Moon-Misers

"There are some things we were not meant to know, they say. But you wouldn't be down here if you took that seriously." Beyond this point lie spoilers for Fallen London, Sunless Sea, Sunless Skies, or Mask of the Rose. This may include midgame or minor Fate-locked content. Proceed with caution. You can find out more about our spoiler policy here.

"You open the box, and something climbs out. Something has a glistening carapace the colour of smoked sapphires. Something is made almost entirely of legs. Too many legs."

Moon-misers, or simply misers, are insectoid creatures that reside on the roof of the Neath. Their bioluminescence is visible from London, which has led Londoners to call them false-stars.

Glim-Bugs

"A moon-miser! They live on the roof – you know, the false-stars. Shed their carapaces and glim falls. And on the roof they stay. Even the Masters understand that."

A White Glim Telescope.

Moon-misers are crustacean-like creatures with several pairs of legs, hundreds of dark eyes, and blue, chitinous exoskeletons. Their legs can dig into the hard stone of the Neath, allowing them to walk across the cavern roof, and the blueish glow the misers produce is known as moonish light, which turns apocyan when reflected off the crests of the waves of the Unterzee.

Moon-misers shed their chitinous exoskeletons regularly, which then fall into the Unterzee in a process called glim-fall, heralded by an enthralling purple haze. The pieces they shed are called glim, which is used in crafts and as a currency, or is burned as a light source to create glimmering-lamps, which unfortunately also emit noxious fumes. Glim that is sourced directly from moon-misers is called skyfire glim, and is notable for its high quality, and white glim is highly sought-after and is used in telescopes to reveal strange hidden sights.

Morphology

"Are you quite sure you want to know this?" Beyond this point lie major spoilers for Fallen London, Sunless Sea, Sunless Skies, or Mask of the Rose. This may include endgame or major Fate-locked spoilers. Proceed at your own risk. You can find out more about our spoiler policy here.

"'Not locals, the moon-misers. They don't share any biology with us worth speaking about. Internally, they're more like Rubbery Men. Now isn't that fascinating?"

The moon-misers hail from the planet Axile, where they were apparently purposefully bred as mounts, apothecaries, and lighting fixtures. Along with the Flukes and the Rubbery Men, they were brought to the Neath by the Bazaar as part of some mysterious scheme.

Moon-misers are also highly carnivorous, with a taste for human flesh, and the Starved Men on the roof tend to their appetites and pay handsomely for sacrifices, willing or unwiling.

Moon-milk

"Anyway, the moon-misers exude this stuff. Moon-milk. Acts like one of those love potions out of a silly romance tale. You come across that?"

Jewels in the far air.

The most valuable product produced by the moon-misers isn't glim, it's moon-milk, a sickly yellow liquid that oozes from their bodies like a venom or plasma. This substance has a unique and dangerous property when someone is exposed to it: it causes the imbiber to fall madly in love with the first thing they see, be it a person, an object, or even a color. This obsession fades over years, though, and is shallow and obsessive in comparison to real love; however, if a person exposed to moon-milk is separated from their object of desire for too long, they may go insane, die, or suffer from "avulsion".

Moon-milk is actually used by the moon-misers to ensnare their prey when they embark on hunts. The moon-miser spits their moon-milk at their quarry, and the poor target becomes infatuated with the moon-miser, leaving them vulnerable to their powerful jaws.

The Moon-Mother

"You need to go up to the roof. Yes, the roof. I've been there before, but I'm not going back. You have to get up there somehow, and find a moon-miser brood mother. They're easy enough to spot, twice the size of the others and more legs."

"-ALL CHILDREN SHE EMBRACES ALL CHILDREN SHE EMBRACES ALL CHILDREN SHE EMBRACES-"

The roof of the Neath.

Moon-misers have brood mothers, which are twice as large as their offspring and possess many more legs. One matriarch of the moon-misers is the Moon-Mother, also known as the Static Star. She is so large as to be confused for a great stalactite, and her glim carapace is the shade of a dark mirror. Starved Men have hollowed out her insides, practicing their Shapeling Arts within the Amber Chamber inside her using her amber secretions, and also act as servants of the Moon-Mother to tend to her well-being, revering the Moon-Mother as a highly sacred deity of sorts. The Moon-Mother is also capable of unfurling her carapace into a pair of gorgeous mirror-wings, and when those wings beat, a gateway to Parabola opens.

The Moon-Mother exudes a mysterious red strain of moon-milk in the chamber of the Holy Passage, a place of horror and madness that claims, asserts, insists that the Mother accepts all children and only wishes for them to be happy, and this substance can ensure that newly-born moon-misers are smaller than usual for the safety of the parent, though its exact properties and true purpose are currently unknown.

The Birthing Ceremony

"A Moon-Miser can only be born when the stars align. It must also be coaxed from the womb with a Song of Birthing. Customarily sung by the Moon-Mother, of course."

"Once the baby is born, we must have something to feed it and something in which to wrap it. Otherwise it will not survive."

