The Immortal Naturalist's Guide to Cryptic Creatures: The Notorious Beast

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

    The Notorious Beast is one of the few creatures I've encountered who is not only known worldwide, but also largely believed to be a hoax. This massive creature, nearly thirty feet tall at the shoulder, is seen regularly by those who visit the remote Peninsular Range. Reports uniformly describe a creature which looms over the treetops, leaving a path of trampled and toppled plants that anyone can follow. Pulsating Plums are the creature's favorite food, although it will eat any fruits it can find in the cloud forests it calls home. Should anything try to challenge the Notorious Beast, it can use its tail like a massive whip, capable of snapping large trees in half. Despite this formidable weapon, the Notorious Beast is so large that very few things are able to gain its attention. Conversely, its size makes it difficult for people not to notice it.

    The fact that the Notorious Beast is so large makes it hard to miss, but the remoteness of its home means that very few people actually have the opportunity to see it in person. This is where the notoriety of the beast comes in. For some strange reason, anyone who sees the Notorious Beast is magically compelled to tell everyone they meet about it for up to a year after seeing the creature. A secondary part of this magical effect seems to be that anyone who hears about the Notorious Beast but hasn't seen it will assume that they are being lied to. Due to the low number of people who have actually seen the creature, this has led to global derision at the idea of such a creature, and even resulted in the rather sarcastic name bestowed upon it. The magical effect seems to be some kind of defense mechanism to keep attention away from the Notorious Beast, and it seems to be working quite well. As far as curing this effect goes, I found that eating a pulsating plum, the beast's favorite food, does the trick, and will also work as effective bait for the creature itself.

    Related to the effects of viewing the Notorious Beast is the effect gained from covering oneself in a powder made from the creature's shed scales. After several months of following it around, I had amassed quite the collection of shed scales, so I chose to experiment a little. As it turns out, the powdered scales have a strange effect. While they do not turn things invisible or muffle sounds, the powdered scales made it so that other living things simply do not notice whatever is covered in scale powder. In essence, with the scale powder one does not need to become invisible because no one will notice or care that they are there. Of course, it did take me a long time to collect enough scales to grant this effect to myself, but considering my line of work, I actually followed the Notorious Beast for much longer than I had planned to collect a decent supply of scales. The Notorious Beast seems to shed the most during drier parts of the year, but not by much.