Beasts of the Wasteland: Churros

BestiarioDrSirious

Heyya,

As everyone knows, the Wasteland is full of dangerous critters, the type that can tear your balls off if you don’t know what you are doing. Usually folks go fucking around like true jackasses, without any second thought to what kind of beasts they might go across, and then it’s time for regretting and bleeding. That’s why I have decided to consecrate my life to be a boffin about all this, a respected Official Bugger and Mutardologist from the Scrapbridge Methane and Meat Electro-proteic Guild (in which I am founding member, as well as president, secretary, treasurer and field specialist). I am doctor Sarious, and I will try in this Guide to the animals, critters and mutations of the Wasteland to make a cool study about the animals that populate our world.

Ah, the churros, funny creatures they are. Ugly to the point of puking and beyond, always under the ground eating dirt, but useful and sometimes even vital to nearby settlements. It is possible that you haven’t seen any of them in your whole life, even though I’m sure you have taken advantage of their body oil. How is that?, would you ask. Listen up, sucker.

Description

Churros are like sluggish worms, with a color tone ranging from dirty yellow to diarrhea brown. Their size can vary from one hand long and the thickness of a thick rope, to as much as three feet long and the thickness of a Nowater’s pit fighter ripped arm. On one of their ends they have a round mouth full of these little teeth forming concre… concin… contren… several circles one inside the other, while on the other end there is a shithole to dump their stuff. If it wasn’t for this tiny detail, truth is that those fucks look exactly the same on both sides. Their skin is quite leathery, but it is always covered with a dense layer of greasy oil they produce endlessly and naturally, so they have a glossy look in exchange of smelling like an old fryer miles away (although as they spend their lives underground, I think they might give a flyin’ fuck about it).

Habitat

Under the rocky and sandy plains of the Wasteland they breed without control, living most of their lives digging in the dirt to create huge colonies, feed and move around from here to there. They don’t care about any other species of their environment, but they have a natural predator in the churreater, a really tame mammal with thick fur that loses its shit for these critters: when it locates an underground colony of churros, I guess thanks to the smell they generate with their nasty oily skins, the churreater uses its long trunk to scout the tunnels excavated by the churros and hunts them with its large, elastic tongue, dragging them out to its mouth where it sucks them dry to their last drop of oil. The churreater seems to need this greasy meals as corporal protection, so the churros are its favorite preys, but it wouldn’t be the first time some folk leaves their dirty frying pans with dried-up fritter leftovers outside their shed, and one of these furry fellas show up to lick them for good.

bestiariochurroBehavior

It doesn’t seem that churros have any goal in their lives other than roam digging around,  minding their own business and leaving the rest of the world aside. I have been unable to identify any logic in their behavior, but again, as they spend their lives underground, you might realise that it is quite difficult to spy on them without opening these big-ass holes in the desert and sitting down to wait until one of them shows up in front of you. Even if any of these creatures shows its ugly dickhead out in the open, it will most likely be scared away by sunlight or the lack of earth, and it will twist its body in a most disgusting way to go back to the safe underground of the Wasteland. Apart from that, they are really harmless and will never attack anyone unless they really fear for their lives, in which case they will writhe with violence to whip any nearby enemy with their muscled bodies, making room for their hasty escape. Although their mouths look scary as fuck with all those teeth inside, I have never seen any churro bite case: they seem to use it only to dig.

Uses

This is the crotch of the matter. Being all the goddamn time digging with their mouths under the Wasteland, churros swallow a huge amount of all the waste products leaking from the surface: crude oil from the old wells, gas spilled by all kind of vehicles, industrial oil abandoned in collapsed factories… There are large pockets of earth soaked in all that shit just under our feet, that you can take advantage of if you have the patience to shovel it out and squeeze it. But luckily for all, churros do just that for us: the poor creature does not seem to digest all those greasy fluids, so its body expels them through the skin creating a thick greasy coat of oil around them. A good churro hunter knows the location of several colonies, and controls the timing to let their wormy bodies generate a good quantity of oil to harvest an area without completely depleting it. They need to dig a big-ass hole and fetch them as they show their dickfaces on the surface, for which they need strength, agility and a pair of special gloves covered in spikes to poke their bodies and prevent them from slipping away, as those motherfuckers have so much grease all over their skin that they can break any hold with a single jerk. Once the hunter has secured a firm hold on them, he twists their bodies as if they were a wet t-shirt, squeezing all the oily material into cans or barrels. The creature writhes all the time with violence, and I have met a couple of churro hunters (or churreros, as they like to call themselves) who have lost an eye or several teeth after a particularly nasty blow, but actually the churro does not suffer any harm at all. When it has been squeezed dry, it is released and returns to the underground, where it will start generating its greasy coat again as it munches dirt until the churrero thinks the area is ready again for a new harvest season.

Then all that greasy oil has a lot of uses, from feeding the deep-fryers of any fast-food joint (you know the revolting smell in Armpit, right? Now you know who is to thank for it), to lubing machinery (here in Scrapbridge there are a couple of elevators that work mostly on churro oil), or if the harvest is especially strong, even powering small engines such as those of the generators you can find in a farm, or even a motorbike. It is known that sugar is lethal for these creatures: if you sprinkle a good handful of sugar all over the body of a churro it will writhe and convulse to death, leaving a black, dry and twisted carcass. I wish it would have been that easy to get rid of my second mother-in-law, Annie Three-hairs, because instead a handful of sugar I needed six pounds of salt in the form of 12 gauge double-aught shotgun shells. That said, there is no known use for a dead churro, apart from being a really, really disgusting thing to see.

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