DOLDRUMS Day after day, day after day, We stuck, nor breath nor motion; As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean —Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner When the matabiri created the bitterclaws for Flibbertigibbet, they went through more than one discarded draft and unique specimens before they — 22 — succeeded An evolved form of gremlin, the doldrums were an attempt to slow down the former’s fecundity by manipulating how they interacted with time itself The resulting creatures— blessedly few in number—live within a bubble subtly timeshifted from standard reality Viewed from the outside, doldrums appear sluggish and slowmoving, surrounded by ephemeral, twisting tangles of warped rea lit y Mov ing inside of their bubble, however— like stepping into a s ove re i g n’s demesne—other creatures stand on doldrum turf and suddenly must play by their rules Inside the bubble, doldrums move with a frightening a lacrit y while outsiders now sharing their isolated temporal bubble are equally slowed down Thankfully, what few doldrums exist primarily dwell in isolation, wandering Nibiru’s pathways and only occasionally stepping into the Material Plane Environment & Society: Doldrums largely exist in isolated solitude, normally lacking the numbers and interaction with their own kind to develop any social structure to speak of Almost without exception, doldrums dwell within the myriad pathways of Nibiru, where they seem content to wander, surviving as opportunistic predators or scavengers of things stolen during brief forays into the Material Plane Curiously, they display a fearful animosity toward other gremlins