So far in their great long life of⦠about a month, Crawler had never experienced the urge to try and help another living being. They hadnāt considered it an option, really, and their interactions with other creatures were neutral at best, or more commonly, ended in predation.Not so with this particular human, for reasons Crawler could not begin to understand. He had stumbled into the beastās nest, wretchedly drunk, and instead of running or fighting the poor man just sputteredāin fact, he simply wouldnāt shut up.Ā It was entertaining to the monster, all those strange things he said, and they had eaten recently, so before either of them knew it Crawler had started being gentle to the thingāgentle by Eldritch horror standards, anyway. They didnāt bite him, they stopped hitting him when he started to leak, and most surprising of all, the only thing Crawler actually ate was his backpackāand his shoes, but to the monsterās delight, those had been freely offered.So when the man began to succumb to the overwhelming, pulsing atmosphere of their nest, Crawler was kind enough to wrap the frail little thing in a cocoon, to protect against the cool night air and help him with that nasty cough.That cough was now the wet wheezing of fluttering book-lungs, and the silly creature wouldnāt stop calling them ābrother.ā He seemed a bit lost, but Crawler didnāt mind so much when he followed, doggedly, to their next nest.Even now Crawler was dragging the dripping upper half of a corpse back home, back to the strange, sobbing lump they had left there.Ā