Aw, I-9s are easy to tame. They've just got a big ego since they're suddenly oh-so-important after being an afterthought for so many years.
Now, the health insurance forms, THEY'RE the really nasty ones. Like ninjas or those....whatever they are from D&D, those pumas with the tentacles that phase in and out of existence. Slipperly and you can't look at them directly or they explode.
A couerl? At least that's what I think of when I hear tentacled pumas, though I know them through Final Fantasy games.
Displacer beasts.
That is a weird name for an animal.
Though it makes enough sense, according to Wikipedia "it is described as a vaguely puma-like beast that always appears to be two feet away from its actual position"
And also according to Wikipedia, it was inspired by the couerl which was first created by A.E. Von Vogt in a 1939 story.
Displacer beasts are part of a hilarious era of D&D monsters, things that looked EXACTLY like what they said they were and usually had nothing to do with mythology of any kind. Beholders are... giant eyeballs. Displacer beasts are... beasts, that are visually displaced. Lizardmen are men, who are also, you know, lizards. I love it.
I'm even more fascinated by the fact that some of these monsters have
entered our collective imagination
with basically the same strength as creatures that have basis in mythology! Did you know, for example, that the lich - the iconic undead wizard - has no mythological basis? None, whatsoever. And yet, I challenge you to find a single reader of fantasy who doesn't know what a lich is.
I mean, you could probably find
one. But not five. Unless they're all friends, and then it doesn't count.
There are a hundred other examples. Beholder-like monsters, born in the U.S. out of Gary Gygax's imagination, found in Japanese video games alongside other monsters from East, West, North, and South, all of them with serious mythological pedigrees. More serious, literary, mythological roleplaying games like
Vampire: the Masquerade using the word "liches" to describe a cabal of vampiric magicians - and again, in one of their new lines, to describe semi-living magicians who must eat souls. This, in a game founded on mythologically sound principles of Gnosticism! It's amazing.
Syncretism is the coolest thing in the world. I want to be a syncretism when I grow up.