Editing Tsochar (section)

==Tsochar Anatomy==
[[Image:Tsochar Anatomy.png|thumb|right]]
A tsochar resembles a tangled mess of knotted ropes or a ball of barbed wire. It has dozens of thin but strong tentacles, each studded with small, sharp, sicklelike claws. Its body is little more than a thickening and joining of its multiple limbs. The creature’s eyes are small, dark orbs that rest at the end of smaller, thinner tentacles, well hidden in the mass of its other limbs, and its mouth is a round, lampreylike orifice in the middle of its underside. The tsochar is an indigo blue in color, with a mottled pattern of lighter blue spots on its upper surface.

The tsochari are products of an alien world. Tsochar flesh is freakishly strong and tough, more like iron cable than the bodies of creatures of this world. This accounts for their damage reduction and their surprising strength.

A tsochar is not actually a single living creature, but instead an aggregate being. Each of the dozens of coiling tentacles and limbs that seem to comprise its body is, in fact, a living creature in its own right, known as a strand. A strand has its own nervous system and organs of respiration, digestion, and reproduction. Carefully detached from the rest of the body, a tsochar strand could live on indefinitely, but it would be virtually mindless. Only in close association with twenty or thirty similar strands, linked by nerve ganglia and blood vessels into a tangle, do the tsochar strands achieve a collective sentience and sense of self.

Like some of the simplest animals found in the mundane world (such as jellyfish), the tsochar strands show a degree of specialization for certain tasks. For example, the creature’s lampreylike mouth is actually a specialized structure composed of the mouthparts of four to eight strands, fused together in common growth. Fighting and motive limbs are another specialization, as are the sensory limbs with their dark eye-structures at the tips. Since they share nervous tissue, blood vessels, and sentience, the tsochar strands collectively form a single entity, just as vulnerable to physical damage as a more mundane form of life.

A tsochar strand is about 3 to 8 feet in length and averages about half an inch in diameter, but it commonly coils and tangles with other strands close to the center of the body. Tsochar strands are strikingly strong and tough for their size and weight, armed with numerous sicklelike barbs. The barbs contain small grooves or channels through which the tsochar can inject its poison, but each barb administers only a tiny dose. It takes numerous tentacles working together to administer a dangerous dose of venom, which is why the tsochar only poisons creatures it is constricting.

The internal arrangement of a tsochar is minimal for such a complex creature. Within each strand, the vital organs are concentrated within a foot or so of the “front” end, the part of the creature that binds itself to the other strands. The brain is a studded string of nerve ganglia resembling a string of pearls. The digestive tract is an undifferentiated gullet that absorbs food from the collective “mouth” of the monster. Each strand pumps its own blood through a constriction of its motive muscles, which is why a tsochar at rest coils and seethes constantly. Tsochar take in oxygen through tiny holes spaced along the length of their strands.

===Senses===
Unlike some of the other aberration races, tsochari enjoy little in the way of truly extraordinary senses. Tsochari see well in complete darkness and have an uncanny knack for “seeing” heat, although they do not possess true infrared vision. A tsochar typically has between five and ten eye-strands, well hidden in the mass of motive and fighting limbs. Each eye is somewhat weak, but by focusing multiple eyes on objects of interest, tsochari attain a visual acuity equal or superior to human vision under good conditions. Since tsochari use multiple eyes on the same target, they do not possess the all-around vision one might expect of a creature with many eyes and no particular bodily orientation.

Tsochari hearing is comparable to human hearing, despite the conditions of their native world. Undoubtedly, the shrieking winds scouring their homeworld made hearing a sense that provided little information to the forebears of the race. They have no true sense of smell, and instead taste their environment much like snakes do, sampling scents through their hidden mouthparts. Tsochari do not have very acute senses of touch, since their hard flesh resists small impressions or stimuli that a soft-skinned human notices easily.

The most unusual tsochari sense is their telepathic ability. The race is somewhat empathic, and can easily receive and transmit information through telepathy. Some tsochari are so sensitive that they can detect and locate nearby creatures by their mental signatures, but most tsochari do not ascertain another creature’s presence through mental awareness alone.

===Parasitism===
More so than other aberrations, tsochari are physically associated with creatures of other races. Monsters such as [[aboleth]]s, [[grell]], and [[Illithid|mind flayers]] frequently eat or enslave humanoids, but tsochari possess the unique capability of inhabiting the living bodies of other creatures, sometimes for months or years at a time.

While a tsochar can skillfully position its thin tendrils within its host’s body cavity without killing the victim, it still requires a fair amount of room. Tsochar can only enter the bodies of creatures that are their own size or larger. Thus, a typical tsochar, which is size Small, can enter a victim that is size Small or larger. Tsochari lose the ability to invade Small humanoids as they grow older, simply because they grow too big to fit in their bodies. They can and do infest larger creatures, given the chance.

A tsochar establishes physical contact with the key nerves and blood vessels of its victim by growing the ganglia connecting its own limbs into the key parts of its victim’s anatomy. The monster can deliberately avoid inflicting lethal injury, remaining an unwelcome hitchhiker hiding in the victim’s body, or it can set about ripping out and replacing brain tissue, major nerves, and other critical parts. In the former case, the victim revives, awake and quite aware that an alien presence is now ensconced in his or her body. In the latter case, the victim suffers a death of indescribable agony, leaving behind a ready-made shell for the tsochar to masquerade in.

A humanoid carrying a tsochar in his or her body appears normal enough at a quick glance, but a closer look shows several telltale signs—a slightly distended abdomen; long, snakelike cordings bunched beneath the skin; and glints of blue-black alien flesh in the navel, the throat, or the ear canal.

===Reproduction===
Tsochari are completely hermaphroditic. Each tsochar strand is both male and female, and the creature can spawn any time it cares to. In general, a tsochar reproduces once every five to ten years, laying a clutch of about one hundred small, tough eggs. Each egg hatches into a single undifferentiated tsochar strand. A single strand is not a new tsochar; instead, thirty to forty must assemble into a collective tangle before a new tsochar comes into existence. New tangles can spring from a single parent, but tsochari take no special steps to make sure that this happens. In places where tsochari breed, it’s more common for a new tsochar to arise from strands hatched by multiple parents, as egg-clutches from several different tsochari hatch and intermingle. Thus, a single mature tsochar might have anywhere from one to dozens of different parents.

===Development and Aging===
A single tsochar strand is only a small portion of an adult tsochar. During their first four to eight weeks of life, individual strands in the same area encounter each other and slowly self-organize, joining each other by ones and twos as they grow into tangles. These accumulating tangles begin to grow together, fusing mouthparts, sharing blood vessels and nerve connections, and gradually waking to full sentience about one year after hatching.

Tsochari are virtually immortal. As strands age and die, a mature tsochar subsumes newly hatched strands to replace the old. Roughly half of all tsochari strands become incorporated into mature adults in this fashion (the other half assemble new individuals, given the opportunity). An individual strand lives about 100 years. Tsochari grow larger as they grow older, adding more strands than they lose. The more strands a tsochar has, the larger those strands tend to be. Very old tsochari might consist of a hundred or more strands, some close to 20 feet long and 3 inches thick.

On rare occasions, tsochar strands never find others of their kind to fuse with, and live out their lives as small, solitary predators that prey on rodents and vermin.