There are times I have all the tools I need for this
job. Other times…not so much, especially
when it comes to movie monsters. Once
you get below top-tier sci-fi and fantasy films, I’m pretty weak—for some
reason I never got the steady diet of B movies and Saturday-afternoon UHF marathons
that many of y’all did. And horror
movies I’m hopeless at (because I
hate them). I even missed the Slender
Man reference in the Inner Sea Bestiary,
despite the monster being called the thin man!
(I feel well within my rights to blame the art in that case, but still,
jeez.)
This time, though—for once—I caught the reference.
Emotion oozes are the
ooze from Ghostbusters II!!!
All together now:
A young etheric
dragon has become trapped on the Material Plane. The gout of ectoplasm that got trapped with
him and the esoteric energies the growing dragon gives off have combined to
form pools of emotion oozes reflecting the dragon’s psychological state—despair,
fear, and anger in particular.
Unfortunately, the dragon is not immune to the oozes’ compulsions, and
its behavior grows more and more erratic.
The countess of
Rostovy was said to bathe in the blood of virgins every new moon. In truth she bathed only in her own jealousy,
stewing in the emotion until the stew became literal—a jealousy ooze that
devoured her entirely. The ooze still
dwells in her sumptuous bathing chamber, but it moves through the palace pipes
to foster mistrust and hunt new prey.
Officially, the
Forgotten Crusade has ended. The
Rose Cardinal unmasked the Peacock Cardinal, branded and executed her as a
heretic, erased her proclamations from the Book of Bulls, and announced that
the crusade formerly known as the Third Crusade was not only anathema, but
actually had never occurred at all. This last fact in particular caught the
besieged and besieging armies facing off at the Bleak Pedestal completely by
surprise. By all rights the demoralized
crusaders should have returned home…but still they soldier on a decade later,
as do the defenders (who are watered by a natural spring and can be resupplied
by sea). The reason for their
persistence is occult in nature. The
glories and atrocities of the Second Crusade were so extreme that the caverns
below the Bleak Pedestal are slick with the slime of emotion oozes attuned to
zeal, dedication, and hatred. These
oozes’ unnatural compulsions have wiped all thought of parley or retreat from
the minds of the combatants. And so the
Forgotten Crusade lumbers on until someone—perhaps a party of
adventurers—disrupts the oozes’ manipulation.
—Pathfinder Bestiary 5
108–109
My dad took me to see Ghostbusters
II in the theater. Ditto the 1989 Batman, which came out a week later. (In my memory, we saw BM first, and then GB2,
but I might be wrong about that.) I was
just blown away because we didn’t see a ton of movies in the theater and almost
never on school nights, so the fact that I got to see two movies within a week
or two of each other was mind-blowing.
(BTW, talk about fortuitous timing for this post! Haven’t seen the new Ghostbusters yet, but I plan to!)
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