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[[User:Ywhateley|Ywhateley]] ([[User talk:Ywhateley|talk]]) 21:42, 31 May 2018 (UTC)
=== Mercurian Cat ===
ShadowWalker described a dream to me in which she pictured a Mercurial Cat at a dwarven, brutish, translucent thing with vacant eyes, a glass (silicon-based?) tale that rattles when it shakes before pouncing, and an eerie, thin, bird-like cry: "maaaah?  mommy, meeeeeeee...."  They are strange and solitary creatures, rarely seen, and Mercurians, human colonists, and Dreamers consider it unlucky to see such a cat, believing that it chooses a victim when seen, stalking for months or years unseen in the shadows where it cries and rattles ominously, before pouncing at last, stealing its victim's heart....  

As rare as they are to see on Mercury, it is rarer still to see them elsewhere, even the Dreamlands.  Dreamlands cat legend suggests that in the Dreamlands, Mercurial cats look almost indistinguishable from Earthly cats, as they have the power in Dream to disguise themselves as ordinary cats almost perfectly, save for their unblinking, wide, vacant, staring eyes and strange, slow, silent movement, as if walking in a daze or sleepwalking... it is in such a disguise that Mercurial cats can pursue their victims unseen even into Dream, until ready to strike; ordinary Dreamlands cats and humans who are familiar with normal cat behavior are said to be able to easily recognize these imposters, but those humans who do not know cats well may not recognize the strangeness of these cats until it is too late....  In variations on this legend, Mercurial cats are said to have the power to possess the bodies of Earthly cats in Dream, or to reanimate the bodies of dead cats, becoming undead cats of strange and unnatural habits and sinister magical powers.

=== Mercurian Sand Dwellers ===
The Sand-Dwellers, a nocturnal, sentient species, flourish near the night side of Mercury, where their large eyes and ears assist them in hunting and gathering in the near darkness of Mercury's icy night.  Sand-Dwellers are capable of hibernating deep underground beneath the burning sands of Mercury's day side. 

Sand-Dwellers are essentially apex predators of Mercury's night time surface, but while hibernating underground by day they are vulnerable to being attacked and eaten by mysterious subterranean tentacled Mercurian Cthonians, which Sand-Dwellers have been known to try to appease with sacrifices of their own people.

Based partly on a silicon-based chemistry, their species has made use of a peculiar form of silicon crystal-based "biotechnology" which they have used for many remarkable purposes ranging from generating warmth in the icy darkness of Mercurian night, to opening portals through time and space onto other worlds. Their strange "bio" chemistry renders them vulnerable to sunlight:  their occasional journeys by portal into Human-occupied Earth may have led to human legends of strange nocturnal bogeymen and trolls turned into stone by the rising sun - victims of Earth's far milder daylight climate.

Sand-Dwellers play the important role in the Mercurian ecology of carrying seeds of Mercurian plants deep underground with them, where the seeds, protected from the deadly sunlight of this world, can germinate and grow by twilight, blooming as they reach the sun-baked surface, beginning their strange life-cycle anew as night falls and the Sand-Dwellers rise up from the depths to harvest the alien crops.


=== The Sphinx of Chou-Enlai Valley ===
An ill-fated, little-known, unpublicized series of Chinese interplanetary expeditions using Astral Projection through the 1950s had begun with three expeditions to Mercury.  The first expedition was a complete disaster, with the unprepared remote viewer going mad in the blinding Mercurian sunlight, but the second expedition, consisting of a team of three remarkably talented remote viewers, met with better initial success, arriving in an area tentatively named the "Chou-Enlai Crater" or "Chou-Enlai Valley", located at the time in Mercury's twilight zone between the day and night sides. 

Transcripts of this second expedition began with an elaborate description of a vast statue of a creature described by the viewers as a "kind of cat", sprawled on its side at the day-side edge of the crater beneath a large, angular arch, as if lounging on a window in the last rays of the setting Mercurian sun.  The viewers expressed the belief that the sphinx must have been constructed for the purpose of casting more of the crater below in shadow, as the statue's shadow, indeed, completely shaded streets full of strange buildings dimly seen in the crater below.  Heads of the project then guided the expedition to journey down into the depths of the crater, to explore the buildings below.  This part of the narrative consists of a disjointed description of the buildings' unearthly architecture, interspersed with complaints of a feeling of being stealthily observed from the shadows.  It was when the expedition attempted to enter one of the buildings that the second expedition deteriorated into a chaos that resulted in the agonized deaths of two of the expedition's remote viewers from apparent psychic trauma, and madness for the third member.

The third and final known Chinese expedition to Mercury took place after five successful astral expeditions of another team of remote viewers to Mars.  This team, considered hardened and experienced by their Martian journeys, was guided to the night side of Mercury, where they, too, appear to have met disaster while narrating sketchy accounts of a titanic, shadowy colossus striding across the black, starlit landscape, stooped as if peering intently in searching the ground below for something it had lost, before the form looked up, apparently seeing the astral bodies of the expedition's members, who, upon being asked to provide a description of the giant's face, ceased narration, beyond a single remark from the expedition leader about "falling into the sky, into the stars, falling forever...."  The expedition, according to the transcript and attached report, did not awaken from their trance, and were transferred to a special Party hospital in Manchuria for long-term care, their fates, and the fates of their mad predecessors from the first two experiments, currently unknown.


=== Parasols: Haunted Cities of Mercury ===
Some of the most ancient and mysterious buildings on Mercury's surface are the Great Parasols, seven vast structures built from solid stone in the shapes of low but wide Earthly toad-stools with multiple tower-stems over the southern polar plains of Mercury.

The tower-stems are hollow, containing multiple floors and large windows or vents facing the open air.  The ground beneath the umbrella-like "caps" of these structures, shaded for millions of years, support fertile soil and lakes of dark, oily water.

The Great Parasols thus seem to be ideal places for civilized natives of Mercury to establish agriculture on the ground below, and live in relative safety in the tower-stems above, while shaded beneath the caps, and this location would at first prove a popular location for Earthly colonists to try to gain a foothold on Mercury's unforgiving surface.

But, the Parasols seem to have a bad reputation among even those natives who live in their shelter, and Earth's colonists within a short time would begin to hold the sites of these structures in equally ill regard, in connection to a long series of strange disappearances and mysterious deaths and other phenomena which were noticed very soon after the colonists arrived. 

The colonists in the Parasols are thus widely regarded as the most ignorant, superstitious and backwards folk in all of Earth's empire, well known for their weak and childish cowering to ridiculous stories of ghosts and evil goblins hiding under their beds and in their closets, and for their mutterings about revivals of ancient alien sorcery and witchcraft performed by unseen hands in the darkness of Mercury's alien skies....