Linked-body mimics

The linked-body mimics are five shape-changing beings met in Aquila in the campaign Yeni Dünya ("New World"). Their kind, true identity and maker are not known; they were likened to doppelgangers, though they are not truly of that kind.¹

The attack

On the night the band went to two meetings at once, six lookouts posted by Travis vanished, leaving blood and signs that their bodies had been carried off. As part of the band made for the city wall, two figures who looked like the doctor Bruno and the head consul Orpi ran up to them; the false Bruno, copying his voice and manner, said that they had been attacked at the shop. When they were questioned and came close, the face of one was revealed as smooth, without eyes or mouth.²³

Once wounded, the two lost their borrowed faces and clothes. Their true forms were bodies wrapped in bandages, with shackles on hands and feet trailing broken chains, and round, toothed mouths; they had neither eyes nor ears. At the same time three more, wearing the shapes of Sticks, a small gnome and a woman, fell on the real Bruno as he watched his shop.⁴⁵⁶⁷

Shared bodies

A wound to one body was shared among the others. When an arrow struck one, a lighter wound opened on another and the three by Bruno shuddered at once; when Fauna heated one's shackle with magic, smoke rose from the left hands of those across the city; when Finli struck one in the chest, Bruno heard ribs break beside him; and when Fauna bit into one's head, part of the head of the one before Bruno burst, though it lived on. A physical bond joined the five bodies, and each could see what the others saw, so that they did not need to turn their heads towards a target.^8910111213

In the end all fell from the same wound in the chest. A human mage and an archer on the rooftops, who had joined the attack, withdrew; Bruno covered the bodies near his shop and dragged them away.¹⁴¹⁵¹⁶

Accounts

Orpi said he could not claim to know the creatures and thought a mage might have made them by toying with local natural phenomena. He likened their old shackles to the hard, bronze-like alloy his people use on their shield rims, and explained that though he feels pain in each of his own bodies, wounds do not pass between them.¹⁷¹⁸¹⁹

An Archon mage whom Sticks met in a tavern had heard of at least two other brief cases of imitation and attack in the past week, and guessed that the mimics combined mind-reading with skilled imitation rather than reaching memories directly. Travis said that his advisers described multiple manifestations as a sharing of minds and thought a bodily form of it possible in lesser minds.²⁰²¹²²