Guests
"The Guests were stuffed into the locomotive like the meat in a sausage. Most of its contents have been ground to powder or paste. Only the crew's keepsakes – no matter how fragile – have been spared. Did the Guests take care of them?"[1]
The Guests are a species of slug-like organism attracted to the feelings of warmth,[2] companionship, and sentimentality,[3][4] which causes them to often appear inside of sky-farers' trains.[5][6] They are not very dangerous on their own but even a single Guest will quickly attract many more of its kind; if left unchecked, the Guest population of an infested train can eventually grow large enough to overpower and kill its human crew.[7][8]
These actions make the Guests one of most despised and feared creatures in the High Wilderness; in fact, entire teams of volunteers willing to rid the visiting trains of Guests can be found at every major port.[9]
The Guests are also known to exude a variety of noxious fluids, some of which can prove very dangerous under high pressure. Some enterprising skyfarers have taken advantage of this ability to create Guest-powered weaponry, however.[10][11]
The Guests seem to highly revere the Waste-Waif, a god of the sky's abandoned places; one of the best ways of dealing with an infestation lies in building a shrine to said god, as the Guests will consider such a train as a sanctified ground and leave it alone.[12][13]
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The Guests's gunge, used in The 'Uninvited'.
