Lacerator Beetle

The jungle shakes around you, you hear a sound like the whirring of a Magnecore Engine, but less consistent, more rhythmic. Like....wings on the air perhaps? Then the whining, the high pitched drone reaches your ears, about when the canopy parts, and the form of the creature, its insectoid legs and chitin lined body visible, become obvious. Powerful with a large horn like growth above where its mandibles are, the brown and dark green beetle swoops, diving towards you, clearly on the hunt. The droning only gets louder and you watch in horror as you realize...its the beetle's body! You watch as the open shell, allowing its delicate wings to flutter free, is turning to mulch any part of the canopy it touches. As you leap aside, spinning to get a better look at the near wagon sized insectoid, it becomes more clear the danger you are all in. The chitinous armor has bands within it, dark black and crisscrossing its form, and these bands are serrated, sharpened strong much like its 'horn' and they are vibrating back and forth. Its a Lacerator Beetle, a highly territorial, highly aggressive, and thankfully generally anti social carnivorous species that prowls the northern parts of the Tevani Cloud Jungles.

The Lacerator Beetle is a rather rare insectoid specimen and is beyond most any shadow of a doubt the largest distinct and non-magickal species of insect on Valerick. Their chitinous armor plating is well known amongst those that live close to the Tevani Cloud Jungles as favored armor for the warlike and dangerous Cruxi, massive monitor lizard like beastkin well known for their foul rituals to the Void Gods and their vicious raids upon outpost settlements. Only the most elite among their kind would be deigned appropriate wearers of such armor.

These beetles are uniquely interesting predators, hunting more akin to some birds than to insects, and are very aggressive, oft having wide home ranges. Their massive stag beetle like horn is of course a danger, and a weapon worthy of note, however far more intriguing is the unique design of their chitinous exoskeleton. The plates of it are far more numerous than most beetles, with even the two large shells that cover the wings having the unique black banding, the almost metal-like serrated bands of chitin that seem to rest on some sort of oddly inflatable thin sacs of some sort. It is with these, and the vibrating of their wing membranes, even when closed, drawing air in rapidly, that the Lacerator Beetle gets its name, for any creature fool enough to get a piece of their anatomy to close to, or touching, the beetle are in for a bloody and nasty surprise. The lacerator beetle is a marvel of nature, able to set these saw like strips of its exoskeleton vibrating and shifting at speeds not unlike a Dwarven Stone-saw, a most impressive feat, and one that unsurprisingly makes them very dangerous.

"These beetles are very rare indeed, and though not endangered, they are certainly dangerous to any creature in their domain. They are majestic and powerful beasts however, and beautifully unique, the largest member of the insect family by an impressively wide margin. The operation of their defensive shell is most fascinating as well, the sheer pneumatics of it, the oddity of its functions, the sheer power in those fragile seeming wings that must exist if the whole system works as we believe it must. It is unfortunate my time in the Tevani Cloud Jungles was cut short by the Teva Pennisula conflict between Mora and Waston. It is always the way of politics to get in the way of good clean scientific inquiry, with their soldiers and their guns and blades and battles. I've no patience for it. I do hope the matter is settled in the coming months, as some rumors and news suggest it will be. I would love nothing more than to return to the Cloud Jungles and continue my research and explorations!"

Mochi, over a meal with a fellow naturalist and colleague, Rumen Alexander, waxing poetic about another of their lost loves, a field research expedition that had to be cut drastically short due to the eruption of a small scale war in the region. Mochi's disappointment, even 2 years later, has not lessened.