The Immortal Naturalist's Guide to Cryptic Creatures: The Blue Man

This post is part of the Immortal Naturalist's Guide series. The explanation for that series can be found in this post.

    There is an island in the Sea of Treasure that is said to be covered in plants that are blue instead of green. Home to many blue animals as well, the strangest inhabitant is a creature that appears to be made of living sapphire, the Blue Man. While it is unclear if he actually requires food to survive, he periodically leaves his giant crystal home with a retinue of crystalline animals to hunt down pretty much anything that moves. His victims are dragged back to his home, after which what the Blue Man does with them is entirely unknown. Standing about ten feet tall, the Blue Man is able to alter his shape to better match his needs, making him a formidable foe to the poor creatures in his path. Despite all this, the Blue Man and his retinue blend in with the foliage very well and frequently surprise their prey. Incidentally, this made finding them for observation nearly impossible. Most visitors to the Sapphire are lucky enough to never even hear of the Blue Man, which is for the best.

    The Blue Man has an obvious magical nature that seems to only be limited by the amount of crystal in his body. While he is able to change his shape, he never creates or destroys crystal. He also appears to be limited to a relatively humanoid form. While I have certainly witnessed him taking extreme liberties with his shape, I have never witnessed him take on a non-humanoid shape. The Blue Man's behavior is often inscrutable, but one consistent thing I noticed was that he goes out of his way to pick up any chunk of himself or his posse of crystal animals that happens to fall off, but he seems unable to reattach these pieces outside of his crystal home.

    Of course, if the larger world was more aware of the Blue Man, he would probably start to see many visitors trying to take parts of him or his home to sell. I believe that in addition to their value as gemstones, these sapphires would have value in amplifying the strength of transmuting magics, or even be able to perform some small feats of transformation with their own magic. The Blue Man is very protective of these fragments that fall off of it, so I have not had much opportunity to test these theories.