The reproductive cycle of the moon-misers is as strange as everything else about them. One is born each decade or so, and to herald their birth, the false-stars align in a particular arrangement called the Counterfeit Constellation. The child is then coaxed from the womb using the Song of Birthing, customarily sung by the Moon-Mother and highly dangerous for human throats. The infant then feeds on a strange substance from the roof, the jellied remains of some burrowing ceiling creature called Stalactite Nectar, usually extracted by its father, and must then be swaddled in its mother's silk, called Moon-Silk, while its carapace develops.

The Masters and the Misers

"...and Mr Stones is furious that its box has gone missing again. The Clay twins are tearing the place up looking for it. No box means no moon-milk. And that means our exiled captain won't provide it with the troops it wants. It'll just have to wait for its blessed Sixth City."

A dark, scary building.

The Orphanage

The value of the moon-misers and their myriad secretions has not escaped the attention of powerful parties in the Neath, including the Masters of the Bazaar. There are those among them who seek to use the power of moon-milk to further their own goals for London, and those who would work to oppose them.

Among them, the Mr Fires has a particular use in mind for the moon-misers. As part of its many schemes to ensure that London remains in the Neath indefinitely, it plans to use moon-milk to taint London’s supply of love stories with artificial love, so that the Bazaar cannot extract any more usable stories from it.

Nevertheless, its plan is doomed to failure, as the effect of moon-milk is more akin to a shallow obsession than to real love. For its plans to work, it requires a more potent strain of the milk, so it set up the Orphanage as a testing ground for the effects of the milk by trapping an unfortunate moon-miser in a barbaric contraption that restrains its limbs and brutally extracts its secretions, while exposing many unfortunate prisoners in the Orphanage to moon-milk, driving them to near-madness as a result. It has also attempted to breed the moon-miser with a human host, and it hopes that the resulting Hybrid will produce a more potent milk, with an effect indistinguishable from true love.

A Heavy Iron Box.

Another Master, however, has seen a different potential use for the moon-milk. An Exiled Captain from Hell is willing to trade the use of their army in exchange for a sample of moon-milk, so Mr Stones abducted a small moon-miser from the roof and locked it inside a heavy iron box, along with a collection of Fourth City love letters from the Gracious Widow it stole from Mr Fires. If this scheme comes to fruition, London will be razed to the ground by devils, forcing the Bazaar to steal a Sixth City ahead of time, bringing Stones one step closer to its ultimate objective: presumably returning to the High Wilderness. However, this has brought Stones in conflict with Mr Fires, who works tirelessly to sabotage its wicked plan.

Astrology?

"Surface astrologers believe that celestial bodies exert forces great enough to affect people's lives. That's why events can be predicted by observing their movements. Moon-misers must be doing something similar, but I'm not sure what. Perhaps they secrete something into the air?"

The Entomological Astrologer

The Counterfeit Constellation is only one of the many peculiar arrangements that the moon-misers can take on. The newly-developed field of entomological astrology revolves around identifying these patterns, and using them to divine the future. The Entomological Astrologer has identified four such patterns, which repeat in a regular cycle. She believes that the stage of the cycle a person is born under can determine aspects of their personality, and that the movements of the false stars can reflect present and future events. Despite any apparent effectiveness of the method. It enjoys little credibility and is treated with outright hostility by more established fortune-tellers, such as Madame Shoshana.

It turns out that the moon-misers can form colonies, which operate as a hive-mind as sorts. Each stage of the moon-misers life-cycle has a role in these colonies, and they all form individual constellations containing members of similar development.

The entomological signs the Astrologer observed correspond with the stages of the moon-misers' life-cycles. They are, in order:

• Eggs are laid in large quantities by the colony's brood mother, and tended to by the adult members. Their constellations take on the form of a cluster, and the Astrologist describes those with the sign of the Egg as austere loners who can't live in the moment, as all of their focus and time goes into thinking about the future.

• Larvae are large enough to be viewed from a telescope on the ground. They apparently do little else than eat, and they do not produce phosphorescent light. Their constellations take on the form of a line, and according to the Astrologist, those with the Larva sign enjoy life, enjoy company and new experiences, and leave themselves open and vulnerable to others.

• Pupae are larvae who cocooned themselves and are waiting to emerge as an adult. Their constellations take on the form of a circle, and according to the Astrologist, those with the Pupa sign are austere, but forward-thinking and ripe with potential for growth.

• Imagoes are the adult forms of the moon-misers, and are what is commonly observed as a "false-star". They form hive-minded colonies with each other, and tend to the colonies' eggs. Their constellations take on the form of a cross, and according to the Astrologist, those with the Imago sign are collaborative and utilitarian, and can achieve great things together, but often cannot enjoy life very much.

Other known constellations the moon-misers can form include:

A false-star in the distance...

• The Cedar Tree
• The Beehive
• The Rose
• The Eating Bear
• The Forked Tree
• The Cask of False Drugs
• The Prison Gate
• The Debtor Asleep
• The Khan's Stallion
• The Cantigaster
• The King of Ways

References

Original by NotaWalrus