Kage Baker:  you may imagine her cursing her lunhs out if you like, Dear Readers. She would be, if this were happening to her. My computer just ate my entire blog entry.

I must post before midnights, so explanations must wait until tomorrow. But I’ve been working on “A Zombie Story” and I needed the ecology of moomies and zombats for that. I include it here as a little giggle (I hope) for those who don’t recall them.

More later!

Moomies are a kind of land mollusk. They have internalized their shell, rather like an octopus, but it’s not a beak. It’s a crispy layer around their innards, a burrito full of goo. Surrounding the shell  is not tasty cephalopod but yet more goo – a slimy layer that turns their exoskeleton into a kind of endoskeleton: so when you step on them they squish, then crunch, then squish again. Like a multi-stage snail, but worse. The shell is fragile and the internal slime is caustic, so if you pick one up you are risking a goo hand grenade explosion.

They are about a foot long; scavengers and ambush hunters. They smell overpoweringly of stale pineapple. They have bulging pale green eyeballs on stalks, which they can partially withdraw into their shells – only the stalks, though, so the bulging pale green eyeballs stay on the surface, staring at you, daring you to squash them. While you dither, they creep up and dissolve your feet with acid spit-slime and dozens of rubbery teeth, eating you very slowly once your feet fall off …

Zombats, now: they do not fly, nor burrow. Bats fly, and wombats will undermine your house without a moment’s thought (assuming they are capable of any thought) but zombats are climbers only. Tree-dwelling insects, in fact. They hum soothingly  and are furry, probably a form of wingless apoid. They form brightly coloured globes about 2 inches in diameter, from a waxy natural substance.  They use these as hunting blinds; seen in tree branches, they can easily be mistaken for berries and consumed by the unwary.

Zombats are active predators and specialize in victims with hands and poor impulse control. Most animals are too instinctively clever to eat them, but they prey heavily on primates; they are also one of the main predators of Procyon lotor: the raccoon. While a swift and experienced raccoon or human can get the zombat-fruit in their mouth and crunch it up immediately (this can be a nice source of protein), the hidden predator usually emerges as it enters the mouth – where it immediately burrows through the soft palette and the sinuses and so into the brain. It eats only  small portions of the frontal lobes, so the victim may survive indefinitely – they are notable, however, by steadily decreasing intelligence and initiative, and are characterized by a nasal tone of voice caused by having a zombat up their nose.

Many zombat victims get into politics. Or your garbage.

Some natural history: Moomies pollinate molds, and zombats keep down the raccoon population. Moomies are hermaphrodites, while zombats form seasonal pair bonds. Most moomies are an off-white colour, but the Pacific Northwest variant comes in a tabby morph. Zombats are translucent greyish-pink, which assists in camouflage while they are eating your brain.