Scalpel Nurse [Night Terror]

This night terror wears two faces, both faintly ghostly. At first it is a lovely brown-haired young woman in a neat nurse's uniform, just as the real nurse looked in life. When it turns hostile, the uniform rots into stained tatters, the hair goes wild and streaked with white, the eyes empty into pools of shadow, and every slender finger lengthens into a surgical scalpel. It never speaks, but sometimes it screams as though dying all over again.

Each round both bladed hands may strike for 1d8+2. A blow that rolls the full 10 points forces a save vs. death magic; on a failure the victim loses one experience level.

At will it can turn incorporeal, during which it can neither attack nor be attacked. Solid or not, only +1 or better weapons hurt it. It is a dream given form rather than a true ghost, so it cannot be turned.

Ordinary harm never ends it for good. Its single weakness is the rose of midnight: while that flower's light touches it, the creature cannot go incorporeal, and only then can it be permanently destroyed.

The real nurse was killed at the clinic by a patient wielding scalpels that belonged to her friend, the clinic's doctor. His guilt bred terrible dreams, and the Dream Tormentor shaped them into this creature, whose one purpose is to shatter the doctor's will.

It fits no natural order in either world; it is a custom construct. To stay powered it drains levels from the living. By day it returns to the nightmare realm, prowling the waking world only in the deepest part of the night.

The rose grows in exactly one place: an empty lot between two tenements in Mother Marrow's slums. When the moon peaks each night it opens for one hour, shedding a cleansing glow 30 feet in every direction. Everything in the glow is guarded as by protection from evil, and members of the court of nightmares caught in it flee for 1d6 turns. A picked rose keeps working for 1d6+1 days, then withers; a new one sprouts 1d4+1 days later.