usually bridges, though any kind of threshold, including metaphorical ones, might gain a troll's interest. Trolls are driven to oversee passage through such places and make sure no one passes without acting "properly", the definition of which depends on the troll, but usually involves praise or payment being given to them.

In recent decades, the "internet troll" subspecies (for lack of a better term) has appeared, a troll variant that takes great pleasure in tricking and frustrating people.

Threat level: regional. Trolls are capable of pulverising any continent in one strike, shattering tectonic plates and moving and reacting at lightspeed. Trolls are immune to esoteric effects and regenerate from any damage not dealt by attacks containing sunlight or otherwise related to or empowered by the sun.

Tollkeeper trolls, as they are called, are dangerous if localised beings, capable of spontaneously acquiring the appropriate abilities and levels of physical prowess to prevent people from passing without paying their toll, including an immunity to their usual weakness towards sunlight.

Internet trolls, aside from being immune to many physical attacks when manifested in the analog world, are also capable of jumping between non-warded devices, possessing them and reshaping them to suit their whims. This is not limited to computers: any device that enables communication, such as a megaphone, can be hijacked.

Neutralisation: a Warscaled reptilian, aside from possessing more than the necessary physical prowess to incapacitate a troll, can also project sunlight and shape it into weapons. In the case of the digital variants, virus containment and erasure protocols are to be initiated; our firewalls, while appearing literal from an analog perspective, are capable of containing digital entities as well as their manifestations, as they cannot be bypassed by going under or above them.

Tollkeeper trolls, like all beings capable or arbitrarily redefining and increasing their abilities, must often be stalemated until reconciliation is possible. If it does not appear so, quantum entanglement with one of the Collective's datafiles concerning endlessly escalating entities is to be initiated; a tollkeeper troll would be both practical and ironic.