Red Mudfish

Type

Animal

Base HD

1

Terror

-1

Height (cm)

185 (Length)

A huge fish the size of a man which resembles an overgrown catfish, except it is the colour of rusted iron. It is also three times as lazy as a catfish and barely moves at all instead of moving very slowly. Red mudfish spend all their time half-buried in silt and occasionally manage to muster the energy to swim lazily upstream or downstream. Like all mudfish, red mudfish become agitated before thunderstorms, so they are also called red weatherfish.

Red mudfish are not aggressive, but are dangerous pests nonetheless because their skin secretes an oily ooze that is poisonous to most land animals and mortals. The presence of a red mudfish means nearby catches of otherwise edible fish cannot be eaten without suffering a bad case of the scours. Red mudfish are difficult to kill due to their sheer size, and care must be taken to not be struck by the flailing fish’s strong body or by its also-poisonous blood. Killing one in the water still makes the entire area unsuitable for fishing for days or even weeks in slow-moving water, and a wounded but not killed red mudfish can flee upstream surprisingly quickly and contaminate the area for even longer. The ooze degrades in open air after a few weeks, so it can be smeared on plants as pest repellent during the growing season without poisoning the gardener come harvest. Because the ooze works only on lunged creatures like deer, it is useless against insects, and because the ooze has to be applied by hand it is useful mostly on gardens instead of on fields. Red mudfish cannot be easily farmed for their ooze, and a red mudfish in stagnant water will die after a year or so.

Because one of the only safe ways to kill a red mudfish is to catch it in a net and haul it onto land, and because this requires much work and the creature might still injure someone in the process, villages which suffer from red mudfish often take to pushing it upstream or downstream. A red mudfish which is repeatedly irritated, such as by being prodded insistently with a sturdy stick, will attempt to flee upstream. Portable river-fences that force the mudfish to move the preferred direction are a common sight in villages that lie next to rivers, and in these regions one can periodically see bored teenagers holding a stick walking aside an irritated fish. Red mudfish refuse to enter the sea, so villages engaging in this sort of prodding inevitably push it into the territory of a neighbouring village, and because a mudfish lives for a long time one mudfish can be repeatedly kicked between villages in a sort of interminable but mild local conflict.

As an aside, the green mudfish is not at all poisonous despite the vile colour of its meat, and is very good eating; but it is also much less lazy than the red mudfish and will not wait to be stabbed to begin its flight.