Keeper

From a distance a keeper passes for human, but its skin is gray with an unhealthy sheen, and its gestures are subtly wrong, as though its skeleton were assembled by someone guessing. Bulky, shapeless garments cover everything except the face and hands, and keepers add dark spectacles or eye shades as if bright light pains them. Underneath, the body is smooth, rubbery and featureless: no nails, hair or visible muscle, only gleaming gray skin, and blank flesh fills the eye sockets.

Their manners are jarring. They grasp human customs poorly and swing between stiff overpoliteness and appalling rudeness. When seeking information they are pushy and relentless, using threats, bribes or theft of anything that interests them; when suppressing it, they add murder.

A keeper picks a plan and clings to it. If it decides to talk, it keeps trying to communicate long after anyone else would quit; if it decides to fight, it strikes without warning and works single-mindedly to kill its target. It will repeat a failing approach until destroyed rather than change course.

Despite its soft frame it has 18 Strength. It can reshape its limbs into crude weapons, stretching an arm into a hard-edged blade like a long sword or knotting its fist into a dense, macelike club. Any such form deals 1d8+2. It can also spit a mild poison up to 20 feet with a normal attack roll; a struck target must save vs. poison or suffer nausea and spasms that act like being slowed (though not the actual spell) for 2d6 rounds.

Eyeless or not, a keeper sees flawlessly whatever the lighting. They are as stealthy as any professional thief, with climb walls 95%, move silently and hide in shadows 75% each, pick pockets 40% and open locks 35%, and they backstab unwary or surprised foes for triple damage.

A keeper cannot be taken alive. Facing capture, or losing control of its mind, it dissolves within a round into a heap of greasy gelatinous lumps. It saves at +4 against mind-affecting spells such as charm, command and domination, but if it fails anyway, it dissolves the same way.

No one truly knows who keepers are or what they want. They turn up in odd places at odd times, demanding information or ordering people to keep quiet, and those who laugh them off sometimes vanish for good. One popular story says a high-ranking member of a law-obsessed faction of sages discovered something no one should know, often said to be a way to find new universes just by thinking of them. To guard the secret he fetched keepers from another universe and set them on his rivals. They served gratefully until he carelessly ordered them to make sure no one ever learned how they arrived, and they obeyed by killing him. He had already brought over hundreds or thousands, each with its own task of uncovering knowledge or burying it, and they still follow those old commands with religious devotion.

Keepers always travel in small groups, and one whose companions all die has a 50% chance to simply dissolve. Yet they barely acknowledge one another. Sages suspect a telepathic group mind, since they finish each other's sentences and instantly know what happens to any member. They ignore all socializing beyond their mission: at an inn they eat in total silence and go straight to their rooms, and anyone peeking in hours later finds them sitting motionless in exactly the same poses.

Adventurers cross them by stumbling onto something keepers want buried, or by seeming to know something keepers want. They make relentless enemies, but the moment a matter stops touching their mission, their interest ends completely.

Keepers plainly come from a world with different rules, as their bodies and alien thinking show. Much of their everyday behavior is a clumsy attempt to blend in that often misfires: a keeper may notice tavern patrons drinking ale and copy them, whether its own mug holds ale, hot tar or lamp oil. How they increase their numbers is unknown. No young or female keeper has ever been seen, and questions about it earn only a flat, silent stare.