True Hydra

Height:  10 feet at the shoulder

Length:  12 feet

Weight:

Lifespan:

Habitat:  Swamps across the Southern belt of the Circle, the Sunset Islands, Azhuihotl, Demotikos, and Western Arcadia.

Diet:  Carnivorous

Nearest Relation:  Salamanders

True Hydræ are large ambiphibious relatives of salamanders. 

They are powerfully built creatures, with long, heavy forelimbs and a massively muscled chest, tapering down to hind legs about half the height of the front and a long, webbed tail fanning out into fin. They have a brain stem lodged in their chests, from which emerge anywhere from 10-30 long sinewy appendages that might be described as necks. The necks end a bulb, rather like a head with a large mouth and nostrils, but no eyes. True Hydrae are blind, using their highly adapted sense of smell and sensitivity to motion to to hunt their prey. True Hydrae are about 12 feet long and stand 10 feet tall at the shoulder but the necks can easily double the length of their bodies. The most terrifying thing about True Hydrae though, is not in their form but in their regenerative capabilities. Unlike the reptiles that share their name, true hydrae have very limited material in each of their heads and they can be quickly regenerated through a thaumic organ at the base of he brain. Within minutes a severed head can be regrown or, occasionally, through advantageous miscoding, two or three heads might regrow from a single neck. It is not uncommon to see elderly Hydrae whose necks branch off at multiple points into a myriad of heads. Inducing some sort of chemical change of the tissue, fire for instance, will keep the Hydrae from regrowing a particular head, and their slimy, ambiphibious skin does easily catch, but geting close enough to do so proves a problem as it usually means being mobbed by at least fifteen or so angry, snapping maws.

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