The moradromir (/'mɔɹədɹoʊmɪɹ/) is a pale and dingy, thin-striped stranger with blotch(m)e(n')s around its eyes, mouth, and the tips of its four to eight limbs. Its white skin attracts grime and airborn dusts, leading to its dingy appearance. This grubby physical form is made further foul by the stranger's slick and sour mouth, filled with rows of uneven grey and rotting1 teeth.
The moradromir's soft but grubby skin is not durable enough to resist bruises from rough handling, and can be torn or cut open to reveal the stranger's loose and fetid inner folds.
When it speaks, the moradromir's voice is resonant, and distorted in its depth.
Month-long stretches of cloudy days, dead grass grey at the edges of pavements, one and two-story concrete buildings, colorless courts, waist-high stone fences and climbable barricades, and faded white posters2 all contribute to the moradromir's generation.
On flat stretches of brush, pavement, or bare soil, the moradromir fades into view. Its appearance is at first gummy and indistinct; it congeals into a solid form only with hesitance, skipping any juvenile state.
In its personality, the moradromir seems both smug, and endlessly aware of its loathsome exterior, vacillating between a cringing fearfulness, and vain posturing.
A largely inactive stranger, the moradromir spends ninety-six percent of its time in a resting3 state, stirring only to chuckle with contempt. During rare alert periods, its primary focus falls on newspapers and flyers, which it gathers and arranges around itself, its den eventually attaining its distinguishing appearance.
When not accumulating its thrown-out news, it pushes and pulls at objects within its environment in arbitrary ways. A "bored but too smug to say it" moradromir may push an empty fuel canister against a wall, turn coin-shaped rocks upside-down, or drag a branch across a patch of dusty earth.
Though individuals tend to occur near one another, the moradromir does not want to be around others of it strain. Though they don't fight per se, they will resort to pushes or strikes in order to ward each other off.
The stranger shows particular contempt for corpses of its kind, and pushes stained and crumpled papers into its face.
The moradromir cowers and shrinks back when near a sensitive, retreating with its back to a corner, and offering only token resistance against violence or manipulation. As soon as the sensitive turns their back, however, the moradromir's smug laugh soon spills up out its vile mouth.
The moradromir's presence severs the ability to transcribe reality4 within a two hundred and five foot radius. This effects both sensitives and non-sensitives alike, who react with varying degrees of lucidity. For the vast majority of individuals, the truth is distorted so subtly that they remain naive to the moradromir's obfuscation – yet, on a long-term scale, the effect becomes overwhelming.5.
Even for those rare few who are aware of the stranger's mesmeric influence, there appears no work-around, save for abstraction through intricate systems of metaphors,6 garbled7 words, and other transmutations.
They always got their way until
They'd swallowed up our whole domain,
And showed us all how inhumane
We'd always hoped that we could be
(The answer is, appallingly.)
The moradromir's nature becomes more decadent as it ages, its gasping slowing to a lurid drawl. It abandons former pursuits in favor of languourish recline, and at the end of its life, dies with an unimpressive wheeze.
The moradromir's corpse remains for some time, bloating centrally but not rotting. Though it takes several months for the moradromir to deflate, once emptied of "air", it crumples into a papery material that does not withstand scrutiny.
